-SPOILER- Uncompromising Honor - Likes and Don't Likes

runsforcelery wrote:

TangoLima wrote:Thank You
Sectari Pro Apium
Latin: Runs For Celery

You really seem to enjoy wrenching our hearts.

Through this, I haven't decided whether or not he was, but he should have been. So, if he wasn't there, I have to manufacture a reason why he wasn't, and I already sort of did that by sending Tom Theismann off on that exercise and Trevor's Star because I knew that if I'd killed him, Rose wouldn't wait for Manticon . . . and could probably get lots of people to help her.

I admit it. I was too chicken. And the fact that I really, really like Tom and really, really didn't want to kill him, and know that Eloise really, really needs him was also a significant factor in my decision.

And like I said elsewhere, I think I've killed enough characters who were hugely important to me to indulge myself by telling the ferryman that he can't have some of them just yet.

1. He was home minding the store. Beowulf isn't that far away - staying in touch would be easy and someone had to stay in Landing to keep on top of things.

2. He was on his honeymoon. With me. We were having quite a lot of truly spectacular sex.

3. He was helping Tom Theisman out with that exercise at Trevor's Star.

4. He was on a quick jaunt to Haven to confer with Eloise and whoever's in charge of Capital Fleet these days about something, because everyone else was gallivanting off to Beowulf and someone had to play errand boy.

5. He was on a quick jaunt to the Talbott Quadrant to touch base with Khumalo and Dame Estelle about recent events and future plans. Khumalo would probably appreciate that. So would Essie.

6. He was on a quick jaunt to Silesia to touch base with Mark Sarnow. Sarnow kept him longer than expected because Allen developed an unexpected interest in needlepoint.

7. Just think of what I'd do to you if he didn't survive.

There you are. Pick one or combine several. No charge, no credit requested or required, and you can devote the saved brain cells to other things.

Personally, I prefer number 2 myself, but that's just me.

Also, you are a very astute man. I wouldn't have waited until this winter, and I would've had lots of help. I wouldn't have killed you, though. Far too kind. My plans in the event of Tom Theisman buying it are much more creative and exponentially more painful.

With undying love and adoration for Your Devilish Celeryness,
Rose

Like - Sonja and Shannon finally meet. Yay! (happy dance)

Dislike - Abigail is only in the book so she can get a boyfriend and cry on his shoulder? (and play arounfd under the table with him in the presence of the admiral)

Question - Where was Hamish's armsman during the attack at Beowulf? He's not at his duty station if he's not with Hamish. And nowhere in that section is an armsman mentioned (that I noticed). Letting Hamish go off alone with Jacques would not happen because the villains have tried to move on Beowulf before in the recent past. Guarding Hamish is his job, so where was he?

8: He was in the crapper, which happens to be a self contained life pod. (Which thinking about it, it would make a kind of sense if the toilets were emergency lifepods.)

Annachie wrote:8: He was in the crapper, which happens to be a self contained life pod. (Which thinking about it, it would make a kind of sense if the toilets were emergency lifepods.)

It wasn't like this came as a giant surprise. It's that it was a VERY large bomb and there wasn't a lot of time to act. Large like hundreds of tons of lithium deuteride. And LiD yields 50KT per kg, hence 50MT per ton, so yeah, we're talking double digit gigaton range. And it is INSIDE the structure.

Alpha is huge, like 150 km in diameter. So, unlike a nuke in space, you get supersonic shock waves and an actual fireball. Inside of Alpha. Which means if you are in the main core of Alpha you get crushed into paste, heated to incandescence and receive an instantly fatal dose of radiation. And then what is left is in hard vacuum. So unless you are way the hell out on the edges there is zero chance of survival.

Thank you RFC for the inside explanation. I could have wished for time chops during that Sol Attack because, well, it got a bit confusing/distracting trying to set some continuity between the segues. Possibly some sub chapters generally?

My vote is for more Honorverse. But after 25 years I can understand any lack of desire to revisit the place. I am sufficiently endeared of some of the characters, I'd like to follow them further (farther?). Ye s I wanna see how the Shadow arc pans out, along with Silesia. Want to see how the SL Chamber of Stars resolves that Crisis of theirs.

I enjoyed the book a lot. So much in fact that I have trouble even finding something that I am not content with

I particularly liked:

- seeing HH herself back in action !! and ! I simply love her as the main heroine. Oh and add a few more !!! here heh.

- that the Harringtons turn out to be a lost alpha line - making the whole Alignment plot personal and opening up possibilities for future stories.

- the ghosthunter story! Aside from the HH scenes this is my fav storyline. And the icing was how they use the Alignment's own nano programming to find and eliminate the spies hehe.

Now crawling over the story with a microscope and trying really hard I can come up with a nitpick:

- I would have preferred if Hamish and uncle Jaques died along with the others. I don't want to sound bloodthirsty but this rescue felt a bit miraculous for my taste.
Also on a practical side I don't really see the two characters' usefulness in future stories whereeas dead they would have had the use of haunting Honor, making her a broken heroine of sorts.
That might have openend up possibilities, particularly when I think about the how the Detweiler sons seem to be emotionally impacted as well at the moment. I may be nasty but seeing two trains on a headon collision course is just too fascinating to look away from.

Bruno Behrends wrote: SNIP
- the ghosthunter story! Aside from the HH scenes this is my fav storyline. And the icing was how they use the Alignment's own nano programming to find and eliminate the spies hehe.

Now crawling over the story with a microscope and trying really hard I can come up with a nitpick:

- I would have preferred if Hamish and uncle Jaques died along with the others. I don't want to sound bloodthirsty but this rescue felt a bit miraculous for my taste.
Also on a practical side I don't really see the two characters' usefulness in future stories whereeas dead they would have had the use of haunting Honor, making her a broken heroine of sorts.
That might have openend up possibilities, particularly when I think about the how the Detweiler sons seem to be emotionally impacted as well at the moment. I may be nasty but seeing two trains on a headon collision course is just too fascinating to look away from.

But to what end? This is the end of the Honor Harrington arc of the Honorverse. If Hamish dies,-what? Honor rides into battle crushes the SLN, goes off to Harrington Steading and we get to watch both Honor and Nimitz suicide. fun that. There are NO MORE Honor Harrington books to explore any of the interesting possibilities.

kzt wrote:So I was rereading the attack on Beowulf and the block ships being effective is dumb.

Assuming that Beowulf system works roughly like the only solar system we understand, all the planets are essentially in the same plane, and the shortest path to a planet from the hyperlimit is going to be in the same plane as the planet.

So the missiles fired at Beowulf are going to be more or less in same orbital plane as Beowulf. So if a missile is aimed at an orbital object and is directly targeting it and missed, what is behind it? Beowulf. So the block ships, which are said to be blocking the most direct path between the fleet and the stations, are blocking missiles that are basically on a collisions course with Beowulf. Even the SLN agrees that hitting Beowulf with a frac C missile would look bad.

So to avoid this you do what the MA did at Manticore. You have the missiles stay say 10,000-20,00 km away from Beowulf (on paths that do not intersect the planet ever) and fire at closest approach to the stations. Which means you have the x-ray lasers coming in from all sides, not where a single 300 km wide wedge will stop them.

Wasn't a single wedge. Was a whole bunch of wedges, forming a multi-layered shell. There are a lot of idle Manticoran-flag merchies right now, and since Oyster Bay there are dozens of them assigned to protect really important bits of system infrastructure. If no one ever attacks, they can go right back to being merchant ships; in the meantime, they are a solid barricade of impeller wedges to provide 360-degree cover (well, they usually don't worry about fire coming from the planet) against stand off missile attacks.

runsforcelery wrote:
Wasn't a single wedge. Was a whole bunch of wedges, forming a multi-layered shell. There are a lot of idle Manticoran-flag merchies right now, and since Oyster Bay there are dozens of them assigned to protect really important bits of system infrastructure. If no one ever attacks, they can go right back to being merchant ships; in the meantime, they are a solid barricade of impeller wedges to provide 360-degree cover (well, they usually don't worry about fire coming from the planet) against stand off missile attacks.

OK, I either misunderstood or it was too subtle for me. I didn't get the impression that they have basically englobed the stations. I can certainly see how a very large number would work much better.

I really obtained the impression that they were just blocking the direct threat vector. Probably from this line

"they stood ready to interpose their impeller wedges between the targets under their protection and the threat axis from any attacking force."

Perhaps a clearer explanation in the text would be possible?

Thanks.

runsforcelery wrote:
This book was intended to wrap up the Honor Harrington story line that began with On Basilisk Station. There is no way on God's green earth I could have wrapped up all of the threads in the Honorverse without writing a 17,000-page novel, and I don't believe I ever said anywhere that this book was intended to wrap up the Honorverse.

So if I'm gonna write more novels down the road — and I may — I need to leave myself some plot hooks. And if I decide I'm not gonna write more novels down the road, the plot strands I left unresolved probably aren't going to keep a lot of you awake at night.

In hindsight, my frustration was all PEBKAC. I _assumed_ the Mesan Alignment plot would be wrapped up in this book, with typical results.

Mr. Weber, thank you for your more than quarter century of work on this setting! If you've gotten a tenth of the enjoyment out of writing it as I have reading (and re-reading, and re-reading) it, you must be a really happy fellow.