Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington II

[Batman]

Discounting the BBs Manticore actually had a marginal advantage in hulls (1621 vs 1570) with 71% the tonnage (2318.6 Mt vs 3243.9)
With the BBs it was 83% the hulls (1621 vs 1944) and ~50% the tonnage (2318.66Mt vs 4675.5).

[Simon_Jester]

I don't think the battleships can be entirely discounted. They play a huge role in blunting the effectiveness of Manticore's (informed) traditional raiding strategies (which, honestly, I think were originally devised by admirals who didn't seriously expect to ever have to fight a peer competitor).

[StarSword]

Yeah, but the point is that thanks to its little accident of galactic geography Manticore can afford to fund a way larger military than anybody in local space except the Andies and the Peeps, and both of those are empires comprising dozens to hundreds of inhabited systems. IIRC most one-system polities are more like the pre-Alliance GSN in fleet size, albeit with a better starting tech base. So, I'm just wondering whether, in those one-system polities that like Manticore have strong aristocratic traditions, but unlike Manticore don't have 1600+ ships to man, nepotism and family influence accounts for a significantly higher percentage of the officer corps.

[Simon_Jester]

Very probably. Come to think of it, I'm remembering David Drake's story, set in the Honorverse as part of the first anthology. That ship from the Melungeon "navy" is a pretty good example of a horrible, nepotism-riddled mess from a horribly aristocrat-riddled society.

[Batman]

Given that Manticore's hopelessly bloated (for a single-system polity) Navy apparently had its fair share of 'I'm the son of a Duke, that's why' officers in positions they were hopelessly unqualified to fill it's pretty much inevitable that in Navies with similar (or worse) aristocratic traditions but far fewer hulls to spread those nincompoops across the percentage of that happening would be far higher.

[Ahriman238]

On the other hand, the Committee of Public Safety didn't trust the military to ride herd on its own. That meant the people who passed ultimate judgment upon its actions, by and large, had no naval experience . . . and that most people who did have that experience were prepared to keep their mouths shut unless someone screwed up royally. It should be possible to come up with the right double talk, especially with Jourdain's covert assistance.

Sometimes there are good aspects to having to convince only amateurs that you were justified in chasing spurious sensor ghosts. Of course, in the old days there weren't such steep consequences associated with Wasting the People's Resources.

The ship had once been a Trianon Combine-flag vessel. The Combine was only a single-system protectorate of the Silesian Confederacy. It had no navy—the Confederacy's central government was leery about providing prospective secessionists with warships—and it was unlikely anyone was looking out for its commerce. Which might explain what had happened to the hulk which had once been TCMS Erewhon.

A lot of semi-honest governments don't get naval resources for fear of arming secessionists. The Sillies fear any officer competent and successful enough to carve out a mini-empire or seize power back home, sort of like 'Foundation and Empire.'

Also, a Trianon freighter is named Erewhon, like a certain planet that is a Manticore Alliance member. Don't worry if they sound unfamiliar, they don't really get the spotlight until the spin-off books and post-war politics.

Whoever had hit Erewhon had been unlucky in their target selection. According to the manifest in her computers, the ship had been inbound to pick up a cargo from Central, Arendscheldt's sole inhabited world, and she'd been running light, with little in her holds but heavy machinery for Central's mines. Loot like that was low in value, and the raiders' fire had crippled Erewhon's hyper generator. There'd been no way to take the ship with them, and it seemed they'd had too little cargo capacity to transship such mass-intensive plunder. But they appeared to have found a way to compensate themselves for their loss, he thought with cold savagery, and made himself look at the bodies once more.

Every male member of the crew had been marched into the gym and shot. It looked like several had been tortured, first, but it was hard to be sure, for their bodies lay in ragged rows where they'd been mowed down with pulser fire, and the hyper-velocity darts had turned their corpses into so many kilos of torn and mangled meat. But they'd been luckier than their female crewmates. The forensic teams had already compiled their records of mass rape and brutality, and when their murderers were done with them, they'd shot each woman in the head before they left.

All but one. One woman was untouched, her body still dressed in the uniform of Erewhon's captain. She'd been handcuffed to an exercise machine where she could see every unspeakable thing the raiders did to her crew, and when they were done, they'd simply walked away and left her there . . . then cut the power and dumped the air.

Legally, pirates are in hostis generis: enemies of all mankind. Perhaps the last real outlaws, in that they enjoy none of the protections of law. Even countries without a death penalty kill pirates, because as far as society is concerned pirates are no longer human, they are rabid animals that need to be put down for the safety of all. Scenes like this are a big reason why, with little risk of intervention pirates routinely engage in the worst depravity and barbarity imaginable. I've been told that a person only needs to see the aftermath of a pirate attack once, and he will never again question the need to hunt down and exterminate every last pirate on the face of the earth. I wouldn't know from experience though.

Well, that's the real world, 21st Century Earth. David Weber seems to share this opinion of pirates as shown in this and other encounters.

And on the other hand, people love pirates, They dress up as pirates, watch movies about them etc.

"Given Citizen Admiral Giscard's other resources, Sir, I believe he can dispense with our services for the next few weeks. In the meantime, we know there's someone out here who deliberately tortured and butchered an entire crew. I don't know about you, Sir, but I want that bastard. I want him dead, and I want him to know who's killing him, and I believe the Citizen Admiral and Commissioner Pritchart would share that ambition."

Jourdain's eyes flickered at that. Eloise Pritchart, Javier Giscard's people's commissioner, was smart, tough-minded, and ambitious. The dark-skinned, platinum-haired woman was also strikingly attractive . . . just as her sister had been. But the Pritcharts had been Dolists, living in DuQuesne Tower, arguably the worst of the Haven System's housing units, and one dark night a youth gang had cornered Estelle Pritchart. It was Estelle's brutal death which had driven Eloise into the action teams of the Citizens' Rights Union and from there into the Committee of Public Safety's service, and Jourdain knew as well as Caslet how she would react to an atrocity like this. Yet for all that, what Caslet was suggesting made Jourdain uneasy.

The Peeps are getting into the commerce-raiding game, just not for a couple of months. In the meantime, here's Warner Caslet and his intrepid crew again, scouting for the main force and diverting to look for these pirates.

If everything went perfectly, Citizen Admiral Giscard's Task Force Twenty-Nine was supposed to remain totally covert, but in a burst of all too rare realism, someone back home had realized that was unlikely to be possible in the long run. It hadn't prevented them from ordering Giscard to do it anyway, but it had caused them to consider how the Andermani were likely to react if the Empire realized what was going on. The diplomats and military were divided over how the Andies would respond. The diplomats felt the longstanding Andermani-Manticoran tension over Silesia would keep the Empire from complaining too loudly on the theory that anything which weakened the Star Kingdom gave the Empire a better chance to grab off the entire Confederacy. The military thought that was nonsense. The Andies had to figure they were next on the Republic's list, and, as such, were unlikely to passively accept the extension of the war to their doorstep.

Caslet shared the military's view, though the diplomats had triumphed—in no small part, the citizen commander knew, because of the Committee of Public Safety's lingering distrust of its own navy. But the admirals had been tossed one small bone (which Caslet suspected they would have been just as happy not to have received), and the task force's orders specifically required it to assist Andermani merchantmen against local pirates. Doing so would, of course, make it impossible to remain covert, but the idea, apparently, was that the gesture would convince the Andies the Republic's motives were pure as the snow where they were concerned. Personally, Caslet thought only a severely retarded Andy could think anything of the sort, but the clause about protecting imperial shipping gave him a tiny opening.

More interstellar politics involving the Andies, who regard Haven as a grave but not immediate threat.

Honor sat in her briefing room, a month and a half out of New Berlin, while the squadron orbited the planet Sachsen. Sachsen was one of the Confederacy's sector administration centers, which meant a powerful detachment of the Silesian Navy was home-ported here, and the Andermani Empire had acquired a hundred-year lease on the planet's third moon as the HQ of an IAN naval station. As a consequence, the system was a rare island of safety amid the Confederacy's chaos, but Honor's attention wasn't on Sachsen at the moment.

One hundred year leases, feels like an anachronism though such things happen, I believe, even today.

The problem lay in the new data Commander Hauser had provided. Raiding patterns had shifted since ONI put together her own pre-deployment background brief. Ships had been disappearing in ones and twos in Breslau and the neighboring Posnan Sector, and they still were. But where whoever it was had been snapping up single ships and then pulling out, so that the next half-dozen or so got through safely, now as many as three or even four ships in a row were disappearing—all in the same system. Losses were actually higher now in Posnan than in Breslau, which was what had forced Honor to rethink her original deployment plans, but the new pattern of consecutive losses was almost more worrisome than the total numbers. Consecutive losses meant raiders were hanging around to snatch up more targets, and that was wrong. Raiders shouldn't do that . . . or not, at least, if they were operating in the normal singletons.

No raider captain wanted to stooge around with a prize in tow, because two ships together were more likely to be detected and avoided by other potential prizes. Then there was the manpower problem. Very few pirates carried sufficient crew to man more than two or three—at most four—prize ships unless they captured the original ships' companies and made them operate their ships' systems.

On the other hand, she thought unhappily, they might just be managing to hang onto those crews. Normally, something like half the ships hit by pirates were able to get their personnel away before the ship was actually taken, and some incidents were still following that pattern. But some weren't, and the crews of no less than eighty percent of the Manticoran ships lost in Posnan had vanished with their vessels. That was well above the usual numbers, and it suggested two possibilities, neither pleasant. One, someone was simply blowing away merchant ships, which seemed unlikely, or, two, someone had sufficient ships to use one to run down any evading shuttles or pinnaces while another took the prize into custody.

And that, of course, was the reason for Rafe's concern. If the bad guys had multiple ships working single systems, the opposition might be far tougher than the Admiralty had assumed.

Unusually large and well-organized pirate group, maybe. Which makes Cardones nervous about splitting the squadron. Also normal pirate operating procedure.

"You know what I wish?" Truman asked. Honor looked at her, and the other captain shrugged. "I wish we knew who was funding and supporting the bastards. You know as well as I do that the average piracy ring can afford to lose and replace vessels—and crews—all year long if as much as a third of them manage to take a decent prize on each cruise. Think about it. These eleven ships"—she tapped her screen, where the names of the most recently missing vessels were displayed—"represent an aggregate value of almost twelve billion just for the hulls. You can buy a lot of ships heavy enough to kill merchies for that kind of money."

"According to Commander Hauser, the Andies are working on that, just like ONI," Honor said. "If we can identify whoever's actually disposing of the ships and cargoes, we'll be in a position to demand their local authorities take action against them." Truman made a sound which might charitably have been called a laugh, and Honor shrugged. "I know a lot of the locals will be in bed with the pirates, but if they're too stupid—or dirty—to take at least pro forma action, I suspect Admiral Rabenstrange would be delighted to drop a squadron of the wall in on them to convince them to see reason. We, unfortunately, don't have that sort of firepower. All we can do is pour water on the fire and at least make them replace losses."

Apparently there's some impressive profit margins in piracy, as long as you can find somewhere to dispose of the goods.

"There are two more things we should consider. The first is what we do with anyone we capture. Rafe was out here in Fearless with me, so he already knows my policy, Alice, but you weren't. Have you had a chance to review my memo on it?"

"I have," Truman replied with a sober nod.

"Do you have any problems with it?" Honor asked quietly.

"No, Ma'am." Truman shook her head. "If anything, you're being too lenient."

"Perhaps so," Honor acknowledged, "but we have to at least pretend the Confederacy has a functional government—until they prove otherwise, at any rate. In the meantime, I'll draft formal orders for you, Allen, and Samuel to cover the situation. Remember that we need any information we can get on operational patterns, though. If anybody wants to deal by turning informer, feel free to use your initiative and judgment as to terms."

We'll get to Honor's policy shortly.

"And that brings me to my last point—which is the possibility that these new patterns indicate we aren't looking just at normal raiders, or even privateers. The 'liberation governments' in Psyche and Lutrell are the most likely culprits if someone is operating in squadron strength, but there's one other possibility."

"Peeps," Truman said flatly, and Honor nodded.

"Exactly. Neither ONI nor the Andies have picked up any signs of it, but the Peeps have their own connections out here. For that matter, their embassies are still open, since they aren't at war with Silesia or the Andies. It wouldn't be too hard for them to make a quiet deal with one of the smaller system's governors for clandestine resupply, and their embassies' intelligence on shipping patterns is probably at least as good as ours. If they have managed to slip a raiding squadron in on us, they'd go after our shipping, not anyone else's, and they wouldn't want the crews of the ships they hit getting loose to tell us they're here."

"Unless their purpose is to force the Admiralty to cut loose heavier forces to chase them," Truman pointed out. "That's exactly what they tried to do before they hit you at Yeltsin, Honor, and they succeeded. Why not deliberately let our people 'get away'? Wouldn't it make sense to be obvious if their object is to prove to the Admiralty how seriously our shipping here is threatened?"

"A possibility," Honor agreed, "but I don't think they would. Their operations before Fourth Yeltsin were part of a coordinated plan designed to impose a temporary change in our deployments to suck forces away from a specific objective for a single offensive strike. They could be trying to draw us into false deployments again, but this far from home there's no way they could coordinate with the front. I suspect that means they'd go for a long term, general diversion, not a specific, short term one."

She frowned at the holo, rubbing the tip of her nose, then shrugged.

"On top of that, anything they sent out here would find itself in a world of hurt if we went after it in a big way. Without regular fleet bases of their own—which they don't have—they'd be at a severe disadvantage if we did transfer the forces to go after them. And don't forget the edge our shorter passage times through the Junction give us in information flow and deployment speeds. We'd have an excellent chance of making the transfer, hitting them hard, and getting our light forces back home before the rest of the Peeps even knew we'd made the move. By the same token, I doubt they want to do anything to irritate the Empire. They have to be delighted that the Emperor's sitting things out so far, and open, large scale fleet operations in the Andies' backyard might just cause him to change his mind. Besides, they don't have to operate openly to achieve the same objective. Bottom line, it doesn't matter who's raiding us, just that someone is."

The question of Haven intervention is raised and dealt with in an intelligent manner, unlike the pre-War when they would blithely assume Haven had nothing to do with it, or bend over backwards to not be prejudiced by their natural suspicions. Also raised for the only time in this book is why Haven commerce raiders would act covertly, when being open might shake significant Mantie forces loose from the front.

Of course, the whole thing was an ostentatious affectation in a counter-grav civilization. Towers were far cheaper and more space efficient—it was always easier to build upward than to excavate downward, and servants didn't have to walk half a kilometer from the kitchen to the dining room in a properly designed tower—but Klaus Hauptman's grandfather had decided he wanted a country seat, and a country seat was what he'd built.

Mania for super-towers.

She wasn't beautiful, but, in its own way, that was a statement of power, for she could have afforded the finest biosculpt in the galaxy and had herself turned into a goddess. Stacey Hauptman had chosen not to, and her willingness to settle for the face genetics had given her when she didn't have to said that this was a woman who was comfortable with who and what she was—and who had no need to prove anything to anyone.

Biosculpt (space age plastic surgery) is still only an affectation of the wealthy, who can usually be spotted by their good looks. There's a part in a later spin-off where someone spends ages assuming another person is a snobbish aristocrat because no one is born looking that good, only it turns out he was a genetically-engineered pleasure slave. Awkward, that.

Her father had said "we," and the term was accurate, for Hauptman had learned from his own father's mistakes. Eric Hauptman had belonged to the last pre-prolong generation, and he'd insisted on maintaining direct, personal control of his empire till the day of his death. Klaus had been given some authority, but he'd been only one of many managers, and his father's death had left him woefully unprepared for his responsibilities. Worse, he'd thought he was prepared for them, and his first few years in the CEO's suite had been a roller coaster ride for the cartel.

Klaus Hauptman wasn't prepared to repeat that error, especially since, unlike his father, he could anticipate at least another two T-centuries of vigorous activity. He'd married quite late, but he'd be around for a long, long time, and he'd had no intention of letting Stacey turn into an unproductive drone, on the one hand, or of leaving her to feel excluded and shut out—and untrained—on the other. She was already the Cartel's operations director for Manticore-B, including the enormous asteroid mining activity there, and she'd gotten that position because she'd earned it, not just because she was the boss's daughter.

Unintended effects of prolong. You might expect a different reactions, where he'd assume both he and his daughter would be around for centuries, plenty of time for her to learn the ropes, but I suspect he doesn't like the idea of her lounging around for mush of that time.

The Atlases had minimal cargo capacity, but they were equipped with military-grade compensators and impellers, and they were excellent at getting people from place to place quickly. Because Artemis and Athena had been expressly built for the Silesian run, they'd also been fitted with light missile armaments, and their high speed and ability to defend themselves against run-of-the-mill pirates made them extremely popular with travelers to the Confederacy.

The Hauptman Cartel has at least two armed merchants with military-grade accel/decel.

She punched the destination code and then made herself stand still and consider what she knew. The acuity of merchant-grade sensors varied widely. Any skipper with more than half a brain wanted the best ones he could get if he was going to wander around the Confederacy, but no sensors were any better than the people who manned them, and some merchant spacers tended to be a bit lackadaisical about such things.

Bearing that in mind, whoever was behind Wayfarer probably wouldn't be too surprised if she didn't react immediately to his presence, but he was going to be suspicious if she kept on not reacting for very long. Which meant—

Merchants tend to have good sensors, but poor operators.

Wayfarer was twenty-one light-minutes from the G2 primary of the Walther System, just under fifteen light-years from Libau, stooging along at a mere 11,175 KPS with an accel of only seventy-five gravities. That was on the low side, even for a merchie, but not unheard of for a skipper with worn drive nodes, and Honor had chosen it with malice aforethought. She hadn't wanted anyone to miss her, and such a low velocity was the equivalent of blood in the water. And it seemed to have worked.

Honor's bait of low accel and speed, less than half what the average merchie is capable of.

Wayfarer's starboard sidewall vanished. Seconds later, six small warships spat out of the "cargo bays" on her starboard flank on conventional thrusters. They raced clear of their mother ship's wedge before they brought up their own drives, then hovered there, screened from radar and gravitic detection by her massive shadow, and Honor looked back at her plot.

LAC launch, as it's on the far side the pirates can't see it.

Honor glanced down. The decelerating raider was stern-on to the pickup, giving her a good look up the open rear of his wedge. He was smaller than most destroyers, and he couldn't be very heavily armed if he'd shoehorned a hyper drive and Warshawski sails into that hull. He had a conventional warship's hammerhead ends, however, which suggested at least some chase armament, and whatever he mounted was aimed straight at Wayfarer. She checked Kanehama's intercept solution and nodded mentally. There was no point letting that ship get close enough to shoot through her sidewall—not when she had a perfect up the kilt shot at him.

"On my mark, Jenny," she said quietly, raising her left hand, then keyed her own com with her right hand. "Unknown vessel," she said crisply, "this is Her Majesty's Armed Merchant Cruiser Wayfarer. Cut your drive immediately, or be destroyed!"

She slashed her hand downward as she spoke, and every weapon in Wayfarer's broadside fired as one. Eight massive grasers flashed out, the closest missing the bogey by less than thirty kilometers, and ten equally massive missiles followed. As the single shot the bogey had fired, they were standard nukes, not laser heads, but unlike the bogey's, they detonated at a stand-off range of barely a thousand kilometers, completely bracketing him in their pattern.

The message was abundantly clear, and just to give it added point, six LACs suddenly swooped up over their mother ship, locked their own batteries on the bogey, and lashed him with targeting radar and lidar powerful enough to boil his hull paint to be sure he knew they had.

"Acknowledged, Wayfarer! Acknowledged!" a voice screamed over the com, and the bogey's drive died instantly. "Don't fire! God, please don't fire! We surrender!"

And that was the first fight. Bit anticlimactic, but it's a Q-ship, the entire point is to fight from ambush. Also 30 km is close enough for warning shots with the grasers.

"You and your crew were captured in the act of piracy by the Royal Manticoran Navy," she went on after a moment. "As this vessel's captain, I have full authority under interstellar law to execute every one of you. I advise you to spare me any blustering which might irritate me."

The prisoner flinched again, and Honor felt a trickle of cold, amused approval of her hard case persona leaking from Susan Hibson. She held the pirate with glacial brown eyes until the man nodded jerkily, then let her chair swing back upright.

"Good. The Major here"—she nodded to Hibson—"is going to have a few questions for you and your crew. I suggest you remember that we took your entire database intact, and we'll be analyzing it as well. If I happen to detect any discrepancies between what it says and what you say, I won't like it."

They recovered the pirate's computers and are interrogating them besides. Oh, and interstellar law provides not only for execution of pirates, but doesn't require a trial.

"I'm not going to space them, if that's what you mean—not unless we find something really ugly in their files, anyway."

"I didn't think you would, My Lady. But in that case, what will you do with them?"

"Well," Honor turned her chair to face him and waved for him to sit on the couch, "I think I'll turn them over to the local Silesian authorities. There's no real fleet base here in Walther, but they do maintain a small customs station. They'll have the facilities to deal with them."

"And their ship, My Lady?"

"That we'll probably scuttle after we've vacuumed its computers," she said with a shrug. "It's the only way—short of actually executing them—to be sure they don't get it back."

"Get it back, My Lady? I thought you said you'd hand them over to the authorities."

"I will," Honor said dryly, "but that doesn't necessarily mean they'll stay turned over." LaFollet looked puzzled, and she sighed. "The Confederacy's a sewer, Andrew. Oh, the ordinary people in it are probably as decent as you'll find most places, but what passes for a government is riddled with corruption. I wouldn't be surprised if our gallant pirate has some sort of arrangement with the Walther System's governor."

And ultimately they scuttled the pirate ship to keep the local governor from just turning the pirates loose in it again.

"I found it almost as hard to believe as you do on my first deployment out here, Andrew. But then I captured the same crew twice . . . and they were a darned sight nastier customers than this fellow. I'd handed them over to the local governor and he'd assured me they'd be dealt with; eleven months later, they had a new ship and I caught them looting an Andy freighter in the very same star system."

"Sweet Tester," LaFollet murmured, and shook himself like a dog throwing off water.

"That's one reason I wanted to put the fear of God into that sorry scum." Honor twitched her head at the hatch through which the prisoner had vanished. "If he does get turned loose, I want him to sweat bullets every time he even thinks about going after another merchie. And that's also why I'm going to tell him and his entire crew one more thing before I hand them over."

"What's that, My Lady?" LaFollet asked curiously.

"One free pass is all they get," Honor said grimly. "The next time I see them, every one of them will go out the lock with a pulser dart in his or her head."

LaFollet stared at her, and his face paled at the absolute sincerity in her expression.

"Does that shock you, Andrew?" she asked gently. He hesitated a moment, then nodded, and she sighed sadly. "Well, it bothers me, too," she admitted, "but don't let that fellow's sad sack look fool you. He's a pirate, and pirates aren't glamorous. They're thieves and killers. That other crew I told you about?" She quirked an eyebrow, and LaFollet nodded. "The second time I captured them, they'd just finished killing nineteen people," she said flatly. "Nineteen people whose only 'offense' was to have something they wanted—and who'd have been alive if I'd executed them the first time I got my hands on them." She shook her head, and her eyes were cold as space. "I'll give the locals one chance to deal with their own garbage, Andrew. Corrupt or not, this is their space, and I owe them that much. But one chance is all they get on my watch."

And this is Honor's policy regarding captive pirates, first offense they get turned over to the local government to deal with however is appropriate. But since so many governments are corrupt, if she sees them a second time it's summary execution.

"'Barbarian' may be just a bit strong, Ma'am," Rafe Cardones protested with a grin.

"Nonsense," Honor replied briskly. "Any truly cultivated palate realizes how completely cocoa outclasses coffee as a beverage of choice. Anyone but a barbarian knows that."

"I see." Cardones glanced at his fellow diners, then smiled sweetly. "Tell me, Ma'am, did you see that article in the Landing Times about Her Majesty's favorite coffee blend?"

Honor spluttered into her cocoa, and a soft chorus of laughter went up around the table. She set down her cup and mopped her lips with her napkin, then beetled her eyebrows at her exec.

"Officers who score on their COs have short and grisly careers, Mr. Cardones," she informed him.

It is nice to be reminded that Honor is a human being who can banter with her officers.

"Governor Hagen took the lot of them into custody with thanks, but he seemed just a little eager to see the last of us." Honor toyed with her cocoa cup and glanced at Major Hibson. She and the Marine had delivered their prisoners to the system governor in chains, and she knew Hibson shared her own suspicions. Of course, Susan didn't have the advantage of a treecat. She couldn't have sensed the pirate captain's enormous relief at seeing the governor . . . which wasn't exactly what might have been expected of a man who anticipated being punished.

"He was certainly that, Ma'am," Hibson agreed now. She grimaced. "He seemed a bit put out with your decision to blow up their ship, too. Did you notice?"

"I did, indeed," Honor replied. Governor Hagen had made noises about commissioning the pirate vessel as a customs patrol ship, and "a bit put out" considerably understated his reaction to her refusal to turn it over. She contemplated her cup a moment longer, then shrugged. "Well, it's not the first time, now is it? I'm afraid I can live with the good governor's unhappiness. And at least we're certain we won't see their ship again."

Sketchy governor wanted their ship too, and the pirates were happy to see him which bodes ill.

"The Confederacy's roughly a hundred and five light-years across, with a volume of something like six hundred thousand cubic light-years. Without an effective—and honest—government to run them out of town, raiders can always find someplace to hole up, and most of them are only hired hands, anyway."

"I've never really understood that, Ma'am," Ryder said.

"Historically, piracy's always been subsidized by 'honest merchants,'" Honor explained. "Even back on pre-space Old Earth, 'respectable' business people fronted for pirates, slave traders, drug smugglers, you name it. There's a lot of money in operations like that, and the front people are always harder to get at than their foot soldiers. They go to considerable lengths to be pillars of the community—quite a few of them have been major philanthropists—because that's their first line of defense. It places them above suspicion and lets them pretend they were dupes if an illegal operation does blow up in their faces. Besides, they never get their own hands bloody, and the courts tend to be more lenient with them if they do get caught." She shrugged. "It's disgusting, but that's the way it is. And when the situation's as confused and chaotic as it normally is in Silesia, the opportunities are just too tempting. There's actually a sort of outlaw glamor to piracy out here in many people's eyes, so why shouldn't someone like Governor Hagen take the money as long as someone else does the actual murdering?"

Size of the Confederacy and some of the history/economic realities behind piracy, the cliff notes version of course. Even Weber isn't that big on info-dumps.

The deck came up and slammed him in the face with stunning force. The totally unexpected impact smashed the breath out of him in a gasping whoop of agony, and then something crunched brutally into his ribs.

The impact bounced him off the bulkhead, and instinct tried to curl his body in a protective ball, but he never got the chance. A knee drove into his spine, a powerful hand gripped his hair, and he cried out as it smashed his face into the decksole. He reached up desperately, fighting to grip the hand's wrist, and a cold, ugly laugh cut through his half-stunned brain.

"Well, well, Snotnose!" a voice gloated. "Looks like you did have an accident."

Ah, things got so interesting there, for a moment I forgot all about the bullying subplot.

"What you do is up to you, but Commander Tschu's headed this way from Fusion One, man!"

"Shit!" Steilman whirled to look down the passage Tatsumi had just come up, then wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist and glared down at Aubrey. "We ain't done, Snotnose," he promised. "I'll finish your 'accident' later." Aubrey stared up at him in bloody-mouthed terror, and the power tech grinned viciously, then turned his glare on Tatsumi. "As for you, powder head, I got three people ready to swear I'm in my rack right now, and you didn't see nothing and you didn't hear nothing. This fucking snotnose just fell over his own clumsy feet, didn't he?"

Tatsumi bails out Wandreman this time by pretending an authority figure is coming, but is unwilling to confront Steilman directly or report him

But if Tatsumi wouldn't back up his own version of what had happened, it would be just his word against Steilman's. That might be enough, given the difference in their service records . . . but it might not, too. Besides, if Tatsumi was right and Steilman had a "crowd" to back him up—and the fact that Steilman had known where to ambush Aubrey suggested that he did—even getting the power tech in the brig might not be enough. Everyone on Aubrey's watch knew about his explorations, and he hadn't made any particular effort to keep this evening's plans a secret, but Steilman wasn't on his watch. The only way he could have known was if someone else had told him.

And Aubrey talks himself into not reporting Steilman either, telling the medics he fell.

[Simon_Jester]

Legally, pirates are in hostis generis: enemies of all mankind. Perhaps the last real outlaws, in that they enjoy none of the protections of law. Even countries without a death penalty kill pirates, because as far as society is concerned pirates are no longer human, they are rabid animals that need to be put down for the safety of all. Scenes like this are a big reason why, with little risk of intervention pirates routinely engage in the worst depravity and barbarity imaginable. I've been told that a person only needs to see the aftermath of a pirate attack once, and he will never again question the need to hunt down and exterminate every last pirate on the face of the earth. I wouldn't know from experience though.

Well, that's the real world, 21st Century Earth. David Weber seems to share this opinion of pirates as shown in this and other encounters.

And on the other hand, people love pirates, They dress up as pirates, watch movies about them etc.

I think the catch is that our idea of "pirate" is this almost comically anachronistic thing, it's not real to us.

It also doesn't help that to be perfectly frank, the beginnings of what would become the British Navy and Empire had a lot to do with privateering and piracy, especially directed against the Spanish. Francis Drake and all that, though Drake kept more control over his crew than, say, the pirates we're weeing in Silesia.

As a result, in the collective mythos of the English-speaking world, there's this sort of split personality attitude toward piracy. Sometimes it's good or at least good-ish because you're plundering big boxes of treasure from Spanish galleons and taking them back to jolly old England.

Sometimes it's not good at all, because the pirate in question is the dread pirate (Bartholomew) Roberts, who hung the governor of a Caribbean island and brought trade in the Caribbean to a standstill, killing hundreds if not thousands of sailors.

One hundred year leases, feels like an anachronism though such things happen, I believe, even today.

What makes hundred-year leases happen is usually a sovereign government that is so physically helpless, so shambolic, or so corrupt that it's willing to (more or less permanently) sell off chunks of its territory to a foreign power for cash on the barrelhead.

In other words, the Silesian Confederacy is a textbook example.

Apparently there's some impressive profit margins in piracy, as long as you can find somewhere to dispose of the goods.

It probably helps that they don't really need warship-class ships. The minimum required for a functional 'pirate' would be a fast merchantman (say, built on the same hull as a low-end passenger liner) that is capable of launching pinnaces that are in turn armed with a few nuclear missiles. Comically inadequate for fighting 'real warships' in the Honorverse, but more than enough to subdue an unarmed merchantman.

Mania for super-towers.

I wouldn't say mania as such. It's actually a reasonable and interesting architectural choice if you can minimize the social malaise we associate with people living in high-rise buildings today.

With flying cars that can potentially park at any level of the building (so that you don't always have to enter and exit at ground level), it may become a social preference to keep the bulk of the population in towers and preserve the natural surroundings relatively unchanged.

Biosculpt (space age plastic surgery) is still only an affectation of the wealthy, who can usually be spotted by their good looks. There's a part in a later spin-off where someone spends ages assuming another person is a snobbish aristocrat because no one is born looking that good, only it turns out he was a genetically-engineered pleasure slave. Awkward, that.

Well, I don't think it's only an affectation of the wealthy, but it's used on a larger scale by the wealthy certainly.

Unintended effects of prolong. You might expect a different reactions, where he'd assume both he and his daughter would be around for centuries, plenty of time for her to learn the ropes, but I suspect he doesn't like the idea of her lounging around for mush of that time.

Also, like any normal person he's got a strong aversion to anything bad that was a part of his own formative experiences- in this case, having the child shut out of the company's operations. If he were approaching the issue from a blank slate perspective maybe he'd feel differently.

LAC launch, as it's on the far side the pirates can't see it.

I assume this is from relatively long range- so the only thing the pirates can 'see' is gravitic signatures.

And that was the first fight. Bit anticlimactic, but it's a Q-ship, the entire point is to fight from ambush. Also 30 km is close enough for warning shots with the grasers.

Er, by this I assume you mean that the grasers are precise enough that they can 'fire a warning shot' by passing thirty kilometers away from a ship, followed by Honor saying "I didn't have to miss."

Or did you mean something else?

[Ahriman238]

And that was the first fight. Bit anticlimactic, but it's a Q-ship, the entire point is to fight from ambush. Also 30 km is close enough for warning shots with the grasers.

Er, by this I assume you mean that the grasers are precise enough that they can 'fire a warning shot' by passing thirty kilometers away from a ship, followed by Honor saying "I didn't have to miss."

Or did you mean something else?

Partially. With Honorverse weaponry anything within 2,000 miles probably counts as enough of a wakeup call. Then again, with the precision required to actually hit targets at the distances and speeds involved, for all we know Honor could have sent those beams n 30 meters from the pirate's hull.

[Simon_Jester]

At thirty meters she'd have to penetrate their sidewall and an error might result in blowing the target away. At thirty kilometers, she won't miss.

[Batman]

Um no she wouldn't as it was an up-the-kilt shot? Besides, given the size of impeller wedges 30 km might still have need her to penetrate the sidewall in a broadside attack (do we have any information on how if at all wedge size scales with vessel size?)

[Crazedwraith]

So as I mentioned in the book thread in OT. I read Field of Dishonour and Flag In Exile recently and it sort of killed my interest in read much further. Q-ships or no.

Something that did surprise me while reading FoD that I don't think has been touched upon in the thread was when Henke and MacKeon had both been bumped up to Captain J.G and had been assigned a light and heavy cruiser respectively. (i think it was those two to those classes). Up until then I hadn't thought about exactly what that grade was for. Since we'd only ever seen Tankersly, a yard dog with it. Usually its Lt.Cmmdr and Cmmdrs in charge of destroyers, Cmmdrs in Light cruisers. And Captains of the line, in Heavy cruisers and up (all the way to SD if Yu in the Grayson Navy can be appplied to the RMN at all)

But it turns out Capt JG is also used for cruisers. So I guess what you get is partially on your competency and partly just seniority? Like if you a well regarded lt.cmmdr you get a destroyer but you also get one if you're a new or just shit commander or something.

That's also a wide range of ships that rate a full captain of the line as well. But I guess its like the old RN where a post-captain could get anything from a 22 gun sixth rate to a 100+ gun first rate.

Anyhoo, sorry that wasn't as coherent as I thought it was going to be.

[Simon_Jester]

It sounds like a post-captain is unlikely to be assigned anything lighter than a battlecruiser. While there's a big range in size between a battlecruiser and a ship of the wall, the gap between a battlecruiser and a light cruiser is proportionately just as large. So the CL is the 'junior training wheels' ship for officers busy collecting command experience; battlecruisers are what you get in the latter half or third of your career after you've proven yourself.

Besides, in the RMN tradition the battlecruiser is the "normal" ship. The waller is not. Well within the living memory of most senior Manticoran officers, the RMN had a hundred or more battlecruisers, and no more heavy capital ships than could be counted on one's fingers. Toes, too, if one were generous in including the tiny old battleships.

[Ahriman238]

"Good." Caslet nodded, killed the circuit, and crossed to his suit locker. One of the many privileges the Republic's officer corps had been required to give up under the new regime was its stewards, but that had never bothered Caslet particularly, and it certainly didn't bother him now.

The egalitarian Committee has dispensed with the elitist tradition of giving a captain or admiral a personal servant. Of course, for this to happen the Legislaturists had to have them, which isn't really out of character for them, I just can't recall it having been mentioned before one way or another.

"None of their sensors can see through our wedge, Sir. At the moment, all they have to go on are its apparent strength and our active emissions, and Shannon and Engineering have gone to some pains to make both of them look like a merchantman's. We couldn't fool a regular warship for very long if it was suspicious, but these people expect to see a merchie. They should go right on assuming that's what we are until and unless we do something to change their minds or they get a look at our hull. Fortunately, they're well above us, which means they're headed directly towards the roof of our wedge right now. We can't count on that lasting all the way to intercept, but they should give us plenty of excuse to react before then. And if we time it right, the geometry when we finally decide to 'see' them and respond to the threat should keep them from seeing up the rear of our wedge."

"So they won't get that look at our hull," Jourdain said, nodding slowly, and Caslet nodded back.

"That's the idea, Citizen Commissioner. If this is their max acceleration, which seems likely, we've got about a ten-gee edge, but that's not enough unless we can get them in closer. At the moment, their overtake is still so low they could easily evade and get back across the hyper limit before we overhauled if we simply turned and went in pursuit. But if we act like a properly terrified freighter, they should keep coming in—and slowing to board or engage us, as well—until we've got them right where we want them."

Apparently they can pretty credibly use maneuvers that prevent a clear view of the ship through the wedge. Also, most of the space battles in this book involve a ship pretending to be a harmless freighter to set up an ambush. Seriously, we see this three times before the halfway point. Of course, that's the entire point of a Q-ship, but even the Peeps are doing it now.

The raider's overtake velocity was up to almost ten thousand kilometers per second, which seemed excessive to Caslet. Even at the low acceleration Vaubon had so far revealed, a sudden reversal of power on her part would force the raider to overrun her at a relative velocity of over six thousand KPS in fourteen and a half minutes. Assuming the "freighter" survived the overrun, the raider would need another twenty-six minutes just to decelerate to zero relative to its target, by which time the range between them would have opened to nine and a half million kilometers once more, and the pirates would have to chase her down all over again. Of course, that would still be an ultimately losing game for the "freighter," given the higher acceleration the raider could pull, but a gutsy merchant skipper might go for it. Useless as it would probably prove in the long run, he might be able to spin things out long enough for someone else to turn up, and even in the Confederacy, it was possible that someone else might be a warship. The odds against any such happy outcome were literally astronomical, but the fact that the bad guys hadn't allowed for it was one more indication of professional sloppiness.

Pirates reveal their lack of professionalism by keeping too much overtake, so Caslet could theoretically slam the brakes and offer them a choice between straight up blowing his ship to hell in passing or stretching out the chase another couple of hours.

The raider continued to close, and Vaubon let it come. The light cruiser forged steadily towards Sharon's Star, plodding along on a routine approach to turnover, and Caslet and Shannon Foraker watched the pirates sweep nearer and nearer. Thirty-four minutes ticked past, and the range fell to just over seven million kilometers.

-snip-

On the other hand, not even this bunch of yahoos were likely to keep pouring on the accel much longer, particularly since even a merchantman was bound to pick them up in the next million klicks or so. They'd be making their presence known pretty soon, and—

Roughly 6 million km range for even cheap sensors. At least, I assume that's what is meant, since Honor claimed earlier that merchants in particular tend to spring for high-end sensor suites, it's usually the operators that are the problem.

"Ted, hail them—audio only; no visual. Inform them that we're the Andermani merchant ship Ying Kreuger and order them to stand clear."

"Aye, Citizen Commander." Citizen Lieutenant Dutton turned back to his pickup, and Jourdain gave Caslet a mildly puzzled look.

"And just what is this in aid of, Citizen Commander?" he inquired.

"We're inside their missile envelope, Sir," Caslet replied, "but no sane pirate wants to blow his prize up, and even with laser heads, missiles aren't precision weapons. They're mostly for show; he needs to get in close with his energy mounts to be able to threaten us with the sort of damage that could stop us without destroying us outright. Merchant skippers know that, and a gutsy captain—or a stupid one—would at least try to talk his way out of it until they managed to bring him into effective range. It wouldn't do to slip out of our role just yet, and, more to the point, the more vertical separation I can generate before resuming our original course, the sharper the angle will be when our vectors intercept. They'll have to come in from higher 'above' us, and that should keep our wedge between us and their active systems at least a little longer."

More wedge hiding, and because missile lasers are scattershot you have to close to beam range if your intent is to disable a ship. Of course, Caslet himself wants to disable the pirate swooping in on him so he can find out if there are any more where they came from.

No one could see through an active impeller wedge from the outside, anyway, since the effect of a meter-wide band in which local gravity went from zero to almost a hundred thousand MPS2 twisted photons into pretzels. Someone on the inside, who knew the precise strength of the wedge, could use computer compensation to turn mangled emissions back into something comprehensible, but no one on the outside could manage the same trick. Caslet's maneuvers had kept his wedge between his ship and the raider's sensors for reasons which the pirate saw no cause to question, but the bad guys were well within effective energy weapons range now, and he glanced at Foraker.

For the thousandth time you can see out through a wedge but not in. Quoted for the first mention of the physical thickness of a wedge's inclined planes, one meter.

PNS Vaubon stopped being a freighter. Foraker hadn't been able to use any of her active systems without giving the game away, but her passive systems had run a painstaking track on her opponent for almost two hours. She knew exactly where the enemy was, and she also knew that enemy was decelerating towards her at a sharp enough angle to give her an up the kilt shot. Allison MacMurtree rolled Vaubon up on her starboard side with sudden, flashing speed, and as the ship rolled, her port broadside came to bear on the raider and two powerful laser mounts fired as one. Caslet could have fired a broadside three times as heavy, but he wanted that ship to survive . . . and two clean hits with no sidewall interdiction should be more than enough for his purposes.

Lasers are light-speed weapons, and the raider's first warning was the instant both of Foraker's shots scored direct hits on the stern of his ship. His chase armament vanished in an explosion of shattered plating, and the beams of coherent light blew forward into his after impeller ring like demons. Massive power surges bled through his internal systems, blowing equipment like popcorn as the entire after third of his hull was smashed into rubble, and his fusion plant went into emergency shutdown. His impellers died, and he was suddenly unable to maneuver, stern-on to his would-be victim, with neither wedge nor sidewall to interdict Vaubon's fire.

Firing to disable. 6 lasers to a broadside for a Haven Conqueror class CL.

Caslet was waiting in the boat bay gallery when Branscombe's pinnace docked. He folded his hands behind him and stood still, hiding his impatience as the docking tube ran out. The umbilicals engaged, and the tube cycled open. A moment later, Branscombe drifted down it in his battle armor, caught the grab bar, and swung over into Vaubon's internal gravity. It wasn't a simple maneuver in battle armor, and more than one Marine's exoskeletal "muscles" had ripped a grab bar completely off its brackets, but Branscombe made it look easy. He landed on the deck, standing a half-meter taller than usual in his massive armor, and raised his visor.

Power armor is the one thing in the series that Weber never infodumps on (unless it's a later book?) they're just there. We know they make you half a meter taller, are strong enough to rip up metal handles, and effectively immune to normal pulser fire. Not so great against plasma guns and IIRC tri-barrels. In the first book they had some kind of counter-grav jump gear that's never mentioned again.

Sukowski gave a small, bitter smile of understanding. Branscombe's Marines had brought all the surviving pirates across to Vaubon by now, and Caslet had never seen a more psychopathic crop in his life. He'd never really believed in Attila the Hun in starships. By and large, spacers required a certain degree of intelligence, but these people were something else. No doubt they were intelligent, in their own way, but they were also brutal, sadistic scum, and Caslet couldn't imagine how Sukowski and Hurlman had survived as their captives.

Space travel has evolved to the point where you don't have to be a rocket scientist/astronaut math god to fly in space. But you do generally have to be smarter than the average bear to make it as a spacer.

"I got this right after they boarded," he said flatly. "They were . . . angry my people got away from them, and three of them held me down while another sawed my ear off. I think they were going to kill me just because they were pissed off, but they wanted to take their time about it, and Chris got loose from the one holding her somehow. I wasn't much use, but she crippled the bastard with the knife and took three more of them down before they all piled onto her."

-snip-

"Sorry. It's just that what they did to her . . . diverted them from me. They took it out on her, instead." He closed his eyes, and his jaw clenched. "The men were bad enough, but, Jesus, the women! They actually gave the sick bastards advice, like it was all some kind of—"

-snip-

"The only reason we're alive is that we're with the Hauptman Cartel. Mr. Hauptman's agreed to ransom any of his people who fall into pirate hands, and one of their 'officers' came along before they quite killed Chris. God, I never talked so fast in my life! But I managed to convince him we were worth more alive than dead, and he called his animals off. Not that I was sure they'd stay called off. The brother of the bastard who'd sliced my ear off came by the brig the first night and tried to rape Chris again. She was barely even conscious, but that didn't bother him, only I caught him with his back turned and kicked his balls up between his ears. I thought for sure they'd kill us both then, and part of me hoped they would. I must've been out of my head. I was screaming I'd kill anyone who touched her, and the bastard's buddies were screaming that they were going to kill me, and then Chris was on her feet somehow, trying to get at them, and they butt-stroked her with a pulser and I went for the one with the gun, and—"

He broke off, hands shaking violently, and cleared his throat again.

"That's all I remember for a day or two," he said flatly. "When I started tracking again, their 'captain' told me I'd damned well better be right about that ransom, because if I was lying, he was going to give Chris to the crew and make me watch before they spaced us both. But in the meantime, they left us pretty much alone. I think"—he actually managed a ghastly parody of a smile—"they were afraid that if they tried anything else they'd have to kill one or both of their golden geese. At any rate, that's what we were doing in that hell ship, and even a POW camp is going to look like heaven compared to it."

The moral here is that pirates are bad.

"You're going to need more than one ship," Sukowski said grimly. "I never got a chance to look at any of their astrogation data, but they decided I should 'earn my keep' and put me to work in Engineering. They said that since I'd fixed it so they had to man Bonaventure, I could help take up the slack in their ship. They enjoyed the hell out of giving me all the shit jobs, but, frankly, I was glad to have something to do, and they talked in front of me. I kept track of the ship's names they dropped, and as near as I can make out, they've got at least ten of 'em, maybe a few more."

"Ten?" Caslet couldn't keep the surprise out of his voice, and Sukowski smiled bitterly.

"I was surprised, too. I couldn't imagine that anyone would be crazy enough to bankroll maniacs like this, but these aren't 'pirates' at all. What you're dealing with, Citizen Commander, used to be an official squadron of privateers operating out of the Chalice."

"Oh, God," MacMurtree muttered, and Caslet's mouth tightened. Their background brief had covered the Chalice Cluster Uprising and the lunatic who'd launched it. Only a government like the Confederacy's could have let a madman like Andre Warnecke take over a single city, far less an entire cluster with three inhabited planets. Of course, to be fair he'd started out sounding sane enough—until he was in power, anyway. He'd announced his intention to create a republic and hold free and open elections as soon as he'd "provided for the public safety," then put his cronies in charge of internal security and launched a reign of terror which made State Security's purges back home look like a tea party. What had once been NavInt estimated that he'd killed something like three million citizens of the Chalice himself before the inept Confederacy Navy managed to move in and crush his rebellion after over fourteen T-months of trying.

Only a madman like Andrew Warnecke would praise democracy and egalitarianism while carrying out bloody purges in the name of public safety! Isn't that right, Citizen Commissioner? Alright, so I don't think they've been killing their own people by the million in Haven.

"Warnecke's alive?" Caslet gasped, and Sukowski nodded. "But they hanged him," Caslet protested. "We've got copies of the imagery in our database!"

"I know," Sukowski grunted. "His people have copies of it, too, and they laugh their asses off over it. The best I could figure it, the Confeds figured he'd died in the fighting but still wanted to make an 'example' of him, so they faked up the imagery of his hanging. But he's alive, Citizen Commander, and he and his murderers've taken over some outback planet lock, stock, and barrel. I'm not sure where it is, but the locals never had a chance when the squadron came in on them. Now Warnecke's using it as a base of operations until he's ready to mount his 'counter offensive' against the Confederacy."

Gordon's alive?

Also, the People's Republic are far too clever to dummy up film of the 'execution' of an enemy they've presumed dead. Particularly if said enemy was still alive. Man, can you imagine how embarrassing this must be for the Sillies?

"Don't underestimate these people just because they're animals, Sir. Granted, the Confederacy Navy is incompetent, but Warnecke did hold them off for over a T-year—and got himself out when it finally fell apart. The ship we just took was as heavily armed as one of our Bastogne-class destroyers. He may have others even more powerful, and if he swarms us one at a time, he could take out even a battlecruiser with enough of them."

Apparently 10 odd destroyers are a credible threat to even a BC.

"You don't have any idea where this planet they've taken over is, Captain?"

"I'm afraid not, Sir," the Manticoran said heavily. "All I know is that they were working their way back to base."

"That's something," Caslet murmured. "We know where they were a few weeks ago, and we know where they are now. That gives us a general direction, anyway." He scratched his eyebrow. "Were these people operating solo, Captain?"

"They were the whole time we were aboard, but from the scuttlebutt, they expected to meet up with at least two or three other ships fairly soon. I'm not sure where, but there's supposed to be a convoy coming into Posnan sometime in the next month or so, and they figure they've got the muscle to take out the escorts."

So Caslet knows where to go.

"So we ask the crew," Jourdain said, and smiled coldly. "I think if we offer not to shoot the one who tells us where 'Base' is, someone will come forward."

"We can try, Sir," Caslet sighed, "but now that Sukowski's told us who's behind this, something that didn't make much sense to me before is starting to seem a lot more believable." Jourdain looked a question at him, and the citizen commander shrugged. "These people are actually working under operational security. I think that's why the log never refers to their base system by name. It may also explain why the noncommissioned crew doesn't seem to have any idea where it is. Most of their officers had already been detached to handle prize ships, and their astrogator, captain, and exec were all killed when the bridge lost pressure. No one among the survivors seems to know, and what they don't know—"

Oops. Well if these guys are a dictator's military in exile, it makes sense they might have some discipline and security, making them a greater threat than most pirates.

"Schiller," Caslet replied with a smile. "Magyar's well below Schiller, which puts it a good twenty light-years closer to us than Schiller. If it weren't for Sukowski, that would make Magyar seem more likely as these people's next objective, but Schiller's elevation places it closer to Posnan, and if we head straight there, we may get there soon enough to pick off another singleton who can tell us where their base is."

"And if they get there in strength first?" Jourdain asked just a bit frostily.

"I'm not feeling particularly suicidal, Sir," Caslet said mildly. "If they're present in strength, there's no way I'd tangle with them without a very pressing reason. But the other thing that makes Schiller more attractive to me than Magyar is that we have a trade legation there, and the attaché has a dispatch boat. If we pass our information to her, she can use that boat to alert Citizen Admiral Giscard even more quickly than we could."

And so that's the plan, head to Schiller hoping to find another single pirate ship to jump and interrogate while passing on the message to the Admiral that Warnecke is alive and running a large militant group.

Really unfair to have an Andrew Warnecke and Aubrey Wanderman in the same book. Their names are just similar enough for me to transpose the wrong one half the time.

Ginger rocked back on her heels. Her initial suspicion that Tatsumi been part of Aubrey's beating had been blown out the lock by the depth of the SBA's obvious fear, and that same fear sent an icy wind through her bones. Something even uglier than she'd first guessed must be going on here, and she bit her lip. Aubrey didn't want her involved, and Tatsumi seemed genuinely frightened for his very life. Somehow she felt certain the SBA would have told her if only one person was involved. After all, if Tatsumi and Aubrey both testified against him, Navy discipline would come down on whoever it was like a hammer. They wouldn't have to worry about him again . . . which meant they were worrying about someone else. And that suggested . . . .

Oh, back to the bullying subplot. yay. Ginger Lewis is pretty sure she knows what's going on, as does the Doctor who treated Wanderman and the Bosun. But he's sticking to his story and she's only just now figuring there had to be more than one person involved to frighten Andy into silence.

Sally MacBride watched the younger woman stalk out of her office and sighed. As she'd hinted to Ginger, she had a very strong suspicion as to what had happened, and she blamed herself for it. Not that it was all her fault, but she should have run Steilman out of Wayfarer's company the instant she saw his name on the roster. She hadn't, and she wondered how much of that had been pride. She'd kicked him into line once, after all, and she'd been certain she could do it again. For that matter, she was still certain of it . . . she just hadn't counted on what it was likely to cost someone else, and she should have, especially after his original run-in with Wanderman.

She frowned at her blank terminal. She'd kept an eye on Steilman, but he seemed to have developed a greater degree of animal cunning since their previous cruise together. Of course, he was ten T-years older, as well, and somehow he'd managed to survive all those years without landing in the stockade. That should have told her something right there, yet she still couldn't understand how he'd gotten to Wanderman without her knowing about it. Unless Ginger Lewis' suspicions were correct, that was. Most of Wayfarer's company was as good as any MacBride had ever served with, but there was a small group of genuine troublemakers. So far, she and Master at Arms Thomas had managed to keep them in check—or thought they had. Now she had her doubts, and she pursed her lips as she shuffled through her mental index of names and faces.

Coulter, she thought. He was in on it. He and Steilman were both in Engineering. She and Lieutenant Commander Tschu had split them up as best they could, but they were still on the same watch in different sections. That gave them too much time to get their heads together off duty, and it was probable they'd managed to bring in a few more like-minded souls. Elizabeth Showforth, for example. She was running with Steilman, and she was just as bad, in her own way. Then there were Stennis and Illyushin.

MacBride growled to herself. People like Steilman and Showforth sickened her, but they knew how to generate fear, and the inexperience of most of their crewmates would give them more scope for their efforts. Too many of Wayfarer's company were too damned young, without the grit to stand up for themselves. She'd already been picking up rumors of petty thefts and intimidation, but she'd thought it was being held in check and expected the situation to improve as the newbies found their feet. Given the escalation of what had happened to Wanderman, however, it seemed she'd been wrong. And if the youngster wouldn't come forward and admit what had happened, she couldn't take any official action—which would only increase Steilman's stature with his cronies and make the situation still worse.

Sally MacBride didn't like her own conclusions. She knew she could squash Steilman and his bunch like bugs if she had to, but that would mean a full scale investigation. It would include a crew-wide crackdown, and the consequences for morale and the sense of solidarity she'd been nurturing might be extreme. Yet if something wasn't done, the canker coming up from below would have the same effect.

She pondered for another few moments, then nodded. As she'd told Lewis, there was a time not to push . . . but there was also a time to push. Lewis was too new in her grade to do that sort of thing, and MacBride couldn't do it herself without making it too obvious that she was doing so. But there were other people who could make their presence felt.

She punched a code into her com.

"Com Center," a voice said, and she smiled thinly.

"This is the Bosun. I need to see Senior Chief Harkness. Find him and ask him to come to my office, would you?"

The Bosun orders Lewis to drop it, then brings in Horace to try and handle things unofficially. Mostly by befriending Andy and teaching him to fight his own battles. Uh huh. At the point where multiple crewmen are genuinely in fear for their lives, I think we've gone a bit beyond "give the bully a bloody nose and he'll leave you alone" territory.

"Don't know, Skip." Commander Hernando shook his head. "They're coming in on a fairly standard intercept vector, but there's two of them. That's outside the profile for freelancers. And see this?" He tapped a command into his console, and the estimated power figures on the Bogey One's impeller wedge blinked. "That's awful high for his observed accel, Skipper. Puts him in at least the heavy cruiser range—and the same holds true for his buddy."

The high power wedge gives them a crude mass estimate compared to the accel they're getting from it. Which may well be how they've been estimating masses and classes all along.

"No possibility they're Silesian?" he asked, and Hernando shook his head.

"Not unless the Confeds' EW systems've gotten an awful lot better than they're supposed to be. If these bozos are holding a constant acceleration, they were inside nine light-minutes before we even saw 'em, and they're harder than hell to hold on passive even now. I doubt your standard merchie would have any idea they were out there."

9 light-minutes (roughly 162 million km/100 million mile) detection range for a ship under good, modern ECM stealth.

Tyler's Star was virgin territory, but this would be the fifth overall capture for Waters' cruiser division, and so far the entire operation had gone as smoothly as Citizen Admiral Giscard had predicted. The trickiest part had been keeping any of their prizes' crews from getting away, and so far none of them had shown any particular urge to try.

Waters rather regretted that. He hated the Star Kingdom of Manticore with a white and burning passion. Hated it for what its navy had done to the People's Navy. Hated it for building better ships with better weapons than his own government could provide him. And most of all, the ex-Dolist hated it for having an economy which ignored all the "level field" and "economic rights" truisms upon which the People's Republic had based its very existence . . . and still providing its people the highest standard of living in the known galaxy. That was the insult Waters could not forgive. There'd been a time when the Republic of Haven's citizens were at least as affluent as those of Manticore, and by all the standards Waters had been taught from the cradle, the People's Republic's citizens should be even better off than Manticore's today. Hadn't the government intervened to force the wealthy to pay their fair share? Hadn't it legislated the Economic Bill of Rights? Hadn't it compelled private industry to subsidize those put out of work by unfair changes in technology or work force requirements? Hadn't it guaranteed even its least advantaged citizens free education, free medical care, free housing, and a basic income?

Of course it had. And with all those rights guaranteed to them, its citizens should have been affluent and secure, with a thriving economy. But they weren't, and their economy wasn't, and though he would never have admitted it, the Star Kingdom's successes made Jerome Waters feel small and somehow petty. It wasn't fair for such economic heretics to have so much while the faithful had so little, and he longed to smash them into dust as their sins demanded.

....

Yeah, I don't think all of the EVIL SOCIALISM had quite been purged from the series by this point.

"Engaging—now!" Hernando snapped, and thin plastic hatch shields vanished as eight massive grasers smashed out from Scheherazade's port broadside. The range was barely four hundred thousand kilometers, there was no sidewall to interdict, and seven of the eight beams scored direct hits.

Both heavy cruisers staggered, bucking as the kinetic energy transferred into them, and huge, splintered fragments of hull spun away from them. Their flared sterns tore apart like paper, shedding wreckage, weapons, men, and women in a storm front of escaping atmosphere. Their armor meant less than nothing against superdreadnought-scale energy fire, and the grasers blew deep into their hulls, shredding bulkheads and smashing weapons. Both ships lost their after impeller rings almost instantly, and Falchion's emissions signature flickered madly as the power surges bled through her systems.

But Scheherazade didn't linger to gloat. Even as Hernando fired, her helm was hard over, completing her hundred-and-eighty-degree turn to port. In the same flashing seconds, she rolled up on her side. The mauled cruisers roared past her, surviving broadside weapons firing frantically in local control over the deep-space equivalent of open sights, but they had no target; only the impenetrable roof and floor of her wedge.

"Baker Two!" Hernando snapped, and the helmsman threw his helm over yet again. The Q-ship circled still further to port, coming perpendicular to the Peeps' vectors, and rolled back upright, firing as she came. Her broadside flashed once more, spewing missiles as well as grasers this time. Her fire ripped straight down the fronts of her enemies' wedges, and even as her port weapons fired, her starboard sidewall dropped and six LACs exploded from their bays to accelerate after the heavy cruisers at six hundred gravities.

The Peeps did their best, but that first, devastating rake had wreaked havoc on their electronics. Central fire control was a shambles, fighting to sort itself out and reestablish a grasp on the situation as secondary systems came on-line. Their surviving weapons were all in emergency local control, dependent on their own on-mount sensors and tracking computers. Most of them didn't even know where Scheherazade was, and frantic queries hammered CIC. But CIC needed time to recover from that terrible blow . . . and the cruisers didn't have time. They had only fifteen seconds, and only a single laser smashed into Scheherazade in reply to her second, devastating broadside.

Q-ship vs. 2 Peep Sword class CAs. Scheherzade is Webster's ship, mildly amused at Honor's old commo officer getting a ship named after Scheherzade, also he lets his XO, a straight tactical sort, give most of the orders in combat.

Webster's ship shuddered as that solitary hit ripped into her unarmored hull, and damage alarms wailed. Missile Three vanished, and the same hit smashed clear to Boat Bay One and tore two cutters and a pinnace—none, fortunately, manned—to splinters. Seventeen men and women were killed, and eleven more wounded, but for all that, Scheherazade got off incredibly lightly.

Single laser hit on a Q-ship, in case you thought anyone was kidding about them being glass cannons.

The Peeps didn't. Hernando's second broadside wasn't as accurate as his first; there were too many variables, changing too rapidly, for him to achieve the same precision. But it was accurate enough against wide open targets, and PNS Falchion vanished in a boil of light as one of Scheherazade's grasers found her forward fusion room. There were no life pods, and Webster's eyes whipped to the second cruiser just as her bow blew open like a shredded stick. Her forward impellers died instantly, stripping away her wedge and her sidewalls, leaving her only reaction thrusters for maneuver, and Webster bared his teeth.

"Launch the second LAC squadron," he said, and then flicked his hand at his com officer. "Put me on, Gina."

"Hot mike, Skipper," Gina Alveretti replied, and Samuel Houston Webster spoke in cold, precise tones.

"Peep cruiser, this is Her Majesty's Armed Merchant Cruiser Scheherazade. Stand by to be boarded. And, as you yourself said—" he smiled ferociously at his pickup "—any resistance to our boarders will be met with deadly force."

Webster captures a Peep commerce raider and it's crew, proving beyond all doubt that Haven is here and up to no good. It probably won't change deployments any, but at least the Andies can start those diplomatic pressures they mentioned.

It was as well for the Committee of Public Safety's peace of mine that neither it nor its minions in StateSec suspected quite how well Giscard and Pritchart got along. Had they known, they would have been quite shocked, for Giscard and his watchdog were in bed together—literally.

Yep, even in this most hostile relationship between flag officer and political officer there is room... for love. And sex.

"It's his judgment that worries me. The man hates the Manties too much."

"How can someone hate the enemy 'too much'?" From any other commissioner, that question would have carried ominous overtones, but Pritchart was genuinely curious.

"Determination is a good thing," Giscard explained very seriously, "and sometimes hate can help generate that. I don't like it, because whatever our differences with the Manties, they're still human beings. If we expect them to act professionally and humanely where our people are concerned, we have to act the same way where their people are concerned." He paused, and Pritchart nodded before he went on. "The problem with someone like Waters, though, is that hate begins to substitute for good sense. He's a well-trained, competent officer, but he's also young for his rank, and he could have used more experience before he made captain. I don't suppose he's all that different from most of our captains—or admirals," he admitted with a wry grin "—in that respect, given what happened to the old officer corps. But he's too eager, too fired up. I'm a little worried by how it may affect his judgment, and I wish I'd kept him on a shorter leash."

Giscard is worried his mad dog (with the powerful political backers because of his surplus of revolutionary zeal) is going to do something stupid, possibly something that'll lead to reprisals from the Manties, like mistreating prisoners.

"No, not really. I am a bit concerned over the reports that the Manties've sent Q-ships out here. If they cruise in company, two or three of them could be a nasty handful for someone who dives right in on them, and Waters had headed out before we got the dispatch alerting us to their presence. But he's under orders to hit only singletons, and I don't see one Q-ship beating up on a pair of Sword-class CAs unless the cruisers screw up by the numbers. No, it's more of a feeling that I ought to be looking over his shoulder more closely than anything else, Ellie."

Drastically underestimating the enemy, check. Alright, it makes perfect sense in the context of everything he knows to be true about Q-ships. I can't really blame him for not guessing they'd stuff them full of pods and combat-effective LACs.

Also, does the entire galaxy know about the Q-ships? Well, probably. At the very least the Navy has told the merchant cartels about them to show they're doing something and it's a fairly short step from that to a public announcement. At least any spies worth their salaries should have an ear inside the cartels.

"I thought you just said a Q-ship was no match for a heavy cruiser," Pritchart pointed out. He nodded, and she shrugged. "Well, you've got twelve heavy cruisers, and eight battlecruisers. That seems like a reassuring amount of overkill to me."

"Oh, agreed. Agreed. But if they're all busy looking here, maybe we should go hunting somewhere else. Whatever the theoretical odds, there's always room for something to go wrong in an engagement, you know. And a Q-ship is likely to beat off one of our units—one of our light cruisers, say—and blow the entire operation by discovering our presence here."

"So?"

"So, Citizen Commissioner," Giscard said, setting his wineglass aside to free both hands and turning to her with the smile she loved, "it's time to adjust our operational patterns. We can leave dispatches for Waters and Caslet at all the approved information drops, but the rest of us are concentrated here right now. Under the circumstances, I think I'll just have a word with my staff about potential new hunting grounds . . . later, of course," he added wickedly, and kissed her.

Amount of forces committed to this commerce raiding expedition, small enough to not be missed from the front, enough to make serious problems. Giscard is departing the sector, leaving messages for his detached commanders to make trouble elsewhere in Silesia.

[Simon_Jester]

The egalitarian Committee has dispensed with the elitist tradition of giving a captain or admiral a personal servant. Of course, for this to happen the Legislaturists had to have them, which isn't really out of character for them, I just can't recall it having been mentioned before one way or another.

We don't have many Legislaturalist viewpoint characters. We DO have mention that Havenite senior admirals travel in really great style, as I recall, but I can't remember where. I think it was Honor mentioning just how big and grand the admiral's quarters were on her captured Havenite dreadnought.

Apparently they can pretty credibly use maneuvers that prevent a clear view of the ship through the wedge. Also, most of the space battles in this book involve a ship pretending to be a harmless freighter to set up an ambush. Seriously, we see this three times before the halfway point. Of course, that's the entire point of a Q-ship, but even the Peeps are doing it now.

Pirates fly around in bitty little ships, and no pirate in their right mind wants to tangle with a warship. If you don't troll them by pretending to be a merchantman, how in heaven's name do you even get into weapon range?

Roughly 6 million km range for even cheap sensors. At least, I assume that's what is meant, since Honor claimed earlier that merchants in particular tend to spring for high-end sensor suites, it's usually the operators that are the problem.

Operator skill may relate to the range at which faint sensor contacts are identified as such, though- if you have a relatively inept operator, you set the computer to filter out everything that isn't obviously a contact, because otherwise your ship winds up hallucinating a lot.

With good crew you can set the sensors to be more... sensitive, I guess... because you can trust the operators to filter out false positives. So your effective detection range is longer.

Space travel has evolved to the point where you don't have to be a rocket scientist/astronaut math god to fly in space. But you do generally have to be smarter than the average bear to make it as a spacer.

Well yes- because your life depends not only on your technology, but on that technology being handled reliably and competently. If you screw up there are a lot of ways to die, what with all the hard vacuum, thermonuclear plasma, and high voltage electricity around the place.

So you don't want ignoramuses or irresponsible people operating the systems. You don't want people who can't count, or can't be bothered to remember things entrusted to their care. If you DO find yourself working with such a person you try to get rid of them as soon as possible.

Only a madman like Andrew Warnecke would praise democracy and egalitarianism while carrying out bloody purges in the name of public safety! Isn't that right, Citizen Commissioner? Alright, so I don't think they've been killing their own people by the million in Haven.

Put this way- I think even someone like the real Robespierre, for all the death he caused in places like the Vendee, would look down on Pol Pot.

Plus, Caslet isn't exactly fond of the current political system in Haven; he's the viewpoint character, right? He is at best apolitical and at worst actively disaffected.

Also, the People's Republic are far too clever to dummy up film of the 'execution' of an enemy they've presumed dead. Particularly if said enemy was still alive. Man, can you imagine how embarrassing this must be for the Sillies?

My theory about all that is wrong with Silesia is that they lost the embarrassment battle when they got that nickname, and just plain gave up.

Apparently 10 odd destroyers are a credible threat to even a BC.

Roughly equal tonnage, and that many destroyers could fire forty or fifty missile broadsides without breaking a sweat- probably more than a battlecruiser could easily shoot down, because they only have so many beams and launchers to do it with.

If the destroyer squadron is competent, they can start screwing around with double broadsides and forming their own wall, at which point things could get really ugly, especially since there's no way for the battlecruiser to bring them into beam range against their will.

The Bosun orders Lewis to drop it, then brings in Horace to try and handle things unofficially. Mostly by befriending Andy and teaching him to fight his own battles. Uh huh. At the point where multiple crewmen are genuinely in fear for their lives, I think we've gone a bit beyond "give the bully a bloody nose and he'll leave you alone" territory.

I'm not sure McBride's planning to leave it at that, mind you. She may also be hoping Harkness can indirectly pry the attackers' identities out of Wanderman (which he tries to do), and also ensuring that Wanderman is less of a target because Harkness will keep the kid around tough but reliable Navy and Marine ratings and noncoms while off duty (which he does do).

Yeah, I don't think all of the EVIL SOCIALISM had quite been purged from the series by this point.

Definitely not. It'd be more fun if they'd gone full-on Bolshevik CAPITALIST WRECKERS, really.

Drastically underestimating the enemy, check. Alright, it makes perfect sense in the context of everything he knows to be true about Q-ships. I can't really blame him for not guessing they'd stuff them full of pods and combat-effective LACs.

Especially since one of those hasn't been invented yet as far as he knows, and the other... well. Actually it shouldn't surprise anyone that you could build a "minelayer" that would kick out missile pods, because the RMN did exactly that on Hancock Station at a time when so far as I know no pod-laying ship of the wall was even on the drawing board.

[Terralthra]

Eh? The minelayers at First Hancock laid minefields, didn't they?

[Ahriman238]

We don't have many Legislaturalist viewpoint characters. We DO have mention that Havenite senior admirals travel in really great style, as I recall, but I can't remember where. I think it was Honor mentioning just how big and grand the admiral's quarters were on her captured Havenite dreadnought.

Yes it was. FiE.

Operator skill may relate to the range at which faint sensor contacts are identified as such, though- if you have a relatively inept operator, you set the computer to filter out everything that isn't obviously a contact, because otherwise your ship winds up hallucinating a lot.

With good crew you can set the sensors to be more... sensitive, I guess... because you can trust the operators to filter out false positives. So your effective detection range is longer.

A lot longer. Webster's Scheherzade spots the incoming cruisers at over thirty times that range, and they're mildly impressed by the stealth systems it took to get so close.

Well yes- because your life depends not only on your technology, but on that technology being handled reliably and competently. If you screw up there are a lot of ways to die, what with all the hard vacuum, thermonuclear plasma, and high voltage electricity around the place.

So you don't want ignoramuses or irresponsible people operating the systems. You don't want people who can't count, or can't be bothered to remember things entrusted to their care. If you DO find yourself working with such a person you try to get rid of them as soon as possible.

Sure. To say nothing of air-consuming fires, explosions, radiation, the fusion plants and other hazards you don't want people around unless they've proven they can be responsible adults.

Put this way- I think even someone like the real Robespierre, for all the death he caused in places like the Vendee, would look down on Pol Pot.

Robespierre would probably say there was a point to every horrible thing he ever did. Pol Pot would probably retort that so did he, and then we get megalomanical dictators rolling on the floor clawing at each other.

[Simon_Jester]

Eh? The minelayers at First Hancock laid minefields, didn't they?

...Hm. Actually you're right, sorry. Somehow I got the idea that the mines in question WERE pods, probably because I misremembered a line from Shadow of Saganami where a Technodyne rep described missile pods to a Third Galaxy dictator as 'a kind of mine' or some such. Because honestly, that sort of cemented in my mind the idea that technologically the SLN is (at least potentially) roughly where the RMN was in 1905 PD. The single biggest military obstacle they face against the Grand Alliance is duplicating the MDM before their shipyard capacity gets chopped up too badly. If they can do that they'll still be able to win, in my opinion.

[They have enough building capacity in potential, I think, that if they really wanted to, they could build enough pre-Apollo MDM-capable ships to overwhelm an Apollo-capable fleet. IF they could build missiles of adequate range. Apollo's good, but not that good.]

Political obstacles are, of course, a whole different order of problem.

A lot longer. Webster's Scheherzade spots the incoming cruisers at over thirty times that range, and they're mildly impressed by the stealth systems it took to get so close.

Much of this probably represents the gap between RMN military sensors, the product of massive, dedicated research into ECCM and signal processing... and what can be had on the civilian market and/or as the castoffs of the Silesian Navy or whatever.

Also, do we know if Webster had drones out? I would if I could get away with it.

Put this way- I think even someone like the real Robespierre, for all the death he caused in places like the Vendee, would look down on Pol Pot.

Robespierre would probably say there was a point to every horrible thing he ever did. Pol Pot would probably retort that so did he, and then we get megalomanical dictators rolling on the floor clawing at each other.

Well yes, but I sincerely think there was a moral difference. Robespierre didn't actually want to 'liquidate' entire categories of his own citizenry so much as he wanted to break down the old hierarchy and reorder society. He was utterly, horribly willing to kill to get that, but mass murder wasn't necessary to his goals.

Pol Pot, on the other hand, seems to have wanted to annihilate everyone in his society with an education and start over from Iron Age farming villages.

For that matter, Robespierre was pretty arguably not a megalomaniac or a dictator... The real one, I mean, in case you weren't sure.

So yes. I think there was a real difference. Robespierre would be justified in having Pol Pot hauled to a guillotine as a filthy parody of the very idea of revolution, that would not be hypocrisy on his part to me.

So if Peeps look down on Warnecke, maybe it just means that Warnecke is worse.

[Ahriman238]

...Hm. Actually you're right, sorry. Somehow I got the idea that the mines in question WERE pods, probably because I misremembered a line from Shadow of Saganami where a Technodyne rep described missile pods to a Third Galaxy dictator as 'a kind of mine' or some such. Because honestly, that sort of cemented in my mind the idea that technologically the SLN is (at least potentially) roughly where the RMN was in 1905 PD. The single biggest military obstacle they face against the Grand Alliance is duplicating the MDM before their shipyard capacity gets chopped up too badly. If they can do that they'll still be able to win, in my opinion.

[They have enough building capacity in potential, I think, that if they really wanted to, they could build enough pre-Apollo MDM-capable ships to overwhelm an Apollo-capable fleet. IF they could build missiles of adequate range. Apollo's good, but not that good.]

Political obstacles are, of course, a whole different order of problem.

The Mesans already have, and will likely share at some point. Mind, theirs are just dual-drive and carry a warhead a class lighter than they'd normally fire (so BCs are throwing cruiser-scale missiles.)

Mind, in theory the SLN began with more superdreadnoughts than the RMN or PN had ships when the war started.

[Simon_Jester]

Well yes, but they're all meat on the table. The Mesan Alignment's "Cataphract" is a miserably inadequate substitute for a real MDM, and nothing noticeably more effective can be modified to launch from the tubes of any SLN ship now in service.

Basically, what's really needed is, at least, a capital-class three stage MDM. Probably a capacitor-fed analogue to what Haven fought the second round of the Manticore-Haven War.

If Haven could do this it seems likely the League could do so within several years; some of their technical firms may already be trying just as they tried (and succeeded) in duplicating the missile pod within 15 years or so of its introduction.

[Checks wiki]

Apparently the RMN is up to four stages now- but at some point you hit diminishing returns, almost inevitably; you're sharply increasing powered range, but even Apollo can't be carrying signals with indefinite range.

The big obstacles the SLN would face, assuming it had the determination and organization to prosecute the war seriously, are:

1) Apparently they do not have Manticore's high density fusion plants, which are the cornerstone of many of their EW and missile range advances.

2) They are badly outclassed in EW equipment, not so much because Manticore has physically better computers than the League (which was the case against Haven) as because Manticore and Haven both have a massive edge in practical combat experience. Their EW suites are seriously designed to face continuously advancing, upgrading threats in the hands of people whose survival as an independent state depends on having optimal military technology. The SLN just doesn't have that, even though they are seriously trying to develop better EW drone and countermissile capability.

3) The temporary RMN (and to a lesser extent IAN and RHN) advantage in hardware is almost sure to last at least five to ten years, because it will take considerable time for the League to design and build weapons that incorporate the new technologies. By the time the League could effectively and start to build a really serious fleet (i.e. thousands of the wall) capable of fighting the Grand Alliance, the Grand Alliance may have already parked its fleets in orbit around the shipyard planets and made the whole issue moot.
______________________

Just to think about this, what could they do in the next year or two? They could build a working SD(P) quickly, but they can't design a serious competitor to even Havenite MDMs for at least a few years, unless their contractor companies are way ahead of anything we've seen direct evidence of in the series. And without MDMs to put in their pod-layers, said pod-layers really aren't a threat.*

They might also build CLACs; as others have noted, LACs seem to play a major role in blunting the effectiveness of massed MDM attacks and trimming back their lethality. And the SLN might actually have some pretty damn competitive LAC designs, simply because there's a huge market for system defense units and LACs have a lot of advantages in that role.

On the other hand, these are purely defensive concepts, and neither really matters unless the League can find an offensive weapon capable of credibly threatening a (for instance) Havenite fleet. Anything they could do with single-stage missiles or something like Cataphract would be laughable except in extremely large quantities, because RHN missile defense is adapted to a much more dangerous threat.

And the sheer size of the zone an SLN fleet would have to cross to get into range for its own short-ranged single or dual-drive missiles... basically guarantees that a defense system that purely limits the effect of an MDM attack will not be enough. The SLN fleet would still take huge casualties on the approach while being unable to shoot back, and that's a recipe for very one-sided battles, especially given the Alliance acceleration advantage.
____________________

[*Well, probably not. One thing the SLN might try is massive fleets of SD(P)s that dump huge swarms of countermissiles and rely on sheer insane salvo density to break MDM barrages up. It wouldn't be at all impractical for them to put, say, ten or twenty thousand countermissiles into space from a fleet of even moderate size compared to the size of their navy We know they already have the technology to fire a countermissile canister out of a standard missile tube; that presumably translates into being able to fit a few dozen countermissiles into a pod...]

[Terralthra]

"Good." Caslet nodded, killed the circuit, and crossed to his suit locker. One of the many privileges the Republic's officer corps had been required to give up under the new regime was its stewards, but that had never bothered Caslet particularly, and it certainly didn't bother him now.

The egalitarian Committee has dispensed with the elitist tradition of giving a captain or admiral a personal servant. Of course, for this to happen the Legislaturists had to have them, which isn't really out of character for them, I just can't recall it having been mentioned before one way or another.

The RMN has stewards for Captain and higher, I see no reason why the PRN wouldn't have similar personnel for command and flag officers. It's "unegalitarian" on one level, but on another level, we really don't want our ship COs and Admirals to be worrying about polishing their own boots, I wouldn't think.

Apparently they can pretty credibly use maneuvers that prevent a clear view of the ship through the wedge. Also, most of the space battles in this book involve a ship pretending to be a harmless freighter to set up an ambush. Seriously, we see this three times before the halfway point. Of course, that's the entire point of a Q-ship, but even the Peeps are doing it now.

We see them doing it repeatedly...against pirates. Most real military forces wouldn't fall for such a shenanigan, both because they'd be suspicious, and because they'd be using recon drones and so on to make sure of their target IDs.

The Bosun orders Lewis to drop it, then brings in Horace to try and handle things unofficially. Mostly by befriending Andy and teaching him to fight his own battles. Uh huh. At the point where multiple crewmen are genuinely in fear for their lives, I think we've gone a bit beyond "give the bully a bloody nose and he'll leave you alone" territory.

I agree with Simon on this one. We don't see her orders, and we see Harkness do more than just "befriend Aubrey." He tries to get Aubrey to talk about the situation, the accomplices and so on. He keeps an eye on him when the confrontation occurs, and he's probably doing even more behind the scenes. MacBride probably ordered him to handle it, but Harkness isn't really a POV character this book; we see what Aubrey sees him doing.

"Engaging—now!" Hernando snapped, and thin plastic hatch shields vanished as eight massive grasers smashed out from Scheherazade's port broadside. The range was barely four hundred thousand kilometers, there was no sidewall to interdict, and seven of the eight beams scored direct hits.

Both heavy cruisers staggered, bucking as the kinetic energy transferred into them, and huge, splintered fragments of hull spun away from them. Their flared sterns tore apart like paper, shedding wreckage, weapons, men, and women in a storm front of escaping atmosphere. Their armor meant less than nothing against superdreadnought-scale energy fire, and the grasers blew deep into their hulls, shredding bulkheads and smashing weapons. Both ships lost their after impeller rings almost instantly, and Falchion's emissions signature flickered madly as the power surges bled through her systems.

But Scheherazade didn't linger to gloat. Even as Hernando fired, her helm was hard over, completing her hundred-and-eighty-degree turn to port. In the same flashing seconds, she rolled up on her side. The mauled cruisers roared past her, surviving broadside weapons firing frantically in local control over the deep-space equivalent of open sights, but they had no target; only the impenetrable roof and floor of her wedge.

"Baker Two!" Hernando snapped, and the helmsman threw his helm over yet again. The Q-ship circled still further to port, coming perpendicular to the Peeps' vectors, and rolled back upright, firing as she came. Her broadside flashed once more, spewing missiles as well as grasers this time. Her fire ripped straight down the fronts of her enemies' wedges, and even as her port weapons fired, her starboard sidewall dropped and six LACs exploded from their bays to accelerate after the heavy cruisers at six hundred gravities.

The Peeps did their best, but that first, devastating rake had wreaked havoc on their electronics. Central fire control was a shambles, fighting to sort itself out and reestablish a grasp on the situation as secondary systems came on-line. Their surviving weapons were all in emergency local control, dependent on their own on-mount sensors and tracking computers. Most of them didn't even know where Scheherazade was, and frantic queries hammered CIC. But CIC needed time to recover from that terrible blow . . . and the cruisers didn't have time. They had only fifteen seconds, and only a single laser smashed into Scheherazade in reply to her second, devastating broadside.

Q-ship vs. 2 Peep Sword class CAs. Scheherzade is Webster's ship, mildly amused at Honor's old commo officer getting a ship named after Scheherzade, also he lets his XO, a straight tactical sort, give most of the orders in combat.

Not going to beat a dead horse here, but uh...when the cruisers pass Scheherazade, they have "well over thirty thousand kps" of overtake. Webster fires a full broadside at their chasers, meaning he has effectively made them cross their own T by committing to a stern chase, then making a 90 degree turn to fire, and after firing, completes his turn (Weber is explicit here that Webster is "completing a 180 degree turn to port") and half-rolls to bring Scheherazade's wedge up to block as the cruisers flash by on either side (top/bottom) of her. At over 30,000 kps of overtake, it takes a maximum of 13.3... seconds to go 400,000 kilometers. During that time, Scheherazade, explicitly a converted bulk cargo ship the size of a ship of the wall, with the manueverability of a particularly misshapen brick, makes a 90 degree turn.

Weber's tech bible/pearls of weber time-to-turn figures (a dozen minutes for an SD to turn 90 degrees, 120 seconds for a DD to make a 90 degree turn) are simply not in keeping with what he wrote in his books.

Giscard is worried his mad dog (with the powerful political backers because of his surplus of revolutionary zeal) is going to do something stupid, possibly something that'll lead to reprisals from the Manties, like mistreating prisoners.

Well, in this case, his mad dog's judgment was so impaired by the desire to chase Manties that he got his ass shot off by a Q-ship he didn't spot until it was way way too late.

[StarSword]

I'm curious about HMAMC Scheherazade. Was it ever specified whether she was purpose-built like Sirius, or was she another refit freighter like Wayfarer et al.?

[Terralthra]

I'm curious about HMAMC Scheherazade. Was it ever specified whether she was purpose-built like Sirius, or was she another refit freighter like Wayfarer et al.?

Scheherazade is one of Honor's squadron of four armed merchant cruisers. She's a Trojan-class converted Caravan-class freighter. Same pod-deploying, SD-grasering, LAC-launching loadout.

[StarSword]

I'm curious about HMAMC Scheherazade. Was it ever specified whether she was purpose-built like Sirius, or was she another refit freighter like Wayfarer et al.?

Scheherazade is one of Honor's squadron of four armed merchant cruisers. She's a Trojan-class converted Caravan-class freighter. Same pod-deploying, SD-grasering, LAC-launching loadout.

Rrrg. I obviously need to reread Honor Among Enemies. I've got this recollection of another Manticoran Q-ship running around in Silesia separate from Honor's squadron that crops up a couple times and gets pretty torn up the second or third time it shows up.

[Terralthra]

I'm curious about HMAMC Scheherazade. Was it ever specified whether she was purpose-built like Sirius, or was she another refit freighter like Wayfarer et al.?

Scheherazade is one of Honor's squadron of four armed merchant cruisers. She's a Trojan-class converted Caravan-class freighter. Same pod-deploying, SD-grasering, LAC-launching loadout.

Rrrg. I obviously need to reread Honor Among Enemies. I've got this recollection of another Manticoran Q-ship running around in Silesia separate from Honor's squadron that crops up a couple times and gets pretty torn up the second or third time it shows up.

That's the Pirate's Bane, commanded by ex-RMN Captain Thomas Bachfisch. He gets drummed out of the RMN (effectively, anyway; he's still technically in the RMN on half-pay) while captaining the War Maiden, aboard which Honor was serving her middie cruise, for letting another warship beat the stuffing out of War Maiden until Honor, serving as acting tac officer, saves his bacon. He also owns and commands the Ambuscade, another armed merchant cruiser.

[StarSword]

That's the Pirate's Bane, commanded by ex-RMN Captain Thomas Bachfisch. He gets drummed out of the RMN (effectively, anyway; he's still technically in the RMN on half-pay) while captaining the War Maiden, aboard which Honor was serving her middie cruise, for letting another warship beat the stuffing out of War Maiden until Honor, serving as acting tac officer, saves his bacon. He also owns and commands the Ambuscade, another armed merchant cruiser.

Thank you, that's the one. Dug up its page on the Honorverse wiki and the Pirates' Bane seems to be another refit freighter. "Armed collier" led me to "collier" on Wikipedia, which turned out to be a fuel tender for coal-fired warships.

It was also all the way over in War of Honor, so no wonder he hasn't turned up yet.