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Bluesqueak wrote:

MrZero wrote:Weber said that there would be no Gbaba in Safehold. (of course that was years ago now) So as long as they aren't digging up crashed ufos at the north pole or something like that, the series is going to end after reaching space. I am one of those readers who think that there's a lot for the Safeholdians to do after and around that time, without dropping the exact situation the Dhak novels spelled out for the suddenly-outdated people of Earth. Ships are outdated when compared to the raikurai and the skimmers, but that doesn't mean that they have enough of the advanced stuff to get the fishing done. Or search all that wreckage they've been putting in the oceans for the past few years. With the Stone of Schuler looking like a rock, there's a lot of inconspicuous things on a wrecked warship of the gentry to go through. In sci-fi people always handwave the part where building the spaceships means filling up the pantry- or the biodomes of the (other planet name)-base.

Once the Safeholdians get into space, the story that makes Safehold a unique series is basically over. That is, the continuing story would then turn into some kind of 'The Honor of Safehold' space battles and politics series, so why would RFC want to write it? He could write a very similar story set in the Honorverse, and earn more for it...

It is possible there's another tech cache hidden away, maybe on that big moon that keeps irritating me and which I went on about so much I managed to also irritate RFC. If Safeholdians do get into space, the Langhorne Plan has failed, so someone other than Shan-Wei might have stashed a 'Gbaba for Dummies' and 'Mighty Space Warships For Beginners' in a place the Safeholdians could reasonably get to in a fairly primitive spaceship. Not a UFO at the North Pole, more a Big Obelisk on the Moon.

Personally I've always preferred he write another grand space opera in the The Excalibur Alternative universe. Pretty much the same story, but the Acchultani/Gbaba are, IMHO, boring adversaries. Monolithic has been done to death, and it would be hard to beat the Bugs as an antagonist.

The Federation has a huge cast of both bad guys and oppressed, potentially allied worlds/species, making for a much more interesting series of space opera stories that are more than just massive lines clashing and trying to utterly exterminate each other. Probably never happen, but I think that universe is even more rich for space opera tales than the Honorverse.

Technically, that's not Himself's sandbox to play in.

The setting and basic scenario was created by David Drake in Ranks of Bronze, and while I have no reason to think he disliked where RfC took it, there may well be a reason beyond sales why there's been no further mention of it. And if the reason _is_ sales, then it's dead in the water - if those gents can't sell a story nobody can.

NervousEnergy wrote:Personally I've always preferred he write another grand space opera in the The Excalibur Alternative universe. Pretty much the same story, but the Acchultani/Gbaba are, IMHO, boring adversaries. Monolithic has been done to death, and it would be hard to beat the Bugs as an antagonist.

The Federation has a huge cast of both bad guys and oppressed, potentially allied worlds/species, making for a much more interesting series of space opera stories that are more than just massive lines clashing and trying to utterly exterminate each other. Probably never happen, but I think that universe is even more rich for space opera tales than the Honorverse.

NervousEnergy wrote:Personally I've always preferred he write another grand space opera in the The Excalibur Alternative universe. Pretty much the same story, but the Acchultani/Gbaba are, IMHO, boring adversaries. Monolithic has been done to death, and it would be hard to beat the Bugs as an antagonist.

Well... there is small problem: RFC is quite prone to villain depletion syndrome. He usually start with pretty interesting bad guys, but by the later part of series (both Honorverse and Safehold affected), basically all interesting bad guys are either dead or switched to heroes side, and the only ones left are the utterly monstrous morons, who only able to do war crimes, massacre innocents & pillage & rape (and sometimes left you wondering "how those evil imbeciles could do even THAT MUCH without help?").

>Excalibur Alternative
Probably my favorite Weber Novel.
I'd love to see additional books in that universe.

I suspect I am not alone in a) wanting RFC to live for ever and continue writing and also b) wanting closure on my most favourite series within RFS's writing.

I love the Bahzell books (obvious, I guess) - but even it his world were to be closed off in a book or three, we don't have a solution to the whole 'mega' world battle.

Whereas with Safehold, we have to solve the Safehold story - AND know how we might then take on and defeat the Gbaba

Julia Minor wrote:The OBS was built using something, and the asteroid belt (assuming Safehold had/has one) would be a good source of raw materials that's obtainable without dealing with pesky gravity wells. I don't know how safe hiding anything among the asteroids would be.

The OBS was built aboard Hamilcar (and deployed just before it was used to prevent Commodore Pei from being able to intervene.) It had been Langhorne's command ship, and a major industrial center. I have the impression that a lot of what got used in terraforming Safehold, and doing things like carving out the earliest canals was made about Hamilcar and ferried to the surface.

Hamilcar would have been disposed of in Langhorne's original plan, but Chihiro and associates had already been thinking of retaining it. With Langhorne dead, there was no reason they couldn't do so.

(Safeholdians during the War Against the Fallen could see it in Safehold's sky but didn't know what it was. The called to the Dawn Star. The "servitors" used in the War Against the Fallen withdrew to it at the end of that conflict, and it "departed in glory". Precisely where it went is one of those interesting questions, and I suspect we'll see it again.)

(Me, I'd have recycled the colony ships into raw materials for the OBS instead of shoving them into the sun. But I can see Langhorne being worried about the chance someone could sneak unauthorized tech off a ship under the cover of "disassembly".)

What raw materials are needed for the OBS? Once built, what it will mainly need is reloads for the kinetic weapons launchers. Handy drifting rocks do fine. And we don't know exactly how big the OBS is, but I doubt even one discarded ship would be required to provide construction material. My impression is that Hamilcar could use drifting space junk just fine.

The problem with a hypothetical tech stash in a cometary orbit is that it's not necessarily available once Safehold gets back into space. Halley's Comet has a nice short orbital period of 75 years or so; if the tech stash were placed in a similar orbit you could easily be looking at decades between "first Safeholdian in space" and "here's what you need to know about the Gbaba". That's too long for safety.

Another problem is simply locating it again. Unless you have precise orbital information, it's just more drifting space junk, and how do you sort it out from the rest?

If there's another tech stash, I'm betting on the moon simply because on the scale of a solar system it's basically staying in one place, which makes it much easier to find when the time is right.

I concur, and it wouldn't have been a challenge to do it. Whether anyone did is another matter. But there was a thread elsewhere here about using telescopes to view space. A decent telescope trained on Langhorne might see interesting things.
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Dennis

Theemile wrote:Actually, It would make more sense if the Ark fleet, when being sent on it's solar death dive, executed a hidden command which altered it's trajectory, fired a ECM drone into the sun, while turning on it's stealth fields, and sling-shoting into a cometary orbit. The ships would slowly change their orbit so they were orbiting several dozen AU past the last planet and re-enter stasis.

That way Langhorne could observe their deaths, yet the ships would still survive - and the capability was well within the capability of the military faction.

It would be lovely if it could be done. But recall the fun Commodore Pei and Shan Wei had in diverting stuff from ships being discarded to stock Nimue's Cave. I suspect there was more they would have liked to preserve, but simply couldn't cover their tracks in doing so. Langhorne wanted the ships disposed of, and enough of the command crew agreed with his ideas that doing what you suggest would have been a non-trivial exercise. The sort of folks who could do it, like Commodore Pei, would have been watched like cat lizards watching spider rat holes to make sure they had no opportunity.
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Dennis

That impression is certainly wrong: Hamilcar _was_ Langhorne's command ship. And therefore not in-system for most or all of the terraforming.

And it occurs to me in passing that either we have been making some rather inaccurate assumptions about the tech level the mission plan allowed for, or Shan Wei pulled a fast one with those canals. Everyone seems to take it for granted that canals are low-tech. After all, they use animal draught, and in our history were superseded by railways and later motor transport [except where they haven't been - like Panama & Suez]. However, the kinds of canals that she created, and were taken as models in the succeeding centuries, are very much creatures of the Industrial Revolution, and the latter part of it at that. The little we hear about their hydraulic mechanisms suggests that they are _very_ sophisticated. I wonder if there are any ship lifts tucked away in areas we haven't visited yet?

DMcCunney wrote:The OBS was built aboard Hamilcar (and deployed just before it was used to prevent Commodore Pei from being able to intervene.) It had been Langhorne's command ship, and a major industrial center. I have the impression that a lot of what got used in terraforming Safehold, and doing things like carving out the earliest canals was made about Hamilcar and ferried to the surface.


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Dennis

Louis R wrote:That impression is certainly wrong: Hamilcar _was_ Langhorne's command ship. And therefore not in-system for most or all of the terraforming.

Sorry, but I can't agree. It was the command ship and a major industrial node. Just where else would it be, and why? You tend to want HQ and major industrial center close to where the work is being done. I see no reason for it to be elsewhere.

And it occurs to me in passing that either we have been making some rather inaccurate assumptions about the tech level the mission plan allowed for, or Shan Wei pulled a fast one with those canals. Everyone seems to take it for granted that canals are low-tech. After all, they use animal draught, and in our history were superseded by railways and later motor transport [except where they haven't been - like Panama & Suez]. However, the kinds of canals that she created, and were taken as models in the succeeding centuries, are very much creatures of the Industrial Revolution, and the latter part of it at that. The little we hear about their hydraulic mechanisms suggests that they are _very_ sophisticated. I wonder if there are any ship lifts tucked away in areas we haven't visited yet?

I don't think Shan Wei pulled a fast one with the canals. I'd say they were part of the original plan for Safehold, to provide water transport over long distances. There are example in Earth history of development and expansion being spurred by such things.

Shan Wei and her folks had the advantage of high-tech gear to dig the original canals, allowing it to happen far faster than low tech would have permitted. And we are told that the Book of Hastings provides a fair bit of information on geology, in part because the original canals like the Holy Langhorne carved through some elevated terrain and revealed geological strata in the process which needed some explanation. (Similar cuts happened on Earth as railroads were developed and in some cases required extensive excavation of the right of way. The Pennsylvania Railroad made rather enormous changes along its right of way.)

But the Archangels were divine beings with mystical servitors to aid them. That's not high-tech - it's magic.

Later canals created according to the spec laid down in the Holy Writ were low tech construction. Canals can be dug with muscle power and draft animals. High tech just lets you do it far faster and cheaper.

And I suspect that later canals dug and equipped by colonists didn't occur for some time after the Adams and Eves were awakened. There would need to be significant population growth to provide a reason to dig new canals, as canals connect points with substantial populations, and you need the industrial base to provide the tools to dig the canals and the mechanisms they use.

The colonists had the original canals dug by Shan Wei's teams as models to copy, but it would have been a while before they could do so.
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Dennis

wasn't there a line in OAR about how Langhorne didn't oversee the terraforming, he was with the majority of the fleet elsewhere. That was how the brain washing of the colonists escaped notice until it was too late to do anything about it.