Hope & Aspirations for the Finale

kzt wrote:And then the crew will blow it up. The end.

WeirdlyWired wrote:Wow more battle porn. Gotta love it
OMG this is just too easy.

phillies wrote:Clearly, Harahap will board and kill the unsuspecting crew.

Seriously? I thought that was Black Victor's forte, or the Torch marines under the auspices of the Beowulf Biological Survey Corps.

Do we have a new team developing? Black Victor and The Firebrand LLC. Where is Anton Zilwicki now?

Sharp Claw wrote:As I am not that young, my primary hope is to live long enough to read the next Honor book.

My second hope is that the series will advance beyond the conquest of Mesa.

If there is a battle between the Detweilers or any spider drive ships and GA ships, the outcome will depend on the GA's ability to detect the spider drive. Forraker, Hempill and Simoes have more than enough brainpower to develop a spider drive detector.

I hope there are representatives from Grayson too. Which I feel fairly confident there were even on Weyland. The Graysons have demonstrated extreme talent in thinking outside the box. Including being given a dead end path to the development of inertial compensators yet managing to make them not only work but be adapted by SKM.

Perhaps a sensor that is better at detecting small variations in the NS/HS interface or the GA could just use a brute force approach and saturate the location of any sensor ghost with enough drones to make a visual observation.

Which is the only way MAN ships can detect it even knowing where to look for them. And also, apparently the hoped for and assumed (by GA) operating principle for detection by the Mycroft system.

I hope the Alignment has a plan B ready to drop on the galaxy, like spreading genetic improvement virally as done on Grayson (although hopefully with less unintended side effects). Seeding a few semi-forgotten verge worlds with something like this would be interesting and drive the Beowulf establishment crazy.

I guess that my main hope for the closing Honorverse book is a satisfactory resolution to the conflict with the Alignment. I don't see how leaving Darius still out there and undiscovered and the Alignment completely back in the shadows makes a satisfactory conclusion to the Honorverse series.

If this is what we get, then what RFC has done is set himself up for another book which means, contrary to what he has already said, that the upcoming book is not the closer.

A couple of other items:

Fill in what happened to the attack on Beowulf.

Advance the thread on how Daud and his reinforced band of young Turks make out in unraveling how the Alignment manipulated the League into its war with Manticore.

Have Zilwicke and Cachat exchanging notes with Mike and Lester as they begin to expose Houdini.

Don

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Given that David has allowed himself just one book to close out two huge plots and numerous minor plots, they won't all be resolved. (Baring "Rocks fall, everyone dies" ) The impression I have gotten from people who have talked to David is that only one of the two major plots gets resolved and the MA is the one left hanging.

I suspect, and it saddens me to agree with others, that we shall only see the resolution of the problems with the league and the cats paws of the MA. The MA will fall back to Darius and vanish into the shadows again. That won't be resolved in the coming book.

Worse, every delay in the books makes it less likely that the MWW will finish the series We've all been wishing him long life and health but our wishes seem to be going consistently unanswered.

I have to wonder if we won't see the Lenny Dets show up at the very end of the next book and tear some battle group of the GA totally to shreds. Maybe with unforeseen weapons systems. The MA wouldn't send them out to get splattered, after all they do have a notion of the GA war fighting capability.

Maybe their new super weapon is a way to shoot through a wedge or something? If the best protection in the galaxy was just rendered obsolete wouldn't that turn everything on it's head?

Fireflair wrote:I suspect, and it saddens me to agree with others, that we shall only see the resolution of the problems with the league and the cats paws of the MA. The MA will fall back to Darius and vanish into the shadows again. That won't be resolved in the coming book.

Worse, every delay in the books makes it less likely that the MWW will finish the series We've all been wishing him long life and health but our wishes seem to be going consistently unanswered.

I have to wonder if we won't see the Lenny Dets show up at the very end of the next book and tear some battle group of the GA totally to shreds. Maybe with unforeseen weapons systems. The MA wouldn't send them out to get splattered, after all they do have a notion of the GA war fighting capability.

Maybe their new super weapon is a way to shoot through a wedge or something? If the best protection in the galaxy was just rendered obsolete wouldn't that turn everything on it's head?

They already have and have used weapons capable of that: Those spider drive grazers that took out the Manticore space stations. Still can't shoot what you can't see until it kills you.

I was under the [obviously mistaken] impression that this would be the final Honor Harrington book in the Honorverse.

A couple or three things come to mind,

1 rfc's original plan (before it was derailed by the Victor Cachat character) was for Honor to die in AAC and the children carry on the fight against the MA some 20+ years later, I think that the children's part of plan will be resurrected and only the conflict with the SLN will be resolved in the "last" book of the current arc.

2 At the time of the Yatawa strike Benjamin states that the LDs are at least another 2 years from being released from the yards for working up, so I don't expect to see them take part in the battles that will form parts of the "last" book.

3 rfc is said to have suggested that one of his daughters may continue the saga starting from when Honor's children pick up the baton/flag/torch (or whatever simile you care to use). That could happen or not as the case may be, however as far as Honor is concerned I think that whatever comes after the "last" book she will only be a peripheral part of it, maybe the odd consultation, a reminiscence by a now older former junior officer under her command, references to her exploits in training literature used in the academy and such like.

kzt wrote:Given that David has allowed himself just one book to close out two huge plots and numerous minor plots, they won't all be resolved. (Baring "Rocks fall, everyone dies" ) The impression I have gotten from people who have talked to David is that only one of the two major plots gets resolved and the MA is the one left hanging.

That's the impression I've gotten as well, which is why I've been kind of caustic with people who are speculating about power struggles in the succession to Albrecht. That might make a good plot line for someone who likes that kind of thing, but it's a horrible plot line when the MAlign's current objective is to camouflage the hole that they didn't quite manage to pull in after themselves.

At one point I think he mooted the notion of a second series to handle the MA plot line, but I think he abandoned that idea, and is going to settle for some side books that I will most likely have absolutely no interest in buying.

WeirdlyWired wrote:

Fireflair wrote:II have to wonder if we won't see the Lenny Dets show up at the very end of the next book and tear some battle group of the GA totally to shreds. Maybe with unforeseen weapons systems. The MA wouldn't send them out to get splattered, after all they do have a notion of the GA war fighting capability.

Maybe their new super weapon is a way to shoot through a wedge or something? If the best protection in the galaxy was just rendered obsolete wouldn't that turn everything on it's head?

They already have and have used weapons capable of that: Those spider drive grazers that took out the Manticore space stations. Still can't shoot what you can't see until it kills you.

Uh, no. The spider toros cannit pierce a wedge. They're more powerful than a laserhead, but less powerful than the grasers carried by BCs (or Shrikes). They'd splattter on a wedge just like every other known weapon in the Honorverse.

But being very stealthy they've a much better chance of slipping around to fire down the throat; making the wedges protection fairly irrelevant. But that's not what I believe Fireflair was speculating about. If the stations had had any clue there was an attack inbound they could have raised their bubble sidewalls - that would have made each graser torp far less effective. They still would have done devastating damage; but possibly not quite the catastrophic levels actually achieved.

Try the same thing against a Junction fort with its armor and its bubble wall online and you'd need dozens of grazer torp hits to kill it. (Maybe only 1/3 to 1/4 as many hits as the hundreds you'd need from laserheads; but still no one shot super-weapon)