The Decline of Baen Books as a Respectable SF Publisher

[MKSheppard]

Britain had several major rivals; France, Germany, ect. All of these nations were close by, and close in technological advancement and industrialization. HMS Dreadnought was as much a political statement as an actual need for it.

Nice way to dance around the fact that by Weber's logic; Britain shouldn't have built the Dreadnought, because it made the Royal Navy's edge in warships semi-obsolete; and let everyone start out on a level playing field regarding a modern battleline.

The Solarian League has a massive widespread "not invented here" syndrome. They think everyone outside their borders is a "neobarb". They literally dont think that any of them has anything to offer the Solarian League.

Why should they build an impressive new Battleship to impress the neighbors? they are not worth impressing.

Gee; I dunno, for the same reason the U.S. continued to build the B-2 and F-22 (albeit in reduced procurement), and kept on buying DDG-51 ARLEIGH BURKE SWARM well after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

By your impeccable logic, the United States' position as a hyperpower following the breakup of the Soviet Union should have caused the US to cancel the DDG-51 class at just those units under construction at the time; DDG-51 through DDG-56.

But no, instead the US bought a further 56 (!) Arleigh Burkes. To defend against what threat?

It's even more absurd when you consider the fact that a single Burke on it's own can shoot down most of the world's air forces and then blow up targets well inland.

Even more fun is the fact that the US Military has continued to plan for next generation weapons systems that are lightyears ahead of anyone else's -- with the mission doctrine of "attack any place on the globe in one hour or less."

What world class peer competitor is driving this military spending?

The same reason that a non-author fiat crippled Solarian League would be spending megabucks on it's military -- to maintain utter sheer dominance over any possible threat, to the point where overkill is beyond absurd -- so that you don't have to fight at all.

The only reason the Solarian League can maintain the Eridani Edict is because of it's military power -- and if it wants to maintain the Edict, it must continuously upgrade and modernize it's military to maintain that decisive edge over all other states; to the point where people would rather put a gun to their head and pull the trigger than fight the Sollies.

You can't do that if you bring fifty-year old dreadnoughts to the playing field.

Besides, who is going to attack the Solarian League?

I could turn this on it's head and ask; Who is going to attack the United States? Why do we maintain a massive navy that not only outguns everyone else by absurd margins; but also is so far ahead of everyone else technologically that it's no contest?

There are military intel departments, but with the exception of 2 people, they are staffed by people who have that not invented here syndrome.

Again, authorial fiat.

I can understand the first couple of battles in the First Havenite-Manticorean war being basically ignored -- it's basically:

"Oh, those two are fighting AGAIN. Wake me up when something interesting happens."

*yawns; few years pass*

"What? They're still fighting? Okay, set a team onto those guys. We might need to intervene if their war rises to the level requring an Edict Enforcement"

By the time the Second War started, the Sollies would have been very interested.

Plus; you know, it's live fire excercises on a scale not seen in a while -- always very useful to evalulate your computer simulation codes for weapons damage effects; and general simulation purposes.

Oh, and didnt the US think it could win the Vietnam war easily because it was the most advanced nation and was taking on a bunch of barely industrialized rebels?

I see we have a live one here who knows nothing at all about history. When we first intervened in Vietnam; the US Military service chiefs kept begging the White House, etc to adopt the 90~ target plan to destroy North Vietnam's capability to wage war and support an insurgency in the South.

Johnson and McNamara turned that plan down in favor of a 'gradiated response' to use Action-Reaction methodology to 'walk' the North Vietnamese to the Negotiating table. Didn't work.

The 90~ target plan was adapted into the famous Linebacker I/II planning document which basically crushed North Vietnam and forced them to the negotiating table -- because by the end of Linebacker II, they had no SAMs left, no heavy AA ammunition left, their entire transportation network had been blown up, making it impossible to supply the guerillas in the South; and their major harbors had been mined, making it impossible to bring in more ammuntion from China and the Soviet Union.

[Falkenhayn]

If she took his head of, I assume they used some type of longsword. Video of longsword fencing. As you can see, stepping inside is very hard to do, even more so without deflecting an attack first.

The swords in question were modified katanas, with a bell guard, a cross, and sharpened along the last foot or so of the back edge. There can be some real shock between different systems of using the same weapon (I've been clocked in the head many times by practitioners of the Italian longsword, for not respecting a volte from posta di Dona), but you'd literally have to be 30% stronger, faster, larger, etc. than your adversary for Honor's attack to work against a trained opponent. She's taking a greater tempo, in measure, using an attack with shorter reach; in other words purposely (mystifyingly) nullifying all of her advantages and still killing the guy effortlessly.

But Bean is right: the shark was jumped with the hip shoot Summervale massacre. And Shep's none-too-subtle attempt to redirect the course of the thread a few posts back is probably well founded.

[Mr Bean]

Sheppard is also ignoring this thing called distance. The Haven/Manticore wars were fought at something like two months FTL travel time without using the Manticore Wormhole junction and that's to Manticore. Further to the acutal Manticore/Haven border is closer to two and a half months plus Haven (Which has lots of system thus lots of space) it's closer to three months for word to go from Haven itself to Sol and then only by special Courier boats. Standard warship FTL takes a 1/3rd longer. Merchant FTL taking nearly five months to make that trip.

A better comparison for the Manticore/Haven wars would be if China and India started fighting each during the middle of 1846. Would America be interested in such a war? Yes but if it goes on for ten years without series result I don't think they would be breathlessly following it The Solly's still held the edge in quality under post Buttercup MDM's So from 1903 PD to start of 1914 the Manticore/Haven wars were between two second rate powers. Had the Soly's gone to war in 1913 with Manticore they could have run right over there because they outnumber them by Super dreadnoughts alone by 9 to 1. As in you can take every single Dreadnought, Cruiser, Destroyer, add them together, divide that by the number of Super Dreadnoughts the Solly's have in their inventory and get 9 to 1 (Roughly) odds. Even in 1917 PD the Solly could have sent a 3,000 ship task force which despite Ghost rider & MDM missile swarm could have easily gotten to within beam range and ripped apart any Manticore navy if they recalled every ship in every system back to Manticore itself for it's defense.

It's not until recently that the ship balance got so out of whack. Until the resumption of war in 1919 PD when both sides took the wraps off of all their new toys and suddenly they jumped from "Ships that are better than ours, can we conviced them to give us another 500 billion for a new class to match the latest Manticore class? To... "Our timberships are useless before their Ironclads"

[Batman]

I could-barely-have accepted her being a crack shot, given she IS a genie and the prosthetic eye definitely giving her an advantage had her being used to chemical burners in special and firearms in general been mentioned EARLIER.
I could POSSIBLY have accepted her outmatching Burdette despite being a rookie for the same reason-she IS a genie and therefore considerably faster and stronger than a baseline human, and thanks to Grayson's lower gravity, Burdette WASN'T quite baseline human. IF SHE WERE RESTED AND IN TOP FORM.
A rookie who is for all practical purposes DEAD ON HER FEET beating one of Graysons Top Ten swordsmen?

[Jadeite]

Also; that's another thing -- Weber makes the Sollies into fucking idiots who don't even have Military attaches or whatnot going around and making notes of what other people are doing and mailing back the notes.

Attaches exist, they just get ignored because they aren't part of Battle Fleet. The Solarian League's problems are less based upon technology, strategy, or assets, but more because they have enormous HR issues, namely personnel mobility, internal divisions, and office politics.

Battle Fleet itself is the main problem. Its officer corps hasn't fought a war within living memory, and the last war that it did fight was still essentially a minor scuffle. Then you toss in established upper-class families with naval traditions and political connections to dominate the ranks of flag officers, and upward mobility based upon merit is diminished (particularly since there are few opportunities to distinguish oneself). The end result is a force with an ossified executive structure composed of people who were the best at playing politics, not distinguishing themselves in the field. Furthermore, because they have the best political connections, the majority of the naval budget is allocated to Battle Fleet, where it is spent on Battle Fleet priorities, which are not necessarily representative of naval needs.

Then there's the internal competition with Frontier Fleet, which actually does engage in combat on a semi-regular basis (usually punitive expeditions or pacification of frontier worlds). Frontier Fleet has nothing heavier than a battlecruiser, far less prestige, fewer political connections, and operates further from the Core, which makes it less noticeable. There is very little transfer of personnel between in it and Battle Fleet, which means that knowledge of any lessons learned by Frontier Fleet stays in Frontier Fleet.

There are also the various System Defense Forces, but they are viewed with even less regard by Battle Fleet. These are where the military attaches sent to report on the Manticore-Havenite War are mostly drawn from IIRC, and their reports are usually shuffled into the appropriate place by Battle Fleet analysts (the circular filing bin). Further complicating the situation is the dubious loyalty of many of these system navies, such as the Beowulf SDF which has a warmer relationship with the Manticoran Navy than it does with the SLN.

Furthermore, one must consider the political structure of the League. Its various ministries and departments are in many cases purposely constructed to avoid accountability. The OFS sector governors want no involvement from Sol, the Assembly is essentially powerless due to every system having veto power, and even the upper echelons of the government hate being forced into any sort of commitment. Further compounding this situation is the infiltration of Mesan Alignment agents into the League's power structure and their influence over its officials and SLN officers.

Remember that the Alignment actually wants the League to be torn apart, and so it is in its best interests to ensure any fleet upgrades get skimmed away by graft, corruption, or even simple incompetence. Any reformers must not only contend with bureaucratic inertia and responsibility-avoidance, but elements that are hostile to their goals.

[MKSheppard]

Because-you say so. They're so freaking powerful they don't expect to HAVE to enforce the Eridani Edict because they expect everybody to remember what happened to the people who made them come UP with the Eridani Edict.

Wrong. The Edict has been enforced at least FIVE TIMES.

But of course the US routinely goes out of its way to prevent human rights violations in third world countries.

The Edict is actually quite functionally similar to what Stuart's America imposes in TBO.

"If you guys want to have a conflict, fine -- keep it down to a dull roar, please, or else we get mighty annoyed."

But there's an important and crucial difference.

Stuart's TBOverse 'American Doctrine' is an unwritten one, which allows TBO America a lot of flexibility in applying it.

Meanwhile, the Eridani Edict is formally written into the actual Solarian Constitution as Article 97.

That removes a lot of flexibility, since if you go against the Edict as written in law; you are performing an unconstitutional act and can be removed from command.

Thus, your only option is to destroy the nation or peoples responsible for the violation. You can't wriggle out of it by blowing up a couple of ships -- you have to destroy the violator, totally.

That then imposes a Constitutional requirement for having a military force unpreceedented in Human space in order to enforce the Constitution of the Solarian League.

Imagine if the US Constitution had a 28th Amendment, which set into constitutional law a requirement to 'destroy' anyone who committed genocide. We'd have a much larger and powerful military so we could intervene and invade around the world as required by the Constitution; and for once, the US Military would actually have an airdroppable vehicle that wasn't a joke -- the Armored Gun System would ride again!!!

Nevermind the fact that the Solarian League has been you know, funneling technology and monies to Haven in secret -- that completely blows the whole authorial fiat excuse of "oh noes, teh NEOBARBS!" out of the water; if they think the conflict is important enough to intervene in a soft way.

Secondly, Manticore is the major trade hub -- it's how Manticore has been able to punch above it's weight for so long -- it's been able to tax trade moving through it's area of control and profit off ancillary industries like ship repair, bars for spacers, etc.

The fact that it's one of THE major trade hubs in human space makes it automatically an area of interest for any halfway competent military staff; because any conflict in the region has the strong potential to disrupt interstellar trade and commerce on a big scale -- especially if the Manticoreans do what they like to do; declare their trade space off limits to certain star nations.

Thirdly; the fact that the Sollies are passing tech to the Havenites through back channels means that the impact of the Manticorean Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) is much less than the Manties think it will be; because the Sollies will be getting information back from the Havenites -- "Hey guys, your tech was really nice; but it's got these problems..."

[Batman]

Because-you say so. They're so freaking powerful they don't expect to HAVE to enforce the Eridani Edict because they expect everybody to remember what happened to the people who made them come UP with the Eridani Edict.

Wrong. The Edict has been enforced at least FIVE TIMES.

I stand corrected, then.

But of course the US routinely goes out of its way to prevent human rights violations in third world countries.

The Edict is actually quite functionally similar to what Stuart's America imposes in TBO.

Which is relevant-how? I was talking about the REAL WORLD US which routinely ignores atrocities commited in countries that don't particularly impact their interests, AND routinely ignores massive human rights violations in countries that happen to be big trade partners (like, say, China? )

[MKSheppard]

Which is relevant-how?

Because you know, both the Solarian League and TBO America have as policy "destroy those who rock the boat"?

I was talking about the REAL WORLD US which routinely ignores atrocities commited in countries that don't particularly impact their interests, AND routinely ignores massive human rights violations in countries that happen to be big trade partners (like, say, China? )

Considering we don't have a constitutional amendment that requires us to intervene when mass atrocities like genocide etc happen, your comparison holds invalid.

[Batman]

Which is relevant-how?

Because you know, both the Solarian League and TBO America have as policy "destroy those who rock the boat"?

As evidenced by-what, exactly? Because at least as per the main line Honerverse books the Solarian League doesn't HAVE a foreign policy.

I was talking about the REAL WORLD US which routinely ignores atrocities commited in countries that don't particularly impact their interests, AND routinely ignores massive human rights violations in countries that happen to be big trade partners (like, say, China? )

Considering we don't have a constitutional amendment that requires us to intervene when mass atrocities like genocide etc happen, your comparison holds invalid.

Point taken. Your evidence for the Solarian League actually LOOKING for something like that is...? I repeat, have you actually READ the series? The Solarians DIDN'T FUCKING CARE about the Haven/Manticore war except where it affected their domestic concerns (like increased Junction tarrifs).

[MKSheppard]

As evidenced by-what, exactly? Because at least as per the main line Honerverse books the Solarian League doesn't HAVE a foreign policy.

Constitutional Amendment 97 of the Solarian Constitution requires them to destroy anyone who violates it.

That's about as fucking foreign policy as you can get -- go and kill a nation state which broke this law of the land that we laid down.

Your evidence for the Solarian League actually LOOKING for something like that is...?

Because it's in their constitution? Because they've enforced it five times before?

The Solarians DIDN'T FUCKING CARE about the Haven/Manticore war except where it affected their domestic concerns (like increased Junction tarrifs).

Which is actually at odds with what Weber had written down in their constitution -- they have to be on the lookout for situations which might rise to the level of the Eridani Edict so they can respond to it in a reasonable amount of time; rather than belatedly destroying the transgressor a year later.

But I'm pretty much innured to "Forced Act of Plot Stupidity" in Baen books now.

Weber's just a bit more subtle than Ringo, Krautman or Michael Lolbertarian Williamson.

[Simon_Jester]

11.000 SD vs ~200 while one side cannot produce new units....really, this should be a curbstomp even if the Manticorean units are so powerful (especially since the Solarians could easily steal/replicate the technology, which is what happens when you have comparable industry bases).

It will, eventually. The Manties would be fucked in that situation, with their only hope being that the Sollies get tired of throwing away ships before they run out of missiles. Even Weber admits this.

And once again it proves why Baen's authorship stable is crap.

Except Drake. Don't you dare go shitting on Drake, he's pretty good.

By that argument; the British should never have built HMS Dreadnought; since it revolutionized naval warfare and instantly rendered all ships built before obsolete to varying forms -- and the British had the most to lose by doing this, as they had the most predreadnoughts.

Yeah, thegreatpl's argument is crap.

The real reason the Sollies don't do much R&D is that until quite recently (the last few decades compared to the last several centuries they were the most advanced nation in the galaxy in addition to being the biggest, the toughest, and the most heavily armed. Their R&D establishment has atrophied to the point where it took them a couple of decades just to remember what it meant to try to develop new weapons.

Again, the analogy is Qing China. How long did it take them to start turning out modern weapons in even tiny quantities, after they got their big wake-up call in the 1860s or so? The Sollies aren't in that bad a situation because they at least have factories and scientists, but their military research and development organs are so atrophied that it's taken them this long to even start making incremental improvements using the new technology.

Also; that's another thing -- Weber makes the Sollies into fucking idiots who don't even have Military attaches or whatnot going around and making notes of what other people are doing and mailing back the notes.

They do, but the guys writing the notes are the equivalent of the handful of Chinese people in the Qing era who actually left fucking China and realized how weird and different the outside world was. They could write all the letters home they wanted; it didn't make any fucking difference to the ruling ministers who spent pretty much their whole lives in Peking.

So basically, authorial fiat makes the Solarians ignore the last 20 years of increasingly larger scale military conflict between two mid-level powers...
-- hint --
The Sollies might have to intervene to enforce the Eridani Edict in case one power goes crazy; so they'd be paying attention
--hint--

Since the Edict is a retaliatory doctrine, they're not really worried about the time delay. There have been historical cases of it taking a few years to enforce it, I gather; the point is to make breaking the Edict an eventual death sentence for the government involved, not to automatically stop a conflict in time to save the devastated remnants of the planet the bad guys just nuked.

...so that for the next book in the Honorverse; the Sollies get danced around and destroyed in the Manticore system by the Combined Havenite/Manticore fleet, which scores an astounding 20 to 1 kill ratio.
Come on.
Admit it.
You see this coming a mile away.

Yup. The threat is that the Sollies will catch on when a real fleet (by their standards, anything less than several hundred dreads isn't a real fleet) gets crushed and they start actually forcing their engineering firms to push the envelope. They have the industrial bulk to overwhelm both Manticore and Haven with relatively shitty weapons that at least put them within shouting distance (by brute force if nothing else, making missiles twice as big to get the same range or whatever).

Weber himself figures on the Sollies needing about five years to gear up... which when you think about it is not that bad given that they were twenty years behind the curve to start with.

Nice way to dance around the fact that by Weber's logic; Britain shouldn't have built the Dreadnought, because it made the Royal Navy's edge in warships semi-obsolete; and let everyone start out on a level playing field regarding a modern battleline.

Weber's logic doesn't apply to historical Britain because they had credible opponents. They actually needed a qualitative edge; they could not rely on quantity alone as a stopgap measure in the event that the enemy innovated without their knoweldge. The League can- really, they can. They would still win this war in the long run, assuming their country doesn't fall apart, because their hordes of crapships would buy them time to build less crappy ships.

And they know this. They have always known that their great advantage over any potential rival is sheer size. And so to get the maximum size at the minimum cost they have chosen a strategy of using a large reserve fleet, one that will never be quite up to date but is big enough to flatten almost anything they can imagine. Even against technological threats more sudden and large than they had any reason to think were on the horizon a few decades ago, it's still working- sort of.

Gee; I dunno, for the same reason the U.S. continued to build the B-2 and F-22 (albeit in reduced procurement), and kept on buying DDG-51 ARLEIGH BURKE SWARM well after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Uh, no?

See, we kept doing that, yeah. But what if the US were instead the US-RUSSO-EURO-INDO-CHINESE FEDERATION (not only the biggest country in the world by a factor of five to ten, but also the supplier of military tech to nearly everyone else)? And if the last major threat had vanished hundreds of years ago? Would we still be frantically innovating and pouring more and more money into replacing our already excellent ships with still more excellent ones? Having to replace the entire fleet of planes and ships every twenty to thirty years?

At what point does it just stop making economic sense to do that? Shep, you personally may have an endless lust for more advanced military hardware... but that doesn't mean everyone else should.

On top of which, unlike the modern US the League doesn't have an "enforce our will everywhere in the universe on a minute's notice" policy driving obsessive advances in capabilities in order to meet the imagined horror of not being omnipotent. They can live with just being fucking huge.

The only reason the Solarian League can maintain the Eridani Edict is because of it's military power -- and if it wants to maintain the Edict, it must continuously upgrade and modernize it's military to maintain that decisive edge over all other states; to the point where people would rather put a gun to their head and pull the trigger than fight the Sollies.

You can't do that if you bring fifty-year old dreadnoughts to the playing field.

Sure they could. Twenty years ago that would have worked. Fifty years ago, it would have worked like a charm. Sure, they might have lost some ships... but they'd have lost nothing compared to what their enemies would lose. It's only unexpected advances in one corner of human space that made this plan NOT work perfectly, as it did for centuries.

Shep, you're right that this is all author fiat. But you seem to have absolutely no ability to imagine that the situation is anything other than what you expect it to be from the point of view of someone who cares about nothing but the maximum possible military R&D investment. About capability for the sake of capability, about overkill for the sake of overkill.

As a serious policy for a nation that faces no existential threat and has not for centuries, that's ridiculous, and you ought to realize it. Yes, they have overkill- enough to enforce the Eridani Edict three times over on any nation that ever existed until about five years ago.

Why does it break your mind that someone might slip up after a few hundred years?

[Thanas]

Again, the analogy is Qing China. How long did it take them to start turning out modern weapons in even tiny quantities, after they got their big wake-up call in the 1860s or so? The Sollies aren't in that bad a situation because they at least have factories and scientists, but their military research and development organs are so atrophied that it's taken them this long to even start making incremental improvements using the new technology.

It took Han China less than ten years to jump from 1600 tech to 1870 tech. And that was done despite the shitty economy.

In comparison, the league is so powerful that it would be like the USA trying to adopt a weapon system developed by a village in Panama. Guess how long that will take?

Really, the Solies should already have this tech lying around, considering how they had spies in Haven, a lot of trade etc. You can't tell me that there is not a single competent person in the Intelligence Apparatus who funded pocket change for acquiring a piece of that.

[Dahak]

We have been shown competent intelligence people from the Sollies in the latest books. It's just that they are mostly ridiculed, ignored, or sidelined because their opinions are not politically convenient.

[Jadeite]

We have been shown competent intelligence people from the Sollies in the latest books. It's just that they are mostly ridiculed, ignored, or sidelined because their opinions are not politically convenient.

Not only that, but one actually expected his career to be ended precisely because he was correct about Manticoran capabilities, and as such would be made a scapegoat for not 'trying harder' to bring it to the attention of the brass. It didn't help him that he was Frontier Fleet, IIRC.

[Dahak]

It is quite obvious, from our outside perspective, that Solarian League could duplicate Manticore's technological advances in relatively short time.
But we can look at the whole thing more or less objectively. Any SL official does not have this luxury. Instead, they are saddled with centuries of groupthink and institutional cognitive dissonance and structurally ossified to a huge degree (made worse by the sheer longevity of their people).

[eyl]

The Edict is actually quite functionally similar to what Stuart's America imposes in TBO.

"If you guys want to have a conflict, fine -- keep it down to a dull roar, please, or else we get mighty annoyed."

But there's an important and crucial difference.

Stuart's TBOverse 'American Doctrine' is an unwritten one, which allows TBO America a lot of flexibility in applying it.

Meanwhile, the Eridani Edict is formally written into the actual Solarian Constitution as Article 97.

That removes a lot of flexibility, since if you go against the Edict as written in law; you are performing an unconstitutional act and can be removed from command.

Thus, your only option is to destroy the nation or peoples responsible for the violation. You can't wriggle out of it by blowing up a couple of ships -- you have to destroy the violator, totally.

That then imposes a Constitutional requirement for having a military force unpreceedented in Human space in order to enforce the Constitution of the Solarian League.

Except that as far as the Solarians are concerned, they already have the most powerful fleet in human space, as well as being the largest and most technologically advanced state*. By this point, "challenging the League in warfare is suicide" is pretty much an axiom of political thought. From their POV, their navy is already powerful enough to fulfill the Edict (and they're probably right - I doubt those Eridani interventions required much in the way of capital naval force) and no-one else has any significant contributions to miltary technology. Challenging that conception is pretty much futile career suicide.

Nevermind the fact that the Solarian League has been you know, funneling technology and monies to Haven in secret -- that completely blows the whole authorial fiat excuse of "oh noes, teh NEOBARBS!" out of the water; if they think the conflict is important enough to intervene in a soft way.

IIRC that was specific factors in the League rather than the League government as whole - and the thinking was less "this is important enough", rather "we can make a buck off this".

[thegreatpl]

The Manticoran tech examples the Solarians have are about 5 or 6 years out of date, as they got pretty much cut off from getting samples from Haven by the new regime. Except that those examples are in the hands of Solarian private corporations, and not the Navy. The Manticorans strong armed the Solarian League into putting a tech embargo with Haven up at the beginning of the 1st war. And we have seen evidence that Technodyne at least was doing some experimentation. So not all the Sollies are thinking that they have the best tech in the universe.

The problem is that the Navy, which is a pretty insular group in the first place, thinks it has the most advanced tech.

And before Manticore started it's innovations, Naval warfare had remained the same for centuries. So frankly, you could bring along a hundred year old superdreadnought to the party and still win.

[Thanas]

Speaking of Baen's decline, I am now convinced that a very right-wing ideology was extremely prevalent in their products right from the start.

I mean, I am just reading some books from the Honorverse and it is more than annoying how much they are filled with "STUPID LIBRULS" nonsense. This is more than evident when you have a conversation between Mary Sue Honor and a "liberal". For example, the entire first chapters of Honor of the Queen read as if somebody had taken the worst liberal caricatures of Bill O'reilly and lined them up.

[Vehrec]

We have been shown competent intelligence people from the Sollies in the latest books. It's just that they are mostly ridiculed, ignored, or sidelined because their opinions are not politically convenient.

Not only that, but one actually expected his career to be ended precisely because he was correct about Manticoran capabilities, and as such would be made a scapegoat for not 'trying harder' to bring it to the attention of the brass. It didn't help him that he was Frontier Fleet, IIRC.

This is bullshit. Where are the Young Turks? The politically ambitious officers and junior officials who want to overthrow their superiors, and take their jobs? Political ends can be served by creating a 'crisis' of even the slightest perceived inferiority. The people who are looking for a lever to increase their personal power and might try pushing through a fleet modernization or a crackdown on non-state actors like Manpower as the vehicle to achieve that. Certainly, the shipbuilding interests of the Solarian league would love a modernization contract round, more business for them! Hell, shouldn't some of them be rich enough to build a pod-laying superdread themselves as a technology demo?

[Connor MacLeod]

Are there people who actually took the John Ringo/Weber novels as serious SF (doesnt matter if its military or not) rather than mindless pulpy soft core sci fi? IT's the fucking eqiuvalent of Transformers or Die hard in dead tree form. IT's no better than SW or 40K in that regard and thre's nothing fantastic about it (or if there is something meaningful its largely by accident).

[Simon_Jester]

It is quite obvious, from our outside perspective, that Solarian League could duplicate Manticore's technological advances in relatively short time.
But we can look at the whole thing more or less objectively. Any SL official does not have this luxury. Instead, they are saddled with centuries of groupthink and institutional cognitive dissonance and structurally ossified to a huge degree (made worse by the sheer longevity of their people).

It is equally obvious to in-story characters who understand those advances that the League could duplicate them quickly. This is a major factor stated in Manticore's strategic planning, because they know damn well that their technological edge is going to evaporate if the war stretches out more than a couple of years. The Sollies have the equipment to build most of what the Manticorans have built quite easily, just not the incentive to tear apart their mass-scale production lines for conventional weapons in order to build the new stuff in the needed quantity.

Are there people who actually took the John Ringo/Weber novels as serious SF (doesnt matter if its military or not) rather than mindless pulpy soft core sci fi? IT's the fucking eqiuvalent of Transformers or Die hard in dead tree form. IT's no better than SW or 40K in that regard and thre's nothing fantastic about it (or if there is something meaningful its largely by accident).

I, for one, never took anything Ringo wrote as serious SF, or as particularly good SF. I think the Honorverse is at least one narrow grade above "mindless," it's less stupid than that, but it's far from truly good.

This is bullshit. Where are the Young Turks? The politically ambitious officers and junior officials who want to overthrow their superiors, and take their jobs? Political ends can be served by creating a 'crisis' of even the slightest perceived inferiority. The people who are looking for a lever to increase their personal power and might try pushing through a fleet modernization or a crackdown on non-state actors like Manpower as the vehicle to achieve that.

Now this is a really good question. The only Young Turks we've seen are in the Frontier Fleet, and their ambitions tend to be more secessionist than revolutionary (they want to run their own fiefdoms, not to take over the League naval bureaucracy).

Certainly, the shipbuilding interests of the Solarian league would love a modernization contract round, more business for them! Hell, shouldn't some of them be rich enough to build a pod-laying superdread themselves as a technology demo?

Technodyne Industries, for one, was already working toward that. By February 1921 (in the mutant Post Diaspora calendar the setting uses), they'd already duplicated the pod technology, and were throwing something broadly similar to what Manticore would have been using in the 1905-1910 period. Once you have the pods, building podlayers is comparatively easy; I would honestly not be surprised to see demonstration SD(P) types coming out of their yards very soon.

Of course, without the extended range capabilities this doesn't do them a lot of good, but podlayers also have the advantage that they can be reconfigured to launch smaller numbers of larger missiles more easily than something that fires them through internal launch tubes. And the first generation of Sollie missiles that can match Manticoran MDMs in range are going to be big, much like their Havenite counterparts. Probably big enough that firing them from internal magazines would require new-build ships in any case.

Of course, any plans that Technodyne had along those lines were disrupted by the political crisis they now face, but it seems quite likely that the other shipbuilders are moving in the same direction.

[andrewgpaul]

Speaking of Baen's decline, I am now convinced that a very right-wing ideology was extremely prevalent in their products right from the start.

I mean, I am just reading some books from the Honorverse and it is more than annoying how much they are filled with "STUPID LIBRULS" nonsense. This is more than evident when you have a conversation between Mary Sue Honor and a "liberal". For example, the entire first chapters of Honor of the Queen read as if somebody had taken the worst liberal caricatures of Bill O'reilly and lined them up.

I remember thinking that when I read the Starfire novels. Every good guy was in the military, and every bad guy was a politician. No matter what side they were on - the books are written from the human perspective, yet Orion Khanate admirals were sympathetic, honourable foes, while the human government was filled with conniving, moustache-twirling villains.

The only exceptions were ex-military men who took up careers in politics, or the political appointees in naval staff posts. None of whom ever turned out to be hidden gems. At least (AFAIK) the odd 'blue-blooded' political appointee in the Honor Harrison novels might actually turn out to be useful in a fight.

By the way, is it just me, or do all the Baen novels look like cheesy shite? shiny CGI backdrops, titles and authors' names in huge 'exploding' typefaces, that sort of thing. Even GW can turn out a better-looking book cover. Is it just that's what US mass-market SF novels look like?

[Stofsk]

I remember thinking that when I read the Starfire novels. Every good guy was in the military, and every bad guy was a politician. No matter what side they were on - the books are written from the human perspective, yet Orion Khanate admirals were sympathetic, honourable foes, while the human government was filled with conniving, moustache-twirling villains.

The only exceptions were ex-military men who took up careers in politics, or the political appointees in naval staff posts. None of whom ever turned out to be hidden gems. At least (AFAIK) the odd 'blue-blooded' political appointee in the Honor Harrison novels might actually turn out to be useful in a fight.

By the way, is it just me, or do all the Baen novels look like cheesy shite? shiny CGI backdrops, titles and authors' names in huge 'exploding' typefaces, that sort of thing. Even GW can turn out a better-looking book cover. Is it just that's what US mass-market SF novels look like?

It's probably a marketing thing. As a publisher, you want your product to be distinctive enough to draw the eye to it. That said I have three baen books (the first three Honor books) and they were obviously printed at different points, because only one of them has that 'garish' looking cover.

[RedImperator]

By the way, is it just me, or do all the Baen novels look like cheesy shite? shiny CGI backdrops, titles and authors' names in huge 'exploding' typefaces, that sort of thing. Even GW can turn out a better-looking book cover. Is it just that's what US mass-market SF novels look like?

No. Baen covers are distinctly garish and amateurish.

[Junghalli]

You know, I've never read any of the later Honor stuff so for all I know it's brilliant and I've completely misjudged it just going off the comments in this thread, but as I read all the explanations of how the Solarians' state totally makes sense a distinct picture is forming in my mind here: a picture of a papier-mache opponent that the author has carefully created to be so loaded with weakness and incompetence that it's just barely strong enough that the good guys can look all heroic and hard-core beating it up. In fact some of them remind me of the reasons given that it made perfect sense for the demons in Armageddon to be a bunch of weaksauce bronze age throwbacks, and if any of you have read that "Salvation War Criticism Thread" that I helped shit up you'll know what I think of that.

I think arguing over whether such an opponent is "realistic" or not kind of misses the point, honestly. Oh sure, if the whole thing is nonsensical on top of being blatant author favoritism that's icing on the cake, but the fundamental problem with such storytelling is with drama, not realism. When it's blatantly obvious the author is kneecapping and hamstringing the antagonist at every turn it tends to render the story boring, predictable, and masturbatory (since the author is basically creating a representation of something he hates and something he likes and tying up the former and presenting it on a silver platter to the latter all trusted and prepositioned and quivering for the imminent buttrape, which he then cheers on). No amount of realism is going to render that unobjectionable, because it's fundamentally objectional because it's shit storytelling not because it's unrealistic.