Human Treecat Names

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Shannon_Foraker wrote:I think Shannon's come out of her shell enough to be adopted, personally. She interacts with Sonja, in UH, instead of hiding behind a screen. She'd also make some new tech for her cat.

Nimitz was the first to get a space suit and a pulser. But I think you're right: that privilege is a thing of the past now. Sonja and Shannon's treecat bodyguards will get first dibs on any new tech.

Yep! If they get adopted, all the more reason to give them tech goodies. Even post defeat of the MA, the cats may stay in touch with their humans and get gifts from them.

Also who gave Nimitz a pulsar and when was that!?

Shannon_Foraker wrote:Yep! If they get adopted, all the more reason to give them tech goodies. Even post defeat of the MA, the cats may stay in touch with their humans and get gifts from them.

I don't think that's what the treecats will have in mind, but it will be a side benefit. They have surprising long-term view of things, like emigrating from Sphinx to Grayson, and being close to the monarch of Manticore for centuries.

They are very smart. They adopted agriculture in less than one generation after the Jason arrived in the MBS and settlers settled on Sphinx, for example. So they will continue to spread through friendly territories.

Also who gave Nimitz a pulsar and when was that!?

Honor, at the beginning of UH I think. There's a scene where Zilwicki comes by and questions why the shots in the target were so bad. He asks her (I think) if she was shooting with her non-dominant hand or if her prosthetic was having problems, and she replies she could hit the bullseye every time with both hands, but those shots weren't hers. They were Nimitz's.

Nimitz and Fire Watcher (Harahap's treecat) were the first two to get the pulsers. Then they walk into Queen Elizabeth's presence with them, to the dismay of Colonel Shemais.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Shannon_Foraker wrote:Yep! If they get adopted, all the more reason to give them tech goodies. Even post defeat of the MA, the cats may stay in touch with their humans and get gifts from them.

I don't think that's what the treecats will have in mind, but it will be a side benefit. They have surprising long-term view of things, like emigrating from Sphinx to Grayson, and being close to the monarch of Manticore for centuries.

They are very smart. They adopted agriculture in less than one generation after the Jason arrived in the MBS and settlers settled on Sphinx, for example. So they will continue to spread through friendly territories.

Also who gave Nimitz a pulsar and when was that!?

Honor, at the beginning of UH I think. There's a scene where Zilwicki comes by and questions why the shots in the target were so bad. He asks her (I think) if she was shooting with her non-dominant hand or if her prosthetic was having problems, and she replies she could hit the bullseye every time with both hands, but those shots weren't hers. They were Nimitz's.

Nimitz and Fire Watcher (Harahap's treecat) were the first two to get the pulsers. Then they walk into Queen Elizabeth's presence with them, to the dismay of Colonel Shemais.

Oh, I haven't read UH yet. I'd understand Colonel Shemais's dismay, though, with the way Nimitz is with his jokes.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Nimitz was the first to get a space suit

Nimitz spacesuit goes a long way ( Field of Dishonor IIRC ), so even before treecats came out of their trees and started to join two legs as associates, it was available to adopted that had the money to afford it.
Even if I don't think there was many RMN officers/spacemen with the funds to buy one for their 'cat, since being adopted and in service was rare enough, it was really the niche of a niche market and could probably be qualified as spacesuit haute couture. [ meaning, built on order, and for a specific 'cat instead of being produced in mass ]

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Nimitz was the first to get a space suit

Guillaume wrote:Nimitz spacesuit goes a long way ( Field of Dishonor IIRC ), so even before treecats came out of their trees and started to join two legs as associates, it was available to adopted that had the money to afford it.
Even if I don't think there was many RMN officers/spacemen with the funds to buy one for their 'cat, since being adopted and in service was rare enough, it was really the niche of a niche market and could probably be qualified as spacesuit haute couture. [ meaning, built on order, and for a specific 'cat instead of being produced in mass ]

That was in chapter 12:

"Actually, I thought of it the first time I saw that life-support module you keep for him in your cabin. I started out with BuShips, you know, before I got sidetracked into shipboard assignments. One of my first chores out of the Academy was a stint as junior project officer on the redesign of the old skinsuits when the new higher pressure storage vacuoles came in, so I started doodling on my terminal in my off time. I had the design run up by the time we got back from Hancock."
"But it must have cost a fortune," Honor said slowly. "That module alone cost me an arm and a leg."
"It wasn't cheap," Paul agreed, "but my family's always been involved in shipbuilding and chandlering. I took it to Uncle Henri—he's not really related, but he runs our R&D section—and he took over from there. Gave me a pretty hard time about my design, too," he added meditatively. "I'd guess he'd improved it by a couple of hundred percent by the time he finished playing with it. After that—" he shrugged "—the actual fabrication was a snap."
Honor nodded, but her expression was uneasy, and she frowned as she turned the helmet more slowly. She'd been surprised to discover how wealthy Paul's family was. She shouldn't have been, perhaps, given his relationship to Mike Henke, but that was on the commoner side of Mike's family. Yet despite his breezy dismissal of the suit's price tag, she knew how much a regular life-support module ran, and this had to be far more costly.
"It's gorgeous, Paul, but you shouldn't have done something so expensive without warning me."
"Oh, don't worry about that! Uncle Henri thought it was going to turn into some sort of expensive toy, too. Until Marketing got wind of it, that is." Honor looked surprised, and Paul grinned. "You're not the only person with a treecat, Dame Honor. We supply about a third of the modules people buy for them, and the people who sell the other two-thirds are going to be very unhappy when we start marketing skinsuits for them! You have no idea how flattering it is to be considered a prodigy after all these disappointing years."

Nimitz's left over life support module was then used to save Samantha in HAE.

Honor and Nimitz are working to get the kinks out of the cat's pulser in the first section labeled "November 1922" of Uncompromising Honor (page 491 hardback) on board HMS Imperator. The solution is to add a laser pointer, so Nimitz can point and shoot.

tlb wrote:Nimitz's left over life support module was then used to save Samantha in HAE.

I'm actually surprised those modules weren't supplied by the RMN itself, like they supply skinsuits for their two-leg crew. It was RMN policy not to separate treecat from two-leg person (after prodding by Queen Adrienne, the first to be adopted), so outfitting everyone in ship duty, even the treecat has no other duty, should be mandatory.

Samantha's case is in point: if Nimitz' old module wasn't available, what was she to do to survive? Are there life-support modules around the ship she could be placed before the battle, but wouldn't be in the crew's way when they performed damage control, or had to evacuate? But if those existed, why did Honor buy one for Nimitz when all she had to draw upon was her Commander's salary and her meagre yeomen family's wealth?

Or is it that not all crew members aboard ship get skinsuits, only those that are expected to move around during battle? Do the stewards have a battlestation? Space battles are long periods of boring with short moments of frantic action and panic, so they don't really need skinsuits to prepare meals when shots aren't actually flying. But even marines have damage control duties aboard RMN ships, so why wouldn't actual naval personnel like stewards have some too?

If they don't, then I could see the solution to treecat survival to just put them in the pantry while the ship is in battle. Though I wouldn't want to see what happened to said pantry after the treecats were done trying to tear it down to get to the celery. Or what practical jokes a certain treecat called Laughs Brightly prepared.

Given what we have seen with the proliferation of Treecats in shipboard situations, the RMN might want to consider issuing the treecat version of skin suites to the Cats who are bonded with RMN two legs. Given that that there are now Cats being assigned to people in other Alliance navies Manticore might just want to consider providing skinsuits for those bodyguards who are going to be spending time aboard ships etc....at Manticore's expense. These (I know there are various legal niceties and protection for the Cats) are Manticore Citizens. Training the cats to use them is a lot easier than training the two leg to be able to help or check out that they are functioning correctly etc.

Would someone want to steal one and reverse engineer the suits? Sure, and who would they sell them too? It's not clear if the Alignment knows that the Treecats are now out in the dual roles of "furry lie-detectors" and counter intelligence agents. Besides, can you imagine some maid or just a thief trying to make off with a Treecat skin suit anywhere near where it's owner was?. Messy might be a good description.

I also have to wonder what effects all this pairing off as Watch-cats / personal protection agents is going to have on Cat society. They will see a lot more things, interact with more variations of human governments and general different takes on live. Consider Shannon, that would be an interesting journey. I know that the Cats are motivated to do this. When you consider that they had the realization slammed into them that there is at least one very powerful and dangerous group in the universe that is responsible for all those cat deaths along with what the they know of humans, they see the protection partnerships as at least a defensive action --if not a more deep seated desire to "deal" with the people who inflicted the deaths and damage on the Manticore system.

It does have a lot of symmetry of Nimitz using a laser pointer to help with the pulsar....a cat using a laser pointer and the humans jump.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I'm actually surprised those modules weren't supplied by the RMN itself, like they supply skinsuits for their two-leg crew. It was RMN policy not to separate treecat from two-leg person (after prodding by Queen Adrienne, the first to be adopted), so outfitting everyone in ship duty, even the treecat has no other duty, should be mandatory.

Samantha's case is in point: if Nimitz' old module wasn't available, what was she to do to survive? Are there life-support modules around the ship she could be placed before the battle, but wouldn't be in the crew's way when they performed damage control, or had to evacuate? But if those existed, why did Honor buy one for Nimitz when all she had to draw upon was her Commander's salary and her meagre yeomen family's wealth?

It doesn't appear that the RMN issues them -- and now that you bring it up they really should provide at least a basic life support module. Treecats are a recognized sentient species and one that is allowed to accompany their bonded human on RMN ships - they should have been issued emergency life support gear when their bonded human was assigned to RMN ships or stations.

Though I guess it might be possible that in an emergency someone could get a treecat closed up within a standard human rescue suit "the clumsy rescue suits which were part of any ship's lifesaving gear, could be worn by almost anyone but had limited utility [...] little more than emergency environmental envelopes designed to be towed around by rescue crews."

Also, way back in Treecat Wars we're told that Stephanie Harrington was traveling from Sphinx to Manticore with Lionheart that she had "the standard interstellar pet carrier they’d bought for him" which had "emergency life support" -- though I'd guess that those aren't shock mounted and wouldn't have the kinds of radiation shielding and EMP resistance that you'd want of life support equipment for use on a warship.

Apparently Honor's father bought her Nimitz's first life support module

Changer of Worlds: Ms. Midshipwoman Harrington wrote:Unlike the locker, which was standard Navy issue, she-or rather, her father, who had provided it as a graduation gift-had paid the better part of seventeen thousand Manticoran dollars for that unit. Which was money well spent in her opinion, since it was the life support module which would keep Nimitz alive if the compartment lost pressure.

Though OBS says she'd paid for it

On Basilisk Station wrote:Nimitz had hurtled from his perch at the first shrill of the alarm. He'd been through this same drill as often as she, and he scurried across the cabin to the boxlike affair she'd had clamped to the bulkhead below her sailplane plaque immediately after coming aboard. That box wasn't Fleet issue, and it had cost Honor a small fortune, for it was a custom-built life support module, sized to Nimitz's stature and fitted with the same search and rescue beacon as a Fleet vac suit. It was good for a hundred hours on its internal life support, and the door slammed automatically behind him as he fled into it. He couldn't open it from the inside, but unless something scored a direct hit on it, he could survive even if battle damage opened the cabin to space.

However it's possible that even as early as OBS she'd bound the new deluxe life support module mentioned in HAE - incidentally the following also says Samantha already had her own life support module - she just used Nimitz's because it was better.

Honor Among Enemies wrote:She spared time for one anguished glance at the back of her command chair, wishing desperately that she'd sent Nimitz across, as well. But he would no more leave her than Samantha would leave Harold Tschu-or than Honor would leave him. She might have had him forcibly removed, but she couldn't do it. She simply couldn't, and at least he was better off than Samantha. He had his skinsuit; Tschu hadn't been able to afford one, and he'd had to settle for a standard life support module. But that much Honor had been able to improve upon. She still had the deluxe module she'd bought Nimitz before Paul designed his suit-the one with the built in anti-radiation armor and the extended life support-and she'd insisted that Tschu take Samantha to her quarters and put her inside its greater protection.

So in this specific case Samantha would have had emergency life support -- but you're right; it shouldn't be down to the officer, sailor, or marine to have to pay out of pocket for proper emergency life support for their treecat.

I thought skinsuits were dependent on proper fit, thus, they had to be fitted (tailored) to the particular person. Which means a cat couldn't use one. Are they one size fits all?

About Treecats with pulsars. One of my European friends brought up the fact that animals are also handedness like humans. I suggested that since Cats have two hands on either side that they could carry two pulsars on the favored side. But someone reminded me that there is only one true hand.

Anyway, two gun cowboys would have been cool. Do cats carry the pulsars in a holster?

cthia wrote:I thought skinsuits were dependent on proper fit, thus, they had to be fitted (tailored) to the particular person. Which means a cat couldn't use one. Are they one size fits all?

About Treecats with pulsars. One of my European friends brought up the fact that animals are also handedness like humans. I suggested that since Cats have two hands on either side that they could carry two pulsars on the favored side. But someone reminded me that there is only one true hand.

Anyway, two gun cowboys would have been cool. Do cats carry the pulsars in a holster?

You know cats can use specially designed skinsuits, because Nimitz has had one since Field of Dishonor. It could be that there is less size variation among cats than people.

There could have been two gun cowboys, since there some people are ambidextrous.

The cats in UH do have holsters, otherwise they would always have one hand encumbered.