The Decline of Baen Books as a Respectable SF Publisher

[Mr Bean]

Edited to add:
Surely, I'm not the only one who was bothered by Weber's treatment of starship classes? In the real world, as technology and doctrines have changed, the class names have shifted; the modern frigates, for example, are very different from WWII-era frigates, which in turn are completely different from the Age of Sail frigates. In Honorverse, though, these classes are absolute, so battleships end up being these inferior, second-line rubbish ships! Generally speaking, nothing smaller than a dreadnought seems to be worth anything. I kept expecting him to bring out hyperdreadnoughts, superhyperdreadnoughts and ultradreadnoughts as the books progressed...

I'd disagree there, from the books standpoint, Frigates can fight Destroyers and it might go either way because neither side posses any significant armor and only speed is different between the too. However no one fields frigate style ships anymore because the hull is to small to fit in all the new toys like FTL and Ghost rider and the like. So destroyers are the new bottom end.

The books keep the ship classes identical at least. IE if it's a Destroyer it can fight but it's lightly armored and fast, Light crusiers are destroyers but half again as big still lightly armored but much better armed. And then we get into actual armoring, IE Heavy Crusiers can pound Destroyers because they are still pretty fast but armored enough to take a few hits while destroyers go kaboom in one or two hits. Then we get into Battlecrusiers which are in essence really big destroyers, fast enough to catch Crusiers and just about as armored but they have the firepower to threaten battleships which means they rule over anything they can catch up to. Battleships suck because they are to small to mount enough firepower and enough armor and be worth a damn since Battle-crusiers are faster, and dreadnaughts have much better armor. It's not till we get into the final ship class, Superdreadnaughts that we get to ships of the line, "slow" ships that are designed to take a good-awful pounding and dish one out in return.

These ship classes have been consistent through most of the books, the only difference is that crusiers and destroyers have been getting more dangerous by mounting battlecruiser sized energy weapons and getting missiles with much heavier warheads.

[Xon]

In a setting where ship classes have been set in stone for literially hundreds of years due to technological stasis, bitching about how ship classes haven't changed is oddly short sighted.

Fundmentally, how major battles are fought hasn't changed at all for the entire series. The switch to massive missile slugfests increases the need for a massive wall of ships so you have enough integrated PD to shoot down all those missiles. Smaller ships are of dramatically less worth because they don't continute as much to the PD grid.

Remember, Honorverse ships are networked to an massive degree. For example, Point-Defense is completely computer controlled, and targeting priorities calculations and execution of those orders are distrbuted across the entire network of ships. The bigger the ship, the dramatically more processing power per unit can be brought to bear and the number of PD nodes increases significantly compared to the total wedge footprint.

When an Honorverse military ship is comming into dock, they have to explicitly switch the PD systems off. No IFF? The PD will automatically shoot anything approaching the ship. That can include a freaking space station.

[Thanas]

Fundmentally, how major battles are fought hasn't changed at all for the entire series. The switch to massive missile slugfests increases the need for a massive wall of ships so you have enough integrated PD to shoot down all those missiles. Smaller ships are of dramatically less worth because they don't continute as much to the PD grid.

Remember, Honorverse ships are networked to an massive degree. For example, Point-Defense is completely computer controlled, and targeting priorities calculations and execution of those orders are distrbuted across the entire network of ships.

Really? Wasn't a huge part why the Masadan BC lost in book 2 due to it having computer controlled PD, thus allowing Cordones to sneak in nukes?

Is this another of Weber's contradictions?

[Serafina]

Hmm, IIRC the problem was that the point defense was set to a purely automatic pattern. Normally, human controllers are supposed to program their own patterns and switch between them as they see fit. It's still under computer controll, but there is a human element to it. The lack of that element made it predictable and hence vulnerable.

So it seems to make sense - but then again, that was one of the early books. It really only get's bad in the later books IMO.

[Batman]

The problem wasn't the PD but the ECM, which was COMPLETELY under computer control, thus allowing Cardones to spot the pattern and USE their ECM to turn his missiles into really nasty ARMs.

[Xon]

Basicly PD will shoot at anything inbound if the system thinks it's a threat. The problem becomes when there are more inbound targets than the ship has PD capacity at a given time. Sure, you can automatically filter stuff out but it comes down to an arms race between the attacker and defender on what is a real missile, what is a dud, and what actually requires a surface hit to do any damage (and thus can be targetted last). And the Honorverse does lack powerful AI, so the most powerful pattern recognition system they have is a human mind.

Really? Wasn't a huge part why the Masadan BC lost in book 2 due to it having computer controlled PD, thus allowing Cordones to sneak in nukes?

Fire control, ECM & ECCM is computer controlled, but humans are in the command loop for selecting target priorties and patterns the fire control system uses.

In the book it gets explained that the incompetence of the officers actually compromised effectiveness of the automatic systems by selecting bad choices which allowed the Manties to trick them into thinking that the real missiles where actually fakes.

[Simon_Jester]

This is indeed a pattern. Weber has occasionally dabbled in letting Honor lose (bad luck in Book Seven, to a superior naval force in Book Eleven), but he never made as much of a habit of it as he should have.

Yeah, but no Havenite never outmaneuvered her on a one-to-one basis. I know she is supposed to be a good ship handler, but with the numbers of engagements one would think she'd be able to finally do much more.

Even competent Havenites like Theissman (sp?) always fail to perform when they are up against Honor. Heck, in book 2, Theissman had her perfectly ambushed....and for some reason split his fire instead of focusing on the more valuable target.

Theisman's first target (which he hits with a concentrated salvo and mission-kills, rendering it incapable of combat despite the fact that it outmasses his command by something like 1.5 or 2 to 1) was Honor's second-largest ship, the light cruiser Apollo.

Past that point, Theisman considers his mission to be to damage and disable as many of the Manticoran ships as possible, not to simply blow one of them out of space: "The Captain would finish [Apollo off; his job was to damage as many Manticorans as he could before Thunder [the battlecruiser] came back." I'm not sure whether this counts as "failure to perform;" even if Theisman had concentrated his fire on finishing off Apollo, it's not clear that he would have accomplished more or that the outcome of the overall campaign would have been dramatically different.

In book 6, he once again has her in his sights and knows he can take her SDs (albeit at the lost of much of his command), but the loss in forces would be worth it. Any commander would jump at this - but he suddenly lost his edge, despite being earlier on described as one of the most aggressive and competent commanders.

Book Five, actually, and there are two problems with that:
1) Taking the remaining SDs would involve heavy casualties for his entire command, and would probably still leave an unfavorable tonnage exchange for Haven. There's a difference between "aggressive" and "kamikaze."
2) The operation was already pretty much a failure. Assuming they managed to engage and destroy the surviving Grayson ships (not just the damaged SDs but their screening battlecruisers), his own force would be in no shape to handle the Grayson orbital defenses, or the other forces remaining in-system (including picket units that were not in position to fight in the opening phase of the battle). He wouldn't accomplish anything except taking out the ships, and it's debatable whether it would have been worth it.

That is the most ridiculous about the series - when Hornblower went up against enemy forces, you actually knew he was in some kind of danger because Forester had earlier shown he would not bullshit his way out of inwinnable situations. With Harrington, there always just happens to be the tiny mistake made by her opponents that she always manages to catch.

This is true. I don't feel that the points where Theisman goes up against her are the ones that stand out so much, but I do agree that there are plenty of such situations.

Yes, however it shows that earlier on the Solies were quite willing to modernize, something weber has forgotten now.

The Sollies' defense contractors are willing to modernize. But even after they've developed the systems, they still have to convince the League to mass-produce the new warship classes... which is more or less out of the question without being able to point to a threat sufficient to make the old ones obsolete.

A rough estimate of what Technodyne and such have already done suggests that, on their own initiative, they've already caught up (in 1922) with where the Manties had deployed in 1912, and what the Havenites had deployed in 1916-17. That's consistent with the R&D establishment making efforts on a scale commensurate with the Manties' own (probably on a comparable budget), but with a ten year lag time imposed by the fact that the Manties started working on these technologies some time before 1900 but the Sollies didn't start until *after* the onset of the Manticore-Haven war.

The problem is that the improved equipment hasn't penetrated to the fleet yet, because unlike Manticore and Haven, the League hasn't been building new capital ships at war-mobilization levels. Which makes sense, since they weren't at war and didn't expect to be until the past five years or so... and their existing fleet would have been perfectly capable of rolling over anything in the galaxy until the past few years.

Given the size of those companies, Defence companies could easily field a few dozen ships of the wall of their own, which would be enough to give the league enough to duplicate the technology within a year or so.

I don't think they could build the ships without naval contracts giving them permission to do so, but yes. They have the building slips and they're close to having the technology. But I'm actually not surprised that the technology hasn't penetrated to the battle fleet when that would require large scale new building programs at a time when (until the past year or so) the League had no expectation that it would need to fight a war against an enemy the new ships would be needed against.

What's contrived is the lack of strategic alertness at the very top level of the League: the fact that the R&D people's noticing new technology on the horizon didn't trickle up to the people who could make an independent decision to pursue that technology. That's why the Sollies are screwing up in Book Twelve: they don't realize the new weapons exist, or are in denial, because of that failure for information to trickle up the chain as it should.

And that is the contrived and stupid part: the strategic paralysis at the top of the League. It's far from unprecedented, but it's still stupid.

It's definitely frustrating that the actual units fielded by the Sollies show no sign of advances over the 1900-1920 period; we don't get an adequate idea of what's changed. I, for one, would be happier if they'd incorporated FTL comms into their doctrine, at least for flagships and such.

Which reinforces my earlier point - Weber's policy is to limit the enemies artificially, with limits that should not be existing. And the earlier point to Qin China is not really a valid analogy, given that the Solies do not enjoy dominion over their neighbours.

...Uhm, yes they do?

Note that I said Qing China, not Qin: the dynasty founded in the early 17th century AD, not the 3rd century BC. The Qin enjoyed total superiority over all possible enemies, having conquered all their enemies in the process of becoming the rulers of China. The Qing started out enjoying crushing superiority against the local opposition, and retained that advantage up until some time after 1800... at which point they started taking humiliating defeats due to their technological and organizational disadvantages compared to Westerners.

The Sollies had overwhelming numerical superiority and technological parity up until about 1900 in this setting. The Manticorans didn't start pulling ahead technologically until then. Even then, Manticore didn't deploy any revolutionary new systems until 1910-1915; the Sollies could easily have overwhelmed Manticore at any time until they started fielding the "new" weapons seen in Books Eight and Nine; the Havenites didn't acquire that level of capability until around 1920.

So after centuries of having both quantitative and qualitative superiority over everyone else in the galaxy, the Solarians slipped up and lost qualitative superiority over a couple of the most prosperous and advanced of the "outer nations" for about a decade. I think it's important not to overstate the magnitude of their blunder here.

Haven starts shaping up in Book Six (Warner Caslet is the first sign of the Peeps growing a brain); they do launch some fairly effective offensives in Seven and Eight. Unfortunately, then they start running into the next round of the Manticoran Superweapons... bleh.

Yeah, another load of BS. Manticore is able to do what the league, despite its far higher potential, is not.....

That's why I said "bleh." I'm not charmed by it.

Again, I very much agree that the League's failure to use its higher potential to keep the lead in military technology is contrived and stupid. It's not unprecedented in real history, but it's bad form to make the opposition behave that way, especially when it's just as an excuse to throw gigantic hordes of crapships at your Heroic Protagonist and have them triumph easily.

[Lurks-no-More]

Edited to add:
Surely, I'm not the only one who was bothered by Weber's treatment of starship classes? In the real world, as technology and doctrines have changed, the class names have shifted; the modern frigates, for example, are very different from WWII-era frigates, which in turn are completely different from the Age of Sail frigates. In Honorverse, though, these classes are absolute, so battleships end up being these inferior, second-line rubbish ships! Generally speaking, nothing smaller than a dreadnought seems to be worth anything. I kept expecting him to bring out hyperdreadnoughts, superhyperdreadnoughts and ultradreadnoughts as the books progressed...

I'd disagree there, from the books standpoint, Frigates can fight Destroyers and it might go either way because neither side posses any significant armor and only speed is different between the too. However no one fields frigate style ships anymore because the hull is to small to fit in all the new toys like FTL and Ghost rider and the like. So destroyers are the new bottom end.

And that's my beef. In the real world, the ship classes have never been set in stone; as technology advances, you reassign the ships and classes to match the changes. New-style battleships replace old-style ones, new cruisers that are bigger and more powerful replace the old ones; and so on. You don't leave entire ship classes "behind" as you build bigger and beefier ships!

I choose to blame this on Weber's background w. SF board games, where you have distinct unit types and then, as expansions come, add to those instead of reassigning and recycling types and names.

[Thanas]

Past that point, Theisman considers his mission to be to damage and disable as many of the Manticoran ships as possible, not to simply blow one of them out of space: "The Captain would finish [Apollo off; his job was to damage as many Manticorans as he could before Thunder [the battlecruiser] came back." I'm not sure whether this counts as "failure to perform;" even if Theisman had concentrated his fire on finishing off Apollo, it's not clear that he would have accomplished more or that the outcome of the overall campaign would have been dramatically different.

Yeah, but it is always stuff like this. If Harrington was in command, do you have any doubt that the fight would have ended with at least one of the Peep ships dead?

Book Five, actually, and there are two problems with that:
1) Taking the remaining SDs would involve heavy casualties for his entire command, and would probably still leave an unfavorable tonnage exchange for Haven. There's a difference between "aggressive" and "kamikaze."

Yeah, instead of killing the ships, he just concedes the exchange outright and lets them have a much more unfavorable tonnage exchange. Right. 22 battleships to one SD is a lot worser than 30+ battleships to 5 SD.

2) The operation was already pretty much a failure. Assuming they managed to engage and destroy the surviving Grayson ships (not just the damaged SDs but their screening battlecruisers), his own force would be in no shape to handle the Grayson orbital defenses, or the other forces remaining in-system (including picket units that were not in position to fight in the opening phase of the battle). He wouldn't accomplish anything except taking out the ships, and it's debatable whether it would have been worth it.

Given how many BBs Haven has to throw around and how desperately Manticore is strapped for ships of the wall, yes, it would.

Yes, however it shows that earlier on the Solies were quite willing to modernize, something weber has forgotten now.

The Sollies' defense contractors are willing to modernize. But even after they've developed the systems, they still have to convince the League to mass-produce the new warship classes... which is more or less out of the question without being able to point to a threat sufficient to make the old ones obsolete.

Again, nonsensical and author fiat for no reason other than ego-stroking. There is no reason for a nation to just suddenly atrophy.

A rough estimate of what Technodyne and such have already done suggests that, on their own initiative, they've already caught up (in 1922) with where the Manties had deployed in 1912, and what the Havenites had deployed in 1916-17. That's consistent with the R&D establishment making efforts on a scale commensurate with the Manties' own (probably on a comparable budget), but with a ten year lag time imposed by the fact that the Manties started working on these technologies some time before 1900 but the Sollies didn't start until *after* the onset of the Manticore-Haven war.

Technology transfer does not work like that in the real world. If you already have comparable industry bases, copying new technology does not lead to a 10 year lag. Otherwise I'd like you to come up with historical examples for that.

And that is the contrived and stupid part: the strategic paralysis at the top of the League. It's far from unprecedented, but it's still stupid.

So why do you continue to defend Weber then?

Which reinforces my earlier point - Weber's policy is to limit the enemies artificially, with limits that should not be existing. And the earlier point to Qin China is not really a valid analogy, given that the Solies do not enjoy dominion over their neighbours.

...Uhm, yes they do?[/quote]

No they do not. Manticore has more Capita per head, for one.

The Qing started out enjoying crushing superiority against the local opposition, and retained that advantage up until some time after 1800... at which point they started taking humiliating defeats due to their technological and organizational disadvantages compared to Westerners.

That is not even comparable. Qing China faced internal revolts, the Solies did not. Qing china had no potential external enemies which could really threaten them if they want to, the Solies do.

So after centuries of having both quantitative and qualitative superiority over everyone else in the galaxy, the Solarians slipped up and lost qualitative superiority over a couple of the most prosperous and advanced of the "outer nations" for about a decade. I think it's important not to overstate the magnitude of their blunder here.

Yeah, it is. Their blunder would be akin to the Roman Empire suddenly losing qualitative superiority to the allied Germanic tribes, for example.

[Mayabird]

The thing about all the crap in the Honor Harrington series is that I'd be willing to accept any one thing since crazy things can and do happen (Harrington managing to win the duel, one of those ridiculous battles, etc.), or maybe even a few because maybe she just gets lucky a lot, but when it's all together (including the political stuff) it's just unbelievable. That's why I stopped reading the series; I just couldn't take the additional contrivances added to contrivances that just built on each other like a house of cards constructed mostly out of fairy dust. It wasn't worth trying to justify anything anymore.

Just me saying. Sneaking back out of the thread.

[Simon_Jester]

I partly agree with Maya; the collective burden of absurd things (Harrington managing to win the gunfight duel in Book Four, Harrington winning naval battles over and over in which her ship gets pounded flat but she's still alive, aspects of the escape from Hades in Book Eight, the weakness of the League in Book Twelve...) is enough to justify calling the series bad. Not, I would say, atrocious, but bad. The only reason I continue to defend it is because I think it is easy to overstate how bad it is- it is bad in too many places, but is not uniformly or entirely bad.

Yeah, but it is always stuff like this. If Harrington was in command, do you have any doubt that the fight would have ended with at least one of the Peep ships dead?

If she were given one small ship and was aiming to damage as many as possible of her larger opponents before being taken down? Yeah. But that reflects on her character shield adding +50% to missile damage or whatever, not to Theisman screwing up.

Again, I don't maintain that the Harrington books are good or that they are free of contrivances. I just think they're not quite as bad as you make them out to be.

Yeah, instead of killing the ships, he just concedes the exchange outright and lets them have a much more unfavorable tonnage exchange. Right. 22 battleships to one SD is a lot worser than 30+ battleships to 5 SD.

The previous losses are sunk costs, at an unacceptable loss rate forced on you by enemy action- should they affect the decision to engage?

Remember that this mission would never have been launched if the overall battleship force commander had known he was going up against SD's, even at those relatively favorable odds. They thought they would be hitting weak defenses (and yes, that was a screwed up operations plan).

Given how many BBs Haven has to throw around and how desperately Manticore is strapped for ships of the wall, yes, it would.

Granted, but I have a hard time condemning the commander on the spot for failing to commit suicide against a force that could quite possibly destroy his entire command in search of a double-kill. Haven is willing to wage a war of attrition, but they don't train their officers to be kamikazes.

Again, nonsensical and author fiat for no reason other than ego-stroking. There is no reason for a nation to just suddenly atrophy.

Weber's ego-stroking fiat was to make the League incapable of rapid turnarounds at the top, to say "OK, write off all the old ships, new military technology is the wave of the future and we'll have to replace everything." in the absence of defeat in a major conflict imposing modernization on them against their will. That's not historically unprecedented, but most of the nations with that problem were punching bags for their enemies, not credible antagonists.

Thus, Weber did as you say fail to make the League a credible antagonist (even less so than Haven as of Books Seven and later).

Technology transfer does not work like that in the real world. If you already have comparable industry bases, copying new technology does not lead to a 10 year lag. Otherwise I'd like you to come up with historical examples for that.

Off the top of my head I cannot think of a ten year example, but I can think of five year examples easily enough: the atomic bomb. In this case the problem was that even for nations with advanced industrial infrastructure (and yes, damage from World War Two delayed many nations' nuclear programs, I admit this), the bomb was a very specialized application of that industry. Making nuclear weapons requires specialized tools and techniques not needed for any other purpose, so there's a fixed investment of time and effort that has to be made before a nation can build nuclear weapons.

I strongly suspect that some of the things that go into a multiple-drive starship missile or an FTL comm fall under the same heading: they are expensive and specialized items that it takes years to learn to build even with samples of the hardware around to reverse-engineer, and years more to learn to build if you have to go through the same trial and error process to match what the original developers did.

And that is the contrived and stupid part: the strategic paralysis at the top of the League. It's far from unprecedented, but it's still stupid.

So why do you continue to defend Weber then?[/quote]Because I don't like seeing him accused of sins of greater magnitude than the ones he actually commits. He's bad, but I don't think he's as atrocious and contemptible as some on this thread make him out to be.

So when people say "Ha, X is stupid" and I do not think X is stupid, I say so. When I do think X is stupid, I don't argue with them.

No they do not. Manticore has more Capita per head, for one.

South Korea has a higher per capita GDP than China; this does not make South Korea the more powerful state or prove that China needs to engage in large-scale military reorganizations in order to keep up with South Korea.

The fact that a small state on the border of a large state outperforms the large state on a per capita basis is not, by itself, cause for alarm. What is cause for alarm is when the small state manages to capitalize on its performance advantage to the point where it actually poses a credible threat, which is a sign that the large state screwed up badly. Which the League has.

That is not even comparable. Qing China faced internal revolts, the Solies did not. Qing china had no potential external enemies which could really threaten them if they want to, the Solies do.

I'm not sure I agree with this. Weber wrote the League with serious internal problems, ones that cripple it quite badly, as part of the artificial weakening he imposed on them. Indeed, I'd argue that those are the main weakness the League has, because they're the ultimate cause of the League's being a late adopter of the new military technology. If the leadership wasn't stupid, hidebound, and isolated from the practical side of what's happening on the frontiers, they wouldn't have this problem and would probably have already launched an all-out effort to catch up with the new developments coming out of Manticore.

So I'd argue that the Sollies do have internal problems that explain their weakness as a state... but that these problems are, yes, author fiat and they make the League a dull and inferior opponent, much like a story of Britain versus Qing China would be on the strategic scale.

So after centuries of having both quantitative and qualitative superiority over everyone else in the galaxy, the Solarians slipped up and lost qualitative superiority over a couple of the most prosperous and advanced of the "outer nations" for about a decade. I think it's important not to overstate the magnitude of their blunder here.

Yeah, it is. Their blunder would be akin to the Roman Empire suddenly losing qualitative superiority to the allied Germanic tribes, for example.

I submit that it would be more akin to China suddenly losing qualitative superiority over South Korea (say, if they managed by dint of heroic national effort to produce a substantial force of fifth generation stealth fighters). The Romans had the advantages of size and per capita wealth and organization over the Germanic tribes; the League does not have the latter two advantages over Manticore.

[andrewgpaul]

No. Baen covers are distinctly garish and amateurish.

Actually, they used to be pretty decent until the mid-1990s with a few exceptions. Look at the Hammers' Slammers series for example.

Some of the early Honor covers do look pretty good like Honor among Enemies LINK; since they were still in that period where book companies commissioned artists to paint covers.

But ever since they went all CG/Photoshoppery; it's been bad bad bad.

Not linked to Baen alone -- there's been an overall decline in artwork commissioned for book covers in other genres in favor of photoshoppery of five photos into one. Look at the hardcovers for Turtledove's Timeline 191 series. They start out with good impressionistic paintings for the WWI books; but then quickly degenerate into photoshoppery by the Blood and Iron series.

Huh. To me, that one (the cover of Honor Among Enemies) is just as bad. Not sure what it is. It's a combination of things; the 'logo' around the author's name (and the fact that the name is in bigger type than the title) and the title, and the overall high-contrast, bright colours of the cover art itself.There's a sort of mid nineties 'look' to SF 'tech' art, and that cover has it. Don't know if everyone started copying the same artist or what, but lots of SF coers look the same. Not just Baen, but they're the only ones who appear to have stuck with it.

Oh, and then there's a reviewer blurb right on the front, too. Ugh.

[Stofsk]

Don't judge a book by its cover.

[Imperial Overlord]

It's worth noting that Drake was friends with Jim Baen and strongly prefers to work with people he's already comfortable with. He's not a writer who will quickly jump ship, but most of his fantasy is being published by Tor, not Baen.

[Samuel]

Off the top of my head I cannot think of a ten year example, but I can think of five year examples easily enough: the atomic bomb. In this case the problem was that even for nations with advanced industrial infrastructure (and yes, damage from World War Two delayed many nations' nuclear programs, I admit this), the bomb was a very specialized application of that industry. Making nuclear weapons requires specialized tools and techniques not needed for any other purpose, so there's a fixed investment of time and effort that has to be made before a nation can build nuclear weapons.

I strongly suspect that some of the things that go into a multiple-drive starship missile or an FTL comm fall under the same heading: they are expensive and specialized items that it takes years to learn to build even with samples of the hardware around to reverse-engineer, and years more to learn to build if you have to go through the same trial and error process to match what the original developers did.

I don't think those are comparable. Unless you need higher precision parts or materials that have to be developed to meet the tolerances, you just have an engineering problem of building something and working out the flaws. This isn't like the atom bomb where no one had ever done anything like it before and they had to design the equipment they were using to build the device.

[eyl]

I don't think those are comparable. Unless you need higher precision parts or materials that have to be developed to meet the tolerances, you just have an engineering problem of building something and working out the flaws. This isn't like the atom bomb where no one had ever done anything like it before and they had to design the equipment they were using to build the device.

IIRC the sticking point for both FTL comms and multi-stage missiles is power generation - it's mentioned in the second book that the FTL comm required a new generation (and apparently type) of fusion reactor, and the reason most Solarians in the recent books were sceptical of claims of Manticoran missile ranges was because they didn't believe anyone could make a missile with enough power (without making it too big to be practical, anyway) - presumably Manticore uses the same new generators for there missiles as well as the comms.

[Simon_Jester]

I don't think those are comparable. Unless you need higher precision parts or materials that have to be developed to meet the tolerances, you just have an engineering problem of building something and working out the flaws. This isn't like the atom bomb where no one had ever done anything like it before and they had to design the equipment they were using to build the device.

Thing is, a fair amount of the new Manticoran stuff is explicitly stated to be using the cutting edge of modern technology: ultra-dense capacitors, very small miniaturized components, things like that. This suggests that the Manties really did have to build specific facilities to manufacture the stuff*.

*Which helps to explain why they're so fucked by the loss of those space stations in Book Twelve; they can't easily repurpose other production lines.