Space piracy (and OBS named SFIA book of the month)

George J. Smith wrote:OBS was written first and portrays a time when WH travel was commonplace therefore using "T time" to tie everything together was more practical (Grayson notwithstanding) , the Manticore Ascendant series is set in a time before the WH junction was discovered and all times/dates were therefore local to Manticore.

Sorry, I didn't mean that the Manticore Ascendant series used Manticoran time-keeping. I meant that OBS did. The first sentence in my reply was related to the other reply in this thread that talked about how one starts with the books.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

George J. Smith wrote:OBS was written first and portrays a time when WH travel was commonplace therefore using "T time" to tie everything together was more practical (Grayson notwithstanding) , the Manticore Ascendant series is set in a time before the WH junction was discovered and all times/dates were therefore local to Manticore.

Sorry, I didn't mean that the Manticore Ascendant series used Manticoran time-keeping. I meant that OBS did. The first sentence in my reply was related to the other reply in this thread that talked about how one starts with the books.

I think it's more likely that RFC (and his co-authors) decided it was less confusing for readers to just normally use Earth years rather than trying to have everyone use local years and then note the conversions.

drothgery wrote:I think it's more likely that RFC (and his co-authors) decided it was less confusing for readers to just normally use Earth years rather than trying to have everyone use local years and then note the conversions.

Fair point.

Though what confused me more were not the years, but the weeks and months. I could convert the 3-to-5 Manticoran to Terran years easily after the first time, but figuring out how long the months were and how many weeks in each didn't really work until I got to the Appendix.

It is confession time for me.

OBS was not my favorite Honorverse novel nor was it the first book in the series that I read. To be blunt, if OBS had been my first read of the Honorverse, it would have been my last. Weber was expanding the boundaries by having a woman as a warship commander. The character had to be credible. The focus on the attempted rape by Pavel Young and Honor's cowardice in response to that assault demeaned her. It is the only shower scene that Weber has written that I didn't want to visualize. In retrospect, I realize that Honor was reacting to the realization that she has the same beast lurking inside her that frightened her father into becoming a physician.

OBS also demanded to much suspension of disbelief. I am usually able to accept Weber's handwavium, but TWTSNBN was just to implausible.

I can not recall which Honorverse novel I read first. I remember perusing it and being encouraged to see that Weber had actually calculated acceleration, velocities and distance. I am manical about Sci Fi with rivets.. I believe that it might have been Flag in Exhile or Honor Among Enemies. After reading that novel, I returned to the bookstore to buy the first novel in the series but they were out of OBS so I bought HotQ.

HotQ is definitely my favorite Honorverse novel. The weapons and tactics employed were more credible. Not even a reference to Pavel Young. The portrayal of the attempted assination of Protector Benjamin and his family was excellent. Weber set the stage by portraying Honor's high gee physique and martial arts skill in previous scenes. In retrospect, the Pavel Young encounter makes her homicidal response to finding the surviving prisoners from Madrigal even more credible.

Another confession is that AAC is another one of my favorite novels. The final battle of Manticore offended my sense of plausibility. Yanekov had been employing Apollo with only quadruple patterns (24 pods) suggesting that the number of FTL control links was limited. Then Honor launches hundreds of Apollo pods in a single salvo. I accepted the BoM after Weber explicitly revealed how capable Apollo was even without FTL communications. I will piss people off by mentioning that Honor's decision to tube her baby then the scene where she links telepathically with him while he is in the incubator appealed to me politically as well as emotionally.

Shadow of Saganami was another of my favorite Honorverse novels. The shower scene with Abby Hearnes in In the Service of the Sword had certainly made her character more appealing to me but it was the ground combat with Mateo against the pirates that made her a favorite. The reference to her standing on the balcony of her father's palace watching the battle as Honor Harrington took on a BC with her CA just clinched my connection to the character.

HotQ is the best book in the series. AAC, aka 'That Awful Book' isn't. Way too many character actions driven only by 'the almighty plot demands that you must be a moron here',

AAC also needed an editor wielding a chain saw through the parts before BoM.

You have to remember that RFC had to rewrite AAC to take into account that Honor was not going to die in BOM.

Only RFC knows what the book would have been like if he had not needed to have another favourite character die instead of Honor.

cthia wrote:Sometimes piracy makes sense simply for the value of being a pain in the ass to your enemy.

That'd be commerce raiding.

Piracy has to be financially self-supporting. (Or at least appear sufficiently so to bring in a constant stream of pirates).
Commerce raiding, being military funded, can be a money loser as long as the funding government is happy with the impact on the enemy that their funding is achieving.

(Plus it can be harder to defend against commerce raiding because the raiders usually have more resources than pirates and when it comes down to it they're almost as happy to just destroy your shipping as to capture it. So you have to keep them out of attack range, not just keep them from being able to board and seize a ship)

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:Sometimes piracy makes sense simply for the value of being a pain in the ass to your enemy.

That'd be commerce raiding.

Piracy has to be financially self-supporting. (Or at least appear sufficiently so to bring in a constant stream of pirates).
Commerce raiding, being military funded, can be a money loser as long as the funding government is happy with the impact on the enemy that their funding is achieving.

(Plus it can be harder to defend against commerce raiding because the raiders usually have more resources than pirates and when it comes down to it they're almost as happy to just destroy your shipping as to capture it. So you have to keep them out of attack range, not just keep them from being able to board and seize a ship)

See this post.

Daryl wrote:I'd agree about OBS being the best Space Opera ever written, even compared to Heinlein, Asimov, Smith, and other golden era authors. Generally Space Opera is comprised of huge ideas, and not always perfectly written.
A purely personal view I have is, that RFC hadn't fully considered the full ramifications of his Honorverse physics in his early books. Basically perpetual motion machines with free energy, where the missile inertia becomes a bigger potential explosion than any conceivable nuke.
The fact that he successfully rode that tiger all the way through his series shows just how brilliant he is.

OBS wins by a landslide.

I always thought Beth would be partial to the jeune ecole because of King Roger and the history of Project Gram. So how did Beth feel about the dressing down Honor gave Sonja?

Theemile wrote:In light of a possible on-rush of newer posters, I want to ask again if we want to place a sticki topic of "Dead-Horse" subjects to point newbs to. I brought this up before, and it want no where - several people thought it was a good idea, but no one wanted to assist and we even argued whether some items (Like the recently mentioned Corvette) should be on the list.

If we did such a list, the first post should have a explanation that this is a list of long-discussed dead-horse topics, any new readers are recommended to find out more on any subject by going to the Pearls (with a link), or by searching the Forum, and it is recommended to do so before posting on the board. below would be the list of "Major Dead-horse topics" and a list to individual posts on the subjects. the topic should be locked so it stays nice and clean.

While we were discussing it, I wrote up drafts for a couple posts - like the one everyone can agree on - The Weapon That Should Never Be Named - The Grav Lance.

Conversation Topic: Grav Lances - aka The Weapon That Should Never Be Named (TWTSNBN)

Common Post: Posters are positing new uses for a Grav Lances or advanced Grav Lances

Discussion Outcome: David has been inundated by so many ideas for Grav Lances over the years that the device has pretty much been dropped from the series.

The use of the Grav Lance on the Courageous was not new, the device already had existed for years and normally was installed on Capital ships which had the spare mass to carry a system like the Grav Lance which had little chance of being used. The new concept was to mount it on a small hull, which could turn the ship into a Capital ship killer. In production, this was intended to be a CA, but the only available test bed at the time was the soon to be retired CL, the Courageous. Unfortunately, the tests showed that the idea was a 1 trick pony – after it worked the first time, any possible light ship which looked like it was about to attempt such a maneuver was hammered by every opposing capital ship.

It must be noted, the Grav Lance is not a weapon system. It is an engineering system that uses a ship's wedge to temporarily destabilize and drop the sidewall of an opposing ship. An additional weapons system must then be used to damage/destroy the opposing ship – in the case of the Courageous, this was an array of energy torpedoes, which otherwise would have been useless against sidewalls.

The Grav Lance requires the drive system of a hull of about 85 Ktons at a minimum to function – it cannot work without all the hardware necessary to generate the ship’s wedge. It also has a max range of less than 125,000 KM –less than 1/3 the range of an energy torpedo, 1/4rd the range of Lasers, 1/8th the range of Grasers. Any ship attempting to use them had to survive through missile range and 85% of energy range to do so. In Honorverse Naval terms, this is the equivalent of knife fighting in a (small) coat closet.

Manticorian miniaturization and research since 1900 has not overall affected the above stats. It cannot be placed on a significantly smaller hull, it cannot have a noticeably longer range, it will never do physical damage on its own, it will never drop a warship’s wedge. Manticore did not launch the intended CA class with the Lance, did not install lances in any SD(p) classes and removed the lances from some of the existing capital ship classes in refits over the years as it simply was never used as energy battles became rarer and rarer in combat.

Because of the above, The Grav Lance will never be placed on an economical mine, will never be placed in a reasonably sized missile, and will never be mounted on a LAC. It will never destroy ships on it’s own. It will never have millions of KM’s of range. It probably will never be used in combat again.
Links to David’s Wisdom:

Something should be done whether we want to or not.

Looking for Easter eggs on a website is one thing, but having to look out for landmines that can be stepped on by accident is unacceptable and downright uncivilized.

The author chewed my ass off for bringing up that damned grav lance, to the cheers and jeers of many childish posters.

I was told that I should have known. How? I don't usually frequent the technical threads and TWTSNBN wasn't being named or talked about. Yet, somehow I should have known, when a poster who's been on the forum for years wasn't even aware there is a politics forum.

Stop setting up newbies. Post that damn Voldemort as something to steer clear of. But not just in a sticky, but as part of a member's very first private message! In case his reason to join the forum is because he has an idea about the author's own damned Voldemort.

If not, at least ship new members some phucking quick heal.