Uncompromising way out of order snippet for Rose

Theemile wrote:

cthia wrote:
Wasn't their mention of another huge contingency of SLN ships flailing about somewhere?

For Jeopardy question #2...

"What is 'Where was that other SLN fleet? And could a detached prong of it have been the forces engaged at Hypatia?' "

If memory serves, we have only been told of 2 other active formations of the SLN. Tang's 100 SDs was based out of (and returned to) Hyperion 1 around Mars.

The 2d Manticore "Smash and Grab" force was forming up at the same place Filaretta's fleet did - the planet, Tasmania, is way out in the Verge, roughly in line between Sol and Manticore, about a month's military travel from Manticore. That 2nd force is ~600 SDs and is completely out of the game for the next 4+ months - the time it will take to get a message to them and get them to return to the inner core.

Other than that, there are still ~1200 other BF SDs wandering about the Core or undergoing maintenance which we don't know about.

It still gets me that 1/2 of the active and under maintenance ships in BattleFleet were directed at Manticore without anyone noticing.

I suspect it wasn't so much that nobody noticed as much as it was "somebody else's problem."

cthia wrote:

PeterZ wrote:Sounds like the destroyer skipper is using SDM at extreme range. Likely delaying the drives from lighting off to hide her location better. Warheads sound like they are quite a bit more robust than the ones the RN had in the first Manty War. They would need to be kill RMN combatants with fewer hits an RN destroyer would expect to score.

She is dancing at the edge of more than one BC's effective range and using her guile and EW to snipe at them. Cheeky one, she is. Great big ovaries too!

Never said she wasn't, either.

Yes, but couldn't they still be tracked back to their origin as Honor's missiles were in BoM from outside the RZ?

You'd suffer issues with maintaining telemetry, but delayed missile launch would let you be well clear of the area where you launched from before the missile wedges come online.

Project where the BCs are going, get ahead of them, use your tubes to launch a few salvos worth of delayed activation missiles slip further away and then fire up the missiles. Even better if you're carrying at least ERMs with their 15 million km range (which would be extended if the BCs are heading roughly straight at the missiles).

As long as your accel advantage is high enough, and your stealth good enough, that you can outrun the BCs while keeping wedge strength down to something you can hide you can play tag all day (or at least until you run out of room between the BCs and their objective)

A few key points:

1. The ship is almost certainly not Torch. They have frigates and they're dealing with an Admiral. They'd have no chance.

2. Not Abigail. She's just been promoted to Lieutenant. She needs more seasoning as Tac. Then she's serve as an XO. Then she'd get a
command. Not enough time.

3. Naomi Kaplan is possible but she has a man...unless he was killed in the Mesalliance Attack.

Also,

RFC may be setting the bar a bit to high for the next arc. If Bernard Raoul can read emotions the way his mother can...and it's hinted he'll actually be better, he would be one hell of an officer. But the push would be on to keep him in Intelligence. He would be a great interrogator.

But Superman is actually a boring character. They need great villains and had to invent Kryptonite. When someone is just too good it gets boring.

ldwechsler wrote:A few key points:

1. The ship is almost certainly not Torch. They have frigates and they're dealing with an Admiral. They'd have no chance.

2. Not Abigail. She's just been promoted to Lieutenant. She needs more seasoning as Tac. Then she's serve as an XO. Then she'd get a
command. Not enough time.

3. Naomi Kaplan is possible but she has a man...unless he was killed in the Mesalliance Attack.

Also,

RFC may be setting the bar a bit to high for the next arc. If Bernard Raoul can read emotions the way his mother can...and it's hinted he'll actually be better, he would be one hell of an officer. But the push would be on to keep him in Intelligence. He would be a great interrogator.

But Superman is actually a boring character. They need great villains and had to invent Kryptonite. When someone is just too good it gets boring.

Raoul must have the integrity of battle steel. Then give him the morality to abhor intrusion into another human's mind. Another sentient being's mind or emotions who cannot reciprocate the intrusion. Reading broader emotions is unavoidable, but drilling down deeper must take effort. The sort of effort he would avoid.

That's why he ends up a straight leg in a tactical tract and Katherine goes into intelligence.

When he fights however, all bets are off. He'll learn to spar and read his opponent like a book. I suspect he'll end up bigger than his grandpa considering how tall his parents are. That's big, fast, prescient and very deadly.

If Hypatia is about 42LY from Beowulf and an SL member, it is just possible that it has also announced that it is taking a vote about leaving the SL. Given the location, it is also probably an existing trading partner with Beowulf and possibly a daughter colony.

We don't yet know. On the other hand, there was that approx 25% of SL member systems that voted with/for Beowulf instead of launching an investigation about their potential wrongdoing in not letting the SLN take over the Sigma Draconis Terminus to "assist" Fillerta.
Since we don't have any indication of timeing relative to anything else that is going on in the next book, this could be the opening round of RMN/GA needing to provide support for SL or SL Protectorates that want to leave.
Some of the questions would be why SLN is there with BCs and not SD although if Hypatia doesn't have any SDF to speak of, several BCs is just as effective as several SDs. Another is why does it have to be a DD? That is prompted by the relativly limited amount of missiles a DD would be carrying so just how many BCs would one want to take on even if it was playing cat & mouse with them using RMN stealth and MDMs fired from launchers but not engaging their drives. Could really cause havoc with a BC sending a couple of pods in ballistic and then swamping it with ECM and multiple missiles from close range.
Have to wonder how deep the ammo magazines are and what is left.

If you want to go to a nasty place, it could be a Malignment Spyder Drive ship doing the same things (and tougher to find) and CLAIMING to be a RMN ship. It is still killing SLN BCs but eventualy might just have to withdraw, leaving Hypatia to deal with the return of the SLN ships to finish thier mission.

What about a Ghost class ship with a skipper that simply cannot abide the butchery the SLN is proposing. That would both add dimensions to the MAlign and perhaps leave breadcrumbs for the next story arc.

ldwechsler wrote:
But Superman is actually a boring character. They need great villains and had to invent Kryptonite. When someone is just too good it gets boring.

Sounds like the space battles in a couple of books I've read recently. "James, I think those spearman are advancing on us again. Could you have the artillery give them a time on target battalion 1, fuse VT? And get me a glass of lemonade too?"

ldwechsler wrote:A few key points:

1. The ship is almost certainly not Torch. They have frigates and they're dealing with an Admiral. They'd have no chance.

2. Not Abigail. She's just been promoted to Lieutenant. She needs more seasoning as Tac. Then she's serve as an XO. Then she'd get a
command. Not enough time.

3. Naomi Kaplan is possible but she has a man...unless he was killed in the Mesalliance Attack.

Also,

RFC may be setting the bar a bit to high for the next arc. If Bernard Raoul can read emotions the way his mother can...and it's hinted he'll actually be better, he would be one hell of an officer. But the push would be on to keep him in Intelligence. He would be a great interrogator.

But Superman is actually a boring character. They need great villains and had to invent Kryptonite. When someone is just too good it gets boring.

I see your point ldwechsler and it is such a salient slobbering of saliva. Others join you down that path of thinking and I can surely understand why. If I may, I'd like to offer an alternative view point.

I see it as RFC priming our pumps to accept the replacement of Superwoman (Honor) with Superman (her son). Superman will be no more boring than Superwoman. And perhaps the bar is being set high because RFC plans to raise the bar of the enemy as well. The MAlign could turn out to be far more formidable than the Peeps. And they won't be hampered by internal political strife. If the new enemy is graded on a curve, then the hero must also be graded on a curve.

Honor had plenty of kryptonite. The many lives she was responsible for. That was her weakness. I don't imagine that she was the only CO that cared so deeply for her crew. But I can believe that she was the only one who had nightmares because of them. She had more than her share of enemies. The entire Young family. The Opposition. The many deaths she was responsible for. Adam Gerrick and those poor kids under the collapsed dome. The treecats of Black Rock clan.

I personally don't expect Raoul to be any less entertaining than his mother, who surely floats my boat.

I wonder if there will be an arch nemesis of Raoul's. His very own Pavel Young. I certainly expect that he will have a main enemy at least as worthy as the Havenites turned out to be.

A question that interests me however, is whether or not — in the future when Honor's offspring are engaging the MAlign — RFC will develop some of the MAlign characters as intricately and intimately so as to capture our imagination and sympathy, as he did with the Havenites? So that some of us will fall prey and identify with their cause, or with specific characters, which is symptomatic of Stockholm Syndrome, or in this case just plain old good storytelling. Will he give some of them endearing qualities.

We already know that if the MAlign has the equivalent of a Eloise and a Javier, rose will fall harder than a brick under nanite compulsion. I think she's actually living in Stockholm now.

Ok, ok, I may or may not have already fallen for Niecy. That's Anisimovna to all of you suckers! Eat your hearts out!

.

Theemile wrote:The 2d Manticore "Smash and Grab" force was forming up at the same place Filaretta's fleet did - the planet, Tasmania, is way out in the Verge, roughly in line between Sol and Manticore, about a month's military travel from Manticore. That 2nd force is ~600 SDs and is completely out of the game for the next 4+ months - the time it will take to get a message to them and get them to return to the inner core.

This is a totally predictable evolution, but I haven't read textev that says so. What did I miss?

PeterZ wrote:What about a Ghost class ship with a skipper that simply cannot abide the butchery the SLN is proposing. That would both add dimensions to the MAlign and perhaps leave breadcrumbs for the next story arc.

As far as we know, Ghosts aren't armed. They're purely scouts. And there's no particular reason the MAlign would want them at someplace like Hypatia.