David Weber's Starfire series

[Molyneux]

She's also a genetically enhanced super-strong, fast,

Just like everyone else on her planet...and you mock the treecat at your own risk! That thing is awesome. Reminds me of Mercedes Lackey's shipscats.

... did I forget anything? Because I'm not sure I can apply anything that ridiculous to any other character in existance.

I've only read as far as the second book so far, but she's gotten beaten up worse than Dresden does.

Let's see, over the course of about five years in the Dresden Files, he:
Gets possessed by, resists, and redeems the shade of a fallen angel,
Has both Winter and Summer Courts of the fae determined to either kill or seduce him,
Has acquired an extremely powerful, vampiric half-brother (who is also of the "atoning bloodsucker" sort, metaphorically speaking),
Has befriended a pack of teenage (well, college-age) werewolves, and personally brought down a loup garou,
Has learned to play D&D,
Has gone face-to-face with the Wild Hunt,
Has bent the Laws of Magic a dozen times,
Has befriended the wielders of, and later possessed one of, the only honest-to-God paladins in the world,
Has adopted an incredibly useful god-dog-thing,
Has discovered that his mother arranged for him to become an incredibly potent wizard due to some time-of-birth flimflam,
Has learned that he is capable of using the power of freakin' angels themselves,

Oh, and personally beat the crap out of an Elder God before he was old enough to legally drink.

Would you say Dresden is a Mary Sue?
Anyone with a long-running series, reasonably interesting is apt to acquire an astounding range of friends, enemies, abilities and scars, simply by virtue of the author having to keep topping himself to keep the books going.

[Samuel]

It was played on a starmap with lots of counters and paperwork.

That... is alot of work. Wow. Like table top games but harder.

The frontier worlds were settled by individual nations and political, ethnic groups in an attempt to fill up all the worlds found or taken in the various wars. They were needed as a buffer. They tended to on the frontlines in all the wars. They had a lot of worlds but most had small populations and were always pushed around by the corp worlds. They tried to build up industry and commerce but the corp worlds always went after them.

That doesn't make sense. The costs of lifting products of planet is too expensive to be worth it.

As to why not use missiles. The games is late 70's early 80's they have shit for computers and their drives make their ships move like UFO's from the 50's.

... they had good enough computers in the 70s to do that. I'm guessing that the warheads were cheap and the drive was expensive... except the warheads were anti-matter.

The lanti agathic drugs were legal on the frontier to encourage immigration. They were illegal on the Heart worlds and really expensive on the corp worlds.

I think Dresden is less a Mary Sue than living in an insane world.

[consequences]

The missiles have a strictly limited drive duration, and in the time it would take for them to come about and make an additonal attack run would generally be completely out of juice. Plus, of course, the fact that the drive technobabble makes anything completely blind in a sixty degree cone to the rear, so the missile would have to reacquire entirely on its own int he face of full shipboard jamming, and then point defense. Light speed restrictions on communications and sensors are a bitch, and always play in favor of the defender.

Insurrection was written multiple rules iterations ago, before any real effort was made to make everything make sense. Among other things, you have to multiply ship numbers by an order of magnitude to make it jive with the other books. Things used to be a whole lot more planet-based, which went the way of the dodo with Imperial Starfire. But even with that, their drive tech could give a shit less about lifting mass out of a grav well when it's designed to run at .05c indefinitely, it's primarily the large scale manufacturing that moved to space.

As far as the anti-agathic drugs go, it's population control. The Heart Worlders are almost all characterized as lazy brainless sheep who don't contribute enough to justify another century or more of breathing and sucking down resources, on top of the fact that there's generally considered to be an overcrowding problem.

Fighters make perfect sense in the paradigm that's been built, you don't have to risk a capital platform in direct combat, and they deliver a much heavier punch from an equivalent sized hull, at the cost of being attritioned much more easily. Also, anyone who thinks general quarters can be maintained 24/7 needs to try to do something important after a single 24 hour straight duty shift, and have their performance properly evaluated as crap.

The books were co-written by Steve White, who's a mediocre author at best.


And yes, Honor Harrington has the deck stacked in her favor. It's been said, it's true, we all know, move on, deconstruct some other character with too much going for them already.

[Aeolus]

It was played on a starmap with lots of counters and paperwork.

That... is alot of work. Wow. Like table top games but harder.

The frontier worlds were settled by individual nations and political, ethnic groups in an attempt to fill up all the worlds found or taken in the various wars. They were needed as a buffer. They tended to on the frontlines in all the wars. They had a lot of worlds but most had small populations and were always pushed around by the corp worlds. They tried to build up industry and commerce but the corp worlds always went after them.

That doesn't make sense. The costs of lifting products of planet is too expensive to be worth it.

As to why not use missiles. The games is late 70's early 80's they have shit for computers and their drives make their ships move like UFO's from the 50's.

... they had good enough computers in the 70s to do that. I'm guessing that the warheads were cheap and the drive was expensive... except the warheads were anti-matter.

The lanti agathic drugs were legal on the frontier to encourage immigration. They were illegal on the Heart worlds and really expensive on the corp worlds.

I think Dresden is less a Mary Sue than living in an insane world.

yes the anti agathics were illegal in the Heart worlds in order to limit population growth. They were allowed on the frontier to encourage people to go there.
As to the economics these are a people with very advanced gravity control and reactionless drives with really good inertial dampers. it was cost effective for them to ship food between worlds. The corp worlds were trying to keep the frontier worlds as resource supplying colonies.
Where is this mary sue idea coming from? that is Honor Harrington not the starfire books. The starfire verse had lots of weird tech but how is that mary sue?

[The Romulan Republic]

Yes, he is responsible for the Honor Harrington series and one of the Universe's biggest Mary Sues. He does that often I take it (haven't read the HH series)?

Yes Harrington is a rouge asshole of an officer who should be court martialled yet her actions are always justifiable and any character who opposes her is always an irredemable monster. I kind of liked some of books 1 and 3, but book four's ode to vigilantism really pissed me off, and it largely went down hill from there.

Uh...what the hell? I just finished reading the second book in the series, and all the Havenite officers seemed to be decent men forced, through quirk of birth, to serve a corrupt government. The only real bastards in that book were the Masadans.

I should have been more clear. Any of her political opponents are complete subhuman scum.

Anyways, its just my luck that out of about the first ten books, number two is the only one I haven't read. My advice if your on book two: stop now before you get to the bad stuff. The best book was number three. After that there were ups and downs, but that was the high point for me.

[Molyneux]

Uh...what the hell? I just finished reading the second book in the series, and all the Havenite officers seemed to be decent men forced, through quirk of birth, to serve a corrupt government. The only real bastards in that book were the Masadans.

I should have been more clear. Any of her political opponents are complete subhuman scum.

Anyways, its just my luck that out of about the first ten books, number two is the only one I haven't read. My advice if your on book two: stop now before you get to the bad stuff. The best book was number three. After that there were ups and downs, but that was the high point for me.

There was one strawman political in the second book, but on the other hand she did outright admit that the woman who'd saddled her with (mostly) useless weapons in the first one had a point about something else. Can't remember exactly what, and I've already returned the book to the library so unfortunately I can't look it up.

[Psychic_Sandwich]

[quote=Samuel]To me, the oddity is that defense is not supreme- you know where they are coming and there is a choke point. Apparently they can't keep their ships on high alert for extended periods of time.
[/quote]

The view you get from the books is skewed because the only one that doesn't have SBMHAWKs is Crusade. Prior to their introduction, the defence was supreme. The Theban War, for example, took years, despite it's relatively small area, because Second Fleet had to effectively build a new battleline after every warp point assault. Those assaults only succeeded because Antonov always had enough ships that he could just keep feeding them through the warp points until the Thebans sustained enough damage to their effectively irreplaceable batteline that they had to withdraw. Just look at the way they were talking about the Thebes system itself; they were operating on the assumption that it would take half a decade's worth of warship construction destroyed to break into the system without SBMHAWKs, which sounds pretty supreme to me.

[SylasGaunt]

What he said. Before they came up with SBMHAWKs defense was supreme, now it's trickier because putting defenses right on top of the warp-point is asking for them to get the shit blown out of them since the other guy can just shovel pods through until he runs out of them or you run out of ships.

A warp-point cant still be a choke point but unless you've got some hellaciously good PD, and are able to maintain high alert at all times it's basically suicide to go about things the old way (put your defenses right on the warp-point and pound the shit out of the enemy while their systems are destabilized from transit). The other guy could only go through one ship at a time and would have his point defense temporarily down so theoretically any assault could be completely stalled if you could kill ships faster than they could come through. Now though it just gets you a face full of anti-matter warheads.