SPOILERS==Shadow of Victory Comments, Queries and Opinions

JohnRoth wrote:There are a couple of problems with that. First, if Mannerheim pulls out of Felix, leaving a gently glowing crater on Felix Beta, what's the obvious conclusion from the crater? Right. There's someone that doesn't want you to know something.

No, the obvious conclusion is just some other Mesan Alignment base that blew itself up before capture.

JohnRoth wrote:Second, if they leave the junction to be explored, the GA will find The Twins, and will then discover that it links to Torch.

Yeah so?

JohnRoth wrote:Of course, claiming that it was a Manpower/Jessyk operation might work, although with the link to Darius I have this suspicion that claiming that might be met with a bit of rolling around on the floor laughing hysterically.

What is the Alliance supposed to do? Conquer Mannerheim based on 'whaaa they didnt tell us about those strange Mesans next door when we didnt even ask them'?
Obviously they wont tie everything up perfectly but as said, its a long way from a couple of inconsistencies to uncovering the RF.
Its more than likely they call it a day when Darius is destroyed and all Detweilers are dead.

JohnRoth wrote:Of course, claiming that it was a Manpower/Jessyk operation might work, although with the link to Darius I have this suspicion that claiming that might be met with a bit of rolling around on the floor laughing hysterically.

So, after you assault thought a fortified wormhole to take Darius you will

STOP

How many times has David pointed out that assault through a fortified WH is just an expensive way of committing mass suicide? Do you think that only the RMN and RHN understand this? If you go through that WH you are not ever coming back to tell anyone anything because you'll be dead long before your hyper generator cycles.

Star Knight wrote:I dont remember, is Felix Beta really inhabited atm?

Its not so clear cut IMO.
At worst the Alliance discovers that Mannerheim knew about an Mesan / Manpowe / Jessyk (or whatever the cover of the day might be) operation going on next door.
You can blame them for not telling anyone but why should they?
Its a huge stretch from 'yeah well, they didnt betray their strange neighbour' to 'oh gosh, their is a multiple system post solarian conspiracy going on'

They even have an explanation for not developing the junction, they were still in the process of getting legal ownership for the system.

And even if they discover the Mannerheim part of the RF, how many RF members on Mannerheim even know about the rest of the RF? Its very likely that the secret would die with the handful who know whats going on.

Or the Alignment solution: Mannerheim pulls out of Felix before the Manties transit from Darius and nuke the colony before they leave.

The Felix system, although it has a technically habitable planet in Felix Beta, is uninhabited due to its undesirability to colonists:

Torch of Freedom, Chapter 50 wrote:Felix was an uninhabited star system little more than ten light-years from Mannerheim. The dim K2-class star was brighter than SGC-902-36-G, and it did have one marginally habitable planet, although that was about the best anyone was ever likely to say about it. The planet itself, which had never been assigned any better name than "Felix Beta," was a fairly miserable piece of real estate, with a gravity 1.4 times that of Old Earth, an axial inclination of thirty-one degrees, and a miserly hydrosphere of barely thirty-three percent. With an average orbital radius of right on six light-minutes, it was a cold, arid, dusty, windstorm-lashed, thoroughly wretched lump of dirt, but the Alignment had been considering it as a potential site for further development anyway, because of its proximity to Mannerheim.

***Snip***

Fortuitously, from the Alignment's perspective, establishing that ownership was going to be complicated and (even better) time-consuming. Useless as the Felix System had turned out to be, colonization rights to it had been purchased by a Solarian corporation better than five hundred T-years ago. Since then, they had passed through the hands of at least a dozen levels of speculators—always trading downward, once the newest owner discovered how difficult it would have been to attract colonists to the system when there were so many other, more attractive potential destinations. By now, there were actually four separate corporations which claimed ownership, and none of them were likely to relinquish their claims without seeking at least some compensation to write off against their bad debt.

Boldface is my emphasis.

If Felix Beta was inhabited, ownership of the system would be clear, with no dispute over who owns it (no person or corporation would risk immigrating to to a system that is entangled in the legal system).

At this point, nobody outside the Alignmente and the operational people and top leadership in the RF know anything about the RF.

It is unreasonable to expect that the RF is going to solidify into what the RFis supposed to be in even 5 years after whatever the trigger event actualy happens that breaks the League.

Remember, the RF members are supposed to be a "soft" growth of alliances with neighbors and others AFTER the SL is precived as losing the ability to maintain it's nominal "rule of law" under the bureaucracy with the power of SLN to back that up.

How likely is it that Mannerheim is going to 1) abandon the Felix system? At this point, ownership of the Felix system, is in some cloudy legal mess tangle and it doesn't include a habital planet and nobody else knows there is a wormhole terminus there. Nobody (that we know of) beyond Mannerheim is there and it isn't clear if any of the people who have claims on Felix even know that Mannerheim is using it as a military training range.

How likely is it that Mannerheim, let alone any other of the RF members, is going to tell anybody that they have a live wormhole that goes somewhere and they aren't exploring it?

Then there is that whole situation of at least Mannerheim providing the terminus picket for the other side of the Torch wormhole. Sure, Mannerheim has AT LEAST modern SLN level tech and weapons (probably including Cataphracts even if they are not deployed on ships other than those on the Torch picket). How likely is it that Darius DOESN'T have (and is using) capasity to build conventional warships which could take over the various interior picket duties for the Alignment Secret Wormhole Network? Yes, we are being told that the LD's are building and that the Sharks and Ghosts were "test beds" but they were built somewhere and it would not appear that it was at Mesa (why would you let that tech and data float around at Mesa?) .

Don't see any quick resolution unless someone provides the Normal Space coordinates for Darius and somebody (like the GA and the Aldermani) put together a truly massive fleet to go hammer it AFTER they decide that the information is accurate and actionable.
Fun

Brigade XO wrote:Don't see any quick resolution unless someone provides the Normal Space coordinates for Darius and somebody (like the GA and the Aldermani) put together a truly massive fleet to go hammer it AFTER they decide that the information is accurate and actionable.
Fun

May I point out that the RMN captured at least dozens of ships built there and tens of thousands of personnel trained there, including ships with fully intact computer systems, and Manticore STILL doesn't know where Bolthole is.

kzt wrote:

JohnRoth wrote:Of course, claiming that it was a Manpower/Jessyk operation might work, although with the link to Darius I have this suspicion that claiming that might be met with a bit of rolling around on the floor laughing hysterically.

So, after you assault thought a fortified wormhole to take Darius you will

STOP

How many times has David pointed out that assault through a fortified WH is just an expensive way of committing mass suicide? Do you think that only the RMN and RHN understand this? If you go through that WH you are not ever coming back to tell anyone anything because you'll be dead long before your hyper generator cycles.

Since I've been one of the people who's been pointing this out regularly, would you do me the courtesy of remembering that I know this, and that therefore your interpretation of what I just said might not be what I actually said?

The context was that they found Darius, and then they either got the wormhole specifics after assaulting Darius, or they surveyed it. There was no assault through a wormhole they knew was defended.

Now, later they found the Twins after either surveying the Felix wormhole or getting the specs from Darius. There is no reason to think the Felix-Twins link is defended. The link from The Twins to Torch, yes. Absolutely. With a lot of automatic defenses, but the two termini at The Twins aren't in the same place.

kzt wrote:May I point out that the RMN captured at least dozens of ships built there and tens of thousands of personnel trained there, including ships with fully intact computer systems, and Manticore STILL doesn't know where Bolthole is.

"Hey Rocky, watch me pull a plot point outta my ... oh, never mind." I realize RFC says the next book will be his last honor book. But he wouldn't be the first author [Robert Ludum, James Patterson] to pass the torch (pun probably intended) to others [Eric Flint, Timothy Zahn, Joelle Presby, Tom Pope &Bu9) to continue the saga.

npadln wrote:

n7axw wrote:I think RFC can finish the storyline with the next book. All of the loose ends won't be tied up. But that can be handled later with anthologies like some of you guys thought that the material in SoV should have been done.

I will speculate further and say that Darius will be found and the factor exposed. I know that under normal circumstances, Darius would be very hard to find. But frankly all it would really take would be a break like someone left behind who should have gone with Houdini or perhaps a stray computer or whatever.

We do know that David intends the next book to be it. Until it turns out otherwise, that is what I'm going to presume will happen.

Don

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The thing is the Alliance has barely begun major offensive actions against the behemoth that is the SL. Outside the "Talbot Sector" and various junction points the SL has hardly been troubled by any GA incursions into the vastness of their territory. Unless the SL is supposed to fold like a cheap deck of cards I can't see the "SL War" being only addressed in a single book as merely part of a larger story; surely it requires a book onto its own. And then there is Beowulf, Darius and other open threads going back many books ago. There is a lot to cover even if we don't want everything tied up in a nice bow. The key word here is a satisfactory end; after thirty years it just has to be that way regardless of waning patience.

I am waiting on the publication date for SOV. But my impression is that the Sollies are pretty much a side show from now on. The main tension remaining is resolution of the conflict with the Alignment. That would mean that we don't need a complete blow by blow of the League's deterioration. It will be referred to in passing, but not fully described.

For different reasons, neither does the Factor... Without the driving force of the Alignment behind it, the Factor either collapses or becomes a normal star nation, but without the Alignment's great mission.

The primary thing to be dealt with, then, is to penetrate the inner core of the onion and to localize and deal with Darius.

Don

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n7axw wrote:
I am waiting on the publication date for SOV.
Don

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I suppose I best re-check my order. Now Baen says Ebook ships 1st Nov .

>>> No Amazon says hard cover ships Nov 1 also.

Coming in very late to this discussion, so please forgive me if I rehash things that may have already been addressed in the 34 preceding pages.

I see where others get the impression that this really seems to be little more than filler. We're filling in some blanks before the Battle of Manticore; we're filling in some blanks before the Battle of Spindle; before the Yatawa Strike, and so forth.

I once read somewhere that about the time of War of Honor is where the series began a transition from military science fiction to political science fiction. That makes sense when we start to see how the Honorverse setting suddenly had much broader horizons than simply Manticore and Haven (and Grayson and the Andermani). We're now including the Talbot quadrant, the Solarian League, Mesa, Torch, Erewhon, and all points in between.

If you have an overarching plot involving all those locations, it would be impossible to adequately convey the scope and intricacies without diving into the kinds of details that begin to bog down the immediacy of the action. DW seems to have struck the compromise of giving us the highlights in previous novels so that we can move forward while saving the details for the times where he feels it's appropriate.

As a case in point, while the first 3rd seems to deal with the events of Monica, what he's doing is setting up Ginger Lewis' promotion to Captain, the aftermath of her assignment to Weyland, and how that affects her assignment as Captain of a ship. Those kinds of details would have detracted from Shadow of Sagamani and Mission of Honor, but work here.

In a similar fashion, the journey of Damien Harahap illustrates the implementation of the Alignment's plan and how that affects the hopes and dreams of real people. To MA - it's an operation. To the residents of Swallow or Mobius - it's a chance to break out from the hell of their lives. I think if you read close enough, you begin to see Firebrand develop a bit of a conscience regarding what he's doing to those people. It's not (yet) enough to stop him but it's something he considers more and more as SoV progresses. It will be interesting to see how that plays out in the next novel, especially in light that he has to suspect that Mesa put a deadman's switch into his various booster shots.

I also liked the various pieces where members of the Gendarmerie begin to see pieces of the MA plot, which brings us back to Daud al-Fanudahi near the end.

Of all the novel, the only part I really think should have been in another book (in this case Cauldron of Ghosts) is the end-parts on Mesa. What happened to the Detwilers would have been a perfect end point for CoG as Albrecht becomes one of the casualties himself. I can see why it might have been removed (to better focus on Zilwicki and the siege of Neue Rostock, but it still seems more fitting there.

Like some others, I'm afraid my eyes glazed over with the Polish and Czech plots due to the volume of (to me) unpronounceable names. No offense meant to anyone - it was just very hard to parse.

On the whole - I liked this story. I'm going to re-read it again to see if anything else jumps out at me.