SPOILERS==Shadow of Victory Comments, Queries and Opinions

Well, I finished it.

It was well-written, I enjoyed the characters (even the ones I couldn't pronounce) and the ending was the best part of the entire read.

That said, at least 75% of the book is Shadow of Freedom on steroids.

If RFC is supposed to 'wrap' up this arc of the Honorverse in one more book, it going to have to be a wowser.

IMHO as always. YMMV.

OrlandoNative wrote:

jgnfld wrote:Timings aren't that tight. A nanosecond is a light foot. 3.3 microseconds is a light kilometer. Sensors in the Honorverse should have no trouble with microseconds and can probably do well better.

Perhaps. But they'd have to be watching and *recording* the proper place at the proper time.

They're militarily invading a planet!!! I should hope they are watching and recording!!!

JohnRoth wrote:
This dead horse has been flogged to a pulp. There's no way of tracing it from the Torch end until Mannerheim quits fortifying it - which will be way too late for the plot purposes.

If I remember correctly, none of the what was waiting at the other end was larger than a battlecruiser. If that's the case, a Manty SD might just survive the trip, where a survey ship obviously wouldn't.

JohnRoth wrote:Does the phrase "gilding the lily" sound familiar? Although blowing up a few Manpower stations has a certain appeal, one of the standard detective fiction tropes is the thief who is caught because he took a few too many precautions, and the detective used those precautions to find him.

A ship - or the remains of one, isn't all that large on a galactic scale. One could be lost literally forever.

Since it's pretty clear that the Alignment had "infiltrated" Manpower, Jessyk, and probably every other transsteller based or having an office on Mesa, it probably wouldn't have been all that hard for them to get their hands on shipping routes. If they had a MAN unit or 2 lie in wait for each ship utilized for Houdini, it could be weeks or months before anyone actually realized the ships were gone. By that time, the folks responsible could be back on Darius, and invisible.

It's usually the trail, especially an unusual trail, that eventually trips someone up. No trail, then there's very little likelyhood of tripping.

jgnfld wrote:
They're militarily invading a planet!!! I should hope they are watching and recording!!!

They would be watching space based installations, "junk" and debris. Probably not planetside. At least, not unless they were actually *targeting* and attacking installations on the planet at the time.

No where in any of the Honorverse novels do we find any mention of planet based deep space weapons emplacements. Except, perhaps for airless moons, but in many ways that's just basically a modification of an orbital or junction fortress. We find mentions, like the emplacements at Mount Royal, for what is basically defensive installations against craft already in the atmosphere, but not in space.

It's always easier to fight from the TOP of a planetary gravity well than from the BOTTOM. Including the fact that it requires FAR more energy to fire a missile upwards, especially if it's velocity while passing through the atmosphere will cause it to require heat shielding to protect from friction. A projectile *dropping* doesn't require that, and, indeed, the added mass of any shielding merely translates to more momentum converted into energy once gravity has accelerated it and it hits.

You know, I think this whole book would have been brilliant as single chapter, or half chapter, internet releases over the last few years, instead of as a book when everybody wsd expecting the Mesa resoloution.

It's good, it's interesting, it fills some sections out, but it's not what we were expecting.

I'm also betting that we are seeing some characters either introduced or expanded upon who are going to become important post 10th fleet taking Mesa.

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OrlandoNative wrote:

JohnRoth wrote:Most of us were assuming that he had a critical part to play in finding Felix and then Darius. By getting him to Darius, RFC closed off one of the five possible ways of finding Felix and Darius that's been discussed. He also closed off the Simoes possibility in a post here, leaving just three.

1) They stumble on the Renaissance Factor
2) Good intelligence work traces either the Houdini evacuation or the Streak Drive C&C chain
3) Blind luck.

As for tracing a Houdini route, after all they've done to preserve any actual factual evidence of their existence, I can't really see the Alignment letting any of the ships (or their crews) who participated in Houdini to stick around afterwards. Especially since they belong to Jessyk, Manpower, etc; and aren't the Alignment's per se. Vaporized ships and dead men tell few tales.

I think there are opportunities for a crack team of forensic accountants. Thousands of people left Mesa in a short period. And in a scramble, so plans were somewhat ad-hoc. The number of ships they could have left on is large, but not impossibly so. Building a four-dimensional picture of ship movements ought to be doable. I'm presuming ships have to file some equivalent of a flight plan, and identify themselves when they arrive in a system.

The ones that can be tracked down are mostly uninteresting, but talk to some of their crew about passengers, with a tree cat for verification. The ones that didn't arrive at their destinations are interesting. The ones that didn't arrive, but a ship with similar characteristics arrived somewhere, likewise.

This requires a fair amount of cooperation from other systems. I suggest the new military governor of Mesa put out an announcement that, Manpower, Jessyk, etc. have been disestablished with prejudice. Would system governments please oversee the shutdown of their local operations -- sell their assets, pay off their employees, pay back taxes, etc. And please send copies of all corporate records, ships' logs, whatever. After taxes, fees, bills are paid, I wouldn't expect a lot of money... but you might get a fair amount of information.

So, another make $$$ book that does nothing for the actual story arc. Good to know. So, SoV, SoF, and CoG are all anthology books pretending to be Honorverse novels.

1/2 price books in about 2 year's time maybe...

OrlandoNative wrote:

noblehunter wrote:Manty stealth systems. It'll be conspiracy theory level thinking but accusing the Mesan Alignment will sound the same, if one already doubts its existence.

Though it seems like the timing of the bombs would demonstrate a single point source for the detonation command. They might even be able to pinpoint Albrecht's location.

I sort of doubt you could stealth something like that. It's like one of our rocket re-entries, it's not exactly hard to miss with the glowing from air friction.

You're talking about speed of light. On a planetary surface. And "timings" would be on the order of nanoseconds or maybe microseconds. Not exactly easy to measure without at least some preparation.

In any case, since Albrecht was at "ground zero" of one of the larger nukes, I sort of doubt you're going to find any trace of him. Or his wife.

Some of the bombs were in space, include ships underway IRRC (it was late when I finished the book). Potentially far enough for lightspeed lag to be noticeable.

OrlandoNative wrote:

jgnfld wrote:
They're militarily invading a planet!!! I should hope they are watching and recording!!!

They would be watching space based installations, "junk" and debris. Probably not planetside. At least, not unless they were actually *targeting* and attacking installations on the planet at the time.

No where in any of the Honorverse novels do we find any mention of planet based deep space weapons emplacements. Except, perhaps for airless moons, but in many ways that's just basically a modification of an orbital or junction fortress. We find mentions, like the emplacements at Mount Royal, for what is basically defensive installations against craft already in the atmosphere, but not in space.

It's always easier to fight from the TOP of a planetary gravity well than from the BOTTOM. Including the fact that it requires FAR more energy to fire a missile upwards, especially if it's velocity while passing through the atmosphere will cause it to require heat shielding to protect from friction. A projectile *dropping* doesn't require that, and, indeed, the added mass of any shielding merely translates to more momentum converted into energy once gravity has accelerated it and it hits.

Possibly. But if they are not instrumented to detect nuke explosions, IMO that would be silly.

We here right now with our tech can observe (possible) nukes from space with high temporal and spatial precision as part of our monitoring programs. I find it hard to believe the tech wouldn't be far better for Honorpeople. The textev is they immediately had locations, counts, and yield levels. Surely they had time marks too, IMO at least.

I fully agree with the main critique of this book:

I fail to see where this is a "Honor Harrington" mainline book. Because it totally isn't, and I'm really really disappointed that it isn't. Imho it was being advertised as one, yet the main plot was literally untouched. Just like another reader here I kinda regret getting the eARC, because what's in there is totally not the information I was looking for.

I really am wondering what MWW and Bean were thinking when they created this. I mean, they are reading the forums. They absolutely knew what we were expecting (a mainline novel), just as they absolutely knew what we were not expecting (another glorious side-show with almost no chronological progression).

Tl;dr:
I really feel a bit cheated here... :/