Uncompromising Honor, snippet #1

The book starts out so fun!

Thank you for the snippet!

kzt wrote:I was thinking that the facilities that remove high-value delicate items are generally called shipyards while ship breakers are normally turning the low value non-delicate parts into razor blades.

It just so happens that the family of companies that I work for started its existence as shipbreakers tearing down surplus US Navy vessels after WWII. Removing still useful parts for resale was a major part of the work, and in fact generated the majority of the profits. So to me at least, RFCs intent that others missed was quite clear.

There seems to be a lot of discussion about the quality of the grasers. They very well might be ahead of GA tech--the GA has converted to a basically pure missile doctrine. While they retain some of their energy weapons improving them would have been way down on the priority list. They might have gotten spinoff improvements from other developments but that's about it.

Of course, we all realize my concern way back when of returning the captured ships back to the SLN. In case they had a sudden epiphany to reuse some of their own tech in an "out of the box" fashion.

After all, their industry is still intact, and they have the metric tools to fit all of the "nuts." LOL

Loren Pechtel wrote:There seems to be a lot of discussion about the quality of the grasers. They very well might be ahead of GA tech--the GA has converted to a basically pure missile doctrine. While they retain some of their energy weapons improving them would have been way down on the priority list. They might have gotten spinoff improvements from other developments but that's about it.

I asked David above, and he confirmed that the Grasers are neither higher tech, nor higher output than current tech RMN SD Grasers. Just a massive bunch of really nice, powerful Grasers.

This passage includes the mention of stevedores and a time when there was more muscle than automation, as I once mentioned how difficult it must be for some of the poorer systems to offload the huge cargo freighters of huge containers, then the containers themselves, lacking the more modern and convenient, yet quite expensive equipment.

I had the good fortune of riding along with a coast to coast trucker (18 wheelers) before entering high school from North Carolina to California, round trip. The differences between some of the stops were incredible. Some of the destinations' docks unloaded the large behemoths that were packed to the gills in a matter of hours. Some took days because of a lack of a decent dock, help and equipment. This is real guys. No handwavium used here at all.

Please do forgive the snips. Snipped not for brevity, but for the emotional content and feel.

RFC wrote:Hope you like it.

I do indeed RFC. Intensely. I have often said that an author is only as good as his ability to invoke tears of emotional involvement. No matter the taste of the tears. No tears, no deal. I must share the emotional content of this passage that was not, is not, lost on me. If only for those who may have missed it, and for those who may not be familiar with the ballad. And for those just needing a ride back down memory lane. A quite powerful and emotional ballad it is for me, that induces many tears and the memories of a bygone, but never forgotten era. The ballad will help place you in the shoes of the young Clayton.

JULY 1922 POST DIASPORA






Unicorn Belt
Manticore B
Star Empire of Manticore

Waiting, as it happened, for Phil Clayton, and he wondered again how he’d drawn the duty. Oh, he had the engineering background for it, but so did a lot of other officers, and he hated his new assignment. Maybe they had been enemy vessels, but they’d been ships, and he’d loved the inner magic of ships for as long as he could recall.

His earliest memories were of standing with his nose pressed to the window on the south side of his parents’ modest house, watching the atmospheric counter-grav freighters drive across the heavens, splashed in sunlight and cloud shadow, gleaming like the Tester’s own promise of beauty. Pygmies compared to the doomed ships outside his shuttle at the moment, of course, but enormous for pre-Alliance Grayson.

And even more so for the imagination of a little boy who’d realized even then that ships had souls. That anything that lovely, that graceful — anything that many men had given so much of themselves to — had to be alive itself. He’d watched them summer and winter, in sunlight, in driving rain, in snow. He’d watched them at night, roaring low overhead in a bellow of turbines, flanks gleaming with their own private constellations of running lights. By the time he was ten, he’d been able to identify every major class by sight. And when he’d climbed up into the attic (which he’d been able to do only when all of his moms assumed one of the others had him in sight), he could actually get an angle down onto Burdette Port’s docks, where those massive constructs landed.

Oh, the cargoes he’d summoned from dreams of other steadings! The pallets and boxes, the containerized cargo, the nets of fruit and vegetables. He’d watched stevedores unload the cavernous holds — there’d been far more muscle power and far less automation at the time — and wished he was one of them. And he’d devoured everything he could find in print and on vid about not just the atmospheric ships, but about the freighters that called on Grayson, however rarely, from far beyond his own horizons. He’d ingested anything and everything, from the ballad of the Wreck of the Steadholder Fitzgerald to the mystery of the colony ship Agnes Celeste and her vanished crew, and he’d known what he wanted.

Do pardon my bold to call attention.


The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald(s)
Gordon Lightfoot

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called 'gitche gumee'
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy
With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more
Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty
That good ship and crew was a bone to be chewed
When the gales of November came early
The ship was the pride of the American side
Coming back from some mill in Wisconsin
As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most
With a crew and good captain well seasoned
Concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms
When they left fully loaded for Cleveland
And later that night when the ship's bell rang
Could it be the north wind they'd been feelin'?
The wind in the wires made a tattle-tale sound
And a wave broke over the railing
And every man knew, as the captain did too,
T'was the witch of November come stealin'
The dawn came late and the breakfast had to wait
When the gales of November came slashin'
When afternoon came it was freezin' rain
In the face of a hurricane west wind
When suppertime came, the old cook came on deck sayin'
Fellas, it's too rough to feed ya
At seven pm a main hatchway caved in, he said
Fellas, it's been good t'know ya
The captain wired in he had water comin' in
And the good ship and crew was in peril
And later that night when his lights went outta sight
Came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
Does any one know where the love of God goes
When the waves turn the minutes to hours?
The searches all say they'd have made Whitefish Bay
If they'd put fifteen more miles behind her
They might have split up or they might have capsized
They may have broke deep and took water
And all that remains is the faces and the names
Of the wives and the sons and the daughters
Lake Huron rolls, superior sings
In the rooms of her ice-water mansion
Old Michigan steams like a young man's dreams
The islands and bays are for sportsmen
And farther below Lake Ontario
Takes in what Lake Erie can send her
And the iron boats go as the mariners all know
With the gales of November remembered
In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed,
In the maritime sailors' cathedral
The church bell chimed till it rang twenty-nine times
For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call 'gitche gumee'
Superior, they said, never gives up her dead
When the gales of November come early

*** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***

A bonus just to stop and smell the coffee. You old timers will understand.

cthia wrote:This passage includes the mention of stevedores and a time when there was more muscle than automation, as I once mentioned how difficult it must be for some of the poorer systems to offload the huge cargo freighters of huge containers, then the containers themselves, lacking the more modern and convenient, yet quite expensive equipment.

I had the good fortune of riding along with a coast to coast trucker (18 wheelers) before entering high school from North Carolina to California, round trip. The differences between some of the stops were incredible. Some of the destinations' docks unloaded the large behemoths that were packed to the gills in a matter of hours. Some took days because of a lack of a decent dock, help and equipment. This is real guys. No handwavium used here at all.

Please do forgive the snips. Snipped not for brevity, but for the emotional content and feel.

RFC wrote:Hope you like it.

I do indeed RFC. Intensely. I have often said that an author is only as good as his ability to invoke tears of emotional involvement. No matter the taste of the tears. No tears, no deal. I must share the emotional content of this passage that was not, is not, lost on me. If only for those who may have missed it, and for those who may not be familiar with the ballad. And for those just needing a ride back down memory lane. A quite powerful and emotional ballad it is for me, that induces many tears and the memories of a bygone, but never forgotten era. The ballad will help place you in the shoes of the young Clayton.

JULY 1922 POST DIASPORA






Unicorn Belt
Manticore B
Star Empire of Manticore

Waiting, as it happened, for Phil Clayton, and he wondered again how he’d drawn the duty. Oh, he had the engineering background for it, but so did a lot of other officers, and he hated his new assignment. Maybe they had been enemy vessels, but they’d been ships, and he’d loved the inner magic of ships for as long as he could recall.

His earliest memories were of standing with his nose pressed to the window on the south side of his parents’ modest house, watching the atmospheric counter-grav freighters drive across the heavens, splashed in sunlight and cloud shadow, gleaming like the Tester’s own promise of beauty. Pygmies compared to the doomed ships outside his shuttle at the moment, of course, but enormous for pre-Alliance Grayson.

And even more so for the imagination of a little boy who’d realized even then that ships had souls. That anything that lovely, that graceful — anything that many men had given so much of themselves to — had to be alive itself. He’d watched them summer and winter, in sunlight, in driving rain, in snow. He’d watched them at night, roaring low overhead in a bellow of turbines, flanks gleaming with their own private constellations of running lights. By the time he was ten, he’d been able to identify every major class by sight. And when he’d climbed up into the attic (which he’d been able to do only when all of his moms assumed one of the others had him in sight), he could actually get an angle down onto Burdette Port’s docks, where those massive constructs landed.

Oh, the cargoes he’d summoned from dreams of other steadings! The pallets and boxes, the containerized cargo, the nets of fruit and vegetables. He’d watched stevedores unload the cavernous holds — there’d been far more muscle power and far less automation at the time — and wished he was one of them. And he’d devoured everything he could find in print and on vid about not just the atmospheric ships, but about the freighters that called on Grayson, however rarely, from far beyond his own horizons. He’d ingested anything and everything, from the ballad of the Wreck of the Steadholder Fitzgerald to the mystery of the colony ship Agnes Celeste and her vanished crew, and he’d known what he wanted.

Do pardon my bold to call attention.


The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald(s)
Gordon Lightfoot

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called 'gitche gumee'
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy
With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more
Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty
That good ship and crew was a bone to be chewed
When the gales of November came early
The ship was the pride of the American side
Coming back from some mill in Wisconsin
As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most
With a crew and good captain well seasoned
Concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms
When they left fully loaded for Cleveland
And later that night when the ship's bell rang
Could it be the north wind they'd been feelin'?
The wind in the wires made a tattle-tale sound
And a wave broke over the railing
And every man knew, as the captain did too,
T'was the witch of November come stealin'
The dawn came late and the breakfast had to wait
When the gales of November came slashin'
When afternoon came it was freezin' rain
In the face of a hurricane west wind
When suppertime came, the old cook came on deck sayin'
Fellas, it's too rough to feed ya
At seven pm a main hatchway caved in, he said
Fellas, it's been good t'know ya
The captain wired in he had water comin' in
And the good ship and crew was in peril
And later that night when his lights went outta sight
Came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
Does any one know where the love of God goes
When the waves turn the minutes to hours?
The searches all say they'd have made Whitefish Bay
If they'd put fifteen more miles behind her
They might have split up or they might have capsized
They may have broke deep and took water
And all that remains is the faces and the names
Of the wives and the sons and the daughters
Lake Huron rolls, superior sings
In the rooms of her ice-water mansion
Old Michigan steams like a young man's dreams
The islands and bays are for sportsmen
And farther below Lake Ontario
Takes in what Lake Erie can send her
And the iron boats go as the mariners all know
With the gales of November remembered
In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed,
In the maritime sailors' cathedral
The church bell chimed till it rang twenty-nine times
For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call 'gitche gumee'
Superior, they said, never gives up her dead
When the gales of November come early

*** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***

A bonus just to stop and smell the coffee. You old timers will understand.

Try Stan Rogers' "White Squall," "Mary Ellen Carter," or "The Last Watch."


Heck, ANYTHING of Stan's is worth listening to!

As we are talking about Gordon Lightfoot's song on a board about Sci-Fi I thought I would throw in a shout out to the "Ballad of Apollo XIII".

"There's legends galore in the pulp SF lore 'Bout shipwrecks of spacecraft a-spacing When meteor holes come 'tween men and their goals By demolishing ships that they're racing

Painting pictures with words like none you'd ever heard SF writers made frightening predictions But the terrors they tell cannot equal the hell Faced by three men in fact, and nonfiction To April 11, Nine-teen Seventy now We must let our narrative carry us Three men in a C.S.M named Odyssey Beneath them, the L.M named Aquarius

With a furious roar, Saturn leapt for the sky With Jack Swigart, Fred Haise, and Jim Lovell Toward a planned rendezvous that would never come true With the grey lunar gravel and rubble Still, they set up housekeeping in orbit, 'round Earth, And translunar insertion was kindled, But the public just yawned, for this landing was third And behind them old Terra slow dwindled

Apollo XIII traveled on down the track laid down by the three laws Of Newton At fifty-six hours into lunar bound coast Lovell said, "Houston, we have a problem" Now, they might have been struck by a meteorite Maybe something had just overloaded But their panels went red with their malfunction lights And in Odyssey something exploded

That blast blocked or ruptured their fuel cell line Their electrical energy faltered With no hope at all of a rescue in time Thirteen's mission profile had just altered To physics and God they commended their lives For no power on Earth now could save them Although NASA let the men talk with their wives Of goodbyes there was never a mention

Three men in a CSM bound for the Moon Reached two hundred and six thousand miles Did they have enough air to get all the way there? Could they trust what they read on their dials? And when they reached Luna, could they change course for home Would she trap them, or loose them at random Untested advice and contingency plans Were the only things NASA could hand them

When Apollo 13 crossed the limb of the moon And death came from the receivers We knew the next signal would speak of their doom Or answer the faith of believers "Apollo Thirteen, This is Houston, Do you read?" Dear god let them answer us quickly The world held its breath and in mission control Every screen lit a face pale and sickly

"Apollo Thirteen, this is Houston. Do you read?" ... That empty sound stretched on for years "Houston... This is Thirteen... We're coming home!" said a voice And the world found relief in its tears.

At T plus one hundred and thirty-eight hours They jettisoned Odyssey's wreckage That module was shattered and blasted apart A symbol of death in the space age Aquarius served as their lifeboat to shore Till they knew they would no longer need her. At T plus one hundred and forty-one hours With a deep prayer of "Thank You" they freed her

Ed, Roger, and Gus must have smiled on those days Knowing theirs was the path not to follow But their souls were with Swigart and Lovell and Haise Riding home on the thirteenth Apollo At T plus one hundred forty-three fifty-four Apollo XIII hit the waters Three men returned home, shaken up, but alive To their wives and their sons and their daughters!

There's legends galore in the pulp SF lore 'Bout shipwrecks of spacecraft a-spacing But all of them now do cause men to reflect On three days when the world's heart went racing Painting pictures with words all too few people heard, SF writers could make their predictions But always recall that in spite of them all, The truth was much greater than fiction

Yes always recall that, that in spite of them all The truth must be greater than fiction."

Filk Version of Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" by Julia Ecklar. YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbL3oNEDvJ0

So sad. This reminds me of the transcripts from the sailing vessel El Faro. They really didn't know what they were facing. And at the end you could hear the despair.

https://www.theatlantic.com/news/archiv ... sb/510662/

runsforcelery wrote:Try Stan Rogers' "White Squall," "Mary Ellen Carter," or "The Last Watch."


Heck, ANYTHING of Stan's is worth listening to!

"Northwest Passage," "The Idiot," and (of course) "Barrett's Privateers" are particularly worth looking up in addition to those three. I wonder what the Graysons would think of "The Field Behind the Plow."

Though if you have Honor listen to "Mary Ellen Carter" I will cry.