FAQ

I’ve had people comment on this before. There are several reasons I tend to write about empires and kingdoms, but please note that even most of the monarchies I write about (at least approvingly) have both input from those governed (which may or may not be called a parliament) and a means whereby an incompetent/corrupt monarch may be removed. I also write about monarchies/empires in transition towards other forms of government quite a lot, as well.

Historically, monarchy has a much longer track record than democracy, and outside a high-bandwidth society, real participatory government on a nationstate level is pretty thoroughly impractical. Note that in this case I’m using “bandwidth” in a rather sweeping sense which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with electronics. Electronic communication interfaces are good, but what I’m really speaking of here is a broad-based educational system and widespread news availability. Obviously it’s possible for people to vote without possessing — or availing themselves of — either of the above (as some recent US elections demonstrate, whichever side of the political aisle one might be on), but the intelligent, effective use of the franchise means that the voters have to be at least reasonably well-informed upon the issues facing them (in a direct democracy) or their elected representatives (in a representative democracy). You don’t get that sort of voters if the information they need isn’t available to them, and that requires both sufficient education to access information and set it in a coherent context and avenues by which that information can reach them in the first place. While I can get seriously pissed off with the gentleman (and gentlewomen) of the Fourth Estate, widespread, open, and at least reasonably honest news reportage is essential to a functioning elective form of government.

Direct democracy begins to break down very rapidly once one gets beyond purely local government. Athens, so frequently referred to as the mother of democracy, had a very limited franchise and was not a very large social entity, whether in terms of population or geographic extent, compared to the vast majority of modern nationstates. In addition, whatever their other advantages (and I grant that the advantages are legion), elective forms of government tend to be less efficient in the face of an emergency than monarchial ones. Mind you, there’s something to be said for governmental inefficiency under normal circumstances, given that government inevitably accrues all of the power it can. This isn’t necessarily because the government in question is inherently evil, either. A government’s job — its entire reason for being — is to govern, and it seeks the tools and authority it needs in order to accomplish that task. (The fact that governments tend to be made up of fallible, corruptible, and often corrupted human beings who seek power for reasons of ego, personal wealth, or any number of other regrettable motivations only makes a potentially bad situation worse in that respect.) However that may be, in times of great emergency, successful democratic/representative governments tend to adopt rules and procedures which vest enormous power in the state’s executive with the understanding (or at least the hope) that the power in question will be returned to the electorate and/or its representatives once the emergency passes. And the reason they do that is because there isn’t time for reasoned debate and to seek parliament/congress’ approval of every decision or action.

One-person rule is more efficient (note that I did not say it was necessarily better) than a representative democracy, and a representative democracy is more efficient than a pure democracy. I think it should be evident that the empires and monarchies of which I write approvingly are generally constitutional monarchies with a powerful representative element. It should also be noted that I also write rather approvingly of representative democracy in general. The restored Peoples’ Republic of Haven in the Honorverse is one example of that, I would say. So are quite a lot of the system and planetary governments in the Honorverse. Both the Protectorate of Grayson and the Star Kingdom of Manticore became monarchies for quite different reasons, but the trend even in both of those star nations is towards increasing representation. The Solarian League, on the other hand, is an example of one type of façade democracy, while several of the pre-annexation governments in the Talbott Cluster were examples of other sorts of façade democracy is.

From a literary perspective, there are some significant advantages in writing about monarchial governments, of course. It allows the writer to focus more directly on individual strong characters whose decisions have immediate impact and who become personally responsible for the outcomes of those decisions. It’s clearly not impossible to come up with characters and situations where both that focus and that responsibility can also be achieved in non-monarchial systems, and I’ve done that, too. For example, Eloise Pritchart in the Republic of Haven has to work within the constraints of a representative democracy. It’s easier and “cleaner” (at least in my opinion and experience) to work with someone who is expected by both his/her fellow citizens and by the reader to be able to make, implement, and “own” critical decisions of state quickly and on his/her own recognizance, however.

In a more general sense, I tend to believe that the jury is still out on the longevity, effectiveness, and universality of representative/democratic government. I happen to think that that type of government offers the greatest opportunities politically, economically, and in terms of “quality of life” to its citizens, but monarchies and empires of one sort or another have been around far longer and one need not look far to find autocracies masquerading as democracies all over the world today. I’m inclined to think that if/when we finally do get to the stars, effectively monarchial governments are likely to reemerge, although in the Honorverse I’ve tried to present specific reasons for their reemergence. In the case of Manticore, as a deliberate move by the original colonists to conserve their political power in a star nation which of necessity was about to absorb a huge influx of newcomers. In the case of Grayson, as a response to the critical survival imperatives of a rather intensely hostile environment. There could be any number of other “legitimate” reasons for that sort of transformation, and there could also be an even greater number of “illegitimate” reasons, including an unscrupulous political leader who seizes absolute power and makes it stand up. Four or five generations later, the descendents of even the most unscrupulous political leader imaginable may actually have become enlightened rulers with the best interests of their subjects in mind, whereas after the same time period, the descendents of even the most enlightened ruler can have become despots concerned only with their own self-interest and the preservation of their own power. Which way it goes in a specific literary universe depends on the story the writer wants to tell. In real life, the reasons and the consequences can be far messier and more painful.

I expect that most people have a tendency to subconsciously assume that the form of government under which they were born and raised is the inevitable, default form of government. We assume the permanence of what are actually transitory, perpetually evolving forms of government. Someone living in the United States of 1800 would be shocked by the power of the central government in the United States of 2000. For that matter, the changes in power structures, centers of authority, and routine government interference (for good or ill) in the personal lives of US citizens between 1950 and 2000 are enormous. They’ve happened so gradually, however, that the majority of American citizens take them for granted without ever really thinking about how transformative they’ve actually been. I try in my writing to show that evolutionary process in progress, and the truth is that most of the forms of government — and most of the specific governments — I write about are constantly in the process of becoming something else.

Baen pays me just fine, thank you. [G] The problem was that at the moment I needed to get some cash in the door, Jim Baen was already about as committed to DMW as he could get. I have (literally) a couple of dozen books currently under contract to Baen, which is a really nice situation to be in. Most authors aren’t fortunate enough to have that sort of job sewcurity! But when the Tor deal came up, Jim Baen actually played rabbi with Tom Doherty for me to make the deal work. This was in no wise a case of Tor buying me away from Baen; it was a case of my finding two publishing houses that I can work with simultaneously without anyone stepping on anyone’s toes.

David’s releases from Tor and Baen can be purchased from amazon.com in the Kindle store as well as other websites that host e-reader downloadable formats.

You can actually buy all of David’s books from Baen Books in Kindle friendly, downloadable formats, as well as download from the Baen Free Library. Go to:

http://www.baenebooks.com/t-ereaderinstructions.aspx

for complete information on how to download books to your e-reader.

From David, posted to a forum:

Fanfic poses all sorts of problems for an author, and not just of the “how dare you publish in MY universe” sort of hurt feelings.

   As Mike pointed out in his post, it leads to a situation in which an author can be accused of "ripping off" someone else's idea, which can both impugn his/her honesty and even lead to ugly courtroom scenes as some non-pro attempts to sue because his or her original idea was "stolen" by a pro. (This has actually happened.) It would also be possible for a pro actually TO rip off an idea, perhaps without even realizing that he or she has done so. (I have never seen any actual documentation of such an event, but I HAVE seen a couple of stories, by authors who shall remain nameless, in which I personally suspect that that is precisely what happened.)

   Even more importantly, the publication (even in electronic form) of fiction based on a writer's work, without the specific, documented permission of said writer (on a case-by-case basis) can void the writer's copyright. This has actually happened, and does not represent mere paranoid fantasy on my part. Nor am I the only writer concerned about it. Misty Lackey, for example, has a legal contract form drawn up which anyone publishing fanfic in her universe(s) is required to sign and return to her before they may use any of her material. (I have a copy of it thumbtacked to my wall for use as a model if I ever decide to go that way.) Anyone who publishes WITHOUT said signed contract is in violation of her copyright and she will, if it comes to her attention, take legal action against them. (Mind, I suspect many authors in such a position might take some pains to avoid having the unapproved fanfic come to his/her attention if he/she believes the fans' intentions were pure, but there is a limit to how many times someone can look the other way and still convince a judge, at need, that his/her ignorance was genuine.)

   I deeply regret that this should be the case, as fanfic is often at least as imaginative and enjoyable as anything the writer who created the character/universe/whatever is likely to turn out. It is also rather flattering to an author to know that other people want to come over and play at his house, as it were. Unfortunately, the situation has become such that a writer cannot allow the free use of his universe without risking the loss of his own rights to it, and so I must regretfully ask that no fanfic appear on this group. Should that happen, I would have only two choices: (a) to take legal action (which I would hate to do and would endeavor to make as painless as possible for all concerned), or (b) leave the group and not return, as the only way I could avoid taking legal action NOW and still be in a position to defend my copyright down the road at need would be to avoid learning that the fiction was being published, electronically or otherwise. Since I would like to lurk and keep an eye on what's happening whenever projects (and things like weddings and house buying expeditions) allow me the time, I would very much appreciate it if it didn't happen here.

   Again, my sincere regrets at having to take this position. I checked with my attorney when the matter first came up for me a couple of years ago, however, and he confirms what Baen, Misty, Roger Zelazny, Fred Saberhagen, and several other pros had all told me on previous occasions. With that much experienced opinion on one side of the question, I see no choice but to believe they know what they're talking about.

   Take Care,
   David

Due to David’s writing schedule and having 3 kids, he is only able to do about 5-6 events a year, including the events that his publisher requests. We are always glad to consider your convention, but currently we are booking about two years ahead for cons. E-mail  duckk@davidweber.net with all of the pertinent information, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible!

Oh, no!

You’re not getting me into that trap. First, because asking someone to choose between his own books is like asking him to choose between his children. And, second, because whatever my answer might be today, it would almost certainly be different tomorrow. There are books which I consider to be weaker and books which I consider to be stronger, but the truth is that my “favorite” changes as my mood, my energy level, and my personal interests change. So this is one question I genuinely can’t answer.

I really can’t answer this one. There are entirely too many writers whose work I currently enjoy or whose work I have enjoyed enormously in the past. I can tell you that writers who clearly had a formative impact on me included Robert Heinlein, H. Beam Piper, “Doc Ed” Smith, Isaac Asimov, Andre Norton, Keith Laumer, and Anne McCaffrey. I learned different things from each of them, of course, and I think that the influence of some of them is probably more readily apparent to a reader than the influence of others. Other people I read and greatly admired in my “formative years” included Theodore Sturgeon, Roger Zelazney, Poul Anderson, Mack Reynolds, James White, John Campbell, Jack Williamson, and quite a few others.

It’s harder to pick favorite authors out of the folks who are writing now, and I am ashamed to say that part of that is because I have so much less time to read than I used to have. Back in the “good old days” (as it were) I tended to polish off at least one novel a day. These days, I’m using up all that “literary energy” writing instead of reading, which is probably my greatest regret as a negative consequence of the success of my own books. I tend to grab books here and there, devour them, then fade back into writing mode, and that leaves me with a sort of . . . out of focus sense of what I’ve read. There are people who I enormously enjoy reading — Walter Jon Williams, Steve Stirling, Jon Ringo (when I’m in the mood for a lot of bloodshed), Greg Benford, Patricia McKillip (I think she’s one of the finest stylists writing today), Jim Butcher, Katherine Kurtz, Emma Bull, and the list goes on and on. All of them are damned good, and rather than picking an absolute favorite, I tend to just be glad there are so many of them!

Having said all of the above, I have to admit that I think probably the writer who had the greatest single influence on me in a great many ways (although it took me a while to realize this) was Anne McCaffrey. I’m not trying to downplay the effect that E. E. Smith had on me when it came to giving me a taste for space opera, but it was Anne who truly made me appreciate what goes into successful “world building.” I was (I know Anne will forgive me for admitting this) in high school when I read Dragonflight in its original serialized version, and I was deeply impressed by the sense of realness she had managed to give Pern. It was the first time that I’d really sensed the texture of a literary universe, become aware of all the little things that had to fit into place, how a writer had to be careful about making sure that the cultural references of her literary creation remained internally consistent and coherent without slipping into the cultural references of her readers’ “real world” experience. There was a real, live planet, with its own indigenous societies and political institutions and histories and art, and when I began to write myself, I realized that all those little bits and pieces had to be fitted together properly. So, in a very real sense, Anne is the literary grandmother of the Honorverse, because she’s the one who gave me my own taste for world building in the first place.

I’m glad that I finally figured that out, and that I had the chance to tell her that. And if anyone out there hasn’t read her Pern novels, rectify that fault immediately!

Well, with three children, writing time (or any other kind of time) is clearly at a premium.

I do the most productive of my writing, on average, in the middle of the night. I work till roughly dawn, take the kids to school, then turn in, sleep until early afternoon, get up, get my circulatory system moving, and head out to the office for a couple of hours until supper. Most nights, Gena or I fix supper (I’m the cook, but she helps when I’m busy), then I spend a couple of hours with the kids and Sharon, supervise bedtime prayers, kiss Sharon, and head back out to my office to work again.

When a book is going really well, or when I’m really pushing a deadline (the two are not always identical, unfortunately), I tend to work longer hours on shorter sleep. In those cases, I’ll work three or four hours (minimum) during “normal” working hours, then go back to work in my usual night owl mode. When a book is coming together properly for me, I’ll usually hit between 5,000 and 7,500 words a day. The most I’ve ever done in a single day was around 39,000 words (after which I went and slept for two days), and I did the entire original Path of the Fury in only nine days. Mind you, that doesn’t mean that I finished editing and tweaking in only nine days; the entire project took the better part of a month. Still, that was working in what they call a “white hot heat,” and I’ve never had that particular experience again. In fact, that’s one reason why I hesitated so long before doing the prequel to that novel. I knew I wasn’t going to have that same experience all over again, and I was afraid that the energy level of the prequel would suffer because of it.

I don’t know that I have a lot of “tricks” that I use when I write. There are things I’ve learned about myself over the years that helped me through rough spots and potholes, and I’ve discovered just how useful the Internet is when you find yourself suddenly forced to do a little extra research.

I suppose the biggest single change in the way I work came about eight years ago when I broke my right wrist into 57 pieces. The doctors put it back together again with two plates, twelve screws, and six pieces of wire — to which I have since added bone spurs and early onset arthritis. These minor “improvements” to the joint that nature intended me to use have had a significant negative impact, shall we say, on how long and how hard I can type (or sign autographs, for that matter) before the hand and wrist give out on me.

Because of that, I’ve been forced to go to voice-activated software. In fact, I use Dragon NaturallySpeaking. There are some distinct problems with using voice-activated, some of which are simply irritating and some of which get considerably worse than that. There are, however, two enormous advantages. One is that I can continue to work, which I probably couldn’t if the only option I had was working on the keyboard until my bum wrist locked up. The second is that even though it’s necessary to stop and correct errors which have been introduced by the voice-activated fairly frequently, it’s also possible to dictate at better than 200 words a minute. Nobody I am familiar with can actually write at 200 words a minute for more than brief spurts, but the fact is that I believe my output has gone up considerably simply because of the speed Dragon makes possible. If you have the patience to deal with the foibles of the software, learn how to make it work for you instead of tripping you up, and get comfortable with it, it definitely becomes a speed multiplier, and any production writer will tell you just how important that is.

I do more collaborations than some writers, less than others.

As a general rule, I won’t do a collaboration just to increase “product,” nor will I do one that I’m not going to be fully involved with. If my name is going on the cover of a book, then I’m going to be directly involved in producing what goes between the covers.

Just about every collaboration I’ve done has been done because I believed that the final product would be stronger in some ways than either of us would have produced on his or her own. The fact that the final book will be stronger in some ways doesn’t necessarily mean that I expect it to be stronger in all ways, but it does mean that my collaborator and I are each going to be bringing different strengths to the table with us.

I’ll do collaborations whenever I think it’s going to be a case of combining strengths, rather than reinforcing weaknesses. And I’ll do them when I think I can learn something or perhaps teach something along the way. Actually, I’m constantly learning something new even when I do solo novels; when I get a chance to work “inside someone else’s head,” as it were, the opportunities to learn and improve my craft as a writer are much greater.

I have to admit that another factor in my deciding to do collaborations is sometimes to tell stories I wouldn’t have time to tell entirely on my own. In that sense, I suppose, you could say that I was collaborating with someone else to “increase product,” but there’s a difference between simply trying to get word count out (and separate your readers from their hard-earned money) and working with someone else to tell a story that you really, really want to tell it simply don’t have enough time to tell entirely on your own.

The Hell’s Gate novels are a case in point, and, to be honest, I was unfair to Linda Evans when I started the project. I thought I was going to have a lot more time to devote to it than I turned out having, and I pulled her with me into a series that I simply haven’t been able to get back to. Linda brought exactly what I wanted her to bring to the project, but the story is important enough to me that I really need to be hands-on with it at all stages, and I simply don’t have the time to do that right now. I should have realized that I wouldn’t, and I should have refrained from launching yet another series.

At the same time, this is definitely a series I intend to get back to as soon as humanly possible. I love the storyline, Linda and I have put a lot of thought into where the series needs to go, I like working with her, and this is a story I’ve wanted to tell for the next best thing to 20 years. The problem, of course, is when “as soon as humanly possible” is going to come, and all I can say in this case is that I hope it’s sooner, rather than later.

UPDATE, 4/2013: Unfortunately, David and his co-author, Linda Evans, have yet to have the chance to begin the third Hell’s Gate novel. David appreciates the number of devoted fans who are still interested in the series, and plans to schedule time to work on it later this year.

Sigh.

I have this problem. Basically, you understand, it’s a problem that comes with its own built-in advantages, but it’s still a problem. Put simply, I have more stories I want to tell than I have time in which to tell them. Trust me, that’s a much better problem for a writer to have than to have the reverse problem — too many books he’s obligated to write, and too few stories to put in them.

In answer to the questions above:

There are at least two more novels to be written in the Mutineers’ Moon series. One will be a sequel to Heirs of Empire, and one will be a prequel to the original Mutineers’ Moon novel, starting about an hour before that book opens and then following the mutineers down to Earth and up through the Wars of the Roses.

There are at least two more Norfressa novels which will focus on Bahzell and Brandark and events already set in motion in the four existing novels. Once those are written, I plan on what I think of as my fantasy magnum opus — currently projected at six volumes (and we saw how well my initial projections worked out for the Honorverse, didn’t we?), in which the conflict between Norfressa and Kontovar will finally be brought back out into the open and pushed through to a conclusion. The body count will be high.

John Ringo and I met at a recent con, and have started talking about what would be needed for the next Prince Roger book. Although we had originally discussed doing a seperate series about Miranda, who started the Empire, both of us like the idea of finishing up the story.

I am contemplating at least two additional novels in the Fury universe, as well. One of them would be a sequel to Path of the Fury/In Fury Born, with Alicia DeVries, Tisphone, and Megaira working with Ferhat Ben Belkassem. The other would be a prequel, in which a very young Ben Belkassem, fresh out of the Justice Academy and firmly convinced that procedure must be followed if true justice is going to be achieved, comes face-to-face with the situation which compels them to break all the rules in order to survive and get the job done. In short, it would be the story of Ben Belkassem’s recruitment into O Branch.

From Gena: In the Hell’s Gate series, there are two more books under contract, but the project is in hiatus while David tries to catch up with his writing schedule. He has told people at Cons that he had no business starting “still another series”, but he wanted to tell the story so badly that he bit off more than he could chew. This was actually one of the original series that he pitched to Jim Baen all those years ago, and he’s been itching to get it told. It’s a good story! I’ll let you know as soon as we have something solid about the publication date!

From Gena: Out of the Dark is currently a stand alone book, which is an expansion of a short story that David wrote for the Warriors anthology, edited by George R. R. Martin. David’s editor at Tor likes it well enough that he has asked David to consider expanding it to a series. His writing schedule will determine how feasible that is, but he doesn’t have another one planned for 2013.

More from David: The problem, of course, is when and how I’m going to get around to doing all of the above. The standard joke between me and Sharon is that I’ll do them in “my copious free time,” but in some ways I’m the victim of my own success. The Honorverse novels have done so well, and have such a large readership, that there’s enormous pressure to produce more of them instead of writing anything else, and I think we’re headed the same way with the Safehold novels from Tor, as well. Basically, I’m in the position of having to keep both of those series moving along and fitting everything else in around them. This has been a significant problem for me in at least a couple of instances, and it also means that there is a tendency to leave storylines which have reached a satisfactory (or at least semi-satisfactory) resting place alone until I’ve got time to “do right by them.”

All of which means that I genuinely can’t give you anything that would be a remotely dependable schedule for when I’m going to get to all of these projects. The good news is that I know pretty much exactly what I want to do with them when I get there; the bad news is simply finding the time to do it.

– David

As I have said before, the very best and most fundamental piece of advice, I think, is to write what you enjoy reading. In addition to the reasons for that which I gave above, there’s also this: if you enjoy reading it, the odds are someone else will, too. In other words, there’s going to be a market for it somewhere. It’s important to remember that publishers are in the business of publishing, which means that they need writers. So if what you produce is of marketable quality, sooner or later an editor somewhere will probably recognize that and buy it.

Mind you, it may take some time for that to happen. Want-to-be writers tend to collect a lot of rejection letters. For most of us, that’s part of paying our dues. Rejection letters have to be something that you are able to take in stride and continue submitting, and sometimes that’s hard for people to accept.

It’s my opinion, for whatever it’s worth, that no one can teach you to be a storyteller. Obviously, there are some exceptions to that statement, and most of us who become storytellers learn from watching others in action, or from the traditions of the stories we were told. But that’s not the same thing as going to a creative writing seminar and having someone teach you how to be a storyteller. It’s something that you absorb through your pores, and that experience has to find something inside you that moves you to tell stories, as well.

Now, you can be taught to be a better storyteller, just as you can be taught to be a better writer. I’m not trying to make some sort of mystery process out of this, I’m just saying that successful writers have to develop their own style of storytelling — their own voices as writers. A weak story, well told, will be far more successful than a strong story which is weakly told, both in terms of the amount of entertainment it will provide for your audience and also for the ultimate marketability of your work.

People have often asked me how I “learned to write.” My response is to ask them how they learned to walk. Again, this isn’t an attempt to imbue my craft as a writer was some sort of undeserved mystique. Instead, what I’m trying to explain to them is that I’ve been doing this for so long that I really don’t remember how I learned to do it in the first place, any more than I remember how I learned to walk in the first place. The best I’ve ever been able to do is to point out to them that when they were learning to walk, they fell down a lot. When you’re learning to write, you wind up throwing a lot of things into trash cans. That’s your “falling down” process, and I don’t think anyone’s ever come up with a way to avoid it.

But just like you fall down a lot when you’re learning to walk and get steadily better in the process, you get steadily better by exercising your writing, as well. In the process, hopefully, you learn to become your own best editor. You watch what you’re doing, you try to learn from your own mistakes, and you begin to develop an ear for verb choices, adjectives, adverbs, ways to describe action sequences.

So my advice to someone who wants to write is, first, write a lot, even if you’re not sure you’ll ever actually submit any of it for publication. Find out whether or not this is something you really enjoy doing, and whether or not you’re able to gradually improve both your storytelling skills and your “literary tools.”

When you write a lot, write what you enjoy reading.

When you get ready to begin submitting stuff, look for somebody who publishes the kind of stuff you’re submitting. Sounds like a “d’oh!” but it’s amazing how many people overlook that simple preliminary step.

If you get rejection letters, don’t give up. If you actually get a letter — one which explains why they didn’t buy your book, rather than simply a form letter– read it carefully. Think about what it says. But don’t make the mistake of accepting everything in it as gospel. For one thing, the person writing the letter may or may not have had time to carefully read, and so may or may not have misinterpreted or misconstrued something. Secondly, some editors simply don’t like some kinds of stories, and while most of them try very hard to be professional, they may come down harder on one of the “I don’t like this kind of story” submissions than they would on one of the “Boy, I really like this kind of story!” submissions. (The caveat to the above is that if the editor tells you “Change this the way I’m asking you to, and I’ll buy it,” then you should listen very, very, very carefully to that editor! [G])

If you get a rejection letter that suggests what’s wrong with your story and it makes sense to you, then by all means treat it as a highly experienced critique which can point you towards improvements in your writing style.

And, finally, never forget that confidence is an enormous factor in how well you succeed in this field. Obviously, confidence in your ability to trust your own judgment, or in your ability to continue submitting because you’re sure that what you’ve done is publishable, is hugely important, but there’s another kind of confidence. I’m pretty sure that I could have been published at least 10 years before I actually was if only I’d had the confidence in my own work to begin submitting them. I wouldn’t have been the writer that I was when I actually sold my first novel (in collaboration with Steve White), but I’m still pretty sure that I could have sold my work. The problem was that, like quite a lot of us who dream of being published writers, I was afraid to reach out for the dream for fear I would find out that a dream was all it had ever been. As long as you haven’t submitted your work and been rejected, then you can still say to yourself “I can be a writer someday.” If you submit, and you get rejected over and over again, until you finally accept that this isn’t really what you were born to do, and that “someday” goes away, and most of us don’t want to risk that. But if you’re never willing to risk having “someday” go away, then the dream will never happen. That’s the one and only thing you can always count on, because if you never take that first step of actually submitting your work to someone, no one will ever even know it was out there to be purchased in the first place.

As a general rule, I think probably In Fury Born (which is the original Path of the Fury novel and its prequel bound into a single set of covers) is the best place to start if you’ve never read any of my books. It’s one of the few standalone novels I’ve written which actually stayed a standalone (sort of), and a lot of people who tell me they enjoy my work started with it.

I get asked this question a lot, and I’ve never really come up with a satisfactory answer. The one thing I know with a relative degree of certainty is that it was never a “marketing” or demographic decision on my part. I never really thought of it as a “selling point” for a novel. In that regard, it genuinely is something that just happened.

Having said that, I also have to say that I’ve known a lot of strong women in my life, starting with my mother and certainly including my wife Sharon, and that I’m comfortable with them. That I prefer strong people to weak people, whatever their chromosome balance may be, and that I prefer strong protagonists to weak protagonists. It’s not exactly as if I don’t have strong male characters and protagonists, either. Colin MacIntyre in the Dahak books, for example, or Bahzell in the Norfressa novels. And there have always been strong male characters in the books which do have female protagonists.

I’m inclined to think that there is a little quirk in my gallop which enjoys putting women into traditionally “male” occupations and positions. To be honest, I quite frequently end up literally flipping a coin to decide whether a new character is going to be male or female, but there does appear to be a significant bias towards female commanders and authority figures generally in quite a lot of my work.

I suspect that part of that stems from my own belief, on the one hand, that we’re on the right track in terms of gender equality, coupled, on the other hand, with my distaste for the more strident forms of feminism. Mind you, if I were female myself, my tolerance for “feminism” might well be significantly higher than it is under the actually obtaining circumstances. I’m certainly well aware of that. However, it’s always bugged me when I read a novel or short story set hundreds or even thousands of years in the future in which the female characters are experiencing exactly the same sorts of problems and prejudices which women have faced in Western society over the last hundred years or so. My own feeling is that if we’re on the right track here (and I clearly think we are), then by the time we get a few centuries down the road the question of whether or not women ought to have exactly the same opportunities, receive exactly the same compensation, find themselves being promoted in step with their male compatriots, etc., is going to be a done deal. It’s going to have about as much burning significance as a topic for debate as the moral rectitude of the African slave trade does for 21^st-century Americans. And by the time you get a couple of centuries beyond that, the significance is going to have dropped to about that of Pharaoh’s policy towards the Hittites.

If you look at the universe of Honor Harrington, or of Alicia DeVries, or of Li Han, the question of whether or not a woman ought to be doing what they‘re doing simply doesn’t arise except under very special circumstances (like pre-alliance Grayson). In that sense, I suppose one might call me a post-feminist science fiction writer, but I think that what I write is actually a healthy manifestation of feminism. My female characters posit societies in which the relationships between beings have advanced (or, as I prefer to think of it, matured) to a point at which attitudes which have victimized so many people for so long have simply died. And I also think that my female characters and their societies recognize the fundamental strength of women — the fact that when half the human race puts its formidable intelligence, abilities, and determination to work to achieve complete equality, it’s going to happen and anybody who thinks he can turn back that particular clock probably likes standing directly in front of speeding locomotives, too.

In a lot of ways, the answer to this one is the same as the answer to why I decided to write science fiction at all. My academic training is as a historian with special emphasis in military, diplomatic, and political history. That gave me a pretty good background in what human beings have already tried when it comes both the politics and to killing one another in the names of various disagreements, and one of my own favorite authors when I was younger [he still is one of my favorite authors, he just hasn’t been around to write any new books in entirely too long] was H. Beam Piper. Anyone who’s read his stuff knows how much history went into it — and not just into his maritime stories. That was a large shaping factor on my own view of what science fiction was and certainly on what it was that I liked to read.

In addition to the “this is what I enjoy reading and writing” factor, though, there’s the fact that approaching the kind of story I’m most comfortable telling from a military and/or political perspective provides me with all sorts of source material. That may sound a bit peculiar when we’re talking about writing science fiction, since science fiction is the literature of the future, after all. But if you really think about it, people are going to be pretty much people until we evolve into something we won’t really recognize anymore. That means that looking at the way people have responded to certain types of pressures in the past ought to provide a pretty reliable template for how people would be likely to respond to those types of pressures in the future, as well. And that, in turn, means that it provides a science fiction writer with both examples and also with responses most readers are going to find plausible.

I think the best advice any perspective author can be given is that he should write what he likes to read. There are a lot of reasons for giving that particular piece of advice, beyond the mere fact that it will be a lot more fun. There’s also the fact that you’ll probably do a better job of writing something you enjoy reading than you would of writing something simply because you might be able to sell it.

In my own case, I’ve enjoyed reading science fiction since I was about 10 years old, although I didn’t get around to figuring out why I enjoyed it until much later in my reading career, of course. When I started writing, the fact that I’d already been reading science fiction for the better part of 30 years before I sold the first novel made the genre a natural fit for me.

That’s why I chose to start writing science fiction. The reason that I’ve continued to write it instead of some other genre [and there are other genres I’d like to write in, including historical fiction and fantasy] is that I’ve continued to enjoy it a great deal and the stories have succeeded rather better in many cases than I’d ever anticipated when I first started out.

First, and this is really the point that is holding up both of them, is the fact that David and John Ringo both have several contracted books that they are due to write and they honestly haven’t had a break in their writing schedules for quite a while. When they both have a break together, David will prepare an outline, and (since you have read David’s work, I’m sure you can understand this) David never does anything short…In fact he has written short stories that have managed to grow into a full novels! So, yes, David does have to do an outline for John to work from, but it isn’t something he can just sit down and write out at breakfast. David assures me that it is a story he wants to continue, but he won’t be continuing the Prince Roger storyline, rather he will be going back and telling the prequel story of Miranda McClintock, the founder of the Empire of Man. So, David says there will definitely, definitely be a continuation of the story, but he’s not sure of exactly when!

January 2014 January 2014

The only problem is that you won’t get the hits in the first place, for a lot of reasons.

The biggest one, as I’ve mentioned several times, is that the vulnerable aspects of an Honorverse ship are extremely limited even when the ship in question isn’t maneuvering radically to make things worse. You can’t get a hit through the wedge; you can only hit it through the sides of the wedge, up the kilt, or down the throat, and Honorverse missiles aren’t that maneuverable, especially at the ends of their runs when they have an enormous velocity.

Terminal velocity on a Mk 23 after a 9-munute run from rest is .81 cee, and you can’t turn something moving at that velocity on a dime. But the sidewall is 10 kilometers from the side of the ship and roughly 140 kilometers from the outer edge of the wedge. Threading that narrow chink of vulnerability is tough even with a laser head’s standoff range; it would be a lot tougher for a contact warhead. And even assuming you pull that off, without the right penetrator, a warhead’s not getting through that, which automatically means a 10-km-plus standoff range for a “contact” nuke in an airless, noncompressible medium, against radiation and particle shielding that can handle incoming particles at .7 cee for days on end.

Of course, the target can deny you that angle by rolling ship as the missile comes in, and as noted above, there’s only so much delta vee you can apply in the period in which your missile overruns the target. If I roll, your missile (or its wedge) is going to hit my wedge on the way in if you can generate a sharp enough turn to nip in between the edges of a 300-km-wide wedge in the first place. Same with “hooking” a contact nuke down the throat of a wedge or up the kilt, and the manuvering aspect of the geometry of the warhead’s approach to contact completely ignores the active defenses, which are going to have a field day during the warhead’s final approach.

The laser head has a vastly larger range basket, is far better suited to “snap shots” as it crosses the vulnerable aspect of an evading wedge, has a greater standoff range, and is a much more difficult target for the close in defenses. The percentage of hits you will score is much, much higher than even Apollo could possibly hope to score with contact warheads (especially against a peer warship with bow and stern walls), so even if each individual hit is less destructive, the damage budget is much larger for the same throw weight of missiles.

I can’t see anything on the horizon that’s likely to alter those fundamental limitations against an iumpeller drivfe vessel.

decor

The only problem is that you won’t get the hits in the first place, for a lot of reasons.

The biggest one, as I’ve mentioned several times, is that the vulnerable aspects of an Honorverse ship are extremely limited even when the ship in question isn’t maneuvering radically to make things worse. You can’t get a hit through the wedge; you can only hit it through the sides of the wedge, up the kilt, or down the throat, and Honorverse missiles aren’t that maneuverable, especially at the ends of their runs when they have an enormous velocity.

Terminal velocity on a Mk 23 after a 9-munute run from rest is .81 cee, and you can’t turn something moving at that velocity on a dime. But the sidewall is 10 kilometers from the side of the ship and roughly 140 kilometers from the outer edge of the wedge. Threading that narrow chink of vulnerability is tough even with a laser head’s standoff range; it would be a lot tougher for a contact warhead. And even assuming you pull that off, without the right penetrator, a warhead’s not getting through that, which automatically means a 10-km-plus standoff range for a “contact” nuke in an airless, noncompressible medium, against radiation and particle shielding that can handle incoming particles at .7 cee for days on end.

Of course, the target can deny you that angle by rolling ship as the missile comes in, and as noted above, there’s only so much delta vee you can apply in the period in which your missile overruns the target. If I roll, your missile (or its wedge) is going to hit my wedge on the way in if you can generate a sharp enough turn to nip in between the edges of a 300-km-wide wedge in the first place. Same with “hooking” a contact nuke down the throat of a wedge or up the kilt, and the manuvering aspect of the geometry of the warhead’s approach to contact completely ignores the active defenses, which are going to have a field day during the warhead’s final approach.

The laser head has a vastly larger range basket, is far better suited to “snap shots” as it crosses the vulnerable aspect of an evading wedge, has a greater standoff range, and is a much more difficult target for the close in defenses. The percentage of hits you will score is much, much higher than even Apollo could possibly hope to score with contact warheads (especially against a peer warship with bow and stern walls), so even if each individual hit is less destructive, the damage budget is much larger for the same throw weight of missiles.

I can’t see anything on the horizon that’s likely to alter those fundamental limitations against an iumpeller drivfe vessel. The only problem is that you won’t get the hits in the first place, for a lot of reasons.

The biggest one, as I’ve mentioned several times, is that the vulnerable aspects of an Honorverse ship are extremely limited even when the ship in question isn’t maneuvering radically to make things worse. You can’t get a hit through the wedge; you can only hit it through the sides of the wedge, up the kilt, or down the throat, and Honorverse missiles aren’t that maneuverable, especially at the ends of their runs when they have an enormous velocity.

Terminal velocity on a Mk 23 after a 9-munute run from rest is .81 cee, and you can’t turn something moving at that velocity on a dime. But the sidewall is 10 kilometers from the side of the ship and roughly 140 kilometers from the outer edge of the wedge. Threading that narrow chink of vulnerability is tough even with a laser head’s standoff range; it would be a lot tougher for a contact warhead. And even assuming you pull that off, without the right penetrator, a warhead’s not getting through that, which automatically means a 10-km-plus standoff range for a “contact” nuke in an airless, noncompressible medium, against radiation and particle shielding that can handle incoming particles at .7 cee for days on end.

Of course, the target can deny you that angle by rolling ship as the missile comes in, and as noted above, there’s only so much delta vee you can apply in the period in which your missile overruns the target. If I roll, your missile (or its wedge) is going to hit my wedge on the way in if you can generate a sharp enough turn to nip in between the edges of a 300-km-wide wedge in the first place. Same with “hooking” a contact nuke down the throat of a wedge or up the kilt, and the manuvering aspect of the geometry of the warhead’s approach to contact completely ignores the active defenses, which are going to have a field day during the warhead’s final approach.

The laser head has a vastly larger range basket, is far better suited to “snap shots” as it crosses the vulnerable aspect of an evading wedge, has a greater standoff range, and is a much more difficult target for the close in defenses. The percentage of hits you will score is much, much higher than even Apollo could possibly hope to score with contact warheads (especially against a peer warship with bow and stern walls), so even if each individual hit is less destructive, the damage budget is much larger for the same throw weight of missiles.

I can’t see anything on the horizon that’s likely to alter those fundamental limitations against an iumpeller drivfe vessel. The only problem is that you won’t get the hits in the first place, for a lot of reasons.

The biggest one, as I’ve mentioned several times, is that the vulnerable aspects of an Honorverse ship are extremely limited even when the ship in question isn’t maneuvering radically to make things worse. You can’t get a hit through the wedge; you can only hit it through the sides of the wedge, up the kilt, or down the throat, and Honorverse missiles aren’t that maneuverable, especially at the ends of their runs when they have an enormous velocity.

Terminal velocity on a Mk 23 after a 9-munute run from rest is .81 cee, and you can’t turn something moving at that velocity on a dime. But the sidewall is 10 kilometers from the side of the ship and roughly 140 kilometers from the outer edge of the wedge. Threading that narrow chink of vulnerability is tough even with a laser head’s standoff range; it would be a lot tougher for a contact warhead. And even assuming you pull that off, without the right penetrator, a warhead’s not getting through that, which automatically means a 10-km-plus standoff range for a “contact” nuke in an airless, noncompressible medium, against radiation and particle shielding that can handle incoming particles at .7 cee for days on end.

Of course, the target can deny you that angle by rolling ship as the missile comes in, and as noted above, there’s only so much delta vee you can apply in the period in which your missile overruns the target. If I roll, your missile (or its wedge) is going to hit my wedge on the way in if you can generate a sharp enough turn to nip in between the edges of a 300-km-wide wedge in the first place. Same with “hooking” a contact nuke down the throat of a wedge or up the kilt, and the manuvering aspect of the geometry of the warhead’s approach to contact completely ignores the active defenses, which are going to have a field day during the warhead’s final approach.

The laser head has a vastly larger range basket, is far better suited to “snap shots” as it crosses the vulnerable aspect of an evading wedge, has a greater standoff range, and is a much more difficult target for the close in defenses. The percentage of hits you will score is much, much higher than even Apollo could possibly hope to score with contact warheads (especially against a peer warship with bow and stern walls), so even if each individual hit is less destructive, the damage budget is much larger for the same throw weight of missiles.

I can’t see anything on the horizon that’s likely to alter those fundamental limitations against an iumpeller drivfe vessel. The only problem is that you won’t get the hits in the first place, for a lot of reasons.

The biggest one, as I’ve mentioned several times, is that the vulnerable aspects of an Honorverse ship are extremely limited extremely limited even when the ship in question isn’t maneuvering radically to make things worse. You can’t get a hit through the wedge; you can only hit it through the sides of the wedge, up the kilt, or down the throat, and Honorverse missiles aren’t that maneuverable, especially at the ends of their runs when they have an enormous velocity.

Terminal velocity on a Mk 23 after a 9-munute run from rest is .81 cee, and you can’t turn something moving at that velocity on a dime. But the sidewall is 10 kilometers from the side of the ship and roughly 140 kilometers from the outer edge of the wedge. Threading that narrow chink of vulnerability is tough even with a laser head’s standoff range; it would be a lot tougher for a contact warhead. And even assuming you pull that that off, without the right penetrator, a warhead’s not getting through that, which automatically means a 10-km-plus standoff range for a “contact” nuke in an airless, noncompressible medium, against radiation and particle shielding that can handle incoming particles at .7 cee for days on end.

Of course, the target can deny you that angle by rolling ship as the missile comes in, and as noted above, there’s only so much delta vee you can apply in the period in which your missile overruns the target. If I roll, your missile (or its wedge) is going to hit my wedge on the way in if if you can generate a sharp enough turn to nip in between the edges of a 300-km-wide wedge in the first place. Same with “hooking” a contact nuke down the throat of a wedge or up the kilt, and the manuvering aspect of the geometry of the warhead’s approach to contact completely ignores the active defenses, which are going to have a field day during the warhead’s final approach.

The laser head has a vastly larger range basket, is far better suited to “snap shots” as it crosses the vulnerable aspect of an evading wedge, has a greater standoff range, and is a much much more difficult target for the close in defenses. The percentage of hits you will score is much, much higher than even Apollo could possibly hope to score with contact warheads (especially against a peer warship with bow and stern walls), so even if each individual hit is less destructive, the damage budget budget is much larger for the same throw weight of missiles.

I can’t see anything on the horizon that’s likely to alter those fundamental limitations against an iumpeller drivfe vessel.

Honorverse

Could a Peep attack through the Manticore Wormhole Junction succeed? (Asked Thu Jun 14, 2012)

January 2014

Honorverse Honorverse

January 2014 January 2014

The defender’s problem, of course, arises when there are multiple axes of attack. That is, when someone can flank you and hit you from hyper as well as through the terminus. Even then, you are risking enormous losses for the force transiting the terminus, and one reason to attack from hyper as well is to get close enough that you can target the terminus defenses (including all those mines and stuff) from behind. You cam “sweep” the mines on a terminus with weapons launched in n-space on the other side, opening a gap in any “automatic” defenses, while your forces coming in through hyper draw any defending starships out of position by forcing them to honor the new threat.

In the case of Trevor’s Star, the Peeps hadn’t put any forts on the terminus. They hadn’t needed to. If anyone started any wars between them and the SKM, they intended for it to be them, which meant that — unlike the SKM — they didn’t have to worry about a sneak attack in peacetime. Therefore, it made more sense to use the immensely less expensive option of mining the single transit lane to a fare-thee-well. That strategy came back to bite them when White Haven managed to convince the Admiralty to let him go after the terminus from both directions at once, but please do note how long it took him to convince Admiralty House to let him try that even with the enormous strategic edge Trevor’s Star’s was going to give the RMN. Had the PR been able to find the resources to put forts on the terminus to protect it against an attack through hyper-space, White Haven’s plans probably wouldn’t have worked because there would have been something in place to back up the mines, but the PN didn’t have all those big nasty forts and was under the impression that a sufficient number of SDs ought to do the trick.

In Honor’s case in OBS, her major concerns were (1) the SKM would lose the entire Basilisk System plus terminus if the Peeps succeeded; (2) in the event of a war, the SKM would pay just as hideous a price as anyone else if the Manties were insnae enough to try an assault through a terminus; (3) Manticore would have lost control of a full third of the Junction’s then known termini if the Peeps succeeded; and (4) that the bad guys might not accept the conventional wisdom and that the conventional wisdom might be wrong.

IRT that last point, note that no one had ever been stupid enough to TRY a terminus assault into a prepared defense. Manticore couldn’t be positive that the Peeps might not be ready to try it in the event of a war, and until someone did try it — or until they’d had sufficient time to be sure the laserhead was going to work as advertised — they couldn’t be positive it was unworkable.

I suppose I should admit that the terms in which I have been discussing this sort of a scenario are those of around 1900-1920 — i.e., after the laser head has been throughly tested in battle. Prior to that time, a terminus assault just might have been survivable in the absence of powerful fortifications, and in that sense I have been guilty of a possibly misleading statement in earlier posts. Prior to the development of the laser head, minefields were armed with the old “boom or burn” warheads rather than laser heads. They required longer to get into effective attack range, which actually might have given someone who transited the terminus long enough to get his own missiles off before he got wiped. At that point, you needed the forts to back up the mines against someone coming through the terminus. It was only after the laser head was developed and thoroughly tested that the SKM’s forts became redundant in wartime defense against assault transits and assumed defense against attacks via hyper as their primary function. Prior to the laser head, defense against a “peactime” assault through the terminus and against a more conventional attack through hyper were of coequal importance.

One should also note that SKM doctrine and defensive analysis was lagging even in 1900 because the laser head had not yet been used in combat. To use a very imperfect analogy, their fears that the Peeps might be willing to throw in a wave of BBs, even knowing they would lose them all, in order to erode the defenses, was somewhat equivalent to an admiral in 1939 being unprepared to declare the battleship obsolete in the face of carrier airpower. Until the Manties knew laser heads were going to work as well as they hoped, they were unprepared to risk the SKM’s existence on the proposition. In that respect, shutting down the Junction forts as obsolescent reflected the final validation of the laser head. The RMN now knew that the mines could do the job unassisted; until they had the test of combat behind them, they couldn’t be positive of that.

decor

The defender’s problem, of course, arises when there are multiple axes of attack. That is, when someone can flank you and hit you from hyper as well as through the terminus. Even then, you are risking enormous losses for the force transiting the terminus, and one reason to attack from hyper as well is to get close enough that you can target the terminus defenses (including all those mines and stuff) from behind. You cam “sweep” the mines on a terminus with weapons launched in n-space on the other side, opening a gap in any “automatic” defenses, while your forces coming in through hyper draw any defending starships out of position by forcing them to honor the new threat.

In the case of Trevor’s Star, the Peeps hadn’t put any forts on the terminus. They hadn’t needed to. If anyone started any wars between them and the SKM, they intended for it to be them, which meant that — unlike the SKM — they didn’t have to worry about a sneak attack in peacetime. Therefore, it made more sense to use the immensely less expensive option of mining the single transit lane to a fare-thee-well. That strategy came back to bite them when White Haven managed to convince the Admiralty to let him go after the terminus from both directions at once, but please do note how long it took him to convince Admiralty House to let him try that even with the enormous strategic edge Trevor’s Star’s was going to give the RMN. Had the PR been able to find the resources to put forts on the terminus to protect it against an attack through hyper-space, White Haven’s plans probably wouldn’t have worked because there would have been something in place to back up the mines, but the PN didn’t have all those big nasty forts and was under the impression that a sufficient number of SDs ought to do the trick.

In Honor’s case in OBS, her major concerns were (1) the SKM would lose the entire Basilisk System plus terminus if the Peeps succeeded; (2) in the event of a war, the SKM would pay just as hideous a price as anyone else if the Manties were insnae enough to try an assault through a terminus; (3) Manticore would have lost control of a full third of the Junction’s then known termini if the Peeps succeeded; and (4) that the bad guys might not accept the conventional wisdom and that the conventional wisdom might be wrong.

IRT that last point, note that no one had ever been stupid enough to TRY a terminus assault into a prepared defense. Manticore couldn’t be positive that the Peeps might not be ready to try it in the event of a war, and until someone did try it — or until they’d had sufficient time to be sure the laserhead was going to work as advertised — they couldn’t be positive it was unworkable.

I suppose I should admit that the terms in which I have been discussing this sort of a scenario are those of around 1900-1920 — i.e., after the laser head has been throughly tested in battle. Prior to that time, a terminus assault just might have been survivable in the absence of powerful fortifications, and in that sense I have been guilty of a possibly misleading statement in earlier posts. Prior to the development of the laser head, minefields were armed with the old “boom or burn” warheads rather than laser heads. They required longer to get into effective attack range, which actually might have given someone who transited the terminus long enough to get his own missiles off before he got wiped. At that point, you needed the forts to back up the mines against someone coming through the terminus. It was only after the laser head was developed and thoroughly tested that the SKM’s forts became redundant in wartime defense against assault transits and assumed defense against attacks via hyper as their primary function. Prior to the laser head, defense against a “peactime” assault through the terminus and against a more conventional attack through hyper were of coequal importance.

One should also note that SKM doctrine and defensive analysis was lagging even in 1900 because the laser head had not yet been used in combat. To use a very imperfect analogy, their fears that the Peeps might be willing to throw in a wave of BBs, even knowing they would lose them all, in order to erode the defenses, was somewhat equivalent to an admiral in 1939 being unprepared to declare the battleship obsolete in the face of carrier airpower. Until the Manties knew laser heads were going to work as well as they hoped, they were unprepared to risk the SKM’s existence on the proposition. In that respect, shutting down the Junction forts as obsolescent reflected the final validation of the laser head. The RMN now knew that the mines could do the job unassisted; until they had the test of combat behind them, they couldn’t be positive of that. The defender’s problem, of course, arises when there are multiple axes of attack. That is, when someone can flank you and hit you from hyper as well as through the terminus. Even then, you are risking enormous losses for the force transiting the terminus, and one reason to attack from hyper as well is to get close enough that you can target the terminus defenses (including all those mines and stuff) from behind. You cam “sweep” the mines on a terminus with weapons launched in n-space on the other side, opening a gap in any “automatic” defenses, while your forces coming in through hyper draw any defending starships out of position by forcing them to honor the new threat.

In the case of Trevor’s Star, the Peeps hadn’t put any forts on the terminus. They hadn’t needed to. If anyone started any wars between them and the SKM, they intended for it to be them, which meant that — unlike the SKM — they didn’t have to worry about a sneak attack in peacetime. Therefore, it made more sense to use the immensely less expensive option of mining the single transit lane to a fare-thee-well. That strategy came back to bite them when White Haven managed to convince the Admiralty to let him go after the terminus from both directions at once, but please do note how long it took him to convince Admiralty House to let him try that even with the enormous strategic edge Trevor’s Star’s was going to give the RMN. Had the PR been able to find the resources to put forts on the terminus to protect it against an attack through hyper-space, White Haven’s plans probably wouldn’t have worked because there would have been something in place to back up the mines, but the PN didn’t have all those big nasty forts and was under the impression that a sufficient number of SDs ought to do the trick.

In Honor’s case in OBS, her major concerns were (1) the SKM would lose the entire Basilisk System plus terminus if the Peeps succeeded; (2) in the event of a war, the SKM would pay just as hideous a price as anyone else if the Manties were insnae enough to try an assault through a terminus; (3) Manticore would have lost control of a full third of the Junction’s then known termini if the Peeps succeeded; and (4) that the bad guys might not accept the conventional wisdom and that the conventional wisdom might be wrong.

IRT that last point, note that no one had ever been stupid enough to TRY a terminus assault into a prepared defense. Manticore couldn’t be positive that the Peeps might not be ready to try it in the event of a war, and until someone did try it — or until they’d had sufficient time to be sure the laserhead was going to work as advertised — they couldn’t be positive it was unworkable.

I suppose I should admit that the terms in which I have been discussing this sort of a scenario are those of around 1900-1920 — i.e., after the laser head has been throughly tested in battle. Prior to that time, a terminus assault just might have been survivable in the absence of powerful fortifications, and in that sense I have been guilty of a possibly misleading statement in earlier posts. Prior to the development of the laser head, minefields were armed with the old “boom or burn” warheads rather than laser heads. They required longer to get into effective attack range, which actually might have given someone who transited the terminus long enough to get his own missiles off before he got wiped. At that point, you needed the forts to back up the mines against someone coming through the terminus. It was only after the laser head was developed and thoroughly tested that the SKM’s forts became redundant in wartime defense against assault transits and assumed defense against attacks via hyper as their primary function. Prior to the laser head, defense against a “peactime” assault through the terminus and against a more conventional attack through hyper were of coequal importance.

One should also note that SKM doctrine and defensive analysis was lagging even in 1900 because the laser head had not yet been used in combat. To use a very imperfect analogy, their fears that the Peeps might be willing to throw in a wave of BBs, even knowing they would lose them all, in order to erode the defenses, was somewhat equivalent to an admiral in 1939 being unprepared to declare the battleship obsolete in the face of carrier airpower. Until the Manties knew laser heads were going to work as well as they hoped, they were unprepared to risk the SKM’s existence on the proposition. In that respect, shutting down the Junction forts as obsolescent reflected the final validation of the laser head. The RMN now knew that the mines could do the job unassisted; until they had the test of combat behind them, they couldn’t be positive of that. The defender’s problem, of course, arises when there are multiple axes of attack. That is, when someone can flank you and hit you from hyper as well as through the terminus. Even then, you are risking enormous losses for the force transiting the terminus, and one reason to attack from hyper as well is to get close enough that you can target the terminus defenses (including all those mines and stuff) from behind. You cam “sweep” the mines on a terminus with weapons launched in n-space on the other side, opening a gap in any “automatic” defenses, while your forces coming in through hyper draw any defending starships out of position by forcing them to honor the new threat.

In the case of Trevor’s Star, the Peeps hadn’t put any forts on the terminus. They hadn’t needed to. If anyone started any wars between them and the SKM, they intended for it to be them, which meant that — unlike the SKM — they didn’t have to worry about a sneak attack in peacetime. Therefore, it made more sense to use the immensely less expensive option of mining the single transit lane to a fare-thee-well. That strategy came back to bite them when White Haven managed to convince the Admiralty to let him go after the terminus from both directions at once, but please do note how long it took him to convince Admiralty House to let him try that even with the enormous strategic edge Trevor’s Star’s was going to give the RMN. Had the PR been able to find the resources to put forts on the terminus to protect it against an attack through hyper-space, White Haven’s plans probably wouldn’t have worked because there would have been something in place to back up the mines, but the PN didn’t have all those big nasty forts and was under the impression that a sufficient number of SDs ought to do the trick.

In Honor’s case in OBS, her major concerns were (1) the SKM would lose the entire Basilisk System plus terminus if the Peeps succeeded; (2) in the event of a war, the SKM would pay just as hideous a price as anyone else if the Manties were insnae enough to try an assault through a terminus; (3) Manticore would have lost control of a full third of the Junction’s then known termini if the Peeps succeeded; and (4) that the bad guys might not accept the conventional wisdom and that the conventional wisdom might be wrong.

IRT that last point, note that no one had ever been stupid enough to TRY a terminus assault into a prepared defense. Manticore couldn’t be positive that the Peeps might not be ready to try it in the event of a war, and until someone did try it — or until they’d had sufficient time to be sure the laserhead was going to work as advertised — they couldn’t be positive it was unworkable.

I suppose I should admit that the terms in which I have been discussing this sort of a scenario are those of around 1900-1920 — i.e., after the laser head has been throughly tested in battle. Prior to that time, a terminus assault just might have been survivable in the absence of powerful fortifications, and in that sense I have been guilty of a possibly misleading statement in earlier posts. Prior to the development of the laser head, minefields were armed with the old “boom or burn” warheads rather than laser heads. They required longer to get into effective attack range, which actually might have given someone who transited the terminus long enough to get his own missiles off before he got wiped. At that point, you needed the forts to back up the mines against someone coming through the terminus. It was only after the laser head was developed and thoroughly tested that the SKM’s forts became redundant in wartime defense against assault transits and assumed defense against attacks via hyper as their primary function. Prior to the laser head, defense against a “peactime” assault through the terminus and against a more conventional attack through hyper were of coequal importance.

One should also note that SKM doctrine and defensive analysis was lagging even in 1900 because the laser head had not yet been used in combat. To use a very imperfect analogy, their fears that the Peeps might be willing to throw in a wave of BBs, even knowing they would lose them all, in order to erode the defenses, was somewhat equivalent to an admiral in 1939 being unprepared to declare the battleship obsolete in the face of carrier airpower. Until the Manties knew laser heads were going to work as well as they hoped, they were unprepared to risk the SKM’s existence on the proposition. In that respect, shutting down the Junction forts as obsolescent reflected the final validation of the laser head. The RMN now knew that the mines could do the job unassisted; until they had the test of combat behind them, they couldn’t be positive of that. The defender’s problem, of course, arises when there are multiple axes of attack. That is, when someone can flank you and hit you from hyper as well as as well as through the terminus. Even then, you are risking enormous losses for the force transiting the terminus, and one reason to attack from hyper as well is to get close enough that you can target the terminus defenses (including all those mines and stuff) from behind. You cam “sweep” the mines on a terminus with weapons launched in n-space on the other side, opening a gap in any “automatic” defenses, while your forces coming in through hyper draw any defending starships out of position by forcing them to honor the new threat.

In the case of Trevor’s Star, the Peeps hadn’t put any forts on the terminus. They hadn’t needed to. If anyone started any wars between them and the SKM, they intended for it to be them, which meant that — unlike the SKM — they didn’t have to worry about a sneak attack in peacetime. Therefore, it made more sense to use the immensely less expensive option of mining the single transit lane to a fare-thee-well. That strategy came back to bite them when White Haven managed to convince the Admiralty to let him go after the terminus from both directions at once, but please do note how long it took him to convince Admiralty House to let him try that even with the enormous strategic edge Trevor’s Star’s was going to give the RMN. Had the PR been able to find the resources to put forts on the terminus to protect it against an attack through hyper-space, White Haven’s plans probably wouldn’t have worked because there would have been something in place to back up the mines, but the PN didn’t have all those big nasty forts and was under the impression that a sufficient number of SDs ought to do the trick.

In Honor’s case in OBS, her major concerns were (1) the SKM would lose the entire Basilisk System plus terminus if the Peeps succeeded; (2) in the event of a war, the SKM would pay just as hideous a price as anyone else if the Manties Manties were insnae enough to try an assault through a terminus; (3) Manticore would have lost control of a full third of the Junction’s then known termini if the Peeps succeeded; and (4) that the bad guys might not accept the conventional wisdom and that the conventional wisdom might be wrong.

IRT that last point, note that no one had ever been stupid enough to TRY a terminus assault into a prepared defense. Manticore couldn’t be positive that the Peeps might not be ready to try it in the event of a war, and until someone did try it — or until they’d had sufficient time to be sure the laserhead was going to work as advertised — they couldn’t be positive positive it was unworkable.

I suppose I should admit that the terms in which I have been discussing this sort of a scenario are those of around 1900-1920 — i.e., after the laser head has been throughly tested in battle. Prior to that time, a terminus assault just might might have been survivable in the absence of powerful fortifications, and in that sense I have been guilty of a possibly misleading statement in earlier posts. Prior to the development of the laser head, minefields were armed with the old “boom or burn” warheads rather than laser heads. They required longer to get into effective attack range, which actually might have given someone who transited the terminus long enough to get his own missiles off before he got wiped. At that point, you needed the forts to back up the mines against someone coming through the terminus. It was only after the laser head was developed and thoroughly tested that the SKM’s forts became redundant in wartime defense against assault transits and assumed defense against attacks via hyper as their primary primary function. Prior to the laser head, defense against a “peactime” assault through the terminus and against a more conventional attack through hyper were of coequal importance.

One should also note that SKM doctrine and defensive analysis was lagging even in 1900 because the laser head had not yet been used in combat. To use a very very imperfect analogy, their fears that the Peeps might be willing to throw in a wave of BBs, even knowing they would lose them all, in order to erode the defenses, was somewhat equivalent to an admiral in 1939 being unprepared to declare the battleship obsolete in the face of carrier airpower. Until the Manties knew knew laser heads were going to work as well as they hoped, they were unprepared to risk the SKM’s existence on the proposition. In that respect, shutting down the Junction forts as obsolescent reflected the final validation of the laser head. The RMN now knew that the mines could could do the job unassisted; until they had the test of combat behind them, they couldn’t be positive positive of that.

Honorverse

Could you build an armored shell encasing a ship such that it could survive a transit through a defended wormhole? (Asked Tue Jun 12, 2012)

January 2014

Honorverse Honorverse

January 2014 January 2014

First, let’s consider the issue of timing (i.e., could the massively armored “outer SD” last long enough for the “inner dispatch boat’s” hyper generator to cycle quickly enough, irrespective of little things like intruding mass and matter.

in A Rising Thunder, pp 254-55, DW wrote:

Filareta walked back across to the master plot and unobtrusively checked the waterfall display on one of the secondary plots which showed the status of Eleventh Fleet’s hyper generators. A hyper generator built to the scale of a superdreadnought like Philip Oppenheimer was a substantial piece of equipment, and it took time to cycle. In fact, it would have taken Oppenheimer thirty-two minutes—over half an hour—to go from powered-down status to translation into hyper. Recovering from a translation took time as well, although nowhere near that long. In fact, Oppenheimer ’s generator could return to standby readiness in only twelve minutes, but it would take another four to cycle all the way up to an actual translation, for a total of sixteen minutes. Unfortunately, they’d been only about nineteen minutes’ flight time from Manticore-A’s hyper limit when they made their alpha translation. That was why his operations plan had specified bringing those generators back to full readiness as quickly as possible, and he gave a mental nod of satisfaction as he observed their progress and then glanced at the time display.

Now, obviously Filareta was thinking about superdreadnoughts and our “inner dispatch boat” isn’t a superdreadnought, but bear with me and remember that any starship’s hyper generator is designed to produce a translation field tailored to pretty exacting dimensions and a specific mass. There is some flex in those parameters, but not a whole lot, and the nature of a hyper generator’s “design capacity,” let’s call it, is going to have consequences where that little matter of being located in the middle of the “outer SD” is concerned. There’s also the problem that we’re talking about two separate hyper generators here — one for the “outer SD” in order to get it through the terminus, and one for the “inner dispatch boat” to get it into hyper before the “outer SD” is torn apart around. I’ll touch on why this is a problem in a moment, but first, here’s a segment from the Honorverse tech bible dealing with hyper generator cycle times:

in the Honorverse tech bible DW wrote:

Just as a ship’s tonnage/dimensions affect its acceleration rate, they also affect how rapidly it can cycle its hyper generator. A hyper generator’s cycle time determines how quickly a ship can actually translate into hyper from complete readiness — that is, from the moment the “go” button its punched on a generator which has been fully prepared for translation.

There are 4 actual readiness stages for a hyper generator:

Powered Down

Routine Readiness

Stand-By Readiness

Translation

The time required to go from Powered Down to Routine Readiness is equal to 4 times the cycle time. The time required to go from Routine Readiness to Stand-By Readiness is equal to 3 times the cycle time. The time required to go from Stand-By readiness to actual Translation is equal to the cycle time. That is, a 1,500,000-ton BC with a cycle time of 75 seconds would require:

300 seconds from Powered Down to Routine

225 seconds from Routine to Stand-By

75 seconds from Stand-By to Translation

Total: 300+225+75 = 600 seconds = 10 minutes

Under normal circumstances, cycle times apply only to translations into hyper-space. Generally speaking, any hyper-capable ship’s hyper generator remains engaged the entire time it is in hyper, and the ship may move freely up or down the hyper bands. Once a ship re-enters normal space, it bleeds off its transit energy (the visible blue flash of its Warshawski Sails) and the generator must be cycled before it can translated back into hyper. Unless the generator is deliberately powered down, however, it remains at Stand-By Readiness and can immediately begin cycling upward again for a translation. Thus our BC with a 75-second cycle time would be required to spend an absolute minimum of 75 seconds (1.5 minutes) in normal-space between translations. Note, however, that accurate astrogation will generally require at least some observation and calculation time, so this minimum figure would not normally be attainable.

Okay, this battlecruiser has a 75-second cycle time. Allowing for tonnage differences, a dispatch boat would have a cycle time of 30 seconds, which is the minimum possible cycle time for a military-grade hyper generator. (Civilian-grade hyper generators have longer cycle times but are also designed for lower power loads and can go much longer between maintenance periods.) However, this is where the problem of “nested” hyper generators comes in, because you cannot have a hyper generator online inside another hyper generator’s translation field. That means you can’t even have it at Routine Readiness. The inner hyper generator would have to be at Powered Down status, which means that even with its 30-second cycle time, your dispatch boat would require:

120 seconds from Powered Down to Routine

90 seconds from Routine to Stand-By

30 seconds from Stand-By to Translation

Total: 120 + 90 + 30 = 240 seconds, or 4 minutes.

I submit to you that your “outer SD” is unlikely to survive four minutes under concentrated, short-range energy fire.

There is, however, another problem, and one which makes the reference to Filareta’s superdreadnoughts rather more relevant. . . and the dispatch boat’s theoretical cycle time totally irrelevant .

When a hyper generator’s translation field establishes itself, it attempts to translate all the matter within its area of effect into hyper. The translation field must extend a certain distance from the generator which is proportionate to the translation field’s designed mass — that is, for a ship of a given mass, the spherical translation field has to be “x” meters across. The dimensions of the field scale with the translation mass, but what matters for our purposes right now is that the minimum dimension for a sustainable translation field is going to be about 600 meters. That is, everything within 600 meters of the hyper generator is inside the translation field’s area of effect and its mass affects the translation . The chief engineer can fiddle with the settings on the hyper generator to some extent, and there’s usually some safety margin built into it, but it can’t handle much more than a maximum of about 6% tonnage “overload” before the hyper generator “departs from its mounts in multiple directions,” as the engine room manual puts it. In other words, it blows the hell up, usually inflicting fairly spectacular damage on the ship in which it was mounted.

What this means is that the mass of the surrounding “outer SD” which would lie within the minimum volume of the hyper generator would cause the aforesaid hyper generator to blow up when it attempted to establish its translation field unless the hyper generator was powerful enough to carry the mass. However, that starts requiring bigger generators and bigger power supplies, which requires larger platforms, which increases the size of the translation field. In order for this to work, the dispatch boat would have to have a superdreadnought-sized hyper generator, because all of the “outer SD” mass and volume would be inside the translation field. So the cycle times quoted for Filareta’s superdreadnoughts in the passage I cited is very relevant to our problem here, because that’s where that 32-minute cycle time comes into play. Never mind the fact that the hyper generator you’d need would be just about the size of the entire dispatch boat in which you’re trying to put it, it would also take over a half hour just to cycle up to translation status, during which time both “outer SD” and “inner dispatch boat” would be ripped into very tiny shreds.

As I say, my “can’t do it from inside a solid object” was a way to try to avoid having to explain all of this in such detail, but since you asked . . . . [G]

decor

First, let’s consider the issue of timing (i.e., could the massively armored “outer SD” last long enough for the “inner dispatch boat’s” hyper generator to cycle quickly enough, irrespective of little things like intruding mass and matter.

in A Rising Thunder, pp 254-55, DW wrote:

Filareta walked back across to the master plot and unobtrusively checked the waterfall display on one of the secondary plots which showed the status of Eleventh Fleet’s hyper generators. A hyper generator built to the scale of a superdreadnought like Philip Oppenheimer was a substantial piece of equipment, and it took time to cycle. In fact, it would have taken Oppenheimer thirty-two minutes—over half an hour—to go from powered-down status to translation into hyper. Recovering from a translation took time as well, although nowhere near that long. In fact, Oppenheimer ’s generator could return to standby readiness in only twelve minutes, but it would take another four to cycle all the way up to an actual translation, for a total of sixteen minutes. Unfortunately, they’d been only about nineteen minutes’ flight time from Manticore-A’s hyper limit when they made their alpha translation. That was why his operations plan had specified bringing those generators back to full readiness as quickly as possible, and he gave a mental nod of satisfaction as he observed their progress and then glanced at the time display.

Now, obviously Filareta was thinking about superdreadnoughts and our “inner dispatch boat” isn’t a superdreadnought, but bear with me and remember that any starship’s hyper generator is designed to produce a translation field tailored to pretty exacting dimensions and a specific mass. There is some flex in those parameters, but not a whole lot, and the nature of a hyper generator’s “design capacity,” let’s call it, is going to have consequences where that little matter of being located in the middle of the “outer SD” is concerned. There’s also the problem that we’re talking about two separate hyper generators here — one for the “outer SD” in order to get it through the terminus, and one for the “inner dispatch boat” to get it into hyper before the “outer SD” is torn apart around. I’ll touch on why this is a problem in a moment, but first, here’s a segment from the Honorverse tech bible dealing with hyper generator cycle times:

in the Honorverse tech bible DW wrote:

Just as a ship’s tonnage/dimensions affect its acceleration rate, they also affect how rapidly it can cycle its hyper generator. A hyper generator’s cycle time determines how quickly a ship can actually translate into hyper from complete readiness — that is, from the moment the “go” button its punched on a generator which has been fully prepared for translation.

There are 4 actual readiness stages for a hyper generator:

Powered Down

Routine Readiness

Stand-By Readiness

Translation

The time required to go from Powered Down to Routine Readiness is equal to 4 times the cycle time. The time required to go from Routine Readiness to Stand-By Readiness is equal to 3 times the cycle time. The time required to go from Stand-By readiness to actual Translation is equal to the cycle time. That is, a 1,500,000-ton BC with a cycle time of 75 seconds would require:

300 seconds from Powered Down to Routine

225 seconds from Routine to Stand-By

75 seconds from Stand-By to Translation

Total: 300+225+75 = 600 seconds = 10 minutes

Under normal circumstances, cycle times apply only to translations into hyper-space. Generally speaking, any hyper-capable ship’s hyper generator remains engaged the entire time it is in hyper, and the ship may move freely up or down the hyper bands. Once a ship re-enters normal space, it bleeds off its transit energy (the visible blue flash of its Warshawski Sails) and the generator must be cycled before it can translated back into hyper. Unless the generator is deliberately powered down, however, it remains at Stand-By Readiness and can immediately begin cycling upward again for a translation. Thus our BC with a 75-second cycle time would be required to spend an absolute minimum of 75 seconds (1.5 minutes) in normal-space between translations. Note, however, that accurate astrogation will generally require at least some observation and calculation time, so this minimum figure would not normally be attainable.

Okay, this battlecruiser has a 75-second cycle time. Allowing for tonnage differences, a dispatch boat would have a cycle time of 30 seconds, which is the minimum possible cycle time for a military-grade hyper generator. (Civilian-grade hyper generators have longer cycle times but are also designed for lower power loads and can go much longer between maintenance periods.) However, this is where the problem of “nested” hyper generators comes in, because you cannot have a hyper generator online inside another hyper generator’s translation field. That means you can’t even have it at Routine Readiness. The inner hyper generator would have to be at Powered Down status, which means that even with its 30-second cycle time, your dispatch boat would require:

120 seconds from Powered Down to Routine

90 seconds from Routine to Stand-By

30 seconds from Stand-By to Translation

Total: 120 + 90 + 30 = 240 seconds, or 4 minutes.

I submit to you that your “outer SD” is unlikely to survive four minutes under concentrated, short-range energy fire.

There is, however, another problem, and one which makes the reference to Filareta’s superdreadnoughts rather more relevant. . . and the dispatch boat’s theoretical cycle time totally irrelevant .

When a hyper generator’s translation field establishes itself, it attempts to translate all the matter within its area of effect into hyper. The translation field must extend a certain distance from the generator which is proportionate to the translation field’s designed mass — that is, for a ship of a given mass, the spherical translation field has to be “x” meters across. The dimensions of the field scale with the translation mass, but what matters for our purposes right now is that the minimum dimension for a sustainable translation field is going to be about 600 meters. That is, everything within 600 meters of the hyper generator is inside the translation field’s area of effect and its mass affects the translation . The chief engineer can fiddle with the settings on the hyper generator to some extent, and there’s usually some safety margin built into it, but it can’t handle much more than a maximum of about 6% tonnage “overload” before the hyper generator “departs from its mounts in multiple directions,” as the engine room manual puts it. In other words, it blows the hell up, usually inflicting fairly spectacular damage on the ship in which it was mounted.

What this means is that the mass of the surrounding “outer SD” which would lie within the minimum volume of the hyper generator would cause the aforesaid hyper generator to blow up when it attempted to establish its translation field unless the hyper generator was powerful enough to carry the mass. However, that starts requiring bigger generators and bigger power supplies, which requires larger platforms, which increases the size of the translation field. In order for this to work, the dispatch boat would have to have a superdreadnought-sized hyper generator, because all of the “outer SD” mass and volume would be inside the translation field. So the cycle times quoted for Filareta’s superdreadnoughts in the passage I cited is very relevant to our problem here, because that’s where that 32-minute cycle time comes into play. Never mind the fact that the hyper generator you’d need would be just about the size of the entire dispatch boat in which you’re trying to put it, it would also take over a half hour just to cycle up to translation status, during which time both “outer SD” and “inner dispatch boat” would be ripped into very tiny shreds.

As I say, my “can’t do it from inside a solid object” was a way to try to avoid having to explain all of this in such detail, but since you asked . . . . [G] First, let’s consider the issue of timing (i.e., could the massively armored “outer SD” last long enough for the “inner dispatch boat’s” hyper generator to cycle quickly enough, irrespective of little things like intruding mass and matter.

in A Rising Thunder, pp 254-55, DW wrote:

Filareta walked back across to the master plot and unobtrusively checked the waterfall display on one of the secondary plots which showed the status of Eleventh Fleet’s hyper generators. A hyper generator built to the scale of a superdreadnought like Philip Oppenheimer was a substantial piece of equipment, and it took time to cycle. In fact, it would have taken Oppenheimer thirty-two minutes—over half an hour—to go from powered-down status to translation into hyper. Recovering from a translation took time as well, although nowhere near that long. In fact, Oppenheimer ’s generator could return to standby readiness in only twelve minutes, but it would take another four to cycle all the way up to an actual translation, for a total of sixteen minutes. Unfortunately, they’d been only about nineteen minutes’ flight time from Manticore-A’s hyper limit when they made their alpha translation. That was why his operations plan had specified bringing those generators back to full readiness as quickly as possible, and he gave a mental nod of satisfaction as he observed their progress and then glanced at the time display.

Now, obviously Filareta was thinking about superdreadnoughts and our “inner dispatch boat” isn’t a superdreadnought, but bear with me and remember that any starship’s hyper generator is designed to produce a translation field tailored to pretty exacting dimensions and a specific mass. There is some flex in those parameters, but not a whole lot, and the nature of a hyper generator’s “design capacity,” let’s call it, is going to have consequences where that little matter of being located in the middle of the “outer SD” is concerned. There’s also the problem that we’re talking about two separate hyper generators here — one for the “outer SD” in order to get it through the terminus, and one for the “inner dispatch boat” to get it into hyper before the “outer SD” is torn apart around. I’ll touch on why this is a problem in a moment, but first, here’s a segment from the Honorverse tech bible dealing with hyper generator cycle times:

in the Honorverse tech bible DW wrote:

Just as a ship’s tonnage/dimensions affect its acceleration rate, they also affect how rapidly it can cycle its hyper generator. A hyper generator’s cycle time determines how quickly a ship can actually translate into hyper from complete readiness — that is, from the moment the “go” button its punched on a generator which has been fully prepared for translation.

There are 4 actual readiness stages for a hyper generator:

Powered Down

Routine Readiness

Stand-By Readiness

Translation

The time required to go from Powered Down to Routine Readiness is equal to 4 times the cycle time. The time required to go from Routine Readiness to Stand-By Readiness is equal to 3 times the cycle time. The time required to go from Stand-By readiness to actual Translation is equal to the cycle time. That is, a 1,500,000-ton BC with a cycle time of 75 seconds would require:

300 seconds from Powered Down to Routine

225 seconds from Routine to Stand-By

75 seconds from Stand-By to Translation

Total: 300+225+75 = 600 seconds = 10 minutes

Under normal circumstances, cycle times apply only to translations into hyper-space. Generally speaking, any hyper-capable ship’s hyper generator remains engaged the entire time it is in hyper, and the ship may move freely up or down the hyper bands. Once a ship re-enters normal space, it bleeds off its transit energy (the visible blue flash of its Warshawski Sails) and the generator must be cycled before it can translated back into hyper. Unless the generator is deliberately powered down, however, it remains at Stand-By Readiness and can immediately begin cycling upward again for a translation. Thus our BC with a 75-second cycle time would be required to spend an absolute minimum of 75 seconds (1.5 minutes) in normal-space between translations. Note, however, that accurate astrogation will generally require at least some observation and calculation time, so this minimum figure would not normally be attainable.

Okay, this battlecruiser has a 75-second cycle time. Allowing for tonnage differences, a dispatch boat would have a cycle time of 30 seconds, which is the minimum possible cycle time for a military-grade hyper generator. (Civilian-grade hyper generators have longer cycle times but are also designed for lower power loads and can go much longer between maintenance periods.) However, this is where the problem of “nested” hyper generators comes in, because you cannot have a hyper generator online inside another hyper generator’s translation field. That means you can’t even have it at Routine Readiness. The inner hyper generator would have to be at Powered Down status, which means that even with its 30-second cycle time, your dispatch boat would require:

120 seconds from Powered Down to Routine

90 seconds from Routine to Stand-By

30 seconds from Stand-By to Translation

Total: 120 + 90 + 30 = 240 seconds, or 4 minutes.

I submit to you that your “outer SD” is unlikely to survive four minutes under concentrated, short-range energy fire.

There is, however, another problem, and one which makes the reference to Filareta’s superdreadnoughts rather more relevant. . . and the dispatch boat’s theoretical cycle time totally irrelevant .

When a hyper generator’s translation field establishes itself, it attempts to translate all the matter within its area of effect into hyper. The translation field must extend a certain distance from the generator which is proportionate to the translation field’s designed mass — that is, for a ship of a given mass, the spherical translation field has to be “x” meters across. The dimensions of the field scale with the translation mass, but what matters for our purposes right now is that the minimum dimension for a sustainable translation field is going to be about 600 meters. That is, everything within 600 meters of the hyper generator is inside the translation field’s area of effect and its mass affects the translation . The chief engineer can fiddle with the settings on the hyper generator to some extent, and there’s usually some safety margin built into it, but it can’t handle much more than a maximum of about 6% tonnage “overload” before the hyper generator “departs from its mounts in multiple directions,” as the engine room manual puts it. In other words, it blows the hell up, usually inflicting fairly spectacular damage on the ship in which it was mounted.

What this means is that the mass of the surrounding “outer SD” which would lie within the minimum volume of the hyper generator would cause the aforesaid hyper generator to blow up when it attempted to establish its translation field unless the hyper generator was powerful enough to carry the mass. However, that starts requiring bigger generators and bigger power supplies, which requires larger platforms, which increases the size of the translation field. In order for this to work, the dispatch boat would have to have a superdreadnought-sized hyper generator, because all of the “outer SD” mass and volume would be inside the translation field. So the cycle times quoted for Filareta’s superdreadnoughts in the passage I cited is very relevant to our problem here, because that’s where that 32-minute cycle time comes into play. Never mind the fact that the hyper generator you’d need would be just about the size of the entire dispatch boat in which you’re trying to put it, it would also take over a half hour just to cycle up to translation status, during which time both “outer SD” and “inner dispatch boat” would be ripped into very tiny shreds.

As I say, my “can’t do it from inside a solid object” was a way to try to avoid having to explain all of this in such detail, but since you asked . . . . [G] First, let’s consider the issue of timing (i.e., could the massively armored “outer SD” last long enough for the “inner dispatch boat’s” hyper generator to cycle quickly enough, irrespective of little things like intruding mass and matter.

First, let’s consider the issue of timing (i.e., could the massively armored “outer SD” last long enough for the “inner dispatch boat’s” hyper generator to cycle quickly enough, irrespective of little things like intruding mass and matter.

in A Rising Thunder, pp 254-55, DW wrote:

Filareta walked back across to the master plot and unobtrusively checked the waterfall display on one of the secondary plots which showed the status of Eleventh Fleet’s hyper generators. A hyper generator built to the scale of a superdreadnought like Philip Oppenheimer was a substantial piece of equipment, and it took time to cycle. In fact, it would have taken Oppenheimer thirty-two minutes—over half an hour—to go from powered-down status to translation into hyper. Recovering from a translation took time as well, although nowhere near that long. In fact, Oppenheimer ’s generator could return to standby readiness in only twelve minutes, but it would take another four to cycle all the way up to an actual translation, for a total of sixteen minutes. Unfortunately, they’d been only about nineteen minutes’ flight time from Manticore-A’s hyper limit when they made their alpha translation. That was why his operations plan had specified bringing those generators back to full readiness as quickly as possible, and he gave a mental nod of satisfaction as he observed their progress and then glanced at the time display. in A Rising Thunder, pp 254-55, DW wrote:

Filareta walked back across to the master plot and unobtrusively checked the waterfall display on one of the secondary plots which showed the status of Eleventh Fleet’s hyper generators. A hyper generator built to the scale of a superdreadnought like Philip Oppenheimer was a substantial piece of equipment, and it took time to cycle. In fact, it would have taken Oppenheimer thirty-two minutes—over half an hour—to go from powered-down status to translation into hyper. Recovering from a translation took time as well, although nowhere near that long. In fact, Oppenheimer ’s generator could return to standby readiness in only twelve minutes, but it would take another four to cycle all the way up to an actual translation, for a total of sixteen minutes. Unfortunately, they’d been only about nineteen minutes’ flight time from Manticore-A’s hyper limit when they made their alpha translation. That was why his operations plan had specified bringing those generators back to full readiness as quickly as possible, and he gave a mental nod of satisfaction as he observed their progress and then glanced at the time display. in A Rising Thunder, pp 254-55, DW wrote: in A Rising Thunder, pp 254-55, DW wrote:

Filareta walked back across to the master plot and unobtrusively checked the waterfall display on one of the secondary plots which showed the status of Eleventh Fleet’s hyper generators. A hyper generator built to the scale of a superdreadnought like Philip Oppenheimer Philip Oppenheimer was a substantial piece of equipment, and it took time to cycle. In fact, it would have taken Oppenheimer Oppenheimer thirty-two minutes—over half an hour—to go from powered-down status to translation into hyper. Recovering from a translation took time as well, although nowhere near that long. In fact, Oppenheimer Oppenheimer’s generator could return to standby readiness in only twelve minutes, but it would take another four to cycle all the way up to an actual translation, for a total of sixteen minutes. Unfortunately, they’d been only about nineteen nineteen minutes’ flight time from Manticore-A’s hyper limit when they made their alpha translation. That was why his operations plan had specified bringing those generators back to full readiness as quickly as possible, and he gave a mental nod of satisfaction as he observed their progress and then glanced at the time display.

Now, obviously Filareta was thinking about superdreadnoughts and our “inner dispatch boat” isn’t a superdreadnought, but bear with me and remember that any starship’s hyper generator is designed to produce a translation field tailored to pretty exacting dimensions and a specific mass. There is some flex in those parameters, but not a whole lot, and the nature of a hyper generator’s “design capacity,” let’s call it, is going to have consequences where that little matter of being located in the middle of the “outer SD” is concerned. There’s also the problem that we’re talking about two separate hyper generators here — one for the “outer SD” in order to get it through the terminus, and one for the “inner dispatch boat” to get it into hyper before the “outer SD” is torn apart around. I’ll touch on why this is a problem in a moment, but first, here’s a segment from the Honorverse tech bible dealing with hyper generator cycle times:

Now, obviously Filareta was thinking about superdreadnoughts and our “inner dispatch boat” isn’t isn’t a superdreadnought, but bear with me and remember that any starship’s hyper generator is designed to produce a translation field tailored to pretty exacting dimensions and a specific mass. There is some flex in those parameters, but not a whole lot, and the nature of a hyper generator’s “design capacity,” let’s call it, is going to have consequences where that little matter of being located in the middle of the “outer SD” is concerned. There’s also the problem that we’re talking about two separate hyper generators here — one for the “outer SD” in order to get it through the terminus, and one for the “inner dispatch boat” to get it into hyper before the “outer SD” is torn apart around. I’ll touch on why this is a problem in a moment, but first, here’s a segment from the Honorverse tech bible dealing with hyper generator cycle times:

in the Honorverse tech bible DW wrote:

Just as a ship’s tonnage/dimensions affect its acceleration rate, they also affect how rapidly it can cycle its hyper generator. A hyper generator’s cycle time determines how quickly a ship can actually translate into hyper from complete readiness — that is, from the moment the “go” button its punched on a generator which has been fully prepared for translation.

There are 4 actual readiness stages for a hyper generator:

Powered Down

Routine Readiness

Stand-By Readiness

Translation

The time required to go from Powered Down to Routine Readiness is equal to 4 times the cycle time. The time required to go from Routine Readiness to Stand-By Readiness is equal to 3 times the cycle time. The time required to go from Stand-By readiness to actual Translation is equal to the cycle time. That is, a 1,500,000-ton BC with a cycle time of 75 seconds would require:

300 seconds from Powered Down to Routine

225 seconds from Routine to Stand-By

75 seconds from Stand-By to Translation

Total: 300+225+75 = 600 seconds = 10 minutes

Under normal circumstances, cycle times apply only to translations into hyper-space. Generally speaking, any hyper-capable ship’s hyper generator remains engaged the entire time it is in hyper, and the ship may move freely up or down the hyper bands. Once a ship re-enters normal space, it bleeds off its transit energy (the visible blue flash of its Warshawski Sails) and the generator must be cycled before it can translated back into hyper. Unless the generator is deliberately powered down, however, it remains at Stand-By Readiness and can immediately begin cycling upward again for a translation. Thus our BC with a 75-second cycle time would be required to spend an absolute minimum of 75 seconds (1.5 minutes) in normal-space between translations. Note, however, that accurate astrogation will generally require at least some observation and calculation time, so this minimum figure would not normally be attainable. in the Honorverse tech bible DW wrote:

Just as a ship’s tonnage/dimensions affect its acceleration rate, they also affect how rapidly it can cycle its hyper generator. A hyper generator’s cycle time determines how quickly a ship can actually translate into hyper from complete readiness — that is, from the moment the “go” button its punched on a generator which has been fully prepared for translation.

There are 4 actual readiness stages for a hyper generator:

Powered Down

Routine Readiness

Stand-By Readiness

Translation

The time required to go from Powered Down to Routine Readiness is equal to 4 times the cycle time. The time required to go from Routine Readiness to Stand-By Readiness is equal to 3 times the cycle time. The time required to go from Stand-By readiness to actual Translation is equal to the cycle time. That is, a 1,500,000-ton BC with a cycle time of 75 seconds would require:

300 seconds from Powered Down to Routine

225 seconds from Routine to Stand-By

75 seconds from Stand-By to Translation

Total: 300+225+75 = 600 seconds = 10 minutes

Under normal circumstances, cycle times apply only to translations into hyper-space. Generally speaking, any hyper-capable ship’s hyper generator remains engaged the entire time it is in hyper, and the ship may move freely up or down the hyper bands. Once a ship re-enters normal space, it bleeds off its transit energy (the visible blue flash of its Warshawski Sails) and the generator must be cycled before it can translated back into hyper. Unless the generator is deliberately powered down, however, it remains at Stand-By Readiness and can immediately begin cycling upward again for a translation. Thus our BC with a 75-second cycle time would be required to spend an absolute minimum of 75 seconds (1.5 minutes) in normal-space between translations. Note, however, that accurate astrogation will generally require at least some observation and calculation time, so this minimum figure would not normally be attainable. in the Honorverse tech bible DW wrote: in the Honorverse tech bible DW wrote:

Just as a ship’s tonnage/dimensions affect its acceleration rate, they also affect how rapidly it can cycle its hyper generator. A hyper generator’s cycle time determines how quickly a ship can actually translate into hyper from complete readiness — that is, from the moment the “go” button its punched on a generator which has been fully prepared for translation.

There are 4 actual readiness stages for a hyper generator:

Powered Down

Routine Readiness

Stand-By Readiness

Translation

The time required to go from Powered Down to Routine Readiness is equal to 4 times the cycle time. The time required to go from Routine Readiness to Stand-By Readiness is equal to 3 times the cycle time. The time required to go from Stand-By readiness to actual Translation is equal to the cycle time. That is, a 1,500,000-ton BC with a cycle time of 75 seconds would require:

300 seconds from Powered Down to Routine

225 seconds from Routine to Stand-By

75 seconds from Stand-By to Translation

Total: 300+225+75 = 600 seconds = 10 minutes

Under normal circumstances, cycle times apply only to translations into hyper-space. Generally speaking, any hyper-capable ship’s hyper generator remains engaged the entire time it is in hyper, and the ship may move freely up or down the hyper bands. Once a ship re-enters normal space, it bleeds off its transit energy (the visible blue flash of its Warshawski Sails) and the generator must be cycled before it can translated back into hyper. Unless the generator is deliberately powered down, however, it remains at Stand-By Readiness and can immediately begin cycling upward again for a translation. Thus our BC with a 75-second cycle time would be required to spend an absolute minimum of 75 seconds (1.5 minutes) in normal-space between translations. Note, however, that accurate astrogation will generally require at least some observation and calculation time, so this minimum figure would not normally be attainable.

Okay, this battlecruiser has a 75-second cycle time. Allowing for tonnage differences, a dispatch boat would have a cycle time of 30 seconds, which is the minimum possible cycle time for a military-grade hyper generator. (Civilian-grade hyper generators have longer cycle times but are also designed for lower power loads and can go much longer between maintenance periods.) However, this is where the problem of “nested” hyper generators comes in, because you cannot have a hyper generator online inside another hyper generator’s translation field. That means you can’t even have it at Routine Readiness. The inner hyper generator would have to be at Powered Down status, which means that even with its 30-second cycle time, your dispatch boat would require:

120 seconds from Powered Down to Routine

90 seconds from Routine to Stand-By

30 seconds from Stand-By to Translation

Total: 120 + 90 + 30 = 240 seconds, or 4 minutes.

I submit to you that your “outer SD” is unlikely to survive four minutes under concentrated, short-range energy fire.

There is, however, another problem, and one which makes the reference to Filareta’s superdreadnoughts rather more relevant. . . and the dispatch boat’s theoretical cycle time totally irrelevant .

When a hyper generator’s translation field establishes itself, it attempts to translate all the matter within its area of effect into hyper. The translation field must extend a certain distance from the generator which is proportionate to the translation field’s designed mass — that is, for a ship of a given mass, the spherical translation field has to be “x” meters across. The dimensions of the field scale with the translation mass, but what matters for our purposes right now is that the minimum dimension for a sustainable translation field is going to be about 600 meters. That is, everything within 600 meters of the hyper generator is inside the translation field’s area of effect and its mass affects the translation . The chief engineer can fiddle with the settings on the hyper generator to some extent, and there’s usually some safety margin built into it, but it can’t handle much more than a maximum of about 6% tonnage “overload” before the hyper generator “departs from its mounts in multiple directions,” as the engine room manual puts it. In other words, it blows the hell up, usually inflicting fairly spectacular damage on the ship in which it was mounted.

What this means is that the mass of the surrounding “outer SD” which would lie within the minimum volume of the hyper generator would cause the aforesaid hyper generator to blow up when it attempted to establish its translation field unless the hyper generator was powerful enough to carry the mass. However, that starts requiring bigger generators and bigger power supplies, which requires larger platforms, which increases the size of the translation field. In order for this to work, the dispatch boat would have to have a superdreadnought-sized hyper generator, because all of the “outer SD” mass and volume would be inside the translation field. So the cycle times quoted for Filareta’s superdreadnoughts in the passage I cited is very relevant to our problem here, because that’s where that 32-minute cycle time comes into play. Never mind the fact that the hyper generator you’d need would be just about the size of the entire dispatch boat in which you’re trying to put it, it would also take over a half hour just to cycle up to translation status, during which time both “outer SD” and “inner dispatch boat” would be ripped into very tiny shreds.

As I say, my “can’t do it from inside a solid object” was a way to try to avoid having to explain all of this in such detail, but since you asked . . . . [G]

Okay, this battlecruiser has a 75-second cycle time. Allowing for tonnage differences, a dispatch boat would have a cycle time of 30 seconds, which is the minimum possible minimum possible cycle time for a military-grade hyper generator. (Civilian-grade hyper generators have longer cycle times but are also designed for lower power loads and can go much longer between maintenance periods.) However, this is where the problem of “nested” hyper generators comes in, because you cannot have a hyper generator online inside inside another hyper generator’s translation field. That means you can’t even have it at Routine Readiness. The inner hyper generator would have to be at Powered Down status, which means that even with its 30-second cycle time, your dispatch boat would require:

120 seconds from Powered Down to Routine

90 seconds from Routine to Stand-By

30 seconds from Stand-By to Translation

Total: 120 + 90 + 30 = 240 seconds, or 4 minutes.

I submit to you that your “outer SD” is unlikely to survive four minutes under concentrated, short-range energy fire.

There is, however, another problem, and one which makes the reference to Filareta’s superdreadnoughts rather more relevant. . . and the dispatch boat’s theoretical cycle time totally irrelevant irrelevant.

When a hyper generator’s translation field establishes itself, it attempts to translate all the matter within its area of effect into hyper. The translation field must must extend a certain distance from the generator which is proportionate to the translation field’s designed mass — that is, for a ship of a given mass, the spherical translation field has to be “x” meters across. The dimensions of the field scale with the translation mass, but what matters for our purposes right now is that the minimum minimum dimension for a sustainable translation field is going to be about 600 meters. That is, everything within 600 meters of the hyper generator is inside the translation field’s area of effect and its mass affects the translation and its mass affects the translation. The chief engineer can fiddle with the settings on the hyper generator to some extent, and there’s usually some safety margin built into it, but it can’t handle much more than a maximum of about 6% tonnage “overload” before the hyper generator “departs from its mounts in multiple directions,” as the engine room manual puts it. In other words, it blows the hell up, usually inflicting fairly spectacular damage on the ship in which it was mounted.

What this means is that the mass of the surrounding “outer SD” which would lie within the minimum volume of the hyper generator would cause the aforesaid hyper generator to blow up when it attempted to establish its translation field unless unless the hyper generator was powerful enough to carry the mass. However, that starts requiring bigger generators and bigger power supplies, which requires larger platforms, which increases the size of the translation field. In order for this to work, the dispatch boat would have to have a superdreadnought-sized superdreadnought-sized hyper generator, because all all of the “outer SD” mass and volume would be inside the translation field. So the cycle times quoted for Filareta’s superdreadnoughts in the passage I cited is very very relevant to our problem here, because that’s where that 32-minute cycle time comes into play. Never mind the fact that the hyper generator you’d need would be just about the size of the entire dispatch boat in which you’re trying to put it, it would also take over a half hour just to cycle up to translation status, during which time both “outer SD” and “inner dispatch boat” would be ripped into very tiny shreds.

As I say, my “can’t do it from inside a solid object” was a way to try to avoid having to explain all of this in such detail, but since you asked . . . . [G]

Honorverse

Why doesn’t the Grand Alliance simply attack through the Torch Wormhole? (Asked Mon Jun 11, 2012)

January 2014

Honorverse Honorverse

January 2014 January 2014

As always, I’m flattered that you’re giving attention to my humble work, but this ain’t a’gonna work, guys. Some points (in no particular order cause it’s really late and I’m really tired [G]).

(1) The reasonable assumption for Torch (absent some sort of inteligence info from the other side courtesy of the Daring Duo or some other cloak-and-dagger type) is that whatever happened to their survey ships was a natural hazard to navigation. As such, there is no reason to believe SDs would be any more immune to whatever ate Harvest Joy than a CA was . . . and they’d be a heck of a lot more expensive. Too expensie to be thrown away feeding the nice black hole on the other side of the wormhole.

(2) Even if the more paranoid members of the Torch government decide it was enemy action, instead, they’re gonna need a lot of assistance from someone like the RMN of the PRN to come up with the kinds of SDs and such you guys are talking about.

(3) You cannot enter hyper if your hyper generator is surrounded by solid material. The ships lifted into hyper with another vessel have all been smaller than the hyper-capable unit and have been tractored inside the area of effect of the hyper translation field.

(4) A wormhole is a large volume of space and a very complex phenomenon. It takes a long time and a lot of observations to locate it from either side and plot an approach which will let you get back through it without going “boom,” so even if it were possible to fit a hyper drive and Warshaswki sails into something the size of a missile (and to get it off before someone shoots you dead), you couldn’t get it back through the wormhole with any information about your new discovery.

(5) All planetary-sized bodies generate hyper limits of their own. For habitable planets, it doesn’t matter, because they are uniformly within the hyper limits of their primaries where you can’t translate into hyper, anyway; for planets outside a star’s hyper limit (like gas giants like Blackbird), it does matter, and it’s been referenced several times in the books and in responses from me here and elsewhere to questions about things like establishing a star system’s infrastructure.

(6) IRT sending someone though the Torch wormhole and immediately translating out in a “normal” hyper-space escape, you are going to be right on the very edge of a hyper limit, which is going to create all sorts of interesting problems unless you come through on exactly the right emergence vector. Otherwise, you’ve got to correct course away from the hyper limit before you could translate out. And even if it were possible to cycle a hyper generator that quickly (it ain’t), the odds of your managing to do so before the Bad Guys shoot you dead would be . . . slim.

(7) I don’t see the Manties sending through SDs covered by Ghostrider platforms for several reasons. One is that they don’t know what’s covering it from the other side — a couple of dozen BCs? A squadron of wallers? Three dozen 16-megaton fortresses? 17,495,103 mines? Assuming, of course, that it doesn’t simply lead to a black hole somewhere? Without at least some info on the possible threat, no way are they going to risk 90,000,000 or so tons of ship, no matter how good their EW is. A second reason is that they would be strewing thousands upon thousands of their very best EW platforms around in a system they will automatically be abandoning to the enemy. No matter how good their security protocols, they would have to allow for the possibility that at least some of their most recent goodies would fall into Bad Hands if they did such a thing.

(8) IRT the notion of using a grav pulse to mark the location of the warp bridge’s other end — not gonna happen. First, the range at which you could detect such a pulse is far, far. far lower than certain, ah . . . enthusiastic souls seem to be prepared to argue. Second, it would propagate at a grand and glorious real-space velocity of about 64 times the speed of light. So even assuming you could detect it at, say, 200 LY (which you couldn’t), it would take over three years to get to your sensors. Third, it wouldn’t tell you much of anything when it did get there (if it were going to, which it isn’t) without a cross bearing. Fourth, it would take a measurable period of time — probably at least several minutes — for you to fire up a grav pulse transmitter big enough and powerful enough to have a prayer of being detected at interstellar distances (even short ones) and while you were doing that, the defending ships (or fortresses, or mines, or whatever) would turn your ship into toasted wreckage.

(9) Unless you’re prepared to design (and take the time to build . . . and armor) an SD especially for this mission, any ship that comes through (under Warshawski sails) is going to be exposed to energy fire through its completely unarmored ventral and dorsal aspects until it can reconfigure to impeller drive (which is going to take at least 15-20 seconds, even for a terminus whose stresses you know ahead of time), in which case even lasers would kill just about any ship ever built, SD or not.

(10) IRT (7), above, Ghostrider is most useful against missiles , people; it has very little effect on energy-range fire control that already has you locked up. You can fire off all the decoy drones you want at knife range and your opponent’s energy batteries are pretty much going to drill you, anyway. Now, if you were to come in through normal-space with your drones already deployed in a truly massive, dense shell around your ships, you might — might — be able to get down to energy range under their protection, but not coming through a wormhole from the other side. You couldn’t possibly get them deployed before shipboard fire control locked you up, and at such a short range, it would never let go until you were dead, dead, dead.

I could probably think of a few more point relevant to the topic but, like I say, it’s late and I’m tired, and ten makes a nice, even, two-handed number.

decor

As always, I’m flattered that you’re giving attention to my humble work, but this ain’t a’gonna work, guys. Some points (in no particular order cause it’s really late and I’m really tired [G]).

(1) The reasonable assumption for Torch (absent some sort of inteligence info from the other side courtesy of the Daring Duo or some other cloak-and-dagger type) is that whatever happened to their survey ships was a natural hazard to navigation. As such, there is no reason to believe SDs would be any more immune to whatever ate Harvest Joy than a CA was . . . and they’d be a heck of a lot more expensive. Too expensie to be thrown away feeding the nice black hole on the other side of the wormhole.

(2) Even if the more paranoid members of the Torch government decide it was enemy action, instead, they’re gonna need a lot of assistance from someone like the RMN of the PRN to come up with the kinds of SDs and such you guys are talking about.

(3) You cannot enter hyper if your hyper generator is surrounded by solid material. The ships lifted into hyper with another vessel have all been smaller than the hyper-capable unit and have been tractored inside the area of effect of the hyper translation field.

(4) A wormhole is a large volume of space and a very complex phenomenon. It takes a long time and a lot of observations to locate it from either side and plot an approach which will let you get back through it without going “boom,” so even if it were possible to fit a hyper drive and Warshaswki sails into something the size of a missile (and to get it off before someone shoots you dead), you couldn’t get it back through the wormhole with any information about your new discovery.

(5) All planetary-sized bodies generate hyper limits of their own. For habitable planets, it doesn’t matter, because they are uniformly within the hyper limits of their primaries where you can’t translate into hyper, anyway; for planets outside a star’s hyper limit (like gas giants like Blackbird), it does matter, and it’s been referenced several times in the books and in responses from me here and elsewhere to questions about things like establishing a star system’s infrastructure.

(6) IRT sending someone though the Torch wormhole and immediately translating out in a “normal” hyper-space escape, you are going to be right on the very edge of a hyper limit, which is going to create all sorts of interesting problems unless you come through on exactly the right emergence vector. Otherwise, you’ve got to correct course away from the hyper limit before you could translate out. And even if it were possible to cycle a hyper generator that quickly (it ain’t), the odds of your managing to do so before the Bad Guys shoot you dead would be . . . slim.

(7) I don’t see the Manties sending through SDs covered by Ghostrider platforms for several reasons. One is that they don’t know what’s covering it from the other side — a couple of dozen BCs? A squadron of wallers? Three dozen 16-megaton fortresses? 17,495,103 mines? Assuming, of course, that it doesn’t simply lead to a black hole somewhere? Without at least some info on the possible threat, no way are they going to risk 90,000,000 or so tons of ship, no matter how good their EW is. A second reason is that they would be strewing thousands upon thousands of their very best EW platforms around in a system they will automatically be abandoning to the enemy. No matter how good their security protocols, they would have to allow for the possibility that at least some of their most recent goodies would fall into Bad Hands if they did such a thing.

(8) IRT the notion of using a grav pulse to mark the location of the warp bridge’s other end — not gonna happen. First, the range at which you could detect such a pulse is far, far. far lower than certain, ah . . . enthusiastic souls seem to be prepared to argue. Second, it would propagate at a grand and glorious real-space velocity of about 64 times the speed of light. So even assuming you could detect it at, say, 200 LY (which you couldn’t), it would take over three years to get to your sensors. Third, it wouldn’t tell you much of anything when it did get there (if it were going to, which it isn’t) without a cross bearing. Fourth, it would take a measurable period of time — probably at least several minutes — for you to fire up a grav pulse transmitter big enough and powerful enough to have a prayer of being detected at interstellar distances (even short ones) and while you were doing that, the defending ships (or fortresses, or mines, or whatever) would turn your ship into toasted wreckage.

(9) Unless you’re prepared to design (and take the time to build . . . and armor) an SD especially for this mission, any ship that comes through (under Warshawski sails) is going to be exposed to energy fire through its completely unarmored ventral and dorsal aspects until it can reconfigure to impeller drive (which is going to take at least 15-20 seconds, even for a terminus whose stresses you know ahead of time), in which case even lasers would kill just about any ship ever built, SD or not.

(10) IRT (7), above, Ghostrider is most useful against missiles , people; it has very little effect on energy-range fire control that already has you locked up. You can fire off all the decoy drones you want at knife range and your opponent’s energy batteries are pretty much going to drill you, anyway. Now, if you were to come in through normal-space with your drones already deployed in a truly massive, dense shell around your ships, you might — might — be able to get down to energy range under their protection, but not coming through a wormhole from the other side. You couldn’t possibly get them deployed before shipboard fire control locked you up, and at such a short range, it would never let go until you were dead, dead, dead.

I could probably think of a few more point relevant to the topic but, like I say, it’s late and I’m tired, and ten makes a nice, even, two-handed number. As always, I’m flattered that you’re giving attention to my humble work, but this ain’t a’gonna work, guys. Some points (in no particular order cause it’s really late and I’m really tired [G]).

(1) The reasonable assumption for Torch (absent some sort of inteligence info from the other side courtesy of the Daring Duo or some other cloak-and-dagger type) is that whatever happened to their survey ships was a natural hazard to navigation. As such, there is no reason to believe SDs would be any more immune to whatever ate Harvest Joy than a CA was . . . and they’d be a heck of a lot more expensive. Too expensie to be thrown away feeding the nice black hole on the other side of the wormhole.

(2) Even if the more paranoid members of the Torch government decide it was enemy action, instead, they’re gonna need a lot of assistance from someone like the RMN of the PRN to come up with the kinds of SDs and such you guys are talking about.

(3) You cannot enter hyper if your hyper generator is surrounded by solid material. The ships lifted into hyper with another vessel have all been smaller than the hyper-capable unit and have been tractored inside the area of effect of the hyper translation field.

(4) A wormhole is a large volume of space and a very complex phenomenon. It takes a long time and a lot of observations to locate it from either side and plot an approach which will let you get back through it without going “boom,” so even if it were possible to fit a hyper drive and Warshaswki sails into something the size of a missile (and to get it off before someone shoots you dead), you couldn’t get it back through the wormhole with any information about your new discovery.

(5) All planetary-sized bodies generate hyper limits of their own. For habitable planets, it doesn’t matter, because they are uniformly within the hyper limits of their primaries where you can’t translate into hyper, anyway; for planets outside a star’s hyper limit (like gas giants like Blackbird), it does matter, and it’s been referenced several times in the books and in responses from me here and elsewhere to questions about things like establishing a star system’s infrastructure.

(6) IRT sending someone though the Torch wormhole and immediately translating out in a “normal” hyper-space escape, you are going to be right on the very edge of a hyper limit, which is going to create all sorts of interesting problems unless you come through on exactly the right emergence vector. Otherwise, you’ve got to correct course away from the hyper limit before you could translate out. And even if it were possible to cycle a hyper generator that quickly (it ain’t), the odds of your managing to do so before the Bad Guys shoot you dead would be . . . slim.

(7) I don’t see the Manties sending through SDs covered by Ghostrider platforms for several reasons. One is that they don’t know what’s covering it from the other side — a couple of dozen BCs? A squadron of wallers? Three dozen 16-megaton fortresses? 17,495,103 mines? Assuming, of course, that it doesn’t simply lead to a black hole somewhere? Without at least some info on the possible threat, no way are they going to risk 90,000,000 or so tons of ship, no matter how good their EW is. A second reason is that they would be strewing thousands upon thousands of their very best EW platforms around in a system they will automatically be abandoning to the enemy. No matter how good their security protocols, they would have to allow for the possibility that at least some of their most recent goodies would fall into Bad Hands if they did such a thing.

(8) IRT the notion of using a grav pulse to mark the location of the warp bridge’s other end — not gonna happen. First, the range at which you could detect such a pulse is far, far. far lower than certain, ah . . . enthusiastic souls seem to be prepared to argue. Second, it would propagate at a grand and glorious real-space velocity of about 64 times the speed of light. So even assuming you could detect it at, say, 200 LY (which you couldn’t), it would take over three years to get to your sensors. Third, it wouldn’t tell you much of anything when it did get there (if it were going to, which it isn’t) without a cross bearing. Fourth, it would take a measurable period of time — probably at least several minutes — for you to fire up a grav pulse transmitter big enough and powerful enough to have a prayer of being detected at interstellar distances (even short ones) and while you were doing that, the defending ships (or fortresses, or mines, or whatever) would turn your ship into toasted wreckage.

(9) Unless you’re prepared to design (and take the time to build . . . and armor) an SD especially for this mission, any ship that comes through (under Warshawski sails) is going to be exposed to energy fire through its completely unarmored ventral and dorsal aspects until it can reconfigure to impeller drive (which is going to take at least 15-20 seconds, even for a terminus whose stresses you know ahead of time), in which case even lasers would kill just about any ship ever built, SD or not.

(10) IRT (7), above, Ghostrider is most useful against missiles , people; it has very little effect on energy-range fire control that already has you locked up. You can fire off all the decoy drones you want at knife range and your opponent’s energy batteries are pretty much going to drill you, anyway. Now, if you were to come in through normal-space with your drones already deployed in a truly massive, dense shell around your ships, you might — might — be able to get down to energy range under their protection, but not coming through a wormhole from the other side. You couldn’t possibly get them deployed before shipboard fire control locked you up, and at such a short range, it would never let go until you were dead, dead, dead.

I could probably think of a few more point relevant to the topic but, like I say, it’s late and I’m tired, and ten makes a nice, even, two-handed number. As always, I’m flattered that you’re giving attention to my humble work, but this ain’t a’gonna work, guys. Some points (in no particular order cause it’s really late and I’m really tired [G]).

(1) The reasonable assumption for Torch (absent some sort of inteligence info from the other side courtesy of the Daring Duo or some other cloak-and-dagger type) is that whatever happened to their survey ships was a natural hazard to navigation. As such, there is no reason to believe SDs would be any more immune to whatever ate Harvest Joy than a CA was . . . and they’d be a heck of a lot more expensive. Too expensie to be thrown away feeding the nice black hole on the other side of the wormhole.

(2) Even if the more paranoid members of the Torch government decide it was enemy action, instead, they’re gonna need a lot of assistance from someone like the RMN of the PRN to come up with the kinds of SDs and such you guys are talking about.

(3) You cannot enter hyper if your hyper generator is surrounded by solid material. The ships lifted into hyper with another vessel have all been smaller than the hyper-capable unit and have been tractored inside the area of effect of the hyper translation field.

(4) A wormhole is a large volume of space and a very complex phenomenon. It takes a long time and a lot of observations to locate it from either side and plot an approach which will let you get back through it without going “boom,” so even if it were possible to fit a hyper drive and Warshaswki sails into something the size of a missile (and to get it off before someone shoots you dead), you couldn’t get it back through the wormhole with any information about your new discovery.

(5) All planetary-sized bodies generate hyper limits of their own. For habitable planets, it doesn’t matter, because they are uniformly within the hyper limits of their primaries where you can’t translate into hyper, anyway; for planets outside a star’s hyper limit (like gas giants like Blackbird), it does matter, and it’s been referenced several times in the books and in responses from me here and elsewhere to questions about things like establishing a star system’s infrastructure.

(6) IRT sending someone though the Torch wormhole and immediately translating out in a “normal” hyper-space escape, you are going to be right on the very edge of a hyper limit, which is going to create all sorts of interesting problems unless you come through on exactly the right emergence vector. Otherwise, you’ve got to correct course away from the hyper limit before you could translate out. And even if it were possible to cycle a hyper generator that quickly (it ain’t), the odds of your managing to do so before the Bad Guys shoot you dead would be . . . slim.

(7) I don’t see the Manties sending through SDs covered by Ghostrider platforms for several reasons. One is that they don’t know what’s covering it from the other side — a couple of dozen BCs? A squadron of wallers? Three dozen 16-megaton fortresses? 17,495,103 mines? Assuming, of course, that it doesn’t simply lead to a black hole somewhere? Without at least some info on the possible threat, no way are they going to risk 90,000,000 or so tons of ship, no matter how good their EW is. A second reason is that they would be strewing thousands upon thousands of their very best EW platforms around in a system they will automatically be abandoning to the enemy. No matter how good their security protocols, they would have to allow for the possibility that at least some of their most recent goodies would fall into Bad Hands if they did such a thing.

(8) IRT the notion of using a grav pulse to mark the location of the warp bridge’s other end — not gonna happen. First, the range at which you could detect such a pulse is far, far. far lower than certain, ah . . . enthusiastic souls seem to be prepared to argue. Second, it would propagate at a grand and glorious real-space velocity of about 64 times the speed of light. So even assuming you could detect it at, say, 200 LY (which you couldn’t), it would take over three years to get to your sensors. Third, it wouldn’t tell you much of anything when it did get there (if it were going to, which it isn’t) without a cross bearing. Fourth, it would take a measurable period of time — probably at least several minutes — for you to fire up a grav pulse transmitter big enough and powerful enough to have a prayer of being detected at interstellar distances (even short ones) and while you were doing that, the defending ships (or fortresses, or mines, or whatever) would turn your ship into toasted wreckage.

(9) Unless you’re prepared to design (and take the time to build . . . and armor) an SD especially for this mission, any ship that comes through (under Warshawski sails) is going to be exposed to energy fire through its completely unarmored ventral and dorsal aspects until it can reconfigure to impeller drive (which is going to take at least 15-20 seconds, even for a terminus whose stresses you know ahead of time), in which case even lasers would kill just about any ship ever built, SD or not.

(10) IRT (7), above, Ghostrider is most useful against missiles , people; it has very little effect on energy-range fire control that already has you locked up. You can fire off all the decoy drones you want at knife range and your opponent’s energy batteries are pretty much going to drill you, anyway. Now, if you were to come in through normal-space with your drones already deployed in a truly massive, dense shell around your ships, you might — might — be able to get down to energy range under their protection, but not coming through a wormhole from the other side. You couldn’t possibly get them deployed before shipboard fire control locked you up, and at such a short range, it would never let go until you were dead, dead, dead.

I could probably think of a few more point relevant to the topic but, like I say, it’s late and I’m tired, and ten makes a nice, even, two-handed number. As always, I’m flattered that you’re giving attention to my humble work, but this ain’t a’gonna work, guys. Some points (in no particular order cause it’s really late and I’m really tired [G]).

(1) The reasonable assumption for Torch (absent some sort of inteligence info from the other side courtesy of the Daring Duo or some other cloak-and-dagger type) is that whatever happened to their survey ships was a natural natural hazard to navigation. As such, there is no reason to believe SDs would be any more immune to whatever ate Harvest Joy Harvest Joy than a CA was . . . and they’d be a heck of a lot more expensive. Too Too expensie to be thrown away feeding the nice black hole on the other side of the wormhole.

(2) Even if the more paranoid members of the Torch government decide it was enemy action, instead, they’re gonna need a lot lot of assistance from someone like the RMN of the PRN to come up with the kinds of SDs and such you guys are talking about.

(3) You cannot enter hyper if your hyper generator is surrounded by solid material. The ships lifted into hyper with another vessel have all been smaller smaller than the hyper-capable unit and have been tractored inside the area of effect of the hyper translation field.

(4) A wormhole is a large volume of space and a very complex phenomenon. It takes a long long time and a lot of observations to locate it from either side and plot an approach which will let you get back through it without going “boom,” so even if it were possible to fit a hyper drive and Warshaswki sails into something the size of a missile (and to get it off before someone shoots you dead), you couldn’t get it back through the wormhole with any information about your new discovery.

(5) All planetary-sized bodies generate hyper limits of their own. For habitable planets, it doesn’t matter, because they are uniformly within the hyper limits of their primaries where you can’t translate into hyper, anyway; for planets outside a star’s hyper limit (like gas giants like Blackbird), it does does matter, and it’s been referenced several times in the books and in responses from me here and elsewhere to questions about things like establishing a star system’s infrastructure.

(6) IRT sending someone though the Torch wormhole and immediately immediately translating out in a “normal” hyper-space escape, you are going to be right on the very edge of a hyper limit, which is going to create all sorts of interesting problems unless you come through on exactly exactly the right emergence vector. Otherwise, you’ve got to correct course away away from the hyper limit before you could translate out. And even if it were possible to cycle a hyper generator that quickly (it ain’t), the odds of your managing to do so before the Bad Guys shoot you dead would be . . . slim.

(7) I don’t see the Manties sending through SDs covered by Ghostrider platforms for several reasons. One is that they don’t know what’s covering it from the other side — a couple of dozen BCs? A squadron of wallers? Three dozen 16-megaton fortresses? 17,495,103 mines? Assuming, of course, that it doesn’t doesn’t simply lead to a black hole somewhere? Without at least some some info on the possible threat, no way are they going to risk 90,000,000 or so tons of ship, no matter how good their EW is. A second reason is that they would be strewing thousands upon thousands of their very best EW platforms around in a system they will automatically be abandoning to the enemy. No matter how good their security protocols, they would have to allow for the possibility that at least some some of their most recent goodies would fall into Bad Hands if they did such a thing.

(8) IRT the notion of using a grav pulse to mark the location of the warp bridge’s other end — not gonna happen. First, the range at which you could detect such a pulse is far, far. far far lower than certain, ah . . . enthusiastic souls seem to be prepared to argue. Second, it would propagate at a grand and glorious real-space velocity of about 64 times the speed of light. So even assuming you could detect it at, say, 200 LY (which you couldn’t), it would take over three years to get to your sensors. Third, it wouldn’t tell you much of anything when it did get there (if it were going to, which it isn’t) without a cross bearing. Fourth, it would take a measurable period of time — probably at least several minutes — for you to fire up a grav pulse transmitter big enough and powerful enough to have a prayer of being detected at interstellar distances (even short ones) and while you were doing that, the defending ships (or fortresses, or mines, or whatever) would turn your ship into toasted wreckage.

(9) Unless you’re prepared to design (and take the time to build . . . and armor) an SD especially for this mission, any ship that comes through (under Warshawski sails) is going to be exposed to energy fire through its completely unarmored ventral and dorsal aspects until it can reconfigure to impeller drive (which is going to take at least 15-20 seconds, even for a terminus whose stresses you know ahead of time), in which case even lasers would kill just about any ship ever built, SD or not.

(10) IRT (7), above, Ghostrider is most useful against missiles missiles, people; it has very little effect on energy-range fire control that already has you locked up. You can fire off all the decoy drones you want at knife range and your opponent’s energy batteries are pretty much going to drill you, anyway. Now, if you were to come in through normal-space with your drones already deployed in a truly massive, dense shell around your ships, you might — might might — be able to get down down to energy range under their protection, but not coming through a wormhole from the other side. You couldn’t possibly get them deployed before shipboard fire control locked you up, and at such a short range, it would never let go until you were dead, dead, dead.

I could probably think of a few more point relevant to the topic but, like I say, it’s late and I’m tired, and ten makes a nice, even, two-handed number.

Honorverse

Why didn’t Queen Elizabeth and her coalition try to negotiate peace at the outset of the Havenite Wars? (Asked Fri May 25, 2012)

January 2014

Honorverse Honorverse

January 2014 January 2014

I think that throwing around terms like “tunnel vision” where the Centrists are concerned is a bit like calling Winston Churchill an “alarmist” where the rise of Nazi Germany was concerned. In fact, it would actually be rather more like calling an alternate-history FDR alarmist for regarding the Axis as a threat following the conquest of Western Europe by Germany and the conquest and partition of the Soviet Union by Germany and Japan. The People’s Republic began its forcible expansion through conquest in around 1850; by the time war between the Manticoran Alliance and the PRH actually began 55 years later , the People’s Republic had become second only to the Solarian League in size, population, and military power. Throughout that entire period, the Star Kingdom (in the person of first Roger III and then Elizabeth III and their ministers) had known — not simply from observation but from all manner of human intelligence sources — that the Peeps had no intention of halting their forcible expansion . . . ever. They also had plentiful experience of watching the PRH’s foreign policy, including the subsidization of domestic “separatist” and terrorist organizations (a la the Office of Frontier Security’s tactics) against the targets of their expansion, covert operations to destabilize regimes, assassination, bribery, graft, blackmail, extortion, and economic warfare. And that was simply what they were willing to do to star systems they had not yet conquered and added to the empire; it didn’t even consider what they were willing to do the star systems they had already conquered in order to pacify them. They had, in fact — to the certain knowledge of the then prime minister of Manticore and the Queen, her then regent, and her most trusted inner circle of advisers — used assassination, suborned senior political operatives, and a deliberate effort to destabilize government against the Star Kingdom itself at a critical moment, 20-plus years before active and open hostilities broke out. From Elizabeth’s perspective, the Star Kingdom had been at war with the People’s Republic from the date that it had committed an act of war by murdering the Manticoran head of state, even if the constraints both sides faced had prevented that war from being openly declared before the entire explored galaxy.

It was neither tunnel vision nor paranoia to regard the People’s Republic of Haven and all its works as a mortal threat to everything the Star Kingdom of Manticore held dear in 1905, regardless of what might or might not have been going on domestically in Nouveau Paris . No, there was no formal Peep declaration of war against the Star Kingdom under all of the niceties of interstellar law. On the other hand, there’d never been a formal Peep declaration of war against any of the PRH’s previous victims. In addition, I don’t believe any of the people criticizing Elizabeth’s approach to the People’s Republic in 1905-1906 can point to any communication from Rob Pierre or the Committee of Public Safety offering so much as an apology for the PRH’s unprovoked attacks, far less a stand down order, on the new regime’s part. And the reason you can’t, is that there wasn’t one. There was, however, a great deal of information coming out of the People’s Republic — from both public sources and from existing Manticoran intelligence channels — to suggest that the Pierre regime was using the threat of an external enemy (Manticore), which the PRH’s propaganda had spent decades demonizing, as a means to consolidate his new position in Nouveau Paris. So Elizabeth and her advisers and government were hearing from the new management exactly what they had heard from the old management, with the kicker that the new management was involved in a bloodfest of purges, executions, and a general reign of terror which dwarfed in intensity and violence anything the Legislaturalists had previously produced. A regime, one might also point out, which already controlled or was in the process of consolidating control over the largest navy in the galaxy outside the Solarian League Navy itself.

This is a time when Elizabeth , whose star nation was the victim of aggression to begin the war, is supposed to exercise restraint and open negotiations with a regime which is busy expressing its openly avowed determination to continue the “People’s war” against the “plutocratic oppressors” and “kleptocracy” of Manticore? Please. It was all very well for people outside the government to advocate for “giving peace a chance” and “taking the high road” or “engaging the new regime in dialogue” when (a) they bore no responsibility for what would happen if their advice was/wasn’t accepted and, even more importantly, (b) the people giving that advice knew it would not — and could not — be accepted by the Queen or her government. They were posturing purely for domestic political advantage, for the most part, although I will grant that there were individuals so fundamentally misreading the situation as to believe their advice was also sound policy. They were very few and far between in the Manticoran Opposition at that time, however, and after decades of bitter political strife against the Opposition, Elizabeth understood that perfectly, which was precisely the reason she was so bitterly infuriated at finding herself blackmailed over the matter of Pavel Young’s actions in Hancock and the political machinations pivoting around his court-martial.

Even if Pierre had been willing to entertain the possibility of a negotiated cessation of hostilities at a time when he clearly needed/desired an external enemy in order to consolidate his grip on power, it would have been criminally negligent of Elizabeth to halt military operations against the adversary who had just initiated open hostilities against the Manticoran Alliance — in effect, for NATO to have halted operations against the Warsaw Pact following its invasion of West Germany in 1985 — until she had some evidence of that fact . The last thing she could afford to do would be to permit a new, terroristic, extremist regime busily using the PRH’s historic (and carefully fostered) hostility against the Star Kingdom to whip on the mobs cheering the equivalent of the guillotine in downtown Paris to reorganize and regather its forces for a second, more powerful, and better organized offensive.

If — if — there had been one single word coming out of Nouveau Paris that consisted of anything suggesting for even one moment that the Committee of Public Safety intended to disavow the last 50-plus years of the People’s Republic’s foreign policy, then perhaps it would be legitimate to criticize Elizabeth for failing to “stay her hand” and “give peace a chance.” There was no such single word, however, nor did any of her intelligence sources — which were giving her accurate intelligence — suggest for a moment that there was going to be any such word. I didn’t give you every single gory detail about the intelligence coming into her hands, the blow-by-blow discussion in her cabinet of the position of the Committee of Public Safety, the competing analyses being handed to her, etc., etc., because — in my humble opinion as the author — it wasn’t necessary in the absence of anything from the other side suggesting any change in its foreign policy objectives.

Next, I suppose, we come to the allegation that Elizabeth was wrong to oppose negotiations with Saint-Just following the successes Buttercup and Pierre’s assassination.

First, let’s think about whether she should have halted operations short of “dictating peace” from Haven orbit. Why should she have been insane enough, for a moment, to have considered anything else after 50-plus years of cold war followed by 10 years of hot war against an adversary like the People’s Republic which, under its post-Legislaturalist management, had become even more of a police state marked by terror tactics against its own citizenry and an absolute ruthlessness in military operations? She was in a position to destroy the PRH’s military capability , then do the equivalent of anchoring in Tokyo Bay and saying “we need to talk” from a position in which even the Committee of Public Safety would have been forced to negotiate seriously . The fact that she would be in a clearly demonstrated position of military supremacy — with an unchallengeable military advantage, proven by the destruction of the People’s navy and the fact that her own naval forces were literally anchored in the middle of her enemy’s capital city — doesn’t mean she would have been required to impose a Carthaginian peace and plow the surface of the planet with salt. Nor does the fact that she was never allowed to present peace terms to the People’s Republic under those conditions mean that she didn’t have a set of peace terms in mind. There was never any reason for me to give you a discussion of what sort of post-Peep regime she had in mind for the People’s Republic of Haven, because there was never an opportunity for her to present it to anyone, was there? People seem to be assuming that because she had never enunciated her view of an “exit strategy” from a 70-year (or so) conflict that she must necessarily neither have had one nor been capable of producing one — short of nuking Nouveau Paris into a puddle of volcanic glass, of course, since that was obviously the only outcome she could possibly envision.

When Elizabeth went to consult with Benjamin, she was going to discuss their joint policy towards the People’s Republic in the newly demonstrated military situation. She was going to Grayson for the specific purpose of discussing that with her closest, most trusted, and most powerful ally. (Think of it as the Tehran or Potsdam Conferences from World War II, if you have to have a real world equivalent, although that analogy is rather badly flawed, since there was no equivalent of Joseph Stalin and the USSR in the power equation.) Hostilities were still ongoing, there’d been no initiative (at that time) from the enemy — the enemy in the losing position, given the current correlation of military force — to end or even suspend operations, and the meeting with Benjamin was the first step on Elizabeth’s part towards initiating a discussion and exposition of the Manticoran Alliance as a whole’s position in the endgame of the war against the People’s Republic. This is the act of someone whose “tunnel vision” prevents her from seeing the complexity of the interstellar situation? At what point in this process do we see Elizabeth saying the equivalent of Bill Halsey’s “When this is over, the Japanese language will be spoken only in Hell” following the attack on Pearl Harbor? Yes, she’s a good hater. Yes, she’s determined to see justice done for her father’s murder. Yes, she doesn’t trust Peeps as far as she can spit upwind in a hurricane. So what? I would submit to you that there is exactly zero evidence — prior to her trip to Grayson — that in 1914-1915 PD she intended to impose a peace so punitive that it would fuel revanchism against the Star Kingdom of Manticore on the part of whatever replaced the Committee of Public Safety. I’m not saying it wouldn’t have worked out that way; I’m saying that the only thing you actually have evidence of is her determination to dictate the terms of whatever peace emerges from a position of overwhelming strength founded on the complete destruction of the People’s Republic’s military capabilities. And that, I would submit, was no more than a case of simple sanity after how long her own star nation had been facing outright destruction by those same military capabilities, which doesn’t even consider the . . . psychological stimulus towards accepting terms it would necessarily generate in Havenite minds. The destruction or complete, unconditional stand down of the People’s navy had to be a nonnegotiable precondition for any realistic peace negotiations at that time.

So, she goes to discuss this with Benjamin, and what happens? The Peeps attempt to assassinate her and Benjamin and do manage to kill their prime ministers and their foreign ministers (one of them Elizabeth’s uncle , and along with him her first cousin), and then they offer a cease-fire in place, preserving their military forces and their current conquests and borders by diplomatic sleight-of-hand when they could not possibly have attained either of those objectives by force of arms . . . and “her” own government, without bothering to consult with their treaty partners, decides to accept it at a time when purely domestic political considerations prevent her from rejecting that decision. And please note that the High Ridge Government accepts the cease-fire before Theisman’s coup or any suggestion that any such coup might even remotely be in the offing, so it knew it was dealing with the same management — and the same regime which had just attempted to murder his own head of state and her closest ally . Yet despite Elizabeth’s “tunnel vision” and irrationality where the Peeps are concerned, she swallows all of this rather than provoke a potential constitutional crisis which could have completely paralyzed Manticoran diplomatic and foreign policy at that critical moment. (Had she known how High Ridge & Co. would proceed to mismanage the cease-fire, she might well have gone ahead and provoked exactly that constitutional crisis . . . at which point, I have no doubt, certain of her critics would have used that as proof of her irrationality and unfitness to rule.)

Then, following the High Ridge Government’s unspeakably incompetent foreign policy, the “reformed” Republic of Haven, which has disavowed the Peeps’ traditional foreign policy — officially, at least — forges diplomatic correspondence from Manticore, which Elizabeth knows (correctly, I might point out) is forged, and uses that forgery as a pretext to reinitiate hostilities against the Star Kingdom with the new, powerful, modern navy which it was permitted to build because Elizabeth was never allowed to “dictate terms from Haven orbit” in 1915. Again, her military forces — at the cost of heavy casualties, heavy loss of warships and lives — manage to fight back from an initially highly disadvantageous position, and — again — a Havenite regime proposes a “peace conference” (without ever saying “And, by the way, we’re ready to admit we forged the diplomatic correspondence”).

Admittedly, Pritchart chose a very different messenger, and the strategic situation, what with the looming threat of a confrontation with the Solarian League, was quite different, but only an amnesiac could have been expected to overlook the parallels between the situations, particularly since Elizabeth was fully briefed on what was going to happen when Apollo went into action (or the minor fact that she had proof of the duplicity of the Pritchart Administration’s prewar diplomacy and no reason to think it had become less duplicitous since). Despite that, and against all of her admitted natural inclinations to see the Republic of Haven destroyed once and for all, she allowed herself to be convinced — convinced herself on the basis of her understanding of the situation — to not simply agree to the conference but to use the conference itself as a means of patching up relations with Erewhon, despite Erewhon’s “desertion” to the other side and her full knowledge that in changing allegiances, Erewhon handed the PRN a huge technological bonanza Haven would not otherwise have enjoyed. This is the act of someone with “tunnel vision” which prevents her from formulating rational policy?

So what happens? Having convinced herself to negotiate, to accept that these Peeps actually might be different from the ones she, her star nation, her government, and her family have been facing for 70 years at enormous cost in blood, money, and the deaths not simply of her subjects but of people she’d personally known and loved, her ambassador to the Solarian League is assassinated and her niece and the Queen of Torch are almost assassinated in a direct (indeed,an intentional ) reprise of what happened at Yeltsin’s Star in 1915, under circumstances which point directly towards Havenite involvement and responsibility.

It is certainly fair to say that at this point Elizabeth was “played” by the Mesan Alignment; indeed, she herself later sees it that way. It is unfair to see her response as irrational. There is no question, and I never intend there to be any question, that her response was flawed, that the way in which she interpreted events — while internally consistent, logical (based on her knowledge and understanding of what had happened), and supported by the majority of her counselors, without any hard intelligence data to demonstrate its inaccuracy — wasn’t shaped by her own life experience, attitudes, and — yes — personal hatred for the Peeps and all their works, or that some of those closest to her, notably Honor and Michelle, weren’t worried at the time that it was flawed. It was not, however, irrational , and it was based firmly on decades of experience as the leader of a star nation which she had guided not once, but twice, from positions of weakness to positions of overwhelming advantage against a far larger, expansionist, and hostile star nation. She had an absolute moral responsibility to avoid repeating what had happened following Buttercup and to end the threat of the Republic of Haven — once and for all, without question or equivocation — in the face of the new and even greater potential threat of war against the Solarian League. Since events had just demonstrated to her satisfaction that the Republic of Haven was still essentially the People’s Republic of Haven at the genetic level, it was completely rational of her to terminate that threat by destroying it rather than giving it yet a third opportunity to go for the Star Kingdom’s throat. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice , shame on me .”

Elizabeth Winton is not the perfect head of state, but there are no “perfect” heads of state. She has weaknesses, and while some readers seem persistently unable to recognize it, she understands that she does, and on numerous occasions in her career — occasions which have been shown in the books — she has cut against the grain of those weaknesses in the name of doing what she recognized pragmatic realities required. She is absolutely and totally committed to the protection and well-being of her people and her star nation, and she has demonstrated her willingness and ability to subordinate the things most desperately important to her personally in the universe — like vengeance for her father’s murder, like vengeance for the murder of her beloved prime minister, uncle and cousin, and the minor matter of her own attempted murder — to that protection and well-being. She is also intelligent, determined, and personally fearless, and if the test of success is to protect and preserve her kingdom and its people in the face of overwhelming threats, she is also arguably the most successful head of state in the entire Honorverse.

It’s totally fair for readers, from a reader’s omniscient perspective, to say “it’s really a pity Elizabeth didn’t do thus-and-so” at specific points in the story line. In fact, you’re supposed to say that, to recognize the points at which history could have gone differently “if only.” It’s equally fair for readers to analyze the reasons she didn’t “do thus-and-so,” and I’ve tried to give you a deep enough look inside her skull and inside her heart to understand those reasons. I do not, however, and never have understood why there seems to be a tendency to find her competence as a monarch and a war leader so wanting because she didn’t somehow magically and unerringly see into the minds of her potential and actual enemies as clearly as the readers themselves, having had the opportunity to be inside the heads of those potential and actual enemies are able to see. If she’d had that ability, she would have been God, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

Or else, of course, she could have had Merlin’s SNARCs reporting back from inside the council chambers of all her adversaries, but that’s another set of novels.

decor

I think that throwing around terms like “tunnel vision” where the Centrists are concerned is a bit like calling Winston Churchill an “alarmist” where the rise of Nazi Germany was concerned. In fact, it would actually be rather more like calling an alternate-history FDR alarmist for regarding the Axis as a threat following the conquest of Western Europe by Germany and the conquest and partition of the Soviet Union by Germany and Japan. The People’s Republic began its forcible expansion through conquest in around 1850; by the time war between the Manticoran Alliance and the PRH actually began 55 years later , the People’s Republic had become second only to the Solarian League in size, population, and military power. Throughout that entire period, the Star Kingdom (in the person of first Roger III and then Elizabeth III and their ministers) had known — not simply from observation but from all manner of human intelligence sources — that the Peeps had no intention of halting their forcible expansion . . . ever. They also had plentiful experience of watching the PRH’s foreign policy, including the subsidization of domestic “separatist” and terrorist organizations (a la the Office of Frontier Security’s tactics) against the targets of their expansion, covert operations to destabilize regimes, assassination, bribery, graft, blackmail, extortion, and economic warfare. And that was simply what they were willing to do to star systems they had not yet conquered and added to the empire; it didn’t even consider what they were willing to do the star systems they had already conquered in order to pacify them. They had, in fact — to the certain knowledge of the then prime minister of Manticore and the Queen, her then regent, and her most trusted inner circle of advisers — used assassination, suborned senior political operatives, and a deliberate effort to destabilize government against the Star Kingdom itself at a critical moment, 20-plus years before active and open hostilities broke out. From Elizabeth’s perspective, the Star Kingdom had been at war with the People’s Republic from the date that it had committed an act of war by murdering the Manticoran head of state, even if the constraints both sides faced had prevented that war from being openly declared before the entire explored galaxy.

It was neither tunnel vision nor paranoia to regard the People’s Republic of Haven and all its works as a mortal threat to everything the Star Kingdom of Manticore held dear in 1905, regardless of what might or might not have been going on domestically in Nouveau Paris . No, there was no formal Peep declaration of war against the Star Kingdom under all of the niceties of interstellar law. On the other hand, there’d never been a formal Peep declaration of war against any of the PRH’s previous victims. In addition, I don’t believe any of the people criticizing Elizabeth’s approach to the People’s Republic in 1905-1906 can point to any communication from Rob Pierre or the Committee of Public Safety offering so much as an apology for the PRH’s unprovoked attacks, far less a stand down order, on the new regime’s part. And the reason you can’t, is that there wasn’t one. There was, however, a great deal of information coming out of the People’s Republic — from both public sources and from existing Manticoran intelligence channels — to suggest that the Pierre regime was using the threat of an external enemy (Manticore), which the PRH’s propaganda had spent decades demonizing, as a means to consolidate his new position in Nouveau Paris. So Elizabeth and her advisers and government were hearing from the new management exactly what they had heard from the old management, with the kicker that the new management was involved in a bloodfest of purges, executions, and a general reign of terror which dwarfed in intensity and violence anything the Legislaturalists had previously produced. A regime, one might also point out, which already controlled or was in the process of consolidating control over the largest navy in the galaxy outside the Solarian League Navy itself.

This is a time when Elizabeth , whose star nation was the victim of aggression to begin the war, is supposed to exercise restraint and open negotiations with a regime which is busy expressing its openly avowed determination to continue the “People’s war” against the “plutocratic oppressors” and “kleptocracy” of Manticore? Please. It was all very well for people outside the government to advocate for “giving peace a chance” and “taking the high road” or “engaging the new regime in dialogue” when (a) they bore no responsibility for what would happen if their advice was/wasn’t accepted and, even more importantly, (b) the people giving that advice knew it would not — and could not — be accepted by the Queen or her government. They were posturing purely for domestic political advantage, for the most part, although I will grant that there were individuals so fundamentally misreading the situation as to believe their advice was also sound policy. They were very few and far between in the Manticoran Opposition at that time, however, and after decades of bitter political strife against the Opposition, Elizabeth understood that perfectly, which was precisely the reason she was so bitterly infuriated at finding herself blackmailed over the matter of Pavel Young’s actions in Hancock and the political machinations pivoting around his court-martial.

Even if Pierre had been willing to entertain the possibility of a negotiated cessation of hostilities at a time when he clearly needed/desired an external enemy in order to consolidate his grip on power, it would have been criminally negligent of Elizabeth to halt military operations against the adversary who had just initiated open hostilities against the Manticoran Alliance — in effect, for NATO to have halted operations against the Warsaw Pact following its invasion of West Germany in 1985 — until she had some evidence of that fact . The last thing she could afford to do would be to permit a new, terroristic, extremist regime busily using the PRH’s historic (and carefully fostered) hostility against the Star Kingdom to whip on the mobs cheering the equivalent of the guillotine in downtown Paris to reorganize and regather its forces for a second, more powerful, and better organized offensive.

If — if — there had been one single word coming out of Nouveau Paris that consisted of anything suggesting for even one moment that the Committee of Public Safety intended to disavow the last 50-plus years of the People’s Republic’s foreign policy, then perhaps it would be legitimate to criticize Elizabeth for failing to “stay her hand” and “give peace a chance.” There was no such single word, however, nor did any of her intelligence sources — which were giving her accurate intelligence — suggest for a moment that there was going to be any such word. I didn’t give you every single gory detail about the intelligence coming into her hands, the blow-by-blow discussion in her cabinet of the position of the Committee of Public Safety, the competing analyses being handed to her, etc., etc., because — in my humble opinion as the author — it wasn’t necessary in the absence of anything from the other side suggesting any change in its foreign policy objectives.

Next, I suppose, we come to the allegation that Elizabeth was wrong to oppose negotiations with Saint-Just following the successes Buttercup and Pierre’s assassination.

First, let’s think about whether she should have halted operations short of “dictating peace” from Haven orbit. Why should she have been insane enough, for a moment, to have considered anything else after 50-plus years of cold war followed by 10 years of hot war against an adversary like the People’s Republic which, under its post-Legislaturalist management, had become even more of a police state marked by terror tactics against its own citizenry and an absolute ruthlessness in military operations? She was in a position to destroy the PRH’s military capability , then do the equivalent of anchoring in Tokyo Bay and saying “we need to talk” from a position in which even the Committee of Public Safety would have been forced to negotiate seriously . The fact that she would be in a clearly demonstrated position of military supremacy — with an unchallengeable military advantage, proven by the destruction of the People’s navy and the fact that her own naval forces were literally anchored in the middle of her enemy’s capital city — doesn’t mean she would have been required to impose a Carthaginian peace and plow the surface of the planet with salt. Nor does the fact that she was never allowed to present peace terms to the People’s Republic under those conditions mean that she didn’t have a set of peace terms in mind. There was never any reason for me to give you a discussion of what sort of post-Peep regime she had in mind for the People’s Republic of Haven, because there was never an opportunity for her to present it to anyone, was there? People seem to be assuming that because she had never enunciated her view of an “exit strategy” from a 70-year (or so) conflict that she must necessarily neither have had one nor been capable of producing one — short of nuking Nouveau Paris into a puddle of volcanic glass, of course, since that was obviously the only outcome she could possibly envision.

When Elizabeth went to consult with Benjamin, she was going to discuss their joint policy towards the People’s Republic in the newly demonstrated military situation. She was going to Grayson for the specific purpose of discussing that with her closest, most trusted, and most powerful ally. (Think of it as the Tehran or Potsdam Conferences from World War II, if you have to have a real world equivalent, although that analogy is rather badly flawed, since there was no equivalent of Joseph Stalin and the USSR in the power equation.) Hostilities were still ongoing, there’d been no initiative (at that time) from the enemy — the enemy in the losing position, given the current correlation of military force — to end or even suspend operations, and the meeting with Benjamin was the first step on Elizabeth’s part towards initiating a discussion and exposition of the Manticoran Alliance as a whole’s position in the endgame of the war against the People’s Republic. This is the act of someone whose “tunnel vision” prevents her from seeing the complexity of the interstellar situation? At what point in this process do we see Elizabeth saying the equivalent of Bill Halsey’s “When this is over, the Japanese language will be spoken only in Hell” following the attack on Pearl Harbor? Yes, she’s a good hater. Yes, she’s determined to see justice done for her father’s murder. Yes, she doesn’t trust Peeps as far as she can spit upwind in a hurricane. So what? I would submit to you that there is exactly zero evidence — prior to her trip to Grayson — that in 1914-1915 PD she intended to impose a peace so punitive that it would fuel revanchism against the Star Kingdom of Manticore on the part of whatever replaced the Committee of Public Safety. I’m not saying it wouldn’t have worked out that way; I’m saying that the only thing you actually have evidence of is her determination to dictate the terms of whatever peace emerges from a position of overwhelming strength founded on the complete destruction of the People’s Republic’s military capabilities. And that, I would submit, was no more than a case of simple sanity after how long her own star nation had been facing outright destruction by those same military capabilities, which doesn’t even consider the . . . psychological stimulus towards accepting terms it would necessarily generate in Havenite minds. The destruction or complete, unconditional stand down of the People’s navy had to be a nonnegotiable precondition for any realistic peace negotiations at that time.

So, she goes to discuss this with Benjamin, and what happens? The Peeps attempt to assassinate her and Benjamin and do manage to kill their prime ministers and their foreign ministers (one of them Elizabeth’s uncle , and along with him her first cousin), and then they offer a cease-fire in place, preserving their military forces and their current conquests and borders by diplomatic sleight-of-hand when they could not possibly have attained either of those objectives by force of arms . . . and “her” own government, without bothering to consult with their treaty partners, decides to accept it at a time when purely domestic political considerations prevent her from rejecting that decision. And please note that the High Ridge Government accepts the cease-fire before Theisman’s coup or any suggestion that any such coup might even remotely be in the offing, so it knew it was dealing with the same management — and the same regime which had just attempted to murder his own head of state and her closest ally . Yet despite Elizabeth’s “tunnel vision” and irrationality where the Peeps are concerned, she swallows all of this rather than provoke a potential constitutional crisis which could have completely paralyzed Manticoran diplomatic and foreign policy at that critical moment. (Had she known how High Ridge & Co. would proceed to mismanage the cease-fire, she might well have gone ahead and provoked exactly that constitutional crisis . . . at which point, I have no doubt, certain of her critics would have used that as proof of her irrationality and unfitness to rule.)

Then, following the High Ridge Government’s unspeakably incompetent foreign policy, the “reformed” Republic of Haven, which has disavowed the Peeps’ traditional foreign policy — officially, at least — forges diplomatic correspondence from Manticore, which Elizabeth knows (correctly, I might point out) is forged, and uses that forgery as a pretext to reinitiate hostilities against the Star Kingdom with the new, powerful, modern navy which it was permitted to build because Elizabeth was never allowed to “dictate terms from Haven orbit” in 1915. Again, her military forces — at the cost of heavy casualties, heavy loss of warships and lives — manage to fight back from an initially highly disadvantageous position, and — again — a Havenite regime proposes a “peace conference” (without ever saying “And, by the way, we’re ready to admit we forged the diplomatic correspondence”).

Admittedly, Pritchart chose a very different messenger, and the strategic situation, what with the looming threat of a confrontation with the Solarian League, was quite different, but only an amnesiac could have been expected to overlook the parallels between the situations, particularly since Elizabeth was fully briefed on what was going to happen when Apollo went into action (or the minor fact that she had proof of the duplicity of the Pritchart Administration’s prewar diplomacy and no reason to think it had become less duplicitous since). Despite that, and against all of her admitted natural inclinations to see the Republic of Haven destroyed once and for all, she allowed herself to be convinced — convinced herself on the basis of her understanding of the situation — to not simply agree to the conference but to use the conference itself as a means of patching up relations with Erewhon, despite Erewhon’s “desertion” to the other side and her full knowledge that in changing allegiances, Erewhon handed the PRN a huge technological bonanza Haven would not otherwise have enjoyed. This is the act of someone with “tunnel vision” which prevents her from formulating rational policy?

So what happens? Having convinced herself to negotiate, to accept that these Peeps actually might be different from the ones she, her star nation, her government, and her family have been facing for 70 years at enormous cost in blood, money, and the deaths not simply of her subjects but of people she’d personally known and loved, her ambassador to the Solarian League is assassinated and her niece and the Queen of Torch are almost assassinated in a direct (indeed,an intentional ) reprise of what happened at Yeltsin’s Star in 1915, under circumstances which point directly towards Havenite involvement and responsibility.

It is certainly fair to say that at this point Elizabeth was “played” by the Mesan Alignment; indeed, she herself later sees it that way. It is unfair to see her response as irrational. There is no question, and I never intend there to be any question, that her response was flawed, that the way in which she interpreted events — while internally consistent, logical (based on her knowledge and understanding of what had happened), and supported by the majority of her counselors, without any hard intelligence data to demonstrate its inaccuracy — wasn’t shaped by her own life experience, attitudes, and — yes — personal hatred for the Peeps and all their works, or that some of those closest to her, notably Honor and Michelle, weren’t worried at the time that it was flawed. It was not, however, irrational , and it was based firmly on decades of experience as the leader of a star nation which she had guided not once, but twice, from positions of weakness to positions of overwhelming advantage against a far larger, expansionist, and hostile star nation. She had an absolute moral responsibility to avoid repeating what had happened following Buttercup and to end the threat of the Republic of Haven — once and for all, without question or equivocation — in the face of the new and even greater potential threat of war against the Solarian League. Since events had just demonstrated to her satisfaction that the Republic of Haven was still essentially the People’s Republic of Haven at the genetic level, it was completely rational of her to terminate that threat by destroying it rather than giving it yet a third opportunity to go for the Star Kingdom’s throat. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice , shame on me .”

Elizabeth Winton is not the perfect head of state, but there are no “perfect” heads of state. She has weaknesses, and while some readers seem persistently unable to recognize it, she understands that she does, and on numerous occasions in her career — occasions which have been shown in the books — she has cut against the grain of those weaknesses in the name of doing what she recognized pragmatic realities required. She is absolutely and totally committed to the protection and well-being of her people and her star nation, and she has demonstrated her willingness and ability to subordinate the things most desperately important to her personally in the universe — like vengeance for her father’s murder, like vengeance for the murder of her beloved prime minister, uncle and cousin, and the minor matter of her own attempted murder — to that protection and well-being. She is also intelligent, determined, and personally fearless, and if the test of success is to protect and preserve her kingdom and its people in the face of overwhelming threats, she is also arguably the most successful head of state in the entire Honorverse.

It’s totally fair for readers, from a reader’s omniscient perspective, to say “it’s really a pity Elizabeth didn’t do thus-and-so” at specific points in the story line. In fact, you’re supposed to say that, to recognize the points at which history could have gone differently “if only.” It’s equally fair for readers to analyze the reasons she didn’t “do thus-and-so,” and I’ve tried to give you a deep enough look inside her skull and inside her heart to understand those reasons. I do not, however, and never have understood why there seems to be a tendency to find her competence as a monarch and a war leader so wanting because she didn’t somehow magically and unerringly see into the minds of her potential and actual enemies as clearly as the readers themselves, having had the opportunity to be inside the heads of those potential and actual enemies are able to see. If she’d had that ability, she would have been God, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

Or else, of course, she could have had Merlin’s SNARCs reporting back from inside the council chambers of all her adversaries, but that’s another set of novels. I think that throwing around terms like “tunnel vision” where the Centrists are concerned is a bit like calling Winston Churchill an “alarmist” where the rise of Nazi Germany was concerned. In fact, it would actually be rather more like calling an alternate-history FDR alarmist for regarding the Axis as a threat following the conquest of Western Europe by Germany and the conquest and partition of the Soviet Union by Germany and Japan. The People’s Republic began its forcible expansion through conquest in around 1850; by the time war between the Manticoran Alliance and the PRH actually began 55 years later , the People’s Republic had become second only to the Solarian League in size, population, and military power. Throughout that entire period, the Star Kingdom (in the person of first Roger III and then Elizabeth III and their ministers) had known — not simply from observation but from all manner of human intelligence sources — that the Peeps had no intention of halting their forcible expansion . . . ever. They also had plentiful experience of watching the PRH’s foreign policy, including the subsidization of domestic “separatist” and terrorist organizations (a la the Office of Frontier Security’s tactics) against the targets of their expansion, covert operations to destabilize regimes, assassination, bribery, graft, blackmail, extortion, and economic warfare. And that was simply what they were willing to do to star systems they had not yet conquered and added to the empire; it didn’t even consider what they were willing to do the star systems they had already conquered in order to pacify them. They had, in fact — to the certain knowledge of the then prime minister of Manticore and the Queen, her then regent, and her most trusted inner circle of advisers — used assassination, suborned senior political operatives, and a deliberate effort to destabilize government against the Star Kingdom itself at a critical moment, 20-plus years before active and open hostilities broke out. From Elizabeth’s perspective, the Star Kingdom had been at war with the People’s Republic from the date that it had committed an act of war by murdering the Manticoran head of state, even if the constraints both sides faced had prevented that war from being openly declared before the entire explored galaxy.

It was neither tunnel vision nor paranoia to regard the People’s Republic of Haven and all its works as a mortal threat to everything the Star Kingdom of Manticore held dear in 1905, regardless of what might or might not have been going on domestically in Nouveau Paris . No, there was no formal Peep declaration of war against the Star Kingdom under all of the niceties of interstellar law. On the other hand, there’d never been a formal Peep declaration of war against any of the PRH’s previous victims. In addition, I don’t believe any of the people criticizing Elizabeth’s approach to the People’s Republic in 1905-1906 can point to any communication from Rob Pierre or the Committee of Public Safety offering so much as an apology for the PRH’s unprovoked attacks, far less a stand down order, on the new regime’s part. And the reason you can’t, is that there wasn’t one. There was, however, a great deal of information coming out of the People’s Republic — from both public sources and from existing Manticoran intelligence channels — to suggest that the Pierre regime was using the threat of an external enemy (Manticore), which the PRH’s propaganda had spent decades demonizing, as a means to consolidate his new position in Nouveau Paris. So Elizabeth and her advisers and government were hearing from the new management exactly what they had heard from the old management, with the kicker that the new management was involved in a bloodfest of purges, executions, and a general reign of terror which dwarfed in intensity and violence anything the Legislaturalists had previously produced. A regime, one might also point out, which already controlled or was in the process of consolidating control over the largest navy in the galaxy outside the Solarian League Navy itself.

This is a time when Elizabeth , whose star nation was the victim of aggression to begin the war, is supposed to exercise restraint and open negotiations with a regime which is busy expressing its openly avowed determination to continue the “People’s war” against the “plutocratic oppressors” and “kleptocracy” of Manticore? Please. It was all very well for people outside the government to advocate for “giving peace a chance” and “taking the high road” or “engaging the new regime in dialogue” when (a) they bore no responsibility for what would happen if their advice was/wasn’t accepted and, even more importantly, (b) the people giving that advice knew it would not — and could not — be accepted by the Queen or her government. They were posturing purely for domestic political advantage, for the most part, although I will grant that there were individuals so fundamentally misreading the situation as to believe their advice was also sound policy. They were very few and far between in the Manticoran Opposition at that time, however, and after decades of bitter political strife against the Opposition, Elizabeth understood that perfectly, which was precisely the reason she was so bitterly infuriated at finding herself blackmailed over the matter of Pavel Young’s actions in Hancock and the political machinations pivoting around his court-martial.

Even if Pierre had been willing to entertain the possibility of a negotiated cessation of hostilities at a time when he clearly needed/desired an external enemy in order to consolidate his grip on power, it would have been criminally negligent of Elizabeth to halt military operations against the adversary who had just initiated open hostilities against the Manticoran Alliance — in effect, for NATO to have halted operations against the Warsaw Pact following its invasion of West Germany in 1985 — until she had some evidence of that fact . The last thing she could afford to do would be to permit a new, terroristic, extremist regime busily using the PRH’s historic (and carefully fostered) hostility against the Star Kingdom to whip on the mobs cheering the equivalent of the guillotine in downtown Paris to reorganize and regather its forces for a second, more powerful, and better organized offensive.

If — if — there had been one single word coming out of Nouveau Paris that consisted of anything suggesting for even one moment that the Committee of Public Safety intended to disavow the last 50-plus years of the People’s Republic’s foreign policy, then perhaps it would be legitimate to criticize Elizabeth for failing to “stay her hand” and “give peace a chance.” There was no such single word, however, nor did any of her intelligence sources — which were giving her accurate intelligence — suggest for a moment that there was going to be any such word. I didn’t give you every single gory detail about the intelligence coming into her hands, the blow-by-blow discussion in her cabinet of the position of the Committee of Public Safety, the competing analyses being handed to her, etc., etc., because — in my humble opinion as the author — it wasn’t necessary in the absence of anything from the other side suggesting any change in its foreign policy objectives.

Next, I suppose, we come to the allegation that Elizabeth was wrong to oppose negotiations with Saint-Just following the successes Buttercup and Pierre’s assassination.

First, let’s think about whether she should have halted operations short of “dictating peace” from Haven orbit. Why should she have been insane enough, for a moment, to have considered anything else after 50-plus years of cold war followed by 10 years of hot war against an adversary like the People’s Republic which, under its post-Legislaturalist management, had become even more of a police state marked by terror tactics against its own citizenry and an absolute ruthlessness in military operations? She was in a position to destroy the PRH’s military capability , then do the equivalent of anchoring in Tokyo Bay and saying “we need to talk” from a position in which even the Committee of Public Safety would have been forced to negotiate seriously . The fact that she would be in a clearly demonstrated position of military supremacy — with an unchallengeable military advantage, proven by the destruction of the People’s navy and the fact that her own naval forces were literally anchored in the middle of her enemy’s capital city — doesn’t mean she would have been required to impose a Carthaginian peace and plow the surface of the planet with salt. Nor does the fact that she was never allowed to present peace terms to the People’s Republic under those conditions mean that she didn’t have a set of peace terms in mind. There was never any reason for me to give you a discussion of what sort of post-Peep regime she had in mind for the People’s Republic of Haven, because there was never an opportunity for her to present it to anyone, was there? People seem to be assuming that because she had never enunciated her view of an “exit strategy” from a 70-year (or so) conflict that she must necessarily neither have had one nor been capable of producing one — short of nuking Nouveau Paris into a puddle of volcanic glass, of course, since that was obviously the only outcome she could possibly envision.

When Elizabeth went to consult with Benjamin, she was going to discuss their joint policy towards the People’s Republic in the newly demonstrated military situation. She was going to Grayson for the specific purpose of discussing that with her closest, most trusted, and most powerful ally. (Think of it as the Tehran or Potsdam Conferences from World War II, if you have to have a real world equivalent, although that analogy is rather badly flawed, since there was no equivalent of Joseph Stalin and the USSR in the power equation.) Hostilities were still ongoing, there’d been no initiative (at that time) from the enemy — the enemy in the losing position, given the current correlation of military force — to end or even suspend operations, and the meeting with Benjamin was the first step on Elizabeth’s part towards initiating a discussion and exposition of the Manticoran Alliance as a whole’s position in the endgame of the war against the People’s Republic. This is the act of someone whose “tunnel vision” prevents her from seeing the complexity of the interstellar situation? At what point in this process do we see Elizabeth saying the equivalent of Bill Halsey’s “When this is over, the Japanese language will be spoken only in Hell” following the attack on Pearl Harbor? Yes, she’s a good hater. Yes, she’s determined to see justice done for her father’s murder. Yes, she doesn’t trust Peeps as far as she can spit upwind in a hurricane. So what? I would submit to you that there is exactly zero evidence — prior to her trip to Grayson — that in 1914-1915 PD she intended to impose a peace so punitive that it would fuel revanchism against the Star Kingdom of Manticore on the part of whatever replaced the Committee of Public Safety. I’m not saying it wouldn’t have worked out that way; I’m saying that the only thing you actually have evidence of is her determination to dictate the terms of whatever peace emerges from a position of overwhelming strength founded on the complete destruction of the People’s Republic’s military capabilities. And that, I would submit, was no more than a case of simple sanity after how long her own star nation had been facing outright destruction by those same military capabilities, which doesn’t even consider the . . . psychological stimulus towards accepting terms it would necessarily generate in Havenite minds. The destruction or complete, unconditional stand down of the People’s navy had to be a nonnegotiable precondition for any realistic peace negotiations at that time.

So, she goes to discuss this with Benjamin, and what happens? The Peeps attempt to assassinate her and Benjamin and do manage to kill their prime ministers and their foreign ministers (one of them Elizabeth’s uncle , and along with him her first cousin), and then they offer a cease-fire in place, preserving their military forces and their current conquests and borders by diplomatic sleight-of-hand when they could not possibly have attained either of those objectives by force of arms . . . and “her” own government, without bothering to consult with their treaty partners, decides to accept it at a time when purely domestic political considerations prevent her from rejecting that decision. And please note that the High Ridge Government accepts the cease-fire before Theisman’s coup or any suggestion that any such coup might even remotely be in the offing, so it knew it was dealing with the same management — and the same regime which had just attempted to murder his own head of state and her closest ally . Yet despite Elizabeth’s “tunnel vision” and irrationality where the Peeps are concerned, she swallows all of this rather than provoke a potential constitutional crisis which could have completely paralyzed Manticoran diplomatic and foreign policy at that critical moment. (Had she known how High Ridge & Co. would proceed to mismanage the cease-fire, she might well have gone ahead and provoked exactly that constitutional crisis . . . at which point, I have no doubt, certain of her critics would have used that as proof of her irrationality and unfitness to rule.)

Then, following the High Ridge Government’s unspeakably incompetent foreign policy, the “reformed” Republic of Haven, which has disavowed the Peeps’ traditional foreign policy — officially, at least — forges diplomatic correspondence from Manticore, which Elizabeth knows (correctly, I might point out) is forged, and uses that forgery as a pretext to reinitiate hostilities against the Star Kingdom with the new, powerful, modern navy which it was permitted to build because Elizabeth was never allowed to “dictate terms from Haven orbit” in 1915. Again, her military forces — at the cost of heavy casualties, heavy loss of warships and lives — manage to fight back from an initially highly disadvantageous position, and — again — a Havenite regime proposes a “peace conference” (without ever saying “And, by the way, we’re ready to admit we forged the diplomatic correspondence”).

Admittedly, Pritchart chose a very different messenger, and the strategic situation, what with the looming threat of a confrontation with the Solarian League, was quite different, but only an amnesiac could have been expected to overlook the parallels between the situations, particularly since Elizabeth was fully briefed on what was going to happen when Apollo went into action (or the minor fact that she had proof of the duplicity of the Pritchart Administration’s prewar diplomacy and no reason to think it had become less duplicitous since). Despite that, and against all of her admitted natural inclinations to see the Republic of Haven destroyed once and for all, she allowed herself to be convinced — convinced herself on the basis of her understanding of the situation — to not simply agree to the conference but to use the conference itself as a means of patching up relations with Erewhon, despite Erewhon’s “desertion” to the other side and her full knowledge that in changing allegiances, Erewhon handed the PRN a huge technological bonanza Haven would not otherwise have enjoyed. This is the act of someone with “tunnel vision” which prevents her from formulating rational policy?

So what happens? Having convinced herself to negotiate, to accept that these Peeps actually might be different from the ones she, her star nation, her government, and her family have been facing for 70 years at enormous cost in blood, money, and the deaths not simply of her subjects but of people she’d personally known and loved, her ambassador to the Solarian League is assassinated and her niece and the Queen of Torch are almost assassinated in a direct (indeed,an intentional ) reprise of what happened at Yeltsin’s Star in 1915, under circumstances which point directly towards Havenite involvement and responsibility.

It is certainly fair to say that at this point Elizabeth was “played” by the Mesan Alignment; indeed, she herself later sees it that way. It is unfair to see her response as irrational. There is no question, and I never intend there to be any question, that her response was flawed, that the way in which she interpreted events — while internally consistent, logical (based on her knowledge and understanding of what had happened), and supported by the majority of her counselors, without any hard intelligence data to demonstrate its inaccuracy — wasn’t shaped by her own life experience, attitudes, and — yes — personal hatred for the Peeps and all their works, or that some of those closest to her, notably Honor and Michelle, weren’t worried at the time that it was flawed. It was not, however, irrational , and it was based firmly on decades of experience as the leader of a star nation which she had guided not once, but twice, from positions of weakness to positions of overwhelming advantage against a far larger, expansionist, and hostile star nation. She had an absolute moral responsibility to avoid repeating what had happened following Buttercup and to end the threat of the Republic of Haven — once and for all, without question or equivocation — in the face of the new and even greater potential threat of war against the Solarian League. Since events had just demonstrated to her satisfaction that the Republic of Haven was still essentially the People’s Republic of Haven at the genetic level, it was completely rational of her to terminate that threat by destroying it rather than giving it yet a third opportunity to go for the Star Kingdom’s throat. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice , shame on me .”

Elizabeth Winton is not the perfect head of state, but there are no “perfect” heads of state. She has weaknesses, and while some readers seem persistently unable to recognize it, she understands that she does, and on numerous occasions in her career — occasions which have been shown in the books — she has cut against the grain of those weaknesses in the name of doing what she recognized pragmatic realities required. She is absolutely and totally committed to the protection and well-being of her people and her star nation, and she has demonstrated her willingness and ability to subordinate the things most desperately important to her personally in the universe — like vengeance for her father’s murder, like vengeance for the murder of her beloved prime minister, uncle and cousin, and the minor matter of her own attempted murder — to that protection and well-being. She is also intelligent, determined, and personally fearless, and if the test of success is to protect and preserve her kingdom and its people in the face of overwhelming threats, she is also arguably the most successful head of state in the entire Honorverse.

It’s totally fair for readers, from a reader’s omniscient perspective, to say “it’s really a pity Elizabeth didn’t do thus-and-so” at specific points in the story line. In fact, you’re supposed to say that, to recognize the points at which history could have gone differently “if only.” It’s equally fair for readers to analyze the reasons she didn’t “do thus-and-so,” and I’ve tried to give you a deep enough look inside her skull and inside her heart to understand those reasons. I do not, however, and never have understood why there seems to be a tendency to find her competence as a monarch and a war leader so wanting because she didn’t somehow magically and unerringly see into the minds of her potential and actual enemies as clearly as the readers themselves, having had the opportunity to be inside the heads of those potential and actual enemies are able to see. If she’d had that ability, she would have been God, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

Or else, of course, she could have had Merlin’s SNARCs reporting back from inside the council chambers of all her adversaries, but that’s another set of novels. I think that throwing around terms like “tunnel vision” where the Centrists are concerned is a bit like calling Winston Churchill an “alarmist” where the rise of Nazi Germany was concerned. In fact, it would actually be rather more like calling an alternate-history FDR alarmist for regarding the Axis as a threat following the conquest of Western Europe by Germany and the conquest and partition of the Soviet Union by Germany and Japan. The People’s Republic began its forcible expansion through conquest in around 1850; by the time war between the Manticoran Alliance and the PRH actually began 55 years later , the People’s Republic had become second only to the Solarian League in size, population, and military power. Throughout that entire period, the Star Kingdom (in the person of first Roger III and then Elizabeth III and their ministers) had known — not simply from observation but from all manner of human intelligence sources — that the Peeps had no intention of halting their forcible expansion . . . ever. They also had plentiful experience of watching the PRH’s foreign policy, including the subsidization of domestic “separatist” and terrorist organizations (a la the Office of Frontier Security’s tactics) against the targets of their expansion, covert operations to destabilize regimes, assassination, bribery, graft, blackmail, extortion, and economic warfare. And that was simply what they were willing to do to star systems they had not yet conquered and added to the empire; it didn’t even consider what they were willing to do the star systems they had already conquered in order to pacify them. They had, in fact — to the certain knowledge of the then prime minister of Manticore and the Queen, her then regent, and her most trusted inner circle of advisers — used assassination, suborned senior political operatives, and a deliberate effort to destabilize government against the Star Kingdom itself at a critical moment, 20-plus years before active and open hostilities broke out. From Elizabeth’s perspective, the Star Kingdom had been at war with the People’s Republic from the date that it had committed an act of war by murdering the Manticoran head of state, even if the constraints both sides faced had prevented that war from being openly declared before the entire explored galaxy.

It was neither tunnel vision nor paranoia to regard the People’s Republic of Haven and all its works as a mortal threat to everything the Star Kingdom of Manticore held dear in 1905, regardless of what might or might not have been going on domestically in Nouveau Paris . No, there was no formal Peep declaration of war against the Star Kingdom under all of the niceties of interstellar law. On the other hand, there’d never been a formal Peep declaration of war against any of the PRH’s previous victims. In addition, I don’t believe any of the people criticizing Elizabeth’s approach to the People’s Republic in 1905-1906 can point to any communication from Rob Pierre or the Committee of Public Safety offering so much as an apology for the PRH’s unprovoked attacks, far less a stand down order, on the new regime’s part. And the reason you can’t, is that there wasn’t one. There was, however, a great deal of information coming out of the People’s Republic — from both public sources and from existing Manticoran intelligence channels — to suggest that the Pierre regime was using the threat of an external enemy (Manticore), which the PRH’s propaganda had spent decades demonizing, as a means to consolidate his new position in Nouveau Paris. So Elizabeth and her advisers and government were hearing from the new management exactly what they had heard from the old management, with the kicker that the new management was involved in a bloodfest of purges, executions, and a general reign of terror which dwarfed in intensity and violence anything the Legislaturalists had previously produced. A regime, one might also point out, which already controlled or was in the process of consolidating control over the largest navy in the galaxy outside the Solarian League Navy itself.

This is a time when Elizabeth , whose star nation was the victim of aggression to begin the war, is supposed to exercise restraint and open negotiations with a regime which is busy expressing its openly avowed determination to continue the “People’s war” against the “plutocratic oppressors” and “kleptocracy” of Manticore? Please. It was all very well for people outside the government to advocate for “giving peace a chance” and “taking the high road” or “engaging the new regime in dialogue” when (a) they bore no responsibility for what would happen if their advice was/wasn’t accepted and, even more importantly, (b) the people giving that advice knew it would not — and could not — be accepted by the Queen or her government. They were posturing purely for domestic political advantage, for the most part, although I will grant that there were individuals so fundamentally misreading the situation as to believe their advice was also sound policy. They were very few and far between in the Manticoran Opposition at that time, however, and after decades of bitter political strife against the Opposition, Elizabeth understood that perfectly, which was precisely the reason she was so bitterly infuriated at finding herself blackmailed over the matter of Pavel Young’s actions in Hancock and the political machinations pivoting around his court-martial.

Even if Pierre had been willing to entertain the possibility of a negotiated cessation of hostilities at a time when he clearly needed/desired an external enemy in order to consolidate his grip on power, it would have been criminally negligent of Elizabeth to halt military operations against the adversary who had just initiated open hostilities against the Manticoran Alliance — in effect, for NATO to have halted operations against the Warsaw Pact following its invasion of West Germany in 1985 — until she had some evidence of that fact . The last thing she could afford to do would be to permit a new, terroristic, extremist regime busily using the PRH’s historic (and carefully fostered) hostility against the Star Kingdom to whip on the mobs cheering the equivalent of the guillotine in downtown Paris to reorganize and regather its forces for a second, more powerful, and better organized offensive.

If — if — there had been one single word coming out of Nouveau Paris that consisted of anything suggesting for even one moment that the Committee of Public Safety intended to disavow the last 50-plus years of the People’s Republic’s foreign policy, then perhaps it would be legitimate to criticize Elizabeth for failing to “stay her hand” and “give peace a chance.” There was no such single word, however, nor did any of her intelligence sources — which were giving her accurate intelligence — suggest for a moment that there was going to be any such word. I didn’t give you every single gory detail about the intelligence coming into her hands, the blow-by-blow discussion in her cabinet of the position of the Committee of Public Safety, the competing analyses being handed to her, etc., etc., because — in my humble opinion as the author — it wasn’t necessary in the absence of anything from the other side suggesting any change in its foreign policy objectives.

Next, I suppose, we come to the allegation that Elizabeth was wrong to oppose negotiations with Saint-Just following the successes Buttercup and Pierre’s assassination.

First, let’s think about whether she should have halted operations short of “dictating peace” from Haven orbit. Why should she have been insane enough, for a moment, to have considered anything else after 50-plus years of cold war followed by 10 years of hot war against an adversary like the People’s Republic which, under its post-Legislaturalist management, had become even more of a police state marked by terror tactics against its own citizenry and an absolute ruthlessness in military operations? She was in a position to destroy the PRH’s military capability , then do the equivalent of anchoring in Tokyo Bay and saying “we need to talk” from a position in which even the Committee of Public Safety would have been forced to negotiate seriously . The fact that she would be in a clearly demonstrated position of military supremacy — with an unchallengeable military advantage, proven by the destruction of the People’s navy and the fact that her own naval forces were literally anchored in the middle of her enemy’s capital city — doesn’t mean she would have been required to impose a Carthaginian peace and plow the surface of the planet with salt. Nor does the fact that she was never allowed to present peace terms to the People’s Republic under those conditions mean that she didn’t have a set of peace terms in mind. There was never any reason for me to give you a discussion of what sort of post-Peep regime she had in mind for the People’s Republic of Haven, because there was never an opportunity for her to present it to anyone, was there? People seem to be assuming that because she had never enunciated her view of an “exit strategy” from a 70-year (or so) conflict that she must necessarily neither have had one nor been capable of producing one — short of nuking Nouveau Paris into a puddle of volcanic glass, of course, since that was obviously the only outcome she could possibly envision.

When Elizabeth went to consult with Benjamin, she was going to discuss their joint policy towards the People’s Republic in the newly demonstrated military situation. She was going to Grayson for the specific purpose of discussing that with her closest, most trusted, and most powerful ally. (Think of it as the Tehran or Potsdam Conferences from World War II, if you have to have a real world equivalent, although that analogy is rather badly flawed, since there was no equivalent of Joseph Stalin and the USSR in the power equation.) Hostilities were still ongoing, there’d been no initiative (at that time) from the enemy — the enemy in the losing position, given the current correlation of military force — to end or even suspend operations, and the meeting with Benjamin was the first step on Elizabeth’s part towards initiating a discussion and exposition of the Manticoran Alliance as a whole’s position in the endgame of the war against the People’s Republic. This is the act of someone whose “tunnel vision” prevents her from seeing the complexity of the interstellar situation? At what point in this process do we see Elizabeth saying the equivalent of Bill Halsey’s “When this is over, the Japanese language will be spoken only in Hell” following the attack on Pearl Harbor? Yes, she’s a good hater. Yes, she’s determined to see justice done for her father’s murder. Yes, she doesn’t trust Peeps as far as she can spit upwind in a hurricane. So what? I would submit to you that there is exactly zero evidence — prior to her trip to Grayson — that in 1914-1915 PD she intended to impose a peace so punitive that it would fuel revanchism against the Star Kingdom of Manticore on the part of whatever replaced the Committee of Public Safety. I’m not saying it wouldn’t have worked out that way; I’m saying that the only thing you actually have evidence of is her determination to dictate the terms of whatever peace emerges from a position of overwhelming strength founded on the complete destruction of the People’s Republic’s military capabilities. And that, I would submit, was no more than a case of simple sanity after how long her own star nation had been facing outright destruction by those same military capabilities, which doesn’t even consider the . . . psychological stimulus towards accepting terms it would necessarily generate in Havenite minds. The destruction or complete, unconditional stand down of the People’s navy had to be a nonnegotiable precondition for any realistic peace negotiations at that time.

So, she goes to discuss this with Benjamin, and what happens? The Peeps attempt to assassinate her and Benjamin and do manage to kill their prime ministers and their foreign ministers (one of them Elizabeth’s uncle , and along with him her first cousin), and then they offer a cease-fire in place, preserving their military forces and their current conquests and borders by diplomatic sleight-of-hand when they could not possibly have attained either of those objectives by force of arms . . . and “her” own government, without bothering to consult with their treaty partners, decides to accept it at a time when purely domestic political considerations prevent her from rejecting that decision. And please note that the High Ridge Government accepts the cease-fire before Theisman’s coup or any suggestion that any such coup might even remotely be in the offing, so it knew it was dealing with the same management — and the same regime which had just attempted to murder his own head of state and her closest ally . Yet despite Elizabeth’s “tunnel vision” and irrationality where the Peeps are concerned, she swallows all of this rather than provoke a potential constitutional crisis which could have completely paralyzed Manticoran diplomatic and foreign policy at that critical moment. (Had she known how High Ridge & Co. would proceed to mismanage the cease-fire, she might well have gone ahead and provoked exactly that constitutional crisis . . . at which point, I have no doubt, certain of her critics would have used that as proof of her irrationality and unfitness to rule.)

Then, following the High Ridge Government’s unspeakably incompetent foreign policy, the “reformed” Republic of Haven, which has disavowed the Peeps’ traditional foreign policy — officially, at least — forges diplomatic correspondence from Manticore, which Elizabeth knows (correctly, I might point out) is forged, and uses that forgery as a pretext to reinitiate hostilities against the Star Kingdom with the new, powerful, modern navy which it was permitted to build because Elizabeth was never allowed to “dictate terms from Haven orbit” in 1915. Again, her military forces — at the cost of heavy casualties, heavy loss of warships and lives — manage to fight back from an initially highly disadvantageous position, and — again — a Havenite regime proposes a “peace conference” (without ever saying “And, by the way, we’re ready to admit we forged the diplomatic correspondence”).

Admittedly, Pritchart chose a very different messenger, and the strategic situation, what with the looming threat of a confrontation with the Solarian League, was quite different, but only an amnesiac could have been expected to overlook the parallels between the situations, particularly since Elizabeth was fully briefed on what was going to happen when Apollo went into action (or the minor fact that she had proof of the duplicity of the Pritchart Administration’s prewar diplomacy and no reason to think it had become less duplicitous since). Despite that, and against all of her admitted natural inclinations to see the Republic of Haven destroyed once and for all, she allowed herself to be convinced — convinced herself on the basis of her understanding of the situation — to not simply agree to the conference but to use the conference itself as a means of patching up relations with Erewhon, despite Erewhon’s “desertion” to the other side and her full knowledge that in changing allegiances, Erewhon handed the PRN a huge technological bonanza Haven would not otherwise have enjoyed. This is the act of someone with “tunnel vision” which prevents her from formulating rational policy?

So what happens? Having convinced herself to negotiate, to accept that these Peeps actually might be different from the ones she, her star nation, her government, and her family have been facing for 70 years at enormous cost in blood, money, and the deaths not simply of her subjects but of people she’d personally known and loved, her ambassador to the Solarian League is assassinated and her niece and the Queen of Torch are almost assassinated in a direct (indeed,an intentional ) reprise of what happened at Yeltsin’s Star in 1915, under circumstances which point directly towards Havenite involvement and responsibility.

It is certainly fair to say that at this point Elizabeth was “played” by the Mesan Alignment; indeed, she herself later sees it that way. It is unfair to see her response as irrational. There is no question, and I never intend there to be any question, that her response was flawed, that the way in which she interpreted events — while internally consistent, logical (based on her knowledge and understanding of what had happened), and supported by the majority of her counselors, without any hard intelligence data to demonstrate its inaccuracy — wasn’t shaped by her own life experience, attitudes, and — yes — personal hatred for the Peeps and all their works, or that some of those closest to her, notably Honor and Michelle, weren’t worried at the time that it was flawed. It was not, however, irrational , and it was based firmly on decades of experience as the leader of a star nation which she had guided not once, but twice, from positions of weakness to positions of overwhelming advantage against a far larger, expansionist, and hostile star nation. She had an absolute moral responsibility to avoid repeating what had happened following Buttercup and to end the threat of the Republic of Haven — once and for all, without question or equivocation — in the face of the new and even greater potential threat of war against the Solarian League. Since events had just demonstrated to her satisfaction that the Republic of Haven was still essentially the People’s Republic of Haven at the genetic level, it was completely rational of her to terminate that threat by destroying it rather than giving it yet a third opportunity to go for the Star Kingdom’s throat. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice , shame on me .”

Elizabeth Winton is not the perfect head of state, but there are no “perfect” heads of state. She has weaknesses, and while some readers seem persistently unable to recognize it, she understands that she does, and on numerous occasions in her career — occasions which have been shown in the books — she has cut against the grain of those weaknesses in the name of doing what she recognized pragmatic realities required. She is absolutely and totally committed to the protection and well-being of her people and her star nation, and she has demonstrated her willingness and ability to subordinate the things most desperately important to her personally in the universe — like vengeance for her father’s murder, like vengeance for the murder of her beloved prime minister, uncle and cousin, and the minor matter of her own attempted murder — to that protection and well-being. She is also intelligent, determined, and personally fearless, and if the test of success is to protect and preserve her kingdom and its people in the face of overwhelming threats, she is also arguably the most successful head of state in the entire Honorverse.

It’s totally fair for readers, from a reader’s omniscient perspective, to say “it’s really a pity Elizabeth didn’t do thus-and-so” at specific points in the story line. In fact, you’re supposed to say that, to recognize the points at which history could have gone differently “if only.” It’s equally fair for readers to analyze the reasons she didn’t “do thus-and-so,” and I’ve tried to give you a deep enough look inside her skull and inside her heart to understand those reasons. I do not, however, and never have understood why there seems to be a tendency to find her competence as a monarch and a war leader so wanting because she didn’t somehow magically and unerringly see into the minds of her potential and actual enemies as clearly as the readers themselves, having had the opportunity to be inside the heads of those potential and actual enemies are able to see. If she’d had that ability, she would have been God, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

Or else, of course, she could have had Merlin’s SNARCs reporting back from inside the council chambers of all her adversaries, but that’s another set of novels. I think that throwing around terms like “tunnel vision” where the Centrists are concerned is a bit like calling Winston Churchill an “alarmist” where the rise of Nazi Germany was concerned. In fact, it would actually be rather more like calling an alternate-history FDR alarmist for regarding the Axis as a threat following the conquest of Western Europe by Germany and the conquest and partition of the Soviet Union by Germany and Japan. The People’s Republic began its forcible expansion through conquest in around 1850; by the time war between the Manticoran Alliance and the PRH actually began 55 years later 55 years later, the People’s Republic had become second only to the Solarian League in size, population, and military power. Throughout that entire period, the Star Kingdom (in the person of first Roger III and then Elizabeth III and their ministers) had known — not simply from observation but from all manner of human intelligence sources — that the Peeps had no intention of halting their forcible expansion . . . ever. They also had plentiful experience of watching the PRH’s foreign policy, including the subsidization of domestic “separatist” and terrorist organizations (a la the Office of Frontier Security’s tactics) against the targets of their expansion, covert operations to destabilize regimes, assassination, bribery, graft, blackmail, extortion, and economic warfare. And that was simply what they were willing to do to star systems they had not yet conquered and added to the empire; it didn’t even consider what they were willing to do the star systems they had already conquered in order to pacify them. They had, in fact — to the certain knowledge of the then prime minister of Manticore and and the Queen, her then regent, and her most trusted inner circle of advisers — used assassination, suborned senior political operatives, and a deliberate effort to destabilize government against the Star Kingdom itself at a critical moment, 20-plus years before active and open hostilities broke out. From Elizabeth’s perspective, the Star Kingdom had been at war with the People’s Republic from the date that it had committed an act of war by murdering the Manticoran head of state, even if the constraints both sides faced had prevented that war from being openly declared before the entire explored galaxy.

It was neither tunnel vision nor paranoia to regard the People’s Republic of Haven and all its works as a mortal threat to everything the Star Kingdom of Manticore held dear in 1905, regardless of what might or might not have been going on domestically in Nouveau Paris regardless of what might or might not have been going on domestically in Nouveau Paris. No, there was no formal Peep declaration of war against the Star Kingdom under all of the niceties of interstellar law. On the other hand, there’d never never been a formal Peep declaration of war against any any of the PRH’s previous victims. In addition, I don’t believe any of the people criticizing Elizabeth’s approach to the People’s Republic in 1905-1906 can point to any any communication from Rob Pierre or the Committee of Public Safety offering so much as an apology for the PRH’s unprovoked attacks, far less a stand down order, on the new regime’s part. And the reason you can’t, is that there wasn’t wasn’t one. There was, however, a great deal of information coming out of the People’s Republic — from both public sources and from existing Manticoran intelligence channels — to suggest that the Pierre regime was using the threat of an external enemy (Manticore), which the PRH’s propaganda had spent decades demonizing, as a means to consolidate his new position in Nouveau Paris. So Elizabeth and her advisers and government were hearing from the new management exactly what they had heard from the old old management, with the kicker that the new management was involved in a bloodfest of purges, executions, and a general reign of terror which dwarfed in intensity and violence anything the Legislaturalists had previously produced. A regime, one might also point out, which already controlled or was in the process of consolidating control over the largest navy in the galaxy outside the Solarian League Navy itself.

This is a time when Elizabeth Elizabeth, whose star nation was the victim victim of aggression to begin the war, is supposed to exercise restraint and open negotiations with a regime which is busy expressing its openly avowed determination to continue the “People’s war” against the “plutocratic oppressors” and “kleptocracy” of Manticore? Please. It was all very well for people outside the government to advocate for “giving peace a chance” and “taking the high road” or “engaging the new regime in dialogue” when (a) they bore no responsibility for what would happen if their advice was/wasn’t accepted and, even more importantly, (b) the people giving that advice knew knew it would not — and could not could not — be accepted by the Queen or her government. They were posturing purely for domestic political advantage, for the most part, although I will grant that there were individuals so fundamentally misreading the situation as to believe their advice was also sound policy. They were very few and far between in the Manticoran Opposition at that time, however, and after decades of bitter political strife against the Opposition, Elizabeth understood that perfectly, which was precisely the reason she was so bitterly infuriated at finding herself blackmailed over the matter of Pavel Young’s actions in Hancock and the political machinations pivoting around his court-martial.

Even if Pierre had been willing to entertain the possibility of a negotiated cessation of hostilities at a time when he clearly needed/desired an external enemy in order to consolidate his grip on power, it would have been criminally negligent of Elizabeth to halt military operations against the adversary who had just initiated open hostilities against the Manticoran Alliance — in effect, for NATO to have halted operations against the Warsaw Pact following its invasion of West Germany in 1985 — until she had some evidence of that fact until she had some evidence of that fact. The last thing she could afford to do would be to permit a new, terroristic, extremist regime busily using the PRH’s historic (and carefully fostered) hostility against the Star Kingdom to whip on the mobs cheering the equivalent of the guillotine in downtown Paris to reorganize and regather its forces for a second, more powerful, and better organized offensive.

If — if if — there had been one single word coming out of Nouveau Paris that consisted of anything suggesting for even one moment that the Committee of Public Safety intended to disavow the last 50-plus years of the People’s Republic’s foreign policy, then perhaps it would be legitimate to criticize Elizabeth for failing to “stay her hand” and “give peace a chance.” There was no such single word, however, There was no such single word, however, nor did any of her intelligence sources — which were giving her accurate accurate intelligence — suggest for a moment that there was going to be going to be any such word. I didn’t give you every single gory detail about the intelligence coming into her hands, the blow-by-blow discussion in her cabinet of the position of the Committee of Public Safety, the competing analyses being handed to her, etc., etc., because — in my humble opinion as the author — it wasn’t necessary it wasn’t necessary in the absence of anything from the other side suggesting any any change in its foreign policy objectives.

Next, I suppose, we come to the allegation that Elizabeth was wrong to oppose negotiations with Saint-Just following the successes Buttercup and Pierre’s assassination.

First, let’s think about whether she should have halted operations short of “dictating peace” from Haven orbit. Why should she have been insane enough, for a moment, to have considered anything else after 50-plus years of cold war followed by 10 years of hot hot war against an adversary like the People’s Republic which, under its post-Legislaturalist management, had become even more of a police state marked by terror tactics against its own citizenry and an absolute ruthlessness in military operations? She was in a position to destroy the PRH’s military capability military capability, then do the equivalent of anchoring in Tokyo Bay and saying “we need to talk” from a position in which even the Committee of Public Safety would have been forced forced to negotiate seriously seriously. The fact that she would be in a clearly demonstrated position of military supremacy — with an unchallengeable military advantage, proven by the destruction of the People’s navy and the fact that her own naval forces were literally anchored in the middle of her enemy’s capital city — doesn’t mean she would have been required required to impose a Carthaginian peace and plow the surface of the planet with salt. Nor does the fact that she was never allowed to present peace terms to the People’s Republic under those conditions mean that she didn’t have a set of peace terms in mind. There was never any reason for me to give you a discussion of what sort of post-Peep regime she had in mind for the People’s Republic of Haven, because there was never an opportunity for her to present it to anyone, was there? People seem to be assuming that because she had never enunciated her view of an “exit strategy” from a 70-year (or so) conflict that she must necessarily neither have had one nor been capable of producing one — short of nuking Nouveau Paris into a puddle of volcanic glass, of course, since that was obviously the only only outcome she could possibly envision.

When Elizabeth went to consult with Benjamin, she was going to discuss their joint policy towards the People’s Republic in the newly demonstrated military situation. She was going to Grayson for the specific purpose of discussing that discussing that with her closest, most trusted, and most powerful ally. (Think of it as the Tehran or Potsdam Conferences from World War II, if you have to have a real world equivalent, although that analogy is rather badly flawed, since there was no equivalent of Joseph Stalin and the USSR in the power equation.) Hostilities were still ongoing, there’d been no initiative (at that time) from the enemy — the enemy in the losing losing position, given the current correlation of military force — to end or even suspend operations, and the meeting with Benjamin was the first step on Elizabeth’s part towards initiating a discussion and exposition of the Manticoran Alliance as a whole’s as a whole’s position in the endgame of the war against the People’s Republic. This is the act of someone whose “tunnel vision” prevents her from seeing the complexity of the interstellar situation? At what point in this process do we see Elizabeth saying the equivalent of Bill Halsey’s “When this is over, the Japanese language will be spoken only in Hell” following the attack on Pearl Harbor? Yes, she’s a good hater. Yes, she’s determined to see justice done for her father’s murder. Yes, she doesn’t trust Peeps as far as she can spit upwind in a hurricane. So what? I would submit to you that there is exactly zero evidence — prior to her trip to Grayson — that in 1914-1915 PD she intended to impose a peace so punitive that it would fuel revanchism against the Star Kingdom of Manticore on the part of whatever replaced the Committee of Public Safety. I’m not saying it wouldn’t have worked out that way; I’m saying that the only thing you actually have evidence of is her determination to dictate the terms of whatever peace emerges from a position of overwhelming strength founded on the complete destruction of the People’s Republic’s military capabilities. And that, I would submit, was no more than a case of simple sanity after how long her own star nation had been facing outright destruction by those same military capabilities, which doesn’t even consider the . . . psychological stimulus towards accepting terms it would necessarily generate in Havenite minds. The destruction or complete, unconditional stand down of the People’s navy had had to be a nonnegotiable precondition for any realistic peace negotiations at that time.

So, she goes to discuss this with Benjamin, and what happens? The Peeps attempt to assassinate her and Benjamin and do manage to kill their prime ministers and and their foreign ministers (one of them Elizabeth’s uncle uncle, and along with him her first cousin), and then then they offer a cease-fire in place, preserving their military forces and their current conquests and borders and their current conquests and borders by diplomatic sleight-of-hand when they could not possibly have attained either of those objectives by force of arms . . . and “her” own government, without bothering to consult with their treaty partners, decides to accept it at a time when purely domestic political considerations prevent her from rejecting that decision. And please note that the High Ridge Government accepts the cease-fire before before Theisman’s coup or any suggestion that any such coup might even remotely be in the offing, so it knew it was dealing with the same management — and the same regime which had just attempted to murder his own head of state and her closest ally and the same regime which had just attempted to murder his own head of state and her closest ally. Yet despite Elizabeth’s “tunnel vision” and irrationality where the Peeps are concerned, she swallows all of this all of this rather than provoke a potential constitutional crisis which could have completely paralyzed Manticoran diplomatic and foreign policy at that critical moment. (Had she known how High Ridge & Co. would proceed to mismanage the cease-fire, she might well have gone ahead and provoked exactly that constitutional crisis . . . at which point, I have no doubt, certain of her critics would have used that as proof of her irrationality and unfitness to rule.)

Then, following the High Ridge Government’s unspeakably incompetent foreign policy, the “reformed” Republic of Haven, which has disavowed the Peeps’ traditional foreign policy — officially, at least — forges diplomatic correspondence from Manticore, which Elizabeth knows knows (correctly, I might point out) is forged, and uses that forgery as a pretext to reinitiate hostilities against the Star Kingdom with the new, powerful, modern navy which it was permitted to build because Elizabeth was never allowed to “dictate terms from Haven orbit” in 1915. Again, her military forces — at the cost of heavy casualties, heavy loss of warships and lives — manage to fight back from an initially highly disadvantageous position, and — again — a Havenite regime proposes a “peace conference” (without ever saying “And, by the way, we’re ready to admit we forged the diplomatic correspondence”).

Admittedly, Pritchart chose a very different messenger, and the strategic situation, what with the looming threat of a confrontation with the Solarian League, was quite different, but only an amnesiac could have been expected to overlook the parallels between the situations, particularly since Elizabeth was fully briefed on what was going to happen when Apollo went into action (or the minor fact that she had proof proof of the duplicity of the Pritchart Administration’s prewar diplomacy and no reason to think it had become less duplicitous since). Despite that, and against all of her admitted natural inclinations to see the Republic of Haven destroyed once and for all, she allowed herself to be convinced — convinced herself herself on the basis of her understanding of the situation — to not simply agree to the conference but to use the conference itself as a means of patching up relations with Erewhon, despite Erewhon’s “desertion” to the other side and her full knowledge that in changing allegiances, Erewhon handed the PRN a huge technological bonanza Haven would not otherwise have enjoyed. This is the act of someone with “tunnel vision” which prevents her from formulating rational policy?

So what happens? Having convinced herself to negotiate, to accept that these Peeps actually might might be different from the ones she, her star nation, her government, and her family have been facing for 70 years at enormous cost in blood, money, and the deaths not simply of her subjects but of people she’d personally known and loved, her ambassador to the Solarian League is assassinated and her niece and the Queen of Torch are almost almost assassinated in a direct (indeed,an intentional intentional) reprise of what happened at Yeltsin’s Star in 1915, under circumstances which point directly towards Havenite involvement and responsibility.

It is certainly fair to say that at this point Elizabeth was “played” by the Mesan Alignment; indeed, she herself later sees it that way. It is unfair unfair to see her response as irrational. There is no question, and I never intend there to be be any question, that her response was flawed, that the way in which she interpreted events — while internally consistent, logical (based on her knowledge and understanding of what had happened), and supported by the majority of her counselors, without any hard intelligence data to demonstrate its inaccuracy — wasn’t shaped by her own life experience, attitudes, and — yes — personal hatred for the Peeps and all their works, or that some of those closest to her, notably Honor and Michelle, weren’t worried at the time at the time that it was flawed. It was not, however, irrational irrational, and it was was based firmly on decades of experience as the leader of a star nation which she had guided not once, but twice, from positions of weakness to positions of overwhelming advantage against a far larger, expansionist, and hostile star nation. She had an absolute moral responsibility to avoid repeating what had happened following Buttercup and to end end the threat of the Republic of Haven — once and for all, without question or equivocation — in the face of the new and even greater potential threat of war against the Solarian League. Since events had just demonstrated to her satisfaction that the Republic of Haven was still essentially the People’s People’s Republic of Haven at the genetic level, it was completely rational of her to terminate that threat by destroying it destroying it rather than giving it yet a third opportunity to go for the Star Kingdom’s throat. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice twice, shame on me me.”

Elizabeth Winton is not the perfect head of state, but there are are no “perfect” heads of state. She has weaknesses, and while some readers seem persistently unable to recognize it, she understands understands that she does, and on numerous occasions in her career — occasions which have been shown in the books — she has cut against the grain of those weaknesses in the name of doing what she recognized pragmatic realities required. She is absolutely and totally committed to the protection and well-being of her people and her star nation, and she has demonstrated her willingness and ability to subordinate the things most desperately important to her personally in the universe — like vengeance for her father’s murder, like vengeance for the murder of her beloved prime minister, uncle and cousin, and the minor matter of her own attempted murder — to that protection and well-being. She is also intelligent, determined, and personally fearless, and if the test of success is to protect and preserve her kingdom and its people in the face of overwhelming threats, she is also arguably the most successful head of state in the entire Honorverse.

It’s totally fair for readers, from a reader’s omniscient perspective, to say “it’s really a pity Elizabeth didn’t do thus-and-so” at specific points in the story line. In fact, you’re supposed supposed to say that, to recognize the points at which history could have gone differently “if only.” It’s equally fair for readers to analyze the reasons she didn’t didn’t “do thus-and-so,” and I’ve tried to give you a deep enough look inside her skull and inside her heart to understand those reasons. I do not, however, and never have understood why there seems to be a tendency to find her competence as a monarch and a war leader so wanting because she didn’t somehow magically and unerringly see into the minds of her potential and actual enemies as clearly as the readers themselves, having had the opportunity to be inside the heads be inside the heads of those potential and actual enemies are able to see. If she’d had that ability, she would have been God, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

Or else, of course, she could have had Merlin’s SNARCs reporting back from inside the council chambers of all her adversaries, but that’s another set of novels.

Honorverse

What do the various planets/regions of the Honorverse sound like to you? (Asked Tue Sep 20, 2011)

January 2014

Honorverse Honorverse

January 2014 January 2014

In general:

Planet Sphinx = Midwestern American;

Planet Manticore = British (specifically, English with upper and lower class distinctions, but with a pronounced, rather dreadful 19th century sort of Anglo-Irish drawl for certain segments of the uppermost upper crust [i.e., Oversteegan & Co.]);

Planet Gryphon = Highland Scots;

Haven System (particularly Nouveau Paris) = French;

Planet Grayson = Welsh, that sort of soft, musical edge;

Solarian League (particularly Old Earth) = various “big city” American accents.

This is how my ear “hears” them when I think about it, although to be honest, I usually don’t worry about pronunciation as much as I do about word choice when I’m writing.

decor

In general:

Planet Sphinx = Midwestern American;

Planet Manticore = British (specifically, English with upper and lower class distinctions, but with a pronounced, rather dreadful 19th century sort of Anglo-Irish drawl for certain segments of the uppermost upper crust [i.e., Oversteegan & Co.]);

Planet Gryphon = Highland Scots;

Haven System (particularly Nouveau Paris) = French;

Planet Grayson = Welsh, that sort of soft, musical edge;

Solarian League (particularly Old Earth) = various “big city” American accents.

This is how my ear “hears” them when I think about it, although to be honest, I usually don’t worry about pronunciation as much as I do about word choice when I’m writing.

In general:

Planet Sphinx = Midwestern American;

Planet Manticore = British (specifically, English with upper and lower class distinctions, but with a pronounced, rather dreadful 19th century sort of Anglo-Irish drawl for certain segments of the uppermost upper crust [i.e., Oversteegan & Co.]);

Planet Gryphon = Highland Scots;

Haven System (particularly Nouveau Paris) = French;

Planet Grayson = Welsh, that sort of soft, musical edge;

Solarian League (particularly Old Earth) = various “big city” American accents.

This is how my ear “hears” them when I think about it, although to be honest, I usually don’t worry about pronunciation as much as I do about word choice when I’m writing.

In general:

Planet Sphinx = Midwestern American;

Planet Manticore = British (specifically, English with upper and lower class distinctions, but with a pronounced, rather dreadful 19th century sort of Anglo-Irish drawl for certain segments of the uppermost upper crust [i.e., Oversteegan & Co.]);

Planet Gryphon = Highland Scots;

Haven System (particularly Nouveau Paris) = French;

Planet Grayson = Welsh, that sort of soft, musical edge;

Solarian League (particularly Old Earth) = various “big city” American accents.

This is how my ear “hears” them when I think about it, although to be honest, I usually don’t worry about pronunciation as much as I do about word choice when I’m writing.

In general:

Planet Sphinx = Midwestern American;

Planet Manticore = British (specifically, English with upper and lower class distinctions, but with a pronounced, rather dreadful 19th century sort of Anglo-Irish drawl for certain segments of the uppermost upper crust [i.e., Oversteegan & Co.]);

Planet Gryphon = Highland Scots;

Haven System (particularly Nouveau Paris) = French;

Planet Grayson = Welsh, that sort of soft, musical edge;

Solarian League (particularly Old Earth) = various “big city” American accents.

This is how my ear “hears” them when I think about it, although to be honest, I usually don’t worry about pronunciation as much as I do about word choice when I’m writing.

Honorverse

What exactly can a treecat pick up from a human, and how useful would it be in a court of law? (Asked Tue Sep 13, 2011)

January 2014

Honorverse Honorverse

January 2014 January 2014

Treecats are capable of detecting and parsing human emotions with a high degree of accuracy. They can, thus, detect emotional spikes connected with anxiety. They can also detect/read what you might call “sideband” transmissions. This is spelled out in somewhat greater detail in A Beautiful Friendship (that would be the novel version coming out in October), when Climbs Quickly is thinking about the message content which is subsumed in the emotional/empathic portion of the mind-glow. It’s much more difficult to strain exact meanings out of those “sideband” transmissions without considerable practice with the individual mind-glow in question. That is, a mated pair of treecats would be able to read a great deal of actual meaning and communication out of their mates’ mind-glows, and a treecat who has adopted a human can pick up a great deal of information/communication from the emotional side of the human’s mind-glow. This isn’t the same as telepathy , which is a coherent, deliberate communication — what you might call a “formed” communication. That doesn’t mean that information isn’t transferred, however.

There are, in the human mind-glow, discernible “triggers,” for want of a better word — information tags from a treecat’s perspective which indicate that someone is deliberately telling an untruth. One reason that they can detect this as well as they can is that it is a trigger/information tag completely lacking in treecat mind-glows, because treecats don’t lie. So, yes, when Honor calls Nimitz a “furry lie detector,” she is being exactly accurate: Nimitz can tell whenever someone sets out to deliberately tell an untruth or mislead. Now, the limitation here is exactly the same as would be provided by any other lie detector that was capable of differentiating between a knowingly true and knowingly false statement; you may know the statement is knowingly false , but that doesn’t tell you how it is false. That is, knowing that someone isn’t telling you the truth doesn’t automatically tell you what the truth is . Obviously, if you ask enough questions and are able to tell whether any given answer is true or false, you can eventually narrow the options of the person you’re questioning to a point at which the truth is revealed.

If your alibi in a murder case is that you were cheating on your spouse somewhere else at the time the victim was murdered and you’re asked whether or not you committed the crime and you say “No,” a treecat would know that your statement was not deliberately and knowingly false. He might also know that you were upset, that you were embarrassed about where the questioning might lead if it continued, etc., but he wouldn’t know why you were upset unless specific additional questions were asked. (Well, that’s not entirely accurate; a treecat probably would pick up at least a little information from those “sideband” transmissions. Whether or not he would be able to put that information together to realize what you had been up to and why you were embarrassed about it would be highly problematical, however. He might be able to get as far as your embarrassment/shame focusing on your spouse [or, perhaps, on the public consequences of being found to be an adulterer, assuming you were more concerned about that than about any hurt/paint it might cause your spouse, you louse!], but he wouldn’t be able to tell what, specifically, you’d done to be embarrassed or humiliated by.)

This is something that treecats can’t help knowing. They aren’t especially interested or judgmental about it, but they can’t help knowing . A lot of the things that bother human beings seem pretty silly to treecats, since they’re telempathic, after all, and none of them can help knowing this sort of thing about any of them. Human beings who simply can’t stand the thought that this little alien creature here knows what they’re feeling (whether the little alien creature really cares what they’re feeling or not) are going to be extremely uncomfortable around treecats under any circumstances. But if treecats are going to be accorded the same rights as any other sentient being, then they’re going to have to be allowed in society. That’s just the way it is. And if they’re not allowed in society because of their empathic abilities, then they won’t be being accorded the same rights as any other sentient being. That’s just the way it is, too. In other words, humanity is either going to have to learn how to cope or the people who simply can’t stand that are going to have to isolate themselves from treecats.

In the meantime, however, the issue of using treecats as lie detectors is essentially a nonissue. In the pursuit of security clearances for government officials and — especially — members of the military, being asked in front of a lie detector whether or not you are an agent of an enemy power is not inappropriate. It might become inappropriate if only certain members were singled out to be questioned, although even then it would depend on what the basis for singling out was. If, however, it is an across-the-board policy — in effect, every member of the Navy, for example, is going to be asked exactly the same question and no fishing expeditions are going to be permitted — then it does not constitute an unfair invasion of anyone’s privacy, since the treecat isn’t going to be able to tell a human interrogator (even if the treecat wants to) anything more than the fact that you are/are not lying. That’s it, pretty much.

If you are a civilian, under the Manticoran Constitution, you would have the right to refuse to answer. The treecat might be able to tell that you were upset, but it couldn’t tell the interrogator why you were upset. The consequence of your refusing to answer would be the loss of your security clearance, which would probably cost you your job (assuming that your job was sufficiently sensitive that you were required to have a security clearance in the first place) and it might well lead to an investigation which could turn up all sorts of things you’d rather weren’t turned up. But that would be because the fact that you chose not to answer the question generated suspicion, not because of anything the treecat was able to tell them.

Although this particular issue [the use, specifically, of treecats as an investigating tool] has not been addressed yet in Manticoran criminal law, the issue of coerced testimony and involuntary use of lie detectors has been addressed. You cannot be compelled to testify against yourself and a jury cannot legally consider whether or not you refused to take a lie detector test. It is possible that criminal law may be modified if treecats become part of the recognized police force or of the practice of jurisprudence in the Star Empire. For example, it might become permissible for a treecat police officer to testify “He lied when he said he was at home playing solitaire the night of the murder,” which would obviously be a serious blow. However, the treecat could not then testify “And the reason he lied was that he was actually off committing the murder.” If the suspect was then asked “We know you weren’t really home playing solitaire that night. Did you or didn’t you commit the murder?” and simply refused to answer, the treecat couldn’t testify that he had lied when he didn’t answer. If the suspect did answer and said “No, I didn’t,” the treecat would be able to testify as to whether or not that statement was truthful. Presumably, if a suspect did refuse to answer in front of a jury, the judge would give the jury the equivalent of the charge given in the United States and someone pleads the Fifth Amendment and say “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, refusal to answer is a protected constitutional privilege and cannot legally be construed as indicating guilt. Guilt must still be demonstrated on the basis of the evidence.”

It’s an interesting question and one I’ve been kicking around in the back of my brain for a while as a logical implication of treecats’ abilities. As far as a security investigation vetting personnel for possible membership in an interstellar conspiracy to destroy the Star Empire which has already resulted in millions of casualties in a sneak attack, however, I don’t think that requiring those personnel to answer the question “Are you an agent of the Mesan Alignment?” or even “Are you an agent of any power or organization dedicated to the overthrow or destruction of the Star Empire of Manticore?” would be over the line. There may be quite a bit of legitimate difference of opinion over deciding the appropriate consequences of a refusal to answer the question, but asking the question itself and protecting the security of the civilian government and the military against infiltration by someone willing to kill millions or even billions of human beings is certainly not in appropriate.

It may strike some people as an unwarrantable intrusion, but once again, the only thing it’s going to tell the interrogator is whether or not you answered the question truthfully to the best of your knowledge. Unless we’re going to posit that it’s perfectly all right to be a mass murderer, or an agent of mass murderers, as long as we can game the system successfully, then it doesn’t strike me that this degree of ability to determine the truthfulness of your reply is in the invasion of your constitutional or personal rights. And it certainly would not be something deserving of the term “Gestapo.”

Now, I can certainly think of circumstances under which this ability to differentiate between truthful and inaccurate statements could become a horrible force for the suppression of freedom of thought, expression, and action. A great deal would depend on what your society chose to criminalize. “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of a society dedicated to the democratic reform of the Solarian League?” “Do you now, or have you ever, opposed the genocidal policies of Our Glorious Leader?” The problem with most of the models which could lead to that suppression of freedom of thought, expression, and action is that treecats would refuse to help enforce them. The very nature of treecats’ communication and understanding of one another would make such societies anathema to them, and treecats are very direct personalities. It might be possible to find some way to compel them to cooperate with interrogators in such a society, but it would be very, very, very difficult, and the coercion involved would almost certainly turn around and bite the coercer on the posterior.

decor

Treecats are capable of detecting and parsing human emotions with a high degree of accuracy. They can, thus, detect emotional spikes connected with anxiety. They can also detect/read what you might call “sideband” transmissions. This is spelled out in somewhat greater detail in A Beautiful Friendship (that would be the novel version coming out in October), when Climbs Quickly is thinking about the message content which is subsumed in the emotional/empathic portion of the mind-glow. It’s much more difficult to strain exact meanings out of those “sideband” transmissions without considerable practice with the individual mind-glow in question. That is, a mated pair of treecats would be able to read a great deal of actual meaning and communication out of their mates’ mind-glows, and a treecat who has adopted a human can pick up a great deal of information/communication from the emotional side of the human’s mind-glow. This isn’t the same as telepathy , which is a coherent, deliberate communication — what you might call a “formed” communication. That doesn’t mean that information isn’t transferred, however.

There are, in the human mind-glow, discernible “triggers,” for want of a better word — information tags from a treecat’s perspective which indicate that someone is deliberately telling an untruth. One reason that they can detect this as well as they can is that it is a trigger/information tag completely lacking in treecat mind-glows, because treecats don’t lie. So, yes, when Honor calls Nimitz a “furry lie detector,” she is being exactly accurate: Nimitz can tell whenever someone sets out to deliberately tell an untruth or mislead. Now, the limitation here is exactly the same as would be provided by any other lie detector that was capable of differentiating between a knowingly true and knowingly false statement; you may know the statement is knowingly false , but that doesn’t tell you how it is false. That is, knowing that someone isn’t telling you the truth doesn’t automatically tell you what the truth is . Obviously, if you ask enough questions and are able to tell whether any given answer is true or false, you can eventually narrow the options of the person you’re questioning to a point at which the truth is revealed.

If your alibi in a murder case is that you were cheating on your spouse somewhere else at the time the victim was murdered and you’re asked whether or not you committed the crime and you say “No,” a treecat would know that your statement was not deliberately and knowingly false. He might also know that you were upset, that you were embarrassed about where the questioning might lead if it continued, etc., but he wouldn’t know why you were upset unless specific additional questions were asked. (Well, that’s not entirely accurate; a treecat probably would pick up at least a little information from those “sideband” transmissions. Whether or not he would be able to put that information together to realize what you had been up to and why you were embarrassed about it would be highly problematical, however. He might be able to get as far as your embarrassment/shame focusing on your spouse [or, perhaps, on the public consequences of being found to be an adulterer, assuming you were more concerned about that than about any hurt/paint it might cause your spouse, you louse!], but he wouldn’t be able to tell what, specifically, you’d done to be embarrassed or humiliated by.)

This is something that treecats can’t help knowing. They aren’t especially interested or judgmental about it, but they can’t help knowing . A lot of the things that bother human beings seem pretty silly to treecats, since they’re telempathic, after all, and none of them can help knowing this sort of thing about any of them. Human beings who simply can’t stand the thought that this little alien creature here knows what they’re feeling (whether the little alien creature really cares what they’re feeling or not) are going to be extremely uncomfortable around treecats under any circumstances. But if treecats are going to be accorded the same rights as any other sentient being, then they’re going to have to be allowed in society. That’s just the way it is. And if they’re not allowed in society because of their empathic abilities, then they won’t be being accorded the same rights as any other sentient being. That’s just the way it is, too. In other words, humanity is either going to have to learn how to cope or the people who simply can’t stand that are going to have to isolate themselves from treecats.

In the meantime, however, the issue of using treecats as lie detectors is essentially a nonissue. In the pursuit of security clearances for government officials and — especially — members of the military, being asked in front of a lie detector whether or not you are an agent of an enemy power is not inappropriate. It might become inappropriate if only certain members were singled out to be questioned, although even then it would depend on what the basis for singling out was. If, however, it is an across-the-board policy — in effect, every member of the Navy, for example, is going to be asked exactly the same question and no fishing expeditions are going to be permitted — then it does not constitute an unfair invasion of anyone’s privacy, since the treecat isn’t going to be able to tell a human interrogator (even if the treecat wants to) anything more than the fact that you are/are not lying. That’s it, pretty much.

If you are a civilian, under the Manticoran Constitution, you would have the right to refuse to answer. The treecat might be able to tell that you were upset, but it couldn’t tell the interrogator why you were upset. The consequence of your refusing to answer would be the loss of your security clearance, which would probably cost you your job (assuming that your job was sufficiently sensitive that you were required to have a security clearance in the first place) and it might well lead to an investigation which could turn up all sorts of things you’d rather weren’t turned up. But that would be because the fact that you chose not to answer the question generated suspicion, not because of anything the treecat was able to tell them.

Although this particular issue [the use, specifically, of treecats as an investigating tool] has not been addressed yet in Manticoran criminal law, the issue of coerced testimony and involuntary use of lie detectors has been addressed. You cannot be compelled to testify against yourself and a jury cannot legally consider whether or not you refused to take a lie detector test. It is possible that criminal law may be modified if treecats become part of the recognized police force or of the practice of jurisprudence in the Star Empire. For example, it might become permissible for a treecat police officer to testify “He lied when he said he was at home playing solitaire the night of the murder,” which would obviously be a serious blow. However, the treecat could not then testify “And the reason he lied was that he was actually off committing the murder.” If the suspect was then asked “We know you weren’t really home playing solitaire that night. Did you or didn’t you commit the murder?” and simply refused to answer, the treecat couldn’t testify that he had lied when he didn’t answer. If the suspect did answer and said “No, I didn’t,” the treecat would be able to testify as to whether or not that statement was truthful. Presumably, if a suspect did refuse to answer in front of a jury, the judge would give the jury the equivalent of the charge given in the United States and someone pleads the Fifth Amendment and say “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, refusal to answer is a protected constitutional privilege and cannot legally be construed as indicating guilt. Guilt must still be demonstrated on the basis of the evidence.”

It’s an interesting question and one I’ve been kicking around in the back of my brain for a while as a logical implication of treecats’ abilities. As far as a security investigation vetting personnel for possible membership in an interstellar conspiracy to destroy the Star Empire which has already resulted in millions of casualties in a sneak attack, however, I don’t think that requiring those personnel to answer the question “Are you an agent of the Mesan Alignment?” or even “Are you an agent of any power or organization dedicated to the overthrow or destruction of the Star Empire of Manticore?” would be over the line. There may be quite a bit of legitimate difference of opinion over deciding the appropriate consequences of a refusal to answer the question, but asking the question itself and protecting the security of the civilian government and the military against infiltration by someone willing to kill millions or even billions of human beings is certainly not in appropriate.

It may strike some people as an unwarrantable intrusion, but once again, the only thing it’s going to tell the interrogator is whether or not you answered the question truthfully to the best of your knowledge. Unless we’re going to posit that it’s perfectly all right to be a mass murderer, or an agent of mass murderers, as long as we can game the system successfully, then it doesn’t strike me that this degree of ability to determine the truthfulness of your reply is in the invasion of your constitutional or personal rights. And it certainly would not be something deserving of the term “Gestapo.”

Now, I can certainly think of circumstances under which this ability to differentiate between truthful and inaccurate statements could become a horrible force for the suppression of freedom of thought, expression, and action. A great deal would depend on what your society chose to criminalize. “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of a society dedicated to the democratic reform of the Solarian League?” “Do you now, or have you ever, opposed the genocidal policies of Our Glorious Leader?” The problem with most of the models which could lead to that suppression of freedom of thought, expression, and action is that treecats would refuse to help enforce them. The very nature of treecats’ communication and understanding of one another would make such societies anathema to them, and treecats are very direct personalities. It might be possible to find some way to compel them to cooperate with interrogators in such a society, but it would be very, very, very difficult, and the coercion involved would almost certainly turn around and bite the coercer on the posterior. Treecats are capable of detecting and parsing human emotions with a high degree of accuracy. They can, thus, detect emotional spikes connected with anxiety. They can also detect/read what you might call “sideband” transmissions. This is spelled out in somewhat greater detail in A Beautiful Friendship (that would be the novel version coming out in October), when Climbs Quickly is thinking about the message content which is subsumed in the emotional/empathic portion of the mind-glow. It’s much more difficult to strain exact meanings out of those “sideband” transmissions without considerable practice with the individual mind-glow in question. That is, a mated pair of treecats would be able to read a great deal of actual meaning and communication out of their mates’ mind-glows, and a treecat who has adopted a human can pick up a great deal of information/communication from the emotional side of the human’s mind-glow. This isn’t the same as telepathy , which is a coherent, deliberate communication — what you might call a “formed” communication. That doesn’t mean that information isn’t transferred, however.

There are, in the human mind-glow, discernible “triggers,” for want of a better word — information tags from a treecat’s perspective which indicate that someone is deliberately telling an untruth. One reason that they can detect this as well as they can is that it is a trigger/information tag completely lacking in treecat mind-glows, because treecats don’t lie. So, yes, when Honor calls Nimitz a “furry lie detector,” she is being exactly accurate: Nimitz can tell whenever someone sets out to deliberately tell an untruth or mislead. Now, the limitation here is exactly the same as would be provided by any other lie detector that was capable of differentiating between a knowingly true and knowingly false statement; you may know the statement is knowingly false , but that doesn’t tell you how it is false. That is, knowing that someone isn’t telling you the truth doesn’t automatically tell you what the truth is . Obviously, if you ask enough questions and are able to tell whether any given answer is true or false, you can eventually narrow the options of the person you’re questioning to a point at which the truth is revealed.

If your alibi in a murder case is that you were cheating on your spouse somewhere else at the time the victim was murdered and you’re asked whether or not you committed the crime and you say “No,” a treecat would know that your statement was not deliberately and knowingly false. He might also know that you were upset, that you were embarrassed about where the questioning might lead if it continued, etc., but he wouldn’t know why you were upset unless specific additional questions were asked. (Well, that’s not entirely accurate; a treecat probably would pick up at least a little information from those “sideband” transmissions. Whether or not he would be able to put that information together to realize what you had been up to and why you were embarrassed about it would be highly problematical, however. He might be able to get as far as your embarrassment/shame focusing on your spouse [or, perhaps, on the public consequences of being found to be an adulterer, assuming you were more concerned about that than about any hurt/paint it might cause your spouse, you louse!], but he wouldn’t be able to tell what, specifically, you’d done to be embarrassed or humiliated by.)

This is something that treecats can’t help knowing. They aren’t especially interested or judgmental about it, but they can’t help knowing . A lot of the things that bother human beings seem pretty silly to treecats, since they’re telempathic, after all, and none of them can help knowing this sort of thing about any of them. Human beings who simply can’t stand the thought that this little alien creature here knows what they’re feeling (whether the little alien creature really cares what they’re feeling or not) are going to be extremely uncomfortable around treecats under any circumstances. But if treecats are going to be accorded the same rights as any other sentient being, then they’re going to have to be allowed in society. That’s just the way it is. And if they’re not allowed in society because of their empathic abilities, then they won’t be being accorded the same rights as any other sentient being. That’s just the way it is, too. In other words, humanity is either going to have to learn how to cope or the people who simply can’t stand that are going to have to isolate themselves from treecats.

In the meantime, however, the issue of using treecats as lie detectors is essentially a nonissue. In the pursuit of security clearances for government officials and — especially — members of the military, being asked in front of a lie detector whether or not you are an agent of an enemy power is not inappropriate. It might become inappropriate if only certain members were singled out to be questioned, although even then it would depend on what the basis for singling out was. If, however, it is an across-the-board policy — in effect, every member of the Navy, for example, is going to be asked exactly the same question and no fishing expeditions are going to be permitted — then it does not constitute an unfair invasion of anyone’s privacy, since the treecat isn’t going to be able to tell a human interrogator (even if the treecat wants to) anything more than the fact that you are/are not lying. That’s it, pretty much.

If you are a civilian, under the Manticoran Constitution, you would have the right to refuse to answer. The treecat might be able to tell that you were upset, but it couldn’t tell the interrogator why you were upset. The consequence of your refusing to answer would be the loss of your security clearance, which would probably cost you your job (assuming that your job was sufficiently sensitive that you were required to have a security clearance in the first place) and it might well lead to an investigation which could turn up all sorts of things you’d rather weren’t turned up. But that would be because the fact that you chose not to answer the question generated suspicion, not because of anything the treecat was able to tell them.

Although this particular issue [the use, specifically, of treecats as an investigating tool] has not been addressed yet in Manticoran criminal law, the issue of coerced testimony and involuntary use of lie detectors has been addressed. You cannot be compelled to testify against yourself and a jury cannot legally consider whether or not you refused to take a lie detector test. It is possible that criminal law may be modified if treecats become part of the recognized police force or of the practice of jurisprudence in the Star Empire. For example, it might become permissible for a treecat police officer to testify “He lied when he said he was at home playing solitaire the night of the murder,” which would obviously be a serious blow. However, the treecat could not then testify “And the reason he lied was that he was actually off committing the murder.” If the suspect was then asked “We know you weren’t really home playing solitaire that night. Did you or didn’t you commit the murder?” and simply refused to answer, the treecat couldn’t testify that he had lied when he didn’t answer. If the suspect did answer and said “No, I didn’t,” the treecat would be able to testify as to whether or not that statement was truthful. Presumably, if a suspect did refuse to answer in front of a jury, the judge would give the jury the equivalent of the charge given in the United States and someone pleads the Fifth Amendment and say “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, refusal to answer is a protected constitutional privilege and cannot legally be construed as indicating guilt. Guilt must still be demonstrated on the basis of the evidence.”

It’s an interesting question and one I’ve been kicking around in the back of my brain for a while as a logical implication of treecats’ abilities. As far as a security investigation vetting personnel for possible membership in an interstellar conspiracy to destroy the Star Empire which has already resulted in millions of casualties in a sneak attack, however, I don’t think that requiring those personnel to answer the question “Are you an agent of the Mesan Alignment?” or even “Are you an agent of any power or organization dedicated to the overthrow or destruction of the Star Empire of Manticore?” would be over the line. There may be quite a bit of legitimate difference of opinion over deciding the appropriate consequences of a refusal to answer the question, but asking the question itself and protecting the security of the civilian government and the military against infiltration by someone willing to kill millions or even billions of human beings is certainly not in appropriate.

It may strike some people as an unwarrantable intrusion, but once again, the only thing it’s going to tell the interrogator is whether or not you answered the question truthfully to the best of your knowledge. Unless we’re going to posit that it’s perfectly all right to be a mass murderer, or an agent of mass murderers, as long as we can game the system successfully, then it doesn’t strike me that this degree of ability to determine the truthfulness of your reply is in the invasion of your constitutional or personal rights. And it certainly would not be something deserving of the term “Gestapo.”

Now, I can certainly think of circumstances under which this ability to differentiate between truthful and inaccurate statements could become a horrible force for the suppression of freedom of thought, expression, and action. A great deal would depend on what your society chose to criminalize. “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of a society dedicated to the democratic reform of the Solarian League?” “Do you now, or have you ever, opposed the genocidal policies of Our Glorious Leader?” The problem with most of the models which could lead to that suppression of freedom of thought, expression, and action is that treecats would refuse to help enforce them. The very nature of treecats’ communication and understanding of one another would make such societies anathema to them, and treecats are very direct personalities. It might be possible to find some way to compel them to cooperate with interrogators in such a society, but it would be very, very, very difficult, and the coercion involved would almost certainly turn around and bite the coercer on the posterior. Treecats are capable of detecting and parsing human emotions with a high degree of accuracy. They can, thus, detect emotional spikes connected with anxiety. They can also detect/read what you might call “sideband” transmissions. This is spelled out in somewhat greater detail in A Beautiful Friendship (that would be the novel version coming out in October), when Climbs Quickly is thinking about the message content which is subsumed in the emotional/empathic portion of the mind-glow. It’s much more difficult to strain exact meanings out of those “sideband” transmissions without considerable practice with the individual mind-glow in question. That is, a mated pair of treecats would be able to read a great deal of actual meaning and communication out of their mates’ mind-glows, and a treecat who has adopted a human can pick up a great deal of information/communication from the emotional side of the human’s mind-glow. This isn’t the same as telepathy , which is a coherent, deliberate communication — what you might call a “formed” communication. That doesn’t mean that information isn’t transferred, however.

There are, in the human mind-glow, discernible “triggers,” for want of a better word — information tags from a treecat’s perspective which indicate that someone is deliberately telling an untruth. One reason that they can detect this as well as they can is that it is a trigger/information tag completely lacking in treecat mind-glows, because treecats don’t lie. So, yes, when Honor calls Nimitz a “furry lie detector,” she is being exactly accurate: Nimitz can tell whenever someone sets out to deliberately tell an untruth or mislead. Now, the limitation here is exactly the same as would be provided by any other lie detector that was capable of differentiating between a knowingly true and knowingly false statement; you may know the statement is knowingly false , but that doesn’t tell you how it is false. That is, knowing that someone isn’t telling you the truth doesn’t automatically tell you what the truth is . Obviously, if you ask enough questions and are able to tell whether any given answer is true or false, you can eventually narrow the options of the person you’re questioning to a point at which the truth is revealed.

If your alibi in a murder case is that you were cheating on your spouse somewhere else at the time the victim was murdered and you’re asked whether or not you committed the crime and you say “No,” a treecat would know that your statement was not deliberately and knowingly false. He might also know that you were upset, that you were embarrassed about where the questioning might lead if it continued, etc., but he wouldn’t know why you were upset unless specific additional questions were asked. (Well, that’s not entirely accurate; a treecat probably would pick up at least a little information from those “sideband” transmissions. Whether or not he would be able to put that information together to realize what you had been up to and why you were embarrassed about it would be highly problematical, however. He might be able to get as far as your embarrassment/shame focusing on your spouse [or, perhaps, on the public consequences of being found to be an adulterer, assuming you were more concerned about that than about any hurt/paint it might cause your spouse, you louse!], but he wouldn’t be able to tell what, specifically, you’d done to be embarrassed or humiliated by.)

This is something that treecats can’t help knowing. They aren’t especially interested or judgmental about it, but they can’t help knowing . A lot of the things that bother human beings seem pretty silly to treecats, since they’re telempathic, after all, and none of them can help knowing this sort of thing about any of them. Human beings who simply can’t stand the thought that this little alien creature here knows what they’re feeling (whether the little alien creature really cares what they’re feeling or not) are going to be extremely uncomfortable around treecats under any circumstances. But if treecats are going to be accorded the same rights as any other sentient being, then they’re going to have to be allowed in society. That’s just the way it is. And if they’re not allowed in society because of their empathic abilities, then they won’t be being accorded the same rights as any other sentient being. That’s just the way it is, too. In other words, humanity is either going to have to learn how to cope or the people who simply can’t stand that are going to have to isolate themselves from treecats.

In the meantime, however, the issue of using treecats as lie detectors is essentially a nonissue. In the pursuit of security clearances for government officials and — especially — members of the military, being asked in front of a lie detector whether or not you are an agent of an enemy power is not inappropriate. It might become inappropriate if only certain members were singled out to be questioned, although even then it would depend on what the basis for singling out was. If, however, it is an across-the-board policy — in effect, every member of the Navy, for example, is going to be asked exactly the same question and no fishing expeditions are going to be permitted — then it does not constitute an unfair invasion of anyone’s privacy, since the treecat isn’t going to be able to tell a human interrogator (even if the treecat wants to) anything more than the fact that you are/are not lying. That’s it, pretty much.

If you are a civilian, under the Manticoran Constitution, you would have the right to refuse to answer. The treecat might be able to tell that you were upset, but it couldn’t tell the interrogator why you were upset. The consequence of your refusing to answer would be the loss of your security clearance, which would probably cost you your job (assuming that your job was sufficiently sensitive that you were required to have a security clearance in the first place) and it might well lead to an investigation which could turn up all sorts of things you’d rather weren’t turned up. But that would be because the fact that you chose not to answer the question generated suspicion, not because of anything the treecat was able to tell them.

Although this particular issue [the use, specifically, of treecats as an investigating tool] has not been addressed yet in Manticoran criminal law, the issue of coerced testimony and involuntary use of lie detectors has been addressed. You cannot be compelled to testify against yourself and a jury cannot legally consider whether or not you refused to take a lie detector test. It is possible that criminal law may be modified if treecats become part of the recognized police force or of the practice of jurisprudence in the Star Empire. For example, it might become permissible for a treecat police officer to testify “He lied when he said he was at home playing solitaire the night of the murder,” which would obviously be a serious blow. However, the treecat could not then testify “And the reason he lied was that he was actually off committing the murder.” If the suspect was then asked “We know you weren’t really home playing solitaire that night. Did you or didn’t you commit the murder?” and simply refused to answer, the treecat couldn’t testify that he had lied when he didn’t answer. If the suspect did answer and said “No, I didn’t,” the treecat would be able to testify as to whether or not that statement was truthful. Presumably, if a suspect did refuse to answer in front of a jury, the judge would give the jury the equivalent of the charge given in the United States and someone pleads the Fifth Amendment and say “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, refusal to answer is a protected constitutional privilege and cannot legally be construed as indicating guilt. Guilt must still be demonstrated on the basis of the evidence.”

It’s an interesting question and one I’ve been kicking around in the back of my brain for a while as a logical implication of treecats’ abilities. As far as a security investigation vetting personnel for possible membership in an interstellar conspiracy to destroy the Star Empire which has already resulted in millions of casualties in a sneak attack, however, I don’t think that requiring those personnel to answer the question “Are you an agent of the Mesan Alignment?” or even “Are you an agent of any power or organization dedicated to the overthrow or destruction of the Star Empire of Manticore?” would be over the line. There may be quite a bit of legitimate difference of opinion over deciding the appropriate consequences of a refusal to answer the question, but asking the question itself and protecting the security of the civilian government and the military against infiltration by someone willing to kill millions or even billions of human beings is certainly not in appropriate.

It may strike some people as an unwarrantable intrusion, but once again, the only thing it’s going to tell the interrogator is whether or not you answered the question truthfully to the best of your knowledge. Unless we’re going to posit that it’s perfectly all right to be a mass murderer, or an agent of mass murderers, as long as we can game the system successfully, then it doesn’t strike me that this degree of ability to determine the truthfulness of your reply is in the invasion of your constitutional or personal rights. And it certainly would not be something deserving of the term “Gestapo.”

Now, I can certainly think of circumstances under which this ability to differentiate between truthful and inaccurate statements could become a horrible force for the suppression of freedom of thought, expression, and action. A great deal would depend on what your society chose to criminalize. “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of a society dedicated to the democratic reform of the Solarian League?” “Do you now, or have you ever, opposed the genocidal policies of Our Glorious Leader?” The problem with most of the models which could lead to that suppression of freedom of thought, expression, and action is that treecats would refuse to help enforce them. The very nature of treecats’ communication and understanding of one another would make such societies anathema to them, and treecats are very direct personalities. It might be possible to find some way to compel them to cooperate with interrogators in such a society, but it would be very, very, very difficult, and the coercion involved would almost certainly turn around and bite the coercer on the posterior. Treecats are capable of detecting and parsing human emotions with a high degree of accuracy. They can, thus, detect emotional spikes connected with anxiety. They can also detect/read what you might call “sideband” transmissions. This is spelled out in somewhat greater detail in A Beautiful Friendship A Beautiful Friendship (that would be the novel version coming out in October), when Climbs Quickly is thinking about the message content which is subsumed in the emotional/empathic portion of the mind-glow. It’s much more difficult to strain exact meanings out of those “sideband” transmissions without considerable practice with the individual mind-glow in question. That is, a mated pair of treecats would be able to read a great deal of actual meaning and communication out of their mates’ mind-glows, and a treecat who has adopted a human can pick up a great deal of information/communication from the emotional side of the human’s mind-glow. This isn’t the same as telepathy telepathy, which is a coherent, deliberate communication — what you might call a “formed” communication. That doesn’t mean that information isn’t transferred, however.

There are, in the human mind-glow, discernible “triggers,” for want of a better word — information tags from a treecat’s perspective which indicate that someone is deliberately telling an untruth. One reason that they can detect this as well as they can is that it is a trigger/information tag completely lacking completely lacking in treecat mind-glows, because treecats don’t lie. So, yes, when Honor calls Nimitz a “furry lie detector,” she is being exactly accurate: Nimitz can tell whenever someone sets out to deliberately tell an untruth or mislead. Now, the limitation here is exactly the same as would be provided by any other lie detector that was capable of differentiating between a knowingly true and knowingly false statement; you may know the statement is knowingly false false, but that doesn’t tell you how how it is false. That is, knowing that someone isn’t telling you the truth doesn’t automatically tell you what the truth is is. Obviously, if you ask enough questions and are able to tell whether any given answer is true or false, you can eventually narrow the options of the person you’re questioning to a point at which the truth is revealed.

If your alibi in a murder case is that you were cheating on your spouse somewhere else at the time the victim was murdered and you’re asked whether or not you committed the crime and you say “No,” a treecat would know that your statement was not deliberately and knowingly false. He might also know that you were upset, that you were embarrassed about where the questioning might lead if it continued, etc., but he wouldn’t know why why you were upset unless specific additional questions were asked. (Well, that’s not entirely accurate; a treecat probably would pick up at least a little information from those “sideband” transmissions. Whether or not he would be able to put that information together to realize what you had been up to and why you were embarrassed about it would be highly problematical, however. He might be able to get as far as your embarrassment/shame focusing on your spouse [or, perhaps, on the public consequences of being found to be an adulterer, assuming you were more concerned about that than about any hurt/paint it might cause your spouse, you louse!], but he wouldn’t be able to tell what, specifically, you’d done to be embarrassed or humiliated by.)

This is something that treecats can’t help help knowing. They aren’t especially interested or judgmental about it, but they can’t help knowing knowing. A lot of the things that bother human beings seem pretty silly to treecats, since they’re telempathic, after all, and none none of them can help knowing this sort of thing about any any of them. Human beings who simply can’t stand the thought that this little alien creature here knows what they’re feeling (whether the little alien creature really cares cares what they’re feeling or not) are going to be extremely uncomfortable around treecats under any circumstances. But if treecats are going to be accorded the same rights as any other sentient being, then they’re going to have to be allowed in society. That’s just the way it is. And if they’re not not allowed in society because of their empathic abilities, then they won’t be being accorded the same rights as any other sentient being. That’s just the way it is, too. In other words, humanity is either going to have to learn how to cope or the people who simply can’t stand that are going to have to isolate themselves from treecats.

In the meantime, however, the issue of using treecats as lie detectors is essentially a nonissue. In the pursuit of security clearances for government officials and — especially — members of the military, being asked in front of a lie detector whether or not you are an agent of an enemy power is not inappropriate. It might become become inappropriate if only certain members were singled out to be questioned, although even then it would depend on what the basis for singling out was. If, however, it is an across-the-board policy — in effect, every every member of the Navy, for example, is going to be asked exactly the same question and no fishing expeditions are going to be permitted — then it does not constitute an unfair invasion of anyone’s privacy, since the treecat isn’t going to be able to tell a human interrogator (even if the treecat wants to) anything more than the fact that you are/are not lying. That’s it, pretty much.

If you are a civilian, under the Manticoran Constitution, you would have the right to refuse to answer. The treecat might be able to tell that you were upset, but it couldn’t tell the interrogator why why you were upset. The consequence of your refusing to answer would be the loss of your security clearance, which would probably cost you your job (assuming that your job was sufficiently sensitive that you were required to have a security clearance in the first place) and it might well lead to an investigation which could turn up all sorts of things you’d rather weren’t turned up. But that would be because the fact that you chose not to answer the question generated suspicion, not because of anything the treecat was able to tell them.

Although this particular issue [the use, specifically, of treecats as an investigating tool] has not been addressed yet in Manticoran criminal law, the issue of coerced testimony and involuntary use of lie detectors has has been addressed. You cannot be compelled to testify against yourself and a jury cannot legally consider whether or not you refused to take a lie detector test. It is possible that criminal law may be modified if treecats become part of the recognized police force or of the practice of jurisprudence in the Star Empire. For example, it might become permissible for a treecat police officer to testify “He lied when he said he was at home playing solitaire the night of the murder,” which would obviously be a serious blow. However, the treecat could not then testify “And the reason he lied was that he was actually off committing the murder.” If the suspect was then asked “We know you weren’t really home playing solitaire that night. Did you or didn’t you commit the murder?” and simply refused to answer, the treecat couldn’t testify that he had lied lied when he didn’t answer. If the suspect did did answer and said “No, I didn’t,” the treecat would be able to testify as to whether or not that statement was truthful. Presumably, if a suspect did refuse to answer in front of a jury, the judge would give the jury the equivalent of the charge given in the United States and someone pleads the Fifth Amendment and say “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, refusal to answer is a protected constitutional privilege and cannot legally be construed as indicating guilt. Guilt must still be demonstrated on the basis of the evidence.”

It’s an interesting question and one I’ve been kicking around in the back of my brain for a while as a logical implication of treecats’ abilities. As far as a security investigation vetting personnel for possible membership in an interstellar conspiracy to destroy the Star Empire which has already resulted in millions of casualties in a sneak attack, however, I don’t think that requiring those personnel to answer the question “Are you an agent of the Mesan Alignment?” or even “Are you an agent of any any power or organization dedicated to the overthrow or destruction of the Star Empire of Manticore?” would be over the line. There may be quite a bit of legitimate difference of opinion over deciding the appropriate consequences of a refusal to answer the question, but asking the question itself and protecting the security of the civilian government and the military against infiltration by someone willing to kill millions or even billions of human beings is certainly not in inappropriate.

It may strike some people as an unwarrantable intrusion, but once again, the only thing it’s going to tell the interrogator is whether or not you answered the question truthfully to the best of your knowledge. Unless we’re going to posit that it’s perfectly all right to be a mass murderer, or an agent of mass murderers, as long as we can game the system successfully, then it doesn’t strike me that this degree of ability to determine the truthfulness of your reply is in the invasion of your constitutional or personal rights. And it certainly would not be something deserving of the term “Gestapo.”

Now, I can certainly think of circumstances under which this ability to differentiate between truthful and inaccurate statements could become a horrible force for the suppression of freedom of thought, expression, and action. A great deal would depend on what your society chose to criminalize. “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of a society dedicated to the democratic reform of the Solarian League?” “Do you now, or have you ever, opposed the genocidal policies of Our Glorious Leader?” The problem with most of the models which could lead to that suppression of freedom of thought, expression, and action is that treecats would refuse to help enforce them. The very nature of treecats’ communication and understanding of one another would make such societies anathema to them, and treecats are very direct personalities. It might be possible possible to find some way to compel them to cooperate with interrogators in such a society, but it would be very, very, very very difficult, and the coercion involved would almost certainly turn around and bite the coercer on the posterior.

Honorverse

How does missile telemetry and guidance work? (Asked Thu Aug 18, 2011)

January 2014

Honorverse Honorverse

January 2014 January 2014

Missile-to-missile communication is a bear for impeller drive missiles under power. Their own impeller wedges — and those of their fellow missiles — cut enormous holes in transmission paths, making it very difficult for missiles anywhere except in very close proximity to one another (and very closely coordinating their maneuvers) to “talk to each other” on the sort of basis which would let them keep track of that kind of detailed positional information. One reason the Apollo control muscles follow behind the missiles they are controlling it so that they can maintain a line of sight to the missiles under their command by remaining in their “impeller shadow,” which simultaneously protects them from enemy interception and allows them to communicate with their flocks through the kilts of the attack missiles’ wedges.

I may not have made it sufficiently clear, but the telemetry link between an outgoing missile (especially an outgoing SDM) and the ship that launched it is not a continuous, unbroken two-way stream of data. The ship and the missile both know what the missile’s maneuvers are going to be. If one of those maneuvers turns the missile’s transceiver away from its mothership, both it and the ship know when the ship will be able to re-acquire signal. That “window” on the dedicated channel for that missile is completely predictable and, just as importantly, that window is independent of the window for any other missile in that salvo or any other salvo fired by that ship. What that means is that the other missiles in the flight, broadside, salvo,or avalanche don’t have to worry about communicating with each other; they only have to worry about communicating with the mothership, which puts the data from all the distributed sensor nodes represented by its missiles together into a single, cohesive model of the target. Because it knows precisely where each of its missiles are, it can then steer them into the best attack positions without the missiles themselves needing to know a single thing about any other missile in the attack wave. In other words, in an ideal attack situation, even when the missiles “steady down” on their final attack runs, they wouldn’t have to share information with each other because that information has been shared for them. And because the launching ship’s conversation with each missile is “private,” there was no point in the attack missiles’ combined flight profile when they had to maneuver into attitudes which would allow them to communicate with one another , depriving their target of any opportunity to analyze their flight paths in order to improve counter missile and point defense solutions.

Now, the problem with this ideal attack model has always been the lightspeed limit on the telemetry link, and I’ve never meant to imply that the missiles themselves never go into information-sharing mode independent of the firing ship. That, in fact, is precisely what happens when the firing ship cuts its telemetry links because the range is so great that transmission delay is imposing penalties which outweigh its advantages. When that happens, the missiles go on to a “canned” attack profile and continue their individual attack paths completely independent of one another. The launching ship knows exactly what that profile is, however, which means that it also knows where every “independently targeted” missile is going to be at the instant that they enter that “final run” stage of the attack. With that information, it arranges for them to so position themselves as to give them the best shot at communicating before the attack. What they’re actually doing in that very fleeting time window, however, isn’t trying to find the target. They already know what their target zone is; what they’re doing is checking to see who’s been killed on the way in and redistributing firing assignments amongst the survivors in order to cover their target zone as effectively as possible. The shipboard control which has gotten them to that point actually has a far better picture of where their target can be then they could determine in the very brief time window they have, so they aren’t so much attempting to aim as they are to cover the target they’ve already been aimed at with the greatest density of fire the surviving laser heads will permit.

There’s an inevitable loss in accuracy because the telemetry link which was feeding them their target’s location has been lost. In addition, however, one of the tools of missile defense is to analyze the flight profiles of incoming salvos in order to spot that “handshaking” moment when the attack missiles “talk to each other” before firing. One of the reasons point defense gets more effective in the innermost zone is that there’s a higher percentage chance of predicting the positions of missiles in the moment that they hold that last data exchange if the defenders have had more time to analyze their flight profiles and the missiles have waited to a closer range to roll into one another’s transmission paths. Analysis of relative wedge positions can provide the defenders with a pretty darned good, constantly evolving solution for how the missiles in question have to position themselves in order to get good transmission paths.

Remember that the first time Giscard ever saw MDMs at Lovat, the “clumping” of the incoming fire puzzled him. Standard missile doctrine spreads the attack missiles as broadly as possible, maneuvering them independently towards their targets in order to make them as difficult as possible to lock up and to make prediction of possible transmission paths equally difficult. Tethering the Mark 23s to the Apollo missiles actually makes their positions easier to plot and to predict, which ought to make them even more vulnerable to interception, which is one reason the unusual flight profile puzzled Giscard. The problem for the defender is that because the ship controlling the Mark 23s is looking at its tactical model built on the input from every single attack missile , it’s in a far better position to “thread the needle” on its way in and to utilize the penetration aid platforms seeded into the salvo much more effectively than ever before. Moreover, the ships themselves are in a datasharing network, which means that the combat environment model of the ship directing/controlling any given salvo of Apollo-controlled missiles has the advantage of shared input from every single ship in its formation . What that means is that, at least in theory, a single SD(P) controlling its own missile salvo has the tactical input from every single one of the (probably) thousands of missiles which its wall has fired. And, finally, Apollo has the advantage of real-time telemetry, allowing it to use all of that data effectively, out to an effective range no one else can possibly match.

The sensor capability of any given missile is very, very limited compared to the EW environment, the complexity of the maneuvering environment, and the extremely short time in which the sensors are going to have a look at the target ship as opposed to the target ship’s wedge . The sensor capability of ten or twelve thousand missiles, shared in real time, is quite another kettle of fish, and it is the ability to combine and manage that much data which really accounts for Apollo’s devastating accuracy. The probability of a hit by any given Apollo laser head is enormously higher than for any other missile out there. In fact, even now, the Manties are still in the process of coming to terms with just how much that probability has been increased.

decor

Missile-to-missile communication is a bear for impeller drive missiles under power. Their own impeller wedges — and those of their fellow missiles — cut enormous holes in transmission paths, making it very difficult for missiles anywhere except in very close proximity to one another (and very closely coordinating their maneuvers) to “talk to each other” on the sort of basis which would let them keep track of that kind of detailed positional information. One reason the Apollo control muscles follow behind the missiles they are controlling it so that they can maintain a line of sight to the missiles under their command by remaining in their “impeller shadow,” which simultaneously protects them from enemy interception and allows them to communicate with their flocks through the kilts of the attack missiles’ wedges.

I may not have made it sufficiently clear, but the telemetry link between an outgoing missile (especially an outgoing SDM) and the ship that launched it is not a continuous, unbroken two-way stream of data. The ship and the missile both know what the missile’s maneuvers are going to be. If one of those maneuvers turns the missile’s transceiver away from its mothership, both it and the ship know when the ship will be able to re-acquire signal. That “window” on the dedicated channel for that missile is completely predictable and, just as importantly, that window is independent of the window for any other missile in that salvo or any other salvo fired by that ship. What that means is that the other missiles in the flight, broadside, salvo,or avalanche don’t have to worry about communicating with each other; they only have to worry about communicating with the mothership, which puts the data from all the distributed sensor nodes represented by its missiles together into a single, cohesive model of the target. Because it knows precisely where each of its missiles are, it can then steer them into the best attack positions without the missiles themselves needing to know a single thing about any other missile in the attack wave. In other words, in an ideal attack situation, even when the missiles “steady down” on their final attack runs, they wouldn’t have to share information with each other because that information has been shared for them. And because the launching ship’s conversation with each missile is “private,” there was no point in the attack missiles’ combined flight profile when they had to maneuver into attitudes which would allow them to communicate with one another , depriving their target of any opportunity to analyze their flight paths in order to improve counter missile and point defense solutions.

Now, the problem with this ideal attack model has always been the lightspeed limit on the telemetry link, and I’ve never meant to imply that the missiles themselves never go into information-sharing mode independent of the firing ship. That, in fact, is precisely what happens when the firing ship cuts its telemetry links because the range is so great that transmission delay is imposing penalties which outweigh its advantages. When that happens, the missiles go on to a “canned” attack profile and continue their individual attack paths completely independent of one another. The launching ship knows exactly what that profile is, however, which means that it also knows where every “independently targeted” missile is going to be at the instant that they enter that “final run” stage of the attack. With that information, it arranges for them to so position themselves as to give them the best shot at communicating before the attack. What they’re actually doing in that very fleeting time window, however, isn’t trying to find the target. They already know what their target zone is; what they’re doing is checking to see who’s been killed on the way in and redistributing firing assignments amongst the survivors in order to cover their target zone as effectively as possible. The shipboard control which has gotten them to that point actually has a far better picture of where their target can be then they could determine in the very brief time window they have, so they aren’t so much attempting to aim as they are to cover the target they’ve already been aimed at with the greatest density of fire the surviving laser heads will permit.

There’s an inevitable loss in accuracy because the telemetry link which was feeding them their target’s location has been lost. In addition, however, one of the tools of missile defense is to analyze the flight profiles of incoming salvos in order to spot that “handshaking” moment when the attack missiles “talk to each other” before firing. One of the reasons point defense gets more effective in the innermost zone is that there’s a higher percentage chance of predicting the positions of missiles in the moment that they hold that last data exchange if the defenders have had more time to analyze their flight profiles and the missiles have waited to a closer range to roll into one another’s transmission paths. Analysis of relative wedge positions can provide the defenders with a pretty darned good, constantly evolving solution for how the missiles in question have to position themselves in order to get good transmission paths.

Remember that the first time Giscard ever saw MDMs at Lovat, the “clumping” of the incoming fire puzzled him. Standard missile doctrine spreads the attack missiles as broadly as possible, maneuvering them independently towards their targets in order to make them as difficult as possible to lock up and to make prediction of possible transmission paths equally difficult. Tethering the Mark 23s to the Apollo missiles actually makes their positions easier to plot and to predict, which ought to make them even more vulnerable to interception, which is one reason the unusual flight profile puzzled Giscard. The problem for the defender is that because the ship controlling the Mark 23s is looking at its tactical model built on the input from every single attack missile , it’s in a far better position to “thread the needle” on its way in and to utilize the penetration aid platforms seeded into the salvo much more effectively than ever before. Moreover, the ships themselves are in a datasharing network, which means that the combat environment model of the ship directing/controlling any given salvo of Apollo-controlled missiles has the advantage of shared input from every single ship in its formation . What that means is that, at least in theory, a single SD(P) controlling its own missile salvo has the tactical input from every single one of the (probably) thousands of missiles which its wall has fired. And, finally, Apollo has the advantage of real-time telemetry, allowing it to use all of that data effectively, out to an effective range no one else can possibly match.

The sensor capability of any given missile is very, very limited compared to the EW environment, the complexity of the maneuvering environment, and the extremely short time in which the sensors are going to have a look at the target ship as opposed to the target ship’s wedge . The sensor capability of ten or twelve thousand missiles, shared in real time, is quite another kettle of fish, and it is the ability to combine and manage that much data which really accounts for Apollo’s devastating accuracy. The probability of a hit by any given Apollo laser head is enormously higher than for any other missile out there. In fact, even now, the Manties are still in the process of coming to terms with just how much that probability has been increased. Missile-to-missile communication is a bear for impeller drive missiles under power. Their own impeller wedges — and those of their fellow missiles — cut enormous holes in transmission paths, making it very difficult for missiles anywhere except in very close proximity to one another (and very closely coordinating their maneuvers) to “talk to each other” on the sort of basis which would let them keep track of that kind of detailed positional information. One reason the Apollo control muscles follow behind the missiles they are controlling it so that they can maintain a line of sight to the missiles under their command by remaining in their “impeller shadow,” which simultaneously protects them from enemy interception and allows them to communicate with their flocks through the kilts of the attack missiles’ wedges.

I may not have made it sufficiently clear, but the telemetry link between an outgoing missile (especially an outgoing SDM) and the ship that launched it is not a continuous, unbroken two-way stream of data. The ship and the missile both know what the missile’s maneuvers are going to be. If one of those maneuvers turns the missile’s transceiver away from its mothership, both it and the ship know when the ship will be able to re-acquire signal. That “window” on the dedicated channel for that missile is completely predictable and, just as importantly, that window is independent of the window for any other missile in that salvo or any other salvo fired by that ship. What that means is that the other missiles in the flight, broadside, salvo,or avalanche don’t have to worry about communicating with each other; they only have to worry about communicating with the mothership, which puts the data from all the distributed sensor nodes represented by its missiles together into a single, cohesive model of the target. Because it knows precisely where each of its missiles are, it can then steer them into the best attack positions without the missiles themselves needing to know a single thing about any other missile in the attack wave. In other words, in an ideal attack situation, even when the missiles “steady down” on their final attack runs, they wouldn’t have to share information with each other because that information has been shared for them. And because the launching ship’s conversation with each missile is “private,” there was no point in the attack missiles’ combined flight profile when they had to maneuver into attitudes which would allow them to communicate with one another , depriving their target of any opportunity to analyze their flight paths in order to improve counter missile and point defense solutions.

Now, the problem with this ideal attack model has always been the lightspeed limit on the telemetry link, and I’ve never meant to imply that the missiles themselves never go into information-sharing mode independent of the firing ship. That, in fact, is precisely what happens when the firing ship cuts its telemetry links because the range is so great that transmission delay is imposing penalties which outweigh its advantages. When that happens, the missiles go on to a “canned” attack profile and continue their individual attack paths completely independent of one another. The launching ship knows exactly what that profile is, however, which means that it also knows where every “independently targeted” missile is going to be at the instant that they enter that “final run” stage of the attack. With that information, it arranges for them to so position themselves as to give them the best shot at communicating before the attack. What they’re actually doing in that very fleeting time window, however, isn’t trying to find the target. They already know what their target zone is; what they’re doing is checking to see who’s been killed on the way in and redistributing firing assignments amongst the survivors in order to cover their target zone as effectively as possible. The shipboard control which has gotten them to that point actually has a far better picture of where their target can be then they could determine in the very brief time window they have, so they aren’t so much attempting to aim as they are to cover the target they’ve already been aimed at with the greatest density of fire the surviving laser heads will permit.

There’s an inevitable loss in accuracy because the telemetry link which was feeding them their target’s location has been lost. In addition, however, one of the tools of missile defense is to analyze the flight profiles of incoming salvos in order to spot that “handshaking” moment when the attack missiles “talk to each other” before firing. One of the reasons point defense gets more effective in the innermost zone is that there’s a higher percentage chance of predicting the positions of missiles in the moment that they hold that last data exchange if the defenders have had more time to analyze their flight profiles and the missiles have waited to a closer range to roll into one another’s transmission paths. Analysis of relative wedge positions can provide the defenders with a pretty darned good, constantly evolving solution for how the missiles in question have to position themselves in order to get good transmission paths.

Remember that the first time Giscard ever saw MDMs at Lovat, the “clumping” of the incoming fire puzzled him. Standard missile doctrine spreads the attack missiles as broadly as possible, maneuvering them independently towards their targets in order to make them as difficult as possible to lock up and to make prediction of possible transmission paths equally difficult. Tethering the Mark 23s to the Apollo missiles actually makes their positions easier to plot and to predict, which ought to make them even more vulnerable to interception, which is one reason the unusual flight profile puzzled Giscard. The problem for the defender is that because the ship controlling the Mark 23s is looking at its tactical model built on the input from every single attack missile , it’s in a far better position to “thread the needle” on its way in and to utilize the penetration aid platforms seeded into the salvo much more effectively than ever before. Moreover, the ships themselves are in a datasharing network, which means that the combat environment model of the ship directing/controlling any given salvo of Apollo-controlled missiles has the advantage of shared input from every single ship in its formation . What that means is that, at least in theory, a single SD(P) controlling its own missile salvo has the tactical input from every single one of the (probably) thousands of missiles which its wall has fired. And, finally, Apollo has the advantage of real-time telemetry, allowing it to use all of that data effectively, out to an effective range no one else can possibly match.

The sensor capability of any given missile is very, very limited compared to the EW environment, the complexity of the maneuvering environment, and the extremely short time in which the sensors are going to have a look at the target ship as opposed to the target ship’s wedge . The sensor capability of ten or twelve thousand missiles, shared in real time, is quite another kettle of fish, and it is the ability to combine and manage that much data which really accounts for Apollo’s devastating accuracy. The probability of a hit by any given Apollo laser head is enormously higher than for any other missile out there. In fact, even now, the Manties are still in the process of coming to terms with just how much that probability has been increased. Missile-to-missile communication is a bear for impeller drive missiles under power. Their own impeller wedges — and those of their fellow missiles — cut enormous holes in transmission paths, making it very difficult for missiles anywhere except in very close proximity to one another (and very closely coordinating their maneuvers) to “talk to each other” on the sort of basis which would let them keep track of that kind of detailed positional information. One reason the Apollo control muscles follow behind the missiles they are controlling it so that they can maintain a line of sight to the missiles under their command by remaining in their “impeller shadow,” which simultaneously protects them from enemy interception and allows them to communicate with their flocks through the kilts of the attack missiles’ wedges.

I may not have made it sufficiently clear, but the telemetry link between an outgoing missile (especially an outgoing SDM) and the ship that launched it is not a continuous, unbroken two-way stream of data. The ship and the missile both know what the missile’s maneuvers are going to be. If one of those maneuvers turns the missile’s transceiver away from its mothership, both it and the ship know when the ship will be able to re-acquire signal. That “window” on the dedicated channel for that missile is completely predictable and, just as importantly, that window is independent of the window for any other missile in that salvo or any other salvo fired by that ship. What that means is that the other missiles in the flight, broadside, salvo,or avalanche don’t have to worry about communicating with each other; they only have to worry about communicating with the mothership, which puts the data from all the distributed sensor nodes represented by its missiles together into a single, cohesive model of the target. Because it knows precisely where each of its missiles are, it can then steer them into the best attack positions without the missiles themselves needing to know a single thing about any other missile in the attack wave. In other words, in an ideal attack situation, even when the missiles “steady down” on their final attack runs, they wouldn’t have to share information with each other because that information has been shared for them. And because the launching ship’s conversation with each missile is “private,” there was no point in the attack missiles’ combined flight profile when they had to maneuver into attitudes which would allow them to communicate with one another , depriving their target of any opportunity to analyze their flight paths in order to improve counter missile and point defense solutions.

Now, the problem with this ideal attack model has always been the lightspeed limit on the telemetry link, and I’ve never meant to imply that the missiles themselves never go into information-sharing mode independent of the firing ship. That, in fact, is precisely what happens when the firing ship cuts its telemetry links because the range is so great that transmission delay is imposing penalties which outweigh its advantages. When that happens, the missiles go on to a “canned” attack profile and continue their individual attack paths completely independent of one another. The launching ship knows exactly what that profile is, however, which means that it also knows where every “independently targeted” missile is going to be at the instant that they enter that “final run” stage of the attack. With that information, it arranges for them to so position themselves as to give them the best shot at communicating before the attack. What they’re actually doing in that very fleeting time window, however, isn’t trying to find the target. They already know what their target zone is; what they’re doing is checking to see who’s been killed on the way in and redistributing firing assignments amongst the survivors in order to cover their target zone as effectively as possible. The shipboard control which has gotten them to that point actually has a far better picture of where their target can be then they could determine in the very brief time window they have, so they aren’t so much attempting to aim as they are to cover the target they’ve already been aimed at with the greatest density of fire the surviving laser heads will permit.

There’s an inevitable loss in accuracy because the telemetry link which was feeding them their target’s location has been lost. In addition, however, one of the tools of missile defense is to analyze the flight profiles of incoming salvos in order to spot that “handshaking” moment when the attack missiles “talk to each other” before firing. One of the reasons point defense gets more effective in the innermost zone is that there’s a higher percentage chance of predicting the positions of missiles in the moment that they hold that last data exchange if the defenders have had more time to analyze their flight profiles and the missiles have waited to a closer range to roll into one another’s transmission paths. Analysis of relative wedge positions can provide the defenders with a pretty darned good, constantly evolving solution for how the missiles in question have to position themselves in order to get good transmission paths.

Remember that the first time Giscard ever saw MDMs at Lovat, the “clumping” of the incoming fire puzzled him. Standard missile doctrine spreads the attack missiles as broadly as possible, maneuvering them independently towards their targets in order to make them as difficult as possible to lock up and to make prediction of possible transmission paths equally difficult. Tethering the Mark 23s to the Apollo missiles actually makes their positions easier to plot and to predict, which ought to make them even more vulnerable to interception, which is one reason the unusual flight profile puzzled Giscard. The problem for the defender is that because the ship controlling the Mark 23s is looking at its tactical model built on the input from every single attack missile , it’s in a far better position to “thread the needle” on its way in and to utilize the penetration aid platforms seeded into the salvo much more effectively than ever before. Moreover, the ships themselves are in a datasharing network, which means that the combat environment model of the ship directing/controlling any given salvo of Apollo-controlled missiles has the advantage of shared input from every single ship in its formation . What that means is that, at least in theory, a single SD(P) controlling its own missile salvo has the tactical input from every single one of the (probably) thousands of missiles which its wall has fired. And, finally, Apollo has the advantage of real-time telemetry, allowing it to use all of that data effectively, out to an effective range no one else can possibly match.

The sensor capability of any given missile is very, very limited compared to the EW environment, the complexity of the maneuvering environment, and the extremely short time in which the sensors are going to have a look at the target ship as opposed to the target ship’s wedge . The sensor capability of ten or twelve thousand missiles, shared in real time, is quite another kettle of fish, and it is the ability to combine and manage that much data which really accounts for Apollo’s devastating accuracy. The probability of a hit by any given Apollo laser head is enormously higher than for any other missile out there. In fact, even now, the Manties are still in the process of coming to terms with just how much that probability has been increased. Missile-to-missile communication is a bear for impeller drive missiles under power. Their own impeller wedges — and those of their fellow missiles — cut enormous holes in transmission paths, making it very difficult for missiles anywhere except in very close proximity to one another (and very closely coordinating their maneuvers) to “talk to each other” on the sort of basis which would let them keep track of that kind of detailed positional information. One reason the Apollo control muscles follow behind behind the missiles they are controlling it so that they can maintain a line of sight to the missiles under their command by remaining in their “impeller shadow,” which simultaneously protects them from enemy interception and allows them to communicate with their flocks through the kilts of the attack missiles’ wedges.

I may not have made it sufficiently clear, but the telemetry link between an outgoing missile (especially an outgoing SDM) and the ship that launched it is not a continuous, unbroken two-way stream of data. The ship and the missile both know what the missile’s maneuvers are going to be. If one of those maneuvers turns the missile’s transceiver away from its mothership, both it and the ship know when the ship will be able to re-acquire signal. That “window” on the dedicated channel for that missile is completely predictable and, just as importantly, that window is independent independent of the window for any other other missile in that salvo or any other salvo or any other salvo fired by that ship. What that means is that the other missiles in the flight, broadside, salvo,or avalanche don’t have to worry about communicating with each other; they only have to worry about communicating with the mothership, which puts the data from all all the distributed sensor nodes represented by its missiles together into a single, cohesive model of the target. Because it it knows precisely where each of its missiles are, it can then steer them into the best attack positions without the missiles themselves needing to know a single thing about any other missile in the attack wave. In other words, in an ideal attack situation, even when the missiles “steady down” on their final attack runs, they wouldn’t have to share information with each other because that information has been shared for them. And because the launching ship’s conversation with each missile is “private,” there was no point in the attack missiles’ combined flight profile when they had to maneuver into attitudes which would allow them to communicate with one another one another, depriving their target of any opportunity to analyze their flight paths in order to improve counter missile and point defense solutions.

Now, the problem with this ideal attack model has always been the lightspeed limit on the telemetry link, and I’ve never meant to imply that the missiles themselves never never go into information-sharing mode independent of the firing ship. That, in fact, is precisely what happens when the firing ship cuts its telemetry links because the range is so great that transmission delay is imposing penalties which outweigh its advantages. When that happens, the missiles go on to a “canned” attack profile and continue their individual attack paths completely independent of one another. The launching ship knows exactly what that profile is, however, which means that it also knows where every “independently targeted” missile is going to be at the instant that they enter that “final run” stage of the attack. With that information, it arranges for them to so position themselves as to give them the best shot at communicating before the attack. What they’re actually doing in that very fleeting time window, however, isn’t trying to find find the target. They already know what their target zone is; what they’re doing is checking to see who’s been killed on the way in and redistributing firing assignments amongst the survivors in order to cover their target zone as effectively as possible. The shipboard control which has gotten them to that point actually has a far better picture of where their target can be then they could determine in the very brief time window they have, so they aren’t so much attempting to aim aim as they are to cover the target they’ve already been aimed at with the greatest density of fire the surviving laser heads will permit.

There’s an inevitable loss in accuracy because the telemetry link which was feeding them their target’s location has been lost. In addition, however, one of the tools of missile defense is to analyze the flight profiles of incoming salvos in order to spot that “handshaking” moment when the attack missiles “talk to each other” before firing. One of the reasons point defense gets more effective in the innermost zone is that there’s a higher percentage chance of predicting the positions of missiles in the moment that they hold that last data exchange if the defenders have had more time to analyze their flight profiles and the missiles have waited to a closer range to roll into one another’s transmission paths. Analysis of relative wedge positions can provide the defenders with a pretty darned good, constantly evolving solution for how the missiles in question have have to position themselves in order to get good transmission paths.

Remember that the first time Giscard ever saw MDMs at Lovat, the “clumping” of the incoming fire puzzled him. Standard missile doctrine spreads the attack missiles as broadly as possible, maneuvering them independently towards their targets in order to make them as difficult as possible to lock up and to make prediction of possible transmission paths equally difficult. Tethering the Mark 23s to the Apollo missiles actually makes their positions easier to plot and to predict, which ought to make them even more vulnerable to interception, which is one reason the unusual flight profile puzzled Giscard. The problem for the defender is that because the ship controlling the Mark 23s is looking at its tactical model built on the input from every single attack missile every single attack missile, it’s in a far better position to “thread the needle” on its way in and to utilize the penetration aid platforms seeded into the salvo much more effectively than ever before. Moreover, the ships themselves are in a datasharing network, which means that the combat environment model of the ship directing/controlling any given salvo of Apollo-controlled missiles has the advantage of shared input from every single ship in its formation from every single ship in its formation. What that means is that, at least in theory, a single SD(P) controlling its own missile salvo has the tactical input from every single one every single one of the (probably) thousands of missiles which its wall has fired. And, finally, Apollo has the advantage of real-time telemetry, allowing it to use all of that data effectively, out to an effective range no one else can possibly match.

The sensor capability of any given missile is very, very limited compared to the EW environment, the complexity of the maneuvering environment, and the extremely short time in which the sensors are going to have a look at the target ship target ship as opposed to the target ship’s wedge wedge. The sensor capability of ten or twelve thousand thousand missiles, shared in real time, is quite another kettle of fish, and it is the ability to combine and manage that much data which really accounts for Apollo’s devastating accuracy. The probability of a hit by any given Apollo laser head is enormously higher than for any other missile out there. In fact, even now, the Manties are still in the process of coming to terms with just how much that probability has been increased.

Honorverse

Does the Solarian League as presently constituted a government? It seems more like a free trade pact with mutual defense clauses thrown in. (Asked Mon Aug 08, 2011)

January 2014

Honorverse Honorverse

January 2014 January 2014

Okay, I think there’s some confusion over whether or not the Solarian League is actually a “government.” It is. It’s a government which was established for specific purposes, those having to do primarily with the regulation and protection of interstellar trade and the suppression of threats to that trade, plus the creation of a central military sufficiently powerful to depress any temptations towards warlordism on the parts of individual system governments once the Warshawski sail made interstellar war practical once more, but it is a government, and it always has been one.

If you think about it, that protection against threats is actually the primary motivator for the formation of almost any government. The Solarian Constitution was deliberately structured in a way to limit the power of the central government, but that government was clearly visualized as a government from the get-go, or else there wouldn’t have been a legislative body in which every full member system held veto power. The difficulty wasn’t that the League was denied the power to legislate and create laws in the sense of any other government; the difficulty was that since the League was effectively unable to pass meaningful legislation because of that veto power, the government turned to its regulatory authority to “do an end run” around the legislature . . . and then proceeded to continue doing the same thing literally for centuries. At the time of the discovery of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction, the League in already been in existence for centuries, however, and the SKM could see pretty clearly what that implied even before it became an uber economic power in its own right courtesy of the Junction. It didn’t much care for what it was seeing, either.

For the League’s full member systems, political relations with the central government are probably closer to the relations of states in the United States to the federal government prior to the American Civil War — you know, when we actually paid attention to something called the Tenth Amendment? [G] The central government has extraordinarily limited authority to intervene in the local laws and practices of full member systems of the League unless those laws and/or practices are in conflict with the Constitution and the government’s constitutional authority. As a consequence, a citizen of a typical core star system has very little interaction with the League government and a great deal of interaction with his local system government. He doesn’t care what’s going on in Washington, DC, he cares about what’s going on in Sacramento or Albany.

From the outside looking in, however, the policies and practices of the government in Old Chicago are clearly evident, and the Star Kingdom (as of the discovery of the Junction) had been a Verge system. I realize that’s a bit different perspective from my earlier comments about why the Haven Sector is significantly different from other Verge sectors, but I plead the fact that we’re talking about a process of centuries here. When I said that the Star Kingdom and the Republic of Haven hadn’t been Verge systems because of their proximity in terms of travel time to the Old League, that’s been the case for the last two or three centuries prior to the Havenite wars, but it shouldn’t be construed as meaning that it’s been the case for the entire history of the League. It’s been the case during the formative time period of the Haven Sector’s divergence from the Verge norm, and I should have been more careful and precise in how I formulated and expressed my thoughts in that regard when the topic first came up. But at the time that the Manticoran Wormhole Junction was initially discovered, the Star Kingdom had already “enjoyed” three or four hundred years of watching the League in action and seeing the gradual emergence of the Office of Frontier Security from a Verge perspective. In fact, by that time the policies which later led to the rot within the League bureaucracy and the Protectorates was already fairly visible to anyone on the outside who actually looked at the situation. As such, the SKM — which at that time faced no local external threat — saw absolutely no reason to join a government for which it had already developed a distinct distaste.

By the time the People’s Republic did emerge as a political and military threat, the contemporary Star Kingdom — particularly as the greatest “maritime” power in the explored galaxy — had directly experienced all too much of the reality of the “noble” Solarian League’s policies. As a consequence, it would be difficult to exaggerate the negativity of the late nineteenth century Manty-in-the-street’s distaste for the League. The notion of a voluntary association with the League would have been — at best — a bitterly divisive political issue within King Roger’s Star Kingdom, and the threatened loss of system revenues once the League government started collecting the “user fees” on the Wormhole Junction (which it would have been entitled to do, technically at least, under the League’s constitution) would have been seized upon by opponents to any such association during the domestic political debate over it.

During the Cold War, there was a vocal European opinion group which held that there was actually very little to choose between the Soviet Union and the United States. I suspect that if the members of that group had been forced to choose between becoming citizens of the Soviet Union or of the United States — that is, they’d literally had no choice but to do one or the other — a majority of them would have decided that the USA was a better (or at least, less bad) choice than the USSR. Do you really think, though, that, say France, would have opted to submerge itself in the government of the United States of America, rather than investing in its own military, if confronted by an aggressive and expansionist Germany? France might have sought a military alliance with the US against Germany (seems to me we actually did that a time or two), but it wouldn’t have surrendered its sovereignty to the United States, and rightfully so. The political relationship Washington and Paris has been rocky enough from time to time, but the degree of antipathy between them even at their worst pales in comparison to the antipathy between the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the Solarian League as a whole. That’s why I made the point about the difference between the Manties’ attitude towards Beowulfans and Sollies .

As for the difference between internal and external trade tariffs, there really isn’t one as far as the League is concerned. The League is a great believer in “free trade,” and “tariffs” in the sense in which they exist in our own experience aren’t really part of the League’s system. They aren’t designed to protect the League’s economy from imports, since the League is much more concerned with exports from the most productive (in absolute terms, at least) economy in the galaxy. They are, rather, transactional fees which go into the central government’s coffers. As such, Manticoran exporters really wouldn’t save anything by virtue of membership in the League, but the Manticoran merchant marine would have found itself paying substantial fees (it would never do to call them “taxes,” of course!) which the League automatically levies on its own merchant vessels. (That, by the way, is another reason for the size and power of the Manticoran merchant marine; the additional, government-imposed overhead on Solarian registry vessels is a primary driver in Solly shippers’ preference for leasing Manticoran ships rather than owning their own.)

The probable immediate economic cost to Manticore in dollars and cents probably would have been lower than the cost of King Roger’s build up, although it should be borne in mind that the increase under King Roger was far less costly than even the prewar budgets under Elizabeth. That is, it was a peacetime budgetary increase, probably something like the Reagan Administration’s defense spending increases with a moderate dose of steroids, nothing like defense spending under Eisenhower or Kennedy and not remotely like defense spending under FDR. The long-term, systemic expenses to the Star Kingdom would have been far greater than anything it saved in the short term, however. (Note that we’re speaking here about the cost of the military buildup, not about the cost of an actual war that League membership might have averted. I throw that in because I’m sure one of you would be simply delighted to mention it if I didn’t at least take cognizance of it in passing. [G]) When you combine that long-term systemic cost with the Manticoran sense of “national identity” and deep-seated distaste for the Solarian League, the chance that any Manticoran government would ever have asked for League membership — even as a full member system — would have to be virtually nonexistent. That might have changed in the face of a truly desperate military situation when something like Churchill’s 1940 proposal of joint citizenship for the citizens of Great Britain and France might have offered salvation in the face of actual Havenite conquest, but it would have been a complete nonstarter in the face of any prospect less dismal than that.

Or that’s the way it seems to me, at any rate, but what do I know? 😉

decor

Okay, I think there’s some confusion over whether or not the Solarian League is actually a “government.” It is. It’s a government which was established for specific purposes, those having to do primarily with the regulation and protection of interstellar trade and the suppression of threats to that trade, plus the creation of a central military sufficiently powerful to depress any temptations towards warlordism on the parts of individual system governments once the Warshawski sail made interstellar war practical once more, but it is a government, and it always has been one.

If you think about it, that protection against threats is actually the primary motivator for the formation of almost any government. The Solarian Constitution was deliberately structured in a way to limit the power of the central government, but that government was clearly visualized as a government from the get-go, or else there wouldn’t have been a legislative body in which every full member system held veto power. The difficulty wasn’t that the League was denied the power to legislate and create laws in the sense of any other government; the difficulty was that since the League was effectively unable to pass meaningful legislation because of that veto power, the government turned to its regulatory authority to “do an end run” around the legislature . . . and then proceeded to continue doing the same thing literally for centuries. At the time of the discovery of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction, the League in already been in existence for centuries, however, and the SKM could see pretty clearly what that implied even before it became an uber economic power in its own right courtesy of the Junction. It didn’t much care for what it was seeing, either.

For the League’s full member systems, political relations with the central government are probably closer to the relations of states in the United States to the federal government prior to the American Civil War — you know, when we actually paid attention to something called the Tenth Amendment? [G] The central government has extraordinarily limited authority to intervene in the local laws and practices of full member systems of the League unless those laws and/or practices are in conflict with the Constitution and the government’s constitutional authority. As a consequence, a citizen of a typical core star system has very little interaction with the League government and a great deal of interaction with his local system government. He doesn’t care what’s going on in Washington, DC, he cares about what’s going on in Sacramento or Albany.

From the outside looking in, however, the policies and practices of the government in Old Chicago are clearly evident, and the Star Kingdom (as of the discovery of the Junction) had been a Verge system. I realize that’s a bit different perspective from my earlier comments about why the Haven Sector is significantly different from other Verge sectors, but I plead the fact that we’re talking about a process of centuries here. When I said that the Star Kingdom and the Republic of Haven hadn’t been Verge systems because of their proximity in terms of travel time to the Old League, that’s been the case for the last two or three centuries prior to the Havenite wars, but it shouldn’t be construed as meaning that it’s been the case for the entire history of the League. It’s been the case during the formative time period of the Haven Sector’s divergence from the Verge norm, and I should have been more careful and precise in how I formulated and expressed my thoughts in that regard when the topic first came up. But at the time that the Manticoran Wormhole Junction was initially discovered, the Star Kingdom had already “enjoyed” three or four hundred years of watching the League in action and seeing the gradual emergence of the Office of Frontier Security from a Verge perspective. In fact, by that time the policies which later led to the rot within the League bureaucracy and the Protectorates was already fairly visible to anyone on the outside who actually looked at the situation. As such, the SKM — which at that time faced no local external threat — saw absolutely no reason to join a government for which it had already developed a distinct distaste.

By the time the People’s Republic did emerge as a political and military threat, the contemporary Star Kingdom — particularly as the greatest “maritime” power in the explored galaxy — had directly experienced all too much of the reality of the “noble” Solarian League’s policies. As a consequence, it would be difficult to exaggerate the negativity of the late nineteenth century Manty-in-the-street’s distaste for the League. The notion of a voluntary association with the League would have been — at best — a bitterly divisive political issue within King Roger’s Star Kingdom, and the threatened loss of system revenues once the League government started collecting the “user fees” on the Wormhole Junction (which it would have been entitled to do, technically at least, under the League’s constitution) would have been seized upon by opponents to any such association during the domestic political debate over it.

During the Cold War, there was a vocal European opinion group which held that there was actually very little to choose between the Soviet Union and the United States. I suspect that if the members of that group had been forced to choose between becoming citizens of the Soviet Union or of the United States — that is, they’d literally had no choice but to do one or the other — a majority of them would have decided that the USA was a better (or at least, less bad) choice than the USSR. Do you really think, though, that, say France, would have opted to submerge itself in the government of the United States of America, rather than investing in its own military, if confronted by an aggressive and expansionist Germany? France might have sought a military alliance with the US against Germany (seems to me we actually did that a time or two), but it wouldn’t have surrendered its sovereignty to the United States, and rightfully so. The political relationship Washington and Paris has been rocky enough from time to time, but the degree of antipathy between them even at their worst pales in comparison to the antipathy between the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the Solarian League as a whole. That’s why I made the point about the difference between the Manties’ attitude towards Beowulfans and Sollies .

As for the difference between internal and external trade tariffs, there really isn’t one as far as the League is concerned. The League is a great believer in “free trade,” and “tariffs” in the sense in which they exist in our own experience aren’t really part of the League’s system. They aren’t designed to protect the League’s economy from imports, since the League is much more concerned with exports from the most productive (in absolute terms, at least) economy in the galaxy. They are, rather, transactional fees which go into the central government’s coffers. As such, Manticoran exporters really wouldn’t save anything by virtue of membership in the League, but the Manticoran merchant marine would have found itself paying substantial fees (it would never do to call them “taxes,” of course!) which the League automatically levies on its own merchant vessels. (That, by the way, is another reason for the size and power of the Manticoran merchant marine; the additional, government-imposed overhead on Solarian registry vessels is a primary driver in Solly shippers’ preference for leasing Manticoran ships rather than owning their own.)

The probable immediate economic cost to Manticore in dollars and cents probably would have been lower than the cost of King Roger’s build up, although it should be borne in mind that the increase under King Roger was far less costly than even the prewar budgets under Elizabeth. That is, it was a peacetime budgetary increase, probably something like the Reagan Administration’s defense spending increases with a moderate dose of steroids, nothing like defense spending under Eisenhower or Kennedy and not remotely like defense spending under FDR. The long-term, systemic expenses to the Star Kingdom would have been far greater than anything it saved in the short term, however. (Note that we’re speaking here about the cost of the military buildup, not about the cost of an actual war that League membership might have averted. I throw that in because I’m sure one of you would be simply delighted to mention it if I didn’t at least take cognizance of it in passing. [G]) When you combine that long-term systemic cost with the Manticoran sense of “national identity” and deep-seated distaste for the Solarian League, the chance that any Manticoran government would ever have asked for League membership — even as a full member system — would have to be virtually nonexistent. That might have changed in the face of a truly desperate military situation when something like Churchill’s 1940 proposal of joint citizenship for the citizens of Great Britain and France might have offered salvation in the face of actual Havenite conquest, but it would have been a complete nonstarter in the face of any prospect less dismal than that.

Or that’s the way it seems to me, at any rate, but what do I know? 😉 Okay, I think there’s some confusion over whether or not the Solarian League is actually a “government.” It is. It’s a government which was established for specific purposes, those having to do primarily with the regulation and protection of interstellar trade and the suppression of threats to that trade, plus the creation of a central military sufficiently powerful to depress any temptations towards warlordism on the parts of individual system governments once the Warshawski sail made interstellar war practical once more, but it is a government, and it always has been one.

If you think about it, that protection against threats is actually the primary motivator for the formation of almost any government. The Solarian Constitution was deliberately structured in a way to limit the power of the central government, but that government was clearly visualized as a government from the get-go, or else there wouldn’t have been a legislative body in which every full member system held veto power. The difficulty wasn’t that the League was denied the power to legislate and create laws in the sense of any other government; the difficulty was that since the League was effectively unable to pass meaningful legislation because of that veto power, the government turned to its regulatory authority to “do an end run” around the legislature . . . and then proceeded to continue doing the same thing literally for centuries. At the time of the discovery of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction, the League in already been in existence for centuries, however, and the SKM could see pretty clearly what that implied even before it became an uber economic power in its own right courtesy of the Junction. It didn’t much care for what it was seeing, either.

For the League’s full member systems, political relations with the central government are probably closer to the relations of states in the United States to the federal government prior to the American Civil War — you know, when we actually paid attention to something called the Tenth Amendment? [G] The central government has extraordinarily limited authority to intervene in the local laws and practices of full member systems of the League unless those laws and/or practices are in conflict with the Constitution and the government’s constitutional authority. As a consequence, a citizen of a typical core star system has very little interaction with the League government and a great deal of interaction with his local system government. He doesn’t care what’s going on in Washington, DC, he cares about what’s going on in Sacramento or Albany.

From the outside looking in, however, the policies and practices of the government in Old Chicago are clearly evident, and the Star Kingdom (as of the discovery of the Junction) had been a Verge system. I realize that’s a bit different perspective from my earlier comments about why the Haven Sector is significantly different from other Verge sectors, but I plead the fact that we’re talking about a process of centuries here. When I said that the Star Kingdom and the Republic of Haven hadn’t been Verge systems because of their proximity in terms of travel time to the Old League, that’s been the case for the last two or three centuries prior to the Havenite wars, but it shouldn’t be construed as meaning that it’s been the case for the entire history of the League. It’s been the case during the formative time period of the Haven Sector’s divergence from the Verge norm, and I should have been more careful and precise in how I formulated and expressed my thoughts in that regard when the topic first came up. But at the time that the Manticoran Wormhole Junction was initially discovered, the Star Kingdom had already “enjoyed” three or four hundred years of watching the League in action and seeing the gradual emergence of the Office of Frontier Security from a Verge perspective. In fact, by that time the policies which later led to the rot within the League bureaucracy and the Protectorates was already fairly visible to anyone on the outside who actually looked at the situation. As such, the SKM — which at that time faced no local external threat — saw absolutely no reason to join a government for which it had already developed a distinct distaste.

By the time the People’s Republic did emerge as a political and military threat, the contemporary Star Kingdom — particularly as the greatest “maritime” power in the explored galaxy — had directly experienced all too much of the reality of the “noble” Solarian League’s policies. As a consequence, it would be difficult to exaggerate the negativity of the late nineteenth century Manty-in-the-street’s distaste for the League. The notion of a voluntary association with the League would have been — at best — a bitterly divisive political issue within King Roger’s Star Kingdom, and the threatened loss of system revenues once the League government started collecting the “user fees” on the Wormhole Junction (which it would have been entitled to do, technically at least, under the League’s constitution) would have been seized upon by opponents to any such association during the domestic political debate over it.

During the Cold War, there was a vocal European opinion group which held that there was actually very little to choose between the Soviet Union and the United States. I suspect that if the members of that group had been forced to choose between becoming citizens of the Soviet Union or of the United States — that is, they’d literally had no choice but to do one or the other — a majority of them would have decided that the USA was a better (or at least, less bad) choice than the USSR. Do you really think, though, that, say France, would have opted to submerge itself in the government of the United States of America, rather than investing in its own military, if confronted by an aggressive and expansionist Germany? France might have sought a military alliance with the US against Germany (seems to me we actually did that a time or two), but it wouldn’t have surrendered its sovereignty to the United States, and rightfully so. The political relationship Washington and Paris has been rocky enough from time to time, but the degree of antipathy between them even at their worst pales in comparison to the antipathy between the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the Solarian League as a whole. That’s why I made the point about the difference between the Manties’ attitude towards Beowulfans and Sollies .

As for the difference between internal and external trade tariffs, there really isn’t one as far as the League is concerned. The League is a great believer in “free trade,” and “tariffs” in the sense in which they exist in our own experience aren’t really part of the League’s system. They aren’t designed to protect the League’s economy from imports, since the League is much more concerned with exports from the most productive (in absolute terms, at least) economy in the galaxy. They are, rather, transactional fees which go into the central government’s coffers. As such, Manticoran exporters really wouldn’t save anything by virtue of membership in the League, but the Manticoran merchant marine would have found itself paying substantial fees (it would never do to call them “taxes,” of course!) which the League automatically levies on its own merchant vessels. (That, by the way, is another reason for the size and power of the Manticoran merchant marine; the additional, government-imposed overhead on Solarian registry vessels is a primary driver in Solly shippers’ preference for leasing Manticoran ships rather than owning their own.)

The probable immediate economic cost to Manticore in dollars and cents probably would have been lower than the cost of King Roger’s build up, although it should be borne in mind that the increase under King Roger was far less costly than even the prewar budgets under Elizabeth. That is, it was a peacetime budgetary increase, probably something like the Reagan Administration’s defense spending increases with a moderate dose of steroids, nothing like defense spending under Eisenhower or Kennedy and not remotely like defense spending under FDR. The long-term, systemic expenses to the Star Kingdom would have been far greater than anything it saved in the short term, however. (Note that we’re speaking here about the cost of the military buildup, not about the cost of an actual war that League membership might have averted. I throw that in because I’m sure one of you would be simply delighted to mention it if I didn’t at least take cognizance of it in passing. [G]) When you combine that long-term systemic cost with the Manticoran sense of “national identity” and deep-seated distaste for the Solarian League, the chance that any Manticoran government would ever have asked for League membership — even as a full member system — would have to be virtually nonexistent. That might have changed in the face of a truly desperate military situation when something like Churchill’s 1940 proposal of joint citizenship for the citizens of Great Britain and France might have offered salvation in the face of actual Havenite conquest, but it would have been a complete nonstarter in the face of any prospect less dismal than that.

Or that’s the way it seems to me, at any rate, but what do I know? 😉 Okay, I think there’s some confusion over whether or not the Solarian League is actually a “government.” It is. It’s a government which was established for specific purposes, those having to do primarily with the regulation and protection of interstellar trade and the suppression of threats to that trade, plus the creation of a central military sufficiently powerful to depress any temptations towards warlordism on the parts of individual system governments once the Warshawski sail made interstellar war practical once more, but it is a government, and it always has been one.

If you think about it, that protection against threats is actually the primary motivator for the formation of almost any government. The Solarian Constitution was deliberately structured in a way to limit the power of the central government, but that government was clearly visualized as a government from the get-go, or else there wouldn’t have been a legislative body in which every full member system held veto power. The difficulty wasn’t that the League was denied the power to legislate and create laws in the sense of any other government; the difficulty was that since the League was effectively unable to pass meaningful legislation because of that veto power, the government turned to its regulatory authority to “do an end run” around the legislature . . . and then proceeded to continue doing the same thing literally for centuries. At the time of the discovery of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction, the League in already been in existence for centuries, however, and the SKM could see pretty clearly what that implied even before it became an uber economic power in its own right courtesy of the Junction. It didn’t much care for what it was seeing, either.

For the League’s full member systems, political relations with the central government are probably closer to the relations of states in the United States to the federal government prior to the American Civil War — you know, when we actually paid attention to something called the Tenth Amendment? [G] The central government has extraordinarily limited authority to intervene in the local laws and practices of full member systems of the League unless those laws and/or practices are in conflict with the Constitution and the government’s constitutional authority. As a consequence, a citizen of a typical core star system has very little interaction with the League government and a great deal of interaction with his local system government. He doesn’t care what’s going on in Washington, DC, he cares about what’s going on in Sacramento or Albany.

From the outside looking in, however, the policies and practices of the government in Old Chicago are clearly evident, and the Star Kingdom (as of the discovery of the Junction) had been a Verge system. I realize that’s a bit different perspective from my earlier comments about why the Haven Sector is significantly different from other Verge sectors, but I plead the fact that we’re talking about a process of centuries here. When I said that the Star Kingdom and the Republic of Haven hadn’t been Verge systems because of their proximity in terms of travel time to the Old League, that’s been the case for the last two or three centuries prior to the Havenite wars, but it shouldn’t be construed as meaning that it’s been the case for the entire history of the League. It’s been the case during the formative time period of the Haven Sector’s divergence from the Verge norm, and I should have been more careful and precise in how I formulated and expressed my thoughts in that regard when the topic first came up. But at the time that the Manticoran Wormhole Junction was initially discovered, the Star Kingdom had already “enjoyed” three or four hundred years of watching the League in action and seeing the gradual emergence of the Office of Frontier Security from a Verge perspective. In fact, by that time the policies which later led to the rot within the League bureaucracy and the Protectorates was already fairly visible to anyone on the outside who actually looked at the situation. As such, the SKM — which at that time faced no local external threat — saw absolutely no reason to join a government for which it had already developed a distinct distaste.

By the time the People’s Republic did emerge as a political and military threat, the contemporary Star Kingdom — particularly as the greatest “maritime” power in the explored galaxy — had directly experienced all too much of the reality of the “noble” Solarian League’s policies. As a consequence, it would be difficult to exaggerate the negativity of the late nineteenth century Manty-in-the-street’s distaste for the League. The notion of a voluntary association with the League would have been — at best — a bitterly divisive political issue within King Roger’s Star Kingdom, and the threatened loss of system revenues once the League government started collecting the “user fees” on the Wormhole Junction (which it would have been entitled to do, technically at least, under the League’s constitution) would have been seized upon by opponents to any such association during the domestic political debate over it.

During the Cold War, there was a vocal European opinion group which held that there was actually very little to choose between the Soviet Union and the United States. I suspect that if the members of that group had been forced to choose between becoming citizens of the Soviet Union or of the United States — that is, they’d literally had no choice but to do one or the other — a majority of them would have decided that the USA was a better (or at least, less bad) choice than the USSR. Do you really think, though, that, say France, would have opted to submerge itself in the government of the United States of America, rather than investing in its own military, if confronted by an aggressive and expansionist Germany? France might have sought a military alliance with the US against Germany (seems to me we actually did that a time or two), but it wouldn’t have surrendered its sovereignty to the United States, and rightfully so. The political relationship Washington and Paris has been rocky enough from time to time, but the degree of antipathy between them even at their worst pales in comparison to the antipathy between the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the Solarian League as a whole. That’s why I made the point about the difference between the Manties’ attitude towards Beowulfans and Sollies .

As for the difference between internal and external trade tariffs, there really isn’t one as far as the League is concerned. The League is a great believer in “free trade,” and “tariffs” in the sense in which they exist in our own experience aren’t really part of the League’s system. They aren’t designed to protect the League’s economy from imports, since the League is much more concerned with exports from the most productive (in absolute terms, at least) economy in the galaxy. They are, rather, transactional fees which go into the central government’s coffers. As such, Manticoran exporters really wouldn’t save anything by virtue of membership in the League, but the Manticoran merchant marine would have found itself paying substantial fees (it would never do to call them “taxes,” of course!) which the League automatically levies on its own merchant vessels. (That, by the way, is another reason for the size and power of the Manticoran merchant marine; the additional, government-imposed overhead on Solarian registry vessels is a primary driver in Solly shippers’ preference for leasing Manticoran ships rather than owning their own.)

The probable immediate economic cost to Manticore in dollars and cents probably would have been lower than the cost of King Roger’s build up, although it should be borne in mind that the increase under King Roger was far less costly than even the prewar budgets under Elizabeth. That is, it was a peacetime budgetary increase, probably something like the Reagan Administration’s defense spending increases with a moderate dose of steroids, nothing like defense spending under Eisenhower or Kennedy and not remotely like defense spending under FDR. The long-term, systemic expenses to the Star Kingdom would have been far greater than anything it saved in the short term, however. (Note that we’re speaking here about the cost of the military buildup, not about the cost of an actual war that League membership might have averted. I throw that in because I’m sure one of you would be simply delighted to mention it if I didn’t at least take cognizance of it in passing. [G]) When you combine that long-term systemic cost with the Manticoran sense of “national identity” and deep-seated distaste for the Solarian League, the chance that any Manticoran government would ever have asked for League membership — even as a full member system — would have to be virtually nonexistent. That might have changed in the face of a truly desperate military situation when something like Churchill’s 1940 proposal of joint citizenship for the citizens of Great Britain and France might have offered salvation in the face of actual Havenite conquest, but it would have been a complete nonstarter in the face of any prospect less dismal than that.

Or that’s the way it seems to me, at any rate, but what do I know? 😉 Okay, I think there’s some confusion over whether or not the Solarian League is actually a “government.” It is. It’s a government which was established for specific purposes, those having to do primarily primarily with the regulation and protection of interstellar trade and the suppression of threats to that trade, plus the creation of a central military sufficiently powerful to depress any temptations towards warlordism on the parts of individual system governments once the Warshawski sail made interstellar war practical once more, but it is is a government, and it always has been one.

If you think about it, that protection against threats is actually the primary motivator for the formation of almost any government. The Solarian Constitution was deliberately structured in a way to limit the power power of the central government, but that government was clearly visualized as as a government from the get-go, or else there wouldn’t have been a legislative body in which every full member system held veto power. The difficulty wasn’t that the League was denied the power to legislate and create laws in the sense of any other government; the difficulty was that since the League was effectively unable unable to pass meaningful legislation because of that veto power, the government turned to its regulatory authority to “do an end run” around the legislature . . . and then proceeded to continue doing the same thing literally for centuries. At the time of the discovery of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction, the League in already been in existence for centuries, however, and the SKM could see pretty clearly what that implied even before it became an uber economic power in its own right courtesy of the Junction. It didn’t much care for what it was seeing, either.

For the League’s full member systems, political relations with the central government are probably closer to the relations of states in the United States to the federal government prior to the American Civil War — you know, when we actually paid attention to something called the Tenth Amendment? [G] The central government has extraordinarily limited authority to intervene in the local laws and practices of full member systems of the League unless those laws and/or practices are in conflict with the Constitution and the government’s constitutional authority. As a consequence, a citizen of a typical core star system has very little interaction with the League League government and a great deal of interaction with his local system system government. He doesn’t care what’s going on in Washington, DC, he cares about what’s going on in Sacramento or Albany.

From the outside looking in, however, the policies and practices of the government in Old Chicago are clearly evident, and the Star Kingdom (as of the discovery of the Junction) had been a Verge system. I realize that’s a bit different perspective from my earlier comments about why the Haven Sector is significantly different from other Verge sectors, but I plead the fact that we’re talking about a process of centuries here. When I said that the Star Kingdom and the Republic of Haven hadn’t been Verge systems because of their proximity in terms of travel time to the Old League, that’s been the case for the last two or three centuries prior to the Havenite wars, but it shouldn’t be construed as meaning that it’s been the case for the entire history of the League. It’s been the case during the formative time period of the Haven Sector’s divergence from the Verge norm, and I should have been more careful and precise in how I formulated and expressed my thoughts in that regard when the topic first came up. But at the time that the Manticoran Wormhole Junction was initially discovered, the Star Kingdom had already “enjoyed” three or four hundred years of watching the League in action and seeing the gradual emergence of the Office of Frontier Security from a Verge perspective. In fact, by that time the policies which later led to the rot within the League bureaucracy and the Protectorates was already fairly visible to anyone on the outside who actually looked at the situation. As such, the SKM — which at that time at that time faced no local external threat — saw absolutely no reason to join a government for which it had already developed a distinct distaste.

By the time the People’s Republic did did emerge as a political and military threat, the contemporary Star Kingdom — particularly as the greatest “maritime” power in the explored galaxy — had directly experienced all too much of the reality of the “noble” Solarian League’s policies. As a consequence, it would be difficult to exaggerate the negativity of the late nineteenth century Manty-in-the-street’s distaste for the League. The notion of a voluntary association with the League would have been — at best — a bitterly divisive political issue within King Roger’s Star Kingdom, and the threatened loss of system revenues once the League government started collecting the “user fees” on the Wormhole Junction (which it would have been entitled to do, technically at least, under the League’s constitution) would have been seized upon by opponents to any such association during the domestic political debate over it.

During the Cold War, there was a vocal European opinion group which held that there was actually very little to choose between the Soviet Union and the United States. I suspect that if the members of that group had been forced to choose between becoming citizens of the Soviet Union or of the United States — that is, they’d literally had no choice but to do one or the other — a majority of them would have decided that the USA was a better (or at least, less bad) choice than the USSR. Do you really think, though, that, say France, would have opted to submerge itself in the government of the United States of America, rather than investing in its own military, if confronted by an aggressive and expansionist Germany? France might have sought a military alliance with the US against Germany (seems to me we actually did that a time or two), but it wouldn’t have surrendered its sovereignty to the United States, and rightfully so. The political relationship Washington and Paris has been rocky enough from time to time, but the degree of antipathy between them even at their worst pales in comparison to the antipathy between the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the Solarian League as a whole. That’s why I made the point about the difference between the Manties’ attitude towards Beowulfans and Sollies Sollies.

As for the difference between internal and external trade tariffs, there really isn’t one as far as the League is concerned. The League is a great believer in “free trade,” and “tariffs” in the sense in which they exist in our own experience aren’t really part of the League’s system. They aren’t designed to protect the League’s economy from imports, since the League is much more concerned with exports exports from the most productive (in absolute terms, at least) economy in the galaxy. They are, rather, transactional fees which go into the central government’s coffers. As such, Manticoran exporters really wouldn’t save anything by virtue of membership in the League, but the Manticoran merchant marine merchant marine would have found itself paying substantial fees (it would never never do to call them “taxes,” of course!) which the League automatically levies on its own merchant vessels. (That, by the way, is another reason for the size and power of the Manticoran merchant marine; the additional, government-imposed overhead on Solarian registry vessels is a primary driver in Solly shippers’ preference for leasing Manticoran ships rather than owning their own.)

The probable immediate economic cost to Manticore in dollars and cents probably would have been lower than the cost of King Roger’s build up, although it should be borne in mind that the increase under King Roger was far far less costly than even the prewar budgets under Elizabeth. That is, it was a peacetime peacetime budgetary increase, probably something like the Reagan Administration’s defense spending increases with a moderate dose of steroids, nothing like defense spending under Eisenhower or Kennedy and not remotely remotely like defense spending under FDR. The long-term, systemic systemic expenses to the Star Kingdom would have been far greater than anything it saved in the short term, however. (Note that we’re speaking here about the cost of the military buildup, not about the cost of an actual war that League membership might have averted. I throw that in because I’m sure one of you would be simply delighted to mention it if I didn’t at least take cognizance of it in passing. [G]) When you combine that long-term systemic cost with the Manticoran sense of “national identity” and deep-seated distaste for the Solarian League, the chance that any Manticoran government would ever have asked for League membership — even as a full member system — would have to be virtually nonexistent. That might have changed in the face of a truly desperate military situation when something like Churchill’s 1940 proposal of joint citizenship for the citizens of Great Britain and France might have offered salvation in the face of actual Havenite conquest, but it would have been a complete nonstarter in the face of any prospect less dismal than that.

Or that’s the way it seems to me, at any rate, but what do I know? 😉

Honorverse

How is impeller wedge power related to sidewall strength? (Asked Tue May 24, 2011)

December 2013

Honorverse Honorverse

December 2013 December 2013

The strength of the wedge does affect the effectiveness of the sidewall, but it isn’t the decisive factor in sidewall strength . It’s the sidewall generators which determine that.

A sidewall is basically a “plate” of focused gravitic energy, and the bigger (and stronger) its generator, the stronger and tougher the sidewall plate is going to be. The logical implication of this is that larger ships with more tonnage for generators and a larger energy budget can produce stronger sidewalls, and that’s the real reason ships-of-the-wall, for example, have sidewalls so much tougher than a battlecruiser’s or a destroyer’s. It’s also the reason the Nike -class battlecruisers have stronger sidewalls than the Agamemnons ; the BC(L)’s designers devoted the tonnage and the power to generate them because toughness and survivability were higher priorities in the Nike’s concept design stage.

Now, where the basic size and power of the ship’s impeller wedge come in is in the “stitching” — the interface where the sidewall and the wedge come together. The sidewall is strongest at the center, with the strength (the gravitic “depth,” if you will) of the “plate” dropping off proportionately as one approaches its boundaries. That means the upper and lower edges of the sidewall are the “sweet spot” where the attacker really wants his energy weapon shot to hit, and the stronger or “deeper” the impeller wedge is, the more its “shadow” protects that “seam” from incoming fire. The sidewall actually reaches up into the impeller wedge (where the two of them are tuned to interface and interlock), much as the impeller wedge reaches across the alpha wall to siphon in additional power to maintain the wedge once it’s up. The effect in this case is much less noticeable in terms of power supply , but the interface also “bends” or slightly deforms the surface of the impeller wedge, pulling it “downward” to the edge of the sidewall plate, which is where the defensive “shadow” originates, and the stronger the impeller band, the stronger (tougher) that shadow becomes. In combination these factors significantly reinforce the strength of the sidewall edges where they are inherently weaker, which means that the same sidewall generator will produce a more effective sidewall when it has a stronger or “deeper” impeller wedge with which to interface. It’s not that the sidewall itself is actually stronger, but rather that it is able to use its strength in a more inherently efficient fashion. This is only a factor for hits that would come in through that reinforced area, and the reinforcement itself is a small enough factor in the sidewall’s overall power that this is not a significant element in the difference of sidewall strength between, say, a Nike and an Agamemnon . It would, however, be a very significant element in the difference between the strength of an SD’s sidewall and that of a CA.

decor

The strength of the wedge does affect the effectiveness of the sidewall, but it isn’t the decisive factor in sidewall strength . It’s the sidewall generators which determine that.

A sidewall is basically a “plate” of focused gravitic energy, and the bigger (and stronger) its generator, the stronger and tougher the sidewall plate is going to be. The logical implication of this is that larger ships with more tonnage for generators and a larger energy budget can produce stronger sidewalls, and that’s the real reason ships-of-the-wall, for example, have sidewalls so much tougher than a battlecruiser’s or a destroyer’s. It’s also the reason the Nike -class battlecruisers have stronger sidewalls than the Agamemnons ; the BC(L)’s designers devoted the tonnage and the power to generate them because toughness and survivability were higher priorities in the Nike’s concept design stage.

Now, where the basic size and power of the ship’s impeller wedge come in is in the “stitching” — the interface where the sidewall and the wedge come together. The sidewall is strongest at the center, with the strength (the gravitic “depth,” if you will) of the “plate” dropping off proportionately as one approaches its boundaries. That means the upper and lower edges of the sidewall are the “sweet spot” where the attacker really wants his energy weapon shot to hit, and the stronger or “deeper” the impeller wedge is, the more its “shadow” protects that “seam” from incoming fire. The sidewall actually reaches up into the impeller wedge (where the two of them are tuned to interface and interlock), much as the impeller wedge reaches across the alpha wall to siphon in additional power to maintain the wedge once it’s up. The effect in this case is much less noticeable in terms of power supply , but the interface also “bends” or slightly deforms the surface of the impeller wedge, pulling it “downward” to the edge of the sidewall plate, which is where the defensive “shadow” originates, and the stronger the impeller band, the stronger (tougher) that shadow becomes. In combination these factors significantly reinforce the strength of the sidewall edges where they are inherently weaker, which means that the same sidewall generator will produce a more effective sidewall when it has a stronger or “deeper” impeller wedge with which to interface. It’s not that the sidewall itself is actually stronger, but rather that it is able to use its strength in a more inherently efficient fashion. This is only a factor for hits that would come in through that reinforced area, and the reinforcement itself is a small enough factor in the sidewall’s overall power that this is not a significant element in the difference of sidewall strength between, say, a Nike and an Agamemnon . It would, however, be a very significant element in the difference between the strength of an SD’s sidewall and that of a CA. The strength of the wedge does affect the effectiveness of the sidewall, but it isn’t the decisive factor in sidewall strength . It’s the sidewall generators which determine that.

A sidewall is basically a “plate” of focused gravitic energy, and the bigger (and stronger) its generator, the stronger and tougher the sidewall plate is going to be. The logical implication of this is that larger ships with more tonnage for generators and a larger energy budget can produce stronger sidewalls, and that’s the real reason ships-of-the-wall, for example, have sidewalls so much tougher than a battlecruiser’s or a destroyer’s. It’s also the reason the Nike -class battlecruisers have stronger sidewalls than the Agamemnons ; the BC(L)’s designers devoted the tonnage and the power to generate them because toughness and survivability were higher priorities in the Nike’s concept design stage.

Now, where the basic size and power of the ship’s impeller wedge come in is in the “stitching” — the interface where the sidewall and the wedge come together. The sidewall is strongest at the center, with the strength (the gravitic “depth,” if you will) of the “plate” dropping off proportionately as one approaches its boundaries. That means the upper and lower edges of the sidewall are the “sweet spot” where the attacker really wants his energy weapon shot to hit, and the stronger or “deeper” the impeller wedge is, the more its “shadow” protects that “seam” from incoming fire. The sidewall actually reaches up into the impeller wedge (where the two of them are tuned to interface and interlock), much as the impeller wedge reaches across the alpha wall to siphon in additional power to maintain the wedge once it’s up. The effect in this case is much less noticeable in terms of power supply , but the interface also “bends” or slightly deforms the surface of the impeller wedge, pulling it “downward” to the edge of the sidewall plate, which is where the defensive “shadow” originates, and the stronger the impeller band, the stronger (tougher) that shadow becomes. In combination these factors significantly reinforce the strength of the sidewall edges where they are inherently weaker, which means that the same sidewall generator will produce a more effective sidewall when it has a stronger or “deeper” impeller wedge with which to interface. It’s not that the sidewall itself is actually stronger, but rather that it is able to use its strength in a more inherently efficient fashion. This is only a factor for hits that would come in through that reinforced area, and the reinforcement itself is a small enough factor in the sidewall’s overall power that this is not a significant element in the difference of sidewall strength between, say, a Nike and an Agamemnon . It would, however, be a very significant element in the difference between the strength of an SD’s sidewall and that of a CA. The strength of the wedge does affect the effectiveness of the sidewall, but it isn’t the decisive factor in sidewall strength . It’s the sidewall generators which determine that.

A sidewall is basically a “plate” of focused gravitic energy, and the bigger (and stronger) its generator, the stronger and tougher the sidewall plate is going to be. The logical implication of this is that larger ships with more tonnage for generators and a larger energy budget can produce stronger sidewalls, and that’s the real reason ships-of-the-wall, for example, have sidewalls so much tougher than a battlecruiser’s or a destroyer’s. It’s also the reason the Nike -class battlecruisers have stronger sidewalls than the Agamemnons ; the BC(L)’s designers devoted the tonnage and the power to generate them because toughness and survivability were higher priorities in the Nike’s concept design stage.

Now, where the basic size and power of the ship’s impeller wedge come in is in the “stitching” — the interface where the sidewall and the wedge come together. The sidewall is strongest at the center, with the strength (the gravitic “depth,” if you will) of the “plate” dropping off proportionately as one approaches its boundaries. That means the upper and lower edges of the sidewall are the “sweet spot” where the attacker really wants his energy weapon shot to hit, and the stronger or “deeper” the impeller wedge is, the more its “shadow” protects that “seam” from incoming fire. The sidewall actually reaches up into the impeller wedge (where the two of them are tuned to interface and interlock), much as the impeller wedge reaches across the alpha wall to siphon in additional power to maintain the wedge once it’s up. The effect in this case is much less noticeable in terms of power supply , but the interface also “bends” or slightly deforms the surface of the impeller wedge, pulling it “downward” to the edge of the sidewall plate, which is where the defensive “shadow” originates, and the stronger the impeller band, the stronger (tougher) that shadow becomes. In combination these factors significantly reinforce the strength of the sidewall edges where they are inherently weaker, which means that the same sidewall generator will produce a more effective sidewall when it has a stronger or “deeper” impeller wedge with which to interface. It’s not that the sidewall itself is actually stronger, but rather that it is able to use its strength in a more inherently efficient fashion. This is only a factor for hits that would come in through that reinforced area, and the reinforcement itself is a small enough factor in the sidewall’s overall power that this is not a significant element in the difference of sidewall strength between, say, a Nike and an Agamemnon . It would, however, be a very significant element in the difference between the strength of an SD’s sidewall and that of a CA. The strength of the wedge does affect the effectiveness of the sidewall, but it isn’t the decisive factor in sidewall strength strength. It’s the sidewall generators generators which determine that.

A sidewall is basically a “plate” of focused gravitic energy, and the bigger (and stronger) its generator, the stronger and tougher the sidewall plate is going to be. The logical implication of this is that larger ships with more tonnage for generators and a larger energy budget can produce stronger sidewalls, and that’s the real reason ships-of-the-wall, for example, have sidewalls so much tougher than a battlecruiser’s or a destroyer’s. It’s also the reason the Nike Nike-class battlecruisers have stronger sidewalls than the Agamemnons Agamemnons; the BC(L)’s designers devoted the tonnage and the power to generate them because toughness and survivability were higher priorities in the Nike’s Nike’s concept design stage.

Now, where the basic size and power of the ship’s impeller wedge impeller wedge come in is in the “stitching” — the interface where the sidewall and the wedge come together. The sidewall is strongest at the center, with the strength (the gravitic “depth,” if you will) of the “plate” dropping off proportionately as one approaches its boundaries. That means the upper and lower edges of the sidewall are the “sweet spot” where the attacker really wants his energy weapon shot to hit, and the stronger or “deeper” the impeller wedge is, the more its “shadow” protects that “seam” from incoming fire. The sidewall actually reaches up into the impeller wedge (where the two of them are tuned to interface and interlock), much as the impeller wedge reaches across the alpha wall to siphon in additional power to maintain the wedge once it’s up. The effect in this case is much less noticeable in terms of power supply supply, but the interface also “bends” or slightly deforms the surface of the impeller wedge, pulling it “downward” to the edge of the sidewall plate, which is where the defensive “shadow” originates, and the stronger the impeller band, the stronger (tougher) that shadow becomes. In combination these factors significantly reinforce the strength of the sidewall edges where they are inherently weaker, which means that the same sidewall generator will produce a more effective effective sidewall when it has a stronger or “deeper” impeller wedge with which to interface. It’s not that the sidewall itself is actually stronger, but rather that it is able to use its strength in a more inherently efficient fashion. This is only a factor for hits that would come in through that reinforced area, and the reinforcement itself is a small enough factor in the sidewall’s overall power that this is not not a significant element in the difference of sidewall strength between, say, a Nike Nike and an Agamemnon Agamemnon. It would, however, be a very very significant element in the difference between the strength of an SD’s sidewall and that of a CA.

[The] real reason for the reemergence of dueling in the SKM is the sheer bloody-mindedness of the human creature in a frontier environment.

The SKM has always been very “2nd Amendment” friendly, largely as a result of the fairly conservative North American DNA in the original colonists, who were fleeing a Solar System in which they felt the Nanny State had become tyranical. Another consequence of their origins was that they had something of a fetish about self-reliance, standing on your own two feet, and other cliches to that effect. And they were settling on planets much of whose surfaces were then (and in HH’s day still are) hazardous for the unarmed/unprotected. (Don’t forget that as late as HH’s time, people who go wandering in the bush on Sphinx take along some hefty firepower, and even the planet of Manticore has less than 2 billion citizens, quite a few of whom (like the majority) are concentrated in a relatively small number of urban enclaves.) In the earlier days of the SK — post Plague but way pre-Honor — the practice of well-armed citizens settling disputes on their own (and before the cops could respond, given some really long response envelopes) — reemerged. It was not officially sanctioned when it did, but juries tended to refuse to convict if they could be convinced that the dearly departed “needed killing.”

In time, the precedent was pretty well established that a homicide was “justifiable” as long as it was “a fair shootin'” and both sides had participated voluntarily while taking precautions to protect innocent bystanders. In other words, “If you two lunatics really want to shoot at each other, more power to you. The gene pool will be improved whichever of you we manage to remove from it!” Once it became an acceptable practice, laws were passed (beginning on Sphinx, I blush to disclose) codifying it in the interests of conrolling and minimizing it.

Honor thinks it’s a Really Bad Idea (despite the fact that she’s resorted to it twice herself), but not because she thinks you shouldn’t be allowed to settle disputes with a certain degree of . . . finality if both parties agree. Her objection is that the shaming aspect of it has turned it into something that drives/forces/convinces otherwise putatively sane (and honorable, decent, etc.) people who otherwise would know better than to do such a stupid thing (like Paul Tankersley) into situations that get them killed by the scum of the earth. She has no objection in theory to settling things on the dueling grounds (and was willing to use the “shaming” aspect of it herself to get to Pavel Young), but is actually doing all she can currently to support the growing reform movement to abolish the practice in the SEM.

I should, perhaps, point out that she would have been entirely willing to shoot Pavel without aid of the code duello if the code hadn’t been there to be used. Lord knows I love the girl, but I certainly wouldn’t wamt to get on the bad side of her with blood in the water. Moderation under those circumstances is not precisely her strong suit.

Oh, and who says you can’t settle disputes on Montana with a shootin’ iron, Pardner?

For the purposes of the requirement for the heir to the throne to marry a commoner, the restriction generally means that the candidate for marriage cannot hold a peerage or be an immediate family member of someone who does, although there are some “loopholes” built into it. Simple knighthoods do not count for this purpose, since to be defined as a “peer of the realm” in Manticore, one must hold a seat in the House of Lords. Technically every baron or baroness (or higher ranking noble) holds a seat in the Lords, although not all of them ever take it, but knighthoods, in and of themselves, do not confer membership in the Lords. Anyone standing in the direct line to inherit a peerage would also be ineligible as a potential husband or wife for the heir to the throne, but the House of Lords (responsible for interpreting constitutional provisions) has determined that members of collateral lines with at least six direct heirs between them and the title would be eligible. (This is the major “loophole” I referenced above, and it was established over 200 T-years before Honor Harrington’s birth.) It’s been suggested that it should be legal for the heir apparent to marry even someone in direct line for a peerage if the heir to the peerage renounces the title in perpetuity for himself/herself and his or her heirs, but this interpretation of the constitutional requirements has not been argued before the Lords (since the circumstances visualized have never occurred. If it was heard by the Lords and sustained, it would, of course, constitute a second major “loophole” in the requirement. Given the fact that it would obviously violate the intent of the provision, however, most constitutional authorities in the Star Kingdom assume that it would not be sustained. On the other hand, if it has been established, at least in principle, that if the heir to the throne renounces the Crown, then the bar against marriage to a member of the aristocracy becomes moot.

This was actually not in a novel. Helen Zilwicki rescues Berry and her brother Lars from Berry’s rapists in “From the Highlands,” Eric’s first Honorverse novella. When Anton Zilwick (and Victor) end up rescuing Helen (well, “retrieving” her, at least), Anton takes Berry and Lars back to Manticore with him, where he legally adopts them as his children. For all intents and purposes, Cathy Montaigne is their adoptive mother, as well, although Eric (for some reason) prefers not to marry them off. I’m fine with that, myself, but I get asked why they haven’t married fairly often, and I just say “Because Eric doesn’t want them to.”

Interesting question. “Fire Season,” by David Weber and Jane Lindskold, which is the second of the young adult series set in the Honorverse that features Stephanie Harrington, will be released in October of 2012. David has also finished the next Honorverse book, tentatively called “Shadow of Freedom,” due out in 2013. Eric Flint and David are also collaborating on another book, tentatively called, “Cauldron Boil, Cauldron Bubble” (or some other phrase from MacBeth…) which will hopefully also be released in 2013.

Great Question! David originally intended the books to be read in order by publication date, but that’s gotten a little complicated. Check out our handy list, contributed by Christine Acker!

http://www.davidweber.net/downloads/28-honorverse-timeline-1.html

The (Only) Honor Harrington Books: 1. On Basilisk Station (1993)

2. The Honor of the Queen (1993)

3. The Short Victorious War (1994)

4. Field of Dishonor (1994)5. Flag in Exile (1995)

6. Honor Among Enemies (1996)

7. In Enemy Hands (1997)

8. Echoes of Honor (1998)

9. Ashes of Victory (2000)

10. War of Honor (2002)

11. At All Costs (2005)12. Mission of Honor (2010) But please take the time to enjoy the other Honorverse books too, especially Crown of Slaves (2003), Storm from the Shadows (2009), and Torch of Freedom (2009) – they are advancing the plotline for the entire story arc, besides just being really great reads!

There are currently three generations of prolong. The term “generation” has nothing to do with descent or parentage; it refers to the version or variant of prolong available.

First Generation Prolong: May be administered up to the age of about 25; normally administered about 16; may be administered pre-puberty but virtually never is. Aside from the case covered in the 3rd sentence of the next paragraph, 3rd generation prolong works equally well for everyone, regardless of genetic makeup. Stops the aging process in the early 20s. Does not slow physical healing times and/or extend pregnancy periods, etc.

In addition to the above, 2nd and 3rd generation prolong are expected to extend the “frozen” aging process by about 20% and 33%, respectively, over 1st generation prolong. (That is, they will both stop the aging process earlier and keep it stopped longer.) Also, for reasons which are still subject to investigation, it does appear that the children of prolong recipients respond more strongly to the same or later generations of the prolong therapies. 3rd generation also plays less havoc with hormone balances and so forth than 1st or 2nd generation prolong.

Honor is, in fact, 3rd generation, despite the error in the earlier book. She is also the daughter of prolong recipients on both sides. She did not receive the treatment until about the time she entered the Academy, which put her through puberty and most of her physical adolescence before it began taking effect.

As for the “jail bait” aspect of her appearance which some people have commented upon, this is a woman who looks to be about 21 or 22 (which gets her out of the “jail bait” category in most jurisdictions). However, remember that she is also half-Chinese. It has always seemed to me that Oriental women appear physically younger (to Western eyes, at least) than Western women do. This is not a value judgment, only a statement of fact (or, at least, opinion), and I cheerfully acknowledge that it may be culture bound. However, one should also remember that the people to whom Honor seems so physically youthful have their own cultural baggage. Alistair McKeon is a 1st or 2nd generation recipient; Hamish Alexander is a 1st generation recipient (and, because of the culture in which he was raised, continues, deep down inside, to carry around a pre-prolong society’s views on physical aging); and Andrew LaFollet who, in Flag in Exile, thought of Honor as (I believe) “barely post-adolescent” in appearance is from a culture which (a) did not have prolong at all (prior to the Alliance) and (b) had virtually no ethnic Asians in its population. (And note that, nonetheless, he thought of her as post-adolescent.) The point I’m trying to make is that while Honor does look absurdly young for her actual age, she may not look quite as young as you think (by our standards), because you’re seeing her through the eyes of other people with other standards.

There are no real restrictions on the small arms available to private citizens (small arms in this instance being defined as non-energy, projectile-throwing weapons) at the national level. As far as the Crown is concerned, if you can afford it and you want to lug it around, you have a constitutional right to do so. At the same time, the royal ministry of justice comes down like a hammer on anyone who misuses or abuses any weapon. Energy weapons are somewhat restricted in availability. The position of the Crown and Her Majesty’s Government is that projectile weapons, especially with the lethality of pulsers and tri-barrels, are sufficient for most self-defense means and constitute sufficient firepower to give even minions of a tyrannical central government pause. Energy weapons are regarded as falling in an intermediate stage between weapons of self-defense and weapons of mass destruction. Private citizens can own them, but unlike the owners of projectile weapons, they are required to pass a government-designed competency test and to be bonded. Moreover, unlike projectile weapons, energy weapons must be registered.

The Constitution of the Star Kingdom specifically guarantees the right of the citizens to be armed, and where small arms are concerned, the entire Star Kingdom is under a \shall-issue” system. Local municipalities can — and do — pass local ordinances which restrict where and how weapons may be carried, however. For example, in the City of Landing, chemical-powered projectile weapons can be carried by virtually anyone, although the City requires licensing and the successful passing of a basic competency test before they can be carried concealed. Pulsers, on the other hand, are restricted to police officers and bonded security forces as carry weapons within the city limits and may not be carried concealed at all under normal circumstances. In addition, there are certain areas in the city where private citizens are not permitted to bring weapons. Such places would include courts of law, government offices, etc. No municipality, however, under the Constitution, may legally tell a citizen that he/she cannot possess any non-energy weapon he/she wishes, including pulsers, within his/her own home.

The Star Kingdom does not mandate a Kingdom-wide weapons training curriculum, but the policy of the Crown has always been to strongly encourage local school boards to make such courses part of the required curriculum at what we would consider the middle school and high school levels. The position of the Crown is that since the right to be armed is enshrined in the Constitution, it only makes sense to ensure that every citizen has basic safety and marksmanship training. There is, however, an enormous degree of local autonomy when it comes to making decisions about school systems for specific communities or duchies, and by tradition, the Crown cannot dictate what a specific local or regional curriculum will include. In effect, though, the degree of emphasis the Crown has placed on certain courses — history, weapons safety, etc. — has been more than sufficient to ensure virtually 100 percent acceptance of them, which means that almost all citizens of the Star Kingdom have received at least basic weapons instruction.

Honor herself was born in Craggy Hollow, County Duvalier, Duchy of Shadow Vale, on Sphinx. Shadow Vale, which is still very thinly populated, has a typical “rural” attitude towards weapons. They are day-to-day survival tools for people wandering around in backcountry areas which still contain the occasional hexapuma and other large and dangerous predators. People like Honor and her parents also have what you might call a “sturdy sense of responsibility and independence,” because they know perfectly well that it is extremely unlikely, even with modern transportation, that law enforcement personnel are going to arrive in time to do much good in an emergency situation. As a result, they have a powerful “do-it-yourself” attitude where self-defense and defense of property are concerned.

This would not necessarily be the case for someone born and raised in a more urban area. Most of those areas continue to enshrine the right of the citizen to be armed and to use lethal force in self-defense under circumstances which make it appropriate, but the environmental threats are much less extreme and so the majority of the citizens feel no particular need to go around armed to the teeth. This was the attitude of the tactical officer aboard Honor’s ship on her snotty cruise, who was basically a big-city girl. She had received basic training in personal weapons even before joining the military, but she had never acquired the mindset which would have gone with actually carrying one on a day-to-day basis.

Although the Star Kingdom’s Constitution enshrines the right of the citizen to be armed, and specifically prohibits the government from infringing that right (except, as noted above, in the case of energy weapons), there are a great many ways in which an individual citizen may lose that right. All of them involve criminal or criminally negligent actions on the part of the citizen, and the criminal and civil liability penalties for the misuse or abuse of personal weapons, from old-fashioned edged steel to energy weapons, are severe. One might almost call them draconian, because most of them entail hefty periods of jail time (at a minimum) in addition to the subsequent permanent loss of the right to possess weapons.

Basically, the Star Kingdom believes in punishing individuals for their actions rather than depriving entire groups of law-abiding individuals of their rights. There was an effort to amend the Constitution to place much more stringent limits on the rights of citizens to be armed following the clashes between the Gryphon highlanders and the “sons of shareholders” in the so-called “Gryphon Uprising” of 1721 PD. Those efforts failed because the only people who really supported them were certain members of the aristocracy, and those aristocrats found themselves up against the perception by the bulk of the population of the Star Kingdom that the weapons in the hands of the “rebels” had done precisely what they were supposed to do: protected those who had them from the strong-arm tactics of the petty aristocrats trying to force homesteaders off of the recently opened Crown Range on that planet. Eventually, the military was used to separate the two sides and to impose order, but once order had been restored, the right of citizens to be armed remained unimpaired.

I suppose I should properly have said that treecat claws are [12.7] millimeters long, rather than 1 centimeter long. I actually intended it to be understood that they were close to a half-inch in length, and I simply rounded down, which I shouldn’t have done. This is still short, by the standards of terrestrial cats, but treecat claws are not really close analogues to terrestrial felines’ claws. Treecat claws are needle-pointed and sharply curved. The concave, rear-facing side of the claw also closely resembles an extremely sharp knife. Although treecats often use their claws when climbing, they seldom extend them fully when doing so. I have made repeated reference to the fact that they have long, agile, slender, etc., fingers, which they normally use much more as a monkey or a chimpanzee might when climbing. They are, however, capable of extending their claws in order to climb in a fashion much more similar to a terrestrial cat. It’s important to remember, however, that they are called treecats because humans familiar with terrestrial cats were looking for a convenient referent to hang on them. And, of course, the original name was bestowed by a very young — if exceptionally bright — girl, not a trained xenobiologist.

A treecat’s claws evolved primarily as weapons, not as a general utility adaptation, and they are not composed of the same materials as terrestrial felines’ or canines’ claws/toenails. I haven’t made a study of exactly how cats and dogs claws and toenails differ from one another, but my understanding is that a cat’s claws are basically bone, and a dog’s are basically specialized, toughened skin. Treecat’s claws are much closer in composition to what we might think of as teeth. That’s not exactly accurate, of course. For one thing — although this hasn’t been particularly emphasized or dealt with in the novels to date (I’m sort of saving a lot of details about treecat physiology and societal organization for the series I want to do centered around Stephanie Harrington) — the “bone” used by Sphinxian critters is substantially heavier and denser than that of terrestrial animals, thanks to several factors, but most of all to the fact that all of these Sphinxian animals are adapted to a heavier native gravity. Treecat claws should not be confused with toenails, as I think the above establishes, since they are actually much more similar in appearance and hardness to human tooth enamel. Moreover, treecat claws are like shark’s teeth in two ways. First, they have the same sort of “slicing” sharpness. Second, like shark’s teeth, they regrow quickly and can be regrown as many times as necessary. In terms of just how sharp they are, in both the needle and the knife edge sense, you might want to reflect upon the fact that the reinforced portion of Honor’s garments is literally “bulletproof.”

I do not intend, for fairly obvious reasons, I believe, to go into any discussion of future political developments in the Star Kingdom at this time. But if you’re truly curious about precisely how treecat intelligence compares to human intelligence, then I have a few morsels for you. Be warned that not all of this may ever find expression in the novels, given that there is a limit to the human-cat interactions which could make all the similarities and dissimilarities apparent to the humans in anything like a short period of time.

All right, first a few words on memory singers. As I imagine you have already concluded from the short fiction which has been published, memory singers are extremely important to treecat clans. Their more obvious function is to serve as the repository of the collective wisdom and history of their species. The essential requirements to become a memory singer are an extremely strong mind voice, an ability to grasp of the nuances of other cats’ mind glows with extreme acuity, an effectively \photographic memory,” and the ability to project remembered mind voices and mind glows with the utmost fidelity. Normally, a very strong personality and what we might call “command presence” is bound up with the sort of mind and outlook which can satisfy the above qualifications, which further helps explain why senior memory singers are awarded so much weight when they confer with the other elders of a clan. In a very real sense, the treecats’ history is truly a living entity, which moves from avatar to avatar as new generations of memory singers receive it from their predecessors and prepare to pass it on to their successors. Along the way, some of the more distant memory songs begin to lose their fine detail and resolution, and evens which do not make their way into memory songs at all are completely lost to the treecats. What this boils down to is that the portions of their history which they know have an intimacy and immediacy which no human can never match, but that there are much larger gaps in their knowledge of their history than is the case in post-oral tradition human societies.

There is also, however, an additional function of memory singers which in its own way is even more vital to the health and future development of the treecat community, and helps explain the reason why they are so intensely venerated and protected. The memory singers are not merely the repositories of history, but also the teachers of new knowledge.

I suppose that the fairest way to compare treecat intelligence to human intelligence is to say that the two are basically equivalent but function in quite different ways. Even the most intuitive human abilities pale beside the way that treecats process and interpret information. A treecat does not input, correlate, and evaluate data in the same way human does. They are far more likely to depend on their ability to perceive the emotion behind the thought (where humans are concerned; where other treecats are concerned, they perceive the thought itself, of course) and to form what a human might describe as a near-instant gestalt. This is one reason why it was so difficult for Climbs Quickly to reason his way through to an understanding of the bond which had formed between him and Stephanie Harrington. It was far outside the normal parameters of his species’ experience, so he had no existing knowledge base to guide him, yet the fact that the telepathic channel was not available to him virtually shut down half of his normal information pathways and required him to approach the question on a deductive basis, which was not really comfortable fit for him or any other treecat.

In interpersonal relationships, treecats are vastly more sensitive, intuitive, and likely to comprehend intricacies and nuances than humans are, but for most of them (memory singers tend to be exceptions to this rule, but that is far from a universal case) their ability to handle those relationships is restricted to those whom they have actually met. In other words, they are masters of personal relationships, but beyond their own clans, they have a much poorer grasp of the sorts of collective relationships which make mass societies function, which helps explain why a race of telepaths and empaths has not evolved a societal matrix more complex than that of the extended clan.

The plain fact is that treecats are not exceptionally innovative, even in matters of purely social evolution. Once you step beyond the social arena (which, after all, is where they excel) they become even less innovative. As a rule, their first response to any new situation is to attempt to apply existing custom or solutions to it, and they become uneasy when they are unable to do so. When the humans first arrived on Sphinx as a permanent presence, the treecats recognized the potential danger which human technology posed to them and also that they themselves had nothing which might act as a counterweight to human tools and weapons if the situation turned ugly on them, and so they adopted the strategy of observation and concealment which lasted until Climbs Quickly met Stephanie Harrington. Their uneasiness over their inability to get a “handle” on human psychology and intentions (which was made infinitely worse for them by the fact that humans appeared to be mute race, as they were unable to “speak” in any way a treecat could understand) was also a major factor in their standoffish attitude. In addition, treecats — because they are telempathic — tend to be extremely consensual (by human standards) when it comes to choosing courses in action, which means that in potential threat situations the reaction of the species as a whole tends to err on the side of caution, as was demonstrated by the reaction of Climbs Quickly’s clan elders once Stephanie spotted him. In addition, it usually takes something fairly extreme to cause treecats to alter an existing pattern of behavior. You might say that they rely very heavily on the concept of “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.”

Compared to humans, treecats — although in most ways they possess something between 90 and 95 percent as “much” intelligence as humans — produce perhaps 1/10 as many individuals, proportionately, who have what we might call innovating mindsets. Their intelligence also tends to lie within a narrower band then human intelligence, with comparatively few individuals who fall very far below or very far above the median. In short, treecats Leonardo da Vincis are very, very rare, and “village idiots” are equally rare. As individuals, treecats are very unlikely to make great leaps forward, but in the rare occurrences when a treecat possesses both the ability to innovate and what one might call “genius,” the fact that he or she has on the rest of his species is far more profound than the effect a similar human could have on humanity as a whole. The reason for this is the existence of the memory singers. Literally anything a treecat can learn or conceptualize can be passed on in its entirety to any other treecat via a memory singer. It does not necessarily follow that every treecat who receives a concept or knowledge through a memory singer will be able to use it as effectively as any other treecat, because there are levels of ability in all things. But this does mean that when the rare treecat genius comes along, his or her accomplishments can be added to the intellectual armory of his clan — and spread beyond his clan through the traditional interacting of memory singers — far more rapidly and completely than would be possible in a human society. This is precisely what made Climbs Quickly and Sings Truly so extremely valuable to their clan and to their species as a whole. Sings Truly, in particular, was not simply an innovator of genius, but was also a memory singer in her own right, which both gave her very high prestige and made her particularly effective in spreading her innovations throughout all treecats.  By the same token, Samantha — who is very similar to her in both “intellectual stature” and inherent ability as a memory singer — is perhaps even more important to her people than Sings Truly, even though she has never assumed the formal mantle of a memory singer.

There are certain areas in which treecats do not and probably never will equal human capabilities, just as humans will never be telepaths or (with a few significant exceptions) empaths — or certainly never on a scale which will conceivably equaled the abilities of treecats. One major treecat “disability” which probably precludes their ever developing a high-tech society of their own, is a fundamental inability to grasp higher mathematics. It is significant that a society which has been around for thousands upon thousands of years still refers to numbers in terms of “hands of hands” and has never developed a written form of mathematics. Obviously, this has strong implications for all areas of advanced human technology. It is possible, that this inability will begin to ease if and when the treecats do completely internalize the concept of written language. It is also possible that sufficiently persistent humans will be able to teach a treecat someday to transcend the current limitations of his species, and if that happens, the existence of the memory singers means that it would constitute effectively a species-wide breakthrough. Of course, it is always possible that the treecats will never approach human levels of ability in math.

For the foreseeable future, certainly, treecats will continue to regard human technology much as they have for the past several centuries. They will probably learn to use certain human tools more effectively and confidently than is currently the case, and they will not be actively uncomfortable in the presence of humans’ machines and tools, but they will regard those devices as being uniquely “two-leg” in nature. On the social front, treecats will almost certainly become much more deeply integrated into human society as a whole, using their empathic abilities and their intuitive grasp of complex personal interrelationships to make themselves invaluable in such professions as psychology, politics, dispute arbitration, “social services,” the law, etc.  The precise effect which this will have upon their social and political standing is, of course, something which I have no intention of telling you about at this time.

I will add just one more thing. The Ninth Amendment of the Constitution establishes treecats as the native sentient race of Sphinx, reserves just over one-third of the total planetary surface for their sole possession, and grants them the legal status of minor children under the direct protection of the Crown. It does not grant them citizenship in the Star Kingdom of Manticore, enfranchise them as voters, or in any other way contemplate their full integration into the human society of the Star Kingdom. This is not to say that such integration is absolutely ruled out by the Constitution, only that it is not guaranteed or provided for, and that it is quite likely that it would be necessary to further amend the Constitution in order to make treecats citizens or subjects of the Crown. It probably also would require a degree of planet-wide social integration which treecats have not yet attained in order to provide anything like a representative body of treecats empowered to speak for the race as a whole if they were invited to become subjects of Queen Elizabeth.

This is another one I get asked a lot.

In the broadest sense, I suppose, I decided that I wanted Honor to be accompanied by a sentient companion who would represent the native intelligent species of her home. I wanted there to be a very deep bond between them, and I wanted their actual intelligence level to be unsuspected (or, at least, not broadly accepted) by the humans who had moved into their neck of the woods.

That was all I really had in mind initially. Once I started playing around with ideas and concepts, I found myself drifting towards something that would fill a lot of the same niche that Annie McCaffrey’s fire lizards filled in her Pern novels, except that I wanted my “bonded” alien companions to be fully as intelligent — in their own way — as the humans around them, and I wanted them to have taken steps to keep their human neighbors from realizing just how intelligent they actually were. One thing that I decided they ought to have in common with the fire lizards was that they shouldn’t be extraordinarily large. In fact, they ought to be small enough to help with the “Oh, aren’t they cute!” part of their disguise. At the same time, I wanted them to be sufficiently dangerous that Honor’s companion would actually be capable of fending off attempts on her life.

After stirring all of that around in my mind, I decided that the native Sphinxians ought to be arboreal, smallish, fuzzy, at least empathic, and cute (at least until you seen them in action, that was). That led me sort of inevitably towards some sort of cat, and the desire to have them fully intelligent without the humans around them fully recognizing that led me to make them telepaths, as well as empaths, since that way it would be possible for them to have fully developed communication skills without humans noticing it.

Once I got that far, there was really only one possible candidate to fill the ecological and storytelling niche, and those were the treecats. One reason for that, to be honest, was that at that time I had two cats, Leonardo and Bombur. They were brothers, both gray tabbies, but decidedly on the . . . large size. In fact, their father had had enough bobcat in him that he still had the mask and the tufted ears. Leonardo was the long, lean one, with an extra toe on each foot, while Bombur (who was actually the larger of the two) was more the rich, sleek, football-shaped one. The way it worked out, Nimitz got Bombur’s brain and Leonardo’s sense of humor and personality, and if you’ve ever met the Gray Boys, you’d understand just how terrifying that particular mix was.

I lost both of them long ago, of course — they were already approaching feline middle-age when Honor was born in 1993, after all — but in the sense that you never lose beloved pets, they’ll always be with me, and every time I write a passage with Nimitz in it, I can still see the two of them chasing dust bunnies and wrestling with each other on my office rug while I write.

I’d originally anticipated that the entire series would be done in about eight books. Obviously, I anticipated . . . poorly. I hadn’t realized the extent to which readers would take Honor to their hearts, nor had I accurately visualized just how big and detailed the Honorverse was going to get.

Bearing that caveat in mind, I will only say that as of Storm from the Shadows, we’re about halfway through my original storyline for the entire series. My current estimate is that the Honorverse will go on for at least another five to ten novels. You should note, however, that what I had projected as taking eight books has now taken fifteen, so I suppose it’s entirely possible that I may be just a bit off. [G]

Pavel, the political figure, had no choice. Had he not accepted, he would no longer have been a political figure… period. So, yes, he could have refused, but only at the price of giving up everything he felt he had left in life. If you’ll notice, he didn’t exactly cover himself in steely-nerved glory when the moment came, and that was largely because his political ambition (i.e., hunger for power) had gotten him into a situation he lacked the intestinal fortitude to face up to. And remember also that he had agreed to a protocol in which he only had to face a single shot from Honor. Yes, as the moment loomed large before him he became more and more aware of his own mortality; at the moment he actually accepted her challenge, the instinctive need to preserve his position of power (and to avoid a situation in which no one in “society” would ever so much as acknowledge his existence once again) overpowered his fear that she would be able to kill him with that one shot. In the event, his nerve snapped, leading to his ignominious demise.

As for why none of Paul’s family members or HH’s friends challenged Denver, there were two reasons. (1) No one knew where to find him until Georgia slipped the word to Ramirez and McKeon through an intermediary, so no one could challenge him, and (2) Would you really want to be the person who challenged and killed him instead of leaving him for Honor to deal with?

Paul accepted the duel because he made a mistake… and because of who he was. The mistake was allowing himself to be provoked into a position which allowed the challenge to be issued “for cause” in the first place. The fact that he accepted the challenge (and met it) was — IMHO — inevitable in light of who he was, the information he had at the time, and the consequences (personal, professional, and for Honor) if he had not.

At the time that he and Summervale met, he had no idea (and no way of knowing) that Summervale had a reputation as a professional duelist. For that matter, very few people (in the Star Kingdom of Maticore at large) knew that. It was part of what made Summervale so effective. The reader knew it, because I — as the writer — wanted you to know it, so I had Tomas Ramirez and Gunny Babcock explain it to other character’s in Paul’s absence. Accordingly, all Paul really knew was that a stranger had deliberately — and successfully — goaded him into striking the first blow by crudely insulting the woman he loved. (And, I might add, by using an insult which hit Paul especially hard because he knew precisely how hard Honor had found it to open up to him in the first place.)

Paul was the equivalent of a high-level black-belt in a particularly “hard” martial art. Summervale was also a trained martial artist, but Paul had no way of knowing that when he attacked him. Hence, Paul was — to the best of his knowledge — guilty of the equivalent (in both practical terms and in the eyes of the law) of assault with a deadly weapon.

The man he had assaulted, however much he might have deserved punishment, had just challenged him to a duel. In demanding personal satisfaction, he was (in the setting of the Star Kingdom of Manticore) renouncing any other form of satisfaction; that is, the duel, if accepted by Paul, precluded Summervale’s later filing assault charges over the incident. That, alone, would not have been enough to push someone like Paul into accepting the duel, but it was a factor in his thinking. There was also the fact that whether he had been goaded by the fellow or not, Paul had struck the first blow and, in his thinking (and that of most Manticorans of the time), that meant that Summervale had a right to respond by seeking satisfaction, especially since Paul’s blows had drawn blood. Again, social pressure coupled with Paul’s own acceptance of that perspective as a Manticoran.

In addition, Paul wanted to take a shot at Summervale on the field. Yes, he knew he had been goaded. Yes, by the time Tomas Ramirez acted as his second, he clearly knew he had been set up by a professional duelist. But at the time he accepted Summervale’s challenge, he didn’t know Summervale’s reputation and did know that he wanted nothing in the universe more than to finish smashing the supercilious, sneering son-of-a-bitch. This, too, was something Summervale had counted on, and it worked. (Don’t forget that Summervale was a professional. He’d studied his intended victim carefully before choosing exactly how to goad him onto the field, and it worked.)

By the time Paul knew the truth about Summervale’s reputation from Ramirez, he had already agreed to meet him. That moved the entire confrontation to a different plain. Had he declined Summervale’s initial challenge, he would have been cut dead by a sizable chunk of Manticoran society, which would have had major repercussions. Although his family was of yeoman stock, it was also extremely wealthy, connected directly to the House of Winton by marriage (remember that he was Michelle Henke’s cousin and also a cousin of the Queen herself), and the shame he would have brought upon the family name (and its connections) would, in Manticoran eyes, have been profound. Not only would it have had serious social repercussions for him personally, but it could well have had consequences for other members of his family and even — to some extent — on their financial interests. Politically, the Queen’s opponents could have used personal attacks on him as an oblique attack upon the Royal Family itself. “After all, if one of the Queen’s own cousins lacks the courage to offer satisfaction to a man he viciously beat over drunken words exchanged in a bar, then surely — given the House of Winton’s own notorious temper — one can hardly put a great deal of faith in the Queen’s ability either to think clearly and dispassionately in the present confrontation with the People’s Republic or to admit that she might have been wrong and offer the new, enlightened Pierre regime an opportunity to show how different it is from the previous, evil Harris regime.” In professional terms, the consequences for his career might also have been profound. For better or worse, military organizations look for officers who are willing — not necessarily eager, but willing — to fight and to confront physical confrontations they would not expect/require the typical civilian to face. The fact that Summervale had a reputation in certain select circles as a hired duelist might have been expected to offset that to some degree but Paul didn’t know he was one at the time he accepted the duel, and so no subconscious awareness on his part of potential consequences — social or professional — was predicated on that basis.

Once the challenge had been issued and accepted, Paul faced a different set of considerations. Yes, by that time he knew that Summervale was believed by some people (like a goodly chunk of the Marine Corps) to be a professional duelist, but he had no proof of that. (If anyone — including the RMMC — had possessed such proof, Summervale would have been in prison and not available for any duels.) He had accepted the challenge. To withdraw now, because of his opponent’s reputation and record, would have been seen as an act of rank cowardice which would have had even more severe consequences than an initial refusal to meet him would have carried. Of course anyone would have expected him to be concerned, and most people would have agreed that the entire situation was suspicious. But the attitude of the majority of Manticorans would have been that Paul had, in a sense, made his bed. If he only intended to accept challenges from “safe” people and decline to challenge “dangerous” ones, then he shouldn’t have been so lacking in circumspection as to punch Summervale out in a bar to begin with. Even leaving aside all of those considerations, Paul himself would have been unable to back down anymore than Honor could have backed down. Summervale had deliberately set out to create a situation in which he could kill Paul. In the process, he had to expose himself to the possibility that Paul might kill him. And Paul was a smart man. He knew, from Summervale’s choice of tactics, if nothing else, that he (Paul) probably was not Summervale’s only target. He also knew how Honor would react if Summervale confronted her in the same way, and Paul Tankersley was not prepared to protect his own life by hiding behind the woman he loved.

In addition, Paul, as the challenged party, was in control of the protocol chosen, and he chose one in which only a single shot would be exchanged. It was the best compromise between the need to meet Summervale, for whatever reason, and the minimization of the chance of being killed. He clearly understood that he was in greater danger than Summervale, and by the time they faced one another, he knew that his chance of being killed was considerably higher than the chance of his not being killed. But for all of the above reasons, he never even considered not meeting him.

Personally, I thought it was entirely consistent with his character to accept the challenge. I didn’t see any need to sketch all of the above out (I catch enough grief over ‘infodumps!’ ), but it was all present in my thinking and, I’d hoped, sufficiently worked into the subtext of Manticoran society to support the underlying logic of his actions. Please also note that while I do think a case can be made for a code duello serving a useful purpose, I have never been blind to the ways in which such a system can be abused, and the fact that Manticore has one does not mean that I (or, for that matter, Honor) think it is a Good Thing.

I’ve addressed this in part in my previous answers, but let me see if I can give a more complete breakdown here.

The affairs of both houses are affected by the activities of the other in many ways; this is part of the notion of balance of power.

The House of Lords’ power is based primarily on the fact that the Prime Minister must be a member of that House and the control of the initiation of finance bills. The House of Commons’ power lies in the fact that approval of both houses is required for an act to become law as well as the Commons’ ability to amend finance bills before approving them. More to the point for the purposes of this little drama, the House of Commons votes to confirm patents of nobility; no one may become a peer of the SK (and thus a member of the House of Lords) without the approval of the Commons. The ability of the Crown and the Commons to “pack” the Lords by creating new peers favorable to the Crown/Commons side of a dispute with the Lords is limited by two factors:

NOTE: There are Manticoran peerages which do not grant their holder a seat in the House of Lords. Most of these are “life peerages” granted as a sort of public atta-boy! (or atta-girl!), but some are hereditary. After so long as a monarchy, the Star Kingdom has acquired its own share of idiosyncrasies.

Ultimately, the powers of the Lords trump the power of the Commons, which was precisely how the Founders (who were all about to become nobles under the new Constitution) wanted things set up. What Elizabeth wants to do is to split one of the Lords’ twin-barreled “whammy” powers — the power of the purse — away from the Lords and hand it to the Commons, thereby promoting a more equal balance of power between the two Houses.

This one is something of a toughie.

As I have explained, the parallels between Revolutionary France and the British Empire, on the one hand, and the Republic of Haven and the Star Kingdom of Manticore, on the other, are (deliberately) far from a perfect match. On the other hand, this question is about present-day politics, which is another kettle of fish entirely.

Basically, the People’s Republic of Haven was actually the United States of America after a cynical deal had been struck between a political elite and the “machine bosses” who were able to deliver bloc votes on a dependable, reliable basis. The people who became the Legislaturalists deliberately set out to create a situation in which there would be an enormous underclass completely dependent upon the state for its support and upkeep. What had begun as a principled effort to provide the best possible life for all of the Republic’s citizens under the Legislaturalists’ predecessors became, in effect, a means of permanently institutionalizing graft and corruption in a way which would keep the Legislaturalists (and their descendents) in power. What we see beginning to happen in the Republic after Theisman overthrows Oscar Saint-Just and the Committee of Public Safety is a restoration of the Old Republic, under the original constitution (which happens to bear a strong relationship to that of the United States), and a regeneration of the concept of civic responsibility, personal responsibility, and honest government.

Readers are, of course, free to make their own judgments as to how this parallels the experience of the United States over the last century or so, and what it may or may not imply for the future. While they’re doing that, however, they should bear in mind that although every writer’s personal beliefs and politics infuse anything that that writer writes, the primary function of the Republic of Haven — and of everything that happens in it, around it, and to it — in the Honorverse is to provide the basis and framework for the stories I want to tell. In other words, while no writer can avoid stepping up onto a soap box, whether he wants to or not, when he starts writing military or political fiction, I am perfectly willing to subordinate my personal views on many of these questions to the strength of the storyline I’m working with.

I think that readers should also note that my personal sympathies clearly lie with the responsibility-taking moderates in both the Star Kingdom and the Republic of Haven, not to mention the Protectorate of Grayson. I beat up on the extreme left in the form of the Star Kingdom’s old Liberal party; I beat up on the notion of economic redistribution (and the cynicism which can be inherent in it) in the People’s Republic of Haven; I beat up on extreme conservatism and aristocratic abuses of power in the Star Kingdom’s Conservative Association; and I beat up on religious reactionaries in the Protectorate of Grayson. I also try to show the plus sides of most flavors and brands of ideology and religious belief, along the way, and I’m sure that most of my readers can think of characters who cover that entire spectrum.

Well, it’s been about 15 years, you understand, so some of the details have gotten blurred, I’m sure. Basically, though, what happened was that Jim Baen called me up and pointed out to me that, as he put it, my books were “spawning” again. The problem was that when I did what was supposed to be a stand-alone book, I kept thinking about other things that could be played with, or other points that I thought needed more attention, and so I kept on writing sequels. As Jim pointed out, this meant that any fact I was producing a whole bunch of small series, and he suggested that if I was going to do that anyway, I should probably come up with an idea for a series that was designed from the get-go as such. I think what he was thinking about was that if I did that, I would start putting all of the building blocks in place in an orderly fashion from the outset rather than having to go back and think about back story I hadn’t considered with the first novel of an unintentional series. And, I think, there was the notion that if readers knew from the outset that it was going to be an ongoing series, they would be more willing to make the emotional commitment in the protagonist and in the series generally. Not to mention (we are talking about Jim Baen here, after all, bless him) the fact that he felt there would be all sorts of marketing potentials.

So I sat down and thought up 10 potential series concepts and sent all of them to him. One of them became Honor Harrington; one of them became the Safehold series I’m currently doing with Tor Books; and one of them became the multiverse or Hell’s Gate series.

What I didn’t know when I pitched the ideas to Jim was that he had been looking for someone to write an interstellar Horatio Hornblower series for the better part of 20 years. As soon as he read the first sentence of the proposal — “Honor Harrington is a 6’2″ female, Eurasian starship captain in the service of the Star Kingdom of Manticore” — he basically told Toni Weisskopff “Write him a contract. No, make it two contracts! No! Make it four contracts!” I don’t know for certain that he ever read all of the other proposals at all . . . and given the Honorverse’s success, I’m not going to complain if he didn’t!

As for the reasoning process that led me to create this particular literary universe, I knew that I wanted to do a military novel, that I wanted it to be about a very long running war, that I wanted to have “good guys” on both sides, and that I wanted it to be of a naval character. I actually started out looking at the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage, but I decided that the naval aspects of those wars were too limited. Seapower in those wars was really primarily logistical — transporting armies and keeping them supplied — rather than the sort of “command of the sea” warfare in the tradition of Alfred Thayer Mahan that I really wanted to write about. Which, of course, caused me to turn to the wars that Mahan had actually analyzed — the Napoleonic Wars between the British Empire and Revolutionary and later Imperial France.

Once I’d chosen my historical template, I sat down and constructed the basic universe: political units, available technologies, naval strategic and tactical doctrines, historical evolution, etc… And, I will confess, I deliberately constructed my navel technological toolbox in a way which would create something with clear parallels between three-dimensional space-going warfare and the two-dimensional broadside warfare of the eighteenth century.

At any rate, that’s how I came up with the idea.

It would, however, be a mistake to read too much parallelism into the “Honorverse.” There are obvious resonances, but although there are some distinct similarities between the People’s Republic of Haven and Revolutionary France (and especially between the Jacobins and the Havenite Committee of Public Safety under one Rob S. Pierre), France was never the actual template upon which the People’s Republic had been imposed. Mind you, I did my very best to fling out as many red herrings as possible to convince readers that it was, because I didn’t want them to see where I really meant to go with the political developments in the series. By making Haven look like Revolutionary France (hence the French names, calling the capital “Nouveau Paris,” and a few other minor things of that nature), I conditioned readers who’d picked up on it and who knew their history to expect me to eventually produce the Havenite equivalent of Emperor Napoleon, when in fact I had absolutely no intention of doing anything of the sort.

In fact, one of the underlying “themes” of the novel is that the Bad Guys™ at the outset of the series never set out to become the Omnivoracity of Evil and never actually thought of themselves that way, either. Besides, I knew they weren’t going to be the Bad Guys™ for the entire series, so I was going to have to “redeem” them in the readers’ eyes eventually.

It would also be a mistake to regard the Star Kingdom of Manticore as simply the Kingdom of Great Britain transported into the far reaches of space. Again, there are obvious and clear resonances — partly as a result of the template I’d used, partly as another example of my intention to focus the readers’ attention on one anticipated direction while I actually went in another, and partly because I was interested in playing against the tendency to view republics as the good guys and empires or kingdoms as the bad guys. But there are actually rather more differences between the actual Kingdom of Great Britain and the Star Kingdom of Manticore than there are similarities. Elizabeth III, for example, has far more actual power than any British king since George III (at the very best), if not William and Mary. Or, for that matter, probably since Charles I. In addition, the Star Kingdom was a well-developed constitutional monarchy — although with significant differences from its British model — from the moment it came into existence. As a result, most of the political conflict between the various branches and organs of government has taken place in a nonmilitary, purely political arena. In other words, there’s never been a Manticoran Civil War to establish where authority truly lies. Moreover, you’d have to go back to a time well before the British Reform Act of 1832 to find a British House of Lords with the sort of power that was deliberately reserved to the Manticoran House of Lords when the Star Kingdom’s Constitution was written. For example, the provision that the Prime Minister must come from the House of Lords, rather than the House of Commons, and that the House of Lords is the branch of Parliament which actually holds the power of the purse, is quite different from the model which evolved in Britain following the English Civil War. So, in a functional sense, the Star Kingdom is distinctly different from Great Britain, even if a sort of vague concept of Great Britain which existed only in the minds of the Star Kingdom’s Constitution writers did play a significant part in their final product.

We’ve been through a total of 3 artists on the HH covers. Actually, I tend to think that the shape of her face and her eyes are closest to correct on the cover of On Basilisk Station, although Nimitz is not at all how I envision him and there are major problems with the uniform. The same artist did the next 2 covers, and somehow Honor started morphing until we wound up with the The Short Victorious War and someone who, frankly, looks more like my viewpoint character (Li Han) from Insurrection. We changed artists for Field of Dishonor, and while I feel the cover was effective in a marketing sense, I felt that Michael Jackson was considerably \prettier” than Honor. The same artist did Flag in Exile, and (I felt) gave us someone who looked much more like Lt. Dax from DS9 but without the tasteful body decals. (The 2 things that bugged me most about this cover were that I had carefully described the Grayson sword as having a “western style hilt”–and got katanas–and that I had specified that the planet on the Grayson flag was actually Grayson, and not Old Terra.) With In Enemy Hands we shifted to David Mattingly and, despite a few continuing problems, I am more content with his covers than with anyone else’s to date. I think Honor looks a teeny bit too old on In Enemy Hands, but I believe part of this is the lighting, which comes up from below and “loses” the line of her chin against the flesh tones of her throat. (Of course, if he’d included the white turtle neck blouse, this would not have happened, but–hey! He got every other detail of the uniform perfect, which no one had previously managed.) As far as the shapes of the ships are concerned, those seem to be the hull forms for Mattingly space craft. I do not know whether he has read the books or is working from a synopsis provided by Baen. More to the point, perhaps, I don’t really care. While I would be eternally grateful to get the ships right, I am already eternally grateful for the improvements in (and consistency of) Honor’s appearance from book to book.

(BTW, I have a way to describe Honor which seems to work for everyone except artists. I describe her as a slightly taller Eurasian Sigourney Weaver from the original Alien movie with Linda Hamilton’s physique from T2. Works for me, anyway. Also BTW, on the casting question, I do indeed agree that what is needed for an actress to portray Honor is less someone who matches her physical description as closely as possible as someone who can properly portray her character and make the transition from wallflower to beautiful [but not “pretty”] person between installments. [Of course I want sequels, you sillies!] I think someone with, say, Meryl Streep’s ability [and a similarly unique facial structure, perhaps a bit more like Honor’s] but physically younger would be ideal. Of course, where do I find a treasure like that? Sigh.)

Two of the foreign editions of Honor books are the UK edition of Honor Among Enemies and the German edition of On Basilisk Station. The British Honor Among Enemies uses a cover by someone named “Buggy G. Riphead” (and I’m sorry, but that name always makes me think of purple hair and safety pins in navels) which does, indeed, make Honor look a lot more Afroasian than Eurasian, and also I’d guess five years or so younger than I visualize her looking. The German edition of On Basilisk Station uses the cover art from the US edition of Honor Among Enemies, but with one cuff ring removed to get her down to commander’s rank. (Unfortunately, the other rank indications–like her shoulder boards and collar insignia–were not changed, but at least their hearts were in the right place. Please note that it was not until Mr. Mattingly appeared on the scene that we ever got her into a uniform of the proper rank.)

Honor Harrington is a 6’2″ (187.96 cm) tall Eurasian, female starship commander in the service of the Star Kingdom of Manticore who rises eventually to very senior flag rank, not to mention becoming a knight of the realm, a steadholder (think a ruling princess within an empire), a duchess, and general all-round avatar of the war goddess.

Obviously, that’s just a tad simplified and just a mite flippant, but it’s also true.

I think, though, that the real core of Honor’s personality, and what makes her resonate with her readers, is the fact that she’s one of those responsibility-takers I write about. She doesn’t waffle. If there’s a problem to be solved, a job to be undertaken, she simply goes ahead and does it rather than worrying about whether or not it’s her fault, or her responsibility, or whether or not it’s going to make problems for her down the road.

One thing that I think a lot of readers have missed about Honor, though, is that Hamish Alexander was completely correct when he told her that she had “the vices of her virtues.” There have been many instances in the series where Honor has made what was, at best, a suboptimal choice, yet because the readers liked her so much, and because they were “inside her head” when she did it, they give her a pass on it . . . if they ever notice it in the first place. One rather famous incident, for example, comes when she smacks Reginald Houseman. Sure, he deserved it; on the other hand, as a serving officer in the Royal Manticoran Navy, Honor had no business giving it to him the way that she did. Again, in the same book, she almost shoots a POW out of hand. Again, he had it coming; on the other hand, he hadn’t been tried, he hadn’t been sentenced, and what she intended to do — what, in some ways, she actually did do, since she pulled the trigger — would quite rightly have been regarded as an act of murder. Once again, in In Enemy Hands, she makes a seriously flawed decision, although not this time because she loses her temper. In this instance, a bunch of her subordinate officers and her Grayson armsmen have given their lives rescuing her, and by this time she is not simply a captain in the Royal Manticoran Navy — she’s a flag officer, and a steadholder, with all of the duties and responsibilities of a ruling head of state. So, it’s clearly her duty to carry through with her escape, not to mention the fact that if she doesn’t, then all of the people who have already died will have died in vain. Yet when her last armsman is wounded and knocked unconscious, she runs right back into the crossfire to save him, and comes within inches of getting both of them killed.

There are a lot of other instances in the books where she makes decisions based in large part on who she is — what makes her who she is — rather than on a proper analysis of the situation. I think part of the problem is that when a competent person makes a mistake, it’s usually a competent mistake, and it’s usually not made for stupid reasons, which means that when Honor makes a mistake, the readers generally don’t beat up on her for it.

Someone asked about Harchongese rank titles, so here’s a section from the series tech bible which was written before LAMA. I mention this because Church rifle production numbers  have been substantially increased by several factors since October 896. There’s a section in ATST in which Green Valley is rfelecting on Temple production numbers and comparing them to what the Union managed during the American Civili War with a total population of only around 15,000,000.

The projections are . . . illuminating. 😮
_______________________________________________________

Imperial Harchongese Army

Ranks and nomenclature:
Lord of Armies — Army minister
Lord of Hosts — field marshal
Lord of Horse — general (a floating rank)
Lord of Foot — brigadier
Captain of Horse — colonel
Captain of Foot — major
Captain of Swords — captain
Captain of Spears — senior lieutenant (no precise equivalent in other armies)
Captain of Bows — lieutenant
Captain of Staves — cadet/midshipman

Noncommissioned ranks (which are less important and therefore less flowery) are the same as those used by other armies: corporal, sergeant, etc.

The Imperial Hanchongese Army traditionally has relied upon mass and the toughness and endurance of its serf and peasant soldiers. Cavalry has much greater prestige, and traditionally missile weapons have been regarded as suitable for serf soldiers but not for noblemen. There’s been some change in that attitude since the introduction of gunpowder and the emergence of a professional standing army, but old habits die hard, especially given the enormous expansion of the standing army demanded by the requirements of the jihad.

The quality of the standing army is actually quite good, although it can be badly hampered by the influences of nepotism and aristocratic privilege within its officer corps. Long-term noncommissioned officers and enlisted are professionals who spend too little time in training in many ways but who compensate for that with length of service and experience on deployment. They are as much (or more) wedded to old model tactical doctrines as anyone else — in part because whatever the faults and flaws of the Imperial Harchongese Navy, the Imperial Harchongese Army has had a tradition of success in battle. Of course, it never came up against the Republic of Siddarmark, where it would undoubtedly have experienced much greater difficulty. The levees conscripted for the jihad are not going to approach that level of competence; the professional regiments are extremely proficient within the limitations of their tactical doctrine and their archers/arbalesteers are well-trained and accurate, able to produce a very significant volume of fire at ranges which would allow them to more than hold their own with slow-firing smoothbores.

Outside the professional regiments, Harchongese archers tend to have very limited proficiency. This is a direct result of the Harchongese aristocracy’s determination to keep effective missile weapons out of the hands of serfs. For the most part, the Harchongese peasantry is allied with the aristocracy against the serfs, because liberating the serfs would threaten the peasantry’s landownership (the serfs would need land of their own), because the serfs provide a lower-class to which even the poorest peasant can feel superior, and because the peasantry is usually attacked along with the aristocracy in the event of a servile insurrection and peasants usually lack the organized military force to defend themselves. Peasant landowners are permitted to possess arbalests and bows and are subject to emergency call up by the militia in the event of servile insurrection. As a result, many of the peasants are proficient archers. Serfs, who are punishable by death if they are found to possess any missile weapon other than a shepherd’s sling, have no opportunity to develop archery skills during peacetime. This is one reason why the IHA continues to deploy slingers in its missile troops; serfs (and especially serfs who work as shepherds for their masters) are likely to be skilled with that weapon.

The conscript troops raised for the jihad are, for the most part, not very skilled in missile or melee combat and have highly inexperienced officers. The men are tough, by and large, and controlled by brutal discipline and impelled by faith in Mother Church, they possess (or will initially possess, at any rate) a great deal of determination, but their forte is going to be hard, stubborn defensive fighting rather than offensive operations. The standing army, on the other hand, is actually well-suited to old model offensive operations and, in addition, will find its own morale and determination enhanced by its sense of superiority over the vast sprawl of the conscript army.
    
The peacetime strength of the Imperial Harchongese Army (standing regular army, not counting cadre of feudal cavalry regiments) was 471,310, organized as follows:

Household Cavalry (heavy); 45 Regiments; 89,955 men
Household Cavalry (light); 40 Regiments; 79,600 men
Line Cavalry (heavy); 10 Regiments; 19,990 men
Line Cavalry (light); 70 Regiments; 139.930 men
Heavy Infantry; 75 Regiments; 111,975 men
Light Infantry; 20 Regiments; 29,860 men
 
In addition to the combat formations above, the Emperor’s Spears (military police) contributed an additional 20 cavalry regiments (29,860) and 25 infantry regiments (37,325), for another 67,185 men, bringing the total peacetime armed forces of the Harchong Empire (excluding feudal cavalry regiments and purely local militia units) to 538,495 men.

For security purposes, given the perpetual Harchongese fear of servile rebellion, 20 percent of the standing army and 50 percent of the Emperor’s Spears have to be left home both for security purposes and as training cadre, so the maximum deployable force of “regulars” would be approximately 375,000 combat troops and 34,000 military police, or 409,000 men. This means that of the estimated 1.5 million men being sent to the Republic (actually closer to 1.75 million, in the end), approximately 1,341,800 (or better than 75%) are conscripts or feudal cavalry. The actual breakdown is (approximately) :


Feudal cavalry; 135 Regiments; 269,865 men
Conscript cavalry; 53 Regiments; 105,947 men
Conscript infantry;**  647 Regiments; 965,971 men
Total: 835 Regiments; 1,341,783 men
*Number of regiments for feudal cavalry is approximate because of fluctuation in unit organizations.
**75 percent of the conscript infantry regiments (485 regiments = 724,105 men) are heavy infantry. The remaining 162 conscript regiments (241,866 men) are light infantry, of which 45 regiments (67,185) are actually slingers.

Of this total force, 40 regiments of regular heavy infantry are equipped with bayoneted rifles (total of just under 60,000) and 10 regiments are equipped with matchlocks (15,000). Thirty of the heavy Household Cavalry regiments are equipped with pistols (59,916) which have long enough barrels to effectively be treated as carbines. None of the conscripted infantry regiments had firearms initially, but all of the military police are equipped with them, the infantry (12 regiments) with rifles and the cavalry (10 regiments) with pistols, adding an additional 17,916 riflemen and 19,990 pistol-armed cavalry. That gives the field force an initial total of 15,000 matchlocks (all line infantry); 77,636 ML Rifles (59,720 line units); and 78, 926 pistols (78.916 in miltary police hands)


What all of this means is that of the 1,750,000 Harchongese troops in the Mighty Host of God and the Archangels, only 4.4% have rifles and only only 4.5% have pistols, and roughly 30% of each are in the hands of the military police rather than the combat formations, as of October 895. This means, of course, that they are totally and completely unfit for combat against the Imperial Charisian Army or the re-armed Siddarmarkian regiments.

In light of the poor equipment levels of the IHA, extraordinary measures are imposed by Maigwair and Ducharn. Until their meeting in September 896, all new production in the Temple Lands and Border States was intended for the AOG, although transport difficulties had caused quite a bit of the new weapons to pile up in the rear. After their September meeting, however, everything not already forward of the Border States is subject to reallocation. In addition, the decision is made to recall all pikemen from the Army of the Sylmahn and the Army of Glacierheart. They have proven ineffective in combat, making them useless mouths at the end of a long, difficult supply chain. Those pikemen are drawn on for the AOG cadre being spplied to the IHA under the agreement Maigwair and Duchairn (with Clyntahn’s support) have rammed through. With the pikes withdrawn, the supply situation is improved and there’s less reason to get new rifles to the front and many of the rifles which were supposed to be sent to the AOG by the various other realms are diverted to the IHA, instead. Of the roughly 295,000 rifles produced between October 895 and October 896, 225,200 went directly to the IHA, a 317% increase in the originally projected number of weapons going to the IHA.

I can’t explain the behavior behind the Gbaba without explaining things about the Gbaba themselves that I don’t want to explain at this point.

I will say that I strongly disagree with your father’s these us that they “must have evolved as a social species and so should be pre-inclined to cooperate with any new species they encountered.” As you yourself point out, there are more than enough instances of human societies waging merciless war against other human societies in order to “take their stuff,” if for no other reason. Further, it doesn’t follow that our own psychology will be a close match for that of an alien society emerging from an entirely different evolutionary process. The best argument that I have heard for “they should be pre-inclined to cooperate” is based on the thesis that any species which wasn’t so inclined would undoubtedly have destroyed itself once it acquired the technological capability to do so because a society which wasn’t pre-inclined to cooperate (at least with other members of its species) would undoubtedly enjoy a brief but lively experience of nuclear fusion and that would be the end of it. Again, however, that is (in my opinion) a conclusion whose foundation rests upon a humanity-centric perception of what constitutes “reasonable” or “rational” behavior, and even among humans, “reasonable” and “rational” are not, alas, the default setting of far too many societies and social constructs. There is an unfortunate tendency to argue that other human beings must be “just like us” when it comes to their basic motivations and that they must therefore share our basic worldview and concept of rationality. Those who embrace this argument usually believe that adversaries whose fundamental psychology and motivations are fundamentally different from their own really share their understanding of how the world works and have simply chosen to act in a destructive or irrational fashion out of the selfish objectives of the adversary society’s leaders. I certainly don’t know that this is the case with your father, and I’m not trying to suggest that it is; I’m simply pointing out that we are governed by our own fundamental mindsets and that even intelligence analysts who consciously try to avoid doing that do it anyway on an almost daily basis.

I will also say that there is, indeed, a reason the Gbaba act in the way they act, that they did not simply evolve from the protoplasmic ooze equipped with starships or the technology to build them and an unreasoning bloodlust. There’s not any reason why a sapient species shouldn’t evolve “hardwired” to instinctively attack and seek to destroy any competitor/threat species it encounters. One may argue (somewhat precariously, in my opinion) that this isn’t the case with homo sapiens, but that clearly doesn’t eliminate the possibility of its happening with some other species evolving under different constraints and with a completely different historical/social experience. While I can’t (and won’t) explain at this point what it is about the Gbaba that satisfies the conditions of my previous sentence, be assured that I have at least thought through the reasons for their behavior on a basis which makes sense to me and does not rely on an unquenchable, totally irrational mania for homicide on their part. And I should also say that the same thing which explains the Gbaba’s behavior explains the stasis in their technological development which was observed by the Terran Federation during its losing war against them.

Hope this helps, and if I’m remaining too inscrutable, I apologize, but an author needs to keep at least a few surprises in his shot blocker.

I don’t recall anyone saying that they aren’t training dogs. I do recall saying that the melange of animal waste smells and other odiferorous distractions have made it difficult for chemical sniffers to pick explosives out of an entire city’s background emissions, which is how they got past Owl on more than one occasion. On the other hand, if you will recall, it was Owl’s remotes which picked up the rakurai headed to blow of Father Payter and the Patent Office.

I haven’t specifically talked about dogs being used, but, then, there are (believe it or not) quite a lot of things I haven’t specifically addressed in the books but which are cooking away in the background just the same. So far as sniffer dogs are concerned, this is not something you can set up with a snap of the fingers, however, and even after you have the initial program in place, getting enough of them trained and distributed is going to be a bottleneck.

What makes you think (a) that the Terran Federation was still running a capitalist economy, on the one hand, or (b) that a capitalist economy is incompatible with maximum efficiency, on the other? One can certainly argue that “capitalism” wasn’t suspended by the United States during World War Two, despite which the US managed to be the greatest industrial power in the world. There is absolutely no reason to believe that state planning/coordination and capitalism are somehow antitheses. Central planning/coordination and unfettered free market capitalism probably are incompatible, but that doesn’t mean the capitalist system per se is unworkable under those circumstances

Was the Terran Federation sitting around and letting Apple and Samsung duke it out for the civilian market? Absolutely not. Was the Terran Federation backing competitive projects by Boeing and Lockheed in order to keep production lines running? Of course not. Were the Federation authorities allowing anyone to profiteer at the expense of the war effort? Puh-leese! I remember a remark made by one of the naval officers involved in the USN’s World War Two buildup. He said that money wasn’t an issue; you could get all of that you wanted. It was steel and government-assigned priorities for it which were the constraints. I guarantee you that with the human race facing extinction, those “government-assigned priorities” were pretty damned steel clad and every industrial facility in the Solar System was running at full capacity 24-hours a day.

Now, does that mean that no consumer goods whatsoever were being produced? Of course it doesn’t. And does it mean that somebody who was the equivalent of a majority stockholder in Boeing in 1942 wasn’t still able to pull strings sufficiently to acquire a single PICA for his beloved, only-child daughter? In what world do you live that you think Howard Hughes or Warren Buffet or George Soros couldn’t pull that off no matter what the priorities were? The diversion from the war effort would be so minute, so miniscule, that no one would ever notice. It literally would make exactly zero difference to the war effort, and the authorities would probably think it was an extraordinarily minor concession to someone who was an enormous net contributor to that war effort. And that someone, if I haven’t been perfectly clear, was Nimue Alban’s father. He wasn’t just sitting on an inherited trust fund somewhere. He was one of the handful of wealthiest people in the entire Federation, and he’d placed his resources completely at the service at the Federation fifteen years before Nimue was born. That’s why he knew just how bad the situation was long before it became evident to the majority of the human race. In fact, Elystan Alban was one of the individuals who’d been pressing the Federation to pursue a much more robust military budget well before the Gbaba were actually encountered at Crestwell’s Star.

Remember that only forty-three years elapsed between that moment and Operation Ark. (Nimue was born less than sixteen years after Crestwell’s Star, which is one reason her mother was able to convince herself that her father’s pessimism about humanity’s future was unfounded. On the surface, things just looked grim to those outside the innermost circles, not hopeless.) Now, forty-three years may seem like a long time, but given the distances involved, the nature of the threat, the fact that humanity had multiple star systems to defend, that its military machine had to be essentially built from the ground up, and that the Gbaba had a pronounced tech advantage from the outset, it really isn’t all that long, and for that entire time period, humanity had its back to the wall, whether everyone realized it or not. The Federation’s government had every reason to use its already existing infrastructure and economy as the basis for its war effort rather than trying to build something new on the fly. So, yes, they retained a capitalist structure under a strictly rationalized war planning authority, and it worked very well for them. In fact, for the first twenty-odd years, while a majority of the human race was still able to convince itself that the Gbaba were not, in fact, unstoppable, the retention of a familiar, known economic system — on the surface, at least — was a plus for civilian morale.

As to why the Federation might still be producing something as “frivolous” as a PICA, I’ve already told you that PICAs were being produced throughout this period both for industrial applications and for people who needed them for medical reasons. And unlike the purely “industrial” models, most of those PICAs being manufactured for people who needed them for medical reasons were last-generation PICAs, just as capable as Nimue’s. They were no longer being built for recreation (although there were more of those “recreational” PICAs than you might think around, most of which had been built before or during the first couple decade or so of the war against the Gbaba), but they were certainly being currently manufactured for medical purposes, and Nimue’s father happened to own one of the companies which built them. So basically, he diverted a wheelchair from the Army Medical Corps’s delivery queue and repurposed it as a gift for his daughter. Somehow, I don’t think FDR would’ve gotten his undergarments in a wad over that, and neither did the Terran Federation, war of extinction or not.

As for the eggs in a single basket and the second terraforming fleet.

There was never any intention for the Safehold colonization fleet to establish multiple colonies. The planners calculated that the existence of a second colony would have more than doubled the possibility that the Gbaba would stumble across one of them and realize that any colony had gotten past them, but they could have lived with that, given the survival benefits of redundancy. A far larger factor in their thinking, however, was that they had decided that they needed all 8,000,000 of those colonists in a single colony, sufficiently widely spread across the surface of humanity’s new homeworld that no conceivable natural catastrophe or unanticipated environmental disaster was likely to wipe them out. (Excluding, of course, the probability of some planetary extinction event like a cometary collision, but for that to happen the human race would have had to crap out, indeed.) If they were only going to get one shot at building a new home for the human race, then they intended to give that shot the very best odds of success and survival that they could.

Even if the original mission planners had intended to provide for the possibility of a second Operation Ark colony, however, Langhorne and Bédard would have scotched it. They didn’t want an additional colony world. They wanted one world, so deeply buried the Gbaba would never find it, and the anti-tech fanatics of the command crew frankly doubted that they could have found someone as committed as they were to their vision of perpetually preventing the evolution of advanced technology to oversee the creation and establishment of a second colony outside their own direct control. They had enough trouble with Shan-wei right there on Safehold. Did they really want to empower a second Shan-wei in another colony (where they would have no control whatsoever) to undo their “hide forever” strategy? Especially since what Shan-wei wanted to do was exactly what the original mission orders had called for before Langhorne and Bédard . . . modified them. Who knew who else in the command crew might secretly have sympathized with Shan-wei and seized the opportunity to reinstitute the original mission plan?

As for the more . . . esoteric notions being floated about, there are two problems. One is that some of the people proposing them seem to be making assumptions about Federation technology based on facts not in evidence. For example, the notion that “the entire human race” could have been recorded on a molecular disk and that the necessary biological material could have been synthesized from elements extracted from asteroids. If you think the Federation was capable of that, then you are are hugely overestimating its capabilities, at least as constructed in my tech bible. The second is that most of the other proposals — for O’Neil cylinders or colonies, for example — would have left/generated a far more detectable “footprint” than a pre-technic colony at the bottom of an atmosphere. Terran Federation stealth systems were very, very good, and emissions control would obviously have been a huge part of any such colony operation. Nonetheless, the creation of a self-sustaining deep space habitat, including the resource extraction necessary if only to provide raw materials for expansion and maintenance, would be much more apparent to a scout ship passing within a few light-years of a star system than a bunch of human beings emitting carbon dioxide into a planetary atmosphere.

The Safehold colony was not the only colonization attempt the Federation made. If you recall, they got one colony fleet (that Nimue knew about) out, only to have the colony detected and destroyed (and see also my final paragraph below). The Federation was probably technologically capable of building a fleet of von Neumann probes, but they couldn’t build interstellar-capable ships with that sort of capability so small that thousands of them could evade the Gbaba blockade. (Considerations of power supply and the need to build a hyperdrive into them, if they were going to attain FTL movement, meant they had to be a certain minimal size, and that size was big enough that the sensor net the Gbaba had constructed around the Sol System would have seen them coming. That was one of the reasons Operation Ark had such a strong military escort — not simply to fight its way through the blockade, but to be big enough for its active emissions to hide the stealthed colony ships accompanying it.) Moreover, as I’ve already stated above, the Federation’s nanotech, good as it was, had not reached the point of being able to build zygotes out of any handy elements. Given another few decades, they might well have attained that level of medical tech; they didn’t have it yet, any more than they had the ability to place someone indefinitely in cryo and ultimately revive him.

The suggestion that they might have effectively sent out a fleet of PICAs (or of von Neumann ships capable of building a tech base that could then build the PICAs) with recorded human personalities is probably the most workable of the options suggested. Even that, however, would have required multiple breakouts from the Sol System, which was problematical at best.

Essentially, the Federation strategists who came up with Operation Ark put everything the Federation could spare from its defenses into a single roll of the dice that was the very best roll — had, in their estimation, the best chance of breaking out and breaking free — available to them in the time window they had. You may disagree with their analysis; you may disagree with my analysis. There were however reasons for their decisions other than abject stupidity or a desire to lose the war. Had there been time, the fleet that was sent to Safehold would have been followed by a second attempt, and a third attempt — as long as the Federation lasted — to create “hidden” colonies, with each expedition dispatched in a totally different direction from any other expeditions. The problem is that there wasn’t time, and there wasn’t a sufficient covering force to get more than one colony fleet out and away in the window available to them.

The clock ran out on the human race. It was that simple, exactly as Admiral Pei remarked to his chief of staff just before his final battle.

Initially, Merlin didn’t use the remotes for targeted “untraceable assassinations or sabotage” because they either (1) wouldn’t have been traceless but would have been inexplicable or (2) fear of exactly the same sort of reprisals which were seen in the last book.

Remember that Merlin was flying completely under the radar and doing everything he could to stay under the radar for multiple reasons. One was to prevent the Church from seeing what was coming for as long as possible, another was to disperse the new ideas over as many legitimate, known innovators (like Howsmyn, Seamount, Sir Dustyn Olyvyr, etc.) in order to make them less suspect and more “explicable,” and another — and perhaps the most important of all — was to stay away from anything which the Church could convincingly have portrayed as demonic. It wasn’t so much that he was afraid that the “demon” charge would have any effect on the people close to him, but in a civilization where the single religion’s validity is totally unquestioned, any charge of demonic influence or origins could be catastrophic. In the early days, it would have been catastrophic even within Charis; later, it would have been catastrophic in terms of undercutting the willingness of people like Nahrmahn, Gorjah, or Greyghor Stohnar to have anything to do with the “demonically assisted” Charisians. Because of that, he really couldn’t go around committing all sorts of untraceable assassinations without someone beginning to wonder just how they were magically happening. If you’ll recall, he actually considered the possibility of assassinating Hektor by using two or three (or several) of the SNARC parasites to basically set off a thermite charge in his inner ear. He rejected it for two reasons (1) because any trained healer/surgeon who examined Hektor would realize that something very peculiar had happened at a very convenient time for Cayleb Ahrmahk and the Empire of Charis, and (2) because he didn’t – and doesn’t — want to get into the habit of going around assassinating anyone who seems to him to be an obstacle to his plans.

By the time of the last book, the Church has gotten around to officially labeling Merlin a demon, anyway, which leaves them with the problem of where the true seijins which the Holy Writ promises will turn up to defeat genuine demons. In addition, however, by this time the Church’s credibility has been massively undermined. Or, rather, the credibility of the Group of Four and — especially — Zhaspahr Clyntahn has been hugely undermined, and not just in the Empire of Charis. Because of that, you’re seeing him using not simply his SNARCs but others of his technological goodies more offensively, as, for example, when he took out the semaphore towers to clear the way for the Great Canal Raid, or when Dialydd Mab took out the inquisitors on the canal barge in LAMA. On the other hand, we saw in MT&T Clyntahn carrying out precisely the sort of mass reprisal Merlin had feared when the powder barge exploded and neither Merlin nor any other saboteur had had a single thing to do with it.

Moreover, even though Clyntahn’s credibility has been undermined, at some point (hopefully) the Church is going to be defeated and people are going to begin looking at the “historical record” of what actually happened. Don’t forget that the big reveal about the truth where Langhorne and the creation of Safehold and the Church of God Awaiting is concerned has not happened and that it will not happen any sooner than they can possibly avoid. The reason, obviously, is for them to have the greatest possible opportunity to prepare the ground for revealing the truth. It would be a very, very bad thing if someone whose credibility hadn’t been destroyed started looking at two or three instances in which assassinations or sabotage had been so “traceless” as to leave no non-demonic explanation for them.

There are obviously some exceptions to that rule. For example, Merlin has already promised himself that if he ever gets a clean shot at Zhaspahr Clyntahn, he will take it. In the meantime, as Dialydd Mab and his friends and associates, he has a face, a persona who can carry out assassinations without anything more inexplicable than a “normal” seijin’s mystic capabilities. He is extremely unlikely to attempt to “tracelessly” sabotage foundries or manufactories, for a lot of reasons, including the fact that he wants the rest of Safehold, not just Charis, to be developing those capabilities and facilities. He’s perfectly prepared to do what he can to assist them in being. . . less than efficient, shall we say (which was what he hoped to accomplish with the original Mahndrayn breech-loading rifle design), but he is not going to attempt to eliminate any innovators, even on the Church’s side. Or perhaps even especially on the Church’s side, since he’s already pretty much undermined the anti-innovation mindset in the Empire of Charis.

In theory, there are quite a number of things that Merlin could do using his SNARCs or Owl’s remotes which would hasten a Charisian victory; there is, however, nothing he has to do at this point to ensure a Charisian victory. While the Church is fully capable of producing weapons and using them in ways which will lengthen the war and increase the casualty total, there’s not really any probability at this point that they are going to be able to turn the war’s momentum around. (Absent, of course, some sort of catastrophic explosion that completely wipes out the Delthak Works. Short of the kinetic bombardment system, I can’t think of any way that might be contrived, however.)

There was a significant chance of the war’s momentum being reversed when what became the Army of the Sylmahn was about to hammer its way through the Sylmahn Gap, in the east, and Glacierheart was about to fall in the west. That is one of the reasons why he was willing to use his technology — which, by the way, I would point out includes every single thing he’s ever done with his PICA — in order to clear the way for the canal raid. Should a similar situation arise, he would probably be prepared to use technology at least that “openly” once more.

Readers sometimes forget that while Merlin loves his Charisian allies, regards them as the family Nimue Alban never had in the face of the Gbaba onslaught, his and Nimue’s primary mission is to break the Church of God Awaiting’s stranglehold on Safeholdian society and — even more importantly — on technological advancement. He bleeds inside for every single human being killed in the religious war raging across Safehold, but in the final analysis, Gray Harbor, Cayleb, Sharleyan, and Maikel Staynair are all absolutely correct when they say that Clyntahn would have launched a war against Charis whether or not Merlin had ever waked up on Safehold. Moreover, it’s going to take something as catastrophic as the Jihad to break that technological stasis and keep it broken, and in that regard, the longer the war lasts (in very cold-blooded terms) the better for Merlin’s true mission. I’m not saying that he has reasoned it out that way, but those considerations underlie every single decision he’s made. And, if you’ll recall, when he rescued the kids from the krakens in OAR, and when he rescued Sharleyan from assassination in BHD, he told himself the entire time he was doing it that he couldn’t risk doing it. In those instances, he allowed his heart to overrule his head, but he knows that’s exactly what he did. It was simply something he couldn’t not do, but the sort of things which are being suggested here — traceless assassinations, traceless acts of sabotage, etc. — are things he doesn’t have to do, things he isn’t driven by his heart over his head to do, and things which might actively impede his primary object.

I’m sure some readers will insist that he ought to do them anyway. My response is that he is already operating extremely effectively against the Church and the Proscriptions and that he isn’t going to do anything to muck that up.

Not quite correct. The darkness of Nimue’s/Merlin’s eyes is pretty remarkable anywhere on Safehold; they got the huge degree of notice they did early in the books because that coloration is unheard of in native Charisians, however. By and large, the people of Safehold tend to a sort of warm beige coloration, rather like that of my beautiful Cambodian born twin daughters, but the northern portions of both Havens, in particular, have very extreme winters and lighter complexons and blue and gray eyes are much more common there. Blonds and true redheads like Paityr Wylsynn are quite rare even on the Mainland, however, and most people who are described in the books as “fair haired” are generally more of a very light brown or sandy — or honey — blond than your true golden or platinum blond. You’ll come across an occasional character described as “golden haired,” but you should also notice that they’re very uncommon.

Chisholm’s winters aren’t quite up to Mainland standards for cold, but they’re in the running and Chisholmians tend more towards the same sort of “northern” genotype. Emerald and Corisande, even more than Charis, tend to have equatorial climates, with darker coloration being the norm there, hence the comments about Irys’ mother’s exotic coloration and the comments on her own eye color. Harchong was initially heavily Asiatic (and especially Chinese) when it was first settled and continues to demonstrate that genotype pretty strongly. More “Nordic” coloration is sometimes (rarely) found in Northern Harchong, and the “ethnicity” of names and coloration should not be taken to imply that Harchong today is any particular era of historical China. I think of it more as a fusion of medieval Russian social norms mixed with a Mandarinate bureaucracy, in fact.

By and large, the populations originally settled by the Ark command crew were fairly homogenized. Harchong was something of an exception, but that was largely because the initial population had been drawn fairly proportionately from all area of Old Earth, there were a lot of Chinese, and China had specifically requested that even though their colonists were going to lose all memory of technology they retain as much as possible of their cultural heritage. Most of the other Old Earth ethnicities and groups were less concerned with that issue, however, and Harchong lost most of its Chinese “identity” anyway (aside from the heritage of Chinese names and naming conventions) when Langhorne and Bedard rewrote their memories so much more completely than anyone on Old Earth had intended.

There are quite a few echoes of Old Earth still rattling around the planet, but thanks in no small part of Langhorne’s and Bedard’s personal prejudices (and their own backgrounds, which they leaned on heavily when restructuring the memories of the Adams and Eves), a very “Western” blend of culture was imposed on the planetary population from the outset. Remember that they wanted everyone starting from the same cultural and belief template, and they used the one with which they were most familiar as its foundation. One might, I suppose, argue that this is the ultimate case of “Western Imperialism,” although I didn’t really intend to make any statements in that direction, I promise!

It’s not the case that ethnicity in names has disappeared on Safehold, however. Whoever it was that suggested there were no Hispanic names in the mix seems to have missed a few (like Faidel Ahlverez, for example), but that’s probably in part because of the altered spellings. There are, in fact, names from almost every cultural group, but they are (admittedly) biased towards “Western” names (outside Harchong, at any rate).

In general, you can think of the Safeholdian population as having “smoothed out” the extremes of genetic diversity on Old Earth (with the exception of Harchong) when the planet was first settled. For the most part, that smoothing out has continued over the centuries since, but the same environmental factors which selected for differences in things like skin pigmentation and eye coloration have been in play for the better part of a thousand years, as well. Hence the difference between “Northern” and “Out Island” appearances.

The Commodore never saw the original OBS [orbital bombardment system] coming for a very good reason, which I didn’t really intend to share with you at this point, but . . . .

By the time the OBS was deployed, all but one of the colony’s ships had been disposed of (as per the original operations plan) by dropping them into the local sun once they were no longer needed. The ship which remained had been Langhorne’s flagship all along and he’d been very careful about vetting and reassigning shipboard personnel while Kau-Yung and Shan-Wei were off prepping the planet. By the time he came to join them, he’d had several years to weed out any potential weak spots in the crew.

Now, these were big honking ships, and his flagship had been chosen (and hung onto until last) in part because it was one of the main fabrication vessels — that is, it represented a very impressive industrial base. Officially, it was retained till last in case something unexpected came up on Safehold which would require industrial support to rectify. There were no “system defenses” as such any longer, since they were now committed to staying on Safehold no matter what might happen and the small number of relatively light warships Kau-Yung had retained had been destroyed (for the same reasons as the rest of the colony fleet), since they would have been totally inadequate to defend the planet anyway. The military forces which remained under Kau-Yung’s command essentially consisted by that time of a handful of passive sensor platforms (which were looking out of the system and not inward) and the ex-Navy personnel who were now part of the command crew and served more as police than any sort of serious military force. Don’t forget that the entire command crew (less those in the Alexandria Enclave) were in on Langhorne’s basic plan, which came to . . . lots of people. Exactly how many “lots of people” is something I don’t intend to tell you just now. There were enough of them to require policing, and Kau-Yung’s people would also have been in charge of disaster relief or any other emergency that came along.

Langhorne and his inner circle were well aware of how loyal to Kau-Yung his own people were, and despite the deep estrangement between him and Shan-Wei (which most of the “archangels” accepted as genuine) Langhorne was less than confident that Kau-Yung would be in favor of turning her and all the rest of the Alexandrians into ground zero for a kinetic strike. For that matter, Langhorne was far from certain that all the rest of the command crew would think it was a good idea to commit the mass murder of colleagues they’d known and worked with for decades, even if they had reached a point of bone-deep philosophical disagreement.

As a result of that uncertainty on his part, the original OBS was a relatively simple (and cheap) system built for a single purpose — to take out the entire Alexandria Enclave in a single strike — and it was intended to do so so quickly that neither Kau-Yung and his loyalists among the ex-Navy personnel nor any other “archangels” who might have disagreed with the plan would be able to prevent it from happening. In other words, the idea was to burn out the source of “dangerous contamination” in a single stroke and present them with a fait accompli, after which they would have little choice but to accept Langhorne’s plans — and actions — as a “done deal.” To that end, the OBS was also built under high conditions of secrecy in one of the modules aboard the flagship commanded and staffed by people personally loyal to Langhorne. Its existence was concealed not just from Kau-Yung, but from everyone outside Langhorne’s immediate close circle of utterly trusted subordinates, and it wasn’t deployed from inside the module in which it had been built until literally no more than a very few hours from when it was used. As a result, there was no real “window” in which Kau-Yung might have seen what was coming and taken steps to prevent it.

Actually, this appears to be a[nother] point upon which people have missed quite a few small implications of text comments on the tech available to Safehold. Things like Pasqualization [pasteurization], canned foods, etc. The Safeholdian food preservation industry is much farther advanced than some people seem to be assuming, despite the fact that it is (traditionally) far more of a “muscle-powered” affair than would have been the case for an equivalent level of sophistication on Earth. In connection with this, I would also point out that by the time of the American Civil War dehydrated milk, dried vegetables, and quite a few other items/techniques needed to produce relatively low-bulk rations were available. Because low-bulk/low-weight substitutes for much of the human-consumed supplies are available, the imbalance between required rations and required fodder is even more pronounced than some people seem to be assuming. In other words, do not judge the weight, portability, and/or preservation requirements of an army’s logistics train by the “Elizabethan” tech model some people still seem to apply as the default tech level for pre-Merlin Safehold.

The biggest classical pre-motorization problem the QMG faces on Safehold is the need for fodder, which is especially a factor in areas like much of the SR where food supplies have been deliberately destroyed and so high a percentage of normal cropland simply wasn’t planted following the Sword of Schueler. Even there, Safeholdian armies have a huge advantage in the form of the draft dragon because of its combination of size, basic physiognomy, and efficiency of digestion. Using grain(s) as the base fodder helps enormously in terms of transporting feed because it concentrates much more energy in a smaller bulk than grass or hay does, but you still have to have a certain percentage of roughage (best supplied by hay) to maintain health. I think the rule of thumb is that a horse, for example, needs 1-2% of bodyweight in roughage every day and somewhere around 3% of bodyweight total for food. For a 1,000-pound draft horse, that would be about 30 pounds total food, of which around 15 pounds should be roughage, and (if I recall correctly) a “standard” square bale of hay here in the States runs to about 50 pounds. So assuming no free-growing grass for grazing (or a forced march in which there’s no time to turn them out to graze), you need about a third of a bale per draft horse per day. The other 15 pounds or so can be lowered by using very high energy grains for fodder, and high-quality hay (such as alfalfa, which is sort of the gold standard for hay) reduces the total amount of roughage required, as well. Of course, the mule (which is also known on Safehold) requires only about 1/3 as much grain as a horse of the same bodyweight, so a big 1,000-pound draft mule would require only about 10 pounds of grain and slightly less roughage, as well, meaning you could feed one of them for a day on about half the total weight/bulk of food your draft horse would require. (Dragons also require roughage, but not quite as high a percentage. The difference isn’t great enough to have much effect on the bulk and/or weight of the required fodder.)

As a general rule, the US Army during the animal-traction period rated draft animals on the basis that (assuming a 10-hour draft period) 1 ox could pull about 1,500 pounds; 1 mule could pull about 750 pounds, and 1 horse could pull 250-300 pounds. For comparison, a typical Western working ox would weigh about 2,000 pounds, but the oxen the Army was using at this time averaged about 1,700 pounds, which meant that the ox’s sustained draft was roughly equal to its own weight. The typical heavy draft mule would weigh around 1000 pounds, so they it could pull about 75% of its weight, while a horse could pull only about 40 percent of its own weight. By the same token, horse or a mule could carry about 20% of its bodyweight while an ox could carry about 25% of its own body weight. These numbers were all calculated for off-road transportation; on-road they would be substantially higher. They were also calculated on an empirical basis, by observing demonstrated performance in the field, and should therefore be considered pretty reliable. As a check on them, there is a considerable amount of ongoing research into draft animals for use in Third World economies. The current research considers a “burst draft” number and a “sustained draft” number. Oxen have the highest values in each category, with a “burst” number of about 6 times their bodyweight (that is, a 2,000-pound ox would have a “burst draft” value of about 12,000 pounds) and a “sustained draft” of about 5,000 pounds using the modern measure, which (as nearly as I could determine) is a road value, not cross-country, which would fit fairly well with the empirical numbers from above. (That is, the numbers cross-country should be about 1/3 of what they would be on a decent road.) The reason that the numbers for oxen are higher than for horses has a lot to do with the physiology of the animals. Put most simply, an ox’s legs, body form, and musculature are “lower set” and better suited to pulling heavier loads for longer distances but at a substantially lower rate of speed.

A Safeholdian draft dragon has a lower “burst” capability (expressed as a percentage of its own bodyweight) than an ox, but a higher sustained capability because it has an additional set of legs. Oxen can carry (as opposed to pull) a higher percentage of their bodyweight than horses can (again, because of physiology), but dragons can carry an even higher percentage (30-35%) than most oxen can. On Safehold, this isn’t as critical as it might be here on Earth, because oxen are virtually never used, since the dragon is available and is a much more efficient proposition, so what we really need to be comparing them to in terms of performance is the horse or the mule. I’ve included the ox in the current discussion primarily as a “real-life” comparison for the aforesaid horses and mules, however.

A dragon has a “burst” capability of approximately 5.5 times its own bodyweight and a “sustained” capability of about 4.5 times its own bodyweight, and weighs approximately 15,000 pounds. I’ve used a value of 4 times that bodyweight in the books simply to be sure I was allowing a “fudge factor” for dragons which are smaller and/or larger than the average and allow for those which lose body mass while being worked intensively. This happens with all draft animals and is allowed for in the US Army estimates I used above. It is not allowed for in all of the more recent studies I’ve seen, although the majority of them which consider feed requirements do consider the problem at least obliquely, since the intensity of the animal’s labor also affects the efficiency of its digestion.

What this means is that to transport 60 tons of supplies 100 miles along a (good) road would require approximately 145.5 horses, 53.3 mules, or 2 dragons. The horses would require about 4,362 pounds of food per day; the mules would require about 2,180 pounds; the dragons would require only 1,200 pounds, or little more than half the amount the mules would need. (Although oxen don’t really come into this equation, because — as I said — they aren’t much used on Safehold, you’d need about 24 of them to move the same load, albeit at a much lower rate of speed, and they would consume about 1,900 pounds of food.) The horses (and mules) would require about 27 hours to travel 100 miles; the ox would require about 40 hours; the dragon would require approximately 20 hours. (Note: these figures are for continuous hours. All of the various critters involved would require periodic rest stops, not to mention the time required to consume the fodder discussed above.) The dragon’s advantage over the mule or (especially) horse in terms of pounds of fodder per mile traveled would come close to doubling across country, without a road net; its advantage would be no more than about 1.5 greater than for oxen.

Just as a matter of comparison, the famous M35 “deuce and a half” truck of the US Army can carry about 10,000 pounds of cargo and has a “highway” mileage of about 11 miles per gallon, so to transport 60 tons of cargo 100 miles would require 12 of them, each of which would burn roughly 9.1 gallons of gasoline, or a total of 109.2 gallons. A gallon of gasoline weighs about 6.2 pounds per gallon, so the gasoline required to transport our 60 tons for 100 miles would weigh 675.8 pounds, or about 56% of the “fuel cost” for the dragons. Of course, the volume that fuel would take up would be much lower and the entire trip would take a bit less than 2 hours or approximately 10 percent as long as the dragons would take. The advantage over horse or even mule-drawn transport is obviously much greater, and the US Army didn’t have access to Safeholdian dragons, unfortunately, which is probably why it violated the Proscriptions and came up with its infernal creation.

Nonetheless, I think it should be evident from the above that Safeholdian armies’ logistical capabilities come far closer to those of a mechanized era than even late 19th-century Earth-style animal traction could have. Of course, the extent to which that is true depends in no small part on how thoroughly and how well the capabilities of Safeholdian animal traction has been integrated into a given army’s transport system, and not all Safeholdian armies are equal in that respect by any stretch of the imagination.

I see that people have been discussing currency and currency values, so I thought I’d give you the enclosed table. This reflects cumulative changes in currency exchange rates over a five-year period; it does not show you the peaks and valleys involved in those changes. Nor does it show you the purchasing power of the various currencies in terms of US dollars, which I have established for my own use as of 1800, 1850, 1900, 1950, and 2000.

I should point out that the currency units used here are all marks. Prior to the jihad, Temple marks were (you should pardon the expression) the “gold standard” of Safehold. National units minted their own coins simply to put enough currency into circulation, and the exchange rate reflected both the amount of bullion in any given coin (there are different bullion contents for several of them, most notably for Sodar and Harchong, if only because there were no truly standardized planetwide units of measure and weight) as well as the users’ faith in the amount of bullion (the prohibitions of the Writ vis-a-vis debasement of the coinage notwithstanding). It should also be noted, however, that there have always been silver and copper (actually bronze) marks in circulation. Generally speaking, there are 20 silver marks (or “silvers”) in a gold mark and 5 copper marks in each silver mark (or 100 “coppers” in a gold mark). Paper notes have been in circulation for decades (or longer) on Safehold, as well, but the provisions of the Writ which forbid debasing the currency have always been interpreted to mean that while paper notes may be issued by a bank, a nation, an archbishopric, or Mother Church herself, the issuing institution cannot issue notes for more bullion than it has actually on hand. In other words, there is no elasticity in the “paper money” supply. At the same time, paper notes are considered less durable than coins (they can, after all, be burned) and easier to counterfeit (which, despite the Writ’s prohibition on debasing the currency is still done by some criminals), and merchants and bankers (who have had a much closer view than the general public of the realities behind Church and secular corruption) have less confidence that “unbacked” banknotes won’t be issued anyway. All of these are reasons that the majority of transactions have still been carried out in coin. The primary function of these banknotes has been for transactions between banking institutions and treasuries rather than in the marketplace.

In addition to actual banknotes, as defined above, however, institutions may also issue notes which are not backed by actual bullion on hand. These promissory notes are almost always issued on an interest-bearing basis. That is, those who accept the promissory notes in the sale of goods or services do so (in theory, at least) of their own free choice and at their own risk and return for a promised value when the note comes to term in excess of its face value at the time they accepted it. These are much more likely to be used in the marketplace than the banknotes defined above, but are also subject to a certain discount rate by sellers, whether this is openly acknowledged or not.

This is partly reflected in the exchange rates below, because the total amount of currency in circulation includes coins (in gold, silver, and copper), paper notes issued against bullion reserves, and interest bearing promissory notes. The relative values assigned to the currencies in the table below reflect the willingness of sellers to accept all three of the above. One reason for the Charisian mark’s climb in value as opposed to the Church of God Awaiting’s mark is that the Church’s creditors are beginning to cherish serious reservations about notes issued against bullion and promissory notes, whereas Charis is being regarded (whatever the Church might think about it) as a better investment. In short, this shift in value reflects the fact that the Safeholdian marketplace has come to the conclusion that the jihad is most likely to end in the defeat of Mother Church, at least in so far as the Temple’s ability to crush the Empire of Charis is concerned. No one has pointed this out to Clyntahn, needless to say, but were it not for the coercive power of the Church and the Inquisition, the value of the Church’s and Temple Lands’ marks (especially its banknotes and promissory notes) would have fallen considerably further against the Charisian mark.

Eventually, the Charisian, Chisholmian, Emeraldian, Tarotisian, and Corisandian marks will be folded into a single Imperial Mark, but Cayleb and Sharleyan have no desire to pursue any fiscal policies that might shake the faith of the merchants and bankers in the Empire’s constituent realms in the middle of a war.


Safeholdian Currency Equivalents
Nation……Charis 891….Charis 896

Charis……..1.00…………1.12
Chisholm……0.80…………0.96
Emerald…….0.75…………0.80
Tarot………0.90…………0.75
Corisande…..0.78…………0.68
Siddarmark….0.95…………0.96
Siddarmark*……………….0.35
Silkiah…….0.92…………0.92
Silkiah*………………….0.64
Harchong……0.43…………0.41
Desnair…….0.80…………0.75
Dohlar……..0.60…………0.45
Delferahk…..0.68…………0.42
Sodar………0.56…………0.53
Temple Lands..0.94…………0.87
CoG Awaiting..1.14…………1.01

*This line reflects currency value post Sword of Schueler in 896.

You need to reflect upon the fact that the reference was specifically for “most people” and to “full service” PICAs, if you will. In other words, the ones that are faithful analogues of a human original except for the fact that they are immensely stronger, have better reflexes, perfect memory, etc., and were perceived as mobile extensions of their original.

The Terran Federation was lousy with specialized PICAs which were routinely used by people working in high threat environments, etc., and provision of last-generation PICA capability for those who were physically disabled was also routine. In terms of military hardware, the uploading of human awarenesses and human memories into virtual realities for R&D, for the control of warships, fortresses, and system defense nets was widespread, but not as widespread — in tactical applications – as the use of genuine AIs. (Under the Federation’s legal codes, AIs were on a different plane from electronic humans in several ways, primarily because AIs were regarded as artificial constructs which could be and were designed to serve specific functions which often precluded the possibility or even the concept of self-preservation. You might recall Nimue/Merlin’s reflections on why Owl had such limited self-awareness and personality in the first place.)

There were all sorts of other reasons for the greater reliance on human-managed AIs than on PICAs or completely electronic humans, including the sheer expense of last-generation PICAs and a few very unhappy experiences in the early days of their availability. There are also some factors involved that can’t really be discussed at this point because of their bearing on elements of the story line that will never be resolved on Safehold, but in general there was no prejudice against the combination of human and electronic consciousnesses. Virtual personalities were regarded as individuals in their own rights; the restriction on PICAs — the necessity for the PICA’s memories and experiences to be uploaded to (i.e., be combined with) the human original — was required because the PICA was not regarded as an individual but rather as a peripheral being operated by the human original. If there was no “human original,” then there was no responsibility for the PICA to be downloaded to it (obviously), and I never intended to imply that someone who for medical reasons (or whatever, not be construed as precluding philosophical reasons) elected to transfer completely into a PICA would be erased every 10 days if he/she failed to report some sort of central policing authority. Unless one chose to make the transition permanent, however, the legal code continued to regard the human original as the only actual personality (since the requirement to upload effectively “overwrote” the original with the combined experience PICA and original). If a virtual personality was “manumitted” by the human original – and there was a legal procedure for doing just that — it became a complete, self-realized individual in the eyes of the law, with all of these civil rights and legal obligations of any other individual citizen of the Federation. Unless it was manumitted, however, the human original remained legally responsible for any of its actions. Put another way, the human original and the PICA were regarded as a single entity by the law and, that being the case, the law required that the separate aspects of that single entity be periodically merged to ensure that remained a single entity.

Now, I personally cherish certain doubts about the attainability of the singularity and its advantages/promises. At the same time, I’m certainly prepared to acknowledge that my reservations may or may not be well taken. I’ve already discussed in past posts on this forum several reasons why the Federation didn’t simply manufacture a bazillion PICAs in order to man vast fleets warships which could be sent off overwhelm the Gbaba. One reason, frankly, was that manpower was never Federation’s military, and one reason it wasn’t was that Federation military hardware required very, very little in the way of flesh-and-blood human personnel because (a) the Federation had very, very capable AIs and (b) the Federation already made significant use of uploaded human beings. As far as other war-fighting technologies — nano weapons, von neumann machines, etc. — are concerned, I’ve never said they weren’t used; I simply said whatever was used was insufficient to stave off ultimate defeat.

You also have to bear in mind that you’re seeing the Federation through the lens of Safehold. For example, there’s been mention by Merlin on more than one occasion that the reason humans on Safehold can’t use the NEAT technology for education is that none of them have the neural receptors they would have had had they been citizens of the Federation. I don’t believe that Merlin ever said that education was the only reason that citizens of the Federation had those receptors. In fact, citizens of the Federation routinely interfaced directly with computers, AIs, etc. Safehold, on the other hand, was intended — deliberately — to possess no advanced technology, including virtual personalities, PICAs, neural receptors, etc., etc. This is the primary reason that the original colonists volunteered to have all memory of that technology erased during their voyage to Safehold, although none of them ever anticipated what Langhorne and Bédard substitute for their original memories.

What I suppose I’m trying to say here is that you ought not to assume on the basis of the legal provisions attached to a specific use of a PICA that you understand all of the nuances of a Federation which you have seen only in historical perspective after that Federation had ceased to exist. Had I not deliberately allowed for the disablement of Merlin’s high-speed data port, you might have a rather different perspective on the interaction of human beings, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality as practiced by the Federation. This is not to say that I did not envision a Federation in which humanity had chosen — by and large – to preserve its humanity as distinct from the machine or from human-machine fusion. I did, however, envision one in which that humanity was far more intimately involved and . . . intertwined with its technological artifacts then you appear to have been assuming based on the single passage you cited.

In no particular order:

(1) Haarahld could not possibly move against any force launched against Charis by the Church until that force had first moved against Charis. You do remember the Church? The all-powerful, Mother of Men, servant of God, authorized by the Archangels, keeper of souls, and general all round font of wisdom and justice? That Church? Haarahld understood (even better than Merlin, who didn’t know anything about the brethren of Saint Zherneau at that point, realized he did) that no secular realm could even think about moving against any Church-supported, Church-mandated alliance except in self-evident self-defense. That meant he had to wait until (A) he had a plausible means of knowing that the attack was coming which could be publicly demonstrated and (B) until the forces and people committed to that attack were unequivocably identified. Therefore, he literally could not attack Emerald until he “discovered” Emerald’s intention to attack Charis, and he needed the Corisandian fleet elements in Emeraldian waters before he could do that. You may remember the lengths that he (or Cayleb, at least) went to to suggest that King Gorjah’s court had been the source of the information that sent the galleons off to meet Malikai and White Ford so far from home. However, it’s worth noting that even though Charis ostensibly had that advanced warning, Cayleb didn’t actually attack until well after the Corisandian galleys had rendezvoused with the Emeraldian galleys and provided Haarahld with the proof that he was fighting a defensive war rather than impiously raising his merely mortal hand against Mother Church in blasphemous, unprovoked defiance of God’s will. (And I should point out that the Corisandian and Chisholmian contingents actually arrived at Eraystor as a joint force, little though they liked one another. They didn’t straggle in over a period of five-days or arrive separately which means that your “engage them individually at sea” strategy would have put him up against a larger force than you appear to be assuming.)

(2) His ability to find and engage the Corisandian and Chisholmian elements at sea would have been far from certain. Of course, he could have retained Merlin aboard his flagship as his own tame wizard, rather than sending him off with Cayleb, but he had what were in his opinion (and mine) enormously better reasons to send Cayleb and the galleons (and Merlin) off to Armageddon Reef. See below.

(3) His galley fleet was considerably weaker than its “paper” strength thanks to the diversions of men, matériel, and artillery to the galleons. His numerical advantage over the Corisandian/Chisholmian fleet (which was traveling in company) was not as large as you appear to be thinking, and he could pretty much have counted on its getting smaller with the losses he would almost inevitably take against the Eraystor fortifications (and the Emeraldian Navy) if he’d gone into Eraystor Bay after Nahrmahn’s ships. See below.

(4) There were really good and sound reasons for him not to attack Eraystor’s port fortifications with only his understrength galley fleet. They were called guns. Lots of guns. The fact that I didn’t take you on a tour of the batteries certainly shouldn’t suggest they weren’t there, unless you can think of another reason why he wasn’t sending in fire ships against the combined fleets? I promise you it wasn’t out of the goodness of his heart or because he’d forgotten to bring along the marshmallows. I could have done a chapter with his discussing why he couldn’t attack the fortifications in an “As you know, Bob” sort of format, but I personally took it as a given that the Eraystor naval facilities, at least, were reasonably well fortified and provided with artillery. No, it wasn’t the “modern” artillery aboard the Charisian galleons, but then his galleys didn’t have “modern” artillery, either. They would have been forced to engage old-style artillery using old-style tactics, aside from the single squadron armed with carronades, and that would have been a seriously losing proposition. And there were very good reasons why he didn’t use the galleons against those fortifications. See below.

(5) Sending the galleon fleet off to intercept the Dohlaran and Tarotisian fleet elements off Armageddon Reef allowed him to use them under conditions which would maximize their advantages, minimize their disadvantages vis-à-vis galleys, and put the enemy galley fleet at a critical disadvantage. In shallower, more confined waters, where the galleys could make better use of their greater speed and mobility, the galleons’ combat advantages would have been considerably less. Now, it can certainly be argued — after the fact — that the galleons proved capable of decisive action at Darcos Sound, which is arguably “confined waters,” but it was one heck of a lot less confined than Eraystor Bay would have been. Moreover, for all of Haarahld’s faith in Merlin, and all the fact that he belonged to the inner circle, neither he nor any other Safeholdian had ever seen galleons in combat before. He was, therefore, not about to risk finding out that their artillery was not in fact superior to the Emeraldian artillery protecting the fleet anchorages or automatically assume that they would have been as successful against galleys in the sorts of waters galleys had been designed to fight in until that fact had been demonstrated in practice.

(6) Haarahld was, indeed, intelligent enough to recognize the advantages in defeating his enemy in detail. That is, in fact, exactly what he did. He chose to hit the combined Dohlaran-Tarotisian force at its most vulnerable and when it would be psychologically least prepared for combat. By doing so, he preserved the secret of the galleons’ broadside armaments until they had already been used to decisively blunt and defeat that arm of the Church’s offensive. Had he used them earlier and had even a single galley gotten away to Tarot and gained access to the semaphore system, the Dohlarans would certainly have been diverted to Tarot, which would have made that portion of the Church’s attack force much, much harder to get at.

(7) If the galleons proved as effective in combat as everyone on the Charisian side hoped they would, then he would be able to engage the combined galley fleet of the entire “northern force” in a single body and almost certainly crush it once Cayleb returned from Armageddon Reef. He intended from the beginning to amass a crushing superiority before he finally engaged them, although he didn’t realize until Merlin’s visit to his flagship that it would be possible to coordinate a genuine pincer attack against Black Water’s command. His original plan was to combine the galley and galleon fleets together into a single, irresistible hammer, and use that hammer to absolutely demolish the naval power of his foes in order to achieve what he did achieve in the end: a crushing Charisian sense of moral superiority and élan.

(8) Like Admiral Jellicoe, Haarahld could lose the war in an afternoon if he got unlucky against his opponents. As long as his fleet was in being and at sea, his enemies couldn’t land a significant invasion force in Charis. They had to destroy his fleet to accomplish their strategic goal; he merely had to keep his fleet intact to accomplish his strategic goal and avoid the invasion of Charis before Cayleb returned with the galleon fleet to reinforce them. In addition, of course, by keeping his fleet in being and keeping Black Water chasing him, he was able to play anvil to Cayleb’s hammer when the galleon fleet did return.

I’m sure I could adduce additional reasons to dispute your assumption that Haarahld failed to be “as sneaky as his enemies knew him to be.” The problem is that if you don’t already grasp the reasons why he had to (a) stand on the defensive until he was clearly the attacked party, (b) avoid losses to the Eraystor defenses, (c) employ his galleons for the first time under conditions which would give them the maximum tactical advantages and maximize the shock effect of being hit so far from home by a totally new and completely unexpected naval force; and (d) attain the maximum devastation of any opposing navy’s morale when it contemplated fighting the Royal Charisian Navy, then I doubt I’m going to be able to explain it to you.

Okay, a few points, some of which I’m pretty sure I’ve addressed before.

(1) You could have a damned large industrial process on a planet, including use of electricity in many and manifold ways, without producing a big enough electromagnetic signature to be easily picked out against the background noise of any star.

(2) Any signature you were radiating could expand only at the speed of light, attenuating the entire way.

(3) Safehold is hundreds of light years beyond the Gbaba’s sphere, and the overwhelming evidence at the time of the Gbaba’s attack on humanity was that the Gbaba do not aggressively patrol beyond the borders of their own sphere. Rather, they react to incursions into their sphere with the equivalent of a “hot pursuit” response and the extermination of the interloper to be sure he’ll never come back. This means that even if Safehold was radiating radio energy out the wahzoo, it would be centuries — quite a few of them, in fact — before any of their radiated energy could be detected by the Gbaba unless the Gbaba happened to be in the area looking for it.

Because of this, the original mission orders for Operation Ark called for a hiatus in which there would be no electromagnetic footprint from Safehold for a long enough period of time for them to be fairly confident that any actively searching Gbaba scout ships had swept through the area and gone home again. There was never any particular concern over what was going to happen after that hiatus was over, because at that time Safehold would be far enough away from any hostile detectors to be beyond threat until it had had plenty of time to rebuild and advance its technology to a “Gbaba-proof” level. (As a “historical” validation of their assumptions, the mission planners could look at the fact that Earth’s radio emissions had had ample time to reach well beyond her most distant colony before the Gbaba responded. In other words, they had empirical evidence that the Gbaba hadn’t detected them despite radio emissions until they entered the Gbaba’s sphere.)

The basis for the Church’s prohibition of anything touching on the rakurai is threefold.

First, one of the underlying assumptions of the Proscriptions is that true, large-scale technology is impossible to develop without electricity. Or, put another way, electricity is going to be developed by anybody on his way through to large-scale, advanced technology. Therefore, banning electricity effectively bans large-scale technology and serves as a warning flag that it’s being developed.

Second, artificially generated and distributed electricity is something that would be readily detectable from orbit and not something likely to be confused with any natural phenomenon.

And, third, the notion of lightning as sacred and not, under any circumstances, to be profaned by mortal hands provides the permanent remembrance of not just Langhorne’s existence but of the consequences of Langhorne’s wrath.

Now, at the same time that Langhorne was setting up the prohibition of advanced technology, he was making provision for the “archangels” and “angels” to continue to use very advanced technology to validate their supernatural powers. Merlin’s SNARCs are using shielded, stealthed communications arrays designed to hide from hostile tactical sensors — aimed against the Gbaba, at the time the SNARCs were built, but equally effective against any sensors the orbital array might mount — and walking in the footsteps of the technology Langhorne himself ruled was usable by the “archangels.” Moreover, there is a quantum leap between the initial production of electricity and the highly advanced applications of it inherent in Merlin’s toys. In effect, it would be relatively simple to build a protocol into the bombardment platform’s sensors (assuming, of course, that the sensors are actually prepared to blast technology on the planetary surface in the first place) which differentiates between “technology so advanced it must be being used by the ‘archangels'” and “technology so crude that it couldn’t be being used by the ‘archangels.'” If it’s the latter, it needs to be smitten . . . quickly; if it’s the former, leave it alone because it’s being used on Langhorne’s business.

In that respect, Merlin is hiding in the shadow of the original archangels. Although that, of course, assumes that all of his carefully stealthed technology is detectable in the first place. He has no intention of giving away any more detectable signature than he can avoid, of course, but from the perspective of the reader that “shadow” should always be borne in mind

As for Nimue’s Cave, it’s buried beneath 7.5 miles of solid rock and iron ore. During the period before her PICA woke up, the entire installation was, indeed, at absolutely minimal levels of power, and its primary power source when it came back online is a geothermal tap, so there’s no betraying emission of burned hydrocarbons or neutrinos to give it away. Assuming that it was possible for Nimue to excavate a similar underground complex and install a major generating system there, and find the labor force to work in that complex without popping flags with its members about violations of the Proscriptions, then, yes, Charis could have electricity for applications which require it. Of course, digging something that size in anything less than several decades without using technology which in its self would probably trigger the arrays (assuming that they are triggerable). And, equally of course, they might find it a bit difficult to explain to the rest of their workforce where the products being produced using that electricity were coming from and how they were being produced.

The bottom line is that no one in Charis really knows whether or not generated and distributed electricity would trigger a bombardment. They suspect that it would, and in this instance they prefer to err on the side of safety, but they certainly don’t know it. On the other hand, they do know that “profaning the rakurai” would represent a crossing of the Rubicon. It would be an open, explicit defiance of the Proscriptions which no one could argue away. That is something they cannot afford at this time or, indeed, at any time until after the proscriptions themselves have been successfully invalidated/overturned following the “reveal” of the truth about Langhorne and the archangels.

So while there are what you might call “technical issues” bound up in the uncertainty of how the bombardment platform would respond, there is also an overriding reason — found in the Proscriptions — why electricity is impossible. In the meantime, the electronic footprint of Merlin’s stealthed recon skimmer, the SNARCs singular transmissions, the personal coms of the inner circle, etc., are extraordinarily difficult to detect in the first place and (apparently ) trapped in the filters that were established to allow the “archangels” to employ technology.

Don’t know if all of that really makes it any clearer, but there it is.

It would be nice if no military, including that of the Charisian Empire, ever found itself buying something that turned out to be more than it needed. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out that way. For example, the Alaska-class cruisers, which were truly magnificent ships, but which spent around 5 months — total — in commission before they were pulled from service and, eventually, scrapped. Which is to say, that these ships may, indeed, the “excess to requirements” at the time they are ordered and built. (You may recall that I’ve allowed even the Royal Manticoran Navy to make a few . . . questionable purchases over the years.

Having said that, however, they may or may not be “overkill” for Charis’ needs, depending on exactly what it is they have in mind to do with them. And, since I’m not going to tell you about the plot for the next book at this point, I’m not going to discuss whether or not they end up being the aforesaid overkill.

There is, however, another underlying motive for building these ships, and that is to inescapably drive home the war-fighting superiority of Charisian technology. Driving home that superiority is seen by the inner circle not simply as a morale weapon designed to induce earlier surrenders, but also as a means to compel the defeated realms fighting for the Church to recognize that they literally cannot survive on the battlefield — whether afloat or ashore — without duplicating that technology. The world at large will be told that these ships were necessary — just as the new model artillery, cartridge-firing small arms, new steel mills, pneumatically-powered machine tools, etc., were necessary — in order to defend Charis against the Group of Four’s unprovoked attack. And, to be sure, Charis did require hugely enhanced combat abilities to survive. However, what the rest of the world at large won’t be told is that the inner circle desires to create an environment which brutalizes every other ruler or realm on Safehold in such a way as to compel them into jumping on the “the-innovation-genie-is-out-of-the-bottle” train right behind Charis.

In some ways, it’s a risky game, because if the coalition the Church put together for the jihad stays together as a long-term power bloc opposed to the Charisian Empire, and if that power bloc manages to equalize its industrial capabilities with those of Charis (and there is something of a ceiling imposed on Charis by the inability to use electricity), then Charis is in serious trouble in the event of any eventual Round 2. On the other hand, the inner circle has decided that courting that risk has to be a fundamental component of its overall strategy for ultimately dealing with the Church and the bombardment platforms against the backdrop of the millennial “return of the archangels” it now expects.

In reply to the question some other people have been asking about what happened to the other 2 10” guns of the original King Haarahld VII revision, I did, indeed, drop them from my SpringSharp-checked second design when I realized how many more 8” and 4” I could fit into the same displacement. Those lighter guns are the ships’ primary anti-ship armament anyway, so I decided I could live with single-mount 10” weapons, instead. I may still do exactly that, but since people asked, here’s what the KH VIIIs would look like if I went back to the twin-mount layout, instead. Notice that the ship gets a little larger in the process, and there were a couple of other tweaks I had to make to maintain structural strength. The worst aspect of adding the guns is that deep draft goes up to 46’, which is going to make problems in terms of channel depth and harbor depths. Part of that can be solved by increasing length and beam, but that drives tonnage even higher and starts creating some problems for the construction technique I’ve envisioned for building the ships. Cost rises by less than 2% overall by simply adding in the additional pair of 10”guns, so I’m going with the figure stated here.

************************************

King Harahld VII,
Imperial Charisian Navy armored cruiser
Laid down: 896 (Kings Harbor Dockyard)
Barbette ship

Displacement:
10,120 t light; 11,005 t standard; 12,819 t normal; 14,270 t full load

Dimensions:
Length (overall): 465.17’
Length (waterline): 435’
Beam: 77’
Draft (normal): 23’6”
Draft (deep): 46’

Armament:
4 x 10″ 40 cal BL guns, M 896 (2×2) in centerline open barbette mounts.
(508-pound AP shell, 150 rounds per gun)
14 x 8″ 40 cal BL guns, M 896 (14 x 1) in broadside casemate mounts.
(260-pound AP shell, 200 rounds per gun)
12 x 4″ 45 cal BL guns, M 896 (12 x 1) in broadside open mounts with shields
(32.5-pound AP shell, 250 rounds per gun)

Armor:
Belts:
Main: 6” (max), 2” (min), length = 280’; height = 15’; inclined 10°
Ends: 2.5” (uniform), length equals 151’; height equals 15’

Deck:
Uniform thickness = 1.5” in single armored deck.

Conning tower:
Uniform thickness = 6”

Gun armor:
10”/40: gunshield (face) = 6”; gunshield (side) = 6”; barbette = 6”
8”/40: casemate = 6”; shell hoist = 6”
4”/45: gunshield (face & side) = 2”; shell hoist = 6”


Machinery:
Coal-fired boilers, triple-expansion steam engines,
Direct drive, 2 shafts, 1,418 sdp (36,159 ihp) = 28.3 knots (24.6 Old Earth knots)
Range 12,000nm at 10.00 kts
Bunkerage at max displacement = 3,266 tons
Bunkerage at normal displacement = 1,814 tons


Complement:
602 – 783

Cost:
CM 1,850,000

Distribution of weights at normal displacement:
Armament: 917 tons, 7.2 %
Armor: 3,030 tons, 23.6 %
Belts: 1,338 tons, 10.4%; Guns: 928 tons, 7.2%; Deck: 693 tons, 5.4%; CT: 71 tons, 0.6%
Machinery: 2,411 tons, 18.8 %
Hull, fittings & equipment: 3,763 tons, 29.4 %
Fuel, ammunition & stores: 2,699 tons, 21.1 %

Overall survivability and seakeeping ability:
Survivability (Non-critical penetrating hits needed to sink ship = 35.5 x 10″
Stability (Unstable if below 1.00): 1.27
Metacentric height 5.2 ft
Roll period: 14.2 seconds
Steadiness as gun platform (Average = 50 %): 99 %
Seaboat quality (Average = 1.00): 1.23



Hull form characteristics:
Hull has raised forecastle, low quarterdeck, extended bulbous bow, & transom stern
Block coefficient (normal/deep): 0.570 / 0.324
Length to Beam Ratio: 5.65 : 1
‘Natural speed’ for length: 28.54 knots (24.8 Old Earth knots)
Power going to wave formation at top speed: 61 %
Trim (Max stability = 0, Max steadiness = 100): 80
Bow angle (Positive = bow angles forward): 40.00 degrees
Stern overhang: 5.00 ft / 1.52 m
Freeboard: maximum = 30’; minimum = 15’; average = 20’6”


Ship space, strength and comments:
Space:
Hull below water (magazines/engines, low = better): 85.8 %
Above water (accommodation/working, high = better): 157.0 %
Waterplane Area: 24,808 Square feet
Displacement factor (Displacement / loading): 121 %
Structure weight / hull surface area: 123 lbs/sq ft or 599 Kg/sq metre
Hull strength (Relative):
Cross-sectional: 0.91
Longitudinal: 2.67
Overall: 1.01
Adequate machinery, storage, compartmentation space
Excellent accommodation and workspace room
Ship has slow, easy roll, a good, steady gun platform
Good seaboat, rides out heavy weather easily

NOTE: with the twin 10” gun mounts restored, this design compares to HMS Triumph (1903) which mounted 4 x 10”; 14 x 7.5”; and 14 x 14-pounders (3”); with 3-7” belt armor, 1-3” deck armor, 11” conning tower armor, 8-10” turret armor, 2-10” barbettes, and 7” casemates; 12,175 tons (load displacement); 436’x 71’x 25’4”; 21.9 knots (19 Old Earth knots); 6,250 miles@11.5 knots (10 Old Earth knots). I hadn’t looked at Triumph when I started playing with the design, because I’d forgotten that she’d ever existed (although she served in the Royal British Navy, she was actually designed and built by Vickers for the Chilean Navy and only ended up in the RN because the Brits bought her from Chile to prevent her from being sold to Russia during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904). Once I’d turned KH VIII back into a pre-dreadnought battleship from an armored cruiser, however, I decided to see if I could find a historical pre-dreadnought she compared to, and I think I found one. Bear in mind that Triumph carried her main armament in turrets rather than gunshields.

Triumph is within 2% of KH VIII’s normal load displacement, carries the same main battery, the same number of secondary guns (7.5”-vs-8”), and 2 more tertiary guns (3”-vs-4”), but she’s 30% slower and has only 52% of the KH VIII’s endurance. Her design draft is about 2’ deeper than KH VIII’s, but I’m not sure what she’d look like at deep load draft, when she would displace about 800 tons more than the Charisian ship.

One point that needs to be borne in mind looking at these two designs, however, is that Triumph had to be designed on the theory that she would face guns equal to her own, whereas KH VIII is not. That allowed me to do a few things Triumph‘s designers couldn’t. In addition, the real-world design had to worry about torpedos and mines, and KH VIII doesn’t.

Taking everything into consideration, I’m actually pleased with how close to the historical ship my design works out. And I’d have to say that the outcome demonstrates that the SpringSharp software does do a pretty good job of modeling real life ship design.

I think people are vastly overrating what “special forces” could do for Safehold.

If you have a mission suitable to be carried out by “fast-moving cavalry,” you don’t need “special forces,” you need cavalry. And from a reconnaissance perspective, you can’t embed “special forces” in distant locations and have reliable transmission of information in anything remotely like real-time terms. You can send out patrols with messenger wyverns — except, of course, that the messenger wyverns will return to their “home” roost which may not be where you need the information — but you don’t need some sort of super elite special forces for that; you simply need reasonably well-trained cavalry. Nor is there a crying need for forces trained to conduct “irregular warfare.” This isn’t the American frontier in 1776, and for the most part units like Roger’s Rangers aren’t what you’re going to need in a war fought across it. In a lot of ways, the terrain constraints are more like Europe in the late nineteenth century, and unless you want to inspire a full-fledged guerrilla warfare model behind the lines, using organized, openly operating military units to accomplish your goals is going to be much more economical in terms of training, manpower, and consequences to the civilian population.

The sort of information that “special forces” could provide to a commander in the field is exactly the sort of information that he ought to be able to gather with the scouting forces already assigned to him. That’s one of the things the “scout-snipers” were organized to provide in the first place, hence the “scout” in their title. With the creation of the Imperial Charisian Army, the “scout-snipers” concept has evolved/been modified somewhat, although they remain recon specialists whose function is to very quietly slip behind, through, or around enemy lines in order to gather tactical information. The primary reconnaissance function, however, is now provided by mounted reconnaissance troops, and the “reach” of recon is — and will remain in a pre-radio world — very limited. The sorts of tactical data that SNARCs make available to a field commander are generally (not always, but generally) going to be the same sorts of tactical information those trained scouts and their mounted counterparts can provide. In those instances where more “mundane” means cannot duplicate the tactical information gathering capability, there’s probably no way that someone could plausibly claim that the information had been gathered by those merely mortal scouts. In those instances, the commander who has access to the SNARCs — like Green Valley — simply has to “operate on a hunch” or rely on “instinct,” exactly like Cayleb did when he and Merlin led the Navy around Crag Hook in the middle of a storm to attack Thirsk’s ships. Or, for that matter, like Green Valley did in the Sylmahn Gap. There is no way that any plausible non-SNARC source of information could have openly provided to him the grasp of the enemy’s deployments that he used to plan that attack . . . or time the orders that he gave during the actual engagement. At best, his initial understanding of the enemy’s deployment’s could have been based on “patrols moving along the lizard paths” in the cliffs above the gap floor, but there were no Charisian “special forces” in position — and couldn’t have been — to provide it for him. And there is no way in the world that anyone could have plausibly provided him with an ongoing wyvern’s-eye view of how the engagement was developing.

The 21st-century military is in love with the concept of “special forces,” and they have pulled off some truly spectacular successes. They are not, however, the end-all and be-all of reconnaissance and scouting operations — or even sabotage operations — as some people appear to believe. Our present-day concept of special forces has a lot to do with the nature of the conflicts we face — low intensity warfare, antiterrorist operations, what we used to call “hearts and minds” operations, provision of training cadres, deniability, etc. — than with an inherent superiority of special forces warfare over conventional forces in an all out war for survival. The undeniable tendency for special forces organizations to siphon off noncoms and officers — and, of course, enlisted personnel — of superior quality always has a negative effect on the availability of those same officers, noncoms, and enlisted to the regular forces. In some circumstances, that siphoning effect is fully justified because the special forces give you capabilities the regular forces simply don’t have. In the case of Safehold, however, where the “regulars” can do just about anything you need done, it’s much harder to justify making that trade-off.

As far as making use of what we might call “strategic” information gathered by the SNARCs and passing it off as having been gathered by long-range, deep penetration special forces teams, why bother? You’re already passing it off as information that was gathered by your spy network, so why introduce an unnecessary complication to your military forces to explain what you’ve already explained?

And, finally, from the perspective of infrastructure raids, Merlin, Cayleb, and Sharleyan are going to be far more comfortable with carrying them out using “conventional” cavalry forces whose path in and out to the attack infrastructure can be clearly traced and demonstrated (thus demonstrating that the attackers had to come from the outside) rather than special forces which infiltrate to their objective, attack, and then disappear again. The reason for this (as I’ve stated before) is that they have no desire to provoke Clyntahn into retaliatory raids against the local civilian population which “obviously” collaborated with the attackers or — almost equally culpable — didn’t prevent the attack by spotting and reporting the attackers. It could be argued that from a suitably cold-blooded and calculating perspective provoking Clyntahn into additional atrocities can only undermine the authority of the Church of God Awaiting and the Inquisition, on the one hand, and provide recruits for an ever-intensifying guerrilla war in the Church’s rear areas. The inner circle has considered that possibility . . . and rejected it.

From a moral perspective, they refuse to become Clyntahn, regarding anyone in the area of operations as expendable as long as it promotes and supports their tactical and operational objectives. They are fighting this war in no small part because of their belief in human dignity and freedom and the sanctity of human life. They refuse to compromise those objectives in any way they can possibly avoid, and they believe that adopting such morally abhorrent policies would ultimately undercut that overriding strategic goal. And from a pragmatic perspective, they don’t need to provoke Clyntahn into committing additional atrocities to create all of the disgust, hatred, and passive and/or active resistance they could possibly desire because he’s going to do it anyway. That much is already abundantly clear to them.

From a tactical perspective, they don’t feel that they need the “assistance” of a lot of organized guerrilla groups, given the capabilities they already have, when those guerrillas’ operations are only going to deepen and harden the fracture lines already splitting Safehold and leave a legacy not simply of mutual hatred but also a legacy of armed, embittered men prepared to resort to violence again. I would imagine that our own experiences in places like Sarajevo, the Middle East, and a dozen other spots around the globe could probably suggest at least part of their reason for their not wanting to create that sort of legacy unless there is an overwhelming tactical need for them to do so despite the downsides they are trying to avoid.

From a strategic perspective, they clearly don’t need a “special forces” deep reconnaissance capability for military, industrial, and economic planning purposes. They’ve already established the existence of their spy networks, and even if you’re going to operate on the assumption that creating a “special forces” organization would provide them with a more broad-based tool with which to legitimize SNARC-gathered information, it doesn’t provide the interface to get that information into the hands of the commanders/planners who need it. Any information your “special forces” guys could gather and get to the rear through “mundane” channels would probably broaden an army commander’s or an area commander’s “reach,” but it wouldn’t help one bit with SNARC reconnaissance, because you’d still have to use someone or something – like Ahbraim Zhevons or Owl’s letter-writing remotes — to insert the information into the chain at some point.

Please do note that I am most emphatically not saying that field commanders aren’t going to need the very best intelligence they can get and that specially trained scouting and reconnaissance outfits aren’t going to be a vital part of that intelligence gathering. Also note that I am most emphatically not ruling out behind-the-front attacks on infrastructure or other critical objectives. I’m simply saying that “special forces” in the 21st-century sense of the term are not going to be the best, most economical way to acquire those capabilities on Safehold. And that “special forces” in the Safeholdian sense of the term already exist within the Imperial Charisian Army. You may not have seen them in operation yet, but then, you’ve only seen the Imperial Charisian Army fight a single battle under extraordinarily constricted conditions of terrain where Safeholdian “special forces” would have been of extremely limited utility.

Okay, a few points about education on Safehold. I don’t know whether or not this is going to make it front and center in the books, although I’ve been looking for a plot strand to hook it to that would make sense to me. In the meantime, though, this is essentially what’s going on.

First, let’s define some terms in the way I’m going to be using them. Bear in mind that because of the difference between our present-day education systems and the way the Safeholdian educational system has been traditionally structured, “fifth grade” on Safehold isn’t necessarily going to be the same thing as “fifth grade” in contemporary US practice. Bearing that in mind:

“Primary education” refers to what we would consider kindergarten to the end of the fifth grade. That is, the five years of education Cahnyr is thinking about in the passage several people have already referenced, which begins at age 6. “Secondary education” refers to classroom studies after the fifth year and through the tenth year. After tenth grade, we move to “college education,” and we stay there through the end of the thirteenth year of education. From “fourteenth grade” (you should pardon the expression) on, we are normally talking about “university education.” These terms are not necessarily absolutely hard and fast, but they define the range of years of schooling for the purposes of the following discussion.

(A) Who traditionally provides schooling on Safehold. Education on Safehold has never been compulsory, which goes a long way towards explaining the huge upsurge in illiteracy following the War Against the Fallen. At that point the original, terraformed enclaves were spreading out to reclaim the planet, lots and lots of hands were needed in the fields and the forests, and it was more important to get the work done than it was to educate the kids. That set the pattern that was followed for several centuries, so that even though Mother Church was officially offering free primary education to every single child of Mother Church, the majority of Safeholdians were not taking advantage of it. Education tended to be concentrated in the towns and cities because that was where there were enough young people whose parents were seeking education to make it practical for Mother Church to invest in the schools. Over the last few centuries, that pattern has begun to shift, and even the smallest village will have a “one room schoolhouse” with a clerical teacher there to provide the basics.

Within the above framework, the Church has historically been responsible for schooling throughout Safehold. The Archangels were smart enough to recognize that if Mother Church allowed education — and especially control of the curriculum — out of her hands, Safehold and the Church of God Awaiting would, you should pardon the expression, go to hell in a handbasket relatively quickly. In other words, secular education was right out. Instead, education was provided at the primary level by the Chihirite Order of the Quill but supervised by the Order of Schueler. Overseeing education, vetting the curriculum, selecting (or removing) teachers, etc., were all seen as responsibilities of the Inquisition as the keeper of allowable knowledge and people’s souls. I believe we’ve already seen one intendant discussing the Inquisition’s responsibility for education with his archbishop. In all of Safehold, prior to the emergence of the Church of Charis, there have been no “certified” secular teachers, and without Mother Church (i.e. the Inquisition’s) approval, no one could teach in any primary or secondary scholastic setting.

Once the student transitions from secondary to “college education,” it is possible for them to study under teachers who have not been certified by the Church or who are not themselves members of the clergy or one of the teaching orders. This is rare, but it does happen, and it normally occurs when you have the equivalent of an “expert in residence.” That is, the instructor’s knowledge base is sufficiently great that he represents a teaching asset which is too valuable for the Church to simply disallow. One example might be an especially skilled navigator who is teaching navigation despite the fact that he is not a churchman. Even those instructors, however, are going to be teaching under strict Church supervision to be certain that nothing pernicious creeps into their instruction.

The Church typically regards “university education” as falling into two categories: seminary and secular. By the time a student who is not himself intended for holy orders reaches the university level, the Inquisition has already had thirteen years to set its seal on his mental outlook and basic belief structure. At that point, students are free to pursue additional instruction from anyone who sets himself up as a teacher of a given subject. Traditionally, teachers are admitted to secular universities faculties on the basis of the number of students they can attract. It’s actually more of a collection of tutors in specific areas who gradually acquire a number of paying students sufficient for them to begin offering lecture courses in addition to individual instruction. A student who is intended for holy orders attends seminary, instead, which is a much more structured, formally organized educational institution and program.

(B) How much does education cost? There is no charge for the first five years of primary education. It is provided by Mother Church to everyone at no expense, and the school day includes meals for the students. Mother Church pays for the books, for the slates, for the classrooms . . . everything, and the student emerges from those five years of education with basic literacy and basic math skills (remembering that the church was teaching Roman numerals pre-Merlin). A graduate of primary education has the ability to read the Holy Writ, The Commentaries, basic legal contracts, etc., for himself. The Church strongly encourages primary education for all Safeholdians, although that has not always been the case and even now it is not compulsory.

Secondary education, however, is not free. A student is required to pay for his own books, whatever additional school supplies are required, for his meals at school, and a “desk fee.” The desk fee is set at what constitutes a nominal cost for a middle-class family, which means that it is cheaper than dirt from an aristocrat’s perspective and incredibly dear from the perspective of a yeoman farmer. The Church does, however, sponsor a certain percentage of scholarship students, for whom the Church picks up the costs. Not all of these scholarship students are headed for holy orders by any means, however. Mother Church recognizes that the secular community is going to require an educated class, and these scholarships represent the Church’s investment in providing them. In most cases where a family “cannot afford” to continue a child in secondary education, this actually represents a trade-off between the actual out-of-pocket cost and the lost earning opportunity represented if that child’s labor is not available to the family. As far as the Church is concerned, once primary school has been completed, whether or not someone continues with his or her education is no longer the Church’s decision, although particularly gifted children identified by their Church-provided primary teachers will often be offered the equivalent of Church scholarships to continue through secondary school, as well.

College level education is very much like secondary education, except that costs are higher and there are fewer “colleges” available. This has several consequences, but two of them are that: (1) because there are relatively few colleges, proximity to one of those which do exist is a major factor in the availability of “college-level” education, and (2) because there are so few colleges, there is much greater competition for admission to them. That competition is both academic (i.e., who has the better grades) and nonacademic (i.e., who has the most patronage or other clout with the faculty). Many colleges — indeed, the majority of them — got their start out of sponsorship by either an aristocratic family, one of the guilds, or a particularly successful merchant or banker (or merchant or banking family.) Note, however, that as I observed above, the vast, vast majority of teachers at the college level are still going to be provided by the Church. Suppose that the Zhahnsyn family decides to endow Zhahnsyn College in Old Province in the Republic of Siddarmark. First, they have to clear it with the Church. Then they have to petition the Church to provide properly accredited instructors. After that, they have to in effect assign control of the curriculum, the faculty, and the student body to the Church. Since no one on Safehold (prior to the current . . . unpleasantness) saw any reason why the Church shouldn’t have complete control of education, this was an accepted state of affairs. And, to be fair to the Church, if a family endowed a college, that family was normally given a conscientious hearing by the Church where the governance and management of that college was concerned. In addition, the family endowing the college received the gratitude of the Church, which was expressed in memorial masses, indulgences, perhaps a reduction in tithes, etc. In any case, however, college education’s costs normally place it well beyond the reach of any but the upper half of the middle class and the aristocracy.

University level education’s costs are similar to those of the colleges, but the universities by their nature tend to be specialist schools. That is, someone who wants to study literature would choose a university which is inclined in that direction. Someone who wants to study history, would choose a university inclined in that direction. (Please note that this actually constitutes rather a flipping of real life practice, where universities are collections of colleges, with each college or school within the university dedicated to a particular branch of knowledge. I’m using the term “university” here to indicate a level of education beyond those of the normal college, and one whose faculty differs significantly from those of the completely Church-dominated/supplied “colleges,” and I haven’t yet come up with a better term for it.) Because the universities tend to be directed into individual, highly specialized fields, they are virtually never seen as a place someone goes to acquire “practical” knowledge for a business career or something of that sort. They do have a tendency to produce the majority of those secular-but-certified teachers at the college level, but they are much more a place to acquire finish, polish, the greatest imaginable erudition in your field, etc. As such, their student bodies are overwhelmingly dominated by the aristocracy. In fact, outside Charis, their student bodies are essentially totally aristocratic. The cost of university level education tends to account for a lot of that. College education will show a significant economic return on the investment of someone who acquires it; it is extraordinarily difficult to quantify the “return” for a traditional Safeholdian “university education.”

(C) How does the “Royal College” differ from other colleges? As I suspect most of you have already begun to figure out from the above, one of the huge reasons for the Church’s suspicions of the Royal College of Charis lies in the fact that the Ahrmahk dynasty sponsored the college but did not bring in Church-certified teachers. They got around that requirement by not offering courses, although everyone — including the Inquisition — recognized that the “no course offerings” posture of the College was in fact a fiction. The scholars at the Royal College did not have “students;” they had “assistants.” They did not teach courses; they simply amassed and catalogued knowledge. The non-students at the College never left the College; they stayed and became researchers and/or librarians themselves. And the entire edifice was propped up and supported by the Crown’s privy purse, with no support from Mother Church. Officially there was very little for the Inquisition or the Church to take issue with in the Royal College, since it was effectively a relatively small, closed society which acquired new members/scholars by invitation only, and (as noted above) had no students. The College was — officially — only a resource of the Crown, providing things like the Sailing Directions which have been mentioned in a couple of the books, drawing charts of normal weather patterns, collecting information about the proper design of sailing ship hulls, etc., and making that knowledge available as a reference tool to Charisian society as a whole. A lot of pre-Merlin Charisian innovation stemmed directly from the Royal College without its ever once accepting a single official “student.”

Since the schism, however, and especially since Cayleb placed it openly under the protective wing of the Crown, the Royal College has begun to change. It is now a teaching institution, as well as a research institution, and it is in the process of becoming the model for a new, secular education system from the ground up. That’s why Chestyr Aplyn was “admitted to the Royal College” at age 13. He is actually in a “secondary school” within the Royal College. (And, by the way, Hektor’s ability to “pay for” his younger siblings’ education has nothing to do with the Royal College, which charges no tuition. It has to do with the fact that he was able to finance Chestyr’s education to the point at which he won admission to the College.) At an appropriate time, he will transition to the “college level,” still within that educational system. And, eventually, assuming that his scholarly attainments justify it, he will become a fellow of the Royal College rather than a student at the Royal College.

Zhaspahr Clyntahn is not what one might call jumping with joy over the transformation taking place at the Royal College. Fortunately for his blood pressure, perhaps, he is not fully informed at this time of everything that’s going on, but Irys Daykyn’s attraction to the Royal College — and her fear, if you will, of what the Royal College is and, even more, of how Clyntahn is going to regard anyone who embraces it — stemmed in no small part from the change in teaching attitude represented by scholars who are . . . less securely fettered, let us say, by Mother Church. It is important to remember, however, that the new curriculum and the new non-clerical teachers at the Royal College are still subject to the approval of the archbishop of Charis and his intendant. That is the reason that we don’t see the place being stormed by the Safeholdian equivalent of Luddites. The Temple Loyalists have already tried to burn it to the ground once; the Reformists who might be concerned about its “secularization” are confident in the judgment of Maikel Staynair and Paityr Wylsynn. Eventually, of course, this is likely to change . . . at which point the armed guards protecting its campus should discourage any fresh fire bugs.

(D) What do the child labor laws of Charis govern? Primary schooling in Charis begins at age 6 and ends at age 11; secondary school begins at age 11 and ends at age 17. That is, you attend primary school starting on your sixth birthday and ending on your eleventh birthday; you attend secondary school beginning on your eleventh birthday and ending on your seventeenth birthday. (Obviously if the school year ends between birthdays . . . . I point that out because if I don’t some OCD individual is going to question me on it.)

The new child labor laws are designed to keep “school-aged children” out of the labor force. Under the new Charisian laws, it is illegal to employ anyone under the age of 17 in a manufactory or for paid labor anywhere. When the child labor laws were phased in, they began by removing anyone age 11 or younger from the workforce. In the second year, they removed anyone age 13 or younger. In the third year, they removed anyone age 16 or younger. This was designed primarily to allow employers to transition from child-based labor to adult-based labor. If someone was 14 in year one of the transition, then he was 16 in the second year, and 17 in the third year and could remain in the labor force throughout; if he was younger than 14, then he would be removed from the workforce before reaching his seventeenth birthday. For some families, this created significant economic hardships, and the Crown compensated for this by creating “Crown apprenticeships,” although “compensation” was only a portion of the reason Cayleb and Sharleyan created them.

In essence, the Crown set up “technical schools” in which those individuals removed from the labor force by the child labor laws were trained in the new techniques being introduced into the modernizing manufactories and shipyards. Because the child labor law was phased in gradually, the Crown apprenticeship programs began with relatively small class sizes and the young people who had already been trained became available to assist in the training of those joining the program behind them. Edwyrd Howsmyn has been very, very active in the Crown apprenticeship program, and his manufactories have already profited significantly from it. Some of the more conservative manufactory owners, who hate the entire notion of child labor laws, who think it is unnatural to worry about children getting caught in the gears, are already beginning to pay the price for having turned their backs on the Crown apprenticeship program. And Howsmyn, Cayleb, Sharleyan, Maikel Staynair, and Merlin, who all regard the current “apprenticeship program” as the basic platform to provide trained workers — including retrained adults — which the modernizing Charisian industrial base is going to require, I’m moving steadily to open places in it to anyone who has completed at least primary school. It is, if you will, a way for the State to provide the training the Guild system theoretically provided without the infrastructure which serves to protect the guild masters from competition. In addition to the Crown, the Church of Charis is really behind this program and pushing hard.

The existence of the Crown apprenticeship program is one reason that the guilds in Chisholm are not going to be happy to see Charisian industrial innovation coming their way. That potential unhappiness is, in fact, a very significant stumbling block which is going to have to be overcome if Chisholm is going to begin to catch up with Charis in education and industrial capacity. Emerald is very happily going along with the Charisian model, but that’s because the guilds in Emerald were never anywhere near as strong as they are in Chisholm and because Emerald has immediately in front of it as a near neighbor the example of the wealth and success Old Charis has attained because of its willingness to innovate. The commoners in Chisholm who are already Sharleyan’s enthusiastic supporters are, by and large, going to recognize the advantages that this will offer their children, and in the long run it will probably actually strengthen the Crown in Chisholm, but it would be unwise to assume that Chisholm isn’t going to experience a certain degree of . . . liveliness when these changes fully come home to roost.

(E) What about those very young midshipmen? Traditionally, the Royal Charisian Navy accepted midshipmen at around age 10. A family with “pull” could usually get a boy accepted a little younger than that — most often by “adjusting” his birthday on his midshipman’s warrant.

Midshipmen, traditionally, have eschewed “book learning” in favor of the pragmatic business of learning their trade at sea. In essence, it was an old-fashioned apprentice program, with the midshipmen “apprenticed” to the Navy. Even before Merlin came along, Haarahld had been changing that pattern, however, providing for training in literacy, mathematics, etc., in addition to ship-handling, how to command a boarding party, and inconsequential things like that. [G] As is probably evident from Daivyn Daykyn’s experiences in MT&T, the shipboard education program for midshipmen has become much more demanding than it used to be, and the new Naval Academy is going to push that even harder.

I’m not certain where most midshipmen/officers of Hektor’s age are going to fit into the new model. That is, I don’t know if experienced officers of his age are going to be required to attend the Academy for “polishing” or not. I tend to think not, however, but in either case the primary effort is going to be focused on admitting kids to the academy at the point at which they would otherwise be going into “secondary school” (that is, around age 11). They would get a year or so at sea, with a tutor embarked to see to their basic education during that period, during which they would have a chance to find out if they really wanted a naval career and the Navy would have a chance to see if they looked like good officer material. At the end of their year at sea, they would be transferred ashore to the academy, where they would spend the next 4 to 5 years in intensive schooling. Engineering school will certainly be a part of the academy curriculum, and their time ashore will be followed by a minimum of one additional year at sea before they can stand their lieutenants’ exams. So these kids will be eligible for commissions as lieutenants at around 18. They will also be eligible to be sent for higher schooling at someplace like the Royal College before beginning their sea careers or moving into a staff officer track working for someone like Baron Seamount.

Within a fairly short time, you will see the Imperial Charisian Army Academy coming along, as well, organized in much the same way but with an eye towards land service.

(F) What’s the endgame? The idea is that within, say, ten years, Charis is going to have an education system in place which is going to be turning out the people who can take the current Royal College’s knowledge base and run with it, expanding it through study and original research. At the same time, the “Crown apprenticeship” programs will morph into Crown-sponsored and industry-sponsored technical training schools to provide the skilled workforce needed for the rapid innovation and expansion that Merlin, Cayleb, Sharleyan, and the rest of the Circle clearly realize is going to be necessary before the Empire can take the risk of telling the truth about Langhorne and Bédard. At the same time, the Naval Academy and Army Academy will have been turning out a steady supply of officers well-versed in the new technologies and inclined by their classroom experiences to be open to and accept the truth when it comes along.

All of this is cooking away in the background, but I’ve been hesitant to bring it into the foreground because I’m already spending so much time with infrastructure building. As I say, if I’m going to really make this information available to the readers, I have to find a plot strand that I’m satisfied will move ahead in the storyline in general but also give me an opportunity/reason to lay all of this — or much of it, at any rate — out for the general reader. Folks on the forums here who have an especially deep interest in the background of the books will probably be happy as bugs in rugs reading about it here, but I’m not too sure that the average Safehold reader is going to want to see all of this explained between battle scenes. (G)

A few points in response to this entire thread (or the last several posts in it, at any rate), and not all directed to you, FriarBob. Your post just happened to be where I dived in, so you’re the one who got quoted. [G]


First, railroads and telegraphs.

FriarBob is correct that most of the early railroads are going to be relatively short-haul, which, after all, was what happened right here on Earth. Cayleb and Sharleyan are going to be pushing for longer-ranged lines as quickly as they can get them, however, and they’re going to be a lot more practical than some people seem to assume.

The semaphore system would be perfectly suitable for any daytime requirement. It transmits at an average speed of 600 miles per hour (that allows for message transcription at each intervening station) which is more than enough to control each block of track for a train system whose engines are unlikely to move at speeds in excess of 40-50 mph for a long time to come. Not all of the semaphore chains have the ability to transmit through darkness, especially at the present, but many of them do, and it would certainly be possible to build that capability into more closely spaced stations along the routes of the central rail lines.

Moreover, someone (either in this thread or another one) commented on the need for arc lights (which would imply electricity) for really powerful signaling lamps to provide reliable nighttime semaphore capability. This is not necessarily true, and, in fact, Howsmyn is currently experimenting with an alternative to arc lights to illuminate his factories during the after-sunset shifts. It’s called calcium or limelight, and it does not require electricity and is capable of providing some very powerful searchlights and/or signal lamps.

The actual “reach” of the communications systems necessary to make rail traffic work safely is much shorter than a lot of people seem to be assuming. If schedules are set ahead of time and adhered to, and if each line is divided into blocks of track which are, say, 50 miles long (at least 1 hour travel time for any train, 5 minutes transmission time for the existing semaphore system), safety would not be an issue. Double track the line, put in a traffic control station every 50 miles (i.e., at each end of each lock of track) with a red/green/yellow signal light for night use, install a siding at each of those stations so that a train can be shunted off the mainline to let someone with higher priority through, and “failsafe” the system so that traffic is allowed in only one direction on each of the twin tracks, and you could maintain a high level of safe and efficient rail service. The fact that the electric telegraph coincided with the introduction of railroads on a large scale and that its availability made it the logical, most efficient way to control rail traffic most assuredly does not mean that it was the only method of control which could have been used. The availability of rails, engines, and rolling stock will be a far greater obstacle for construction and expansion of railroads them the ability to safely manage their traffic.

BTW, someone commented on the fact that railroads are more efficient than barge traffic. That’s true only for certain definitions of “efficient.” In our experience here on Earth, rail nets have been denser and more diversified than canals. You can ship things to more places by rail then you can by canal, and for a time, industrial development and the mass distribution of goods were largely tied to where the rails went. Then along came internal combustion and the advent of the trucking industry. All of a sudden, secondary rail lines became less important because trucks could collect the goods from nodal points and deliver them hundreds of miles away by highway. In fact, however, it remains far more “efficient” in terms of load size, manpower, and fuel-per-ton to transport goods by rail than by truck over equivalent distances assuming the rail line is available .

Railroads bear the same relationship to canals that trucks bear to railroads; that is, it is more economical to transport goods by barge than by rail over equivalent distances assuming that the barge is available. The mainland on Safehold has a relatively dense canal network, and it has draft dragons filling something of the same transportation niche as the transfer truck does in the 20th and 21st—century US, so it’s something of a false argument to assert that railroads are more efficient. For that matter, it would be interesting to see how the maintenance costs on a couple of thousand miles of railroad trackage, including all of the trestles, tunnels, mountain cuts, etc., compared to the maintenance costs on the same length of canals. I have no idea how the ratio would work out, but I wouldn’t be too surprised to find out that the canals — despite a greater initial capital investment in construction costs — might compare favorably to railroads which are being constantly beaten up by hundreds or thousands of tons of traffic rolling over them.



Second, cross country steam powered transport.

Guys, they are years away from having this kind of capability. Useful numbers of APCs or tanks would require a huge output in relatively small steam engines, and steam engine output is going to be dedicated to industrial, maritime, and rail applications (in that order of priority) for the foreseeable future. So, no, we’re not going to see the Imperial Charisian Army rolling towards Zion in steam powered M113s anytime soon.

Some of the objections raised to the use of steam, however, are fairly readily overcome. I think it was PeterZ who commented that the waste heat from a steam power plant would make it impractical in an APC or a tank. When considering that, however, one might want to consider that the operating temperature of a modern internal combustion engine is often above the melting point of the materials from which it’s built. An oil fired steam engine (or one fed by powdered coal) in a separate, heavily insulated engine compartment (which is where APC and tank designers routinely put internal combustion engines) with proper exhaust and ventilation would be thoroughly workable. Don’t forget that the M1A2’s exhaust gas temperature is 930° F. The temperature from any practical steam plant would probably not be much if any higher than that and, in fact, would far more likely be lower (the USN didn’t go to 850° steam until the North Carolina-class), and using a Doble spiral boiler tube would hold down the quantities of live steam being produced considerably. Coupled with an engineering compartment equivalent of the Abrams’ blowout ammunition compartment, the dangers of the power plant would be almost entirely obviated. I’m not saying that anyone’s going to do that anytime soon, however, if only for the reasons cited above, but the technical objections to the plan, as opposed to the industrial capacity objections to it, are not the reason they won’t.


Third, poison gas is going to be a nonstarter for several reasons.

One is the problem of manufacturing it in quantity, although that could probably be overcome. A second reason not to use it would be the question of how you deliver it to the enemy . . . without delivering it to yourself. The prevailing winds on the mainland are from west to east, which is going to be just a bit of a problem where the use of an atmosphere-borne lethal or incapacitating agent is concerned. A third reason would be the incredible difficulty which even Charis would encounter (anytime in the next five years or so, at any rate) with providing gas masks even to its own troops (far less its civilian population) in anything like adequate/sufficient numbers. A fourth reason is that introducing such a weapon would absolutely validate the Church’s claims that Charis is in the service of Shan-wei. That would be partly because of the horrible nature of the weapon itself, but it would also play from the Holy Writ‘s descriptions of the Fallen Archangel Grimaldi and his works. And a fifth reason (which would trump all the others) is that neither Cayleb nor Sharleyan would ever countenance its use . . . unless, of course, they could somehow figure out a way to deliver it only to the inquisitors attached to the Army of God.



Fourth, trench warfare and the need to overcome it.

The trench warfare paradigm isn’t necessarily going to apply on Safehold, even should breech-loading rifles, and/or magazine rifles and machine guns (whether gas-operated, recoil-operated, or externally powered) become available to both sides. One of the false lessons learned from World War One was that trench warfare was the norm, rather than the exception, without armored fighting vehicles. That’s probably not too surprising, given the slaughter on the Western Front, but you might want to take a look at what happened on the Eastern Front.

Trench warfare happens when the attacker has only one or only a limited number of easily predictable approaches to his objective. Logistics are often a limiting factor when it comes to approach routes, which is what happened to the Germans’ plans in 1914; their turning movement outran the speed of their horse-drawn logistics at the very time that the French (rail) lines of communication were being shortened and compressed, which led to Joffre’s ability to re-concentrate troops in the German’s path. And that, in turn, allowed him to launch the counteroffensive that pushed the Germans back and forced them onto the defensive. At that point, the Germans dug-in, and the “race to the sea” began as both sides attempted to get around the other side’s field fortifications. Unfortunately, the North Sea got in their way at one end, the Swiss frontier got in the way at the other end, and the industrialized states going to war had sufficient population — and sufficient industrial and agrarian efficiency — that they could put literally multiple millions of men into military service. It was the ratio of combat power to the limited length of the front (only about 700 miles, if I remember correctly), coupled with (a) the lethality of the infantry weapons and artillery available, (b) the ability of the industrial plant behind the lines to supply ton after ton of ammunition, (c) the ability of rail transport to move the mountains of supplies and replacement manpower required to sustain the field armies in place, and (d) the ability of both sides to replace both manpower and equipment losses on such a scale because they were industrialized, which created trench warfare on the Western Front. That didn’t happen on the Eastern Front, mostly because neither side produced anything like the same ratio of manpower to space. There was always room to get around the other side’s flank and both sides had to operate at the end of fairly long logistics pipelines.

Not even Charis has anything like 1914 levels of industrial capability at this time; certainly the Church doesn’t, and even if either side had it, the ratio between the space available for military operations and the numbers of men either side will actually be able to put into the field, would greatly favor mobile operations along of the lines World War I’s Eastern Front or Sherman’s March to the Sea. To be perfectly honest, the only reason that Grant and Lee hammered it out in what amounted to trench warfare in the final phases of the American Civil War was the proximity of the two national capitals. The Confederacy couldn’t afford to lose Richmond; the Federals couldn’t afford to lose Washington; and Grant had grasped the essential fact that as long as he kept attacking, Lee had no choice but to defend. His entire job was to pin the Army of Virginia right where it was while Sherman devastated the Confederacy’s rear areas, and he did it by wading straight into heavily dug-in Confederate positions in places like Cold Harbor and Petersburg. Take a look at how radically those tactics differed from the ones he had employed in the Western Theater, where the ratio of manpower to space was so much lower. There will always be times when the defender is able to heavily entrench knowing that the enemy has to come to him on his own terms — as in the Sylmahn Gap or when Brigadier Taisyn plugged the Church of God Awaiting’s line of advance down the Daivyn River — and in those situations something very like trench warfare is going to occur, but that’s been true for as long as organized warfare has existed (Battle of Thermopylae, anyone?) For that kind of a battle, tanks and/or APCs offer a potential solution, but tanks operating in the Sylmahn Gap wouldn’t have found the terrain much more suitable to their proper employment than the Allied armor advancing through the Italian mountains towards Rome found their terrain. (Battle of Monte Casino, anyone?)

The one item from my list above of what allowed the combatants in the First World War to sustain their deadlocked troops on the Western Front for years on end which Safehold would probably come closest to possessing at this time is (c), the ability to transport supplies, courtesy of the existence of dragons. However, the existence of those dragons and their relatively high sustained cross-country speed would also contribute hugely to the ability to mount and sustain mobile operations.

What matters in mobile operations is less the absolute speed of either side than the ratio between their speeds. If one side has a marked advantage in the speed with which it can advance, maneuver, and supply its advanced troops, it is able to dictate the tempo, pace, and (generally) location of operations. Thus, mechanized armies can “march” rings around leg infantry relying on animal transport, as the German panzer divisions and corps demonstrated in the early phases of World War II. They weren’t the first force to demonstrate that, of course, as Europe’s armored knights and heavy cavalry found out against the Mongols. Or, for that matter, as Alexander the Great demonstrated to his opponents. As long as the relative speeds of the opposing forces remain roughly equivalent, the defender usually has the advantage, because under normal circumstances he’s going to be falling back towards that which he needs to defend, whereas the attacker is trying to either break through his position or somehow get around it, which is usually going to mean that his logistics chain is longer and that any flank marches he attempts are going to have farther to go. By no means, however, should it be assumed that the situation on Safehold, outside specific terrain areas like the Sylmahn Gap, the Green Cove Trace, and the line of the Daivyn River is going to lend itself to anything remotely like trench warfare, Western Front style. For that matter, bear in mind what happened to Brigadier Taisyn and his men in the end. They had a heavily fortified position, but they couldn’t retreat and lacked the manpower to mount any sort of mobile opposition to Kaitswyrth’s advance around their position. In other words, mobile warfare and numbers completely trumped fortified position and superior weaponry in the end.

And now I’m going back to work.

Okay. What follows is not completely worked out in all details, but it should serve to give you a general idea.


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Army of God organization:

Infantry:

An Army of God platoon consists of twenty-four men divided into two 12-man squads, each commanded by a sergeant, plus a lieutenant assisted by a platoon sergeant. Total manpower = 28: 24 enlisted, 3 noncommissioned, 1 commissioned.

An army of God company consists of four platoons, a captain as the company commander, a company sergeant, a standardbearer (colors sergeant), and a bugler (considered enlisted). Total manpower = 116: 97 enlisted, 14 noncommissioned, 5 commissioned.

An Army of God battalion — there are no Army of God battalions at this time.

An Army of God regiment consists of four companies, a colonel as CO, a major as his executive officer, a regimental sergeant; a surgeon (non-line commissioned) and 3 assistants (noncommissioned), a bugler, 4 runners/couriers, a regimental supply officer (non-line commissioned) and 3 noncommissioned assistants, and a standardbearer (color sergeant). Total manpower = 481: 393 enlisted, 64 noncommissioned, 24 commissioned.

An Army of God division consists of four regiments, a general, a colonel as his executive officer, a division sergeant major, a surgeon and assistant surgeon (both non-line commissioned) and 9 noncommissioned assistants, a division supply officer and assistant (both non-line commissioned) and 9 noncommissioned assistants, 2 divisional standardbearers (color sergeants), 8 runners/couriers, a bugler, and the divisional band (1 commissioned, 2 noncommissioned, 12 enlisted) which also acts as stretcher bearers. Total manpower = 1,975: 1,593 enlisted, 279 noncommissioned, 103 commissioned.

Because they are as yet inexperienced with rifles, the Army of God’s planners have adopted basically the same approach the Corisandians did in their initial confrontation with the Charisians. Each company has two platoons of pikemen and two platoons of riflemen, so the entire division is half pikes and half rifles. Doctrine calls for a pike line to hold the cavalry at bay while the riflemen either fire over the pikemen’s heads, form on the flanks, or skirmish.


Cavalry:

An Army of God cavalry platoon consists of 12 enlisted, 2 sergeants, 1 lieutenant, and 1 bugler. Total manpower = 16: 13 enlisted, 2 noncoms, 1 commissioned.

An Army of God cavalry company consists of 4 cavalry platoons, 1 company sergeant, 1 captain, 2 buglers, and 3 couriers. Total manpower = 71: 57 enlisted, 9 noncoms, 5 officers.

An Army of God cavalry regiment consists of four cavalry companies, one company sergeant, one standardbearer (color sergeant), 2 buglers, 1 colonel, 1 major (as XO), one regimental sergeant (non-line commissioned) 6 assistant surgeons, 1 regimental farrier (non-line commissioned) and 12 assistants, 6 couriers, and the regimental band (1 non-line commissioned, 1 sergeant, 6 enlisted). Total manpower = 324: 260 enlisted, 39 noncommissioned, 25 officers.

There are no formal Army of God cavalry formations larger than regiments. Army of God cavalry regiments are still thought of as pure shock formations, equipped with lances and swords, but each trooper has now also been equipped with a pair of pistols. In order to save time (and money) these are smoothbore pistols on the assumption that they’re going to be inaccurate fired from horseback anyway and that they will be used at very short range. They do give Army of God cavalry a limited fire capability.

Artillery:

Army of God is organized into artillery regiments, each consisting of four batteries of six guns each, roughly 12-pounders.

An Army of God artillery section consists of two guns, each with a crew of 11 — 1 sergeant and 10 enlisted, commanded by a lieutenant with a sergeant to assist him. Total manpower = 26: 22 enlisted, 3 noncommissioned, and 1 officer.

An Army of God artillery battery consists of 3 sections commanded by a captain, with one commissioned supply officer attached, a sergeant, and 4 runners/couriers. Total manpower = 79: 70 enlisted, 4 noncommissioned, and 5 commissioned.

An Army of God artillery regiment consists of four batteries, commanded by a major, with a lieutenant as his XO, a commissioned supply officer, a battery sergeant major, and 6 runners/couriers.

He has attached to his battery a maintenance officer (usually a captain or a major), with 3 sergeants and 30 enlisted, who also drive the four repair wagons and portable forge (six horses or one dragon, each) and are responsible for repairs and maintenance the gun crews themselves can’t provide. Total manpower = 35: 30 enlisted, 3 noncommissioned, 2 officers.

Each artillery regiment also has an attached surgeon and assistant surgeon (both noncommissioned line) and 8 assistants. Total manpower = 10: 8 enlisted, 2 commissioned.

In addition, each gun has a limber (6 horses or one dragon) and each section has a caisson/ammunition wagon (6 horses or one dragon). The limber crew consists of a sergeant (the driver) and 3 assistants (who normally ride horses or the draft dragon). Total manpower (per regiment) = 96: 72 enlisted, 24 noncommissioned.

The ammunition wagon is driven by a “civilian” crew provided by the Church, which consists of five men per wagon.) Total manpower (per regiment) = 60.

So an Army of God artillery regiment, with supports, consists of:
24 12-pounders,
24 limbers, and
12 ammunition wagons
527 men: 472 enlisted, 54 commissioned, 46 commissioned.
36 horses or equivalent in dragons.

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The Royal Dohlaran Army’s Organization

Infantry:

An infantry platoon consists of two sections (not called squads) of sixteen men, each commanded by a corporal, a platoon sergeant, a standardbearer (color sergeant), and a lieutenant. Total manpower = 37 men: 32 enlisted, 4 noncommissioned, and 1 officer.

An infantry company consists of six infantry platoons commanded by a major, with a captain as his XO. He is assisted by a company sergeant, a standardbearer (color sergeant), a bugler, and 2 noncommissioned clerks assigned to the color party in battle. Total manpower: 229: 192 enlisted, 29 noncommissioned, and 8 officers.

An infantry regiment consists of six infantry companies commanded by a colonel with a major as his XO. He is assisted by a regimental sergeant, a standardbearer (color sergeant), a bugler, and 6 noncommissioned clerks assigned to the color party in battle. Also attached to the regiment is the regimental surgeon, with 3 assistant surgeons and 12 noncommissioned assistants. Total manpower: 1,398: 198 noncommissioned, and 53 officers.

The infantry regiment is the primary maneuver unit of the Royal Dohlaran Army. Divisions are primarily administrative rather than maneuver formations, and a divisional commander usually is the senior regimental commander of the division. Normally, two infantry regiments are grouped together into a division; the Royal Dohlaran Army is not organized on a brigade system. One company in each regiment is equipped as pikemen. In the majority of infantry regiments, 3 companies are armed with rifles and 2 companies are armed with muskets. Rifles remain in short supply (as of the beginning of the 896 campaign), however, and approximately 1 third of all regiments have 2 companies of rifles and 3 companies of muskets, in some few cases still matchlocks. The Royal Dohlaran Army has not been equipped with grenades.

Note: clerks attached to color parties are also utilized as couriers/runners.


Cavalry:

The Royal Dohlaran Army is “infantry heavy” by the standards of most mainland armies outside the Republic of Siddarmark. Approximately 1/2 of its pre-Jihad manpower is organized into cavalry units, in which the nobility is heavily represented. Dohlaran cavalry is organized primarily for shock combat, although approximately 1/4 of all Dohlaran cavalry units are medium cavalry, or dragoons, armed primarily with arbalests or horse bows with sabers as their primary melee weapon. Dohlar has as yet made no effort to produce cavalry carbines or rifles, but the majority of their heavy cavalry is equipped (largely out of its own resources) with a pair of horse pistols, many of which are double-barreled, virtually none of which are rifled.

A cavalry platoon consists of 3 sections, each of 10 troopers commanded by a corporal, a platoon sergeant, a standardbearer (color sergeant), and a lieutenant. Total manpower = 36: 30 enlisted, 5 noncommissioned, and 1 officer.

A cavalry company consists of 4 sections, commanded by a major with a captain as his XO. He is assisted by a company sergeant, a standardbearer, 2 buglers, and 4 noncommissioned clerks (attached to the color party). Total manpower = 154: 120 enlisted, 28 noncommissioned, and 6 officers.

A cavalry regiment consists of 4 companies, commanded by a colonel with a major as his XO. He is assisted by a regimental sergeant, 2 regimental standardbearers (color sergeants), two buglers, and 8 noncommissioned clerks (attached to the color party). Also attached to the regiment is the regimental surgeon, with 3 assistant surgeons and 12 noncommissioned assistants. Total manpower = 646: 480 enlisted, 137 noncommissioned, and 29 officers.

As with infantry, there are no permanent Dohlaran cavalry divisions. Cavalry regiments are organized into “pure” dragoon or heavy cavalry. Two companies in each heavy cavalry regiment are lancers; the other two are saber-armed.

Dohlaran cavalry regiments do not have permanently assigned farriers. This is dealt with at the army/corps level (although the concept of a “corps” is not yet part of Dohlaran thinking on anything except an administrative level).


Artillery

The Dohlaran artillery is organized on the same pattern as the Army of God’s artillery, but the Dohlarans have deployed 6-pounder pieces with their cavalry units. These guns are not equipped with exploding shells. They have the same number of horses (dragons are not used for the horse artillery) as the infantry’s 12-pounders, in order to provide them with the ability to keep up with the cavalry in the field.

In addition, at the instigation of the Earl of Thirsk (and despite a certain amount of spinal reflex opposition from his superiors), the RDA is in the process of fielding a 6-inch and a 4-inch howitzer (actually more like a mortar, given the shortness of the barrel). The 6-inch weapon is organized as the 12-pounder batteries, while the 4-inch weapon is the horse artillery equivalent.

Artillery is not permanently attached at the regimental level but assigned from the central army reserve as is deemed necessary.

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The Imperial Desnairian Army

Infantry

The Imperial Desnairian Army is traditionally heavily biased towards its cavalry. Infantry has always been more or less an afterthought, which has been compensated for to some extent by the Desnairian cavalry’s willingness to fight dismounted. The infantry units described below are new for the IDA and have not (pre-896) been tested in combat.

An infantry company consists of 5 platoons, each of 25 enlisted men, commanded by a lieutenant assisted by a company sergeant, 4 corporals, a standardbearer (color sergeant), 2 noncommissioned company clerks, and a bugler. Total manpower = 135: 125 enlisted, 9 noncommissioned, 1 officer.

An infantry regiment consists of 5 infantry companies, commanded by a major with a captain as his XO, assisted by a regimental sergeant major, 5 regimental sergeants, 1 standardbearer, 4 noncommissioned company clerks, and 2 buglers. Total manpower = 690: 625 enlisted, 58 noncommissioned, and 7 officers.

As in the Royal Dohlaran Army, the infantry regiment is the primary maneuver element. Only about half of the IDA’s infantry is equipped with firearms, but the remaining pikemen have been transitioned to arbalests, so there are no pure melee infantry units in the IDA. About 1/3 of all Desnairian infantry firearms are still matchlock muskets; the remaining firearms are all “modern” muzzleloading rifles with socket bayonets, and similar bayonets have been manufactured for the matchlocks.

All medical services in the IDA are centralized at the army/corps level. Sick and wounded are expected to get themselves back to central aid posts or, in encampments, are visited in rotation by healers from headquarters.

[b/Cavalry[/b]

Traditionally, the cavalry have been the elite arm of the IDA. This is one reason the Church created the Grand Duchy of Silkiah, because otherwise Siddarmark’s pikemen would have kicked the Desnairians’ butt.

Desnairian cavalry are either heavy, medium, and light. All are organized on the same pattern, but the heavy cavalry is armored in half-plate and armed with classic shield and lance. Medium cavalry wears chain with a smaller shield normally slung across the trooper’s back to free his hands for a composite horse bow. One third of the cavalry in any medium cavalry regiment is not armed with a bow, however, and carries a lance instead. The light cavalry wears leather buff, a light breastplate, and a helmet. They are armed with composite horse bows, swords, and around a quarter of them may carry small shields slung across their backs, as well. There are no light Desnairian lancers.

A cavalry company consists of 10 sections, each of 5 enlisted men and headed by a corporal, and is commanded by a captain, with a lieutenant as his XO, and assisted by a company sergeant, a standardbearer (color sergeant), 2 buglers, and 3 noncommissioned clerks (who join the color party in combat). Total manpower = 69 men: 50 enlisted, 17 noncommissioned, and 2 officers.

A cavalry regiment consists of 10 cavalry companies, commanded by a colonel with a major as his XO, assisted by a regimental sergeant major, 2 regimental sergeants, 2 standardbearers, 2 buglers, and 6 noncommissioned clerks (who join the color party in combat). Total manpower = 705: 500 enlisted, 183 noncommissioned, and 22 officers.

There are no permanent cavalry formations larger than a regiment, although the IDA does occasionally brigade 2 regiments together, at which time the senior colonel commands the brigade. Multiple brigades may be combined tactically under a single officer’s command, but there is no provision for this on a permanent basis.

Although the IDA’s medical support is concentrated at the army/corps level, it is not unusual for special mounted medical detachments to be assigned to cavalry forces sent on independent missions.

Desnairian cavalry units are supported by centralized farriers and veterinarians, but each regiment will normally have one officer and two or three noncommissioned clerks who are designated as being in charge of the regiment’s mounting.

Artillery

The Desnairian artillery is organized on much the same basis as that of the Army of God and the Royal Dohlaran Army. However, the Desnairians, with their greater number of cavalry, have adopted an even higher percentage of horse artillery than the Dohlarans. This represents, in part, a failure on their part to fully appreciate what the range and accuracy of rifles mean for light, smoothbore artillery. It also does represent an appreciation of the mobility of light guns, however, and they have actually tinkered up a 9-pounder heavy horse gun which is capable of firing a (very light) explosive shell.

The Desnairians have shown no interest in howitzers at this time.

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Imperial Charisian Army

The Imperial Charisian Army, having possessed rifles and artillery longer than anyone else, having the first breech-loading rifle in production, and having the advantage of advice from Merlin and Owl, has adopted a doctrine and an organization radically different from that of its opponents. Recognizing that rifle-armed lines which stand in the open and blaze away at one another aren’t going to lead primarily to mutual slaughter, they have embraced the concept of skirmishers and open-order combat, which places a far higher premium on the abilities of junior officers and noncoms, since senior officers cannot control such dispersed forces.

An infantry platoon consists of 4 squads, each consisting of 12 enlisted and 1 corporal, commanded by a lieutenant assisted by a platoon sergeant and 3 lance corporals to serve as runners and clerks. Total manpower = 57 men: 48 enlisted, 8 noncommissioned, and 1 officer.

An infantry company consists of 4 platoons and is commanded by a captain, assisted by a company sergeant, a company color sergeant (who may or may not actually carry a standard in the field), and five lance corporals to serve as runners and clerks. In addition, each company is assigned 1 surgeon with 4 assistants (enlisted). Total manpower = 241: 196 enlisted, 39 noncommissioned, and 6 officers.

Each platoon lieutenant in the company is assigned a staff function under the system adopted by Duke Eastshare and Baron Green Valley.

An infantry support platoon consists of 4 squads of mortars of 3 mortars each. Each mortar has a crew of 6 (mortar captain, loader, spotter, and three assistant gunners/loaders) commanded by a corporal (serves as gun captain), and each squad is commanded by a sergeant. The platoon is commanded by a lieutenant, assisted by a platoon sergeant. Total manpower = 74: 60 enlisted, 13 noncommissioned, 1 officer.


An infantry battalion consists of 4 infantry companies and one attached infantry support platoon, and is commanded by a major, with a captain as his XO/adjutant, assisted by a battalion sergeant major, a battalion color sergeant (who may or may not actually carry a standard in the field), and 10 lance corporals to serve as runners and clerks. In addition, each battalion is assigned 1 surgeon, 3 assistant surgeons, and 12 enlisted surgeon’s assistants. Total manpower = 1,071: 856 enlisted, 181 noncommissioned, and 31 officers.

An infantry regiment consists of four infantry battalions and is commanded by a colonel, with a major as his XO/adjutant. He has an additional surgeon and 3 assistant surgeons, and an additional 12 enlisted surgeon’s assistants. He is assisted by a regimental sergeant major, a regimental color sergeant (who may or may not actually carry a standard in the field), and 10 lance corporals to serve as runners/clerks. Total manpower = 4,314: 3,436 enlisted, 748 noncommissioned, 130 officers.

An infantry brigade consists of two infantry regiments and is commanded by a brigadier with a colonel as his XO/adjutant. He is assigned a formal staff of 5 captains and/or lieutenants. The brigade surgeon has 3 assistant surgeons and 12 enlisted surgeon’s assistants. The brigade noncommissioned staff consists of a brigade sergeant major, a brigade color sergeant, and 10 lance corporals to serve as runners/clerks. Total manpower = 8,662: 6,884 enlisted, 1,508 noncommissioned, and 270 officers.

An infantry division consists of two infantry brigades commanded by a general with a colonel as his executive officer/adjutant and 5 captains or majors as staff. The brigade surgical group and noncommissioned staff repeat at the divisional level. Total manpower = 17,358: 13,780 enlisted, 3,028, and 550 officers.

In addition, each brigade has its own permanently assigned, integral artillery battalion (see below).


Cavalry

The Imperial Charisian Army’s cavalry is organized tactically as the infantry into platoons, companies, battalions, and regiments. Cavalry brigades are primarily administrative units, although an entire brigade can be assembled at need. There are currently (896) no Charisian cavalry divisions, however. Note that cavalry battalions have integral mortar companies, just as infantry, with the tubes and ammunition packed on horse and/or mule back.

All Charisian cavalry are armed with sabers in addition to rifles and bayonets. In addition, one platoon in each company (i.e., 1/4 of all cavalry in a formation) is also armed with a lance. Charisian cavalry are also armed with 2 twin barreled, rifled pistols at this time (896). Revolvers will be issued as they become available.

A Charisian cavalry bridage is normally permanently assigned a battalion of horse-drawn field guns.

Artillery

Charisian field artillery is divided into field guns and “angle guns” (or howitzers). The field guns are all (896) either 12-pounder Napoleon smoothbores or 4″ muzzleloading rifles. The angle guns are 6″ weapons and all of them are rifled muzzleloaders.

An artillery section consists of 2 guns, regardless of type. Each gun is crewed by 12 men commanded by a sergeant. An additional sergeant commands the section. So an artillery section consists of 27 men: 24 enlisted and 3 noncommissioned.

An artillery battery consists of 4 sections, regardless of type. It is commanded by a captain, assisted by two lieutenants, a battery sergeant major, and 4 lance corporals to serve as runners/clerks. So an artillery battery consists of 116 men: 96 enlisted, 17 noncommissioned, and 3 officers.

An artillery battalion consists of four batteries, regardless of type. It is commanded by a major, assisted by two lieutenants or captains, a battery sergeant major, and 8 lance corporals to serve as runners/clerks. So an artillery battalion consists of 476 men: 384 enlisted, 77 noncommissioned, and 15 officers.

An artillery regiment consists of four artillery battalions, regardless of type. It is commanded by a colonel, assisted by two captains, a regimental sergeant major, and 12 lance corporals to serve as runners/clerks. So an artillery regiment consists of 1,920 men: 1,536 enlisted, 321 noncommissioned, and 63 officers.

Charisian artillery is not normally organized into higher formations than this, which, after all, would amount to 64 pieces. An artillery regiment may consist of mixed types, field guns and angle guns, but strenuous efforts are made to avoid mixing smoothbores and rifles.

Charisian artillery has no organic medical support; it depends upon the infantry and/or cavalry with which it is deployed.

Charisian artillery does not use separate limber and caisson drivers and gunners; the gun crew is responsible for the caisson and the gun itself and each gun details one man to assist with driving the artillery wagons. Charisian draft is provided by dragons for guns assigned to the infantry and by teams of horses and/or mules for those assigned to the cavalry. Horse artillery uses 8-horse teams for guns and ammunition wagons; foot artillery normally uses one dragon per gun and one dragon per ammunition wagon.


The ICA’s mortar is a 3″ weapon. It has the following specifications:

Caliber in inches 3.0
Projectile weight in pounds 10.0
Bursting charge HE 2.0
Bursting charge AP 1.0
Barrel length in feet 4.0
Barrel weight in pounds 65.0
Baseplate weight in pounds 115.5
Bipod weight in pounds 27.5
Elevation unit weight in lbs. 26.0
Total weight of piece in lbs. 234.0

Muzzle velocity in ft/sec 650.0
Minimum range in yards 300.0
Maximum range in yards 2,500.0
Lethal radius in feet HE 30.0
Lethal radius in feet AP 50.0


It is a rifled weapon, with studs engaging in rifling. The end of the projectile terminates in a short rod into which a percussion cap is inserted and around which the propelling charge, a circular cloth “donut” of gunpowder, is wrapped. The round is indexed into the rifling and dropped down the tube, at which point the firing pin on the base of the rod detonates the percussion cap which, in turn, fires the propelling charge.

The HE round is fitted with an impact fuse and its case sides are thinner than those of a conventional shell because of its lower muzzle velocity, which allows its charge to be proportionately heavier, coming close to the effectiveness of a 4″ smoothbore shell’s. The antipersonnel round is a shrapnel round with a timed fuse. It normally takes at least a couple of rounds to judge fuse settings properly, and they are not completely reliable. As an antipersonnel weapon, however, the shrapnel round is superior to the HE round because the black powder charge tends to shatter the case into very lethal but relatively few fragments.


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Republic of Siddarmark Army

A Siddarmarkian regiment, pre-Sword of Schueler, consisted of 1,800 pikemen and 450 light infantry for a total of 2,2500 men.

The pikes are divided into 4 companies (considered battalions by anyone else) consisting of 15 sections of 30 men each. Fourteen of the sections are formed into 7 60-man companies; the 15th section is the company HQ section under the direct command of the company commander. In battle formation, each full platoon forms a double line with one section in each. Since each man requires twice the depth that he does width in formation, 15 sections formed directly behind one another would make a formation 30 men across and 15 men deep, which would be 30 yards square.

A Siddarmarkian regiment forms for battle with two of its pike companies abreast and the other two formed directly behind it, producing a formation which is 60 men across and 30 men deep, or a square 60 yards on a side.

During an approach march, a regiment’s light infantry (arbalesteers or musketeers) areformed into 5 lines, each 3 sections (90 men) wide, which overlaps the front of the pikes square by fifty percent, in order to screen the pikes against enemy missile fire. They can also be pulled back into the intervals between the squares and once the squares advance into melee, they fall back to clear the field. The light infantry are armed with swords in addition to their missile weapons.

Siddarmarkian cavalry is less numerous and less heavily armored than, say, Desnairian cavalry, but is armed with a lance and a sword. About 20% of all Siddarmarkian cavalry is equipped with a horse bow, rather than a lance.

Siddarmarkian couriers attached to HQs wear red brassards to indicate their assignments (and prevent them from being stopped if it looks like they might be running for the rear when they’re actually delivering a message).

While I am primarily a shooter of smokeless powder, I have fired black powder — a lot — during my years upon this mortal coil (I’ve been a shooter for almost 50 years, come October), and I’m well aware of the ember problem. I’m also aware of the fouling problem and the fact that black powder is simply one hell of a lot less stable than more modern propellants.

Mahndrayan discusses the need to stiffen the cartridge to give it the strength needed to push the felt wad out of the way. And I think you are over estimating the combustibility of the paper “case” he’s developed. The basic breech sealing system used is essentially that of the Calisher and Terry Carbine of 1860, where it worked quite well. IIRC, the system was tested by the Brits aboard one of their warships and fired something over 1,500 rounds without failures or prematures. Combustion for the C&T was at the midpoint of the cartridge, not the rear (which is also the case for Mahndrayn’s design), and (again if I recall correctly without consulting my notes, which are on a different computer as I write), the C&T used an interrupted screw to close the breech, rather than camming and locking lugs.

The Mahndrayan uses two really big and massive front-locking lugs that engage in machined grooves which are (frankly) the biggest cost (in both time and money) of making the weapon and also sets up against a locking ledge at the rear of the receiver (see below). These costs are a big part of the reason the Charisians don’t have more of the things when the war brreaks out in the Republic and why the quantities they can manufacture between November 895 and July 896 are not a lot higher. It’s also a huge reason (in response to a point which was raised some months ago) they hadn’t manufactured scads of these things and kept them in storage on the offchance that someday they would need to equip a standing army much larger than the one they intended to field. A Mahndrayan costs damned near ten times what a muzzleloader costs, even in Charis, and the tolerances involved are quite demanding . . . which is the real reason only Howsmyn has the tooling and capacity to build the things right now. (And that’s not exactly an accident from Merlin’s perspective, either.)

I never attempted to imply that this was a perfect design — only that it worked and that it had been devised by Mahndrayn, a Charisian from outside the Circle, and that its tactical advantages were sufficient that the Imperial Charisian Army (and a certain couple named Cayleb and Sharleyan) felt it was well worth the costs involved in putting it into service.

Also, some people still seem to be misunderstanding the track the breech block follows in closing. This may be my fault for not describing it adequately, but it also emphasizes the problems inherent in an author sharing too much information with his readers: they fasten on specific detalis, which they may or may not have understood correctly, to decide (a) whether or not the design is workable and (b) whether or not the characters in the novel are smart enough to avoid obvious defects as they test the concepts.

The two biggest drawbacks of the Mahndrayn are that it requires a lot of machining time and operations and that the breech closure has to be over-engineered to stand the strains. In many ways, Merlinwould have preferred something more like the rolling block action, but that wasn’t what Mahndrayn came up with and he (Merlin) went with it both to encourage Mahndrayn and his like to come up with their own ideas and also, frankly, because he didn’t see the Sword of Schueler coming that far in advance any more than anyone else did. He was concerned with giving the Charisians a breechloading capability and, to be honest, he got bitten on the butt a bit by his own cleverness. One of the things which appealed to him was the complexity of the design, because the Mahndrayn’s basic design is beyond mainland manufacturing capacity. He figured Charis would eventually lose some of the weapons in action and he wanted something which would lie within the bounds of what Howsmyn could manage but the Church’s gunsmiths would be unable to produce in quantity. The interrupted-screw design is available to him as a fall back (now that the Charisian artillerists are playing with the concept, and so are several others I can think of right off hand) if it turns out Charis needs a lot more non-cartridge designs for some reason, but the Mahndrayn worked and had the advantage of being impossible for the Church’s artisans to duplicate in quantity.

The actual breechblock is contained in a solid housing in the locked up position. It is about an inch and a half long, and it moves on an angled path, dropping down and then moving to the rear along an angled trajectory. When the activating lever is in the locked position, the breech block is anchored at the front by rotating lugs and the rear rests against a solid steel housing at the rear of the receiver that is essentially an extension of the barrel. It literally cannot move to the rear until the cocking lever drops it a fraction of an inch on the angled track, but it is neither a classic vertically dropping falling block nor the semi-circular block of the rolling block, since it doesn’t rotate on a central pin. The felt wad at the base of the cartridge is heavily lubricated, which keeps the end of the barrel lubed (and has the same effect on the bullet) and also helps to extinguish any lingering sparks when the new round is inserted and pushes the remnant of the old wad in front of it (this is an important part of the design, people). Assuming sufficiently good grades of steel (and Howsmyn’s current steels are very good), this action could stand up to the recoil of a nitro express elephant gun, as long as the breech is safelt sealed, which is what the cartridge design is for.

As I say, it was never intended to be a perfect design. You guys need to bear in mind — more than I think some of you do, honestly — that just because what Charis has come up with hugely outclasses what the opposition has, and just because it may seem remarkable against the tech standards of what I think a lot of you continue to think of as a medieval society, it must be the best possible solution to the problem within the constraints of the available manufacturing capabilities of Safehold. That is deliberately not necessarily the case, just as the Royal Manticoran Navy doesn’t necessarily come up with the optimum design for a new ship type, despite all of its testing and modeling. Both Charis and Manticore tend to get the essentials right, and both of them are fiercely innovative, but that doesn’t mean they get [ieverything[/i] right . . . or that the other side can’t also surprise them from time to time.

First, in response to “I just think it was almost criminally inept how they allowed many of those soldiers to be slaughtered because they didnt realise how suicidal it was to try and fight a melee against a rifle armed foe,” they never “allowed” any of their soldiers to be slaughtered against a “rifle armed foe” until after the Army of God and the Royal Dohlaran Army had invaded the Republic. Even then, the “melees” they fought were fought because the troops involved didn’t have any other option. Aside from the Army’s initial losses to the mutinies involved with the original Sword of Schueler uprising, the Siddarmarkian Army kicked ass any time it engaged the enemy on anything remotely like equal numbers until the actual invasion armies were able to come forward. The melees that resulted in the slaughter of Siddarmarkian troops occurred only after the enemy had crossed the frontier, with armies with radically new and different organizations and weapons mixes, and — in the case of Cliff Peak Province — in enormous strength from an unexpected direction. Aside from critical choke points (usually fortified) the Republican Army didn’t try to stand its ground against those forces. Instead, it gave ground, retreating in front of them or attempting to do so. As an example, when the senior Siddarmarkian general in Cliff Peak realized what was coming at him, he correctly deduced that he could neither hold his position nor fight his enemy in the open. So he ordered his troops to fall back immediately; he simply couldn’t fall back fast enough to break contact, and once his command was brought to action every man in it knew what was going to happen to him if he surrendered. With no choice but to fight to the death, he and his men did, but they certainly didn’t choose the time or place and they knew going in that they couldn’t win. Or you might look at what the commander of Alyksberg did when he realized that the Dohlarans were coming at him from the west by the Army of God was coming down from the north. He left a sacrificial rearguard to hold the fortress as long as possible while he got as many as possible of the rest of his men out.

It is incorrect to say that (1) the Siddarmarkian Army had “several thousand” rifles with which to experiment or (2) to conclude that they had or should have had detailed reports about what had happened in Corisande.

To take the second point first. You think there were Siddarmarkian Army observers in Corisande? You think that communications on Safehold are as rapid and have as much bandwidth as communications on Earth? Even if there had been Siddarmarkian observers on the ground, how comprehensive and valuable could their observations have been? If they’d had observers embedded embedded with the Charisians, sharing the Charisian experience with complete input from Cayleb’s officers, they might well have gathered the sort of information you seem to think they ought to have had. Of course, that would also have brought the Inquisition down on themselves two years earlier, longbefore they could have had any time to profit from the knowledge. But they didn’t have that sort of access. The best they could have done would have been to send agents into Corisande to collect information after the fact, which is a very different proposition. You think that reports compiled after the fighting, from the anecdotal accounts of people who (even if they’d been personally involved in the fighting) generally would have only an unclear understanding of exactly what had happened, are going to be so crystal clear that only a “criminally inept” general could (a) fail to realize that the combat paradigm which has obtained for centuries has suddenly been completely invalidated and,(b) not figure out how to fix it in a handful of months?

To address the first point from above. The number of rifles available to the entire Siddarmarkian Army was well under 6,000 as of November of 895. While that probably could be said to equate to “several thousand” that was the total production available to the Army at the time the Sword of Schueler struck. Those weapons had come in gradually, beginning only about six months prior to Clyntahn’s attack, produced in low volume and numbers for the Army in foundries which the Republic and the Lord Protector knew perfectly well were under observation by the Church . . . as were the shipments of weapons from them and what the Army was doing with those weapons once they had them. They came in gradually, in numbers that built only slowly to a useful total and had to be carefully accounted for, and the generals receiving them knew that the ranks of the Army were certainly riddled with agents of inquisition and Temple Loyalist spies. So precisely how were the “criminally inept” generals supposed to conduct field exercises to evaluate the new weapons’ effectiveness or even begin to project new tactics for them in that maximum four or five-month window without pushing Clyntahn into doing precisely what he did even sooner? I can assure you that the generals in question were only too well aware of how the Inquisition and the Group of Four would have reacted had the Siddarmarkian Army not simply obtained the weapons the Church was determined to keep out of its hands in quantity but also begun experimenting with them and radically altering its tactical doctrine as a result. And they were also aware that if they could get through the autumn, they would have the winter months in which they could have done quite a lot of that evaluating and thinking while major invasion forces would have faced a logistical nightmare trying to advance against them. They ran out of time because Clyntahn got in quicker and with a far harder blow than Stohnar’s own agents had believed was possible.

You also seem to feel that somehow Siddarmark should not only have properly extrapolated the new tactics based on reports out of Corisande but adopted them. How? Who is supposed to do the extrapolation, and once it’s been accomplished, how are the conclusions of that extrapolation to be propagated to the Army at large when the only means of communication are semaphore, carrier wyvern, or mounted messenger? Who works out the new doctrine, the new manual of arms, the new formations, the new TO&E? How does he accomplish that without field exercises that will tell the Church exactly what he’s up to and simply accelerate Clyntahn’s plans for the Republic? Assuming he somehow manages to pull off that miraculous feat, how does he get the new manuals — and the handful of officers involved in his experiments — into the hands of garrison forces in South March Province or Cliff Peak? You do remember how long Kynt Clareyk worked at evolving new tactics for the Charisian Marines even with Merlin’s direct input, don’t you? To make the sort of change you’re talking about on an institutional level in an organization as large as he Republican Army takes months or years, even with outside instructors available in large numbers. Where was Siddarmark supposed to get those outside instructors? From the Charisian Empire? I think the Inquisition might have had just a little to say about that, don’t you?

Moreover, it is — or ought to be — self-evident from the tactics that Siddarmarkian officers adopted in the field that they fully appreciated that the new weapons mix was, quite literally, revolutionary. They had only incomplete information and they’d never had the opportunity to experiment with the new weapons, yet they knew they were at a fatal disadvantage against new model armies. There just wasn’t anything they could do about it . . . except die gallantly. These were men who, in their hundreds of thousands, had never seen new model artillery or even a flintlock smoothbore musket, yet they’d heard stories, they’d had reports, there’d been rumors, and the officer corps of the Siddarmarkian Army did its very best to choose its strategy and its tactics based on a comprehensive realization that they could not meet rifle-armed opponents in the open field and win.

You suggested that they should instead have evacuated their noncombatants from the frontiers, destroyed as much as possible of the communication and transportation system, and then (if I understood you correctly) either withdrawn from the frontiers completely and/or disbanded their standing forces, split up into partisan bands and raided the enemy’s communications and logistics.

First, they did encourage the evacuation of everyone they had the capacity to evacuate. If you go back and look at the lead up to the one and only time in the book that you see pike-armed Siddarmarkians charging artillery — and only artillery, not rifles — in the book, their commander specifically reflects before he pulls out of his HQ fort that at least he’d been able to get as much of the population who remained loyal to the Republic out of his command area as possible. The one town they pass through on their way to the battle site is held entirely by Temple Loyalists. Millions of Siddarmarkian civilians had been moving steadily east since the Sword of Schueler’s beginning attacks; transportation facilities were limited, especially because food was so scarce, and hundreds of thousands of those refugees died of starvation or exposure during the evacuation. There were — as there will always be, in similar situations — some civilians who were too stubborn or too foolish to refugee out when the going was good, but that is not because the Army didn’t encourage them to do just that. The Army stayed behind to protect those who could not, or would not, get out; it didn’t stay behind to encourage those civilians to stay in place and get killed.

You also apparently have an exaggerated opinion of how much destruction they could have done to the transport system in their area before they withdrew. How were they supposed to accomplish this when it was all they could do to protect loyal citizens of the Republic long enough for those citizens to flee and when destroying the transportation system would have prevented those citizens from fleeing? This is a primarily muscle-powered civilization. They had limited quantities of gunpowder. They couldn’t afford to disperse their manpower into small forces. The canals are deep, wide, and made of stone and cement that will be very resistant to destruction with anything except large quantities of very strategically placed gunpowder. The high roads are much the same. They could probably burn wooden bridges, they could probably drop even stone bridges, although it’s highly unlikely they could destroy the stone piers and arches which had supported those bridges (and which army engineers would use as the basis for new bridges within, say, 24 hours of reaching the rivers they crossed). They could smash pumping controls and pipes with sledgehammers, but guess what? The Sword of Schueler had already done most of that on Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s orders. The only damage they had the resources to inflict would have been essentially superficial and repairable, and that damage had already been inflicted, which is the entire reason the invaders’ forward movement into the Republic was delayed as long as it was.

If you were also suggesting (I’m not sure that you were, but that was my impression) that after getting the civilians out their frontier forces should have split up to operate in dispersed groups to sabotage logistics behind the advancing enemy, rather than simply in front of him, how might they have gone about that? This is an infantry army, with an extremely limited number of cavalry, who would be operating in hostile territory, where food and supplies are virtually nonexistent, against enemies with superior weapons who also happen to have the local civilian population on their side rather than the defenders’ side. There were already militia forces operating in ambush mode in many places, but the effective sabotage of the canals would have required resources which neither those militia nor the Republican Army’s regulars possessed. Light damage might have been inflicted, semaphore towers might have been burned, but the folks doing the light damage and burning the semaphore towers would rapidly have been hunted down by the cavalry with which the Army of God and the Dohlarans were well-equipped. As I pointed out above, without large quantities of explosives, the canals could not have been significantly damaged, even if that hadn’t been specifically prohibited by the Holy Writ . . . which it was. You expect your bands of partisans to trundle wagonloads of gunpowder around with them when only strictly limited quantities of gunpowder were available anyway for an army which had never had field artillery and whose missile troops consisted of limited numbers of matchlock-armed musketeers and arbalesteers?

Finally, had any such strategy been adopted, it would have been futile for many reasons, the two most immediate of which would be the relative immobility of the foot bound saboteurs as opposed to the high mobility of their mounted pursuers, on the one hand, and the “scorched earth” retaliatory policy the Temple Loyalists would have enacted in response. Heck, they’d already effectively instituted a scorched earth policy before they ever invaded the Republic! Your partisans would have had precious little upon which to subsist; once the Army of God and its attached inquisitors figured out what was going on (which they would have done quite rapidly) they would have burned out everything that was left, moved out the people they figured were on their side, and slaughtered everyone they figured was on the other side. In short, the strategy wouldn’t have worked but it would certainly have made things even worse for any non-Temple Loyalists in the region.

I’m not trying to argue that the Siddarmarkian generals performed feats of superhuman foresight and put together the very best strategy possible. It is highly inaccurate and unfair, however, to accuse them of criminal ineptitude when, in fact, they had quite a clear perception of the problem they faced and of the fact that without massive Charisian assistance they had neither the means nor the time to defeat it. The men you are describing as inept saw very clearly what they were up against yet had been systematically denied the opportunity to do anything about it by the Church and by the threat of the Inquisition in the couple of years leading up to the Sword of Schueler. As someone else has already pointed out, we’re looking at literally centuries of advance in weapons capabilities from the model which had existed only two years prior to the Sword of Schueler. Corisande was defeated in late 893; Hektor was killed in September of that year. The Sword of Schueler was launched in November of 895, barely 2 Safeholdian years (21 months) later. That’s 630 Safeholdian days, or about 690 Earth days. Apparently, to suit your definition of generals who aren’t criminally inept, in that time, they had to get reports from Corisande (voyage time eating up about three of those months one way, please note), accurately determine what had happened from those reports, recognize how what had happened was going to impact/invalidate their existing tactical doctrine, devise new tactics, and get them promulgated sufficiently down the chain for frontier commanders (cut off in many cases from direct communications with hgigher authority, struggling to hold their commands together well enough to protect civilians in their areas of responsibility in the face of insurrection, mutiny, atrocities, and excommunication) to realize that they had no option but to do their best to destroy the Writ-protected transportation infrastructure and retreat. To be perfectly honest, the amazing thing is that they managed to accomplish so much of the things you seem to think they didn’t manage to accomplish in the time frame available to them.

Please note that the Charisians on the ground are deeply impressed by the extent to which the Army of God and the Dohlarans, with a two-year head start on the Siddarmarkians, managed to integrate the new weapons and concepts into their doctrine. And even so, both Maigwair and the Dohlarans are the equivalent of decades (at the least) behind Charis . . . despite the last-minute integration of smoothbore field artillery with exploding shells courtesy of an Inquisition spy in Charis.

If I may . . . .

Safehold is not Earth. The fact that people keep trying to find historical parallels for events and conditions on Safehold anyway sometimes distracts them from the overwhelming nature of the differences between our own history and that of Safehold.

The primary difference between the situation on Safehold and any situation that ever existed on Earth is that there genuinely is a worldwide faith, subordinated to a single church hierarchy, and accepted without question by virtually every living human being (other than those who had been corrupted by the Brethren of Saint Zherneau). The sheer breadth and depth of the Church of God Awaiting’s authority is utterly without parallel in the history of Earth, where even the most extensive empire and/or theocratic state has had neighbors who didn’t necessarily subscribe to the same belief system. It is literally impossible to over emphasize the consequences of that difference when it comes to evaluating diplomatic and political decisions in a Safeholdian context.

If the political situation on Safehold were remotely comparable to any political situation which has ever existed here on Earth, this argument that Cayleb should have played for time before declaring his open opposition to and defiance of the Church might — might — make sense. In a Safeholdian context, it almost certainly would have been suicidal.

There are many reasons I say that, beginning with — but certainly not limited to — the observation someone else has already made that under Safeholdian planetary law, Cayleb’s accession to the throne had to be ratified by the Church, which was completely under the control (as everyone in Tellesberg knew) of the Group of Four. That confirmation was not going to be forthcoming, and anyone who had the remotest shred of an understanding of Zhaspahr Clyntahn and of the power of the Inquisition knew that. At best, the Group of Four would have immediately denied Cayleb’s right to inherit his father’s throne. It wouldn’t have needed to provide a reason for that; such a denial would have been completely within the Church’s prerogatives without the requirement for any secular justification.

The Group of Four could, however, have come up with any number of justifications if they had been needed. The fact that nothing Charis was doing had violated the Proscriptions — in the opinion of Paityr Wylsynn meant diddly in Zion, especially if the Grand Inquisitor himself chose to override the local Intendant’s findings. Does anyone think for a moment that Clyntahn would not have chosen to do just that? Even if Clyntahn had not immediately overridden Wylsynn’s attestation, he could very easily have announced that a review of the youthful Intendant’s findings was in order, particularly given the fact that Charis had managed to devastatingly defeat the combined navies of five other nations. Surely it would have been reasonable for the Church to make certain that such a completely and totally unprecedented victory — and scale of victory — was not, in fact, due to some infringement of the Proscriptions which Shan-wei had managed to sneak past Father Paityr? After all, that would only be the path of caution.

Given that Clyntahn had the bit between his teeth, what would almost certainly have happened would have been what did happen, even without Cayleb and Staynair’s open defiance. Had Trynair been allowed to call the shots, however, a rather more subtle — and probably even more dangerous — policy would probably have been pursued. Trynair would have played for time. Rather than rejecting Cayleb’s right to inherit outright, he would have set up panels and committees to fully examine the circumstances . . . and he would have demanded a regency to oversee the Kingdom of Charis while everything was sorted out. (Echoes of the Hanth succession from Off Armageddon Reef, anyone?) And, of course, that Regency Council would have obediently followed Mother Church’s instructions to stand down its active operations and military preparations against Hektor Corisande during the review process.

Cayleb would then have had only two choices:

(1) Immediately defy Trynair and reject the notion of a regency or a review of the circumstances, at which point his actions would be cast in a purely political view, demonstrating to the Group of Four’s satisfaction (for the rest of Safehold) that Haarahld had, indeed, been the true instigator of the imperialist confrontation which had led to the war and that Cayleb, out of pure, unsullied, secular ambition, was defying Mother Church’s efforts to heal the conflict which had already inflicted so many deaths upon Safehold and was willing to defy the Writ, the Archangels, and God Himself in the name of that secular ambition.

(2) Accede to Trynair’s imposition of a regency and a review of the circumstances, accepting a regency council whose membership was acceptable to the Group of Four, at which point his life would not have been worth a plug nickel and the fate of Charis would have been sealed.

Even if Clyntahn hadn’t immediately arranged Cayleb’s arrest on some suitably serious religious charges as soon as the Regency Council was in place (or had him assassinated, probably by some “heretic” Charisian, thereby once again justifying Clyntahn’s “Permanent Solution to the Charisian Problem”), Trynair would have strung the process out for months or even years, aided by the slow speed of communications (which would become even slower when it suited his purposes), during which the legitimacy not simply of Cayleb but of the entire Ahrmahk Dynasty would have been increasingly undermined in the eyes of the Charisian people. (And, of course, during that same time period, Prince Hektor and King Rahnyld, at the very least, would have been building their own fleets of galleons while Charis wasn’t.) Moreover, one of the very first things that would have happened would have been that Maikel Staynair would have been removed as Bishop of Tellesberg and the entire Charisian church would have undergone a thorough housecleaning under the direction of Clyntahn’s inquisitors. The very best result of that housecleaning (from a Charisian perspective), would have been that the Reformists would have been purged from the Church and that a degree of orthodoxy probably rivaled only by that of Harchong would have been imposed upon it and through it upon the Kingdom as a whole. A more probable result would have been that the Brethren of Saint Zherneau (possibly along with Jere Knowles’ journal) would have been discovered and destroyed and that Clyntahn would have gone ahead and burned Charis to the ground and sown the soil with salt to destroy the cancer once and for all.

From the perspective of Church preparations, the Church didn’t get around to declaring Holy War until well after it had commenced its own massive naval buildup against Charis. There is absolutely no reason to believe for a moment that the Group of Four wouldn’t have gone ahead and begun that naval buildup anyway, particularly given the fact that Charis had already flouted the Group of Four’s collective will by surviving and that Charis could only continue to survive by eliminating its rivals among the Out Islands — Emerald, Corisande, Tarot, and (presumably) Chisholm. Whatever the rights or wrongs of the original confrontation, whether it was Haarahld’s vaunting ambition which had led to the war or not, those four realms (plus Dohlar) were clearly Church allies/clients. The Church had to support and protect them against Charis, both because she had a perceived responsibility to do so and because the Group of Four could not allow an alliance it had created to be defeated by the single secular kingdom it had specifically set out to destroy in the first place. From the Group of Four’s perspective, and especially from Clyntahn‘s perspective, that blow to the Church’s prestige, power, authority, and perceived omnipotence would have been completely and totally unacceptable. It would, in effect, have created the very situation he’d proposed Charis’s destruction to avoid. So pretending it was simply a war between secular powers would have done absolutely nothing to decrease, limit, or slow the Church’s military preparations.

From Charis’ perspective, on the other hand, there was no downside at all to Cayleb and Staynair’s defiance.

First, bear in mind that they never bade defiance to Mother Church or the Archangels in their original communication to the Group of Four. They specifically accused the Group of Four of corruption, abuse of power, and the perversion of Mother Church. Their defiance of the Grand Vicar was predicated on the accusation that the Grand Vicar was the Group of Four’s tool . . . and that situation existed only because of the Group of Four’s progressive corruption and perversion of Mother Church. In other words, they were not defying God’s plan for Safehold, nor were they rejecting the primacy of Mother Church; instead, they were accusing a specific clique within Mother Church of having connived at Charis’ destruction without even first allowing Charis the opportunity due to all of God’s children of defending herself against accusations of wrongdoing or seeking clarification of where and how she might have transgressed so that those transgressions could be correct.

From that perspective, Cayleb and Staynair were defending the Church against her internal enemies. They were not defying God; they were being answerable to God in coming to the defense of His Church against those who would have perverted it into something He had never intended it to be.

Second, by declaring their position so forthrightly, they avoided the delays and possible interregnum Trynair might have imposed and which would have absolutely prevented them from taking the steps necessary to fight their other purely secular enemies, far less preparing to defend themselves against the Church’s fresh assaults.

Third, every informed political observer on the planet knew that, in fact, the Group of Four had been directly behind the attack on Charis. The “Knights of the Temple Lands” were a political fiction which the Church had used before, and everyone recognized that was what had happened this time, as well. Whatever the consequences might have been at the “grassroots level,” the rulers of Safehold all knew who had been calling the shots in the attack on Charis. Bringing that out into the open made the choices clear for all of those other secular rulers . . . and outside Siddarmark, Chisholm, and Charis itself, the “grassroots level” didn’t matter a hill of beans. By taking the position they took, Cayleb and Staynair deliberately stripped away any mask the Group of Four might even have attempted to hide behind as far as the important decision-makers of Safehold were concerned. Moreover, by making it a direct confrontation between Tellesberg and Zion, they underscored what Nahrmahn and Sharleyan, at the very least, had already clearly understood: once Clyntahn had destroyed a realm for irritating him, no ruler‘s crown would ever have been safe from him again. If you think that wasn’t a factor in King Zhorj’s thinking in Tarot, you are mistaken. (And if you think the realization that Chisholm would be next on Clyntahn’s list wasn’t a part of Sharleyan’s calculations when she considered Cayleb’s proposal, I suggest you go back and reread the books! [G])

Fourth, and most importantly of all, it united Charis behind Cayleb in a way nothing else could have. Bear in mind that he wouldn’t have been confirmed in the crown at all by the Church under the Group of Four’s control, and that he, Staynair, and Gray Hill all knew that as well as Merlin did. His choice was between being denied the crown, facing (and attempting — somehow — to survive) Trynair’s delaying tactics, or openly defying the Group of Four. Since both of the first two possibilities would inevitably have led to his defeat and death, it was really a binary decision. But by embracing that decision, he presented himself as the champion of the Church and (although it wasn’t harped upon at the time) freedom of conscience. In the end, of course, freedom of conscience and Mother Church’s paramount authority over every living human being were fundamentally at odds, but that was not immediately apparent, since everything Staynair was saying emphasized the importance of God and an understanding of His will. The fact that he was already subtly dividing or at least distancing God from “His” Church was far from obvious. In fact, Cayleb’s message emphasized the necessity of standing up for God against the corruption of evil and ambitious mortal men who had perverted everything the Church was supposed to stand for. That position, coming on the heels of King Haarahld’s heroic death, the fact that virtually every Charisian understood that their kingdom would have been destroyed had the other side won, and the knowledge that the “Knights of the Temple Lands” had been behind the attack, forced Charisians to choose between becoming Temple Loyalists or Reformists in the church of Charis and firmly — one might say fiercely — united those Reformists behind Cayleb and Staynair. It was, for all intents and purposes, the exact opposite of the circumstances which would have obtained had Trynair’s probable strategy been applied, complete with Regency Council and “delays” in confirming Cayleb as king.

As for the notion that the people of the Temple Lands “quarrel with each other just like any group, or groups of people in power” — oh, please! The “people” of the Temple Lands don’t matter squat; the Knights of the Temple Lands matter. They are the rulers, they collect the taxes, they make the decisions, and they don’t answer to anything remotely like a parliament. And who are the “Knights of the Temple Lands”? The Council of Vicars, that’s who. You know — the people the Group of Four control and dominate? They are going to somehow “quarrel” with Zhaspahr Clyntahn at a time like this? And SWM is correct anyway; the Knights were simply the conduit for funds coming directly from the Church’s treasury under the control of the Treasurer . . . who happens to be a member of the Group of Four and would have been covered, anyway, by the instructions the Grand Vicar would have given him, since the Grand Vicar was under control of the Chancellor, who also happens to be a member of the Group of Four. The degree to which the “Knights of the Temple Lands” could have inhibited the Church’s cash-flow seems to me to be misunderstood by this argument, as well. The Knights didn’t pay taxes or tithes, anyway. The best they could have done would have been to try to somehow prevent the Church tax gatherers from collecting the tithes their subjects paid directly to the Church. I’ll let you calculate for yourself how likely they would have been to succeed in that with Clyntahn’s Inquisition standing behind Duchairn’s Treasury agents. No matter how ardent the Reformists might have been, all they would have achieved by attempting to hamper the Church’s collections would have been to give Clyntahn the pretext he needed to move against the Wylsynns’ Circle and other Reformists even sooner. Not that there would have been the most remote chance that the Reformists would have tried to impede the collection of tithes.

As far as comparing the threat of Charis to the threat of Siddarmark as a means to dissuade the Group of Four from whatever policy it chose to follow, this too is a nonstarter. Until after the events in A Mighty Fortress, there was never any thought on the part of the Group of Four that Charis might seriously threaten the mainland realms in any military sense. For that matter, the Group of Four’s consensus even after the destruction of the Navy of God’s fleet en route to Desnair was that Charis could not build both a navy sufficient to control the seas and provide for its own security and an army remotely large enough to threaten the mainland or the Temple directly. The Church could always build — or rebuild — a navy, no matter how expensive that might be or how many times it had to be done; Charis literally didn’t have the manpower to build a mainland-sized army, and that was all there was to it.

Because of that, there is no way that the “threat” of a powerful Charisian fleet would have dissuaded the Church from pursuing any policy the Group of Four chose to pursue, and to think otherwise is to completely misunderstand the thinking and perceived military realities of Safehold. Indeed, one of Clyntahn’s primary reasons for mounting the Sword of Schueler against Siddarmark was his belief — based primarily on his own, personal longtime suspicion of Siddarmark — that Siddarmark might move from “clandestine” economic cooperation with Charis to open military cooperation. By the time he took action, that suspicion of his had actually taken on a degree of legitimacy . . . but that was due solely to his own actions after Charis’ open — and successful — defiance of his authority. Neither he nor any other member of the Group of Four (with the possible exception of Duchairn, who, if you will recall, was consistently outvoted on a three-to-one basis) would have allowed their calculations to be affected in any way by the military threat potential of Charis to their own or the Church’s position on the mainland. It was the threat to the Church’s (i.e., their own) authority in the Out Islands which had prompted the other three to agree with Clyntahn’s “final solution” in the first place; absent a realistic land threat on the mainland (which, as I’ve just demonstrated, didn’t exist in their minds at that time), they would — they could — only act even more strongly to prevent Charis from securing hegemony over all the Out Islands and thus strengthening the danger against which they had acted originally.

In short, there is no way that a delay on Cayleb and Staynair’s part in proclaiming their defiance of the Group of Four — and setting forth morally, religiously, and spiritually compelling reasons for that defiance — could possibly have offered them anything like the advantages that accrued from an immediate declaration of war against the Group of Four and its corruption. It was not simply the correct thing for them to do from a moral and an ethical perspective, it was also the best thing they could have done from a pragmatic political, military, and economic perspective.

That’s my analysis of the situation, at any rate. And while my natural modesty hesitates to point this out, I probably know more about the internal and external politics of the Church and Safehold’s secular realms than anyone else. [G]

(1) Do you not think that a species which has genocided several advanced species wouldn’t know about looking for hidden bunkers, hideouts, stealthed ships, etc., etc., within the confines of any solar system it decides to kill and taking the time to do the job right?

(2) Do you not think that wshen the time for the final assault came the Gbaba would not bring a crushing superiority to bear, sufficient to close in and destroy the system installations and populations while simultaneously maintaining the same blocklade it took Admiral Pei’s entire fleet to break through, thereby assuring sufficient overkill to take care of any fleeing ships?

(3) Do you not think it likely that if any such sole survivor might have survived (somehow) to run for it and managed (somehow) to evade Gbaba pursuit it would have been way too short of food, fuel, water, air, spare parts, tech base, and/or genetic material to provide a viable population somewhere else? (Note that I ddn’t even ask if you thought it would “just happen” to have sufficient cryo facilities to place its complement in stasis until/if it reached a viable world somewhere without being reacquired by the Gbaba.)

Just asking. [G]

The Church provides five years of basic education, but the nature of that “basic education” is not uniform.

The critical thing that the Church teaches is doctrine. Initially, when Safehold was first colonized and the Church was first set up, the Church’s teaching role was specifically designed to instill literacy, as well as doctrinal soundness, in order to permit every Safeholdian to read The Writ , The Commentaries , and The Testimonies for himself, the better to understand the Archangels’ teachings. It was also essential because they were still very much in the terraforming mode and they needed to be able to read the instructions buried in The Writ . In addition, the literate Adams and Eves wanted and expected their offspring to become literate.

As population expanded beyond the original enclaves and — even more importantly — as individual reading of the holy books began to encourage a small number of independent thinkers, the Church’s emphasis shifted from teaching literacy as a primary goal to teaching it as a secondary goal, with increased emphasis on doctrinal reliability as the overriding objective. Doctrinal reliability had become the primary, quintessential, absolutely necessary aspect of the Church’s teaching during the War Against the Fallen, following Shan-Wei’s Rebellion, so it wasn’t a very difficult step for the Church to take to decide that too much literacy was a dangerous thing. Coupled with the expansion of the population, the creation of more “frontier settlements” where being good with your hands was more important than “book learning,” literacy began a steady decline which became a drastic decline when the Adams and Eves started dying off.

This suited a significant portion of the Church’s hierarchy just fine, since the closer the clergy had to a monopoly on literacy, the tighter its monopoly on doctrine and theology became. That portion of the clergy wanted to create a “closed shop” in which nothing like the Fallen could ever again emerge. Another, smaller, portion of the clergy — centered, ironically, in the Bédardists — argued forcefully against that view, pointing out that Langhorne himself had insisted that God’s children had to be literate and that it was the job of the Church to teach right behavior, not simply to dictate right behavior. The Order of Jwo-jeng was mostly on the Bédardists’ side; the Order of Schueler was not. As the order directly charged with teaching and guiding Mother Church’s children, the Order of Schueler took the position that what mattered most was that right behavior was attained , not necessarily how it was inculcated, and experience had demonstrated that those who read the most also tended to ask the most questions. Admittedly, questions could lead to further enlightenment, but they were also Shan-wei’s portal into the minds of believers and so they had to be handled very carefully, on Mother Church’s terms, and controlling literacy helped Mother Church control the terms of the discussion.

Opinion was not uniform even within the Order of Schueler, but the view of the Order’s senior clergy was strongly against aggressively pushing literacy, and that tended to predominate. A period of competition between the various great orders of the Church began about 150-225 years after the end of the War of the Fallen. It ended, eventually, with the Order of Jwo-jeng being merged into the Schuelerites and the Order of Langhorne losing its primacy to the new, consolidated Order of Schueler, in large part because the Inquisition was firmly in the hands of the Schuelerites. Maikel Staynair’s origins in the Order of Bédard actually have quite a lot to do with the high degree of open-mindedness and the belief in teaching and in the individual’s responsibility to take charge of his own relationship with God which he’s persistently demonstrated. He’s moved well beyond the Order of Bédard’s official positions, of course, but the order helped create the mindset which made him open to the revelations of the Brethren of Saint Zherneau when the time came.

To return to the matter of literacy, however. In the Out Islands, literacy was always relatively high among the classes for whom it was useful — merchants, lawyers, bankers, skilled artisans, physicians, etc. — although rather more restricted in the lower classes where the manual labor of a muscle-powered society was concentrated. Even there, however, literacy was more prevalent than it was in most of the mainland realms at their nadir and the view persisted that it was a Safeholdian’s right to be literate.

In those mainland realms, literacy was most common among the urban classes and least common among the rural classes. It was customary, in most of the mainland realms, for there to be at least one or two literate individuals attached to any large farmstead or small village, with an increasing percentage of literacy as population density went up and the classes for whom literacy was a requirement became more numerous. In addition, of course, the local clergy were always literate, although the extent to which a village under-priest in the Harchong Empire used his literacy skills probably didn’t compare too favorably to the extent to which a law master of the Order of Langhorne in Zion used his.

The general uptick in literacy over the last couple of centuries has been largely the result of the steadily increasing density of the urban populations and the economic expansion of which Charis is the face. I use the term “is the face” because although Charis is way out in front, virtually all of Safehold has been participating in a general upward flow of economic activity and prosperity. The Levelers’ current activity levels are a reflection of the inevitable disparities involved in an economy which is changing and evolving. However, the view that a good education is a doorway to opportunity has begun to emerge more and more strongly during this period, just as the increasing populations of cities like Tellesberg, Siddar City, Gorath, etc., have increased the need for literate specialists to provide the necessary services to manage those populations’ economic affairs, see to matters of public health, provide engineering services, etc.

The general uptick in literacy over the last couple of centuries has also (precisely as the Schuelerites of 600 years or so ago feared) contributed to the Reformist movement. Not so much in terms of questioning doctrine , although there’s obviously at least some of that going on, as well, so much as in the Reformists’ sense that Mother Church is not living up to the obligations set down in black and white in The Writ as the Vicarate has become more and more enamored of secular power and cliques like the Group of Four have emerged to dominate Church policy.

The poorer and sparser a population, the less likely it is to have a high degree of literacy. This is what Cahnyr was thinking about in terms of Glacierheart. The economy there is so hardscrabble that families can neither afford the cost of providing additional education to their children, nor afford the lost income holding the child out of the labor force would cost them. And literacy, like any other skill, is lost when it isn’t exercised, so especially among the lower classes — farmers, coal miners, foresters, etc. — functional illiteracy is still very common because they have neither the time nor the inclination to pursue reading. This is one of the reasons why the Sword of Schueler was more successful in Western Siddarmark. Not only were the western provinces closer to the Temple Lands and therefore more susceptible to infiltration (and strategically more important, leading to a greater concentration of effort in them), but there were far fewer bastions of literacy to help fuel the Reformist movement. As a result, the citizens of those provinces were much more conservative doctrinally and far less likely to be “infected” with schismatic or heretical notions, making them a tool more apt to the Inquisition’s hand.

(It should not, however, be assumed that loyalty and support for the Church are the monopoly of “backwoods hicks.” Illiteracy makes it easier for the Church to control the thinking of its parishioners, but this is an institution with close to a thousand years of doctrinal and theological writing and study. Some very, very smart people who have spent lifetimes acquiring knowledge and understanding of that doctrine are fully supportive of it, with their belief buttressed by their intelligence and study rather than undercut by them.)

Harchong is a special case. In Harchong, the Church and the local aristocracy have been joined at the hip to an even greater extent than elsewhere on the mainland. Harchong — or what eventually became the Harchong Empire, at least — was the focus of the early population and expansion of Safehold for several reasons, despite the fact (if you look at the map) that its internal communications are relatively poor. Tiegelkamp, Boisseau, Stene, Kyznetzov, and Shwei were primarily grassland and particularly fertile. They required much less in the way of terraforming and land clearance, which made them the heart of Haven’s early population growth. The emergence of a strong dynasty in Tiegelkamp which succeeded in uniting all of those separate enclaves into provinces of the same name into Safehold’s first true empire during the War of the Fallen — and which put its new, imperial strength behind Langhorne’s successors — explains a lot about both Harchong’s size and power and its “special relationship” with the Church and with the forces of doctrinal reliability, in particular.

East Haven and Howard — like Charis, Chisholm, and Corisande — had enclaves of their own, and the original canal network constructed by Shan-wei had assumed that East Haven would take the lead in population growth because of the superior possibilities of its river systems where transport was concerned. That’s why the original canals built by the Archangels tend to be concentrated in that region, although at least some of those canals (no, I’m not going to tell you which ones) were built after Shan-wei’s death in order to provide Zion with better communications rather than to promote eventual economic and population growth. Howard’s natural river connections aren’t as good as East Haven’s, but the climate in what became Desnair was very good, lending itself to a strong agriculture-based economy. Sodar’s internal communications are really, really bad, which helps to explain why you haven’t heard very much about the mighty Kingdom of Sodar.

Siddarmark grew out of the enclaves scattered through Old Province, Mountaincross, Midhold, Hildermoss, and Markan. There was also an enclave in what became Shiloh Province, but it was not associated with the early growth of Siddarmark. Unlike Harchong, which grew into a centralized empire very early, the “proto-Siddarmarkians” developed more as city states, independent of one another, which turned into the Republic some centuries before our story (and I’m not going to tell you that part of it now, because this thing is already much too long). However, the city states always laid a greater emphasis on individual liberties, participatory democracy, and rivalry with one another (which, however, usually stopped short of military rivalries), and generally emerged as the antithesis of Harchong. The fact that Siddarmark is almost a reverse image of Harchong helps to explain why those in the Church who regarded Harchong as Mother Church’s faithful bulwark were more inclined to see Siddarmark as a threat, especially after it began aggressively expanding southward following its initial confrontation with the Desnairian Empire. (You’ll get at least some details on the Siddarmark-Desnair . . . relationship in Toil and Tribulation .)

Anyway, the Harchongian aristocracy discovered that an illiterate peasantry and serf class was much easier to control than one which could read. After all, if they could read The Holy Writ , they might also be able to read things like, oh, contracts . For that matter, they might figure out that their beloved overlords weren’t exactly living up to the Writ’s instruction as to how they were to treat their brothers and sisters in God. As a result, they took steps to actively discourage literacy outside the ranks of the aristocracy and the bureaucratic class which actually manages the Empire, and Mother Church was willing to go along because (1) Mother Church owed the Empire for its support during the War Against the Fallen; (2) it was understood that this was a quid pro quo, under which the Harchongian aristocracy would always have the Church’s back; and (3) peasant and serf illiteracy would make it easier for the Church to ensure doctrinal reliability among them.

So, while I apologize for the rather rambling way I got here, the point of my discourse is that literate serfs and peasants are very, very few and far between in Harchong. The village priest and the local Order of Schueler provide not simply what rudimentary education a common born Harchongian gets but also what literate services he requires, which means that while Reformism may be getting a new lease on life in Siddarmark, it has fallen upon almost totally barren ground in Harchong.

At that, of course, my children, explains why Zhaspahr Clyntahn thinks so highly of Harchong. Whatever its other shortcomings, he views the Harchong Empire as an almost bottomless reservoir of religiously reliable manpower, and smart as he is — and he is smart in a lot of ways — his awareness of how the advances Charis has been introducing trump sheer manpower remains sufficiently imperfect for him to fail to recognize that Harchong’s sheer size is no longer enough to carry all before it. Or it might actually be fairer to him to say that he does understand that if he doesn’t nip the Charisian schism in the bud quickly the genie is going to get thoroughly out of the bottle, destabilizing the system upon which Mother Church’s primacy rests, which means he has to employ the Harchongian manpower trump card now to take Charis out before that destabilization devalues his hole card. But he hasn’t figured out yet that his hole card’s already ultimately devalued if he can’t wipe Charis completely out within the next 5 to 10 years. It may even be that he’s simply unwilling to recognize that fact because victory — and the extermination of Charis — is the only outcome acceptable to him and that automatically means it is the only outcome God will permit.

I think you and I have a difference of opinion about what constitutes moral/acceptable behavior in this instance. Nor is that the only reason why nuking Zion is not an option for Merlin. Taking the many reasons for that in no particular order:

Merlin feels personally responsible for the deaths which have already occurred. He is, however, among other things, a product of a Terran Federation Navy which was sworn to the preservation of human life in a war it knew it was losing — a conflict which could have only one outcome. Nimue spent her entire life in that environment, with that overriding imperative. When Merlin says that Nimue was sworn to protect human life, he is telling nothing but the truth, and the number of people he’s already personally killed in relatively small groups already weighs heavily enough upon him. By the same token, he knows — when he’s willing to look at it logically and listen to the testimony of the native Safeholdians on “his” side — that the war which is currently ongoing between the Church leadership and those who believe in freedom of conscience (or at least adherence to the spirit of the Writ as they understand it) was inevitable. In point of fact, aside from the delay he caused an Archbishop Erayk’s pastoral visit (which, arguably, delayed him long enough for the ground fire in Charis to get beyond the point where he could have hoped to re-exert any sort of control), Merlin had very little to do with Clyntahn’s decision to launch the attack on Charis. Arabic numerals? That (along with the abacus) was really the only major innovation to have come out of Charis — and reached the Group of Four’s attention — which was Merlin’s handiwork. Clyntahn had been planning his “final solution” to the Charisian problem for quite some time; he scarcely needed anything Merlin might have done as an excuse.

Despite that, Merlin does feel responsible, even though Cayleb, Sharleyan, Maikel, Nahrmahn (when alive), and many others have told him that it would have happened anyway and that his “guilt” consists primarily of giving Charis an opportunity to survive, thereby lengthening the war and extending the massacre to somewhere else instead of basically allowing Clyntahn to simply depopulate Charis and be done with it . . . until the next secular realm pissed him off.

At the same time, as other readers have pointed out, his primary mission is not the survival of Charis or even of his friends and loved ones. His primary mission is to make sure that the Church is permanently and totally discredited as a “thought control” mechanism, that the orbital bombardment platform doesn’t blast Safehold back into the equivalent of the dark ages, and that humanity is ready the next time it runs into the Gbaba. From that perspective, and speaking totally cold-bloodedly, the more thoroughly the Group of Four discredits itself with the human race — the more and greater the excesses and atrocities Clyntahn is allowed to perpetuate without being stopped by the rest of the Church hierarchy — the more the Church’s legitimacy is undermined and, eventually, destroyed. I’m not saying that Merlin is deliberately attempting to provoke additional atrocities, because he isn’t — his mind doesn’t work that way — but he is aware of that side of the equation . . . and so are Cayleb and Maikel Staynair, quite possibly to an even greater extent than Merlin is. Moreover, Merlin most definitely is aware that he has to get the innovation/invention genie as thoroughly as possible out of the bottle before the Church is defeated. Nimue was a sufficiently astute student of history, and has had long enough to think about this, to realize that even when the Church is defeated militarily, it is extraordinarily unlikely that the Reformists and the Church of Charis are going to succeed in destroying the existing Church (unless, of course, it has succeeded in wreaking sufficient havoc and atrocities to generate the sort of universal revulsion Nazism and Hitler’s “Final Solution” generated after World War II and we have the equivalent of the Nuremberg trials and denazification on a planetary scale). The Church of God Awaiting is almost certainly going to survive the current jihad, one way or the other, and that means that the habit of thinking outside the Writ ‘s limitations and the Proscriptions of Jwo-jeng has to become so widespread, so pervasive, that even a Church which has a successful Counter Reformation won’t be able to fence it around with new restrictions and turn it back off at the tap. From that perspective — again, speaking cold bloodedly — he doesn’t want to end the jihad tomorrow. Please note that that doesn’t mean he’ll deliberately delay a Charisian victory or sabotage Siddarmarkian armies in the field, because he won’t; he’ll fight like hell for Charisian victory. But it is a fundamental, underlying strand of his strategy and his mission.

Leaving all of that aside, however, there is the question of his personal morality, how it plays into that oath Nimue swore (and his own feelings of guilt over the fact that, despite all it can do, the TFN was unable to fulfill that oath), and exactly where direct (as opposed to in direct) responsibility for the atrocities actually lies.

Merlin is not prepared, is not willing, is morally unalterably opposed, to murdering a couple of million people who would never have any opportunity of defending themselves simply because they have been controlled by a monstrous lie and exploited by a corrupt institution headed by four greedy men, one of whom is a certifiable megalomaniac. He simply won’t do it. He can’t do it, and he is not prepared to salve his conscience with the argument of “expediency” or that “the ends justify the means.” It would be a monstrous act, and while he might be willing to accept the blood guilt for it even if it condemns the soul he firmly believes in to hell if he felt it was the only solution to the problem of the Church of God Awaiting and the bombardment platform, that doesn’t change the fact that he would regard it as utterly morally reprehensible and a sin against God Himself . In fact, Merlin would argue that if he does indeed still have a soul at this point, and he carried out such an act, he would deserve to spend the rest of eternity in hell. Nimue’s oath to the Terran Federation Navy, her sense of having failed in that obligation, Merlin’s conviction that it is his duty to protect rather than to destroy — all of those things factor into the psychology of his decision, but only to reinforce the fundamental bedrock of his conviction that it would be an act of evil and that if he could convince himself otherwise there would be no difference between him and Zhaspahr Clyntahn aside from their objectives .

It can be argued — indeed, I have seen it argued in posts on this site — that by not wiping out a couple of million innocent human beings in an eye blink, he is actually facilitating the evils which are being done. That it is somehow his fault that Zhaspahr Clyntahn and the Inquisition are able to commit the atrocities they are committing because he has the power to stop them and he refuses to use it. I’m sorry, but this is the same sort of logic — in reverse — which makes a terrorist’s victims responsible for what happens to them. Merlin believes in freedom of will. So does the Church of Charis and the Reformists in general. So, in many ways, does the Church of God Awaiting, which is one reason for the Punishment of Schueler — men have the freedom to choose to do evil, which means that some of them inevitably will, and when they do, it is Mother Church’s responsibility to deal with that evil. Merlin is not responsible for what others choose to do, any more than the Western Allies were “responsible” for Hitler’s and Himmler’s decision to implement a full bore extermination policy towards the Jews when they began to realize they were likely to lose (or at least not win) the war.

One of the striking aspects, for me, of the debate over moral responsibility and choices in warfare comes out of World War II and is too often lost in the shadows of the Holocaust. Who actually bears the moral responsibility for the millions of dead civilians killed in places like Hamburg, Dresden, Nagasaki, and Hiroshima? Was it the Germans, who first began the practice of bombing civilian centers of population from the air and therefore, in a sense, reaped what they had sowed? Was it the Japanese, who after all were responsible for the Rape of Nanking, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the Batan Death March, and whose distortion of the code of bushido led to the horrendous casualties suffered by both sides in places like Tarawa and Okinawa and to the introduction of kamikaze attacks which convinced the US that an actual invasion would have resulted in over a million military totality’s alone? Or was it the political and military leaders who dispatched the bombers that actually killed the civilians in question? Can men like Winston Churchill, Frankloin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, “Bomber” Harris, Carl Spaatz, and Curtis LeMay be let off the hook because the other side “made them do it,” or should they be held accountable for their own actions and decisions? In many cases, there most definitely were other choices, other options, and people at the time who pointed those options out. Those other options were ignored, however, and surely that means that the military and political leaders who chose to ignore them must bear responsibility for that decision, if no other.

My point here is that Merlin is not responsible, whatever he may think, for a single atrocity the Church has committed. It is because Merlin is not a psychopath that he thinks he is responsible, but the truth of the matter is that the people ordering and carrying out the atrocities are responsible, and no one else . Would Merlin, therefore, be justified in personally killing a couple of million human beings to prevent what the Inquisition and the Church of God Awaiting under Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s leadership is currently doing? Does he have the moral right to murder other innocent civilians in order to prevent someone else from killing innocent civilians?

Merlin doesn’t believe he does, and the true difference between him and Zhaspahr Clyntahn isn’t the fact that Clyntahn is a self-serving, megalomaniac, sabyrite who believes that as God’s anointed champion he can do whatever he wants, but rather that Merlin will not use the argument that “the ends justify the means” to excuse himself for doing something he knows — knows , deep down at the core of what makes him who he is — is not simply wrong but an abomination in the eyes of God.

Having said all of the above, I should also point out that the numbers being thrown around at this point for the deaths and suffering being inflicted by Clyntahn and the Inquisition certainly aren’t based on anything I’ve given you. Starvation, privation, atrocities — all of that is, indeed, happening on a vast scale, but 130,000,000? The combined population of Safehold is a whisker over 1,000,000,000, so this number is a full 13% of the total population of the planet! How are that many human beings supposed to be being killed, tortured, and starved simultaneously?

Remember that the western provinces of the Republic of Siddarmark were the most lightly populated ones, and that the entire population of the Republic amounts to only 129,000,000 and change. You can’t seriously throw the entire population of Siddarmark into the scales for Merlin to balance against murdering the entire population of Zion any more than you could argue that the entire population of the Soviet Union in 1940 was directly and immediately threatened and subjected to atrocities by the German Army between 1941 and the Battle of Kursk in 1943. I admit that the numbers of Siddarmarkian’s who have died, suffered, or been displaced — or who will have been by the time the invasion of Siddarmark is over — greatly outnumber the total population of Zion, but not by anywhere near the scale which is being suggested by using the number 130,000,000.

Even the Nazi extermination machine, with all the advantages of mid-twentieth century technology, was unable to get anywhere near that figure. Estimates for the total number killed in the Holocaust range from 10,000,000 to 26,000,000, and the death toll for the entire war ranges from a low of 40,000,000 to a high of around 78-80,000,000, or about 1.5-3% of the then-current world population. World War I killed between 15,000,000 and 65,000,000 (and the high end number includes the death toll of the Spanish influenza epidemic, not just the direct casualkties inflicted as a result of military operations) or roughly 1-4% of the current world population. To get to higher percentages of the world population than that, you have to go to wars like the Mongol invasions, or the domestic warfare of China prior to the 19th century, where I would submit that the very best records available are likely to be . . . unreliable, at best. Lord knows there’s enough dispute today about numbers in current, ongoing humanitarian tragedies to make me dubious about records that are four and five hundred years old. My point, however, is that Zhaspahr Clyntahn isn’t even in shouting range of that kind of number at this point, and all indications are that the curve of Charisian innovation is sufficient that the Church of God Awaiting isn’t going to be able to inflict that kind of death toll before its armies are eventually crushed by the Empire of Charis. It’s valid to point out that Merlin’s “inaction” is leaving Clyntahn alive to add to his box score, but I think we ought to at least restrict ourselves to numbers that bear a passing resemblance to the numbers the Inquisition and the Church of God Awaiting and its forces have already or are actually in a position to inflict at this time.

You are suffering under a misapprehension in at least one respect: the Border States were not specifically created as a buffer between the Temple Lands and the Republic of Siddarmark. They are a buffer zone, which is why they are collectively referred to as the “Border States,” but they were not created to serve as one. Rather, they are states which existed before the Republic expanded to its current borders and which the Siddarmarkians went to some pains to avoid threatening. The Republic has been aware of the “Knights of the Temple Lands” . . . nervousness over the “Siddarmarkian threat” to the Temple Lands for a long, long time. At no time — prior, at least, to the last few years and Siddarmark’s pointed exclusion from the Church’s preparations for the jihad against Charis — has the Republic ever actually contemplated going to war against Mother Church, however. Not only would it have been impious and almost certainly blasphemous, but the huge preponderance of force the Church is in a position to concentrate against Charis, despite five years of reverses (and the fact that virtually all of the secular rulers of Safehold understand that the Church was actually the initial aggressor in the current war), would always have been available against Siddarmark, especially if the Republic had been so foolish as to attack Mother Church , rather than the reverse.

The Church’s anxiety over Siddarmark represents something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Concerned about potential aggression from Siddarmark because of their worry over its perceived Reformist sympathies and the Republic’s success against secular adversaries, the Group of Four and the last several decades of its predecessors among the Church’s policymakers, have been unremittingly hostile towards the Republic. In the process, they have convinced the last few lords protector and their administrations that the Church sees the Republic as an enemy, despite the fact that the Republic has never intentionally threatened the Church, her territorial possessions, or her security . That being the case, those lords protector have had no choice but to shape their own policies in light of that perceived hostility, and that fact has generated an answering cynicism, distrust, and — yes — defensive hostility towards those policymakers , rather than towards the Church itself. Since those policymakers, like the Group of Four prior to the current unpleasantness, made no differentiation in their own minds between themselves and the Church as a whole, that hostility towards them equated in their view to hostility against Mother Church and thus a potential secular threat to the security of the Temple Lands. This despite the fact that any quick-and-dirty analysis of the potential balance of power between the Church of God Awaiting and any single secular realm ought to have led them to exactly the same conclusion the Republic’s leaders had drawn: that any act of aggression against Mother Church would have been one of suicidal lunacy.

A huge part of the Church’s current problems stem from the fact that as the Church’s leadership has become increasingly involved in expanding and protecting its wealth and secular power, it has systematically undermined the security of the very things it sought to protect. The attitudes the Group of Four so feared among the Out Islands and the Republic are, in fact, a reaction against the perceived corruption of the Church leadership in question, but, even more, a response to the pressures and threats being brought to bear against them by that selfsame leadership.

In other words, to use an ancient cliché, the Group of Four and its predecessors having made their bed, the Church now has no option but to lie in it.

I’m not sure exactly what you mean by “disbelief problems” in this instance. They may, however, result from misunderstanding the purposes of the original Langhorne and then trying to project him back onto the Federation as a whole.

The Federation knew exactly what first brought them to the Gbaba’s attention: interstellar expansion into an area the Gbaba had already swept of competing sentient (or, at least, advanced) lifeforms. They had no way of knowing whether it was because they’d blundered across some stealth sensor system that had been left behind to report to the Gbaba, or because the Gbaba ran patrols through the area on some sort of regular schedule, or whatever, but first contact with the Gbaba followed decades of survey ships turning up evidence of destroyed alien civilizations. Until the Gbaba actually attacked, there was disagreement over how and why those civilizations had been destroyed, but after the Gbaba attacked, the debate was generally considered to have been settled. So while they might not have known exactly what level of technology triggered Gbaba interest in the other civilizations which were destroyed, they had pretty conclusive evidence that it was their own expanding high-tech presence in interstellar space which had brought them to the Gbaba’s attention.

The original purpose of Operation Ark was not for the human race to permanently dig a hole, climb into it, and then fill it in behind them. The original ban on high technology — including interstellar travel — was intended to last only long enough to evade any Gbaba scouts deliberately searching for possible human “hidden colonies.” The intention at that point was to not radiate telltale signals which might attract a scout to Safehold’s star system in the first place and to maintain that “you can’t see me” anonymity long enough for the search for them to have died down. At that point, humanity, knowing about the Gbaba’s existence would begin reestablishing technology as carefully as possible and use the tech base which had been brought with them in knowledge form (which is precisely what Shan-wei and the others in the Alexandria Enclave wanted to maintain) as a starting point for a civilization which had almost been able to defeat the Gbaba as it stood to advance to one readily capable of dealing with the threat when it was encountered a second time.

Clearly, the ultimate intent was for the human race to return (eventually) to interstellar space loaded for bear and deal with the Gbaba once and for all because the Gbaba had left humanity no option through their own previous actions. That is clearly how Pei Shan-wei and Commodore Pei understood their mission orders, and it was the fear that someone like Langhorne would attempt to . . . modify those orders which led to the plans which placed Nimue Alban’s PICA in a cave on Safehold a thousand years later.

Langhorne’s solution to the problem, however, was to dig a hole and pull it in after him. He’d basically decided that the best way to deal with the Gbaba was to hide from them permanently , and his technique for doing that was to forbid the re-creation of a tech base which could ever permit humanity to expand beyond a single planet or draw the Gbaba’s attention a second time. In other words, the Proscriptions — unlike the original plan to “go dark” until after the Gbaba scouts were done looking for fugitives — are intended as a permanent solution to the “Gbaba problem.” As a consequence, they aren’t so much concerned with preventing telltale electromagnetic or neutrino signatures per se as they are with killing the fundamental building blocks that might ever permit those signatures to be radiated in the first place. This doesn’t indicate any ignorance on the part of the Terran Federation as to how/why the Gbaba initially discovered humanity’s existence; it indicates an intention to prevent humanity from running into the Gbaba again anywhere, under any circumstances.

The deliberate imposition of Roman numerals in place of Arabic numerals, as a means to prevent the development of advanced mathematics, is one example of how that was supposed to work. The structure of a cosmology in which as many natural laws as possible are explained as divine dispensations rather than simply ignored is another. The Holy Writ not only describes the “miraculous dispensation” of gravity as a means to provide a constant “down” anywhere on the surface of a spherical planet, but also describes celestial phenomena in a way which accounts for Copernican observations within a basically Ptolemaic context, once again by describing what might be seen by the unaided human eye or through a telescope (and remember they have telescopes) in terms of “and this, too, is the mighty work of the Archangels’ hands.” In other words, the Writ sets forth internally consistent, comprehensive descriptions of observable phenomena in terms of divine dispensation in a way intended to prevent questions from arising in the first place. If we ever get to it (that is, if it ever becomes significant to the storyline), you will discover that most things which could be observed through magnifying glasses or simple microscopes — that is, microscopes which can be constructed without advanced technology — are also described in the Writ and explained in those same consistent cosmological terms. The entire objective was to create a situation in which the conflict between science and religion never arises because anything that the tools of a low-tech civilization can produce have already been satisfactorily explained/described by religion. There’s no need to find a solution to the problem of new discoveries, because everyone already “knows” why things work the way they do. The Achilles heel of the Writ lies in the fact that the Writ doesn’t specifically forbid efforts to expand upon the descriptions/answers already provided. There is a reason that it doesn’t (which I may or may not go into at some point in the books; it was a judgment call on the part of the Writ’s authors on the question of how specifically they wanted to try to nail things down at the risk of inadvertently contradicting themselves internally at some point), but that remains to be seen. It is, however, one of the reasons the Royal College in Tellesberg never quite crossed the line into anathematized knowledge before the Group of Four’s attack on Charis. They weren’t positing new, heretical knowledge; they were simply collecting, collating, and systematizing observations of how the permitted “knowledge” worked and attempting to derive still deeper insight into the “divine laws” established by the Archangels obedient to God’s will.

On the basis of the Proscriptions, Merlin and the inner circle can actually form some pretty fair conclusions about what won’t set off the Rakurai; the problem is that they can’t be positive what will (beyond one point, discussed below). Essentially, the Proscriptions are very simple: instead of defining what technology is, they are intended — by defining what is permissible — to create conditions under which the evolution of an advanced tech base is not possible . In essence, the Proscriptions list the three elements of “Langhorne’s Trinity” of acceptable power sources: wind, water, and muscle. Paityr Wylsynn explained in the last book how, working within those limitations, he can approve steam power. In his attestation, he simply points out that the generation of steam has always been allowed (see his reference to pressure cookers) and that all a steam engine really is is a wind-powered device. The steam simply represents wind generated where it’s needed, just as Howsmyn’s hydro-accumulators were simply a way to generate/provide waterpower where it was required.

The problem comes with an effort to step beyond steam into electricity , which is not part of Langhorne’s Trinity. Moreover, the Writ makes it very clear that one of Shan-wei’s worst offenses against God was to lay impious hands on Holy Langhorne’s divine Rakurai. The deluded mortals who followed her during Shan-wei’s War and The War of the Fallen were anathematized in part for their acceptance of her blasphemous desecration of the Rakurai, which is specifically set forever beyond human touch. From that, Merlin and the inner circle can be pretty clear in their own minds that a generating plant is going to catch a kinetic bombardment is anything is. Indeed, they have inferred (correctly) that the connection between the Rakurai and damnation was made so explicit to be sure that electricity stayed “off the table” once some Safeholdian Benjamin Franklin demonstrated that it and the Rakurai were the same thing.

One thing that needs to be borne in mind is that at this point that the readers of this forum know far more about what went on during Shan-wei’s War and The War of the Fallen than Merlin or the inner circle know. Until the Key of Schueler came on the scene, they couldn’t know what was under the Temple. In fact, even now they don’t “know” a thing about what’s under there; they can only surmise. By the same token, at this point they have no way of knowing exactly what the kinetic platform was put up there to do or what might trigger it.

Because of the rigor with which the Rakurai is forbidden to humans or to anyone except Langhorne Himself (remember, he’s not “dead;” he’s simply no longer “of this world,” which means that the Writ specifically provides for his ongoing supervision of and influence in the world), Merlin is confident that building a generating station would be A Bad Idea. He was careful to set up his steam power experiment in a place where no one would be injured if things went badly and were (almost to support) there would be no human witnesses to a “Rakurai strike” if the kinetic bombardment platform disapproved of steam power. By the same token, he’s not particularly concerned about the platform having been set up to essentially nuke Safehold back into the Key age, either, however. He strongly suspects (again, correctly) that if a electrical generating plant, for example, were to be struck by the Rakurai, it would not set off a general bombardment of Safehold. That, in fact, the people behind the Proscriptions would want witnesses to “Langhorne’s divine wrath” to survive and spread the word of what had happened.

So the Federation was never in much doubt as to what drew it to the Gbaba’s attention; the Proscriptions are intended less to prevent “betraying spoors” which will attract the Gbaba to Safehold than with ensuring that no technology capable of taking humans beyond Safehold ever emerges; and Merlin and the inner circle, by a careful reading of the Writ and the Proscriptions can definitely rule out at least some technologies as virtually certain to activate the “Rakurai” (assuming, of course, that anything will do so).

(1) If you start throwing rocks with remotes and someone sees them, you have demons coming out of the woodwork, thereby validating the Inquisition’s claim to be representing God’s will.

(2) If you start throwing rocks through windows, then the Inquisition will start posting watchmen round-the-clock, at which point you either have to use remotes (demons), human beings (who will be arrested and tortured to death), or Merlin himself (who can only be in one place at a time), or else stop.

(3) Same for stealing food from grainaries or other storage facilities.

(4) The Inqusition has no fields of its own, so if you steal their food, you’re stealing every one else’s.

(5) If you begin having random acts of sabotage, Clyntahn (as I have suggested elsewhere) will begin making examples of people living in the vicinity. He doesn’t believe in demons (or, at least, that God will allow them to operate against Mother Church) so any deliberate sabotage has to be the work of human hands. If the locals weren’t part of it, they should be sources of information about who was behind it. If they aren’t sources of information, then they probably were involved. And even if they weren’t, making salutory examples of folks in the neighborhood should inspire other folks in the neighborhood to start keeping their eyes open so they can provide the Church with clues in future. Defeating such sabotage is God’s work and theefore, however distasteful we may find it, we have no option but to do whatever is required of us (with due considration for the provisions of the Book of Schueler ) to accomplish that end. Please make plans to attend the auto-da-fe at the end of the street next Wednesday after mass. Thank you very much, the Inquisition,

Now, from a coldblooded perspective, I could easily make a case for Merlin deliberately inspiring Clyntahn to begin conductions barbaric, atrocity-generating “reprisals” against innocent civilians for his own [Merlin’s] actions. It would, after all, be a way to accelerate the Temple Loyalists’ . . . disenchantment with the Grand Inquisitor and the Go4. It is, however, a cynical maneuver of the kind Merlin (and Cayleb and Sharleyan) despise in Clyntahn himself. And , assuming the Go4 is ultimately defeated and the truth about Merlin (and his capabilities) comes out, then all the people who lost family members to (or themselves suffered from) atrocities which Merlin deliberately induced Clyntahn to commit are not going to be particularly enamored of the “good guys,” and rightly so.

Just pointing out that it is nowhere near as simple as some people seem determined to assume that it is. I genuinly have considered most of the possibilities which have been presented and rejected them for reasons which —- in my opinion (but I’m only the author, so what do I know about it?) —- make excellent sense from the perspective of the main characters’ morality, ethics, view of their mission, and pragmatic awareness of ultimate consequences for their overarching ojectives.

EDIT: I forgot to add the observation that throwing rocks and open acts of defiance usually only work when (1) the bulk of the population already agrees with those who are doing the defying and is willing to rally en masse to their rescue/assistance in sufficient numbers to offset the “authorities'” preponderance of military power; (2) there is an outside force which can and will intervene on the side of the troublemakers in time to keep them all from being killed; or (3) the people you are defying are the civilized ones, and so hamstrung by their own professed values where truly effective repressive tactics are concerned.

Regimes are seldom overthrown for being too repressive ; they’re overthrown when, for whatever reason, they are no longer willing/able to adopt effective repressive techniques. Brutality can generate people willing to rebel; it seldom generates successful rebellion as long as the people administering the brutality are free to continue to do so. Mahatma Gandhi would not have fared well against Heinrich Himmler; the Libyan rebels would not have succeeded against Kadhafi without outside air support; and the Syrian opposition will not succeed against Assad as long as someone is willing to sell him bullets and he can find soldiers willing to fire them (or the Western powers miraculously develop the cojones to do to him what they were willing to do to poor, isolated, not-connected-to-Iran-or-Russia Kadhafi).

There are enough moral ambiguities involved in attacking clearly military targets in a way which is going to cause collateral damage and deaths to a putatively friendly civilian population, as in Allied bombing of targets on French soil during World War II. Britain’s Bomber Command is demonized in many circles for area bombing of German cities — i.e., cities full of enemy civilians — and then there’s that little matter of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet even Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki could be justified as attacks on military objectives which inflicted those “collateral” casualties on enemy civilian populations. How much worse does the West feel about Stalin’s refusal to advance to the liberation of the Warsaw Ghetto when it rose against the Germans? If Merlin & Co. are responsible for actions which cause the Inquisition to respond by punishing people innocent of any complicity in those actions, then they (in my opinion, deservedly) will carry a stigma as indelible as Stalin’s from Warsaw.

I have to write the stories the way I feel they should be written, however, and Merlin’s high tech goodies are not going to turn into god weapons or panaceas in the course of the books for a whole bunch of reasons. Some I have already spelled out in terms of moral consequences to his actions. Some I have spelled out in terms of the damage they would do if they became known to the other side. Some have to do with the problems of charges of devil-worship and demon familiars which he has been at such pains to avoid. Some have to do with his refusal to replace one forcibly imposed set of technology guidelines and religous proscriptions and diktats with what amounts to another. Some have to do with story telling constraints. Some have to do with things you may not have yet thought about, but which I have . . . like how the Inqusition under Clyntahn is going to react to any town or settlement anywhere near to an “inexplicable” act of non-divine sabotage. (You do realize how likely he would be to start assigning “collective responsibility” and punishing the local inhabitants who were obviously assisting the saboteurs . . . whoever they were, don’t you?) Some have to do with Merlin’s own moral qualms and ethics. Some have to do with . . . .

I’ll stop there. I hope this is enough of an explanation. I hope the readers will trust me with the books and with the characters, and that the characters’ actions (and attitudes) will be consistent with who they are and what they’ve been shown to be. In the end, however, the stories will be written the way I think they need to be written. No doubt some readers will be upset and will voice their unhappiness with characters’ actions (or inactions) as vociferously as thousands of Monday morning quarterbacks have second-guessed real lilfe military and political decision makers for as long as I can remember. If that happens, it will probably indicate that I got it right.

I’ll leave you with one last thought. I could have had Nimue trot out her recon skimmer three days after she woke up in the cave, nuke Zion and all the major sources of the Church’s military capabilities, then appear as “the Archangel Nimue,” decree that the Church had fallen into corruption (as it had) and that she had been sent by God with the new dispensation, completing the teaching which had been interrupted by Shan-wei’s “rebellion” when those claiming to be Langhorne’s true followers had actually perverted the historical record of what had happened. In fact, Shan-wei was the first victim of the rebellion against Langhorne, to whom she was loyal to the moment of Armageddon Reef’s destruction, and the true trator was Chihiro, who proceded to pervert and twist everything Langhorne had intended as his full teaching. That triumph of the Dark in the War of the Fallen established a thousand years of darkness on Safehold, making the Church’s corruption inevitable, but the time has come to right the wrong which was done so many centuries ago and return humankind to the paths of righteousness, including the responsible use of technology which Shan-wei, as Langhorne’s true, loyal lieutenant had been entrusted to reveal and teach before Chihiro the Foul’s sinful, ambitious betrayal and revolt.

Now, obviously, I would have had to deal with the bombardment platform, but I can think of a couple of ways to do that right off the top of my head (one of which may yet be used), or I could simply never have inserted it into the mix in the first place. And what I’ve sketched out above is only one possible iteration of the many, many, many ways I could have allowed use of advanced technology to solve Nimue/Merlin’s problems.

Would have been a damned boring book, too, and the entire war would have been over in about 12 minutes, with no moral growth or exploration of any of the characters. Ho-hum.

If you want that story, you’ll have to go find it somewhere else, though, because I have no intention whatever of writing it.

dis-pen-sa-tion: noun 1.a The act of dispensing. b. Something dispensed. c. A specific arrangement or system by which something is dispensed. 2. An exemption or a release from an obligation or a rule, granted by or as if by an authority. 3.a An exemption from a church law, a vow, or another similar obligation granted in a particular case by an ecclesiastical authority. b. The document containing this exemption. 4. Theology. a. The divine ordering of worldly affairs. b. A religious system or code of commands considered to have been divinely revealed or appointed.

I would direct your attention to 3.a and to 4.b .

Zhaspahr Clyntahn is the “ecclesiastical authority” charged with enforcing the Proscriptions and Church doctrine. He is also the individual who has the authority, under the Writ , to grant dispensations allowing departures — temporary or permanent — from the Proscriptions and doctrine . . . after, of course, prayerful consideration of the Writ and God’s will. Remember that it’s the Intendant in each archbishopric, invariably a Schuelerite, who passes on the acceptability of new innovations under the Proscriptions of Jwo-jeng, but the Intendant can only approve of innovations which are acceptable under currently interpreted Church law. He can’t grant an attestation for something entirely new or novel; that sort of decision would have to be referred up the chain to the Office of the Inquisition, and even his decisions to allow something on the basis that it reflects only already approved technology are always subject to review at a higher level. Remember also, however, that Erayk Dynnys couldn’t simply overrule Paityr Wylsynn; he could pressure Wylsynn, but only the Office of the Inquisition would have had the authority to overrule him. And the Office of the Inquisition is headed by the Grand Inquisitor, who happens to be Zhaspahr Clyntahn.

(Things are just a little different in the Church of Charis, obviously, but we’re not talking about the Church of Charis in this instance.)

So far, Clyntahn is well within the official, legal sphere of his authority in granting dispensations for the use of new weapons, the adoption of new techniques, and even for things like the temporary sabotage of canal locks. There are other things he’s doing in which he is at the very least . . . creatively reinterpreting the Writ , such as his imposition of a worldwide embargo against Charisian commerce and his deliberate destabilization of entire realms. Then there’s the little matter of assassinations and terrorism, so I think it can certainly be argued that he is far, far outside the spirit of the Writ in terms of meeting his pastoral responsibilities.

(And despite what’s currently going on on Safehold, the Writ is really very clear about the “pastoral responsibilities” the Church’s clergy are supposed to meet. It’s important to remember that the Church of God Awaiting wasn’t really established for the purpose of providing the vicarate with cushy, comfortable lifestyles and opportunities for graft.)

Nonetheless, even granting that Clyntahn is off the reservation in several contexts under the normal reading of the Writ , one should also remember what Dunkyn Yairley had to say to Duke Kholman following the Battle of Iythria about how the Writ’s rules change in the event of a jihad. It would be very difficult — so far, at least — for any Temple Loyalist to argue that he’s exceeded his or the Church’s authority or done anything other than what the Writ itself authorizes (where dispensations are concerned, at any rate) in time of jihad.

If anything is going to undermine Clyntahn’s authority with the faithful, it’s going to be the realization that he’s acting in his own self-interest and not in the interest of Mother Church. As long as the Temple Loyalists remain convinced that the things that he’s doing, however horrible, are required by the Book of Schueler and the Holy Writ , his actions are unlikely to undermine the Church’s authority. Once that tipping point is reached, however, and the Temple Loyalists begin agreeing with the Reformists about the need to rectify the Church’s corruption and abuses, everything that he’s done will be looked at through a very different set of prisms. As far as the Temple Loyalists are concerned, his actions are unlikely to undermine the Church’s authority even then, but at that point, the Counter Reformation will set in, and it will be interesting to see if Church doctrine becomes more or less authoritarian after the corrupt men in Zion have been dealt with.

I think I’ve just explained (at least I’ve tried to) why the waters concerned weren’t considered “waters dominated by the ICN” at that time , and I also don’t recall ever having said that no one ever considered stealing “some of the tithe passing by in 800 years.” Even leaving aside the religious convictions to which Friar Bob quite rightly alluded, no nation (and no sane individual — even a Safeholdian athiest [although that’s a concept — pre-jihad, at least — to boggle my mind!] who imagined for one instant that he might be identifiable, for that matter) would ever even have considered it because of the penalties which would have attached and the fact that the Church and every other secular nation on the face of the planet would have come after them, of course, but I never said that no one at all considered pilfering from the tithe. In fact, one of the problems Duchairn has to address in MT&T is how to deal with putting an end to the margin of graft and corruption — embezzlement, if you will — which the Church had previously been willing to put up with in certain places. And I’m quite sure that more than one desperate individual, over the course of Safeholdian history, was willing to hit a Church tithe gatherer over the head to relieve him of the tithe . . . which is why tithe gatherers are normally accompanied by armed guards. And also one reason the tithe is not normally sent any farther by sea than it has to be .

Even without the threat of piracy or thieves, there’s always the possibility of shipwreck, after all, and a “ship” that sinks in a canal is much more readily salvaged than one that sinks in a couple of thousand of feet of seawater. Hence, again, the reference to the fact that sending the shipment from Khairman Keep to Silk Town represented an unusual change which the loss of Archangel Chihiro and Blessed Warrior brought to a screeching stop.

Finally, I don’t know that I ever suggested (a) that piracy was “apparently endemic” to Safehold or (b) that “only the top and bottom of Safehold’s society show[ed] any signs of corruption in those ~800 years.” Certainly piracy was a problem prior to the jihad, but does the fact that piracy is rife in the waters off Somalia mean that piracy is “endemic” to 21st-century Earth? In certain areas, piracy was a known and even severe problem; in other areas, it was an occasional problem; in still others, maritime traffic was considered secure prior to the current unpleasantness. And I’m not sure what you mean about only the top and bottom of Safeholdian society showing any signs of corruption. Exactly what signs of corruption are they supposed to be showing in those theoretically “middle portions” of society? I think it’s been pretty evident throughout the course of the books that there are criminal elements at just about every level of Safeholdian society, just as there are here on Earth, but you’ll have to give me a little more guidance as to exactly what sort of “corruption” in what portion of society seems to be missing before I can address the point. You really need to stop assuming that just because I haven’t made some specific aspect of an entire literary world critical to the storytelling that that aspect doesn’t exist. If you really need me to show you a mid-level bank clerk skimming the accounts going past him, or a dishonest store clerk deliberately making the wrong change, or a plumber committing adultery to make it clear that there is routine, run of the mill corruption and human weakness at all levels of society, the story is really going to bog down, you know.

You guys are being very enthusiastic about what Charis should be doing, aren’t you?

I’m not going to give away any details about what actually happens, but if you’re going to speculate on what may happen in the next book, let’s toss out a few numbers — some of which you already had, many of which you didn’t — which are going to constrain what both sides can do.

First of all, the isthmus connecting Haven and East Howard is, at its narrowest, 252 miles across. That’s a fairly long front to hold in a continuous line.

Second, a few sea distances:

Tellesberg to Siddar City:………………8,000+ miles

Port Royal to Siddar City:………………9,830+ miles

Port Royal to Gorath Bay:………………14,270+ miles

Border States to Siddar City:……………2,400+ miles

Third, available shipping tonnages (burden; short tons):

Total Safeholdian oceanic tonnage……4,900,000 tons (rounded)

Total Charisian oceanic tonnage……..3,580,000 tons (rounded)

Food required per day per man………….3 pounds

Food required per day per horse……….30 pounds

Food required per day per dragon……..580 pounds

Total Safeholdian oceanic galleons: 4,162

Total Charisian oceanic galleons: 2,753

Charis has a lot more coastal shipping and a lot less canal shipping than the mainland realms.

NOTE: the fact that someone has oceanic galleons doesn’t necessarily mean those galleons can get to sea and survive there.

Fourth, population numbers (rounded to nearest million):

Chisholm…………………15,000,000

Corisande………………..15,000,000

Emerald…………………..9,000,000

Old Charis……………….14,000,000

Tarot……………………11,000,000

Windswept Island…………….150,000

Zebediah………………….8,000,000

Border States……………102,000,000

Delferahk………………..83,000,000

Desnair…………………148,000,000

Dohlar…………………..97,000,000

Follos, Duchy……………….463,000

Harchong………………..194,000,000

Siddarmark………………130,000,000

Silkiah………………….46,000,000

Sodar……………………37,000,000

Temple Lands……………..89,000,000

Barren Lands*……………..1,000,000

Raven’s Land………………..123,000

Trellheim…………………3,000,000

*Includes Green Tree Island and Westbreak Island.

Fifth, troop strengths:

Siddarmark’s pre-Sword standing army: 1,200,000

Siddarmark’s post-Sword standing army: 394,550

Siddarmark’s post-Sword loyal militia: 496,420

Imperial Charisian Army: 450,000

Total post-Sword good guys: 1,340,970

Militia as % of total: 37%

Siddarmark post-sword Temple Loyalist militia: 473,900

Desnair + Dohlar invasion force: 360,000

Army of God invasion force: 500,000+

Harchong invasion force: 1,500,000+

Total post-Sword bad guys: 2,833,900

Milita as % of total: 16.7%

NOTE: the majority of the Imperial Charisian Army is in Chisholm (see voyage distances, above), and the Charisian Empire can’t completely strip its rear areas of security forces (remember Corisande?).

Sustained daily movement rates by canal: 50+ miles per day.

Subtle hint: This is all going to be about logistics .

And I don’t want to hear any whining about “but that’s not what you told us before!” [G]

And one more thing, if anyone gets too anal, I won’t give you any more info. So there. Take that.

Since there’s been some discussion about exactly how Charisian warships might stack up against “real world” counterparts, here are some statistics to think about. All tonnages are “burden” not “displacement,” and all are in long tons (despite the fact that long tons don’t exist on Safehold; I’m using similar units so they can be properly compared to one another)

USN Ships:

USS Philadelphia : (1799): length 157′; beam 39′; 1,240 tons; gundeck 28 long 18-pounders; spar deck 16 32-pounder carronades; weight of broadside 508 pounds.

USS President (1799): length 175′; beam 43’8″; 1,576 tons; gundeck 30 long 24-pounders; spar deck 22 42-pounder carronades; 2 long 18-pounder chasers; weight of broadside 840 pounds.

USS Columbia (1813): length 175′; beam 44’6″; 1,511 tons; gundeck 30 long 32-pounders; spar deck 20 42-pounder carronades; 2 long 18 pounder chasers; weight of broadside 918 pounds.

USS Columbus (1816): length 193’3″; beam 52′; 2,480 tons; lower gundeck 30 long 32-pounders; upper gundeck 32 medium 32-pounders; spar deck 24 32-pounder carronades; broadside 1,376 pounds. (Notes: over-gunned for her displacement; despite her size she had no more than 5′ or 6′ freeboard between the waterline and the sills of her lower deck gun ports.)

USS Ohio (1817): length 197’2″; beam 53’10”; 2,725 tons; lower gundeck 30 long 32-pounders; upper gundeck 32 medium 32-pounders; spar deck 24 32-pounder carronades; broadside 1,376 pounds. (Notes: considered one of the finest two-decked ships-of-the-line ever built; carried her armament easily with almost twice Columbus ‘ freeboard to her lower deck port sills.)

USS Pennsylvania (1822): length 210′; beam 56’9″; 3,105 tons; lower gundeck 30 long 42-pounders; middle gundeck 32 long 32-pounders; upper gundeck 32 long 32-pounders; spar deck 30 42-pounder carronades; weight of broadside 2,284 pounds.

Royal/Imperial Charisian Navy:

HMS Hurricane : length 108’; beam 35’; 750 tons; gundeck 14 35-pounder carronades; upper deck 14 35-pounder carronades; weight of broadside 490 pounds. (Notes: this is fairly typical of the Royal Charisian Navy’s smaller converted merchant galleons. She does not have warship-grade scantlings or planking and carries only carronades to reduce weights, which limits the range at which she can engage. Even so, she has very limited freeboard.)

HMS Gale : length 115′; beam 35′; 840 tons; gundeck 18 35-pounders; upper deck 14 35-pounder carronades; 4 long 14-pounder chase guns; weight of broadside 588 pounds. (Notes: this is fairly typical of the Royal Charisian Navy’s larger converted merchant galleons. She does not have warship-grade scantlings or planking, but her greater tonnage lets her carry long guns on the gundeck and gives her slightly better freeboard.)

HMS Dreadnought : length 154′; beam 42’6″; 1,200 tons; gundeck 30 long 30-pounders; spar deck 20 30-pounder carronades; 4 long 14-pounders; weight of broadside 828 pounds. (Notes: the first purpose-built war galleons of the Royal Charisian Navy. Approximately the same burden as Philadelphia but beamier to carry her heavier battery. Freeboard to lower port sills only about 10′ — better than anyone else’s, but still about 3′-4′ short of what a proper blue-water frigate really needs. From this ship on, Charisian warships are as heavily built as — or more heavily built than — their USN counterparts.)

HMS Empress of Charis (original): length 168′ 11″; beam 40’3″; 1,400 tons; gundeck 32 long 30-pounders; spar deck 30 30-pounder carronades; 4 long 14-pounders; weight of broadside 958 pounds. (Notes: if anyone is looking, in my original post about a matchup between this ship and Constitution , I think I forgot to divide by two when calculating Empress ‘ weight of broadside. [G])

HMS Empress of Charis (final): length 168’11”; beam 40’3″; 1,400 tons; gundeck 30 long 30-pounders; spar deck 18 57-pounder carronades; 4 long 14-pounders; weight of broadside 991 pounds.

HMS Royal Charis : length 174′; beam 40′; 1,520 tons; gundeck 30 long 30-pounders; spar deck 24 30-pounder carronades; 4 long 14-pounders; weight of broadside 834 pounds. (Notes: 30-pounder carronades later replaced by 20 57-pounder carronades, at which point weight of broadside became 1,048 pounds. She carried her guns higher than the original Empress , and showed 12′ of freeboard to her port sills. This was the immediate follow-on class to Empress .)

HMS Sword of Charis : length 178’6″; beam 45’4″; 1,725 tons; gundeck 30 long 30-pounders; spar deck 20 57-pounders; 4 long 14-pounders; weight of broadside 1,048 pounds. (Notes: An improved Royal Charis . Her greater displacement gives her 14′ of freeboard to her port sills.)

HMS Thunderer : length 194’6″; beam 52’3″; 2,500 tons; lower gundeck 30 long 30-pounders; upper gundeck 32 long 30-pounders; spar deck 24 57-pounder carronades; 2 long 57-pounders; weight of broadside 1,728. (Notes: This ship, which would have been the Imperial Charisian Navy’s first true ship-of-the-line, was designed by Sir Dustyn Olyvyr before the Battle of the Gulf of Tarot, when no one was really thinking in terms of shell-firing guns or ironclads and the ICN hadn’t captured so many prize ships from the Navy of God. The long 57-pounders are basically long 7.5″ smoothbores on pivot mounts which allow them to fire in either broadside or directly ahead as chase guns.)

When comparing the tonnage costs of these ships’ batteries, remember that: a USN 32-pounder weighs just over 6,000 pounds; a USN 24-pounder weighs 5,376 pounds; a Charisian 35-pounder weighs about 5,000 pounds; and a Charisian 30-pounder weighs about 4,800. This means, for example, that Empress of Charis ‘ 30 long 30-pounders actually weigh 11% less than President ‘s 30 long 24-pounders . Charisian “long” guns would have been considered “medium” guns by the USN, which gives them slightly shorter range than their USN counterparts might have had. On the other hand, they have more range than their Safeholdian counterparts.

And I’m not going to tell you about the ironclads which are going to be built instead of Thunderer .

Couple of points. Well, three points, actually. [G]

First, the hull is very nearly rectangular. This is a converted canal/river barge, not an oceanic hull, which is the main reason such an absurdly overpowered hull isn’t capable of more than 17-18 mph in calm water.

Secondly, 951 metric tons is 1,048.3 short tons, which are the only tons available on Safehold, courtesy of Eric Langhorne, and it was short tons I was citing, so the difference in tonnage from my figures to your “rectangular hull” is only 151 tons, or roughly 7.5%, which very probably occurred in my original rounding and is close enough for me to feel perfectly happy using.

Third, the 6” BL gun you cite is a heck of a lot bigger than the gun I am citing. Your gun was a 6”/44 — that is, it was 44 calibers long, making the tube right on 22’ long; the 6” for the river class are black powder weapons, and longer tubes don’t give black powder cannon the same velocity advantage they give with nitro cellulose propellants because of the difference in burn time. A black powder weapon gives all of its acceleration almost instantly; after that point, friction with the barrel liner becomes a factor (especially in rifled guns, with their reduced windage) which actually reduces muzzle velocity in a longer tube. The 6” BL for the River class is a 6”/18, with a 9’ tube, just over 40% the length of your weapon, and a muzzle velocity of roughly 1,350 fps compared to the 2,700+ fps of the 6” you cite. Total weight of the gun on a wooden truck carriage is only about 2.5 tons and the new mount is based on the Marsilly carriage with a very simple hydro-pneumatic recoil system, so total weight per piece is only going to be in the 4-ton range. I also gave you 2 too many gun ports per broadside in my original notes (I forgot I’d shifted 4 broadside guns to bow and stern positions when I went with a homogenous 30-pounder/6” armament on a 140’ hull rather than having a single 8” fore and aft on a 160’ hull as in my original rough design), so the actual total armament is 22 guns, not 26, giving a weight of around 104 tons, not 195.

Armor (I’m shooting from memory here, rather than going back and hunting up my exact calculations) works out at about 280 tons, hull structure works out at around 250 tons, guns come in at about 100, and machinery (with all liquids aboard) is about 250 tons, for a total of 880 tons, or 1,360 with 480 tons of coal on board. I allowed myself the extra 160 tons as a wiggle-room number, given that all of the figures are approximations. (Besides, I thoght “twelve hundred tons” sounded better than “thirteen hundred and sixty tons,” so I exercised a little authorial license. [G])

If the weight of the machinery seems low, I would point out that the triple -expansion machinery of USS Maine (6,650 long tons [7,448 short tons]; 1895; fire tube boilers; 135 psi steam; trial speed 17.45 Old Earth knots [20.08 Safeholdian knots]) weighed about 700 short tons, whereas these ships have double expansion machinery, small water tube boilers, and 290 psi steam, so the 250 tons number is actually probably high. The third cylinder — the one these ships don’t have — is usually around 3 times the diameter of the first cylinder, so the weight of the engines themselves is cut approximately in half, while Maine had 8 boilers, all of which were bigger and heavier than any of these ships’ 4 boilers.

As another indicator of the difference between water tube and fire tube boilers, the weight of HMS Invincible ‘s machinery (1907) was about 20% of her total displacement, or around 3,925 short tons, and developed 41,000 shaft horsepower. HMS Hood (designed 1917) devoted only 13% of her much greater displacement to machinery (around 6,800 short tons) but developed 144,000 SHP. This means that the earlier ship (with 31 fire tube boilers) developed 10.44 SHP per ton of machinery, whereas Hood (with only 24 water tube boilers and higher pressures) generated 21.22 SHP per ton of machinery, better than twice the efficiency. Both of these ships used turbines rather than reciprocating machinery (as in the River class or the Maine ), but the decrease in weight per SHP (which was really pretty astonishing in only a decade) was due to the greater efficiency of the water tube boilers. That same efficiency curve, only greater, would be in play in comparing Maine ‘s machinery weights to the River class’.

For anyone interested in real esoterica, USS Iowa ‘s machinery weight in 1943 was 4,423.8 long tons (dry) and 4,815.8 long tons (with liquids) and generated 212,000 SHP. That comes to 39.3 SHP per short ton weight of machinery, which explains why a ship with a standard displacement 116% that of Hood was 10% faster than Hood ‘s highest attained speed and 16% faster than her best speed in 1941. I don’t know what Hood ‘s steam conditions were, but Iowa ‘s plant operated at 600 psi, which was 210% of the 280 psi of the Colorado class, the last USN BBs built before the Washington Naval Disarmament Treaty.

Returning to Safehold, one recurrent problem people seem to be having when they look at Safeholdian technology is an effort to pick a period of Old Earth technology and then use it as a yardstick for Safehold. The difficulty is that they appear to be picking the wrong periods rather than looking at the numbers I’m actually giving them, as when it was assumed in another post that Empress of Charis was basically a 16th century galleon with all guns on a single deck instead of, effectively, a 19th century double-banked frigate design. In this instance, for example, you were selecting guns which are much more advanced than (and more than twice as heavy as) the ones actually being mounted, while I suspect most people are looking at machinery weights in terms of around 1850-70 tech when they are actually far more comparable to those of around 1915 (USN service) in terms of steam pressures and weights and hence efficiency.

You make a lot of good points in your analysis, but there are also a few points (historically) on which I disagree with your interpretation, a couple in which you’re arguing on the basis of facts (about Safehold) not in evidence, and at least one in which my own use of terminology (selected to avoid confusing non-technical readers) has, in fact, confused the basis of the discussion.

Taking them in reverse order, I used the term “displacement” when, in fact, I meant “burden” in discussing ships such as HMS Destiny . I don’t remember if I gave the actual displacement for Empress of Charis at any point (the one you’re citing is for Destiny , I think), but I may well have. I just don’t remember. At any rate, I didn’t want to go into discussing the difference between “burden” and “displacement” for the readers, especially after the terms got confused by a copy editor’s correction that I didn’t notice in one of the earlier books. I ought to have been content to simply go with the splendidly ambiguous term “tonnage,” but I didn’t do that, either. I am, however, aware of the difference, and the figures given for Charisian galleons have been the traditional Charisian numbers (i.e., burden) rather than actual displacement figures. This point is made in the book I just finished, where Sir Dustyn Olyvyr, as the Navy’s chief constructor, has begun converting to displacement numbers as a better and more accurate measurement. (Partly so that I can go ahead and correct that earlier incorrect “correction,” if that makes any sense at all.) Because of the way in which I’ve stated tonnage, however, the actual numbers against which you should be comparing Charisian warship tonnages are the “burden” figures, under which Constitution is about 1,575 tons, not the higher (and more accurate) 2,200 of her displacement tonnage. This particular misunderstanding was my bad. Sorry.

Turning to the “facts not in evidence” portion of your argument, however. You are making assumptions which, especially by the time Empress of Charis comes along, are not valid. I’m not sure where some of them came from, although I can see where others did. In part, I think you may also have confused Empress of Charis ‘ dimensions with those of HMS Destiny , a smaller ship from the “first-flight” of purpose built war-galleons.

You say that “Empress carried 68 guns on a single deck but due to her shorter length that weight would have to be supported by a wider hull and that hull would have many more holes (gun ports) and far less frames to give strength to her scantlings.” In fact, Empress of Charis is a double-banked frigate larger than USS Philadelphia . She’s 169 feet in length, 40 feet in the beam, with a burden of 1,400 tons and a displacement of around 2,100 tons, which puts her within 100 tons of Constitution ‘s displacement. I blush to disclose that I can’t find the actual statement of her original armament in text, but according to my notes she originally carried 32 30-pounders on the gundeck, 32 30-pounder carronades on the spar deck (not the gundeck), and 4 long chase guns (14-pounders), total of 68. At that point in her career, she was clearly heavily over-gunned. Remember, however, that she is actually only about 6 feet shorter than Constitution, and in her second iteration, with her armament reduced, she carries only 30 30-pounders on the gundeck, exactly the same number of main battery guns as Constitution , and 30 30-pounder carronades (10 more than Constitution .). In her final iteration (which I don’t think has been specified in any of the books so far) her armament is further reduced — to 30 30-pounder long guns on the gundeck and only 18 carronades, but the carronades are upgraded from 30-pounders to 57-pounders, which increases their individual striking power while reducing the battery’s total weight by approximately 8 tons. And, obviously, it cuts the length of hull occupied by the carronade battery almost in half, which allows it to be placed closer to the center point of the hull, significantly reducing longitudinal stress. Her armament is not, however, and never was carried on a single gundeck, and your assumptions about her hull form which followed from the belief that it was are therefore necessarily incorrect.

(As another point that should be considered here, even with the original 32 guns on the gundeck, Empress of Charis ‘ ports are not actually significantly closer together than Constitution ‘s. She filled all of her gun ports — a not insignificant cause of her overloading — whereas Constitution did not fill her “bridal ports.” The American ship actually had the same number of gun ports spread along only 6 more feet of hull length. In essence, she has one gun port for every 10.9 feet between perpendiculars whereas Empress of Charis has one port for every 10.6 feet, a difference of only 3.5 inches. This is not going to necessarily result in an inherent relative weakness in longitudinal strength because of wider spacing of gun ports and frames. It should also be pointed out that the Charisian Navy’s guns are shorter and somewhat lighter than their USN counterparts; a Charisian 30-pounder is only about 420 pounds heavier than one of Constitution ‘s 24-pounders, so the difference in the weight of her gundeck battery — after its reduction from 32 to 30 — is only about 6.3 tons, which is probably less than you were assuming it was. A gundeck armed with USN 32-pounders rather than 24-pounders would have to carry almost 10 more tons of weight, better than half again the differential between 24-pounders and Charisian 30-pounders.)

You say that ICN galleons are “a comparatively unsophisticated 15th century design are not at all weatherly and cannot even come close to the benefits of design evolution that the British Empire and later the United States enjoyed.” While that statement is accurate about the half-dozen or so galleons the Royal Charisian Navy possessed pre-Merlin, it is emphatically not true of the purpose-built war galleons of the Imperial Charisian Navy. It’s not true even of the “first-flight” purpose-built galleons, and it definitely isn’t true by the time we get to Empress of Charis .

When the merchant galleon conversions were made, the forecastles and aftercastles were substantially cut down to improve weatherliness and reduce top weight. By the time they began building purpose-designed war galleons, they were producing ships with effectively straight sheer; they had, in fact, begun using the same essential hull design as a late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth century sailing frigate like Constitution . There’s a reason all of the non-Charisian people who see these ships comment on how huge they are, and why Sharleyan, at the time of her arrival at Tellesberg, is thinking about how low-slung the Charisian galleons look compared to her own old-style Chisholmian galleon despite the fact that they’ve actually increased freeboard for their gun ports . Don’t forget that Merlin took Olyvyr aside to discuss warship design with him at the same time that he was describing the new artillery to Seamount and the rest of the team King Haarahld assembled under Cayleb’s direction at King’s Harbor. In effect, the first purpose-designed Charisian war galleons were Olyvyr’s attempt to create in wood a 19th-century design concept Merlin had described to him in considerable but not complete detail. So your comments about the weatherliness of the design are based on incorrect assumptions about hull form and upper works. In fact, Empress of Charis is just as weatherly as Constitution or Philadelphia . Her sail plan, in fact, is very nearly identical to Philadelphia ‘s, which means she has slightly less sail area than Constitution (which might make her somewhat slower in extremely light conditions) but gives her essentially identical handling characteristics.

It’s worth noting that the American 44s, and especially Constitution enjoy an iconic status which has led to all manner of inaccurate or exaggerated evaluations of them and statements of fact about them. For example, I’ve seen it stated in several sources (almost all of them British, I believe) that the American ships were originally designed as 74s. Indeed, at least one British source states that they were actually laid down as 74s and later completed as frigates, retaining their original ship-of-the-line scantlings, hull thickness, and sail-plans, thereby explaining why they were so superior to proper British frigates when they met in battle. Needless to say, there is no accuracy in that statement. It may be that it originated in part from the 6 74-gunships authorized in 1799 (but never built). Ihe fact that the same number of frigates and liners had been authorized, that the liners never materialized, and that the frigates — delayed in construction — didn’t begin commissioning until about the time funds for the liners were appropriated, may be the source of the confusion. Unfortunately, if you go back and look at the Act of 1799, the construction of the ships was never authorized; instead, the Navy was authorized to acquire the frames for them so that they could be rapidly built if/when Congress later became convinced there was actually a need for them. The timber was acquired, but it was never used (at least for that purpose) and most of it rotted in storage so that none of it was available for the liners actually built during the War of 1812. It’s very clear from the correspondence of the design team on the 44s that they were intended as extraordinarily powerful frigates from the very beginning, but that they were never visualized as ships-of-the-line.

The truth is that the 44s were bleeding-edge ships when they were built, pushing — and in some cases exceeding — the limits of what the then current technology could build. All of them had trouble carrying the weight of the batteries actually put aboard them. Originally designed to carry 24-pounders on the gundeck and 12-pounder long guns on the upper deck, they were supposed to be converted to 24-pounders on the gundeck and 42-pounder carronades on the upper deck, but Constitution actually carried 32 -pounder carronades because her hull strained and hogged with the heavier “establishment” armament onboard. She was right at the limit of the length attainable in a wooden-framed, wooden-built hull which could be expected to have the longevity the designers wanted out of her, and it was another quarter-century before naval designers really figured out how to build wooden ships as long as she was (or even longer) that didn’t hog excessively. The “truss” system used in the Constitution is actually an example of the same principles used in diagonal planking schemes already being widely experimented with at the time the ships were designed . . . and which (if you read the books carefully) you’ll discover Sir Dustyn Olyvyr is applying to the new, extraordinarily large, purpose-built war galleons he’s designing for the Charisian Navy almost from the get-go.

I could go on at enormous (and enthusiastic) length about the actual design history of the 44s and the smaller ships authorized under the same act and later acts. John Wharton, Joshua Humphreys, Josiah Fox, John Barry, William Doughty, Thomas Truxton, and all of the other naval officers and designers who weighed in on the design and construction process make for fascinating reading, and watching their arguments about the strengths and weaknesses of individual design features is even more fascinating, at least to someone like me. The notion that these ships were revolutionary in every way, breaking all existing patterns, is simply untrue, however. They grew out of the American experience with ships like the frigate South Carolina (ex- L’Indien ), a 40-gun ship acquired from France by the colony of South Carolina during the Revolution coupled with the awareness on the part of the people fighting to create an American navy that they were going to get only a very small number of ships, which implied that the ships they had were going to have to be extraordinarily powerful. It’s worth noting, however, that the basic parameters of the ships — armament, tonnage, crew, etc. — were all pretty much set before they were actually designed. Henry Knox, George Washington’s Secretary of War, was responsible for convincing Congress to appropriate funds for them before the Navy Department’s formal creation in 1798. Knox had no expertise at all in naval matters, so he turned to advisors like Wharton (a Pennsylvania politician with lots of experience with the Marine Committee of the Continental Congress . . . who just happened to be Joshua Humphreys’ cousin), Barry (an experienced naval officer), and (probably) Joshua Humphreys himself (who had been involved with the Continental Navy’s construction programs and was a ship builder in Philadelphia, then the national capital, which meant he was readily available to Knox). The Secretary had to provide at least rough design data to Congress in order to estimate the amounts of money he needed to ask Congress to appropriate, and he couldn’t pay anyone to produce an actual design until the money had been appropriated, so the tonnage and approximate dimensions had been set before the design process as such ever began.

There is no question that the intention was to produce ships of extraordinary combat power for their rate. In fact, American naval designers generally felt that their ships were unsuccessful unless they were fit to encounter a ship at least one nominal rate higher. That showed clearly in the design of 44s, but it also showed in the design of American ships-of-the-line. Although Independence (1814) was officially a 74, her actual battery in 1817 was 84 guns and carronades, all of them 32-pounders. That means her actual weight of broadside (leaving aside the fact that American round shot weighed about 15% more for a given gun caliber) was 200 pounds heavier than that of the 100-gun HMS Victory at Trafalgar. The same disparity in weight of broadside was evident in the frigate actions of the War of 1812, in large part because the Brits had decided that the 18-pounder was the ideal frigate gun, whereas the Americans thought differently. Many British captains of the period believed that the 24-pounder was simply too big to be served as rapidly and effectively as the far lighter 18-pounder, with a weight differential of almost half a ton between the pieces. They found out differently in 1812. It is, however, inaccurate to say that Constitution was intended to take on and defeat other nations’ 74s. She was designed to shoot the ever-loving crap out of anything below the line, but she was also intended to “Run away. Run away!” from a “proper” ship of the line. (see Joshua Humphreys’ letter, below)

There’s some confusion over just how “tough” “Old Ironsides” and her sisters and near-sisters actually were. Joshua Humphreys, who some people argue was “the” master designer for the 44s but who was, in fact, almost certainly simply one of the senior members of the “committee” of designers and officers Knox assembled for the task, wrote in a letter to Robert Morris, then a senator from Pennsylvania and a very influential member of Congress where naval affairs and finances were concerned, in 1793:

Sir:- From the present appearance of affairs I believe it is time this country was possessed of a Navy; but as that is yet to be raised, I have ventured a few remarks on the subject.

Ships that compose the European Navies are generally distinguished by their rates; but as the situation and depth of water of our coasts and harbors are different in some degree from those in Europe, and as our Navy, for a considerable time, will be inferior in numbers, we are to consider what size ships will be the most formidable and be an overmatch for those of the enemy; such frigates as in blowing weather could be an overmatch for double deck ships, and in light winds to evade coming to action; or double deck ships that could be an overmatch for double deck ships- and in blowing weather superior to ships of three decks or in calm weather or light winds to outsail them. Ships built on these principles will render those of an enemy in a degree useless, or require a greater number before they dare attack our ships.

Frigates, I suppose, will be the first object, and none ought to be built less than 150 feet keel, to carry twenty-eight 32-pounders or thirty 24-pounders on the gun deck and 12-pounders on the quarter deck. These ships should have scantlings equal to 74’s and I believe may be built of red cedar and live oak for about 24 Pounds (L) per ton, carpenters tonnage, including carpenters’ , smiths’ bill, including anchors, joiners, block makers, mast makers, riggers and rigging, sail makers and sail cloths, suits and chandlers’ bill. As such ships will cost a large sum of money, they should be built of the best materials that could possibly be procured. Tne beams of their decks should be of the best Carolina pine, and the lower futtocks and knees, if possible, of live oak.

The greatest care should be taken in the construction of such ships, and particularly all her timbers should be framed and bolted together before they are raised. Frigates built to carry 12- and 28-pounders, in my opinion, will not answer the expectation contemplated from them; for if we should be obliged to take a part in the present European war, or at a future day should we be dragged into war with any powers of the Old Continent, especially Great Britain, they having such a number of ships of that size, that it would be an equal chance by equal combat that we lose our ships, and more particularly from the Algerians, who have ships, and some of much greater force. Several questions will arise, whether one large or two small frigates contribute most to the protection of our trade, or will cost the least sum of money, or whether two small ones are as able to engage a double deck as a large one. For my part, I am decidedly of the opinion the large ones will answer the best.

This was fairly early in the process, when they were talking about the general characteristics of the ships they intended to request Congress to approve. (It should be noted here that not everyone agreed that larger was better. Philadelphia was originally intended as a “downsized” 44, although she was re-rated as a 38, and was the work of Josiah Fox, who opposed the enormous size of the big frigates for several reasons, including cost, numbers, and handiness. He was supported in his view by Truxton and several others who shared his opinions.)

What is significant here from a tactical/strategic perspective are Humphrey’s comments on frigates “overmatching” 2-decked ships (64s and 74s) in blowing weather and 2-decked ships “overmatching” 3-decked ships under the same conditions, but that both American types should be able to “evade coming to action” in “light winds.” That is, the frigates he’s proposing would be able to stand up to 74s when weather conditions forced the 74 to close her lowest gun ports, taking her heaviest guns out of action, and the “74s” he envisioned would be able to do the same thing to 3-decked ships-of-the-line under the same conditions, but neither would engage the enemy under conditions in which all of the enemy’s gun decks could be fought.

What is significant here in terms of their construction, however, is that what he’s talking about is not an attempt to make them impervious or even especially resistant to enemy fire. He’s talking about how to design ships to carry the extremely heavy weights of the proposed armaments. The term “scantlings” used here doesn’t refer to thickness of hull planking; it refers to the customary naval definition of “scantling” which is “The dimensions of the structural parts of a vessel. Often used in the plural.” That is, he’s talking about framing members, deck beams, and primary hull timbers, not planking. While it’s true that Constitution ‘s hull is around 20 inches thick across the gundeck, a typical 74 had hull planking which gave it a total depth of timber at the gundeck that was in excess of 2 feet, or something like 25-30% thicker. The thickness of Constitution ‘s “gun deck armor” (if you will) was actually a bit greater than that of a Dutch 64 , because the Dutch had shallower harbors and couldn’t afford the depth of keel other naval powers could, which meant they had to build lighter in order to hold down draft. (And the draft of the big American frigates came as a very unhappy revelation for many of the officers initially assigned to them, since there were quite a few US harbors they couldn’t enter freely.) Constitution would have been a very nasty handful for a single British 74 (28 32-pounders; 28 18-pounders, 18 9-pounders, and 2 68-pounder carronades for a weight of broadside of 894 pounds versus Constitution ‘s 704 pounds) but the British ship would have been clearly superior to the American in actual combat power, particularly because in addition to a 74’s scantlings, a ship like HMS Bellerophon had a 74’s planking and wales.

The closest 20th-century parallel to the big American frigates, conceptually, would be the battlecruiser, designed to crush any armored cruiser in existence and to outrun any battleship in existence, which is actually pretty much precisely what Constitution, President , and United States were, when you come down to it. Although they were inferior in firepower, tonnage, and ability to sustain damage to a ship like Bellerophon with 27% more weight of broadside than their own, they were immensely superior to a 38-gun ship like HMS Java (only 492 pounds weight of broadside, barely 70% as much as Constitution ). The fact that the British frigate captains were supremely arrogant and overconfident in 1812 was another factor. British captains were accustomed to defeating French ships of heavier armament and size for their nominal class, and they had Cape St. Vincent, the Battle of the Nile, and Trafalgar behind them to further increase their confidence. Moreover, by 1812 they’d spent something like 15 years denigrating the “over-armed” American ships, sneering at them for seeking an advantage in sheer size rather than recognizing that it was seamanship, training, and morale that truly mattered. They’d badly underestimated the actual disparity in firepower and ship size, their crews were badly understrength (impressment to provide the needed manpower had been one of the causative factors of the War of 1812, after all), and since the Battle of Trafalgar, their main emphasis had been on commerce protection, support of army operations in the Peninsula, and what we might think of as “presence missions.” That emphasized seakeeping, seamanship, sail drill, etc., but it had not required them to fight a resolute, powerfully armed opponent at sea in over a decade, and training standards for gunnery had slipped badly. And they figured they would be professionally ruined if they avoided action with another “frigate” (however powerful the ship in question) because of the British public’s expectation and demand that British captains take on and defeat all comers. James Carden, of the Macedonian , after surrendering to Stephen Decatur in the United States in October 1812 remarked that he was “a ruined man” as the first British officer to surrender his vessel in a single-ship action since Trafalgar. When he was told Henry Dacres had aready surrendered Guerriere to Isaac Hull in Constution in August, he said “Then I am saved!” according to at least one American witness.

The short, devastating combat between HMS Shannon and USS Chesapeake indicated what happened when a British ship whose captain had heavily emphasized gunnery training ran into an American ship of approximately equal armament, especially when the American had the green crew. The battle was just as one-sided — in the Brits’ favor — as the earlier battles had been in the American favor, which actually represented an even greater achievement on Captain Broke’s part, since he didn’t have the disparity in firepower Hull, Bainbridge, and Decatur enjoyed in their frigate victories.

Getting back (eventually) to the question of Constitution -versus- Empress of Charis , the battle would probably be a lot closer and nastier than you assumed on the basis of your initial analysis.

Constitution : length 175 feet, beam 43.5 feet, tonnage 1,575 tons, displacement 2,200 tons, armament 32 24-pounders (counting chase guns) and 20 32-pounder carronades, weight of broadside 704 pounds.

Empress of Charis : length 169 feet, beam 40 feet, tonnage 1,450 tons, displacement (approximate) 2,100 tons, armament (third iteration) 30 30-pounders, 4 14-pounders, and 20 57-pounder carronades, weight of broadside 1,048 pounds.

I’ll grant you somewhat greater structural strength for Constitution , but there’s very little to choose between hull forms, nothing to choose between weatherliness, and Empress of Charis (third iteration) has a 49% advantage in weight of broadside. In her original 68-gun configuration, her weight of broadside would have been only 988, reducing her “throw weight” advantage from 1.49 times that of Constitution to only 1.4. Constitution is going to have a longer design lifetime because of the extra care taken to strengthen the hull longitudinally (the reason for those “74 scale” scantlings), but in terms of raw fighting power, the offensive edge would have to go to the Charisian while the defenses edge for the American would be much thinner than you seem to be assuming.

Essentially, the reason that no one in Charis has considered going to a “proper ship-of-the-line” is that the ships they already have in commission already have the firepower of a late 18th-century 74 even before they introduce exploding ammunition. Given the capability of the platforms already available to them, there is absolutely no point in their tying up the additional manpower and economic resources in building even bigger sailing warships. I think, however, that the above discussion of Empress of Charis actual dimensions, armament, and hull design may actually make the utterly revolutionary impact of the Charisian “galleons” a bit clearer than it might have been previously. The fact that Safeholdians are still calling them “galleons” an entire six years after the broadside gunnery concept was first introduced should not mislead anyone into thinking that these are the ships of the Spanish Armada being “drummed down the channel” by Sir Francis Drake and John Hawkins. [G]

Sorry about the length and the digressions.

There are things going on, especially in Charis, that I haven’t been telling you about primarily because of space limitations. However difficult it may be to believe this, I’ve actually been trying not to bury the reader in too much “Hey, isn’t this neat?” rediscovery of technology, so quite a few things have been happening offstage. (I haven’t told you about the sea dragoning industry of Charis, either, at least until the current book, and I haven’t really discussed distillation processes available, or crop yields, or quite a few things which have a pronounced significance for where Safehold is going . . . and can go.)

In the current book, Amid Toil and Tribulation , you’re going to meet some of the other faculty members of the Royal College, most of whom have been there all along, doing their things — and, in some cases, being added to the inner circle — even though I haven’t spent a whole bunch of time with them. For example, Doctor Dahnel Vyrnyr, who’s been working out gas and pressure laws, with an occasional small assist from certain parties. And you haven’t begun to see everything that even some of the people you have met have been up to. For example, Rahzhyr Mahklyn and Sir Dustyn Olyvyr (who is now a member of the inner circle) have been working on applying mathematics to calculations of sail area, stability, displacement, metacentric height, prismatic coefficients, etc. Ehdwyrd Howsmyn’s senior engineers and artificers have been applying more of the new math in planning the construction of new canal systems, designing pumps to extract water from deep mine galleries, etc.. Primitive hydraulics have been a part of Safeholdian plumbing basically since the Creation (I did give you just a hint of some of that in Manchyr in the last book), and combined with Doctor Vyrnyr’s work, much more advanced applications are quickly becoming available. Even before Howsmyn came along, Safehold’s basic metallurgy was rather more advanced than many of you seem to have been assuming, as well, even before Nimue Alban woke up. Production techniques were suited only to relatively small volume quantities, but the alloys themselves (mostly, again, because of “recipes” left by the Archangels) were quite good. In Post-Merlin Charis, of course, Houseman, especially with Owl to help him out, has been pushing metallurgy even harder, especially in terms of production but also in terms of quality, and is, in fact, in the process of introducing nickel steel. (Safehold’s known how to extract nickel — in relatively small quantities — from laterite soils for a long time; it just didn’t have a lot of use for it . . . until now. Oh, and while I’m on the subject, for you metallurgists out there, Safehold in general and Charis in particular has used “red lead” as a pigment in paints for a long, long time. I understand that one of Howsmyn’s ironmasters is presently experimenting with heating its oxide in a charcoal oven for some reason, though. Not sure where that might lead, of course. [G]) And then there’s “stone wool” . . . a.k.a. chrysotile, whose production and use is permitted by the Archangels, although hedged about with various laws to minimize the worst of the potential health consequences.

In general, you can think of Howsmyn’s metallurgy as approaching very nearly to the capabilities of, say, 1900, with the proviso that his “power budget” is still limited. As he acquires the capability to supply ever greater amounts of power and apply it in ever more sophisticated fashion, his capabilities will increase geometrically. And, of course, he’s currently building at least two additional industrial works, each of which are ultimately intended to be at least as productive as his Delthak Works.

I think people persist in thinking that they’ve successfully pigeonholed Safehold’s technical sophistication without realizing that there is a difference between process and understanding. For example, Safeholdians understand the process of pasteurization — called Pasqualization, on Safehold — even though they don’t really understand why it works. It’s a “dispensation of the Archangel,” just as the use of pressure cookers and canned (mostly in glass, not metal) food preservation is something “taught by the Archangels.” And I trust you did notice when we were visiting Manchyr and the last book that they use rubber gaskets in their plumbing? Safeholdian agriculture understands four-crop rotation, fertilizers, and other “advanced” farming techniques (although there are still some curious holes in what they know), but it’s all applied by hand, fertilizers are manufactured in “kitchen sink” quantities, nitrates are mined (think Chilean saltpeter) and nobody’s ever heard of Wilhelm Ostwald, etc. In other areas, the porcelain and ceramic producers of Safehold long ago developed/were gifted with pyrometers which allowed them to measure and gauge temperatures far more precisely — and at significantly higher levels — than I suspect most readers are allowing for . . . which has significant consequences in metallurgy, as well (for obvious reasons), once people like Howsmyn begin applying them. Indeed, for those among you of a historical bent in naval matters, the term “Howsmynized” is going to find itself applied to armor plate produced at the Delthak Works in the not too distant future. (There’s a reason, other than a desire to rehabilitate the name “Houseman” for a friend of mine, that I gave Howsmyn his name. It seemed to form a not-too-convoluted homage to Hayward Augustus Harvey.)

Safehold is not seventeenth-century Earth, or even eighteenth-century Earth, despite the relative primitivism of aspects of its capabilities — like artillery, small arms, sailing ships — at the time Merlin comes on the scene. There are, in fact, large reservoirs of capability built into existing Safeholdian processes, and the planet has some truly stupendous engineering works in the form of canals and high-quality transportation networks. (You might want to remember Earl Coris’ thoughts during his journey to Zion and the sophistication of the transport arrangements which were made in his case.) In many ways, even before Merlin came along, Safehold was beginning to “slip through the cracks” of the proscriptions in places other than Charis alone, and that’s one of the things that makes the rest of Safehold still quite dangerous to Charis despite Charisian innovations in productivity. The reason Merlin, Howsmyn, Cayleb, and others keep talking about the absolute productivity of the rest of Safehold is because it’s actually quite significant , despite its limitation to wind, water, fire, and muscle power. In many ways, all that the Royal College needs to do is to determine the underlying principles governing things Safeholdians have been doing for centuries and to codify them to kick off a genuine scientific revolution . . . and that’s precisely what it’s been doing.

Now, that doesn’t mean Merlin, the inner circle, and Owl aren’t cheating just a bit. [G] For example, a native Safeholdian, not a member of the inner circle, came up with the concept of the “crush gauge” for measuring bore pressures in artillery pieces. Obviously, the inner circle was delighted with it, and that “mathematical genius” Mahklyn and some of his students helped handle the math for it. But in addition to that, Owl produced the base, indexing copper inserts for the gauges and substituted them for the ones which had been produced on the shop floor at the Delthak Works, with the result that the pressures which can be extrapolated from later crush gauge tests happen to be quite amazingly accurate. And the ballistic pendulum has also been invented (math courtesy of the Royal College), which means the Imperial Charisian Navy is able to measure bore pressures and muzzle velocities with the same degree of accuracy that was possible here on Earth prior to the introduction of electricity-based measuring instruments. You think that’s not going to have an impact on the design of artillery and small arms? Machine tools — especially Howsmyn’s — remain clunky and huge and bulky because they have to operate under direct drive power from (currently) hydro-sources, but the precision of what they can turn out has advanced very significantly. Tolerances in the Delthak Works are achieving a degree of precision people probably aren’t thinking about, and Howsmyn’s tool steels are attaining early twentieth-century levels of quality.

As I say, there are lots of things going on, and I will simply add for those of you out there who are really into steam plants and steam engineering that Safeholdian riveting, welding, and metallurgy — at least as practiced by one Edwyrd Howsmyn at his Delthak Works, and coming soon to another Charisian foundry complex near you — is sufficient and adequate to produce watertube boilers operating at pressures of up to around 290-300 psi. What that means for, oh, triple expansion engines, shall we say, I leave for your own consideration.

Don’t hold back. Feel free to tell us what you really think about it! [G]

No author is going to please everyone, and there are going to be things that happen in any series of books to which some or more of his readers are going to take exception. That, unfortunately, is a fact of life. And every reader has the right to take exception. That doesn’t mean that the writer is going to agree with him when he does, but the fact that the writer doesn’t agree doesn’t automatically make the reader wrong , except in the sense that the writer is in charge of the literary universe and is going to go ahead and write that universe the way he believes is best. That doesn’t make what the author does an “error,” however. In fact, only one of the points to which you object — so far as I can see — would constitute an “error” under any circumstances. The others strike me as things I’ve done, or the characters have done (or not done), which strike you as illogical, unreasonable, or unnecessary. Those aren’t “errors;” they are storytelling decisions that you object to, which is quite another kettle of fish.

I’m sorry if I’m doing things that strike you as wildly annoying, but I have to write the stories the way I see them. There are, however, specific reasons why I did almost everything that you’re objecting to. Since you took the time to explain the things that bug you, I’ll take the time to explain why I did them.

In response to your points.

1. I’m perfectly well aware of how Nimue is pronounced, and that is in fact the way I pronounce it, and the way I have to pronounce it for the voice-activated software I use. I deliberately spelled the crown princess’ name with a divergent pronunciation which, while incorrect, is one that you hear quite frequently. I’m sorry it bugs you, but be assured that Nimue Alban actually knows how her own name is pronounced, even though it isn’t the same pronunciation as the one bestowed upon her namesake. I will mea culpa on the princess’ name and admit that I probably shouldn’t have done it. (And, for that matter, I should probably admit that one reason — subconsciously — that I did it may have been that the voice-activated software I use can differentiate between Nimue and Naimu cleanly and easily, which is not the case where many of the other alternatively spelled names that I’ve assigned in this series are concerned. So, in that respect, it may actually have been a certain degree of laziness on my part, although I would suggest that anyone who finds it “lazy” might want to consider writing a few 200,000-word novels using voice-activated software. You have to make quite a few . . . adjustments along the way, because Computers Do Not Care.) There, I hope my admission on this point makes you feel at least some better. [G]

2. You are assuming facts not in evidence. First, I don’t believe I’ve ever told you that the bombardment system couldn’t be reloaded. If I did, I certainly didn’t intend to. (You may consider that a hint, if you like.) Second, I never suggested that it was simply dumb rocks, because it isn’t. Third, I don’t believe that I have ever stipulated anywhere in the books that she might not attempt exactly that technique as a means to temporarily run the bombardment system out of ammunition. There are quite a few problems with her doing it, however, the three greatest of which are:

(a) If the kinetic bombardment is known, it will certainly be taken as a sign from God and the archangels, and the Church propagandists will have the inside track for explaining it as a gesture of divine wrath against the Church of Charis . “See how God releases the Rakurai against this desolate, barren, and already accursed place as a warning to those misguided souls in Charis who have embraced the heresy! He could have chosen to smite them in their very cities, yet He gives them this opportunity to reject their vile, despicable leaders who seek to lead them into Shan-wei’s very clutches. Let them repent now, before the next strike of the Rakurai destroys them and all about them! Return to the fold and be saved!” Or words to that effect.

(b) If the kinetic bombardment system is only temporarily disarmed, is Charis going to have a sufficiently wide window to complete the overthrow of Mother Church, take Zion, neutralize the Temple, and secure control of whatever ground station may or may not control the bombardment system? Because, if it doesn’t, then once the bombardment system reloads, anything they’ve built to take advantage of the window will simply be snuffed out from orbit with a very high death toll which will also happen to absolutely confirm for the Temple Loyalists that the Charisians were dangerous heretics being crushed by God.

(c) Merlin and company know something is under the Temple. They have no idea what that something is, or what its resources in addition to the kinetic bombardment system might be, but I think they have to reasonably assume that if the bombardment system fires and it is in some sort of communication with the “something” under the Temple, it’s going to inform that “something” that it’s just fired on proscribed technology. On that assumption, then tempting the bombardment system into firing would effectively start a probably fairly short countdown clock towards bringing them into direct confrontation with whatever the “archangels” left under the Temple. Again, unless they’re in a position to conclusively take out the Temple — and anything under it — once the bombardment system has been neutralized, neutralizing the system is far more likely to prove disastrous than beneficial.

3. In this regard, you are flatly wrong. Sorry about that. Lock Island was not simply the Imperial Charisian Navy’s commander-in-chief; he was also a fleet commander in an era in which fleet commanders are expected to command at sea. That, however, is almost beside the point, since he was also, along with Rock Point, the most qualified officer to command. In fact, he was essential to making the operations plan work, since he had access to Owl’s SNARCs and the recon capability they provided and there was no way for him to pass that information to someone else as his officer in tactical command. In other words, he had to be there in order to provide the tactical command to make victory even remotely possible. He also happened to be on a sailing vessel which had to close to very short range before it could engage the enemy. These are not highly maneuverable ships, and collisions (and subsequent boarding engagements) were not at all uncommon when large numbers of sail-powered vessels encountered one another in a close-range, general melee . . . which happened to be the sort of battle the ICN had to fight. (Go back and look at some of the engagements in the Anglo-Dutch wars, for example.) As for whether or not a flag officer should be engaged in a boarding action, I would direct you to Admiral Nelson’s actions at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, when he led offensive boarding parties across no less than two Spanish ships-of-the-line. In Lock Island’s case, however, the boarding actions were defensive even if the defenders were charging into combat with the attackers swarming onto his flagship. In that sort of an engagement, you fight, you don’t hide, and quite aside from his personal preferences, an officer like Lock Island would have been intensely aware of the positive moral effect of his personally leading his men into combat. If you can show me a way in which he could have used the information he was gaining from the SNARCs to direct the tactical employment of his vessels while he stayed safe ashore somewhere else, then I may grant that this argument has some point. If you can’t (and I don’t think you can), everything else that happened followed from the requirement for him to be there if the battle plan was going to be possible, not because of any reckless disregard of his own safety or any unreasonable action taken by him, Cayleb, or any of the personnel around him on his flagship. And before you point out that Domynyk Staynair, who also had SNARC access, was present at the battle, I cheerfully concede that point . . . and point out to you in turn that the ability of Lock Island and Rock Point to coordinate using their com links was critical to their entire strategy and battle plan. So, again, there was no alternative to “co-locating” Lock Island with the battle fleet in this instance. If you’ve read How Firm a Foundation , you’ll see Rock Point in much the same position in which Lock Island found himself, but with a very different balance and mixture of forces, and Rock Point doesn’t find himself engaged in a hand-to-hand melee, but that’s because the tactical — and strategic — situations are completely different. He doesn’t have to take the chances, if you will, that Lock Island had to take in the Markovian Sea, and because he doesn’t have to, he doesn’t. Different battle, different situation, different imperatives.

4. Obviously I can’t make every technical innovation occur as rapidly as everyone wants me to, however I would point out that it doesn’t really matter how soon they begin thinking about iron or steel armor if they don’t yet have the capability to manufacture it . That is, from Nimue/Merlin’s perspective (and from Cayleb’s, Howsmyn’s, Sharleyan’s, and Lock Island’s), there was time to allow Seamount and Mahndrayn to come up with a solution — thus encouraging that native innovation which they’re after — because even if they’d come up with it before Seamount began experimenting with exploding shells, they didn’t have the capacity to manufacture it. You have been paying attention to what Howsmyn’s been up to up at his foundry complex, yes? Hammermills, rolling mills, open hearth steel production, hydro accumulators to sub for steam power, etc., etc.? Without all of those innovations, they couldn’t have produced the armor anyway. Moreover, even if they could have, there would be all kinds of reasons for them not to actually introduce iron or steel armor until after the bad guys have devised exploding shells of their own. Why in the world would they want to begin building ships which would show the other side how to defend against their new “secret weapon” before the other side was able to duplicate the weapon in question? In short, the Charisians have positioned themselves to be able to begin promptly producing ships armored against the new weapon if and when the bad guys have that same weapon; they couldn’t have produced such ships very much (if any) sooner, because they didn’t have the capacity to manufacture the armor; and they have avoided showing the bad guys how to defeat their new weapon any sooner than they have to. Oh, and don’t forget encouraging native Charisians, without access to Owl, to come up with the answer in the first place. I’m sorry if it offends your sense of timing, but from my perspective that’s a win/win approach for the good guys.

5. I flatly disagree with you about killing Nahrmahn. It was not an easy thing for me to do. If you think that the reader becomes attached to these characters, then you should try it from the perspective of the writer who creates them. However, as I have stated many times before, military fiction in which characters the reader cares about never get killed is pornography. It cheapens the price which both fictitious and real life military personnel pay and it creates a “splatter porn” type of fiction in which the reader can exult in the knee-deep gore without having to worry about anyone “important” dying. Ultimately, I think the majority of readers will recognize not simply the implausibility but the willful unreality of allowing all the characters that all of the readers have become attached to to miraculously skate out and survive when all of those “little nameless people” around them are being killed. I’ve had more than one major character seriously injured — Honor Harrington comes to mind in that regard — and I’ve also had them pay prices in the form of people they’ve lost. Again, Honor Harrington comes to mind. That’s part of the price people pay in wars, and if the characters care about someone in the books, those are also likely the characters the readers care about. In other words, if I kill a secondary character who the primary characters are genuinely going to miss and mourn for, those are also going to be characters that you care about . . . and, conversely, if you don’t care about them, then you will not understand the emotional cost to the characters in the novel, either. Nobody gets a free pass in one of my books, because nobody gets a free pass in real life, and because ultimately the enjoyment you will take from a book in which you don’t have to worry about what happens to the characters I’ve invested effort in making real to you and you’ve invested effort in caring about will be shallower than the enjoyment you take from a book in which you realize that these non-flesh-and-blood characters you’ve come to know and to care about are just as fragile as the people around you in your own lives. That’s how I see it, at any rate, and if you don’t see it that way then you and I simply disagree on what goes into making a good novel. And, unfortunately, I don’t think you can expect me to write the book in what I think is a weaker and less satisfying fashion. So, again, I’m sorry if this is another one of those things I did that annoy you, but there was a specific reason that I did it and I warn you now that I may very well do it yet again before I’m done. Leopards, after all, do not change their spots.

Meow. [G]

I’m sorry? I’m painting too pessimistic a picture? Gosh, and here I thought I was the one person who actually knows who’s building what, where, and why! [G]

More seriously, I don’t know why you think I’m painting too pessimistic a picture. What I’m saying is that Charis does not have an unlimited cornucopia of production capacity; that the Church’s capacity is higher than some people seem to be assuming; and that the Church’s strategists are not all idiots who are going to fail to recognize (a) strategic opportunities and (b) strategic necessities (as in “necessary for our survival , you idiot!” necssities). I don’t believe I ever indicated that the Church wasn’t going to experience some of those ugly times in Siddarmark of her very own, either.

The Church is not going to drop dead tomorrow; there is still a huge reservoir of religious and political loyalty to the Church even in the provinces which remained loyal to Stohnar ; between them, the continents still have an enormous aggregate productive capability (which may or may not be in the process of being successfully tapped); and no matter how qualitatively superior your forces may be, you still need a sufficient quantity of them if you intend to maintain sufficient force density for a strategy of persistence to work.

It might be worthwhile to consider just what Charis’ strategic options ultimately are.

Most satisfying to the reader and to Charisians in general, undoubtedly, would be Cayleb and Sharleyan dictating terms to the Church of God Awaiting in the smoldering ruins of Zion, surrounded by their victorious army. Of course, the question is where they get an army big enough to do that.

There are two basic strategic approaches: raiding and persistence. You can apply either a raiding or a persistent approach to almost any strategic equation; the one a successful strategist chooses is dictated by his tactical tools, his strategic resources, the exact nature of his objective, and how well the force he can project matches up with the opposition he faces.

In a raiding strategy, you operate by launching attacks (which are hopefully carefully targeted) on your opponent’s critical resources, thus weakening him to the point at which he collapses or at least is forced to accede to your demands. In this type of strategy you don’t seek to occupy your enemy’s territory on a permanent basis. Instead, you’re concentrating on in-and-out operations as precisely aimed as you can manage to inflict crippling damage. A strict naval blockade which cripples your opponent’s economy or starves your opponent’s population is also an example of a raiding, rather than a persisting, strategy, despite the fact that it requires a long-term commitment of your forces.

In a persisting strategy, you physically occupy enemy territory, either to compel him to counterattack you to regain critical resources (population, oil, food, whatever), or to establish your permanent control over it by replacing the government or groups which previously controlled it (the English policy in building castles all over Wales would be an example of that sort of strategy).

The two types of strategy can be combined. For example, the Union was waging a persisting strategy against the Confederacy, since its objective was ultimately to physically occupy (or reoccupy , if you want to adopt that terminology) the states which had seceded. Grant pursued a persistent strategy in his Western campaigns and in his drive into Virginia with the Army of the Potomac in the last months of the war; his operational objective was the Army of Northern Virginia, but only because its destruction would give him his ultimate strategic objective of conquering the Confederacy’s critical territory. Sherman , on the other hand, pursued a raiding campaign in his March to the Sea. Arguably, he was pursuing a persisting strategy until he actually took Atlanta, although I think even then he was basically following a raiding strategy, but his march from Atlanta to Savannah was clearly a raiding strategy, aimed at destroying the logistical support base for Lee’s army and also at destroying Confederate morale, rather than remaining in place and permanently occupying the territory upon which his army stood at any given moment.

The problem with a persisting strategy is that you have to be able to achieve a favorable ratio between the area to be persistently occupied and the forces available to occupy it. Put another way, you have to have sufficient density of force to cope with opposition to your presence, which may come in the form of organized hostile armies, or simply a hostile presence conducting either organized or freelance guerrilla warfare against you, or (even more ominously) a combination of the two.

The Group of Four hoped for a situation in which Corisande would become a hotbed of resistance to Charisian occupation. That was a major factor in Clyntahn’s assassination of Hektor and his older son — the hope he could so inflame the Corisandian population by murdering a popular monarch that popular resistance would lead to Charisian overreaction which would, in turn, lead to still more resistance. The way he saw it, if everything worked properly, Charis’ military “conquest” of Corisande would become a deadly trap from which it could not extract itself (à la Napoleon in Spain). At the very least, he hoped for a “quagmire” situation which would impose a steady, debilitating drain on Charisian resources. It was only Cayleb’s and Sharleyan’s careful management of the situation, coupled with the existence (in Anvil Rock and Tartarian) of a power bloc with Corisande’s best interests (as opposed to the Group of Four’s best interests) at heart, which prevented that from happening.

(As an aside, it also forced a situation in which no one in Corisande has yet sworn loyalty to the Crown of Charis as Charisians . They have sworn loyalty to Prince Daivyn as Hektor’s heir, and they have sworn obedience to the Crown of Charis, but they are still Corisandians and not Charisians, which was not what Cayleb had in mind when he invaded. If Hektor had lived, he would have been required to swear the same oath Nahrmahn had sworn and which Gorjah was later required to swear, but Daivyn has not yet sworn that oath, leaving Corisande’s relationship with the Empire unresolved. That may ultimately actually prove beneficial to both Corisande and Charis, but it could also still very well go the other way. And Cayleb’s intention of extracting that oath of fealty from Hektor, by the way, was another reason why it would have been remarkably stupid for him to have Hektor killed before he could swear it . . . a point Earl Coris is going to be making to Irys and Daivyn in the not too distant future, I suspect.)

To return to my main thread, however. If the Corisandian situation had not been handled with extraordinary care, by a viceroy who’d been carefully selected, and if there hadn’t been a competent, sane group of candidates for a Regency Council (and candidates who strongly doubted that Cayleb had actually ordered Hektor’s assassination in the first place), Clyntahn would have gotten what he wanted. He very nearly got it anyway, only it came not in the form of the general uprising and insurrection he’d hoped and aimed for, but rather in the form of an aristocratic plot and cabal . . . which, in turn, lent itself to being identified as such when the conspirators were arrested, tried, and executed. Sharleyan and the Regency Council managed to accurately portray it as a top-down plot orchestrated by self-seeking opportunist, rather than a popular uprising. Another factor which worked critically in Charis’ favor in Corisande, was the strength of the underlying Reformist attitudes of a significant percentage of the Corisandian population. In regard to that factor, it’s also worth noting that despite Clyntahn’s best efforts, the “religious fervor” quotient of the jihad hadn’t been cranked up in Corisande to anywhere near the strength he desired before Charis was able to get in and defeat Hektor in what just about everyone recognized was actually the final stage of a secular conflict which had been initiated by Hektor. (It has been ratcheted up to very nearly those levels in most of the mainland realms by now, however; also a factor in Our Heroes’™ thinking.) If those factors hadn’t broken in Charis’ favor, then even with the advantage of Merlin’s SNARCs, it is highly unlikely that Charis could have found the manpower to hold down Corisande in the face of a general resistance while simultaneously continuing the buildup of its navy and an army which could possibly afford to divert any of its deployable strength to the mainland.

What would have been a serious problem in Corisande (whose population was roughly 49% that of the combined populations of Old Charis, Chisholm, and Emerald) would become a nightmare on the mainland, where the population (even excluding Siddarmark from the equation) would be 10.6 times the entire population of all the territory currently controlled by Charis. (As a relative yardstick, Germany in 1941 had a population of 110,000,000 in all of its home and occupied territories while the USSR’s population in all of its home and occupied territories was 181,000,000, or a ratio of only approximately 1.65-to-1, and we all know how well that worked out. The ratio for a Charisian Empire trying to occupy the mainland would be 6.5 times worse than that, although a Siddarmarkian alliance would help those numbers somewhat.)

From a combat perspective, Charis might well be able to hack numbers like that, if it can stay sufficiently far ahead of the mainland in terms of quality of weapons and if the evolving nature of its industry allows it to free up a significantly higher proportion of its far lower overall manpower totals. From a persisting perspective, however, Charis is hopelessly outnumbered. It doesn’t matter if you have Abrams tanks and M-16s while the opposition has only 1903 Springfields and horsed cavalry if you cannot deploy your forces in sufficient density to prevent those mounted troops from using those Springfields to shoot up your supply convoys and massacre anyone in the countryside who show signs of supporting The Heretical, Demon-Worshiping, Baby-Eating Occupation™. You just can’t be in enough places at once.

That’s the real problem Charis faces with imposing any sort of permanent, lasting peace on the Church. Unless Clyntahn’s excesses become sufficiently blatant, and/or unless the propaganda being distributed by Merlin’s remotes can (a) succeed in distinguishing between the Group of Four and the Church in the minds of a majority of Safeholdians outside the Empire and (b) actually convince the majority of Safeholdians outside the Empire that the propagandists are telling the truth in the first place, the level of bone-deep resistance from the bulk of the mainland population will be widespread, powerful, and probably inextinguishable. As a case in point, I give you British efforts in Ireland, which was an island surrounded (and isolated from outside support) by the most powerful navy in the world, rather than the entire continent of North America and Europe and Asia and India and — well, perhaps you see my point. [G]

Even if Charis succeeds in toppling the Group of Four, or even if the Group of Four is removed from power by some internal faction within the Church, so long as faith in the archangels persists, the Church , and not Charis, holds all the trump cards in creating and sustaining the sort of moral authority and support which can (and will) inevitably defeat any Charisian effort at occupation or the installation of “puppet regimes” which can be delegitimized by the Church. The Brits couldn’t defeat Gandhi in India without resorting to tactics which would have delegitimized Great Britain in the eyes of the world and — even more importantly — its own population. Charis would face very much the same situation on the mainland, following even a crushing outright military victory, despite the fact that readers would realize that, ultimately, it was actually Charis which held the moral high ground.

Cayleb, Sharleyan, Merlin, and their advisers are all aware of this. At the moment, while they are absolutely dedicated to the defeat and destruction of the Group of Four, they recognize that in the long-term they’re fighting for survival and to provide a base from which an effort to eventually successfully debunk the entire theology of the archangels can be waged. Ultimately, they recognize that they cannot defeat the Church of God Awaiting by force of arms . They may be able to defeat the Group of Four and hopefully clear the way for a Reformist takeover of the main Church, but that’s really the best they can shoot to accomplish militarily.

In the long term, a Charisian Empire which is able (thanks to its access to Merlin and Owl) to stay ahead of the curve of industrialization and technology uplift would probably present a challenge to the Church’s more moribund technology which would result in the gradual decay of the Church’s authority to forbid change and control thought. Of course, that supposes that the kinetic bombardment system can somehow be taken out of play.

I’m not saying that there aren’t factors that could dramatically change the strategic realities of Safehold in a relatively short timeframe. For example (and I’m not saying this is going to happen), if it should happen that a handful of “archangels” were to awaken under the Temple and ride out to smite the ungodly in their kyousei hi only to be shot down by Merlin’s recon skimmer, the archangels’ prestige would be severely dented. Even then, however, the Church might not be turned against them, since according to the Church’s own history of Shan-wei’s Rebellion, many angels and archangels were “slain” in the fighting.

Nor am I saying that the removal of the Group of Four wouldn’t bring the present war to a conclusion, because it almost certainly would lead to at least a temporary break in the fighting. But what happens then? If the Church of Charis immediately denounces Langhorne and his fellow archangels, the war begins again instantly, and on a far more ugly basis, with the Reformists who might have thought reasonably well of the Church of Charis faced with the incontrovertible truth that Clyntahn was right all along in denouncing the Charisians as heretics of the worst possible stripe . And, if the Church of Charis doesn’t immediately denounce Langhorne and his fellow archangels, the presumably Reformed Church gradually reasserts its control over the faithful since the Holy Writ itself defines the proper state of affairs as a theocracy in which the secular realms are controlled by the Church. It may well be that the Church of Charis is recognized as equally holy, possibly even a recognized branch of Mother Church, when the smoke clears, but the pressure for the schism to be healed and the ascendancy of Mother Church will still gradually regenerate a level of hostility between the Empire and the mainland realms.

To attain Merlin’s goals, Charis has to sweep the board. It has to militarily defeat the Group of Four; it has to permanently defang the bombardment platform’s threat to re-emergent technology; and it has to permanently and effectively destroy the theological and doctrinal basis of the Church of God Awaiting. Even having the Republic of Siddarmark fully restored to pre-Sword of Schueler status and firmly allied with the Charisian Empire won’t accomplish any of those goals. A Siddarmarkian alliance, even with a grievously wounded Republic, may be a major step in the direction of those goals, but there is a very, very long road between where Charis is right now and where it needs to be to redeem Merlin’s promise to Pei Kau-yung and Pei Shan-wei’s memories.

Or it might — might , I say — have been a case of some of the mortals who fought on the side of the archangels against Shan-wei’s demonic hordes having been given mystical weapons by the surviving archangels and angels before being sent forth to smite the ungodly. For that matter (who knows?), perhaps some of those mystical weapons might have persisted, remained available, for a generation or two after Shan-wei’s defeat. (Do you suppose, for example, that Merlin’s katana might not be the very first battle steel blade ever issued on Safehold? Makes you go “hummmm,” doesn’t it?)

I’m not saying that was what happened, or even anything remotely like it, you understand. Simply tossing out another possibility for consideration.

[Walks away, hands in pockets, whistling tunelessly]

No, you don’t mean that the events are “incredulous,” you mean that you are “incredulous.” I believe the word that you actually wanted was “incredible,” as in impossible/difficult to credit. [G]

If you do, then you do, and there have been events in books I have otherwise very much enjoyed over which I have been incredulous, or at least left considering that they represented major plot holes. In this case, though, I don’t think that “no one in government had a real clue what was going to happen” is precisely accurate. They knew perfectly well that something — and something they weren’t going to like one bit — was going to happen. They knew that the Temple loyalists were organizing an anti-Stohnar movement, they knew it was aimed at the overthrow of the Republic, and they knew the basic structure and shape of the agit-prop being used to fuel it. They even knew enough about the nature and shape of the Sword of Schueler to have deployed more of their available strength in the capital than it turned out they could afford to protect the Charisian Quarter. What they didn’t know was exactly when/how soon the attacks would kick off, although they clearly had enough warning for Stohnar and the seneschal to have coordinated plans for reinforcements to enter the city. Remember that Stohnar wasn’t thinking “it may be days before the troops get here;” he was simply thinking that it was going to take time that he and the defenders of Protector’s Palace were going to turn out not to have for the seneschal to complete the troop movements which had already been ordered and that they had underestimated the forces available to the attackers. There was, of course, an additional problem (which I’ll probably address below) about how preemptive they could afford to be about what they did see coming.

As the situation in Siddarmark progresses, you may very well get a better look inside the admitted intelligence failure which led to the extent to which Stohnar and his most trusted allies in government were taken by surprise on The Day. You may not, too. I know what they were and why they occurred, but the reader won’t find out about them unless the characters find out about about how they happened.

Now, as far as what Merlin and Charis knew and did not know.

Merlin was aware of what was going on in Siddarmark. He was also aware that the Lord Protector was aware of what was going on in Siddarmark. Neither Merlin nor the Lord Protector were aware of many of the details . . . including — and, indeed, especially — the execution date of the operation. And the reason they didn’t that particular minor fact was that the folks on the ground responsible for carrying the operation out didn’t know the execution date. I will give you a hint (and this may or may not be brought out in the books eventually) but if you’ll recall there was another operation that Clyntahn wanted to correspond in time with the uprising in Siddarmark. And when he told Rayno that, Rayno pointed out that the schedule might have to be adjusted slightly. Until Rayno transmitted the actual execution order, the troops on the ground hadn’t been told exactly when they would be ordered to move but it had been clearly (and deliberately) implied to them that it would not be until after winter had closed down the ability of the Lord Protector to move troops around to counterattack their successes. They were to be ready to rise against the “apostate traitors and Charisian lackeys” any time from late summer on, but the emphasis was placed on a rising later in the year as a cover against those infernally effective Charisian (and Siddarmarkian) spies Clyntahn and Rayno have been worrying about for quite some time now. (Hmmmm . . . I see I’m giving away some of those things the characters may/may not learn the books after all.)

There were, obviously, instructions in the pipeline that had to reach all of the various groups before they acted. One thing which I see I did not make sufficiently clear in Cayleb’s mental summarization of what happened in Siddarmark, however, is that not all of these risings and attacks occurred simultaneously with one another. Looking at Cayleb’s reflections on what happened, I can see where it could be reasonably assumed that they did, since Cayleb never reflects specifically that they didn’t . In fact, however, the uprising in the capital was the first, and the order was transmitted to the Inquisition’s agents in place using the Church’s semaphore system (which is faster than anything on Safehold except Owl’s coms . . . which, of course, Stohnar and his subordinate, local military commanders didn’t have access to). As a result, the insurrectionists were inside Stohnar’s communications loop, and would have been no matter what Merlin might or might not have been able to pass on to him the instant in which that order was transmitted from Rayno in Zion, inside the bubble which is closed to Owl’s remotes, to the agents in place in Siddarmark. The orders to the other Inquisition “cells” which had been set up for the Sword went out in a cascade at the same time, which put all of them inside Stohnar’s communications loop. In addition, there were standing orders about how cells were supposed to react when news of “spontaneous uprisings” elsewhere reached them. And, you may recall, at the very moment that all of this was happening, Merlin was rather occupied down in Delferahk. His ability to go gadding about in Siddarmark — even as Zhevons — was . . . restricted.

The bottom line, however, is that Merlin and Co. were focused on the consequences of the Rakurai and Charis, on operations against Desnair, and on getting Irys and Daivyn out of Delferahk. They knew that Stohnar knew Clyntahn and Rayno were using the Inquisition and the Levelers to foment unrest/rebellion/insurrection. There really wasn’t anything they could have told him (that he didn’t already know) without at the very least raising questions they couldn’t answer about how they might have come to know it and how they could conceivably be moving information around that rapidly. Don’t forget their problems communicating with Coris in Delferahk in some explainable fashion. And, of course, they knew Aivah Pahrsahn also had an eye on the situation and was making plans of her own. I suppose I could’ve dwelt on that awareness of theirs at an earlier point at I did. For example, I could’ve actually shown you Aivah training her riflemen on her various farming operations. I could have actually shown you a discussion between members of one of the Inquisition’s cells. There were a lot of things I could have shown you, but I decided I’d rather have the reader wondering about the same things Stohnar and his henchmen were wondering about.

To be honest, from a writer’s perspective, Merlin’s ability to find things out can be a distinct liability, not so much from a plot perspective as from a storytelling perspective. It’s hard to legitimately blindside (I mean, of course, “surprise” ) the reader when one of the characters in the story, not simply the narrator, becomes effectively omniscient. If I write a scene in which I deliberately distort what Merlin “knows” in order to . . . misdirect the reader’s attention, I’m not playing fair with the reader. In effect, I’m lying to him, and he has every right to feel cheated when he realizes that I did. At the same time, if I tell him everything that’s coming before it happens, then I’m shortchanging him. So sometimes what has to happen is that I simply don’t tell the reader at all before the event takes place. In some cases I may go back and explain to the reader how that happened, what people actually knew or didn’t know that the reader wasn’t told about at the time, or how something fell through the cracks without being picked up upon at all. Sometimes that doesn’t happen, either.

I will say this. Even if Merlin had had access to Clyntahn’s entire playbook, and even if he’d handed that information over to Stohnar (assuming there was some way he could possibly explain how he’d come into possession of it . . . and how he could expect Stohnar to believe that such an incredible treasure trove of information wasn’t deliberate dis information on Charis’ part, designed to draw him into an open break with the Church), Stohnar could not have prevented very much what happened from happening anyway . He couldn’t openly challenge what the Inquisition was doing ahead of time without an open breach with the Church. In fact, he couldn’t be positive that that wasn’t what Clyntahn was really after: creating a situation in which Stohnar became the aggressor against Mother Church, exactly as Clyntahn had been warning his colleagues in the vicarate was inevitably going to happen one day. That’s the main reason he had to be so cautious about troop movements and warning orders before the nickel actually dropped; the last thing he could afford was to give Clyntahn a plausible (or even semi-plausible) provocatory pretext. So there was very little he could do prophylactically that he hadn’t already done, and as long as he wasn’t in a position to take powerful, suppressive action — with an army he could be certain would take his orders to move preemptively against Mother Church in the middle of Mother Church’s first true jihad — there was no way he could take the initiative away from Clyntahn. When you add to that that Clyntahn and Rayno had succeeded in confusing him as to the actual timing of the Sword, perhaps you begin to see how the situation could go as far south as it went.

I deliberately structured the book so that all of this came at the reader fast and hard — and so that the extent of Clyntahn’s success clearly came as a surprise both to Stohnar and his supporters and to Charis. Hopefully, as the conflict in Siddarmark comes to be more fully developed in the next book, some of the factors leading up to the deliberately administered shock factor at the end of this one will become fully developed, as well.

Okay, I haven’t read the entire thread about the possibility of additional “secret brotherhoods,” but the dispute going on in it is one reason I said that I didn’t really want to get into the history that I ended up giving you in response to another question. On the other hand, maybe it’s a good thing I did, because you have pointed me at a couple of problems which I’m pretty sure (comparing my rough drafts to final versions) were introduced in the copy editing process. Mind you, one of them is at least partly my own fault.

I’m not going to talk here about whether or not there might or might not be other “secret brotherhoods” out there in the weeds somewhere. I will say that if there ever had been one and if it ever had come to the notice of Mother Church and been dealt with, Clyntahn certainly would have known about it and would undoubtedly already have labeled all of the Reformists as heretics who probably had been exposed to the same pernicious lies Grand Inquisitor Stomp Them out had been forced to deal with however many centuries earlier. IF any similar “secret heresy” had ever been discovered, the Church would be watching for others like a hawk.

Having told you what I’m not going to tell you, let us now continue.

One of the problems I’ve discovered as a consequence of the discussion about “secret brotherhoods “— and the one which wasn’t my fault (except in as much as I failed to catch the change when I went through the copyedited manuscript — is the dating in Saint Zherneau’s journal. I should clarify things a little bit by pointing out that I’ve had problems with my Tor copy editor on every one of these books so far. Part of the problem is that there are a lot of technical terms used in the books (as, for example, were sailing ships are concerned) and that Off Armageddon Reef was my first Tor novel. As a result, I didn’t have a “history” with any of their copy editors, and their copy editors didn’t have an “author’s stylesheet” on me. For those not familiar with the editing process, a stylesheet is a set of notes for the copy editor telling him (or her) how the author’s style differs from the “standard.” All of us differ at least somewhat, and in fairness, I’m rather less “standard” than most. I won’t say that that explains all of the problems I’ve had, because, frankly, it doesn’t, and the process has been very frustrating for me in some respects. (For example, in one of the books the copy editor decided that I couldn’t possibly be speaking of “white horses ” sweeping across a bay. The fact that a “white horse” describes a very specific type of wave formation obviously eluded him. So he changed it to “white houses ” sweeping across the bay. Exactly how having a house float across the bay was better than having a horse do the same thing eluded me, so I went ahead and changed it back, but this is the sort of thing I’ve been dealing with.) Mind you, they’ve caught a lot of things which were errors, and I won’t pretend that they haven’t. At the same time, the irritation quotient for some of the more . . . less than brilliant changes, shall we say, has been high. At any rate, all of my manuscripts have come back with a lot of copy editor marginal notations, queries, “corrections” (the majority of which I’ve reversed), etc. My point here being that there are so many of them that they have a tendency to blur together and things get lost in the underbrush.

One such thing which got “lost” was the fact that the copy editor had taken it upon himself (or herself) to “reconcile” the dates in Saint Zherneau’s Journal, and I didn’t notice it until after the book was printed. He assumed (or she assumed; I don’t know who it was) that if Jeremy Knowles was writing in the 140th year since the Creation, that he also had to be writing in the 140th Year of God, or vice versa, and made the dates “fit.” That is the reason for the discrepancy in the journal’s internal dating. So far, you guys have seen only a handful of words out of his entire journal, none of which include his version of the extended fighting lumped together as “Shan-wei’s Rebellion” by official Church rheology and history. If I’d included more of that information at that time the copy editor might not have taken it upon himself to “reconcile” the dates, since it would (hopefully) have injected an awareness of the times and dates involved in the process. On the other hand, given some of the other things that have been changed, I wouldn’t want to bet anything important on the possibility.

Okay, the discrepancy in the dating on Nimue’s “wake-up call” is more complicated than that, and reflects two errors, one mine and one the copy editor’s. The book as published says that Nimue is set to wake up 750 years after Pei Kau-yung’s decapitation of the command crew. It then has her waking up in the Year of God 890. Now, 750 standard years is approximately 824 Safehold years so, if we assume that we’re dating from the beginning of Shan-wei’s Rebellion, not the end, and that it took approximately 60 standard years after the Creation for that rebellion to begin, the number 890 is about right. After all, 60 standard years are about 66 Safehold years, and 66 plus 824 equals 890.

The problem is that in my original manuscript (checked from my file copy on the hard drive) Pei Kau-yung says to her “I’ve set the timer to activate this . . . depot, I suppose, eight hundred and twenty-five standard years after I complete this recording.” Originally, I had intended to date from the Creation; I changed my mind about that when I was around 75% of the way through the first book. At that point, I decided that there’d been a war of succession among the surviving members of Langhorne’s command group, that there needed to be more time for that to take place, and that the Church would begin dating from the end of that war. It seemed to me that adding 75 standard years or so to my timeline would cover things.

(As an aside, some people seem to be assuming that the aforesaid war of succession started as soon as Langhorne was killed; actually, it took a few years for the tensions among the survivors to reach the point of open conflict, at which point a very complicated situation [which I am not going to go into at this time] came about in the various enclaves. Those of you who are assuming the general use of advanced weapons are mistaken. As far as the command crew were concerned, there was a lot of “taking to the hills,” hiding from each other, ambushing each other, etc., but all of the surviving command crew were dedicated to the notion that the Church of God had to be preserved, at least in the short term, and they were very careful about the terms in which they couched the conflict among the “mortal” factions in the enclaves and about using “divine weapons” even against other mortals. I’m not saying there wasn’t any use of advanced weapons; only that those weapons weren’t in general use.)

Getting back to the dating conflict.

At any rate, there I was, having changed my original plan three quarters or so of the way through the first book. As I say, I had originally had Commodore Pei set the timer for 750 standard years before I decided to add the additional 75 years and have him set it for 825 standard years, instead. I changed the text to reflect that change. Unfortunately, I apparently didn’t remember to change the standard year dating on Nimue’s “wake-up scene.” I had intended to move it up from 3249 to 3324 to reflect the extra 75 years of Nimue’s nap, but checking my file copy of the rough draft, I found that I actually left it at the original 3249. When the copy editor came along, he “checked my math” using the unchanged header dates for the two scenes and came up with the original 750 years between them. He then changed the “eight hundred and twenty-five standard years” in Kau-yung’s final message to Nimue to match the header dates. Now, in fairness to the copy editor, 750 is a much “rounder” number than 825; I’d originally used that number (before the change) and it worked very well with the rest of the text; he did have the interval between the dates I had changed to indicate that there was a problem between the text and the dates; and he probably specifically noted and queried the change on the manuscript. Unfortunately, probably largely because he didn’t have that stylesheet I mentioned above, he was also marking everything else in sight, querying word choices, querying nonstandard grammatical usages, changing completely correct grammar that apparently didn’t match his usage manual, even rewriting some of the sentences entirely (remember those white houses?). My point is that while there isn’t any excuse for my not having noticed if he did, in fact, note the change from 825 to 750, it’s very probable that I simply “lost it in the underbrush.”

The way that it actually works is that approximately 70 standard years (around 77 Safehold years) elapsed between the Day of Creation and the end of Shan-wei’s Rebellion. As of How Firm a Foundation , the date is Year of God 895, and it’s been 979 Safehold years since the Creation. Nimue’s last update was in year 54 after the Creation (16 years before the end of the Rebellion, if any of you are counting), and she woke up in Year of God 890, 906 or so Safehold years later, which is roughly the 825 standard years to which I had changed the date in the first book. The fact that my change got “corrected” back to 750 in the copy editing process accounts for the confusion. Unfortunately, I wasn’t aware of the problem until you people started checking the math. I had to go back and reconstruct what had happened by comparing my electronic file of the original draft for Off Armageddon Reef against the printed version to figure out what had happened. And, since I already have the 70 year interval between the Creation and the end of Shan-wei’s Rebellion in How Firm A Foundation and it’s too late to adjust it at this point, I’m going to have to figure out how (or if) to deal with it for the general readership who might/might not pick out what you eagle eyed . . . people have picked up on.

You’re getting into a degree of historical background I don’t really want to give at this point. The short answer (“short” for me, at least) is that, first, the years of the Church of God Awaiting are counted from the suppression of Shan-wei’s Revolt. This was regarded as a major victory, not a Pyrrhic victory, because neither Langhorne nor any of the other angels/archangels who fought on his side were actually killed. Remember, the theology of the Church of God Awaiting says simply that the physical bodies of the archangels — created on the same day as the rest of the world, and expected eventually to age and ultimately perish anyway (as all things of the mortal world do) — were destroyed, forcing them to return to the presence of God a little sooner than originally allowed for. The survivors were not above generating posthumous holograms of Langhorne and Bédard to bolster the notion that they had not in fact “died,” and did so. At any rate, the years of Safehold are numbered not from the Day of Creation, but rather from the final victory of the forces of Light.

Second, Nimue Alban was actually quite young compared to the command staff of the expedition. I realize that Nimue herself reflects that many of the original command staff had been almost as young as she was, but the majority of the command staff was not, and for fairly obvious reasons when you think about it.

The colonists were all very young, for a society with the youth-prolonging technologies available to the Federation, because they needed to be young for the arduous conditions they were going to face and to provide the “breeding stock” needed to get Safehold’s population off to a good start. But the command staff was picked for experience, knowledge, etc., and not for youth. The command staff was deliberately kept relatively small, and its median age was somewhere around 65 or 70 years. By the time the struggle against “Shan-wei’s Revolt” was over (and, by the way, it took longer to suppress that “revolt” than some people seem to be thinking, even with the strike on Alexandria, in no small part because of certain things that happened that you don’t know about among the surviving members of the command staff after Commodore Pei decapitated it), most of the survivors were in the vicinity of 150 years of age or so, which means they could expect to live about another century and a half. (Around another 160 Safeholdian years, getting them to around the Year of God 160, about 60 years earlier than you had calculated, and putting 247 years between that date and On Obedience .)

The assertion of the Grand Vicar’s infallibility as expressed in On Obedience (and, by the way, since the doctrine of infallibility was only promulgated officially by the Catholic Church in 1870, the better part of 2,000 years into its history, I’m not sure I find myself in agreement with your observation that “most of the evil it has done can be directly traced to their foolish acceptance of that notion,” but that’s a subject for another debate) was thus made around 12 generations after the last of the archangels “returned to the presence of God. That’s actually quite a lot of time. Moreover, the assertion of the Grand Vicar’s infallibility (which — like the doctrine of papal infallibility — is actually quite restricted) was only one part of what On Obedience set out to accomplish as a response to a significant challenge to the Church and God’s Plan as revealed by the Archangel Langhorne.

In the Roman Catholic Church, papal infallibility applies only to statements of a dogmatic teaching on faith contained in divine revelation (or, as I understand it, at least intimately connected to divine revelation); it does not preserve the pontiff from sin or error in his personal life, in his official life and discharge of his duties outside the dogma being set forth, or even in matters of “fallible doctrine.” That is, a pope can make plenty of mistakes and even sin in his administration of the Church, his discharge of his office, his personal life, his decisions where something besides fundamental doctrine is concerned, etc., despite his infallibility as the promulgator of essential doctrine. The same is true in the case of the Grand Vicar, and, in fact, the current doctrine of the Grand Vicar’s infallibility developed from an earlier tradition of infallibility, deliberately established by Langhorne when he created the Church.

The Grand Vicar was established as Langhorne’s successor as the head of the Church. (This was deliberately modeled on the Roman Catholic doctrine of apostolic succession.) Consequently, his pronouncements in doctrinal matters were those of the Church itself, ratified by Langhorne, and (as such) infallible. Under the original construction of the doctrine, however, that infallibility represented not the Grand Vicar’s autocratic ability to declare whatever doctrine he chose at his own sole discretion, but rather his role speaking ex cathedra in the name of the entire vicarate , which under Church law was (and is) regarded as the corporate repository of God’s and Langhorne’s authority in the mortal world. Under the original formulation of the doctrine he enjoyed that infallibility only as the spokesman of the vicarate’s collective understanding of doctrine based on The Holy Writ and such teachings as might have been added to the canon following the departure of the archangels. (That is, in the case of the Church of God Awaiting, the conflict in the Roman Catholic Church between the authority of the Pope and ecumenical councils had been resolved in favor of the ecumenical councils under Langhorne’s original formulation.) In cases of conflict between the Writ and the later portions of the canon, the Writ was to govern. And no later “infallible teaching” could contravene or contradict an earlier infallible teaching. (Which has not prevented some . . . inventive reinterpretations of “infallible teachings” by later vicarates or Grand Vicars.)

At the same time, however, the Grand Vicar enjoyed enormous authority. Whereas he was expressly not preserved from sin or error in his personal life and the general discharge of his office (he was mortal, not Langhorne), he was in most respects an autocrat as the Church’s chief executive, reflecting the autocratic structure Langhorne had created/adopted for his control of the command staff and, thus, of the early Church. The vicarate’s “authority” over the Grand Vicar consisted of the fact that he was chosen by the majority vote of the vicarate and that the vicarate was supposed to have the ultimate authority in the declaration of matters of doctrine and faith. Aside from that, and the fact that Grand Vicars were usually fairly senior members of the vicarate themselves before they were selected (which meant that most Grand Vicarates were relatively short in duration simply because of the Grand Vicar’s age when he was selected), the vicarate was little more than a rubber stamp for the Grand Vicar’s decisions in the day-to-day and year-to-year administration of the Church.

Langhorne’s death and the decimation (actually, a lot worse than simple decimation) of the original, small command staff had a lot of consequences, including the consequence that what Langhorne and Bédard had originally planned as a gradual transition to mortal control of the Church over the space of as much as 200-plus years was significantly accelerated. The surviving members of the command staff found themselves forced to work through “mortals” much earlier and much more comprehensively than had originally been intended, and as such the vicarate and (especially) the Grand Vicar found themselves inheriting a greater degree of personal power earlier on in the process than Langhorne and Bédard had ever envisioned. Worse (from Langhorne’s perspective) it meant that there were no archangels around to help cope with certain later problems as they arose.

The biggest problem that the Church faced in the first two centuries after the archangels “returned to the presence of God” (that is, in the 250 or so years between the departure of the last archangel and the promulgation of On Obedience ) was an enormous expansion in the planetary population. As that population grew and spread out further and further from the original enclaves, additional bishops were required. Under the original provisions of the Church of God Awaiting, Langhorne (or, at least, his successors on the command staff, and I’m not telling you exactly which it was) had always intended for the bishops and archbishops to be selected by the citizens of their bishoprics and archbishoprics. In a previous post I pointed out that the archbishops could be considered provincial or state governors in a theocratic government, and the original thought had been that since these were the prelates who were going to be in closest contact with their flocks, allowing the members of those flocks a voice in their selection would provide at least the rudiments of a genuinely representative government at the local level . (At what you might think of as the “federal level,” the vicarate was specifically and deliberately detached from local selection, although the original assumption of the Church was that since the vicars would be selected from the ranks of the episcopate, there would be a sort of secondhand representative element in the creation of the vicarate.) Where this became a problem was that as the population of the planet spread further and further away from Zion and as communication became more and more arthritic, even with the semaphore and messenger wyverns, the archbishoprics began acquiring too much power. (It should also be pointed out that the institution of the office of bishop executor had its origins during this time period as archbishops found themselves spending more and more time traveling back and forth between the more distant archbishoprics and Zion.)

The Reformist tendencies which are emerging now (as of How Firm A Foundation ) have always been at least potentially present within the Church. Put another way, there has always been a tension between the more humanist elements of the Church (frequently, as now, led, ironically, by the Bédardists and their allies) and those more focused on the preservation of doctrine and strict adherence to the Writ , and signs of that tension began to emerge as popularly selected bishops and archbishops began to push the direction of church doctrine at what might be thought of as the “grass roots” level. They weren’t all pushing in the same direction, either, and the vicarate of the time faced the Church’s first real challenge to its authority and to the overarching authority and absolute primacy of the Writ as understood by the vicarate.

On Obedience was an effort to deal with the perceived danger of the fragmentation of not simply the vicarate’s authority but of Mother Church’s authority . . . which was another way of saying the perceived danger of allowing Shan-wei to reestablish a toehold in the mortal world. Therefore, the vicarate in its collective role as the infallible arbiter of doctrine, fundamentally changed the process by which members of the episcopate were to be selected. At the same time, the current Grand Vicar, an especially able politician (as he had to be to bring about such a basic alteration in the process for elevating bishops), also pushed through a declaration that the Grand Vicar spoke infallibly ex cathedra — that is, specifically when exercising his office as the enunciator of official doctrine — both as the spokesman of the collected vicarate and in his own right when he promulgated doctrine which had been divinely revealed to him in the Writ or by the direct touch of God and the archangels upon his heart . He got it through because of the careful alliances he’d built within the vicarate and because the vicarate had been panicked by what it perceived as an ongoing disintegration of the Church and, hence, of God’s plan for Safehold. Panic over the possible emergence of heresy and/or apostacy (and remember that they had the historical experience of an actual war between good and evil in Shan-wei’s Revolt) led them into desiring an even more authoritarian, even more ironbound protection of orthodoxy, and the Grand Vicar managed to convince the vicarate of something he actually believed: that expanding his power as Langhorne’s successor was, in fact, both directly in line with Langhorne’s expressed desires and an additional and necessary safeguard of orthodox doctrine and theology. And since On Obedience had been issued ex cathedra, it became part of the “infallible doctrine” of the Church and, once done, could never subsequently be undone. In essence, it was an overreaction against the dissipation of the Church’s central authority which went too far in the other direction. Indeed, the overreaction also paved the way for the eventual absorption of the Order of Jwo-jeng into the Order of Schueler and for the Order of Schueler to gradually supplant the Order of Langhorne as the “senior” order of the Church.

Although On Obedience made what turned out to be fundamental shifts in the Church’s internal dynamic, it’s important to understand that it wasn’t seen as doing that by the vicars who endorsed it. Yes, they were restricting the “popular voice” in the selection of bishops and archbishops, but even under the new rules, the vicarate and the Grand Vicar were supposed to solicit the views of those the prelates were to govern. Inevitably, that solicitation of local input atrophied fairly rapidly (in a generational sense, at least), but that was not an intended outcome. Moreover, the Church had always been planned as a strictly hierarchical organization with top-down rule and an Inquisition specifically granted the authority to enforce doctrinal conformity by any means necessary. One of the other unintended consequences of On Obedience was that the vicarate’s power actually increased , since the counterweight of the “popularly selected” episcopate had been removed. Yet another unintended consequence, however, was that a strong Grand Vicar now had the means to tyrannize even the vicarate in ways which had not previously been possible because of his ability to decree doctrine independently of the vicarate in the case of a fundamental disagreement between it and him. And that, frankly, was a reason why the vicarate began electing weak Grand Vicars. Because the office had become too powerful to be restrained in the hands of a strong Grand Vicar, they had to select for weakness in order to preserve their own authority . . . and, on more than one occasion, cabals within the vicarate eliminated Grand Vicars who proved stronger than they had expected. In some instances, that was actually an act of semi-legitimate self-defense, since one or two Grand Vicars had inclinations in Clyntahn’s direction and there was no provision for the removal of a Grand Vicar except by death . Which, unfortunately, helped to legitimize the use of assassination, and thus made it steadily more acceptable.

It’s important to bear in mind that the consequences I’m describing in the above paragraph didn’t happen overnight. In fact, it took several centuries, and it really began to accelerate only in the last couple of hundred years, the period during which the Church has slipped steadily into greater and greater internal corruption. I hope, however, that this gives at least a little better understanding of how the Church originally got to the “tipping point” which provoked On Obedience , not to mention how it reached its current tipping point where the Reformists are concerned.

Another point which it is also important to emphasize (or perhaps reemphasize) is that the premature destruction of the command staff was completely unexpected when Langhorne and Bédard made their original plans for the creation and the nurturing of the Church of God Awaiting. They anticipated a much, much longer period of direct, “hands-on” control of the Church, and they fully intended to make adjustments during that time as experience indicated modifications were necessary. The conflict they got and the casualties they suffered after the Alexandria strike deep-sixed that part of their plans, and the fact that “repairs” to the original master plan had to be made more or less on the fly by the surviving members of the command crew — not all of whom had shared every aspect of Langhorne’s vision — meant there was no one to deal with emerging failure points which might actually have been recognized and compensated for had the anticipated number of “archangels” been available for the anticipated length of time.

I’m not trying to make excuses for Langhorne or for the fundamental failures/weaknesses/blind spots inherent in his vision. I’m simply saying that his own plans got run over by a Greyhound bus called Pei Kau-yung, and that the factors within the Church leading to its present corruption and decadence got a quicker jump because of circumstances beyond his control.

You do remember that 85% of the population of Safehold lives on the “mainland” continents, don’t you? That means that only 15% of the entire population lives in Charis, Corisande, and Chisholm combined. The mainland countries have much higher populations, which means that they have much higher numbers of clergy, which means (surprise!) that they also have much larger numbers of — roll of drums — archbishops. In fact, most provinces of the mainland realms have their own archbishops, with the archbishop of the “capital province” serving as the senior prelate for the entire nation. Some of the most densely populated provinces actually have more than a single archbishopric. For example, the Republic of Siddarmark alone has something like 20 provinces, of which the majority actually have more than a single archbishopric. Glacierheart, Archbishop Cahnyr’s archbishopric, is a mountainous, relatively thinly populated, poor province. As such, he was the entire province’s single archbishop. Old Province, the province directly around Siddar City, has something like eight times Glacierheart’s population with a proportionately higher number of archbishoprics. And you don’t even want to get into the number of archbishoprics in the Empire of Harchong! Each of the small states between the Republic and the Temple Lands has its own archbishop, as well, and there are numerous archbishoprics in the Temple Lands themselves.

Charis, Corisande, and Chisholm were all “second-class” realms as far as the Church and the mainlanders were concerned. They were assigned single archbishops as much as 200 or even 300 years prior to the books, when their populations were still lower in both absolute and proportionate terms, and the Church doesn’t worry about regular censuses and reapportionment of sees on the basis of population. Especially not when there’s as much prejudice against being posted to the “out islands” as has been the case. For that matter, the various archbishops in those “out islands” have had a very strong vested interest in not having “their” archbishoprics broken up into more numerous, smaller archbishoprics, since doing so would have considerably diluted both their own wealth and the degree of power they wielded in Zion as the sole archbishops of their private domains. As a result, each “out island” archbishop represented a much greater total number of parishioners, despite the fact that all of the “out island” realms combined contained only 15% of the total population.

In addition, the number of vicars is not based upon or directly proportionate to the number of archbishops. The vicarate — which was intended from the beginning to be an effective planetary legislature, whereas you could think of the archbishops as district or territorial governors — is based upon the planetary population as a whole. The number of “seats” within the vicarate was set at 300 when “the Archangel Langhorne” first organized the Church, but the vicarate’s composition has been reapportioned several times since the creation of the Church of God Awaiting in accordance with a formula Langhorne also set down. The number of vicars doesn’t change; how those vicars are apportioned between the various secular realms does change, and that fact helps to account (in part) for Clyntahn’s reliance upon Harchong. As the most densely populated realm, Harchong has the greatest number of vicars, who form quite a solid voting bloc within the vicarate. Those vicars, by and large, are not merely terrified into compliance with Clyntahn’s policies but also actively support them because of their own reactionary orthodoxy. That same representational basis also helps to explain some of Clyntahn’s antipathy towards Siddarmark; as the next most populous realm, Siddarmark has the next largest number of vicars, and while they form a less homogenous voting bloc than the Harchongian vicars (in part for reasons mentioned below), they were also substantially less supportive of Clyntahn even before the Group of Four launched the war against Charis. Losses among Siddarmarkian vicars in Clyntahn’s purge of the vicarate were rather higher than among those of other realms, although not hugely so.

Vicars are chosen by the existing members of the vicarate on the nomination of the Grand Vicar. In fact, it is not uncommon for a weak Grand Vicar’s nominations to actually be formulated by someone else, but under normal circumstances the process is for the Grand Vicar to solicit recommendations from the combined archbishops of the realm to be represented and then (after judicious horsetrading with his supporters and the various factions within the vicarate) to make his own selection from their recommendations. Under the current circumstances, any replacement vicars are going to be chosen by the Group of Four (which probably really means Clyntahn and Trynair), and then rubberstamped by the current Grand Vicar.

The Grand Vicar’s nominations are not normally automatically seated in the vicarate. Each nominee requires a majority vote confirmation by the existing members of the vicarate, and it is not unheard of (although rare) for one of the Grand Vicar’s nominees to be rejected. The possibility of that happening under the current circumstances (especially following Clyntahn’s purge) is probably nonexistent, however.

Note that there are no Charisian, Chisholmian, Tarotisian, or Corisandian vicars. This represents a combination of sloth, inefficiency, corruption, and deliberate oversight on the part of several generations of vicarates and Grand Vicars. Initially, there was too little population in any of those realms to qualify them for membership in the vicarate, just as there was too little population to qualify them for multiple archbishoprics. As their populations increased towards levels which would have qualified them for their own vicars, the Church reapportioned the vicarate (in accordance with Langhorne’s formula . . . more or less) by raising the population base necessary to qualify for a vicar. The truth was that the archbishops in those realms didn’t want a vicar “joggling their elbows,” the current vicars at any given moment didn’t want to see one of their number reapportioned out of his seat in the vicarate to make room for some out island rube, and the growing distrust of the “out islands” orthodoxy lent additional force to arguments against creating, for example, a vicar for Charis.

In many ways, although for different reasons, being what I suppose you might call un-vicared suited both Haarahld of Charis and Hektor of Corisande quite well. Haarahld, for obvious reasons, didn’t want someone sitting in Zion who might have a clue about the Brethren of Saint Zherneau and his own apostasy. Hektor’s political ambitions and imperialistic ventures in places like Zebediah were easier to keep “under the radar” when he only had to worry about the oversight of a single archbishop and not someone seated directly in the vicarate. Not only that, but the necessary bribery cost him far less, and the single vicar for whom he might have qualified would have gained him virtually nothing in terms of influence within the vicarate. As such, both he and Haarahld benefited from the “benign neglect” of the vicarate, and neither of them saw any reason to press for a change in the status quo.

It’s important to remember that while the vicarate was established as a planetary government, it was never intended to be a representative government in any present day, real life sense. That is, all of its members were to be elected internally, as part of a closed system and without any notion of those vicars being responsible to the citizens of the realm from which they were selected. The idea was that they would be representative of their realm only in the sense of being familiar with its strengths, weaknesses, needs, desires, etc., and bring that familiarity with them to the vicarate, but their function was to govern the entire planet (in the name of God and the archangels, of course) not to contend for the interests of “their” realm. As such, there was never a tradition of serving the interests of a particular constituency, and the average citizen didn’t think of the vicars chosen from his nation as being “his” vicars. This is an important distinction, and one which is distinctly alien to our own notions of representative government, and it’s another reason why Charisians didn’t particularly worry about the fact that they didn’t have a “Charisian vicar” seated somewhere in Zion.

In the last two or three centuries, the requirement that a vicar come from the realm whose population he “represents” (in the sense described above) has slipped considerably. It isn’t quite a violation of the letter of Langhorne’s directives, but it’s definitely playing fast and loose with the intent of those directives in many ways. In essence, even though someone may technically be a “Siddarmarkian” vicar — that is, hold one of the seats in the vicarate based on Siddarmark’s population — he doesn’t necessarily have to come from Siddarmark at all. Langhorne never established a “residency requirement” as a qualification for the vicarate; he simply established that the Grand Vicar should solicit advice from the archbishops and senior clergy governing the population generating that seat in the vicarate. There was no specific requirement preventing them from recommending someone from outside their realm. For example, the Siddarmarkian clergy could have recommended someone from, say, Dohlar as a candidate for “their” seat in the vicarate. As the Church has grown increasingly corrupt, it has become increasingly common for vicars to be chosen more on the basis of reliability, orthodoxy, patronage (especially), and levels of bribery than on where those vicars may have come from. This is another reason Harchong is as heavily represented in the vicarate as it is. It is also one reason the “Siddarmarkian” vicars have been less homogenous; as the vicarate has become more concerned about Siddarmark, it’s also become more likely to choose a vicar from someplace other than the Republic to “represent” Siddarmark.

Finally, Langhorne wanted to guarantee that the vicarate would be financially independent of the laity it was technically “representing” in order to prevent secular pressure on a vicar’s pocketbook from influencing his actions and his vote. His original plan was for each vicar to be paid a stipend or salary out of Mother Church’s central treasury, but over the centuries a practice evolved in which rather than paying the vicar directly, he was granted the revenues from specific territories to support him. The idea was that this would relieve pressure on the treasury; the result was to create, among other things, the Knights of the Temple Lands.

Now, not all Knights of the Temple Lands are created equal, and legally each vicar’s right to the revenues he is assigned is solely a lifetime grant. That is, it isn’t hereditary, can’t be passed on to his descendents, and reverts to the Church to be reassigned when he dies or leaves office. Most of the “great families” of the vicarate — the families from whom vicars are chosen again and again and again (like the Wylsynn family) — have come over the centuries to hold land in the Temple Lands in their own right. In theory, the revenues of those lands could be assigned to a vicar from outside the family which actually owns them, in which case the landholder would pay “taxes” to support the vicar to whom they have been assigned. In fact, that never happens, because there’s always a vicar from one of those families who — on the rare occasions when he is not the landholder himself — is conscious of the family interest and takes advantage of the other copious opportunities for a vicar to enrich himself.

The result of all of this has been to create a theocratic government which is actually an oligarchy whose membership is self recruiting, which is not subject to recall by those it theoretically represents, and whose financial security does not rest upon the support of those it theoretically represents. And the result of that has been that there’s been no external corrective to the vicarate’s internal decline into corruption, self-aggrandizement, and power seeking, which, in turn, accounts in no small part for the emergence of something like the Group of Four. The vicarate had become as venal and self-serving as the Roman Senate in its final days before Clyntahn came along, and it’s entirely possible that Clyntahn would have used that venality and corruption, coupled with the coercive power of the Inquisition, to make himself virtual dictator of the Church even without the “external threat” of Charis. That was certainly what he had in mind, at any rate.

I was answering the original post in a hurry because I had to take my son to his baseball practice —- one reason we had some of the typos we had in it. I was also responding specifically to the attitudes and beliefs of the Gof4, not the Church as a whole, and I think a more thorough discussion of where the Gof4 came from and what motivated its individual members might be in order. This is especially true of the Grand Inquisitor, since Clyntahn has been the driving force behind so many of the Gof4’s policies and actions.

Clyntahn had several driving motivations beyond simple pique at Charis or “fear” of Siddarmark, and he’s a firm believer in killing as many wyverns as possible with a single stone. Let’s look at some of the aspects of what the Gof4 is, how it came into existence, and exactly what Clyntahn’s role in all this is.

The Gof4 has ZERO official, legal standing as the determiners of Church policy. Its members didn’t exactly set out as a group to “seize control” of the Church; instead, these are the four men who wound up accumulating a terrific amount of personal power because each had risen to the head of one of the four primary bureaucracies of the Church. In effect, they were the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Defense, and the Attorney General AND Supreme Court (in one package) under a President with absolute power . . . and a lobotomy. That’s actually a little unfair to the current Grand Vicar, but not a lot, and the fault in that instance belongs to Trynair, yet it was actually a defensive maneuver on his part.

What may not yet be fully evident in the books to date (but should be clear at least by the end of FOUNDATION) is that the votes were cooked when Clyntahn was selected as Grand Inquisitor, and the guy who handled the tactical details of the ballot box stuffiing was our good friend Rayno . . . which has something to do with his present position. The true winner of the election (though no one actually knows this in the books) was Samyl Wylsyn, which is one reason for Clyntahn’s pathological hatred for the entire family. This was something like the equivalent of Heinrich Himmler taking over the SS, except that when Himmler first took over the SS, it was a very small cadre within the SA whereas the Inquisition was the SS at the height of its power when Clyntahn was “elected.”

The Inquisition was already corrupt (one reason Wylsyn was running for the Grand Inquisitorship; he wanted to reform the abuses he saw), which had a lot to do with how the election could be manipulated in Clyntahn’s favor, but Clyntahn took it to a whole new level. He took a corrupt institution (corrupt in the sense of individual abuse of power and a steadily increasing tendency towards arbitrary decision making, bribe-taking, and the use of the iron fist to suppress dissent and/or resistance to that power abuse) and gave it dynamic new leadership which took it in the direction of his own particular brand of intolerant zealotry. I’m not saying he completely created the “new” Inquisition in his own image or that the “old” Inquisition was somehow benign or “kinder and gentler.” What I’m saying is that the Inquisition (like the Church hierarchy as a whole) had been gradually slipping into a more decadent, power-and-wealth-loving, corrupt stew of political infighting and self-seeking cliques for a couple of hundred years and, in Clyntahn, the process met one of its poles. He was the consummate insider and manipulator of the decaying system, perfectly suited to seizing control of the most powerful and ubiquitous single arm of the Church, and reshaping it in accordance with his own vision. What made him especially dangerous was that he genuinely saw no divergence at all between his own narrow and intolerant views and the will of God. Worse, the cynical and pragmatic side of him recognized the power of terror as a means of discouraging or crushing opposition. Long before he moved against the Wylsyns’ Circle, he’d already decisively crippled their power base within the Vicarate (the only power base that really mattered) by essentially terrifying all of the “fellow travelers” into getting out of the Inquisition’s line of fire.

Trynair didn’t see Clytahn coming. He EXPECTED Wylsyn to win the election, and when he realized what Clyntahn was up to, he cast about for a counterbalance in order to preserve his own powerbase. Fortunately for him, the Grand Vicar died before Clyntahn had fully consolidated his own power. Trynair’s alliances within the Vicarate were enough for him to secure the election of his candidate, the current incumbent. That consolidated his own powerbase in the political side of the Church’s leadership and policymaking, which —- on the surface —- actually gave him more power, more ability to shape the Church’s agenda (at least in the traditional fashion), than Clynthan possessed. At the same time, however, he was aware that his power was more amorphous and indirect than Clyntahn’s . . . and that Clyntahn was still in the process of consolidating and strengthening HIS powerbase. At that point, Trynair made an alliance with Maigwair in order to bring in the Temple Guard as a balance for the Inquisition’s coercive power. It wasn’t that anyone expected there to be a direct confrontation between the Inquisition and the Guard; it was simply a matter of assembling offsetting powerbases with an eye towards distributing control of the Church and Church policy in accord with the de facto division of power.

In effect, Trynair brokered the Gof4 (only he originally envisioned it as a Group of THREE), reaching an accommodation with Clynthan and Maigwair. Initially, Trynair anticipated that Maigwair would be his ally against Clyntahn; in the event, Maigwair proved a weaker reed than Trynair had hoped and Clyntahn’s influence continued to expand.

The offset for that in Trynair’s eyes was Duchairn, who (because of his control of the Church’s finance) had a huge de facto powerbase of his own. Both Clyntahn and Trynair recognized that they would require Duchairn’s participation if their alliance was going to effectively control Church policy, but Duchairn had acquired his powerbase by being the consummate bureaucrat. Unlike Trynair or Clyntahn, he was a nuts-and-bolts kind of guy, a technocrat. He played the game of personal power, of course, and built his own empire in the Treasury, but he wasn’t remotely in Clyntahn’s league for megalomania or in Trynair’s for Machiavellianism. In a way, Duchairn and Maigwair were both technicians *although Duchairn, frankly, was a far more brilliant and CAPABLE technocrat), while Trynair and Clyntahn were both political operators, which left the Chancellor and the Grand Inquisitor as the poles of power within the Gof4.

Clyntahn, in his competition with Wylsyn, had identified the urge for Reformism (which was still very much below the surface) with his opponent in the race for the Inquisitorship. He hadn’t really identified all the components of the movement, nor did he realize how wide and deeply it had truly spread, but he was aware of its existence. Where Trynair was focused on Siddarmark as a potential (and fairly distant, long-term) secular threat to the Temple Lands (which, bear in mind, were OFFICIALLY secular states themselves), CLYNTAHN was concerned by the Republic’s potential to support Reformism. It wasn’t that there were openly “Reformist” congregations springing up everywhere or any organized movement in that direction, but the Republic’s social and political organization (in his view) LENT themselves to the POSSIBILITY of such movements, and he actually saw signs of drift in that direction in places like Glacierheart. His inability to get his hands around the Republic’s throat by threatening/coopting the aristocracy as the Inquisition did in most of the mainland realms made him automatically suspicious of it, just as the geographic distance between Zion and places like Charis (and the failure to cross-transfer so many of the local clergy, as was done in the continental dioceses) made him hugely suspicious of Reformist sympathies in those distant realms. Charis’ wealth and hugely disproportionate and ubiquitous influence (because of its merchant marine and the power of its navy) made it even more visible on his radar screen than the Republic and only reinforced his suspicion of and hostility towards Charis. (Rayno was Clyntahn’s man on the disputed Hanth succession, and the decision that panel handed down was really directed by Clyntahn as a move against Harahld BECAUSE of that suspicion and hostility).

Clyntahn is constitutionally incapable of recognizing what is driving the Reformist movement completely irrespective of anything having to do with Saint Zhernau’s journal. In his eyes, anyone who disagrees with him, who questions any aspect of HIS interpretation of the Holy Writ, or who dares to object to his harsh and arbitrary policies, is an enemy of God Himself. There is no distinction in his mind between himself and God; therefore, anyone who disputes his judgment (or MIGHT dispute his judgment) is a vile, willing servant of Shan-wei and deserves whatever happens to him. As Merlin himself observes, however, Clyntahn’s instincts did NOT play him false in Charis’ case: Harahld and Staynair WERE systematically working to undermine the Church of God Awaiting, to discredit the Archangels, and to embrace all the “heresies” of the historical Shan-wei. Clyntahn may have become suspicious for all the wrong reasons in Charis’ case, but his suspicions were fully justified.

From the perspective of Trynair and (especially) Duchairn, Clyntahn’s “Final Solution to the Charisian Problem” came out of left field and the decision was almost casually reached; from Clyntahn’s perspective, it was anything but casual. There was a reason he assigned his own agent to Archbishop Erayk’s staff, just as there was a reason for the way in which he presented that agent’s findings to the other three members of the Gof4. He wanted to do exactly what he accomplished: to panic them into accepting his deliberate destruction of Charis. And he intended that destruction to be just as spectacular and complete as the Charisians think he did, both to punish them for daring to rebel against him (oh, and against God, too, of course) AND to serve as a grim warning and horrible example to anyone else (like Siddarmark) who might be considering a similarly Reformist approach.

One point that needs to be understood, however, is that he did NOT react out of fear or out of any doubt of his own power or the coercive authority of the Inquisition and Mother Church. He was absolutely confident of his ability to destroy Charis, or he would never have acted in the first place, and the other members of the Gof4 were equally confident of their ability to destroy the kingdom and all its works. He managed to frighten them with the potential of what might happen if they didn’t act, and he rushed them into agreeing with his proposed plan of action (largely because he was the only one of them who brought a plan of action to the meeting, since he was the only one who knew how he intended to shape and push the discussion), but not a single one of them doubted for a moment that they would succeed in their efforts. And none of them really considered the implications for the people of Charis, either. It was a theoretical discussion and decision for them in many respects because they had become so divorced from the day-to-day realities of the Church at the level of local kingdoms and congregations as a result of their high office. That divorce is, in fact, the thing for which Duchairn is unable to forgive himself now that he has experienced a genuine regeneration of his personal faith.

As a consequence of their failure to destroy Charis as planned, the Church of God Awaiting and the Gof4 now face a battle for their very existence. By eliminating the Reformist Circle in Zion —- and using the hideous example of what happens to anyone who questions Clyntahn to completely cow the surviving vicars —- the Gof4 has consolidated its control over the Church. There is no trace of any sort of organized resistance to their policies in the rest of the Vicarate . . . and no new vicars have been named to replace those who were executed for “heresy.” No “new blood” which might dispute the Gof4’s policies (or grow the courage to resist them) is being permitted into the Vicarate, and every present vicar knows that he will survive only so long as Clyntahn is convinced that he is not a threat. The Gof4’s control in Zion is absolute at this point, and the other three members are finding it increasingly difficult to restrain Clyntahn, whose control of the Inquisition in time of jihad has made him unquestionably first among equals. Yet even as that happens, all three of the others are aware (though they aren’t all necessarily to admit it to themselves) that it is Clyntahn and his policies which have created the very real and very deadly threat to their existence and the Church embodied not simply in the Empire of Charis but in increasing Reformist sentiment in OTHER realms.

Where the Gof4’s internal dynamic will go is not (of course) something I’m going to tell you at this point, but that’s where it came from in the beginning and the reason for the actions it’s already taken.

All right — you guys asked for it, so don’t blame ME for the length of this! And BTW, the reason I’m using all caps for emphasis rather than ital isn’t to shout at you but because I composed this off-forum and didn’t want to hunt through it to find and reformat each emphasized word.

We haven’t discussed how Constitutional law works in Charis because it hasn’t really been important to the story. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been important to what’s happening (or to the characters in their off-screen lives), but that the actual mechanisms haven’t been crucial to the results the reader has had to see.

Unlike most medieval Terran monarchies, Charis has a written constitution which was promulgated by the House of Ahrmahk after Saint Zherneau’s journal had revealed the truth about the “Archangels.” It was intended to provide a basis which might later be transitioned into a constitutional monarchy (in our present sense of the term) while conserving the power of the Crown at the moment, and so it favors the Crown rather heavily over Parliament.

Essentially, the Crown can rule by decree, and its decrees need not be approved by Parliament to take effect. HOWEVER, Parliament can by a majority vote of both houses repeal and negate any royal decree within a half-year of its promulgation; after that, it requires a two-thirds super-majority of both houses to repeal a decree. This means (in effect) that Parliament has a collective veto power over the Crown, although the process is complicated enough that it’s not real likely to happen (especially since a smart monarch will withdraw or modify a decree which is generating that much resistance before Parliament gets into the habit of overruling him).

The Crown also controls fiscal policy and establishes tax law and Parliament cannot repeal Crown policy (except by a majority vote of both houses, as described above), but Parliament does have the power to ammend existing tax law. Because the Crown can (and normally does) rule by decree which (in effect) simply has to be approved by a majority of one house to remain law, the Council, as the Crown’s advisor and executor, is of special importance under the Charisian Constitution. The House of Commons’ biggest stick is that it has the responsibility of approving (and the right to recall) all members of the Council. The Crown determines which councilor holds which “portfolio” (including the First Councilor’s position), but the Commons (by majority vote) can control who SITS on the Council. The House of Lords doesn’t get to confirm members of the council, but it CAN move to remove a councilor. The process is sort of a mirror image of the US Constitution’s impeachment process (except that it can be exercised for any reason, not for specifically enumerated offenses against the Constitution) in that a simple majority of the Lords can call for a councilor’s removal but that the actual removal must be confirmed by a two-thirds majority of the Commons.

The House of Lords’ biggest stick is that it serves as the kingdom’s supreme court in constitutional matters (the King’s Bench is the supreme court in criminal matters, which has the potential to lead to a clash of authorities), which means that the Lords are the final determiners of what the Constitution actually says. In addition, the Lords must confirm the succession to the throne. The Constitution doesn’t specifically address the question of inheritance, but Charisian tradition enshrines male primogeniture. The Constitution DOES, however, provide that the House of Lords can refuse to accept the “proper” heir and move further down the line of succession. The Lords are required to approve an heir as soon as a new monarch assumes the throne, however. This means that the succession is always secured, by act of Parliament, without room for a disputed succession in the event that a monarch dies childless. The Lords can alter the succession at any time, but that requires a two-thirds vote rather than a simple majority, and they’d probably better be sure they REALLY want to get into a pissing contest with the Crown if they decide to do so without a damned good reason.

The Crown determines foreign policy and negotiates treaties and alliances, but any formal treaty must be approved by both houses of Parliament. (This means that Cayleb’s proposal of marriage required parliamentary consent. As one may have noticed from reading the books, however, Cayleb didn’t say a word to Parliament until he announced what was effectively a fait accompli. That reflected not simply the absolute necessity of keeping the negotiations coompletely secret until they were concluded but also the fact that he knew damned well Parliament would accept it, in no small part because he had discussed it intensively with the critical members of his council (who tend to keep in touch with little things like the mood of Parliament). In addition, of course, there was the minor fact that it was a matter of national survival . . . and that no one in his right mind wanted to piss Cayleb off at that point in his reign.)

The Crown also makes and determines military policy (which includes procurement fiscal policy covering —- very specifically —- shipbuilding). The monarch is also commander-in-chief, and the military’s oaths are sworn to the CROWN not the CONSTITUTION. (A minor point, after all . . . which the Crown made darned sure was enshrined UNDER the Constitution. ) The Crown does NOT require a formal declaration of war from Parliament to commit the kingdom’s military forces, but Parliament can use its power to amend tax policy to starve the Crown of funds for military operations of which it does not approve. This is a time-consuming process, however, and leaves Parliament without EFFECTIVE control of the kingdom’s military operations. Nor has it ever actually been employed in Charisian history.

Parliament does have the power to initiate legislation. ALL bills must originate in the House of Commons but are amendable (and must be approved) by both houses. However, no act of Parliament can become law without the Crown’s assent, and Parliament does NOT have the power to override the Crown. (It would always be theoretically possible for Parliament and the Crown to get into the equivalent of a series of nuclear exchanges with both sides effectively vetoing the other side —- in Parliament’s case by repealing existing Crown decrees and “amending” tax laws out of existence before allowing them to pass —- until one side or the other gives up. This has not happened in Charisian history to date, however.)

There is a formal procedure for amending the Constitution. Amendments can be proposed by Parliament (simple majority of both houses) or by the Crown. To become law, an amendment must be approved by a two-thirds majority of both houses AND the Crown. An amendment can become law OVER the Crown’s objections only if it can be approved by a two-thirds majority of both houses in successive parliamentary sessions. The sessions in question need not be IMMEDIATELY successive to one another; that is, there is no limit on how much time can pass between the two parliaments which ultimately approve the amendment.

As far as the succession in Old Charis is concerned, the Lords had confirmed the succession before Haarahld’s death as : Cayleb, Zhan, Zhanayt. When Cayleb became king, the succession became Zhan, Zhanayt, Rayjhis Ahrmak (minor Duke of Tirian). The big problem with the succession at this point (of course) was that ALL the immediate heirs were minors, but Zhanayt wasn’t enough older than Zhan (in Parliament’s view) to alter the succession, and Parliament was not prepared to move beyond Cayleb’s immediate family to name a more distant adult relative as his heir although it COULD in theory have done so. Cayleb and his council had named Gray Harbor as his regent in the case of his death in order to provide the greatest possible ciontinuity iin the case of a minor reign.

Under the Constitution, Parliament must meet yearly and must sit for a minimum of four months a year. There is no maximum length on a session of Parliament, and the Crown cannot dissolve it against its will until it has sat for its minimum of four months in a year. In other words, the monarch can’t simply dismiss Parliament and rule by unchecked decree the way Charles I attempted to do in England and the French kings after Louis XIII did regularly up to the Revolution. Members of the House of Commons are elected for three year terms, NOT for the duration of a single Parliament, and elections are staggered, with one-third of the boroughs holding elections each year. The Crown is specifically prohibited under the Constitution from arresting or imprisoning any member of Parliament for any offense during sessions of the Parliament in which he serves. Even MPs or Lords who have been imprisoned for some other offense between sessions must be released to take their seats during the current session.

The Church, under the original Constitution, holds ultimate veto power over any purely political act in that the Church through the local archbishop and/or his intendant may rule any act is not in accord with God’s law as revealed through the Archangels. (This is the case for any Safeholdian rwealm, not simply Charis.) The Church also holds ultimate authority over the confirmation of any title of nobility, since the succession cannot become legal without the Church’s attestation. (This was the reason the Church had final authority in the disputed succession in Hanth.) It has historically been very rare for the Church to have to intervene that “crudely” in domestic political affairs because the Church is guaranteed a large percentage of the seats in the House of Lords in every Charisian kingdom and —- in most Charisian kingdoms —- the Lords dominate the Commons. (This was one reason the Chrch was prepared to whack Chisholm as soon as Charis was out of the way even before Sharley married Cayleb; Chisholm was giving the Commons too much power. The situation in Harchong, where a reactionary nobility is completely loyal to the Church, is the Temple’s ideal political equation. This, of course, is another reason the Church is unhappy with the Republic, where the Lord Protectorship is elective and the legislative authority lies in the hands of an elective senate rather than an hereditary nobility which can be seduced/coopted into serving the Church’s ends out of self interest.)

As part of the marriage contract with Sharleyan, Zhan (who had already been confirmed by Parliament as heir to Old Charis until Cayleb produced a child) was made their joint heir because Sharleyan HAD no siblings or children. Indeed, the succession question in Chisholm was a bit vague, and Sharleyan’s need to produce an heir (or to do an Elizabeth I tap dance about who she might marry as a diplomatic weapon) was a major policy issue for her and her council. The agreement to make Zhan their joint heir satisfied existing Charisian law and clarified the succession for Chisholm (and, of course, the Empire as a whole), while the provision that either partner became joint heir to both thrones in the event one of them died (and the relative youth of both of them, with the promise that additional joint heirs could —- and would —- be produced) went a long way towards quashing any lingering temptation to depose Sharley among the Chisholmian peers. It also solved the problem of minor heirs in Charis, since it provided Sharleyan (an adult and obviously VERY competent monarch in her own riight) as Cayleb’s heir if anything happened to him. When Crown Princess Alahna was born, she AUTOMATICALLY became first in line to the imperial crown because of the specification of the marriage contract (she is the ONLY “heir of their joint bodies” in existence), although Zhan remains next in line behind her. The Imperial Constitution, moreover, provides that the heir to the crown is the FIRSTBORN child, regardless of gender, since they could scarcely exclude female heirs with Sharleyan specifically named to succeed Cayleb if he should pre-decease her.

The Imperial Constitution differs from the Old Charisian constitution in several other minor particulars but follows it in general. The Chisholmian “constitution” was largely unwritten, with the power of the Crown waxing and waning (which was the problem Sharleyan’s father had in recouping the Crown’s power). Sharleyan, however, was a VERY strong monarch, which meant she and Green Mountain had near absolute power when Cayleb’s proposal arrived (and explains the reason she was able to announce to her Parliament that they WERE going to do things her way). By signing onto the imperial Constitution, she has in effect accepted a de jure limitation of her powers, although in a de facto sense she and Cayleb remain very nearly absolute monarchs under the current conditions.

David is currently anticipating that the Safehold series will be a minimum of nine books. And, he is currently planning for the humans of Safehold to run back into the Gbaba at some point…but that’s all the details I could squeeze out of him!

David is currently writing one per year. The next Safehold release is titled Hell’s Foundations Quiver , with the release in November of 2015.

We would like to take this chance to thank Joe Buckley (thefifthimperium.com), one of David’s most tireless fans, for his many long hours of effort that have helped us bring this section to you. Joe has chronicled David’s responses on Baen’s Bar for years, and it is because of Joe’s hard work and organization that we are able to bring you these thoughts and answers about the many worlds of Weber.

I promise I wasn’t really smoking any prohibited substances when this came to me. But, I thought, what the heck, if Heinlein could do it, so can I. 

I wonder if it’s fanfic when the author does it?

******************************************

Despair reigned on HMS Shan-wei’s flag deck as the Gbaba fleet closed in. They’d come so close, Admiral Nimue Howsmyn thought bleakly. But not close enough. Humanity’s resurgent technology was good enough to defeat the Gbaba this time around . . . or would have been, if only the Terran Federation of Safehold had been granted another fifty years to expand its industrial base.

What had given them away, she wondered? The scout ships they’d deployed had been the stealthiest vessels ever built; even human sensors, which were demonstrably at least two hundred percent better than the Gbaba’s, found them almost impossible to detect or hold at ranges above twelve light-seconds. Besides, none of them had returned directly to Safehold or any of its half-dozen daughter colonies. All of them had deployed from and returned to the satellite bases at least seventy-five light years from the nearest inhabited system. Surely the Gbaba couldn’t have tracked them back to their base and then tracked one of the courier vessels here without someone seeing them at it!

But the how didn’t really matter. What mattered was the result, and the result was over ninety-three thousand Gbaba warships closing in on what was still the most heavily populated human star system in existence. With Safehold crushed, her colonies could not long withstand the hurricane coming for them.

Howsmyn looked at the display, showing the rest of her fleet. Nine thousand superdreadnoughts had seemed like overkill to some members of Parliament, given the fact that the Gbaba couldn’t possibly know where to find them. Now they were far too frail a shield, but they were all she had, and if her species was about to die after all, they would not perish without a fight!

“Deploy and spot the missiles,” she ordered.

“Deploying the missiles, aye, Ma’am,” Commodore Cayleb Baytz, her chief of staff replied, hiding his own despair under the crispness of professionalism.

“We’ll hit them with the missiles, then close for an energy engagement,” Nimue continued. “From what our scouts have picked up, their shields will never stand the sort of close range pounding we can hand out.”

“That is undoubtedly true, Admiral,” the melodious voice of Shan-wei’s AI replied. “Unfortunately, while our shields are almost twice as resilient as theirs, they will be bringing approximately four-point-six times the same destructive energy to bear, despite the individual inferiority of their energy weapons.”

“The best we can do is the best we can do, Owl,” Howsmyn replied, and actually managed a smile. “You know, I sometimes wondered how Great Granddad felt fighting the Group of Four. Now I know, and I don’t like it.”

“None of us do,” Captain Merlin Athrawes, Howsmyn’s flag captain said. “Owl and I were there, and neither of us ever really thought we’d be facing this.” He shook his head, sapphire eyes hard, expression grim. “This isn’t what any of us wanted, but it’s what we have. At least we’ll make the bastards work for it, and there’s always Ark II. We buried the twelve colonies so deep and with enough of a tech starting point the Gbaba will never find them in time.” His smile was fleeting but harder than battle steel. “Even the Gbaba may figure out they need to look for them this time, but it would take them fifty years to reach the closest one in direct flight, without any delay to scout at all. They’ll never find Kobol and the others before the colonial warriors are ready for them!”

“I hope you’re right,” Howsmyn replied. “On the other hand, that’s what we thought after you and the rest of the First Circle kicked the Church’s ass right here on Safehold. I wish I could be as confident as you seem to be.”

“So do I,” Merlin replied softly. “So do I.”

* * * * * * * * * *

The Gbaba armada continued to close, and Admiral Howsmyn felt a fresh frisson of despair run through her as a second, equally large fleet appeared on the heels of the first.

Merlin damned well better be right about Ark II, she thought grimly, or this really is going to be humanity’s last dance.

“Get me the Emperor,” she told her communications officer quietly.

“Yes, Ma’am.”

A minute passed, then two. And then, a face appeared on Howsmyn’s com display. Hektor Nahrmahn Cayleb Maikel Ahrmahk, Emperor Hektor II of the Terran Federation of Safehold, looked back at her, his eyes dark.

“Nimue,” he said.

“It’s looking even worse than we thought, Your Majesty,” she said, her tone more formal than it usually was, even in an official setting, when she spoke to the man she’d known since childhood. “Again, I strongly urge you to evacuate. There’s still time to get you away on one of the stealthed transports, and the Ark II colonies will need you.”

“The colonies have Irys and the children,” Emperor Hektor replied flatly. “And my house and I have a responsibility here. I’m not leaving. Here I stand, Nimue.”

The motto of the House of Ahrmahk came out like unyielding steel.

“Hektor,” Howsmyn said, her eyes flipping back up from the com to the tactical display as the leading Gbaba ships spawned literally hundreds of thousands of fighters, “please. This isn’t your fault. There’s no need or reason for you to stay. I promise your subjects here will be defended to the very end. Please evacuate.”

“No,” he said softly in that same iron voice.

“But —” she began.

“Status change!” someone announced. “Admiral, we have another hyper emergence behind Bogey One and Bogey Two. Designate Bogey Three. CIC estimates —” The voice broke off for a moment, then resumed in something closer to a whisper. “CIC makes Bogey Three as five hundred point sources, Ma’am . . . but that can’t be right.”

“Why not?” Howsmyn snapped.

“Because of the mass curve, Ma’am.” The Tactical rating’s face was white. “According to the hyper footprint, Bogey Three masses almost four hundred Safehold Masses.”

Howsmyn blinked. Five hundred additional Gbaba warships could make no difference at all to the odds she and her hugely outnumbered defenders faced. But four hundred Safehold masses? Nothing the old Federation or their own scouts had ever detected could have prepared her for that. Warships that individually massed eighty percent as much as her home world?!

How could we have underestimated them so terribly? she wondered numbly. It’s not possible! But —

Except for the minor fact that it obviously was possible, she heard her own voice telling her inside her frozen brain.

“Bogey Three is closing to rendezvous with Bogey Two,” Tracking told her. Then there was another pause. “Admiral,” the rating continued very carefully, “Bogey Three is moving at almost seventy percent of light-speed.”

“What?!” Howsmyn spun her command chair around. “They’d have to have an acceleration rate of —”

“Admiral,” the rating looked up to meet her eyes, and his own were almost desperate, “they didn’t accelerate. As far as we can tell, they went instantaneously from a closing velocity of less than five thousand KPS to one of almost two hundred and ten thousand KPS!”

Howsmyn bit her tongue before the word “impossible” could escape her, then turned her command chair back to her display with a sense of utter futility. If these new Gbaba behemoths were capable of that sort of performance, her missiles wouldn’t be able to catch up with them, far less her warships. They were going to —

“Admiral! Bogey Three’s just opened fire on Bogey Two!”

Howsmyn half rose from her chair as the tactical display updated itself emotionlessly. Explosions — huge explosions! — ripped through Bogey Two’s solid phalanx of superdreadnought. Warheads, their yields measured in thousands of megatons, blew even the mightiest ships into incandescent gas. And something even stranger was happening . . .

“Those missiles are coming in through hyper-space!” she heard her own voice say.

“That is correct,” Owl responded. “Not only that, Admiral, but in addition to the high-yield antimatter explosions we are detecting, it would appear that Bogey Three is employing some munition which creates small, localized black holes. Many of those ships are being literally ripped apart by immensely powerful, short duration gravity fields.”

“But —”

“Communications request!” someone snapped. “Admiral, we have an incoming communications request!”

“Put it on my display!”

An instant later, a woman’s face appeared on Howsmyn’s display. She was strikingly attractive, with hair as dark black as Empress Irys’ own, and ebon eyes . . . and Nimue Howsmyn had never seen her in her life.

“Admiral Nimue Howsmyn,” she said, surprised by the crispness of her own tone.

“Senior Fleet Admiral Ninhursag MacIntyre,” the woman on her display replied, “commanding officer Third Fleet. I apologize for my late arrival, but we hadn’t realized we were pushing the Achuultani in your direction.”

“Achuultani?” Howsmyn repeated blankly.

“I believe you call this universe’s version of them the ‘Gbaba,’” the “senior fleet admiral” replied, as reasonably as if a single thing she was saying actually made sense. “The Fifth Imperium’s been hunting them down for quite some time now. Ever since we discovered that their master computer had perfected a transtemporal drive.”

Howsmyn sagged back in her command chair, and the woman named MacIntyre smiled crookedly.

“Sorry. I forget how fast this comes at people.”

“How fast what comes at people?” Howsmyn asked.

“All of it. For the moment, though, we have an Achuultani — excuse me, a Gbaba fleet to deal with. And after that, we’ll have to track them back to their central nest place and deal with that, too. Fortunately, I think we brought along enough firepower.”

“Enough firepower?” Howsmyn parroted, watching as the Gbaba fleet which had been called Bogey Two disintegrated like a tide-washed sand castle before her eyes. “Shan-wei! What do you call those things?!”

“These?” MacIntyre smiled again. “These are Dahak IV-class planetoids, but General Bahnakson and Admiral DeVries will be bringing up the troop transports as soon as we’ve dealt with this little infestation. I think you’ll be impressed by how many troops a Tomanāk-class transport can land. And I don’t think your ‘Gbaba’ are going to like it very much when a Mark XLVI Bolo brigade starts rolling, either. Now, if you’ll excuse me for a mi