The big problem of late Honorverse

Theemile wrote:As was, some of her people did die - 200 LACs were lost with their 2000 crewmembers. If she sat and took the fire, how many more would die? As stated above, the first rule of combat is not to let the enemy kill you (and your forces). If she had done anything short of eliminating the threat the Sollie fleet represented as swiftly as possible, more friendly lives would be lost, and that would have been on her.

I think those losses were in the initial panic missile storm--something that wasn't changed by whether she fired or not.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

Theemile wrote:As was, some of her people did die - 200 LACs were lost with their 2000 crewmembers. If she sat and took the fire, how many more would die? As stated above, the first rule of combat is not to let the enemy kill you (and your forces). If she had done anything short of eliminating the threat the Sollie fleet represented as swiftly as possible, more friendly lives would be lost, and that would have been on her.

I think those losses were in the initial panic missile storm--something that wasn't changed by whether she fired or not.

Regardless of when the 2000 lives were lost, or on which platform, If her hesitation caused even 1 more LAC to be lost, those lives would be on her.

Go back and read the part about Filerta giving the order to tell the fleet to surrender etc, his chief of staff having the nanite assassin kick in and send the Go-To-Hell, were's screws order instead and the bomb planted in the Flag Deck wipes out Filerta and his command staff before ANYTHING other than the "Emergency Launch Everything- Flush ALL the Birds" order goes out.
Honor had gone though everything, she is waiting for Fillerta's response.....and the SLN erupts with missile launches: all those pods and then a fast but very uncoordinated crescendo of tube launches as 1st some and them more and more of the SD start firing from magazines as fast as they can go.
Fillerta has said NOTHING, but the fleet has volleyed with it's pods and is now starting to hose out missles from tubes. Exactly what is she suposed to do----other than what she did?

Engage ALL of the GA missle defense to stop that incoming tsunami of missiles (which is what gets the 200 LACs destroyed with thier crews) and start killing SLN SDs as fast as possible to STOP them firing and reduce the numbers of missles the GA has to destroy before some of them make it though the GA's defense. That and start broadcasting to the SLN ships that she will destroy them if they don't surrender.
The SLN overall Commander isn't answering though his ship is still there. Nobody in the SL Fleet with the probable exception of Fillerta's Flag Captain has any idea that there has been a "problem" on the Flag Bridge and nobody else is in a position/has any reason to assume command of the SLN Fleet till the initial GA misslle launch destorys Fillerlta's ship and others before they start working their way though the targeting queue to destroy any ship still firing or hasn't activly surendered.

So, no, there isn't anything she should have done differently. How do you plan for somebody assinating the Fleet Commander on the other side and sending a prepackaged "go to hell" order when you are really conficent the other guy is going to not be a total idiot and will surrender rather than have all of his thousands of people die?

tlb wrote:Perhaps you are right, but they do not need to be together. The fundamental difference between then and now is that there are many more patrol ships assigned to Silesia, so one does not need to send off prize crews and continue the patrol; instead they can cut the patrol short and rendezvous at a central star system with the latest capture and let someone else continue onward. The troopship brigs the captured pirates and uses the excess flight crews that it carries to sent the prize ship to the nearest base for disposal.

But this may be moot if piracy is now a thing of the past in Silesia, as another poster suggests.

Also, unlike on Earth's ocean, a spaceship is unlikely to wander off, become damaged, or founder if left uncrewed in a stable orbit. So if a Roland takes back a pirated ship it doesn't have to put a prize crew aboard and sail it back to some safe port.

It could leave it, powered down, in a safe known orbit well out of the way in the system in which it was recovered. Then pass a message back to someone with more manpower to bring a salvage crew over to bring it home. Yeah, they'd have to rework how prize money was distributed to make sure the Roland's crew still got a fair share - but that's a solvable problem.

You wouldn't want to do the same to a captured pirate ship, not with it being armed an all. But there's no chance one would be bought into service so just scuttle it in place - and interstellar law lets a naval ship try, convict, and execute captured pirates or slavers without first returning them to any planetary justice system.

A surrendered honorable combatant is a trickier thing - that you'd probably have to move just the top officers aboard the Roland, keep most of it's crew locked in their own quarters or operating it under a small prize crew. You'd want to have the Roland closely escort it back to a fleet location where the POWs could be processed. The Roland simply wouldn't have the room to carry the POWs and you can't just put them out in their lifepods - so most of the enemy crew will, lacking any better option, have to be transported on their own captured ship.


The lack of marines to assist in recovering, capture, or overseeing enemy POWs is more of an issue.

My bigger problem with the "late Honorverse" is the MA acting out of character and blowing up so many space habitats, including their own. I get the psychology of trying to both "hide the onion" and blacken the RMN's reputation, etc. -- but these are supposed to be super-geniuses with decades of plans and counter plans in place, and at the end, all Albrecht D. and company can come up with is a continually series of "blow up habitats with cargo container nukes"... the same as in New Tuscany.

Wouldn't any intelligent space-faring entity already have measures in place to make sure that No Weapons get on a space station? sort of like the Wages of Sing in the Torch series?

My big problem with the last book is that the GA fleet didn't have to fire more missiles when they took out the reserve, or the SLN essentially blind-firing all those missiles in the early stages of that final battle. Making the RMN work harder for it would have been more interesting, including the when/if the commander of the SLN forces would have been forced to not surrender all the tech plans intact, etc.

I found that disappointing because that RFC has the lower-level Haven-trained commander -- who doesn't even have a great reputation -- in Torch of Freedom correctly figuring out how to swat Rozak's forces in action, but too late to stop the losses by attrition being inflicted by Rozak's ships. So you'd think the other force command staff would at least be equally smart in their strategic and tactical planning. That's the kind of space battle tactical writing that I like, anyway.

That said, for those are low-level criticisms considering the thousands of pages in the series that I have enjoyed reading many times through.

If you have captured a ship, you are probably not going to just park it someplace in an inhabited system without some sort of guard or watch on it. If there are people around, they might just go on over to that ship and attempt to make off with it.
How many hundreds of millions of credits is a small merchant ship worth? And the value of any cargo?
So, you are probably going to want to at least have the local system government do something to make sure it does't get stolen..earlier, in Silesia that would probably be a bad idea.
If it is in an uninhabited system, then sure, you might park it someplace out of the way (and shutdown with engines off) so it would appear to just be one more bit of material in a very wide orbit. You could always take it for a short hyperspace trip and park it at a point relative to the system it was captured in and park it there. You might or might not want to put it into some sort of inactive mode but certainly take the impellers off line because you don't know how long the thing can sit there with power and enviornmental systems running- and power to whatever cargo containers need it etc.

Scuttleing your average, garden variety pirate ship, probably isn't your best option as these things have tended to have been described as merchant ships modified by adding some weapons to them. If you strip out the weapons, you are back to a merchant hull that has some patching to repair the places the weapons were mounted (and power and controls run etc) but it's a Merchant Ship and it has a signifcant value. How/when/where to strip off the weapons is just one more step. If you take the ship (or have your prize crew take it) to a system with a fleet base, it could be sold subject to the buyer paying for the disarmament prior to taking posession -that would be by an approved yard with at least military inspectors overseeing it and taking charge of the weapons and controls extracted- above the cost of the purchase. Well, that might be a negotiable point, just have the military do it as before the transfer and take the cost out of the proceeds to the people who are due the prize money.
I, for one, would really really hate to just scuttle a navigable freighter because it had a couple of energy weapons and one or two missle tubes on it if I was in posession of it and would get a share of the prize money. 1% of 200 million credits is a lot of money, Heck .01% is still a lot of money.

The Alignment made a few too many miscalculations. Next round is 20+ years from now.[/quote]

MAlign reminds me of Wille E Coyote, super genius. Surrender now to be eaten and save the trouble of having to catch you, when we both know you cant possibly get away.

The MAlign is so impressed with their own cleverness & superiority that their plans cannot fail.

[quote="SharkHunter"]My bigger problem with the "late Honorverse" is the MA acting out of character and blowing up so many space habitats, including their own. I get the psychology of trying to both "hide the onion" and blacken the RMN's reputation, etc. -- but these are supposed to be super-geniuses with decades of plans and counter plans in place, and at the end, all Albrecht D. and company can come up with is a continually series of "blow up habitats with cargo container nukes"... the same as in New Tuscany.

I disagree! The MAlign has consistantly ENJOYED setting up or directly initiating mass casualty events to manipulate star nations into doing their bidding while they are the pupeeter hiding offstage. The Manticore \Havenite war, the Monica /Technodyne affair, the various false flag operations, blowing up the space station after getting Byng assigned there so he could react to the Manties he hated. Admiral Crandal, the Torch attack by former SS ships turned mercenaries, Oyster Bay (Manticore & Grayson), Filaretta's attempted invasion of Manticore, Houdini & finally the 3 Beowulf orbital habitats which killed 43 Million people in less than 30 minutes. The MAlign shows what can only be considered a flagrant and pathalogical disregard for living beings.

This depraved indifference to human & treecat life "appears" to have been working so why change their tactics now? After all their enlightened superior genomes are destined to replace the lesser denizens of the galaxy anyway, so why not get a head start on culling the herd?

Once again l am really looking forward to seeing the onion peeled and the Renaissance Factor discovered. Along the way, their navy shall be spanked very hard when the onion core is exposed and the Detwilers' terminated with extreme prejudice. Sounds like l'm in favor of retribution rather than forgiveness. Oh yes, this is military sci-fi......

bert953 wrote:MAlign reminds me of Wille E Coyote, super genius. Surrender now to be eaten and save the trouble of having to catch you, when we both know you cant possibly get away.

To me, they're actually Dick Dastardly. If they'd just play fair, they'd always win. But no, they have to go the roundabout, evil master plan way with intricately moving pieces.



Have I mentioned Mutley is my favourite cartoon character?

SharkHunter wrote:Wouldn't any intelligent space-faring entity already have measures in place to make sure that No Weapons get on a space station? sort of like the Wages of Sing in the Torch series?

Remember, in the Honorverse you don't need a fission trigger for a fusion bomb. There's very little to distinguish a fusion reactor from a fusion bomb. Thus your bombs are disguised as perfectly ordinary fusion reactors, a not-uncommon commodity.

My big problem with the last book is that the GA fleet didn't have to fire more missiles when they took out the reserve, or the SLN essentially blind-firing all those missiles in the early stages of that final battle. Making the RMN work harder for it would have been more interesting, including the when/if the commander of the SLN forces would have been forced to not surrender all the tech plans intact, etc.

There was no way to make them work harder--by then we had seen how effective Apollo was, on offense a GA fleet is unstoppable. My only problem with the attack on the reserve is the kill percentage--getting a higher kill percentage than the percent of missiles that survived the defense fire means they must have assigned more than one missile per target--but they didn't have enough to fire two missiles per target. The only way I can see to pull this off is if each beam from a missile was assigned to a different target, spreading out the damage. We have never seen anyone do this before and there's no real reason to do it here--the important aspect is showed their defenses are powerless against her missiles. The percent of beams that hit matters (showing how lethal her missiles are), the actual number of kills is irrelevant.