SPOILERS==Shadow of Victory Comments, Queries and Opinions

Relax wrote:

n7axw wrote:Just caught up on this thread....

Goodness, people, is it neccessary for us to take ourselves so seriously? This is just a passtime, however much we get into it
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Exactly, we do it for entertainment. Therefore we want out books to be entertaining... Not full of back fill hogwash on corrupt crappy planets with whole hordes of bad guys or average guys who are either trying to game the system or just get along. We want to read about stuff that gives us hope, and yes, entertainment. Reminds us way too much of real life, and guess what? The book is crap. If we wanted "reality", we would turn on the news, or people claiming to be "journalists" who are in reality propagandists.

Want...want...want... No end to it, is there?

Don

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n7axw wrote:Want...want...want... No end to it, is there?

Don
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Ultimately it is up to the author to choose to write for his audience, therefore increasing sales and his wallet, or for himself, or tries to balance the combination of the two.

Its like some fool singer going to a foreign country and singing in their personal language and wondering why the audience isn't as "enthusiastic" as at home... Maybe because they don't have any inkling of what you are saying.
--> Know your audience, or pay the consequences.

OrlandoNative wrote: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.

That's true, but in the Honorverse extremely high energy systems are common. The fact that you can maneuver a battle cruiser at hundreds of gravities under reaction drive and the fuel lasted as long as shown means that reaction drives are astonishingly effective and efficient.

And once you punch a missile out of the atmosphere, say by using a gravitic mass driver (exactly like a ship uses), once it's past 50 km or so of air it's just like you launched it from a ship. The wedge pops up and the fun starts.

And it's perfectly possible to stop a KE. You can detect it optically on reentry, and a wedge driven missile can easily accelerate enough to catch it well short of the target. Even if you don't destroy it outright, which is the most likely result when the wedge hits it, imparting a upward and sizeways vector of a couple of km/sec is going to make it miss. And yes, assume a 100 kg missile accelerating at 50,000g for a second. You can almost certainly kill anything targeting the ground within 10-15 km.

And a soft xray laser (choosing where there is an atmospheric window) would probably be even more effective. At terarwatt range (which seems well within the capability of the honorverse to make ground/grav mobile given that ship-mounted weapons are about 6 orders of magnitude more powerful) it should pretty efficiently vaporize anything in the atmosphere.

Relax wrote:

n7axw wrote:Want...want...want... No end to it, is there?

Don
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Ultimately it is up to the author to choose to write for his audience, therefore increasing sales and his wallet, or for himself, or tries to balance the combination of the two.

Its like some fool singer going to a foreign country and singing in their personal language and wondering why the audience isn't as "enthusiastic" as at home... Maybe because they don't have any inkling of what you are saying.
--> Know your audience, or pay the consequences.

The point I was attempting to make in at least a semihumorous way is that disappointment over not getting what we want simply isn't an excuse for boorish behavior and lack of basic respect... a point Cthia made more eloquently than I.

Don

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JustCurious wrote:

JohnRoth wrote: This doesn't seem unreasonable for the proportion of outer Alignment members that can be trusted to keep their mouths shut once they're let into the "secret." Most of them aren't at the very inner core, of course; that's why it's called the onion.

Within the onion, discipline is merciless. There's a lot of nanotech that's used to make sure people keep their mouths shut. We've seen a couple of cases of that already. I suspect that one of the very basic criteria for selection is that the candidate is willing to commit suicide to protect the "secret."

Yes, but the very ability to keep their their mouths shut will lead to those who develop doubts doing just that until they decide to defect. And I was talking about a type of doubt formation that the MA would be especially vulnerable to. And that is the doubts that come from maturing and developing a better sense of proportion.

Some people do, some people seem to grow up, mature and die without ever managing to develop that 'sense of proportion' that you seem to think exists. Do you really think that the MAlign has existed for so long without having assessment procedures that are quite reliable for detecting the likelihood of a candidate going soft as ce ages?

Another thing to remember: the biggest protection is Manpower and genetic slavery: the only reason that Jack McBryde and Herlander Simöes were believed is that several people had already deduced the existence of the conspiracy, and were looking for confirming evidence. I have no doubt that there have been people who have tried to defect. Quite a lot of them over the centuries. Most of them were simply not believed.

JustCurious wrote:

RFC seems to have built in a bias so that extreme intelligence has downsides, like a vicious temper - something that Albrecht Detweiller specifically has to keep in check.

Yes, this is one of the implausibilities of the series. It is biologically unlikely. So for that matter is having people who cannot regenerate. If you can bring about regeneration at all then you have to work with such fundamental aspects of development that they would almost certainly be universal.

Of course. There are a lot of holes like that, depending on which ideology you follow. The thing to remember is that the series was created in the early 90s, with the first book published in April of 1993. We've learned a whole lot since then; projecting what we know now onto the past and then criticizing the past for not being like the present is called presentism.

kzt 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.

I'm leaning to the belief that they simply never do. They were sufficiently effective in pulling the hole in after them that they are just GONE.

Or at least that they don't in the next book. That leaves a lot of scope for future stories, even if it isn't another couple-of-dozen book series.

Relax wrote:
Ultimately it is up to the author to write for his audience, therefore increasing sales and his wallet, or for himself, or tries to balance the combination of the two.

A good story has to be a story the author wants to tell. If he is lucky it will also be one that a lot want to read. It is wise to listen to input from readers but ultimately it is his tale. If he simply writes for his audience the result will not be one that is likely to last or bring him much satisfaction.

JohnRoth wrote:

kzt wrote:I'm leaning to the belief that they simply never do. They were sufficiently effective in pulling the hole in after them that they are just GONE.

Or at least that they don't in the next book. That leaves a lot of scope for future stories, even if it isn't another couple-of-dozen book series.

Nope. I think it ends with the fall of Darius. What RFC said is that the original plan was for the story to end with Raoul taking over there.

JohnRoth wrote:

JustCurious wrote:Yes, this is one of the implausibilities of the series. It is biologically unlikely. So for that matter is having people who cannot regenerate. If you can bring about regeneration at all then you have to work with such fundamental aspects of development that they would almost certainly be universal.

Of course. There are a lot of holes like that, depending on which ideology you follow. The thing to remember is that the series was created in the early 90s, with the first book published in April of 1993. We've learned a whole lot since then; projecting what we know now onto the past and then criticizing the past for not being like the present is called presentism.

Back then we knew enough to call his medicine and genetics implausible. It's that biology isn't one of RFC's major interests and so he does not have a good feel for biological phenomena. So he made some things up for story chrome without realizing that for some they would undermine the suspension of disbelief in some of his audience.

JohnRoth wrote:
Some people do, some people seem to grow up, mature and die without ever managing to develop that 'sense of proportion' that you seem to think exists. Do you really think that the MAlign has existed for so long without having assessment procedures that are quite reliable for detecting the likelihood of a candidate going soft as ce ages?

Another thing to remember: the biggest protection is Manpower and genetic slavery: the only reason that Jack McBryde and Herlander Simöes were believed is that several people had already deduced the existence of the conspiracy, and were looking for confirming evidence. I have no doubt that there have been people who have tried to defect. Quite a lot of them over the centuries. Most of them were simply not believed.

what I need to know is how the MA has identified those likely to develop doubts. I would actually expect them to be quite bad at it. They are not good at understanding other people especially those who oppose them.
And how do they think? What is the social mindset that keeps them from questioning what they are doing? I would have liked to see this.
One thing I liked was the peek at life on Darius. It helped make the MA more real.
Agree with the likelihood of defectors finding it difficult to be believed. But the people likely to defect are ones who would have done so with plenty of evidence.
The thing that has made it comparatively easy for the GA public to accept the claims is the treecats vouching for Simoes, something that was not available in the past.