Simon_Jester wrote:Yeah, pairing 4 and 5 would work. I think part of the reason he wrote 4 was that by the time he'd gotten 3 off, he knew he had a franchise going, and so wanted to show off social structure and things a bit more rather than just writing Shit Blows Up. So he wrote something that largely takes place back at the home front.
Though I think a good movie covering both would have to be... pretty long, for a movie. Not necessarily ridiculously so, but pretty long.
Length would depend on what would be interesting or what could be cut out - a bit like how the latter Harry Potter movies were once they got into the longer books (EG 4-6.. you had less and less of the "school work, quidditch, etc." stuff and more focus on other aspects.) There's quite a bit of subplotting in book 5 that probably could either be simplified or cut out - including alot of the "Grayson lifestyle" stuff we get (like the bit where Honor faces down that Grayson Preacher.)
YEah you do end up cutting some of the essential stuff out of the movies, but to be perfectly blunt I would anticipate any Honorverse series that got far enough to cover books 4 and 5 would basically have degenerated into "Big Dumb Action movie" like Star Trek did. And once you get past 6 it mostly gets to be about the space battles and explosions anyhow.
I'm not so sure. Fleets fought missile duels with networked missile defenses and whatnot during the earlier novels. I really think people take the "Oh it's Age of Sail!" based on stuff that is really cultural background*. The fact that Honor shares initials with a famous fictional Napoleonic naval officer really does not mean her setting is "Age of Sail."
It's not a 100% analogy of course - the simple fact they use missiles is a pretty big distinction, but it is enough like it in most ways to call it such (I mean fuck the Impeller wedge is such a convoluted drive system that it basically comes across as "I want age of sail in space"... Nevermind the WArshawskis.)
In real life, basic naval strategy changed less than you might think from the Age of Sail to the Age of Steam. As late as 1900, everyone expected naval battles to involve combat at relatively short ranges (a few thousand meters, tops) between large lines of capital ships that would have to bang away at each other for prolonged periods to batter down the sides of the enemy ships, just like in Nelson's day. Boarding actions weren't seen as very likely, but that was about all that had changed.
I know that there was a transitional period between the 19th and 20th century as far as naval combat went. Turrets only crept in gradually as ironclads required guns become bigger and bigger (and the number of guns dwindled as penetration rather than broadsides became important.) And yes I was aware ranges were still shorter as of WW1, mostly because of the methods of targeting available. It didn't really change much until the invention of Radar, as I remember details.
Dramatic increases in gun ranges, with the rise of post-gunpowder propellants that could loft artillery shells out to ~10 km or more on ballistic trajectories, really surprised people going into Tsushima, and even at Jutland it's questionable whether people had really adapted.
So that sudden "holy shit the definition of 'in range' just increased by a factor of ten in a decade or two" has happened twice in naval history: once from about 1895-1915, and once from about 1940-1960.
Depends on your definition of "dramatic" I suppose. I don't object to the weapons ranges increasing, but the introduction of the MDM, on top of everything else, was pretty much the "breaking" point for the series, and tech advances stopped becoming incremental. It also doesn't help that the fact it was invariably Manticore who devised all the neat high tech gadgetry to save the day. I mean one novel we're facing ships that hurl missiles at something like .25-.3c on average, tops, and next thing you know missile velocities have
tripled - and not only are they routinely flinging massive numbers of missiles at near-c (and point defense and shit can all handle this, mind) but those missiles still have a shit-ton of power on their drive systems...
As I recall they were already tweaking acceleration values on next generations of missiles, which would have already extended ranges. If we needed more range why couldn't drive endurance have been tweaked? I never quite understood why they could cram three SEPARATE drives inot a missile (or even a fucking fusion powerplant) but they couldn't figure somewhay to make a drive system with say, 75/225 seconds endurance.
Let's look at the first couple books. book one was the first one and didn't really have any super duper tech advances, although Manticore's basic edges in electronics and such over Haven probably counts. The Grav lance too, although that was perhaps the one (and only) example of "bad/silly tech that has no place in things" in the entire series, and this is a shame because Weber should have carried this concept to subsequent book as a way of balancing out all the ludicrous advances he kept cramming into Manticore. Book 2 had the recon drones and grav pulse stuff, and the introduction of the Grayson inertial compensators. I didn't mind that either. Book 3 had mainly the missile pods as I recall it, which again wasn't really something that broke things.
"but what about book 6" you ask? Well I'm willing to give that a pass because the Manties are trying out something completely new. I rather liked book six because it had something of a "James bond" feel to it... and honor's starships kinda played the role of the super-secret spy car. Anyhow, Manticore was trying out the "Q-ship" thing at last, so I figured they might try a different approach to it, with different capabilities. And whats more it actually felt kinda natural to have some of the stuff from book 6 end up changing how combat would work in book 7. I even liked the way Honor was portrayed as talking down White Haven for his irrationality towards Hemphill and her ideas.
I also have to think about some of the stuff that has come up form the spinoff series - the "off axis" firing capability, for example, or the Andermani and their innovative approach to sticking missile pods on ships. I think I'd have liked to see stuff like that earlier before we started developing into the insane "podnought wars" we have been stuck with ever since, and it would have been nice if some tech ideas simply hadn't panned out. Or maybe that the enemy would devise some o fthe ideas before Manticore (to counter Manty's tech advantages) and then the Manticorans borrow it. Or something.
The basic point is the technophilia of the later books pretty much fucked up what had started out somewhat reasonable in early ones, and should have been handled far differnelty.
