(Spoilers - sorta) Predictions for Arc 2

Maybe Arc 2 will be in the distant future. start with downing or crippling the OBS, assuming it still functions. Sooner or later lack of maintenance will kill, or at least disable the thing if nothing else does. Hell I'm surprised it still functioned when Merlin woke up.

Roguevictory wrote:Maybe Arc 2 will be in the distant future. start with downing or crippling the OBS, assuming it still functions. Sooner or later lack of maintenance will kill, or at least disable the thing if nothing else does. Hell I'm surprised it still functioned when Merlin woke up.

Provision for maintenance could be built into the thing from the start. Maybe a base on the moon...

Don

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Roguevictory wrote:Maybe Arc 2 will be in the distant future. start with downing or crippling the OBS, assuming it still functions. Sooner or later lack of maintenance will kill, or at least disable the thing if nothing else does. Hell I'm surprised it still functioned when Merlin woke up.

The temple is still going fine so why shouldn't the OBS. After all, all the current humans provide to the temple is a sweeping and polishing service

The last report from David Weber is that the next book will be set 20 years after the end of the current book.

Roguevictory wrote:Maybe Arc 2 will be in the distant future. start with downing or crippling the OBS, assuming it still functions. Sooner or later lack of maintenance will kill, or at least disable the thing if nothing else does. Hell I'm surprised it still functioned when Merlin woke up.

DrakBibliophile wrote:The last report from David Weber is that the next book will be set 20 years after the end of the current book.

Roguevictory wrote:Maybe Arc 2 will be in the distant future. start with downing or crippling the OBS, assuming it still functions. Sooner or later lack of maintenance will kill, or at least disable the thing if nothing else does. Hell I'm surprised it still functioned when Merlin woke up.

One of the nice things about finishing arc 1 is that horizons have widened dramatically again. For the last couple of books we knew lots of detailed info about many things, and that constrained our expectations / RFC's possible plot lines - but now it's much more up in the air.

I'm guessing that RFC is probably appreciating that renewed freedom too!

DrakBibliophile wrote:The last report from David Weber is that the next book will be set 20 years after the end of the current book.

I just hope that doesn't mean it comes out 20 years after the current book!

Same here.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

DrakBibliophile wrote:The last report from David Weber is that the next book will be set 20 years after the end of the current book.

I just hope that doesn't mean it comes out 20 years after the current book!

Merlin's legendary weapon- At the time I read that I wondered if they just snapped a new crossguard on it, or did they make a new sword? And when was the last time that Merlin did anything legendary? The seijin stand-ins tend to lessen what _Merlin_ tended to do. In public, to make anything he did legendary.
-And as long as we're talking about what we want in the next book, I was never a fan of the swearing. You can make any claims of "but that's normal because reasons" you want but it doesn't add up. If you're going to mind-erase and reprogram a small cross-section of humanity, a medically pure to the point of being mentally clean (cured of aggro, cured of schizophrenia, cured most of the things that made people be insane, etc), and even go to the extra step of making the holy church be their government and educational institutions, then that sort of thing should have been as wiped out as it can get. (OK, it's been 9 books so it might have slipped my mind but) Weber didn't even use it for the projected "swears like a sailor" joke. Safehold's early books are mostly wooden-ship-era naval in focus, they didn't even "They don't swear like _our_ sailors. You can't rattle our sailors into blurting it out so easily."
-I probably mentioned a lot of "once and forgotten" stuff last time I posted. The singing-all-the-time boy's choir mentioned in early Safehold strikes me as a perfect setting for a number of short-story styles from murder mystery to horror-tragedy. Are they not being paid anymore? Who's feeding them? It's like a birdcage somebody takes for granted.
-20 years? ugh, please don't let the next war be a take on the Vietnam war. Some of the fun of SH was in the transition, the taking "oars and swords" Safehold and dropping MerlinBot into it. That being from one part of wooden-era technology was why (and Weber could have explained it better) the COG's leadership was so clueless and lost they were taking EVERYTHING that the Empire of Charis did as a one-off. Y'know, under the old pre-Merlin non-Merlin rules. Power-horn rifles, and boats that run off crew-power instead of wind. Fire, wait a minute or three for the reload. But all that meant was that the EOC did something and couldn't do it again, so the EOC doing it constantly was totally wrong/incorrect to the temple-raised, Writ-bound, fact-drilled COG priests. 20 years from now Merlin should be using orbital tether elevators, not trying to drag Safehold out of the candle-light era. There's just too much to do, to dare, to risk, and to dredge up in the immediate after Sound ends.

There are no natural languages that don't include some way to swear. Some may have swear-phrases rather than swearwords, but it does seem that swearing is in-built for humans.

Possibly not just humans: there are some reports that apes who've been taught sign language appear to use certain signs in an 'I'm really annoyed' sense as well as their literal meaning.

The highly religious nature of Safeholdian society would mean that people would have firm views on where swearing is permitted, but as a famous guide to WW2 US soldiers pointed out, 'bloody' is perfectly permissible when under fire.

EdThomas wrote:.
Turrets to protect our big new guns can be operated with hydraulics or pneumatics but you have to connect them to our new fire control system and that's gonna be tough without electricity

The USS Monitor's turret was operated with steam power. Her turret weight 160 tons or so.

With some of the complexities of that design, they're probably better off with some type of en barbette mount.

Military developments are going to be restricted by the absence of a fast, long range communication systems. Machine guns and tanks are a given but communications is going to be a big mobility limiter for both land and naval forces.

To a certain extent it is possible to overcome the limitations of communication, but you have to train your subordinates to have initiative, and you have to learn to perform German "mission type tactics."