Spoilers! Is anyone else feeling....

Fireflair wrote:I've worked my way through the book and while there's lots of background and plenty of information I did like (I Don't regret buying it!), I feel pretty let down over all. Does anyone else feel this way?

We've got chapter after chapter of events that we could probably have done with out. All the different worlds that have building rebellions, for instance. Did we really need to see him going to so many worlds? One or two would have been enough for me with a follow up that he hit a dozen, or two dozen worlds. It feels like filler, especially given that we all want to see the main plot advance.

Shadow of Victory feels like a shadow of progress. (Sorry!) I know that I, and many others, enjoy seeing the story develop, the action of combat and the plot advancing. Those things seem distinctly lacking in this book.

You're not alone. I've only read the first half, and it has his usual good reasons for people's actions, but I found myself very frustrated. I didn't feel the scenes about the history of rebellions that hadn't yet been resolved to be very necessary (we already had all that was needed on those, IMHO), and what's the point of detailed backgrounds on rebellions we already know will fail? Or even the chapters that give scenes that were referred to in previous books, but without any actual new information?

As far as I'm concerned, the entire first half (except possibly a couple of chapters about Harahap) should have been published in a companion book, or one of backgrounds and cut scenes. It makes excellent material for that and some fans will truly be interested, but it's extremely disappointing when I went into it believing that this book would actually advance the storyline. I feel the same way about the recent Safehold books and their enormous detail on technology and military tactics.

If you're reading this Mr. Weber, here's one long-time fan that earnestly wishes you would separate the detailed worldbuilding from the actual story, because it bogs it down. Your books are still good, but that would make them much better.

JohnRoth wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:Wasn't there an Author's comment earlier that there were 10,000 casualties related to whatever happens at Beowulf? No I have not read Shadow of Victory yet.

Somehow I think someone would have mentioned that if it had occured in SOV.

I believe it was ten million, and that was sufficiently long ago that he could have changed his mind several times about how he wanted to handle the Battle of Beowulf.

Since I was the orginator of that, let me comment. The MWW was at Southcon in Chattanooga last year (I think it was Southcon; in my dotage I get confused; it did have Eric Flints' Ring of Fire mini-con with it).

During a "ask the author' period, David Weber did say that he was debating how to kill 10,000,000 Beowulfians, and that while at first he had planned to kill of Honor's Uncle Jacques, he had decided against that, figuring with all of the deaths in MoH, it's doubtful she could hate the MAlignment any more.

Obviously, the MWW decided to go another route (which of course he most certainly had every right to do) so what I wrote as an early spoiler way back then turned out to be incorrect.

Sorry about that.

I do remember him saying that Harahap would play a significant role in the book and that he rather liked him as a character (albeit we had no idea he liked him quite as much as he did in making him the prime character in this book).

Make of it what you will.

WeirdlyWired wrote:

SharkHunter wrote: because you know that of course the MAlign is going to blame the GA or Manticore for all the nuclear explosions, and that the Mandarins are going to play that up for all it's worth...

I thought the point of all the nukes was to cover the Malign's escape from Mesa, and the "evidence" of Audubon Ballroom involvement was planted in various computers [COG]. All the [patsy]official Mesan government needs do is point to computer files.

I haven't read past the free chapters, but what's been said about this incident simply doesn't ring true. Yes, it can be spun that 10th fleet is behind the nukes, but anyone who knows naval procedure would know it's a lie.

Why? Manticore, as I presume just about every space navy in the Honorverse, uses kinetic energy weapons, not nukes. They're configurable for the amount of damage one wants to inflict, and they don't cause collateral nuclear fallout.

So blaming Manticore, as I gather the Solly newsperson (forgot her name) suggested, is something that anyone who knows naval procedure would immediately identify as simply wrong. And that's going to come back to bite her, since she's not the kind of person who misses that kind of detail.

Blaming the Ballroom is likewise going to backfire badly because it raises a whole lot of other questions, like if they could, why did they wait until 2nd and 10th fleet had arrived? Those are presumably allies for mercy's sake.

And if the MAlign has left pointers to the Ballroom, it simply makes it more apparent that there's someone manipulating things from behind the scenes.

The Mandarins may be poorly enough informed to buy it, and their propaganda arm will try to milk it for everything they can, but that isn't going to hold for long. And if they ask Kingsford, I presume he's going to tell them exactly what I've mentioned above: those nukes aren't fleet weapons from any major fleet.

JohnRoth wrote:
...

Why? Manticore, as I presume just about every space navy in the Honorverse, uses kinetic energy weapons, not nukes. They're configurable for the amount of damage one wants to inflict, and they don't cause collateral nuclear fallout.

...

The Mandarins may be poorly enough informed to buy it, and their propaganda arm will try to milk it for everything they can, but that isn't going to hold for long. And if they ask Kingsford, I presume he's going to tell them exactly what I've mentioned above: those nukes aren't fleet weapons from any major fleet.

If I remember from the textev, the "laser heads" use a bomb-pumped fusion explosion that is a "shaped" explosion using gravitational lensing. So even the nukes they have on the ships would be the wrong kind.

From the little stuff about "super excalibur" that I have read it sounded like a bomb-pumped x-ray laser would need to be pumped by an enhanced radiation weapon, rather than a conventional bomb. The only thing that pumps the lasing medium is the EM radiation. So even a "high-yield" laser head weapon would probably produce a relatively small blast for its megatonnage.

drinksmuchcoffee wrote:


If I remember from the textev, the "laser heads" use a bomb-pumped fusion explosion that is a "shaped" explosion using gravitational lensing. So even the nukes they have on the ships would be the wrong kind.

From the little stuff about "super excalibur" that I have read it sounded like a bomb-pumped x-ray laser would need to be pumped by an enhanced radiation weapon, rather than a conventional bomb. The only thing that pumps the lasing medium is the EM radiation. So even a "high-yield" laser head weapon would probably produce a relatively small blast for its megatonnage.

"Ray-Gun" Ronald Reagan was shocked to learn that his SDI x-ray super anti missile weapons had to rely on a nuclear bomb to generate the X-rays. I do vaguely recall the data-dump about Mk18s and Mk 23s upgrades with higher yield bombs, somewhere in the 20 Mt range (?)

My apologies, folks.

I discovered that you can get lasing effects from neutron radiation as well. So far that requires a Helium-Xenon gas mixture, that might be a bit tricky to deploy from a missile accelerating at 49000 gravities. But you can do it.

It still seems quite likely that any warhead pumping a laser is going to have to be quite different from one you'd use to trash a city. Not that the laser-pumping bomb wouldn't do quite a number on a city, it just wouldn't be very efficient.

drinksmuchcoffee wrote:My apologies, folks.

I discovered that you can get lasing effects from neutron radiation as well. So far that requires a Helium-Xenon gas mixture, that might be a bit tricky to deploy from a missile accelerating at 49000 gravities. But you can do it.

It still seems quite likely that any warhead pumping a laser is going to have to be quite different from one you'd use to trash a city. Not that the laser-pumping bomb wouldn't do quite a number on a city, it just wouldn't be very efficient.

Not even new tech today, but there is some fissionable material which has trace elements, from those trace isotopes it is possible to determine which type of reactor generated the material, and even which specific eactor material came from.

I would assume, since different materials can be used for lasing rods, if SEM uses Rubidium and the SLN uses yttrium, it would be fairly simple to check the explosion raius for traces of lasing rods too? No lasing rod residue, you say? Can't be anybody's missile.

Not that it ill make any difference to the Mandarins on Old Earth or their co-opted newsies.

WeirdlyWired wrote:

drinksmuchcoffee wrote:My apologies, folks.

I discovered that you can get lasing effects from neutron radiation as well. So far that requires a Helium-Xenon gas mixture, that might be a bit tricky to deploy from a missile accelerating at 49000 gravities. But you can do it.

It still seems quite likely that any warhead pumping a laser is going to have to be quite different from one you'd use to trash a city. Not that the laser-pumping bomb wouldn't do quite a number on a city, it just wouldn't be very efficient.

Not even new tech today, but there is some fissionable material which has trace elements, from those trace isotopes it is possible to determine which type of reactor generated the material, and even which specific eactor material came from.

I would assume, since different materials can be used for lasing rods, if SEM uses Rubidium and the SLN uses yttrium, it would be fairly simple to check the explosion raius for traces of lasing rods too? No lasing rod residue, you say? Can't be anybody's missile.

Not that it ill make any difference to the Mandarins on Old Earth or their co-opted newsies.

The tech has been explained throughly in "In Fire Forged" and other places. The nukes are grav pinched hydrogen and the laserheads are hafnium. That is quite standard technology across navies. The exact makup of the structure and electronics probably varies, but the basic mechanism does not.

Theemile wrote:The tech has been explained throughly in "In Fire Forged" and other places. The nukes are grav pinched hydrogen and the laserheads are hafnium. That is quite standard technology across navies. The exact makup of the structure and electronics probably varies, but the basic mechanism does not.

So, Missiles are fusion bombs and construction nukes like Idiot Child set off in the park are also fusion? Oooh thinking this through hurts my head.

Also thought I read that any number of materials could be used, Manticore arbitrarily ( or not so) chose hafnium, but Mesa could have equally arbitrarily (or not so) chosen some other.

WeirdlyWired wrote:

Theemile wrote:The tech has been explained throughly in "In Fire Forged" and other places. The nukes are grav pinched hydrogen and the laserheads are hafnium. That is quite standard technology across navies. The exact makup of the structure and electronics probably varies, but the basic mechanism does not.

So, Missiles are fusion bombs and construction nukes like Idiot Child set off in the park are also fusion? Oooh thinking this through hurts my head.

Also thought I read that any number of materials could be used, Manticore arbitrarily ( or not so) chose hafnium, but Mesa could have equally arbitrarily (or not so) chosen some other.

In the Honorverse, Laserhead tech was developed via 2 sources, The Andermani bought the failed tech from an SL company which couldn't get it to work properly, perfected the technology, and sold it to everyone else. Manticore observed the failed trials and developed their laserhead in parallel to the Andermani from details they had learned from the original company.

So all Honorverse Laserheads have the same technology root. The technology was first fielded in ~1860 by both powers, and much later by everyone else, so there has not been alot of time for the technology to splinter widely.

Once we had the details from IFF, it became appearant thst the laserhead was the first modern paradigm change in warfare. It forced the final retirement of gun based cm systems (which couldn't intercept the laserheads 40,000 km away before they fired), and require the shift to more CMs for defense and a move from energy weapon warfare to missile warfare, because prior to the laserhead, a damaging missile hit was usually due to bad luck.