The big problem of late Honorverse

Well, of course its my IMHO, but for me all Honorverse books after the "At All Costs" became... much more boring. The best part of the earlier novels - the complex, fascinating, interesting combat sequences, in which heroes done their very best to achieve (sometimes, very costly) victory - they basically disappeared completely. Basically every major battle became "good guys punch the button - bad guys destroyed in quantities - good guys feel sorry about having to kill so many for about five minutes".

The reason is "Apollo" system. To put it simply - it is too good. It is so good, that it basically eliminated all suspense from the combat sequences; there is no need for any strategy, tactics, inventiveness.

I must point out, that RFC could easily avoid such problem - simply by making the "Apollo" unreliable. And it would make perfect sense, actually. It is a revolutionary new system, designed during the time of severe military funding cuts, and then rushed into deployment. Historical experience generally tell us that such solutions led to... less than ideal success rate. Especially for the system that tend to break the basic physic laws in hard way (seriously, guys, "Apollo" system is based on combining somehow three different concepts of time - the dilated onboard time on the ship, the dilated onboard time on the missile, and some weird "absolute time" of FTL carrier wave. Not to mention, it breaks causality, i.e. it is working as time machine).

By making "Apollo" a capricious, unreliable systems, prone to malfunction, software and hardware bugs, RFC, frankly, could maintain the descent level of suspense and make us actually worry about the characters - because it would be always possible that they would NOT be able to just annihilate the enemy, and may be forced to fight it old-fashioned way. It wouldn't matter even if they still won the absolute majority of battles by Appolinating the enemy: if even ONE battle were lost because "Apollo" was unable to correctly synchronize the compensation of time dilation (or broke causality and collapse on itself ), it would still prove that it may happens again. And we would have a reason to actually worry about our beloved heroes and read the combat sequences, instead of just "meh, they pushed the buttons again and Appolinated everybody with no losses... I just skip it".

Again, it is all my IMHO. But unless the reliability of "Apollo" system would be seriously compromised in the future (or retconned in the past, by adding, for example, some side battle, in which RMN was pounded due to system jinx) - I'm afraid, that one of the best parts of the series would be completely reduced to nothingness.

AAC, aka that terrible book, had issues of its own. But the battles after that were boring at best. Some of them were simply absurd. Like barricade or the sln not bothering to sweep for mines. I’d prefer that if David doesn’t want to write something that doesn’t offend our intelligence or bore us that he not write that battle. 2nd manticre should have been just discussed at one of Honors dinner parties with the senior SLN officer. The entire battle was a turkey shoot, just like every other battle.

I disagree with you in almost all points.

The battles where Apollo was used did include a component of strategy. The first few against Haven was when it was introduced and that's when we needed to know of its capabilities. In First Manticore, it was desperation and only one fleet component had it -- the rest of the battle occurred without it. All the other ones (Second Manticore, Spindle, Sol) required strategy to ensure that the targets would be inside the hyperlimit and would surrender instead of merely escaping.

Second point, RFC did figure out a way to make Apollo not be the solution to everything: Oyster Bay. By limiting its availability, almost all of the battles after AAC happened without Apollo. In particular, Hypatia happened with missiles mostly two generations older than Apollo. If you found those battles boring, then don't blame Apollo. I personally liked them, quite a lot (though I confess I didn't understand the geometry of the Barricade).

Third, Apollo's supremacy will be limited by improvements in defence, which we just haven't seen yet. The only power capable of coming up with them in the timeframe of the books was Haven and instead of continuing to fight, Haven allied itself with Manticore. Now the GA is probably studying its own attacks to figure out how to defend itself when enemies manage to duplicate Apollo, or even a bastardised version of it. Q.v. the creation of Katana LACs, which exist to fight other LACs which were bound to exist.

Finally, as to the kzt's point on SLN blundering into mistakes... well, it's the SLN.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I disagree with you in almost all points.

The battles where Apollo was used did include a component of strategy. The first few against Haven was when it was introduced and that's when we needed to know of its capabilities. In First Manticore, it was desperation and only one fleet component had it -- the rest of the battle occurred without it. All the other ones (Second Manticore, Spindle, Sol) required strategy to ensure that the targets would be inside the hyperlimit and would surrender instead of merely escaping.

Second point, RFC did figure out a way to make Apollo not be the solution to everything: Oyster Bay. By limiting its availability, almost all of the battles after AAC happened without Apollo. In particular, Hypatia happened with missiles mostly two generations older than Apollo. If you found those battles boring, then don't blame Apollo. I personally liked them, quite a lot (though I confess I didn't understand the geometry of the Barricade).

Third, Apollo's supremacy will be limited by improvements in defence, which we just haven't seen yet. The only power capable of coming up with them in the timeframe of the books was Haven and instead of continuing to fight, Haven allied itself with Manticore. Now the GA is probably studying its own attacks to figure out how to defend itself when enemies manage to duplicate Apollo, or even a bastardised version of it. Q.v. the creation of Katana LACs, which exist to fight other LACs which were bound to exist.

Finally, as to the kzt's point on SLN blundering into mistakes... well, it's the SLN.

With all respect, but "the component of strategy" is a poor excuse for the boring sequences in which you have exactly zero empathy for heroes - because they are never in any kind of danger, and all their strategy is centered around concentrating smugness.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:In particular, Hypatia happened with missiles mostly two generations older than Apollo. If you found those battles boring, then don't blame Apollo. I personally liked them, quite a lot (though I confess I didn't understand the geometry of the Barricade).

Please! This battle was just an enormous amount of facepalms, with ideas like stealth drones hitting ships and 88 battlecruisers destroyed by three Manticoran ships. And all this after spending several previous books explaining that while SLN capital ships are crap, their lighter units are much more comparable with Monties ones.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Second point, RFC did figure out a way to make Apollo not be the solution to everything: Oyster Bay. By limiting its availability, almost all of the battles after AAC happened without Apollo.

Can you show me where, in the field, ANYONE was concerned with ammunition, or running out of recon drones, or node wear? Or really any indication that there were now huge logistics issues that hadn't been in place previously?

Becuase I can't, after the discussion with the Queen, remember anyone being at all concerned that they have a very limited amount of anything. Heck, almost all the 'this is really destructive of all of manticore manufacturing' that was said in the text or by David was later walked back. Everything will be fine, no big deal.

kzt wrote:Can you show me where, in the field, ANYONE was concerned with ammunition, or running out of recon drones, or node wear? Or really any indication that there were now huge logistics issues that hadn't been in place previously?

Becuase I can't, after the discussion with the Queen, remember anyone being at all concerned that they have a very limited amount of anything. Heck, almost all the 'this is really destructive of all of manticore manufacturing' that was said in the text or by David was later walked back. Everything will be fine, no big deal.

Come to think about it, I could not recall it also. In reality, the fleet with its infrastructure crippled so much would probably be forced to either reduce readiness to sustainable level, or start to cannibalize ships.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:In First Manticore, it was desperation and only one fleet component had it -- the rest of the battle occurred without it.

One thing that irked me about First Manticore: no mention is ever made of the colossal tactical blunder D'Orville committed by not firing as soon as the Havenites started deploying pods, or at the very least the instant he had the range. It was known from Salon than the Havenites could control launches of that density. Even allowing for the surprising ability to throw salvos that large that frequently thanks to the Donkeys, the better tactic would have been to get early, paced fire onto the Havenite fleet. First, to force them to launch the first massive salvo from a range where they're least likely to get hits and second to prevent those ships from building up following salvos of that size. Use the or lose them on a short time scale; it's not like D'Orville didn't have ammo to burn to do it. He had to jettison thousands of pods to clear the defenses of his older ships anyway, but he could have employed those pods against the enemy rather than simply wasting them.

Home Fleet was hosed either way, but they could have taken a far larger, even crippling, percentage of Second Fleet with them. With Second Fleet crushed, Third Fleet would have fared much better against Fifth Fleet.

(though I confess I didn't understand the geometry of the Barricade).

It could not have worked as presented.

kzt wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Second point, RFC did figure out a way to make Apollo not be the solution to everything: Oyster Bay. By limiting its availability, almost all of the battles after AAC happened without Apollo.

Can you show me where, in the field, ANYONE was concerned with ammunition, or running out of recon drones, or node wear? Or really any indication that there were now huge logistics issues that hadn't been in place previously?

Becuase I can't, after the discussion with the Queen, remember anyone being at all concerned that they have a very limited amount of anything. Heck, almost all the 'this is really destructive of all of manticore manufacturing' that was said in the text or by David was later walked back. Everything will be fine, no big deal.

It's mentioned a few times that DDMs are being used rather than MRMs due to the supply of smaller missiles being much higher than the larger ones. Mostly the built up ammunition supplies are on munition ships like the Volcano rather than in storage on the stations which were destroyed.

Drones aren't specifically mentioned, but it's been recent practice to recover and reuse them whenever possible. Node wear and combat damage are being handled in the limited capacity available in Trevor's Star, using the yard capacity that was initially earmarked for missile production (before Beowulf threw in with Manticore). It's likely most of the ships have little concern over routine dockyard maintenance due to being only a few years old. Node replacement is something that happens infrequently enough that the newest lines of ships shouldn't have to worry about it for a while.

Yup, home fleet not shooting is one of the massive plot hammers David used to produce the outcome he wanted easily. Note how they mention pods and nobody on the staff suggests they should do something?