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Warshawski sail

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Re: Warshawski sail
Post by Daryl   » Wed Jun 12, 2024 3:17 am

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To me it indicates that RFC has read the Lt Leary series by David Drake, which does have sails to navigate hyperspace that need to be folded.
As both know each other, and both are writers of military science fiction, this is to be expected.
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Re: Warshawski sail
Post by tlb   » Wed Jun 12, 2024 7:20 am

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Daryl wrote:To me it indicates that RFC has read the Lt Leary series by David Drake, which does have sails to navigate hyperspace that need to be folded.
As both know each other, and both are writers of military science fiction, this is to be expected.

It is true that David Drake has starships with actual sails that are needed to navigate his version of hyperspace. These sails are physically folded when the ships enter a planet's atmosphere (something Weber's ships never do). So the character and use of the sails are different, Drake's ships do not have a wedge (they do not have any artificial gravity) and are driven by reaction motors (plasma or antimatter) in normal space.

Be aware that Drake's RCN series was inspired by the the short story "A Grand Tour" that appeared in More Than Honor, five years after OBS. However there were similar starships in his earlier stories.
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Re: Warshawski sail
Post by Jonathan_S   » Wed Jun 12, 2024 9:21 am

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Daryl wrote:To me it indicates that RFC has read the Lt Leary series by David Drake, which does have sails to navigate hyperspace that need to be folded.
As both know each other, and both are writers of military science fiction, this is to be expected.

Quite possibly the other way round, as David Weber talked of folding sails 5 years before the Lt Leary series started.

1993's On Basilisk Station used the phrasing of folding sails a couple of times.
1998's With the Lightnings was the start of the Lt Leary RCN series.

(And, as tlb noted, Drake acknowledged that the short story he wrote for the Honorverse, in 1998's More Than Honor anthology, was a conceptual precursor to his Lt Leary series)
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Re: Warshawski sail
Post by tlb   » Wed Jun 12, 2024 12:38 pm

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Note that both David Weber and David Drake set out, at least initially, to write space combat books with some of the flavor of the Napoleonic Wars. Weber's books modelled those of C. S. Forester's Hornblower series and Drake's followed those of Patrick O'Brian's stories about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. If anything, the ships in David Drake's Republic of Cinnabar Navy (RCN) series have more of the feel of ships of the period, because they have physical sails and rigging crews that swarm over them (when in use) to fix the things that always go wrong.

PS: I knew that David Drake has stopped writing due to health problems, but did not realize that he died in December 2023. I enjoyed his characterizations and civilizations and suppressed the problems I had with his ships. I selfishly had hoped for many more stories of the RCN.
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