Uncompromising Honor chatter

pushmar wrote:And also, since Dr. Herlander Simões defected to the Alliance, isn't about time Manticore (and to some extent, RoH) got some prototype form of a Streak Drive© in testing? At least the basic maths worked out ... and some hardware concepts. After all, Dr. Simões is one of the key scientists working on it. Did he bring any notes? How much tech data does he remember?

Instead our esteemed and beloved author has left us slogging along blindly in the Theta bands, without a clue as to when we can expect Alliance hardware to be deployed for native-built streak drive ships. Iota band? Kappa band? maybe Manticore can reach the Lambda band!

tlb wrote:

pushmar wrote:And also, since Dr. Herlander Simões defected to the Alliance, isn't about time Manticore (and to some extent, RoH) got some prototype form of a Streak Drive© in testing? At least the basic maths worked out ... and some hardware concepts. After all, Dr. Simões is one of the key scientists working on it. Did he bring any notes? How much tech data does he remember?

Instead our esteemed and beloved author has left us slogging along blindly in the Theta bands, without a clue as to when we can expect Alliance hardware to be deployed for native-built streak drive ships. Iota band? Kappa band? maybe Manticore can reach the Lambda band!

Isn't he at Bolthole, so we can expect the GA members to jointly benefit.

It seems that cracking the Mesan Alignment has been left to the collaboration books with Eric Flint, featuring Cachet, Zilwicki, Harahap and treecat. So if the next one is due out next year (?), maybe we will see something then.

pushmar wrote:And also, since Dr. Herlander Simões defected to the Alliance, isn't about time Manticore (and to some extent, RoH) got some prototype form of a Streak Drive© in testing? At least the basic maths worked out ... and some hardware concepts. After all, Dr. Simões is one of the key scientists working on it. Did he bring any notes? How much tech data does he remember?

Instead our esteemed and beloved author has left us slogging along blindly in the Theta bands, without a clue as to when we can expect Alliance hardware to be deployed for native-built streak drive ships. Iota band? Kappa band? maybe Manticore can reach the Lambda band!

tlb wrote:Isn't he at Bolthole, so we can expect the GA members to jointly benefit.

It seems that cracking the Mesan Alignment has been left to the collaboration books with Eric Flint, featuring Cachet, Zilwicki, Harahap and treecat. So if the next one is due out next year (?), maybe we will see something then.

Armed Neo-Bob wrote:He brought a lot of the theory, but he is a mathematician, not an engineer--he never built any of the hardware for it. So the Alliance is getting the parts of the project he worked on, but he wasn't privy to all of it. The Malign believed in the need to know.

Herlander was a mathematician and theoretical astrophysicist, and his wife Harriet—their friends often referred to them as H&H—was also a mathematician, although she was assigned to weapons research.

kzt wrote:Yup. But once again I’ll point out that we have very good theoretical understanding of how to build a fusion reactor. And we’ve been 20 years from having commercial fusion for the last 50 years. Sometimes the engineering is the really hard part.

In the honroverse they have been trying to got through that wall for 400 years. I’m pretty sure the obvious approaches have all been tried out, and failed in assorted fatal ways.

kzt wrote:The other issue is the same one with the wh at torch. If you send someone through it, the way you know it worked is if they come back. If they don’t come back you know it didn’t work, but exactly what wrong is not necessity obvious. Or even possible to discover.

Even minor problems at that high a hyperspace band are very bad. So the ship crosses the wall and never comes back. What now? How many people and ships are you willing to lose? My guess is that number is less than the opposition was.

cthia wrote:

pushmar wrote:And then there's the revelation the the Harringtons are an early Detweiler Alpha genotype, which more-or-less escaped (from the MAlign's point of view) from the Myerdahl system way back in the olden days, when Manticore was a backwater Verge system. Whether this was accidental, or there's a good story there about Richard and Marjorie Harrington is up to the author. Sounds like a neat little vignette.

But we already suspected that, right?

Not me, I just thought their increase intelligence was part of the Myerdahl package. Maybe Honor's geneticist mother will make some kind of connection in a future book. If the author doesn't want to play past 1923 PD anymore, he should at least write a short-story afterwords, I hope.

On the other hand, if a treecat meets another alpha genotype, are they more likely to bond with them? At least considering no sociopathic tendencies on the part of the human half (yeah, right), I think that would be - an interesting read. It could be the treecats themselves take down MAlign, with their neat little pulsers in true-hand.

I asked quite a few of the same questions awhile back. The MA are also Alphas, seeing as that treecats generally seem to be attracted to the smarter genome. It certainly seems possible, if Harahap is any indication. In fact, Harahap just might be the "missing link" between the possibility.

At any rate, it makes me wonder about a notion I broached some time ago about a possible conflict of interest between the cats and the two-legs on some upcoming matters, or irreconcilable differences. This passage reminded me of it . . .

UH wrote:Damien Harahap reached up to stroke Fire Watch’s ears gently as the treecat shifted on his shoulder. The ’cat hadn’t liked his person’s insistence that it would be wiser to leave his pulser aboard Tristram just this once, but that wasn’t the reason his muscles quivered with so much tension. It wasn’t difficult for Harahap to guess why they did, however, and he concentrated on thinking soothing thoughts.

That would have been easier if he hadn’t been so aware of the attitude of the red-haired, green-eyed lieutenant at the lift car’s control panel. Young Lieutenant Archer was not one of Damien Harahap’s admirers, and it seemed likely her flag lieutenant’s attitude mirrored Countess Gold Peak’s. That could be…unfortunate.

Fire Watch made a very soft hissing sound, and Harahap shook his head. None of that, he thought as hard as he could. We need to make a good impression on the lady. Trust me on that.

snip

“And this,” she said with a noticeable lack of warmth, “must be the infamous ‘Firebrand.’”

It wasn’t precisely a greeting, Harahap decided, and contented himself with a brief bow of acknowledgment. Fire Watch, on the other hand, flattened his ears at the admiral and Harahap felt his hand-feet’s claws sink deeper into the pad on his shoulder.

One of Gold Peak’s eyebrows rose slightly, and Harahap suppressed an urge to grimace. If anyone who’d never been adopted herself was going to understand treecat body language, it had to be Gold Peak, given her decades of friendship with Duchess Harrington and Nimitz. And the last thing they needed was for Fire Watch’s obvious belligerence to antagonize her.

I'm surprised that Harahap had to admonish Clean Killer in that regard. The 'cat should've long since absorbed as much manners about someone as important as the Queen's cousin of Nimitz' best friend, and how important it is to remain cordial and respectful to her. I can't imagine anything that would be more inappropriate, except maybe a treecat hissing at the Queen herself, or at Honor. I can just imagine another 'cat hissing at Honor in Nimitz' presence.

<Oh no you didn't!>

At any rate, if a cat does bond with a, let's say, Detweiler ( going whole hog) will the cat be a good influence on the Detweiler or will the Detweiler become a bad influence on the Cat? If bonding is anything like two-legs falling in love, we all can't help who our heart chooses.

What an eclectic cornucopia of interesting questions to use as wool while gathering.

runsforcelery wrote:Treecats don't dissemble well. It has something to do with being a telempathic species which can't hide its emotions from other treecats no matter how hard it tries. So physical cues aren't something that they worry about a lot. And treecats basically think that most two-legs' notions of proper etiquette are silly things that poor mind-blind creatures have to put up with because they can't mind-speak to each other.

Having said that, you might consider that all Fire Watch did was to flatten his ears. He didn't hiss, he didn't show his fangs. He indicated his . . . unhappiness and disagreement with Michelle's attitude towards his person with a physical cue he knew she would recognize. And when it comes to social situations involving their people, treecats aren't the most subtle of individuals at any time. Which, for that matter, Michelle would know and understand much better than most two-legs.

Harahap's admonition to Fire Watch was much more in the nature of reassurance to Fire Watch than it was born of any true concern that Henke would misinterpret the 'cat's response.


And I think you may safely assume that as soon as any treecat got a taste of the mind-glow of anyone who could murder (or approve of murdering) 43,000,000 people in cold blood in the service of any ideology, that mind-glow would promptly cease to be a factor in the future history of the galaxy. Treecats are very direct, pragmatic souls, and any mindset that buys into the concept "one death is a tragedy, one million deaths is a statistic" in order to justify an ideology-induced atrocity would be anathema to their shared worldview. And it is a shared worldview, thanks in no small part to the memory singers. There may be individual clans who disagree with one another about how to interpret and/or implement some facet of that worldview, but the basics are genuinely shared.