Shutting down the MWJ

tlb wrote:PS: I do not consider "A Grand Tour" and the Alphanes to be canon in the Honorverse. The story is more significant for being the inspiration for the books about Daniel Leary, Lady Adele Mundy and the Republic of Cinnabar Navy. Those stories have regrettably come to an end with David Drake's health problems.

tlb wrote:PS: I do not consider "A Grand Tour" and the Alphanes to be canon in the Honorverse. The story is more significant for being the inspiration for the books about Daniel Leary, Lady Adele Mundy and the Republic of Cinnabar Navy. Those stories have regrettably come to an end with David Drake's health problems.

markusschaber wrote:Is there any extinct ancient race resembling the Alphanes in those books? Or is it a Honorverse only gem?

I'm still undecided whether to start that series of David Drake.

tlb wrote:PS: I do not consider "A Grand Tour" and the Alphanes to be canon in the Honorverse. The story is more significant for being the inspiration for the books about Daniel Leary, Lady Adele Mundy and the Republic of Cinnabar Navy. Those stories have regrettably come to an end with David Drake's health problems.

markusschaber wrote:Is there any extinct ancient race resembling the Alphanes in those books? Or is it a Honorverse only gem?

I'm still undecided whether to start that series of David Drake.

tlb wrote:I do not remember if he gives a name to them; but there is plenty of evidence for a space faring race long before humans left Earth.

I really enjoyed his books about the RCN; mostly about the societies he created and the way he has people interact. I had to work to suspend disbelief about how his space ships operate.

He does have some quirks, because he did not keep a notebook of facts that were established in previous books; preferring to start fresh each time. This can lead to minor inconsistencies: such as how the RCN ship levels are identified or Daniel wondering if Lady Mundy even owns a set of dress whites (when she has worn them at several points that were very important to him).

But don't let these minor complaints put you off from books that I will still reread for fun. At least try With the Lightnings from a library, if you are uncertain.

tlb wrote:Important to note that the electronic form of With the Lightnings is available free on the BAEN free library.

Also look for the following free download, which contains the first six books in electronic form:
When the Tide Rises CD

tlb wrote:
But don't let these minor complaints put you off from books that I will still reread for fun. At least try With the Lightnings from a library, if you are uncertain.

tlb wrote:But don't let these minor complaints put you off from books that I will still reread for fun. At least try With the Lightnings from a library, if you are uncertain.

kzt wrote:[s]Nothing against that book, I happen to like it, but is that even in the same fictional universe as the Leary stories?[/s]
I think I was confusing this with Redliners.

Introduction wrote:Leary grinned, but there was a serious undertone in his voice as he said, "I really don't dare suggest that, mistress. While I don't think Hogg would be caught, I'm afraid his methods would bring spiritual discredit on a Leary of Bantry. What Hogg does on his own account is his own business, but if I set him a task . . ."

The world had gone gray around Adele. "You said, 'a Leary of Bantry,' sir," she said. Her voice too was without color. "You'd be related to Speaker Leary, then?"

Leary grimaced. "Oh, yes," he said. "Corder Leary is my father, though we'd both be willing to deny it."

"I see," Adele said. Her voice came from another place, another time. She crossed her hands behind her back. "Lieutenant Leary," she said, "I have a great deal of work to do. You're a Cinnabar citizen and I will presume a gentleman. I therefore request that you cease to trouble me and my staff.

Daniel Leary reddened also. He made a stiff half-bow. "Good morning, mistress," he said. "No doubt we'll meet again." He strode with a caged grace from the library.

Later, he sat on a bench in a garden. He'd walked until the adrenaline burned off and he needed to sit. He hadn't been so angry since the afternoon he broke with his father.

He'd have to challenge her to a duel, of course. The insult had been too deliberate to ignore. . . .

WITH THE
LIGHTNINGS
DAVID DRAKE

Prologue wrote:When I entered Category 4 of the Unity civil service thirty-seven years ago, I gave up my former name and life to become a servant dedicated to all mankind. There are those who say I ceased to be human when as part of the process a computer was embedded in my central nervous system.

I am called John Smith, though my name might as easily have been Xiang Quo or Krishna Singh or Ali Nasr. I am now Chief of Administration, the highest permanent official of the Unity. There are those who say I have the powers of a god and the ruthlessness of an avalanche.

Since I entered Category 4, my only desire has been the long-term good of mankind. Since I became Chief of Administration, my will has been the only will of mankind.

There are those who say I have no more mercy than a surgeon treating cancer.

There are those who say my planning has been mankind's only salvation during these seven years of war with the Kalendru, who understand the concepts of "master" and "slave" but not of "equals."

There are those who say that even such as I must retire, as a blade is retired when grinding use wears it to a sliver—be that sliver ever so sharp.

They say, they say . . .
And they are all of them correct.

tlb wrote:PS: I do not consider "A Grand Tour" and the Alphanes to be canon in the Honorverse. The story is more significant for being the inspiration for the books about Daniel Leary, Lady Adele Mundy and the Republic of Cinnabar Navy. Those stories have regrettably come to an end with David Drake's health problems.

Theemile wrote:

tlb wrote:Seems unlikely that any ally, no matter how provoked, would do that. There are Astro-Control Stations at both ends that have give permission to enter the queue for transit (unless an enemy controls one end) and they would get pissed. On the other hand we have the case were Grayson exercised their treaty rights to send a task force through to Trevor's Star in chapter 53 of War of Honor. This certainly did disrupt civilian traffic; but not being a mass transit, did not shut the junction down for hours.

Doing a mass transit with civilian ships, would probably be illegal resulting in the ships being impounded.

Anyway there is enough time after transit where the forts can identify the arriving ships as friend of foe before the ships can take offensive action. But still the books mention the war game that imagined the Peep's would sent a mass transit of battleships and the results were bad for both sides; but then Manticore would have 17 hours to redirect forces.

RFC has done a slight ret-con on that wormhole defense study - it now was made earlier than we thought, (either pre- or early laserhead) and did not include the effects of modern laserheads or pods. in short, missiles at the time of the study could not do damage to any ships in an emergence lane (because they could not enter the Grav flux of the lane because the flux would destroy their drive nodes), so they were not included in the calculation while the opponents were in the emergence lane, only direct energy weapons from the defensive formations were counted. And the Standard Rules of Directed Weapons apply - if you can hit them- they most likely can hit you.

Now defenders can sit further back and control the shoals of missile pods, while being completely safe from return fire. Laser heads have standoff ranges of 50,000 Kilometers or more, and they can easily saturate the emergence lane with fire without entering the grav flux of the lane and blowing out their nodes. Even the missile pods can sit far enough back that they are outside effective direct weapons range, and respond with enough firepower to saturate any conceivable target for the 5+ minutes they are stuck in the emergence lane without wedges and sidewalls.

Shannon_Foraker wrote:What study was that? Where is it?

Chapter 9 wrote:Those fortresses were individually more powerful than any superdreadnought, but not even Manticore Astro Control's traffic managers could know a ship was about to use the Junction inbound until it actually arrived. That meant a hostile mass transit would always take the forts by surprise, and losses among them would be heavy. The attacker's losses would probably be total, yet the new Peep regime had amply demonstrated its ruthlessness, and no one could afford to ignore the possibility that it might launch what amounted to a suicide attack.

Honor had once participated in a Fleet maneuver built around the assumption that the PN might employ some of the enormous number of battleships it had built for area defense to do just that. Everyone knew BBs were too weak to engage superdreadnoughts or dreadnoughts—as Honor had demonstrated once again in the Fourth Battle of Yeltsin—which was why Manticore had none. The RMN could afford to build and crew only ships that could lie in the wall of battle, but if a navy had them, BBs were ideal for covering rear areas against raiding squadrons of cruisers or battlecruisers. They were also potent tools for keeping restive systems from asserting their independence—a major reason the old regime had built them and a task upon which the new one was currently employing something like two-thirds of them.

But the maneuver's authors had assumed that since battleships were useless in fleet actions, the PN might throw them at the Junction from Trevor's Star for the sole purpose of whittling down the fortresses, instead. The umpires had calculated that the Peeps could have put roughly fifty through the Junction in a single transit. That was little more than thirteen percent of their total battleship strength, which meant—in theory—that they could do the same thing more than once if it worked . . . and for their sacrifice, the "Peep CO" in the war games "destroyed" thirty-one fortresses, or a quarter of the entire Junction Defense Force. In purely material terms, that was a sacrifice of roughly two hundred million tons of shipping and, assuming no survivors from any of their ships, 150,000 men and women in return for destroying four hundred and eighty million tons of fortresses and killing over 270,000 Manticorans. If one simply looked at the numbers and ignored the human cost, that had to be a bargain, especially for a fleet which was larger to begin with, though Honor had never been able to believe any sane navy would accept the catastrophic damage such a suicidal operation would wreak on fleet morale.

Unfortunately, no one could rely on an enemy's rationality when the risk was the crippling of your capital system's defenses. Especially when, unlike the People's Republic, that system was also the only one you had. The need for the Junction forts had eaten so deeply into the RMN's budget for decades that the Star Kingdom had started the war with a marked inferiority in ships of the wall, and their ongoing cost and manpower demands continued to suck resources away from the front. The ability to stand down even half of the Junction forts would have released the trained personnel to man twenty-four squadrons of SDs and added over fifty percent to the RMN's strength in that class—a thought, given her own experience of BuPers' manning problems, which was more than enough to boggle Honor's mind.