Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington

[Batman]

The only things I blame Weber for are writing too slow and apparently thinking people only ever read a single one of the books so he has to put his infodumps into every one of them. You see, Mr Weber, I have read this series from the first book, so I know your explanations for the technology, the political situation, and the rough astrographical layout of their little corner of the Milky Way. Graphics showing that layout=good. Datasheets for the new warships=good. Datasheets for the new weapons=good. 20 page long infodumps on how and why those ships came to be, why those new weapons are better, how that affects the political situation in every damned book=bad. Though I DO think that only started in the later books? Been a while since I read them.
Oh, and one more thing. The US was founded by immigrants for Valen's sake. There's ethnic subcommunities everywhere but Weber couldn't find anybody to spellcheck his german?

Rant over.
What I was originally trying to say was that while you are right most of those things are the result of Honor being in the right place at the right time and knowing the right people rather than her personally being super special awesome, it nevertheless happens, and I can absolutely see readers thinking 'well isn't that convenient' and slot her in as a Mary Sue.

[Ahriman238]

While I think nobody sane is going to argue Honor had it easy (loss of an eye and half her face paralyzed in Book 2, lover killed in book 4, loss of the eye function and facial control AND a lower arm in book 7 etc) I suspect what irks people is that other than her totally inconsequential math problem, she's good at everything. Needs to fight a duel with antiquated firearms to avenge her murdered lover? Didn't we mention she's a crack shot with chemical burners?

I think Honor is very good at a limited range of skills, including starship command and unarmed combat. She is noted as a good shot, with a pulser, and spends something like 2 months training obsessively with the guns she'd duel in.

That and slight headgames with Summervale make me think she'd have a shot.

Samurai style sword duel? No biggy. Sure, she's not slept in days, has recently been shot out of the sky and is still seriously hurt, but everybody knows swordfights aren't about who's the better fighter, it's all about who blinks first (I don't know beans about fencing so for all I know this might be actually true, but I seriously doubt the average reader is going to see it that way).

I fence, not Katana though, Italian Rapier. The things Weber discusses in the swordfight segment are real things, though a very... interesting way of explaining them.

Fencing is speed chess, coupled with a small number of what I can only call "readied actions." You step up to the salle, and you're looking over your opponent, planning your first moves and anticipating his first. You have a few contingencies in mind, "If this happens, I move this way" ready for instant execution.

When you change the plan, usually because you went through your planned motions and your opponent is still standing, there is a hitch as you reformulate. There's the smallest fraction of a second (we train to reduce it, swordsmen decide and then act) when you decide to attack but haven't yet, and you aren't attacking or defending, during which you are vulnerable. If an opponent could recognize it, and was waiting to exploit it, like Honor was, he'd hesitate a critical moment to defend. On the other hand, focusing so hard on that should have left her wide open if she'd failed to recognize or exploit it quickly enough. So what she did? Easy money against rookie fencers, hell of a longshot against an experienced opponent, but not technically outside the realm of possibility.

So, Mr. Wizard, what should she have done? Well, "When meeting weakness, show strength. When meeting strength, show weakness." is the fencing mantra for a reason. When fighting a more experienced opponent, you should play it defensively. Even a rookie can last a very long time against a master, as long as he keeps giving ground, and it leaves you in the best position to exploit an opening if your opponent gets frustrated, impatient and sloppy, which really doesn't seem like it would take long in Burdette's case. On the other hand, I've never had a match when wounded and sleep-deprived, so it's quite likely Honor would be eager to avoid a long fight herself. In that case, variation on a theme, brace to stop his first swing, he'll expect a riposte so don't indulge him. Instead, pass forward (step in) to shove or body check him, then bring the sword into play while he's off-balance. Easy, plays to her strengths and his weaknesses, at a likelihood of success about a thousand times what she actually did.

The thing that really bugs me about that sequence is Benjamin Fucking Mayhew. All the Steadholders can appeal to trial by combat, and by virtue of holding Grayson's highest medal, Honor has the position of Protector's Champion. Fine. You're going to tell me she's the only one? What if she was unavailable, suppose she was actually on the frontline instead of beached? Would they try and recall her for this ritual combat? Would the Admiralty let her come? And what would would they do with the delinquent Steadholder til she could arrive? Hold him, making a sham of their law, or let him go and rally his armsmen/people? Suppose she died on her way back, would Mayhew have to concede he had no right to judge Burdette? For that matter, is there some rule that Mayhew himself can't step up to the plate? I don't know anything about his health or training, but he's got to be in better shape for this than a half-dead woman who had never held a sword last year.

Everybody who isn't designed to be a douchebag if not an outright villain likes her (including her enemies) and she even manages to get to terms with some of the douchebag ones. To top it all off, she not only finds a way for people to talk to treecats, develops limited telepathy,

There's a very useful trick for that sort of thing. It's called paying the best expert you can find enough to make your pet project his new full-time job. I'd have thought you'd be very familiar with the concept, Mr. Wayne.

but becomes filthily rich and a major figure in the aristocracy in what, especially in a society with prolong, is a pretty short time, not in one, but two systems (one of which, prior to Honor's arrival, found the very idea of women in positions of political power inconceivable).
So I can see why readers would think that Weber went a little overboard.

Well, Grayson gave her land and a title for saving their planet, and because Mayhew wanted a political symbol for his reforms and restored power. Then Manticore gave her a title and a chunk of the asteroid belt, because it would look bad to have her be a noble to one of their allies but not at home. Also, sends a bad message regarding possible conflict of interest.

Honor's riches came at an inconvenient time narrative, but make too much sense otherwise. She'd already made a couple million in prize money (which is a bullshit thing for an advanced nation, but so's pistol duels) and gotten a decent investor for it. But yeah, it turns out owning not one, but two economically productive fiefs for a few years can make you rich. Who'd a thunk?

[Simon_Jester]

Exhaustive commentary-on-the-commentary post follows; as it happens I've been reading the Honor Harrington novels on and off since I was... oh, about fourteen or fifteen?

Yeah, the villains here are the nightmare scenario every Republican thinks of when he hears the word "socialism." The majority of the population (60%) is on welfare, collect a check for breathing and do nothing with their lives. The leaders are too afraid of riot and revolt to change anything, and the only way to prop up the system is with fresh injections of cash, via military conquest.

I'm really amazed the series doesn't get more shit, just for this.

Probably because by the time that the "welfare will make people lazy" meme started to get really old in the late '90s and early '00s, Weber had:

1) Rearranged the political order, and the emphasis on elements in that order, within the Havenite government, so that the Dolists were no longer much of a conspicuous issue, and
2) Let his writing start going to shit to the point where most people irritated with him focused on the infodumps, not the politics.

Manticore sits at the junction of 6 (well, 7) wormholes, which drastically reduce travel times. The bulk of everyone's trade goes through Manticore.

Some of these wormhole hops shave months off transit times. It's only made explicit in later books, but the density of wormholes in human space is such that it's not just the wormhole hops that lead you to and through Manticore- it's all the other wormholes out there that let you do cool shit like jump 200 light years through a wormhole, fly 50 light-years, jump 300 light years, fly 80 light-years, jump another 200 light years... and still end up getting to your destination faster, even though it was only 200 light years away in a straight line.

Control of the "wormhole network" is a powerful strategic asset, which becomes all the more significant in later parts of the series where we see the Star Kingdom of Manticore begin to engage in more expansion in the directions its wormhole network leads.

Also, much like real life countries such as Panama, Manticore gets a huge amount of Manticore-registered shipping because of the reduced duties on wormhole transits through their junction. Unlike Panama, many of those Manticoran ships are actually crewed and owned by Manticorans, though. Which gives them even more economic leverage and a much larger pool of experienced spacers and space support industry than their population would normally allow.

Hephaestus, the RMN shipyard is 70 km across. Considering the largest ships are 2 km long, that's a lot of room for ships.

They were more like 4000 meters long before the Great Resizing- basically, someone actually did calcs on Weber's early books and found that his "eight million ton" superdreadnoughts would have to be about as dense as styrofoam if his published ship dimensions were correct. So he shrank the hulls down by a factor of several in all dimensions, increasing density by at least an order of magnitude while preserving the tonnage figures.

Even so, yes, Hephaestus is huge, and it's not the only station like it that Manticore built. The sheer physical bulk of the hangar space needed to provide berthing for dozens of multimillion ton warships is only part of it; the stations also accomodate freighters of comparable size, and major industrial/processing facilities.

Advantage: lots of industry and expertise concentrated into one place. Drawback: huge shipyard stations are huge single points of failure for the Manticoran economy.

She has a decent instinct and experience that lends itself well to eyeballing and back of the envelope figures, but when precision matters, not so much. This never comes up, because she can ship handle well enough for most purposes and has a dedicated officer to run the numbers for her. That's realistic, even if navigation is sort of a big part of a naval captain's life.

I kind of wish Weber had picked a different flaw that would come up. As it stands, Honor has three major faults as a naval officer at the start of the series:
1) Poor grasp of mathematics- consequence-free.
2) Allows her distaste for politics to override her judgment- has moderate consequences, arguably gets her mentor Courvosier killed in Book Two, Honor of the Queen.
3) Violently short temper when pushed- has major consequences for her career. Her vengefulness and refusal to consider the consequences of her actions after the assassination of her lover in Book Four, Field of Dishonor, gets her kicked out of the Manticoran aristocratic titles she'd earned in previous books, and effectively thrown out of Manticoran naval service. If she weren't in a position to reboot her career by serving in the Grayson military by that point she would really have been screwed.

Her temper also nearly gets her killed, in a fascinatingly indirect way. That really comes home to roost when the enemies her temper made in Books One and Two get revenge on her by pulling her back into Manticoran service. They manage to pull something close to a Uriah gambit on her in Book Six, Honor Among Enemies.

Now, if (1) were replaced by yet another fault with actual consequences, we'd have a really interesting character. Moreover, (1) might be a fault that would actually persist over time instead of going away automatically as she gets older and more mellow/experienced. And yes, she starts the series at about 42; she's therefore pushing 65 by the most recent novels.

Also, I hope they have inertial dampeners for the capsules.

Easily. The highest acceleration we know "grav plate" inertial compensators can absorb without tying into a starship's impeller drive is around 100 gravities, which is enough to go from Mach 1 to standing still in about a third of a second... or vice versa.

First mention of prolong, a therapy that slows the aging process, doubling to tripling human life expectancy. The major downside is it has to be administered just before or shortly into puberty, so that process gets doubled too. Lots of squandered opportunity for a discussion of how much growing up has to do with biology, and how much is life experience. I mean, Honor is 40+ but she looks barely twenty, and a lot of the time she acts barely twenty.

On the other hand, she doesn't visibly age much during the series- but she's a lot more mellow by 1920 PD, with 1900 Post Diaspora being the beginning of the series.

So her ship, the Fearless, is not docked flush with the station but connected with this tube. The tube itself has zero-g, not covered by the station or ship gravity and takes Honor 2 minutes to cross. No math here, but I'm guessing a hundred yards?

Thanks for noticing that, I hadn't. Thinking about it, having a tube like that is appropriate for a number of reasons. Honorverse ships have bits that stick off the hull in all directions (radar antennas and such). And their sizes are not standardized; Manticore has at least a dozen different classes of destroyers and cruisers that might dock at the berth Fearless is currently in, no two of which are the same size and which aren't exactly the same shape, either.

So an extendable "jetway" probably is the best way to dock with one, so that you have flexibility.

Prolong is more effective if your parents and grandparents had it. Please tell me they did a lot of research into the process before giving it to everyone.

You misunderstand what "generation" means in this context. "Third generation prolong" means "prolong treatment, version 3.0," or possibly 3.1/3.2/whatever.

Version 1.x stops the aging process somewhere in your forties, version 2.x in your thirties, and version 3.x stops it in your twenties when you're at your physical peak, but at the cost of an excruciatingly prolonged (hah!) adolescence.

Also, the prolong treatments emerged on Beowulf, a planet which has been doing biotech research hard for hundreds of years. I suspect they did a lot of controlled studies first.

"We still have the thirty-centimeter laser mounts, two in each broadside, plus the missile launchers. After refit, we'll have the grav lance and fourteen torpedo generators, as well, and the chase armament is unchanged: two missile tubes and the sixty-centimeter spinal laser."

Armament for Fearless, a Courageous-class light cruiser, both before and after her refit. Because of the Napoleon War stuff, it's important to separate light chase (front/rear) armament from broadside weapons. Fearless' chase was and remains 2 missile launchers and a 60-cm laser. The broadside was 4 grasers (gamma lasers) 2 lasers and 7 missile tubes, remeber that's for each side. Now it's 2 lasers, 2 missiles, 14 energy torpedoes, and 1 grav lance. Explanation to follow.

It actually makes sense to make the distinction on one level, even without waving your hands about 'wedges.' Assuming your spacecraft's engines point in a well-defined direction, which we will call "forward," the guns have to point either "forward," off to one side, or backward.

Forward and backward both limit your ability to control range during combat- to shoot at the enemy you must be running towards them (bad if you are outgunned) or running away (bad if you aren't outgunned). Being able to shoot perpendicular to your line of flight/acceleration is desirable.

Given the need to shoot sideways, weapons must either be mounted in fixed tubes bolted to the side of the ship, or in enclosed turret mounts. Turrets are arguably the superior choice, and even in the context of the Honorverse I would put the ships' beam armaments in enclosed turret mounts 'above' and 'below' the hull on a raised ridge along the centerline. But I'd still have the ship firing 'broadsides,' just broadsides in the WWI battleship sense, not the Napoleonic sense.

Missiles of course are a whole 'nother animal, more later.


Side note: Fearless doesn't suffer so much from the removal of her beam armament to make room for the grav lance, because the grav lance/energy torpedo combo is actually very dangerous within practical beam range (1-2 light seconds). The removal of missile tubes is crippling, not just in the context of the novel but overall. The Honorverse series begins just as Manticore is pioneering the military transition from the Beam Age to the Missile Age, so to speak.

Energy torpedoes are energy weapons, not missiles. Rapid-fire bursts of energy that shred ships but don't even inconvenience sidewalls (read shields, explanation soon.)

Sidewalls irritate me. Not because they're handwavy magic gravity manipulation, but because they don't act like it, in that they affect charged relativistic particles differently from uncharged ones. Gravity doesn't play favorites like that.

Just wanting to stress that their missiles are big.

Diagram here. Ignore the "Ghost Rider" missiles for the moment, but as to the rest, capital ship missiles are the approximate size of an 18-wheeler truck towing a single trailer. This makes them about the same size as real life ICBMs, which can (could) carry comparable-yield warheads... except that Honorverse missiles are fatter.

Fearless would be firing the cruiserweight version of the missile, which is shorter and stubbier, and is thus approximately the same length and diameter of a school bus.

Our first whiff of Manticoran politics. They have your basic British Constitutional Monarchy, but such a flowering of parties! Liberal, Conservative and Progressive are all pretty much what you expect. The New Men have an Objectivist/realpolitik philosophy that mostly involves cynically selling their bloc's votes to whoever offers the best concessions to them. The Crown Loyalists support the Crown as a check against the excesses of the nobility (bad boryars, good tsar?) and favor a strong middle class. Consdering the Centrists are the default good guys whenever politics comes up, we learn surprisingly little about them. Really, all we know is that the Centrists are the only ones with a clue about foreign policy, which at this point means accepting that war with Haven is inevitable.

Yes. The Centrists have a deliberately vague set of domestic politics, probably because Weber does not want to alienate readers. The Liberals are somewhere to the left of the Democratic Party in the US, although probably not to the left of SDN, and Weber may not realize about where the Liberals are because I'm not sure he actually comprehends non-Republican Party politics. No non-cardboard Liberal characters appear in the Honorverse until Weber started collaborating with Eric Flint, and Flint is a communist. The Progressives are similar to the Liberals to such an extent that I'm honestly not sure why there are two parties there instead of one. The Conservatives aren't even on the American political spectrum because they are conservative about a social order the US doesn't actually have.

Wait, I'm confused. Does that mean you go Rear Admiral (red) to Rear Admiral (green) to Vice Admiral (red) or that senior and skilled Admirals are promoted to the elite Manticore Division?

The former. This is an anachronism probably explained by Manticore's deliberately mock-British politics. Here's the history:

The English navy (before there was a Britain) was formed out of sailing ships with cannons that were designed to slug it out in long lines of battle. However, it soon became obvious that England had so many ships of war that when they formed a line to fight in a big fleet battle (say, with the French or Dutch), the line would be miles long. Too long for any one person to control effectively.

As a starting move to simplify the command situation, a given fleet would be subdivided into three parts or 'squadrons.' One squadron would sail in the front of the line, one in the middle, and one in the back.

The senior admiral in charge of the whole fleet would lead the squadron in the middle, so that he could communicate as fast as possible with all the ships at both ends, instead of having one bunch of ships strung out miles away from his flagship. In overall decisions he would command everyone, and was therefore just called "the admiral."

The front of the battleline was a responsible position. It was also a dangerous position, and one that often ran into opportunities to do something decisive and important to win a battle. So you needed a competent man to run the squadron in front, one who was experienced and closely trusted by the admiral. It was simple common sense that the front squadron be run by the admiral's most trusted subordinate, who would also be the man who'd step in to lead the fleet if the admiral was out of action. Therefore, the commander of the front squadron was the admiral's seniormost subordinate, called a "vice admiral" in the same sense as "vice president."

The squadron in back could be commanded by pretty much any random bozo, since their orders usually boiled down to "shut up, follow me, and don't let the enemy sneak around behind us without shooting them full of cannonballs." This was a good place to park your junior-varsity admirals while they built up the experience and trust needed to command as vice admirals or full admirals. Therefore, the junior admirals were known as "rear admirals," because they commanded the rear of the battleline.

So you had rear admirals, vice admirals, and admirals, in ascending order of rank. By tradition, the admiral's ships flew a red banner, the vice admiral's ships a white banner, and the rear admiral's ships a blue banner.

Then you got a unique British modification. Some time in the 1600s, the English navy got so big that even the squadrons had dozens of ships and stretched for miles. So the English had a "Red Squadron," a "White Squadron," and a "Blue Squadron..." all of which were so big that they now needed the same three-admiral control system that had originally been used for the whole fleet.

So you had a "Blue Squadron," which had an admiral, a vice admiral, and a rear admiral. And a White Squadron with three more admirals, and a Red Squadron with three more. To distinguish which admiral was from which squadron, you would call, for example, the second-in-command of Red Squadron the "Vice Admiral of the Red [squadron]"

So, nine admirals, each with a rank (to indicate his literal place in line) and a color (to indicate which squadron he was a commander in). Then you add the arbitrary convention that the Blue Squadron is 'less important' than the white one, which is in turn less important than the red one. So the Rear Admiral of the Red outranks the Rear Admiral of the White, even though they're both junior-varsity admirals who just happen to be working in different fleets.

Eventually, the color system got rather silly because there were more than three squadrons in the navy, so you needed more than nine admirals, so you would have (for example) several different Rear Admirals of the Blue or whatever. There was only one full Admiral of the Red, though, and he was in charge of everything.

The promotion path looked like this:


The rank structure of rear/vice/full admirals was preserved in navies until the modern era. It's actually a good idea to have multiple ranks of "admiral," all of whom are qualified for multiple-ship commands and great responsibility, but some of whom are more qualified than others.

What was NOT preserved, and didn't last past 1864, was the color system. There is actually no logical reason to do things this way if you do NOT randomly decide to label your fleets by color and that some of the fleets outnumber other fleets. The Red/Green divide in the RMN is one of the more blatant "Napoleonic-isms" in the Honorverse.

So the Victorian Royal Navy just decided to say "to heck with it," and had rear, vice, and full admirals, with no colors attached.

Now, the top and bottom areas are effectively invulnerable to anything but a similarly powerful impeller wedge (in which case, mutual destruction) but the ship's port and starboard sides are protected by sidewalls, shields that aren't invulnerable but are still pretty tough. You can't shield the front and back though, or you'll interfere with the drive and lose the ability to alter course or speed. So the ideal is that sweet Age of Sail crossing the T, where your broadside full of weapons fires on his unshielded front or rear and only his chase armaments can touch you.

Although, again, this becomes entirely irrelevant within 15 Terran years or so, by which point the state of the military art is warships optimized for enormous waves of missile spam, and the "throat" and "kilt" of a target's impeller wedge are only relevant insofar as that's where most of your missiles will aim for. Nobody ever gets into beam weapon range except under totally bizarre conditions.

Also 400,000 km for beam weapons, and that only because they won't penetrate sidewalls from further off.

Given the accelerations these ships are capable of, it might be impossible for them to hit each other with light-speed unguided weapons from more than 5-10 light-seconds away. A superdreadnought can use 300g of acceleration or so to change its position by a distance equal to its own length in one second; in two seconds it can shift up to four times its own position, and so on. If these ships are free to change acceleration arbitrarily on very short notice, they could dodge light-speed weapons at light-second ranges very effectively- it's hard to hit a target that may be anywhere in a disk a hundred times its size when your shot arrives.

On the other hand, what evidence we have suggests that Honorverse ships are actually not nearly so fast on the helm as that, and do not react instantly to control inputs. So this kind of rapid dodging may not be possible.

That's not true, strictly speaking, as a lot has been done with point defense and missile technology. However, at this point in the series missiles are still considered the things you lob at an opponent to annoy him while you try and get in range for your real weapons.

Some of the pre-1900 PD evolution of military technology is chronicled in I Will Build My House of Steel, which Weber published recently to accompany a new iteration of his series' tech bible. I've only skimmed it, but there might be more information in there.

Also, missiles (with their own impeller drives) have a standing range of a million klicks. Meaning, launch from a stationary position, if a ship is moving the missile's initial velocity will be higher and it will go a lot further.

We get painfully explicit figures on this (actual drive endurance and acceleration) later in the series, by the way. Repeatedly, for different iterations of missile...

First mention of "lying doggo" when a ship hides by shutting down it's drives. Honorverse ships get around mainly with gravity sensors, which are realtime and range over much of a system. A ship's wedge stands out really well. Without the drive to lock onto, they're stuck with radar and lidar, at far shorter ranges. Of course, if they saw you kill the drives, they have a pretty good idea where you are, and killing the wedge is also how ships surrender. The main problem with lying doggo as a defensive tactic is the chance of being caught horribly out of place, and unable to play catch up.

Also, Sonja Hemphill is a bigger hammer fort of admiral. Don't you need a lick of imagination to be a real technocrat or try and shake up the tactical doctrine?

Hemphill has technical imagination but rather limited tactical imagination; this contrasts to, say, Admiral White Haven, who is a very good tactician and strategist, but really doesn't contribute much to the technical side of the RMN's advancing capabilities.

Weber explicitly modeled Hemphill's role in the RMN on the real Royal Navy's Jackie Fisher, the man who invented the modern battleship design in the very early 1900s. Fisher was extremely innovative, he did a lot to get rid of the Victorian fleet's obsolete hulks and useless gunboats, while preparing the fleet to fight a modern naval war using powerful big-gun battleships, fast turbine propulsion, submarines, and so on. He was extremely energetic and forceful- at the cost of being abrasive and making quite a few enemies by getting carried away with himself. And he was extremely creative, resulting in some absolutely brilliant new ideas and innovations- but also some clunkers.

Weber goes into great detail here: http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... ngton/37/0 ...But to sum up:

Basically, Sonja has an abrasive personality, a huge amount of faith and her own judgment on technical matters, and a certain narrowness of focus which drives her directly from Point A to Point B. She is... intolerant of people unable to keep up with her mental processes... And while she is nowhere near the tactical incompetent some people seem to assume she must be, she is definitely a proponent of the theory that quantity has a quality all its own. Her entire approach to the evolution of new war-fighting technology stemmed from her analysis of just how bloody and indecisive traditional fleet combat had become. Since the "traditionalists" seemed unable to find a tactical solution to the problem, she approached it by looking for a technological solution.

Sonja is not [some kind of legendary genius] when it comes to extrapolating tactical applications of technological advances. She is, however,... superior when it comes to driving through those technological advances in the first place. Her abrasiveness and self-confidence are both fundamental reasons for her success in this regard -- since she started out basically having to fight every single major innovation through against the entrenched opposition of the Traditionalists -- and also help to explain the reasons why she is so detested by many of her opponents. Someone once said that crossing swords with Jackie Fisher left [one] feeling as if one had been run over by a bus without suffering actual physical injury. The same thing tends to happen when someone challenges Sonja's theories.

None of the above ought to be taken to suggest that Sonja Hemphill is an infallible genius. Many of her ideas have proved to be nonstarters, or else have required substantial input from other people to make them work. What Sonja does is to simply radiate ideas and concepts by looking at things which the traditional mindset has simply labeled "The Way It Is." Frequently, she runs far ahead of where she can reasonably expect to get to in the short term -- thus her efforts to evolve a new LAC doctrine exposed her to ridicule from the Traditionalists, because the tools to make her new doctrine workable simply didn't exist. However, she recognized that. The new missile pods are a direct consequence of Hemphill's having dug in to evolve and build the technology she needed to make the new doctrine workable. She continued to have some operationally questionable concepts, but one thing about her, was that she never claimed that she had all the answers. What she claimed she had was a set of questions no one else was willing to ask.

As far as Fearless' function in her scheme of things, she regarded the ship purely as a technological and tactical testbed. Honor's initial success against Sebastian D'Orville's flagship delighted Hemphill, because it appeared to be a vindication [of her ideas]. When it turned out that her brainchild didn't work if the other side knew it was coming, she got angry, and her anger showed in her communications with Honor... but Hemphill did not ask to have Honor sent to Basilisk. In fact, she wasn't consulted at all. And if she had been consulted, she would have pointed out that the Fearless conversion had been carried out as part of a test program and that the test had not been a success. She would not have advocated [assigning] Fearless to a duty station where there was the least possibility of the ship being called to action...

In short, Sonja Hemphill is not the appropriate person to blame for the fact that Fearless was committed to a combat situation with the armament she carried at the time. She is the appropriate person to blame -- or credit -- for the fact that Fearless had that armament, but, again, she never contemplated the ship's being used as anything but a testbed, unless, of course, the weapons combination have proved a brilliant success. Which she was quite well aware by the end of the fleet exercise it had not.

Harrington had the bad luck to get saddled with one of Hemphill's clunkers. In the next book, Honor of the Queen, she profits enormously from one of the good ideas to come out of Hemphill's research teams...

D'Orville glanced into the huge main tactical tank, double-checking Lewis's report in pure reflex. His capital ships had spread into the traditional "wall of battle," stacked both longitudinally and vertically into a formation one-ship wide and as tight as their impeller wedges permitted. It wasn't a very maneuverable arrangement, but it allowed the maximum possible broadside fire; and since they could no more shoot out through their impeller bands than an enemy could shoot in through them, it was the only practical way to accomplish that.

"He's intelligent, Captain, but not experienced. Pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking."

Rather impressive the amount of imagination and effort Weber put into developing these novel ideas for drives, just so he could cram in 18th/19th Century anachronisms into starship combat.

And, as noted, within at most four or five novels he's made them entirely irrelevant, as new technological developments start to overtake the technical paradigm he carefully built up here. I think Weber actually sat down, developed these ideas, and explicitly intended to scrap them from the very beginning: in other words, he was trying to write not the story of the Napoleonic Wars, but of a revolutionary change in warfare sort of like the one that happened when Age of Sail ships firing solid cannonballs gave way to steam-powered ironclads firing explosive shells.

I wasn't kidding about them bringing up the math thing a lot. Reading this I was so sure it was going to be crucial to the climax of the book, but nothing came of it.

Yeah, you said it. Weber is a fucking master of building up an arsenal of Chekhov's guns, then not firing any of them.

The crossing the T thing I mentioned earlier. Home Fleet falls to pieces without it's commander, who will probably be doing some epic chewing out of whoever was supposed to assume command if the flagship bit it.

Heh. Good point.

Also bear in mind that this is still the peacetime RMN; they're still working up to the kind graceful handoff of command under fire that we'd like to see in actual combat. This sort of thing is why the RMN does expensive training in the first place- because it takes a fleet-sized exercise to teach people how to command a fleet, and because you really do need to practice that sort of thing many many times to be able to do it correctly under fire

As to crossing the T, note that Hemphill's ships never get into a firing position to shoot beam weapons "down the throat" of their enemies, because her enemies aren't stupid enough to steer their own ships directly into Hemphill's guns. But she is able to get "throat shots" with her ships' missiles, because they can fly to a point 'ahead' of the enemy and fire their X-ray laser warheads at an angle to their line of flight.

I consider this foreshadowing; as I noted earlier, within a few books the 'throat' and 'kilt' of an impeller wedge stop mattering except insofar as they are prime targets for antiship missiles to aim for.

Wait, Sonja Hemphill pulled out her secret weapon in the first of 15 games? Then tried it in every subsequent game, having no other trump card whatsoever? She must have some truly astonishing family connections to be made an admiral with no understanding of tactics, strategy, or politics.

Well no- the point of even bothering with Fearless was that she was a testbed, and given the way she'd been rebuilt she had literally no other use except as an ambush weapon against more powerful enemy ships.

So given that Fearless is part of Hemphill's fleet at all, she's got no other way to use it, and the point of even bringing it to the fleet exercise is to test what it can and cannot do. It turns out that putting grav lances on light cruisers is a really bad idea, staggeringly bad, against a prepared opponent. Testing that in simulated combat is perfectly reasonable, especially since there are many ways that Fearless might be used. A sensible post-battle analysis might go:

"OK, well, that's the second time the enemy wall of battle spotted Fearless and blew her out of the ether from a million kilometers away. So much for using her as an ambush predator against enemy dreadnoughts. What if we try to pot enemy screening cruisers with her?"

[try, fail]

"OK, but she almost got into range that time. What if we mix her in with a whole squadron of destroyers, have the destroyers tangle with enemy cruisers or battlecruisers in energy weapon range, and have that take some of the heat off of Fearless?"

[try, fail]

"Commodore Nolden you idiot, you were supposed to do XYZ! Next time, remember that Fearless is NOT supposed to be exposed to the enemy until you reach point blank range!"

[try, fail]

"Okaaaay, that's not working. What if we try using the dreadnoughts' electronic warfare systems to create fake images that conceal Fearless until the last minute?"

[try, fail]

"What if we do it differently? I can think of three solutions off the top of my head, let's try all of them..."

[try, fail]

"Well shit, I'm out of ideas. You?"

It is not hard to imagine it taking fourteen simulated battles to exhaust all the possible ways of using a ship like Fearless in the context of a complicated major naval action. And the takeaway lesson is "well, we taught the enemy to NEVER EVER allow any of our light cruisers into point blank range of our ships. No matter what we tried, the enemy was so nervous about that that we couldn't get Fearless close enough to do any good."

Meanwhile, Hemphill is presumably still busily fighting all those other fourteen battles using perfectly normal conventional tactics, and there's no evidence that she's incompetent or ignorant of how to fight a battle that way. Sure, she's not one of the RMN's best tacticians or strategists, and D'Orville (or other people like White Haven). But that's not her job, she's a weapons developer.

[Simon_Jester]

Some more stuff:

The only note I'll make now is that Weber doesn't take long to completely abandon any vestiges of the Napoleonic paradigm. The novels take place in the midst of a revolution in military affairs comparable to the rise of guided missiles and the decline of naval artillery in 20th century naval vessels; all this talk about "walls" and "broadsides" and "crossing the T" soon ceases to matter. What's really important is being able to launch, aim, and accurately control large salvoes of nuclear missiles, and defend your battlefleet against the enemy's salvoes.

"Doesn't take long?" It takes 7 books!

Actually, it starts showing up in Book Three with the series' first major live-fire battles between opposing capital ship squadrons. At Hancock, Honor participates in an action that allows a battlecruiser squadron to make an attacking dreadnought force look like a bunch of chumps, and kill multiple dreadnoughts... by exploiting Manticoran missile superiority. In a beam duel Honor's ship would have been blown to gas and iron filings in a matter of seconds, but it doesn't matter because the Havenite fleet never gets close enough to use their beam weapons.

Meanwhile, all over the front lines, Manticore enjoys a decisive advantage in every major fleet battle just by virtue of bringing along "missile pods" that let them open the battle with a single salvo of missile spam that damages and wears down enemy fleets before they can reply effectively. And these missile barrages remain pretty effective regardless of what direction the enemy fleet is flying in.

The question of wedge geometry and 'broadsides' usually only matters in single-ship actions, where jockeying for position makes a serious difference. And about the only fleet battle I can think of where energy weapons even matter is the Fourth Battle of Yeltsin, where it only comes up because Honor tricks Thurston into thinking he has a decisive energy weapon advantage, so that he seeks out a beam duel, when in fact the advantage is all on Honor's side and Thurston's fleet gets the crap blasted out it.

Obviously I agree that this the series shows a revolution in military capabilities. Fleets of the latter books are very unlike fleets of the earlier books, and many times more lethal. Hell, the very next book introduces the first galaxy shaking development of military hardware. But I'm going to need to talk at least a bit about the status quo as of the series' beginning before going into how it changes.

This is true. Again, what I think is interesting is that Weber sets up this very mock-Napoleonic paradigm, then proceeds to totally turn it upside down and inside out with a massive arms race.

Because it's Weber trying to make her flawed, more importantly you'll note she's bad at book math. If she sits down to try and calculate something out she will fuck it up. However if she wings it she will get close to the answer and in the real world that's normally good enough unlike in math where there is right and wrong.

Also why they would think to try to make officers try to do four dimensional math by hand is nuts. I know the last thing a physicist does when trying to calculate the path of a body in space traveling half the speed of light for weeks is reach for a @#$@# slide rule.

I'm not sure she's doing the calculations by hand. If I had to guess, her problem is more in algebra- if you give her, say, the equations that describe the motion of an object, and ask her to determine where that object will be in a week, she messes it up. Or if you give her the equations that describe the stresses placed on an impeller node when the ship is in flight, she messes those up.

Any idiot can punch numbers into a calculator, but it is relatively rare to find someone who can handle abstract mathematical quantities comfortably and well.

[Batman]

While I think nobody sane is going to argue Honor had it easy (loss of an eye and half her face paralyzed in Book 2, lover killed in book 4, loss of the eye function and facial control AND a lower arm in book 7 etc) I suspect what irks people is that other than her totally inconsequential math problem, she's good at everything. Needs to fight a duel with antiquated firearms to avenge her murdered lover? Didn't we mention she's a crack shot with chemical burners?

I think Honor is very good at a limited range of skills, including starship command and unarmed combat. She is noted as a good shot, with a pulser, and spends something like 2 months training obsessively with the guns she'd duel in.

A pulser has zero recoil and sorry, no, two months is not enough to casually outshoot someone who has been professionally using those weapons for years (possibly decades, I don't remember how long that fellow was playing assassin).

That and slight headgames with Summervale make me think she'd have a shot.

Not one even remotely probable, at least not for that result. Remember she didn't just manage to shoot the guy. She methodically executed him. You don't learn that within 2 months.

*SNIPPY sword stuff because as I said earlier I don't know beans about fencing and you apparently do*
So, Mr. Wizard, what should she have done?

Shoot him in the face with a pulser. Screw tradition, you're already in the process of setting fire to most of it anyway, and at that point you already saved the entire fucking planet TWICE.

The thing that really bugs me about that sequence is Benjamin Fucking Mayhew. All the Steadholders can appeal to trial by combat, and by virtue of holding Grayson's highest medal, Honor has the position of Protector's Champion. Fine. You're going to tell me she's the only one?

Um-yes? The books have been pretty explicit about there only being, and there only ever having been, one and only one Protector's Champion?

What if she was unavailable, suppose she was actually on the frontline instead of beached? Would they try and recall her for this ritual combat? Would the Admiralty let her come? And what would would they do with the delinquent Steadholder til she could arrive? Hold him, making a sham of their law, or let him go and rally his armsmen/people? Suppose she died on her way back, would Mayhew have to concede he had no right to judge Burdette? For that matter, is there some rule that Mayhew himself can't step up to the plate? I don't know anything about his health or training, but he's got to be in better shape for this than a half-dead woman who had never held a sword last year.

You DID notice the bit about Grayson society being somewhat behind the times so a setup like that would, under the circumstances, be entirely possible?

Everybody who isn't designed to be a douchebag if not an outright villain likes her (including her enemies) and she even manages to get to terms with some of the douchebag ones. To top it all off, she not only finds a way for people to talk to treecats, develops limited telepathy,

There's a very useful trick for that sort of thing. It's called paying the best expert you can find enough to make your pet project his new full-time job. I'd have thought you'd be very familiar with the concept, Mr. Wayne.

Call me Bats. Everybody else does. (well other than the people calling me a miserable bastard, a stinking piece of shit, and very occasionally Brucie). And yes, I am. I also know that I started out ludicrously rich whereas Honor did not.

but becomes filthily rich and a major figure in the aristocracy in what, especially in a society with prolong, is a pretty short time, not in one, but two systems (one of which, prior to Honor's arrival, found the very idea of women in positions of political power inconceivable).
So I can see why readers would think that Weber went a little overboard.

Well, Grayson gave her land and a title for saving their planet, and because Mayhew wanted a political symbol for his reforms and restored power. Then Manticore gave her a title and a chunk of the asteroid belt, because it would look bad to have her be a noble to one of their allies but not at home. Also, sends a bad message regarding possible conflict of interest.
Honor's riches came at an inconvenient time narrative, but make too much sense otherwise. She'd already made a couple million in prize money (which is a bullshit thing for an advanced nation, but so's pistol duels) and gotten a decent investor for it. But yeah, it turns out owning not one, but two economically productive fiefs for a few years can make you rich. Who'd a thunk?

The problem (if we want to call it that) isn't that it doesn't make sense given the narrative. The problem is that it does, and what that says about the way the narrative was shaped. Or so many people will argue.

[Simon_Jester]

More on the Junction, Basilisk and the politics behind it. They get the system, but can't build real fortifications, a fleet base or have more than couple of ships there. So the Basilisk patrol exists to die in a grotesque military manner in the event of attack, buying time for a warning to reach Manticore.

Also to routinely patrol the system and do all the various random shit that Harrington spends the course of the novel doing, like customs patrol.

Again with guarding against even unlikely attacks.

Although Junction forts (or rather, forts of the same type) actually do get hit by exactly this sort of attack profile: a fleet dropping out of hyper and attacking them with little or no warning. Of course, they're not the forts covering the Manticore wormhole junction, but what of it?

At least, not unless the nightmare scenario of an enemy occupying the far ends of 2 wormholes. Which is what Basilisk was annexed to prevent.

Though in that case you could just build twice as many forts... then again, given the ruinous expense of the existing forts, doubling the fortifications would take a ridiculous amount of resources and effort, so obviously it's worth doing a great deal to avoid needing that.

I actually do like parts of this. I like that Honor is still scarred by even an ineptly attempted rape, and even years later. That matches my experience with rape survivors well. I like that Young is as terrified of her as she is of him. I think abandoning his post, even with his other officers signing off on the need for a refit, and even with his family connections to keep out of trouble, was a moronic way of getting his revenge on her.

Young keeps a large collection of idiot balls in his luggage...

More generally, he's the son of a man who's kept up a dominant political position for decades by virtue of having a huge arsenal of blackmail material tucked away in the basement. No surprise, then, that he's an aristocratic twit with an entitlement complex the size of a small planetoid.

The Star Knight class were the RMN's latest heavy cruisers, three and a half times more massive thanFearless and with almost six times her firepower, even before Hephaestus and Horrible Hemphill had butchered her.

More like three-and-a-third. A heavy cruiser has 6 times the firepower of a light one?

The Star Knights are also several decades newer than the Courageous-class cruisers, so they presumably mount better weapons.

Another factor is that the amount of firepower you can pile on an Honorverse warship is NOT a linear multiple of its tonnage, especially not at the low end. The lower bound of "destroyer" weight class comes from trying to fit a reasonable, minimal armament loadout on a hyper capable platform, given that the smallest practical hyper-capable starship weighs in at about forty thousand tons. Packing on life support, laser cannons, and magazines full of those school bus-sized missiles rapidly causes the ship to bulk up to sixty, eighty, or a hundred thousand tons... only a fraction of which is armament. But if you then put on another 200000 tons of extra weight on top of that, as the Star Knights do, you can add a much larger proportion of weapons.

So Fearless might well be 60000 tons of civilian ship (engines, hull frames, life support) plus 30000 tons of weapons, while Warlock is 120000 tons of civilian ship plus 150000 tons of superior weapons... in which case no kidding she'll have six or seven times the firepower Fearless does.

Which implies the recon platforms normally have a life of 3 days or so. Makes you wonder why she came up with a plan for a sensor net before McKeon said anything.

Maybe she was planning to have the recon platforms set to 'hibernate' until activated if she had some other reason to expect an attack. Maybe she was planning to have only a few of the platforms active at a time, with the others hibernating. Maybe she was planning to have them operate their systems at greatly reduced power.

Maybe she was hoping someone would come up with a better idea, and all the stuff I just said was her plan B in case nobody did.

Maintenance robots too, are the engineers here anything but programmers and overseers to the bots? But again, they drastically speed up production, once the Chief Engineer comes up with a design that won't take much programming.

This is arguably the endpoint of a trend in real life- modern engineers spend a lot of time hammering out designs using computer software, and we already have the technology to use automatic machines for "rapid prototyping:" you design it in AutoCAD and tell me the shape, and I'll have the machine make one for you.

So we might easily imagine the engineer's job as being to be the sentient part of a mixed human-mechanical system, with the mechanical part responsible for physical assembly and the human part responsible for telling it what to do.

Reasons Haven might keep an Embassy, and a dedicated courier in Basilisk.

Also, early Honor is so charmingly naive, thinking the best place to stage espionage form is the most obvious place.

Sometimes it is- what she's thinking of is "OK, where do we keep the facility that knows where all our spies are, that collates all their reports, and so on?"

Since in the Honorverse it takes a lot of time to move messages by courier over long distances, it's best to keep a facility like that relatively close to the people you are spying on... and by that measure, nowhere is closer to Manticore than Trevor's Star or Basilisk is.

Yeah, it's mentioned a couple of times that, this taking place 3,000 years into the future, everyone's been mixed to the point there are very few people 20th Century humanity could sort into one ethnic group or another. Except the ruling dynasty of Manticore, distinctly black. And Honor is clearly Asian in every way except her very brown hair and freakish height. And the Andermani... well, I'll get to them.

Since 'East Asian' people make up something like 25-30% of the human race today, at least, and since it's very likely that genetically homogeneous waves of colonists from China, Japan, and other East Asian countries would be among those headed to colonize specific planets... yeah, I bet the East Asian phenotype will stay around that long.

OK, I may be being a little harsh here. There are plenty of real-world politicians who are this myopic and worse, but you really get this feeling whenever Manticore politics comes up. And we still know nothing of the Centrist's agenda that doesn't relate to war with Haven.

I still say they don't have one, because Weber's smart enough not to alienate his readers by making them anything more than a Rorschach inkblot.

[Batman]

Um-I would like some details on the 'affects charged particles differently than uncharged ones', please, because last I checked, Honorverse weapons use a)photons (which to my knowledge have no charge and are generally not regarded as particles) or b)technobabble gravity magic. I don't recall a single use of charged particle weapons in ship-to-ship combat other than the original Fearless ruining Sirius ' day by way of plasma torpedoes in the first novel.

[Ahriman238]

He leaned back and wiped sweat from his forehead, shoulders tight and aching with the tension of the last forty-five minutes' tactical exercise. He was almost afraid to check the results, but he steeled his nerve and made himself look—then blinked in surprise. Eighty-three percent for the energy weapons, by God! And almost as good for the missiles—three hits out of five fired!

Tactical sims. 83% accuracy with beam weapons and 60% with missiles is apparently a great thing. Which makes a lot of sense for the missiles with ECM and point defense.

"At this point, you pulled a three hundred-gee level-plane heading change to oh-three-five," she said. He relaxed just a bit. There was no bite in her voice; instead, she sounded like one of his Academy instructors. "It got you around to the heading you wanted, but look here." Her finger moved to the range and bearing readouts at the top of the display. "See where his main battery was pointed?"

Cardones looked, then swallowed and blushed pink.

"Right into the front of my wedge, Ma'am," he admitted.

"Agreed. You should have skew-turned and changed planes to bring your belly bands up to cover yourself, shouldn't you?"

The one fault in Rafe's sim performance is exposing his "throat" for 3 seconds.

"Don't feel too bad. Instead, tell me why the computer didn't nail you?"

"Ma'am?" Cardones looked back at the display and frowned. "I don't know, Ma'am. The beam window was wide enough."

"Maybe, maybe not." The Captain tapped the readouts again. "The human factor, Lieutenant. Always remember the human factor. The tac computer's programmed to assign a response time to your supposedly flesh-and-blood opponent, and this time—this time, Guns—you were lucky. The range was long enough your opponent had less than three seconds to see the opening, recognize it, and take it, and the computer decided he hadn't reacted quickly enough to get the shot off. I expect it was right, too, but don't count on that when it's for real. Right?"

The simulator assigns a response time to the opponents. Okay, it wasn't all that impressive even in '94, but it stuck with me for some reason.

She didn't mention that she'd been running the same problem from the other side through her command chair displays, using Cardones's maneuvers in real time, and that she had gotten her shot off.

That's mean. It's not even instructive, since she doesn't mention it to him. Actually, why even have that option if you're not going to actually control the opposing force?

McKeon had been right about the assistant astrogator's tendency to coast, and he'd looked almost betrayed when Honor announced that, shorthanded or not, in parking orbit or no, Fearless would continue her regularly scheduled drills without break.

Simulated combat, at least, is part of the normal routine of ship-life. Again with this feeling more like a navy than anything I'd seen in Trek or Wars.

She let her eyes drift back to the main maneuvering display, pondering the ships in orbit around Medusa. Fearless had been on station for almost a full Manticoran month now, and there were far fewer than there had been when she arrived five weeks before; a direct result, she suspected, of Ensign Tremaine's campaign against illegal traffic. Medusa was no longer a good place to transship prohibited goods, and the word was getting around. She hadn't realized what a holy terror Tremaine was going to be—he seemed to be developing some sort of ESP where smugglers were concerned—and Stromboli's eagle eye on ship-to-ship traffic had guided the ensign to three mid-space pounces that had netted close to half a billion more dollars of contraband.

The extent of their customs work. Nice to make a difference, probably matters little in the long run.

The prize money they'd earned for their seizures didn't hurt any either, of course. The traditional award of a half percent of the value of all contraband seized might not sound like a lot, but they'd sent in over a billion and a half dollars worth of it. If all of it was finally condemned by the Admiralty Court, as Honor confidently anticipated it would be, that was more than seven and a half million dollars for the ship's company to split—and that assumed Mondragon's owners would simply be fined. If their ship was confiscated, as it well might be, its assessed value would be added to the pot. The captain's share was six percent of the total, which gave Honor herself a tidy little half million so far (she'd discovered that even she could do that math easily enough), which was almost eight years' salary for an RMN commander, but her noncoms and enlisted personnel got seventy percent to split among them. That meant even the least senior of them would receive almost twelve thousand dollars, and by long tradition and despite periodic assaults by the Exchequer, prize money was untaxable.

Prize money. Back in the day (and technically speaking "the day" ended in 1947) the government would take possession of a captured ship and it's cargo, but pay most or all of it's cash value to the capturing ship, as a reward and to encourage this lucrative process of taking prizes. In England, they'd have a Prize Court to assess if the ship was lawfully seized, as they do here.

I maintain this is not a terribly practical in a modern navy, though there are some mitigating factors. For one prize money apparently includes all seized contraband, and the crew only sees 0.5% of the thing's value to divide among them. They're only seeing good returns because there's so much smuggling, and the smugglers are so unused to having to work to sneak stuff by. Well, I think good returns, for all I know 1200 Manticoran dollars won't buy you a classy dinner.

The division of the ship's prize money is also very different, IIRC the tradition is a quarter for the captain, a quarter for the ratings, a quarter for the officers, an eighth to be divided among the noncoms, and the final eighth to the captain's CO. Here Honor gets only 6%, and the ratings and noncoms get 70%, presumably the rest is for the officers. Much more equitable to the little guys.

We learn that Honor's yearly salary as a Commander skippering a light cruiser is around $62,500.

And Crystal Space Jesus on an atomic pogo stick! Enough with the math issues if you refuse to make an issue of them!

"You remember your first visit, when I mentioned mekoha to you?" Honor nodded, and Dame Estelle shrugged. "Well, as I said then, mekoha's highly sophisticated for the Medusans' technology. They're surprisingly good bathtub alchemists, but this is a pretty complex—and potent—alkaloid analogue with a kicker something like an endorphin. It's not an endorphin, or at least, we don't think it is, but we're only beginning to really understand Medusan biochemistry, so we could be wrong. Anyway—" she made a moue and shook her head "—what matters is that manufacturing it is a lengthy, complicated, and dangerous process for the local alchemists, especially in the final drying and grinding stages when they have to worry about breathing free dust. That means any heavy, systematic use of it has been restricted, by and large, to the wealthier natives simply on the basis of cost."

She paused, watching Honor until she nodded in understanding.

"All right. The other thing to remember about mekoha is that it has some really nasty side effects. It's extremely addictive, and the lethal dose varies widely from individual to individual, particularly with the poor quality control the alchemists can manage, so a mekoha-smoker usually ends up doing himself in with it eventually. It provides a short-term sense of euphoria and exhilaration and mild—at least, usually mild—hallucinations, but in the long term it produces severe respiratory and motor control damage, gradual loss of neural function, and a marked decrease in both attention span and measurable IQ. All of that is bad enough, but if the drug is sufficiently pure, it produces a strength reaction like an adrenalin-high and virtually shuts down the pain receptors, and the immediate euphoria can slide into a sort of induced psychosis with absolutely no warning, probably because of the hallucinogenic properties. Medusans don't normally indulge very much in violence. Oh, they're as fractious as any other bunch of aborigines you'd care to name, and some of the nomads are natural-born raiders by inclination, but the sort of random or hysterical mob violence you see in disfunctional societies isn't part of their matrix. Unless there's mekohaaround. Mix in mekoha, and all bets are off."
"Have we tried restricting or controlling it?"

"Yes and no. It's already illegal in most of the Delta city-states—not all, but most—and restricted in the others. On the other hand, the cities are where most of the mekoha used outside the Delta has traditionally been made, and even the Delta councils are wary of crossing the mekoha traders. It brings in a lot of money, and the drug merchants are none too choosy about the means they'll adopt to protect their trade. Besides, the stuff has a firm niche in several of the Medusan religions."

Not really relevant to the series as a whole. But the historical relationship between religion and drugs is long and fascinating, people have long taken drugs to try and understand the divine (or inhaled strange fumes from cracks in the earth, whatever works for you.) But I don't think I've ever heard of a religious drug, that causes a chemically induced rage, and I can't help but wonder what this says about the Medusan culture and psyche, that to get close to the gods is also to get close to biting people's ears off.

"Not proof, no. But, as I say, we can probably eliminate some of the innocents, at least, and it may give us a lead." She nodded thoughtfully. "In the meantime, I'll have Ensign Tremaine make some orbital passes looking for power sources outside the enclaves." She grinned suddenly. "I wouldn't want him getting bored now that he and his people have the smugglers cut down to size, now would I?"

Scanning for power sources while making low-orbit flybys.

"I can hold down the cargo flights. I can even reduce foot traffic around the complex," Summervale pointed out. "What I can't do is hide from Fleet sensors. Our power relay will stick out like a sore thumb, and once it draws their attention, we'll leak enough background energy for them to zero us despite the wall shields. You know that."

He chose not to add that he'd argued against a beamed power relay from the beginning. The extra cost in time and labor to run a buried feeder cable would have been negligible beside the investment his employers had already made, and it would have made the entire operation vastly more secure. But he'd been overruled at the outset. And while he had no intention of allowing his caller to saddle him with full responsibility for concealment at this point, there was no point rubbing the man's nose in it.

Efforts to conceal power signature of the evil drug lab. Apparently they can't detect power from a cable, which makes sense.

A dangerous snarl bared his teeth, and his pace quickened as he recalled the moment. The spectators' humming silence, with the point of his dress sword turned towards him on the table before the glittering senior officers while the president of the court read the formal verdict. The roll of drums as he was marched out in mess dress uniform to face his regiment, an officer of the Queen in gorgeous black and green, standing with emotionless face while the most junior enlisted man in his own battalion ripped the buttons and decorations from his tunic to the slow, bitter tapping of the drum. The expression on his colonel's face as his epaulets and insignia were taken from him to be ground under a booted heel. The flat, metallic crack as the blade of his archaic dress sword snapped in the colonel's gloved hands.

-snip-

He dropped back into the chair before the com terminal, grinning dangerously at the blank screen. His father had been there, too, he recalled. His pious, noble father, clinging to the fringes of the Summervale glory despite his poverty. What had the high and mighty family ever given them, that they should ape its manners and honor its name? Their branch had none of the wealth, none of the power, that clung to the direct line of the Dukes of Cromarty!

Summervale's hands clenched in his lap, and he closed his eyes. His own flesh and blood sat in the prime minister's chair. Even then, the precious Duke of Cromarty had been Lord of the Exchequer, second in seniority in Her Majesty's Government, and had he raised a hand to help his distant cousin? Not he! Not that noble, proper, sanctimonious bastard.

Meet Denver Summervale, he is not a nice person. Recounting of Manticoran court-martial and ritual associated with dishonorable discharge. Very similar to the British, I believe.

Also nice to see that there are things family influence can't save you from, even a Prime Ministers cousin in an aristocracy like Manticore's.

Yet in the end, the very people he hated with all his soul had won. "Professional duelist," they'd called him, when all the time they'd meant "paid killer." And they'd been right. He admitted that here in the quiet, empty room. But he'd killed too many of them, even when his sponsors would have been willing to settle for a wound. The blood taste had been too sweet, the aura of fear too heady, and finally the Corps had had enough.

He'd killed a "brother officer"—as if the uniform a dead man wore should matter! He wasn't the first serving officer to do so, but there were too many bodies in his past, too many families that owed too many debts. They couldn't try him for murder, for duels were legal. He'd faced his opponent's fire, and they couldn't prove he'd accepted money for it. But they'd all known the truth, and they could bring up his entire record: his gambling, his women, the adulterous affairs he'd used to lure targets onto the field, the arrogance he'd let color his relations with senior officers as the terror of his reputation grew. And that had been enough to find him "unfit to wear the Queen's uniform" and led to that bright, hot morning and the slow, degrading tap of the drums.

Summervale became an assassin taking money to challenge people to pistol duels, surely the mark of an enlightened civilization. Also, Foreshadowing! (kind of.)

"Any covert operation has a built-in risk factor, but we've put too much time into this one, and Operation Odysseus is too important for guesswork or field operations that can be completely overturned by a single new factor."

Haven names all of their military and intelligence operations after the classics. That way if you ever forget what your project is, you can remember that Odysseus is the cunning Trojan Horse plan, and Icarus is the one involving coordinating fleets over impossible distances by having both race to meet insane deadlines. Actually, contrary to all expectations, Icarus was a rousing success. But I'd still like to smack whoever decided to name an incredibly difficult gambit "Icarus."

Manticore, by contrast, uses a random word generator so no one will ever be able to connect the name of an operation with it's objective. Hence why one of the most devastating military campaigns in living memory goes into the history books as "Operation Buttercup."

"No, Sir." Canning crossed to the desk and managed his first smile of the interview. "It relays through ground stations here and here—" he indicated two mountain peaks in the Outback "—and the initial ground station doesn't link to our collector at all." He met the admiral's inquiring gaze, and his smile turned into something like a grin. "We've been tapping into Dame Estelle's own backup collector."

"You mean you're drawing your power from the Manticoran grid?"

"No, Sir. It never enters the grid. This is their secondary collector, for use only if the main goes down for maintenance or repairs. Aside from their regular demand tests, we're the only station on it. Even if they find our tap, it won't tell them who set it up, and trying to figure out how it got there should point their attention in some very . . . interesting directions."

The drug lab is siphoning power from the governor's own source. Granted, the backup source. Still, points for balls.

"We've set up a fallback lab that uses its own hydro generators, and if they do find this one, it won't tell them much—unless they pick up some of our personnel, of course. But even if they do, none of the equipment was made in the Republic. In fact, most of it was built by . . . a certain Manticoran merchant cartel, shall we say?" He paused, and this time it was the admiral's turn to smile faintly in understanding. "More importantly, the local security man and the techs operating it are also Manticoran, and they have no idea they're working for us. They believe they're working for a domestic criminal syndicate. We've had to bring in some of our own people to operate the backup lab if it comes to that, but even there, almost all the equipment was manufactured in Manticore. Finally, we've had our Manticoran fall guys maintaining a meticulous set of books for their fictitious employers. If the NPA hits the lab, they'll find records the people working in the lab fully believe to be genuine and which point directly away from us."

Well why the hell isn't the backup lab their primary then? Even running both simultaneously, shouldn't priority go to the more secure one?

He hid an inner smirk as the admiral nodded. Gowan was a very big fish, a retired Dolist manager with powerful friends back home on Haven. It never hurt to spread the credit (and any potential blame) over broader shoulders than one's own, and even NavInt would hesitate to antagonize Gowan.

Wait, is the Haven Ambassador to Manticore a retired Dolist (didn't know you could retire from welfare) a retired manager of Dolists, like for vote-selling or something, or a retired manager overseeing a welfare office?

"Probably not," he agreed, and opened the cockpit hatch. He made his way down the cramped passage (pinnaces were little larger than pre-space jumbo jets) to the flight engineer's cubicle and poked his head in.

A pinnace is a bit larger than a "jumbo jet" which to me means a 747. That's actually about the twice the size I always imagined them.

"Y'know, Sir," a voice said from behind him, "without more pinnaces, this is going to take a long time."

Tremaine turned to face PO Harkness.

"Yes, PO, I do know," he said mildly. "But unless you happen to have a half-dozen more of them tucked away in your locker, I don't see anyone else we can assign to it. Do you?"

"No, Sir," Harkness said. The ensign, he reflected, had come a long way since that first contraband discovery. Harkness liked Tremaine—he was neither an arrogant snot, like too many ensigns who were afraid of betraying their inexperience, nor the sort to avoid responsibility—but he'd been testing the youngster. There were many ways to find out just what an officer had inside, and there were depths to young Mr. Tremaine the casual observer might not suspect.

"I was just thinking, Sir," the petty officer went on after a moment.

"About what, PO?"

"Well, Sir, it occurred to me that we're diverting one pinnace full-time from customs work, right?" Tremaine nodded. "With the close passes we have to make, this is going to take days then," Harkness went on, "but what about all the other boats?" Tremaine cocked his head and made a little "go on" gesture with his fingers. "The thing I was thinking, Sir, is that each of those other boats is making at least six space-to-ground passes every day—down and back every time they change off crews—and that got me started wondering. Couldn't we maybe reroute their landings and liftoffs? I mean, they've got the same sensors we've got, don't they?"

"Hmmmm." Tremaine rubbed his chin. "That's true enough. We could lay off flight paths to cover this entire hemisphere, couldn't we? And that would free us up to cover the other side of the planet." He nodded slowly, eyes narrowing in thought, and Harkness nodded back.

"This, PO," the ensign said judiciously, "bears thinking on. Thanks."

"You're welcome, Sir," Harkness said, and Tremaine headed back to the cockpit and the pinnace's com.

Alright, so a large part of what I love about Horace Harkness is his chemistry with Scotty Tremaine. The ancient relationship between the old-hand NCO and the fresh-faced officer except they just keep growing as a team.

Nimitz's buzzing purr confirmed her suspicions, and she shot a humorous glare at Santos as she saw the celery stalk clutched in the treecat's right true-hand. Nimitz's carnivore fangs weren't designed for vegetable matter, despite his tree-dweller origins. Treecats were the top of Sphinx's arboreal food chain, preying on the smaller vegetarians and omnivores who inhabited their domain, and his needle-sharp teeth shredded the celery into stringy green strands—wet, stringy green strands—as he chewed.

Way later we'll find that although celery is junk food for Nimitiz in most ways, it boosts the treecat's psychic powers.

"What I want you and Rafe to do," Honor went on, "is take all the input from the solar collector taps and compare it to Major Isvarian's rough estimates. What I'm looking for is a total usage figure over several days' time for each enclave, one we can relate to his estimate on a proportional basis."

Oh, so those are what the collectors are! I'm a nit, he's done this before in Mutineer's Moon. Solar collector satellites that that beam their power to ground stations. Apparently there's at least 2 for the government building.

In the other series, it was a single small facility (with a number of turrets) powered by the collector sat. I'm not sure how much energy it'd actually provide, it mostly depends how big it is. But apparently there are many collector sats and most of the off-world trading posts use them.

Honor sighed and leaned back. She ought to shut Santos up, she thought. If there was one thing she hated, it was discussing an officer behind his back, especially with one of his juniors. But she was very nearly at the end of her rope where McKeon was concerned. She'd tried everything she could think of to reach him—to make him the true second-in-command she needed, not simply an efficient, perpetually unengaged automaton—and failed. And there was no malice or spite in Santos's voice, only concern. Besides, Dominica was right; she was Honor's next most senior officer, third in Fearless's chain of command, with not just the right but the duty to speak up if she saw a problem.

One of the more baffling things in the first book. Honor's XO is only just doing his job, refusing to collaborate with her like a good XO. He's the one holdout of the "resent Honor" camp, because she took command of his ship instead of him being promoted, and because of her youth, and even a bit because he recognizes she's a decent captain. That's fine, a normal response and good drama.

What I don't get is that in all these months, with everything Honor tries to coax McKeon into working with her, she never once tries to confront the issue, or even just talk to him about. Maybe it would have made things worse, but by this point the rest of the crew is aware of the problem and she says she's at the end of her rope.

"Well," Yammata manipulated controls and frowned thoughtfully, "I figure they're shielded, Sir—I sure can't get a good read on the user end—but the feeder beam seems to be peaking at about two hundred kilowatts." He looked up and met the ensign's eyes expressionlessly. "That's a lot of juice for a bunch of Stilties."

Apparently a collector sat can produce at least 200 kw. Now what's the drug lab doing with all that energy?

Major Barney Isvarian, Medusan Native Protection Agency, slithered forward through waist-high knobs of shemak moss and tried to ignore the chemical stench of its sap. His mottled fatigues and body armor weren't as good as the Corps' reactive camouflage, but they blended well with the monotonous background.

Royal Marines have active camo.

He reached the crest of the rise and paused to catch his breath as Sergeant Danforth eased up beside him. Like Isvarian, Danforth was an ex-Marine, and he unlimbered his massive plasma rifle with reassuring competence. Alloy and plastic clicked as he mounted the one-hundred-fifty-centimeter weapon on its bipod, inserted the heavy power pack, and snapped the electronic sight into place. He hit the self-test switch with his thumb, then nodded and burrowed the stock into his shoulder, peering through the sight at the buildings below.

Doesn't tell us a lot about plasma guns, besides size and man-portable. But I do like that they do a power test after lugging it through the moss.

Isvarian held his glasses steady as the mounting roar of turbines swept up from behind him. It was faint, at first, little louder than the distant wind, but it grew by leaps and bounds as the skimmers roared forward at over nine hundred kilometers per hour.

Supersonic air skimmers, each with room for 8 men and hover capability.

"Ruth! Get me a pursuit vector on that son-of-a-bitch!" Tremaine snarled, and the heavy pinnace dropped like a homesick rock as Kleinmeuller chopped her counter-grav back to zero. She did more than that; she dropped the nose almost perpendicular to the ground, lined it up on the fleeing aircar, and gave her air-breathing turbines full throttle.

Intriguing, it seems a pinnace has both impeller drive and conventional jet engines. Makes you wonder what an impeller drive in atmosphere would do, a windstorm perhaps? If pinnaces don't use impeller in atmo, I think that leaves us with one example, the SAM from Flag in Exile.

The pipper merged with the aircar, a tone sounded, Tremaine's hand squeezed, and a two-centimeter laser ripped its target into very, very tiny pieces and scattered them across the endless moss like tears of fire.

Pinnace has a laser that can casually destroy an aircar.

But she hadn't. Fifty-five dead and six wounded. Over ninety percent of the strike team had been killed, and every one of the survivors was injured, two critically. And one of the perimeter team was dead, as well. Sixty-one men and women, wiped away or hospitalized in the space of two minutes. It was a staggering blow to the small, tight-knit NPA, and she felt physically ill over the role she had played, all unknowing, in creating that slaughter.

NPA casualties when Summervale rigged the drug lab to blow.

The commissioner's mouth twisted at her expression, and she rose from behind her desk, turning the com terminal to direct its pickup at her coffee table. A strange weapon lay on it, looking very like some crude version of a pulse rifle, except that it had neither a magazine nor a proper stock. Instead of a vertical butt stock, it ended in a flat, horizontal arc of curved metal, perpendicular to the line of the barrel.

"See this?" Dame Estelle's voice asked from beyond the pickup's range.

"Yes, Ma'am. What is it?"

"This is what killed Matt, Honor. My people tell me it's a single-shot, breech-loading flintlock rifle. One built for a Medusan."

Well, crap. Apparently Honor can't recognize a flintlock by sight, calling it a primitive pulse weapon.

"A Medusan could reload this a lot more quickly than we could," she went on. "If he puts the butt directly over one of his arms, he could actually reload and re-prime it with that arm without even lowering it from firing position with the other two. And it's a lot longer-ranged and more accurate than you might think. The barrel is rifled, and the explosion of the powder—old-fashioned black powder, not even nitro-cellulose, they tell me—spreads the hollow base of the projectile, forcing it into the rifling and spin-stabilizing it. It's no pulse rifle, Honor, but according to my weapons buff's best guesstimate, this thing is probably accurate to two or even three hundred meters . . . and we have no idea how many of them are out there."

According to Matsuko later, it's basically a Ferguson Rifle, modified for the Medusan frame, like having a chest-stock.

"My own opinion, precisely. Some greedy idiot has jumped the Medusans' ability to kill one another—or us—by something like fifteen hundred T-years." The Resident Commissioner looked strained and old, and her hand trembled slightly as she brushed hair back from her forehead. "He's brought this abortion in through my security, and he's turned it over to the nomads in the Outback, not even to the Delta city-states. Even if we nail him, there's no way to put this genie back into the bottle if he's taught the Medusans how to build the things. In fact, they're bound to figure out how to make heavier weapons—real, honest-to-God artillery—so unless we want to take over the role of guaranteeing the Delta's security with off-world weaponry, we're going to have to encourage the city-states to learn how to make the goddamned things just so they can defend themselves! And worst of all, our forensic people think the Medusans who killed Matt were hopped to the breathing slits on mekoha—the same off-world mekoha we've been seeing clear on the other side of the Mossybacks."

Talk about your cultural contamination. It's an interesting dilemma, commit to protecting people with advanced technology, or encourage them to develop what's already been leaked, knowing wars just got that much more destructive. AFAIK, we never see how it ultimately plays out.

"A Crown courier boat came in from Manticore about an hour ago and headed in-system," Reynaud replied. "It didn't stop for inspection, of course—" Venizelos nodded; Crown couriers had absolute precedence and complete freedom of passage anywhere in Manticoran space "—but I just got a look at the passenger manifest."

Couriers chartered to the Crown can go anywhere unhindered, not surprising. Klaus Hauptman has the clout to take a secret trip in a Crown Courier, surprising.

[Ahriman238]

You misunderstand what "generation" means in this context. "Third generation prolong" means "prolong treatment, version 3.0," or possibly 3.1/3.2/whatever.

Version 1.x stops the aging process somewhere in your forties, version 2.x in your thirties, and version 3.x stops it in your twenties when you're at your physical peak, but at the cost of an excruciatingly prolonged (hah!) adolescence.

Also, the prolong treatments emerged on Beowulf, a planet which has been doing biotech research hard for hundreds of years. I suspect they did a lot of controlled studies first.

Huh, yeah. I stand corrected.

Yes. The Centrists have a deliberately vague set of domestic politics, probably because Weber does not want to alienate readers. The Liberals are somewhere to the left of the Democratic Party in the US, although probably not to the left of SDN, and Weber may not realize about where the Liberals are because I'm not sure he actually comprehends non-Republican Party politics. No non-cardboard Liberal characters appear in the Honorverse until Weber started collaborating with Eric Flint, and Flint is a communist. The Progressives are similar to the Liberals to such an extent that I'm honestly not sure why there are two parties there instead of one. The Conservatives aren't even on the American political spectrum because they are conservative about a social order the US doesn't actually have

Oh I don't know, Estella Matsuko seems quite competent, though minimal attention is paid to her political affiliations. True about the conservatives, on the other hand I'm tickled that he repeatedly calls his Conservative xenophobic nitwits.

Young keeps a large collection of idiot balls in his luggage...

The man tried to rape a girl who was far better than him at unarmed combat, taller than him, and from a heavy-grav planet, and it never occurred to him to bring friends. His stupidity is almost more offensive to me than the actual attempted rape, and he clearly learned nothing from the experience.

Since 'East Asian' people make up something like 25-30% of the human race today, at least, and since it's very likely that genetically homogeneous waves of colonists from China, Japan, and other East Asian countries would be among those headed to colonize specific planets... yeah, I bet the East Asian phenotype will stay around that long.

Starting with the entire population of the Andermani Empire, and Beowulf (which is an awfully odd name for an Asian seed colony.) Still, Honor's Asian-eyes are considered highly exotic. Which seems stranger now I think a planet full of the same is a wormhole trip away.

[Mr Bean]

Quick response since Ahriman238 has never been to Chicago

"We've set up a fallback lab that uses its own hydro generators, and if they do find this one, it won't tell them much—unless they pick up some of our personnel, of course. But even if they do, none of the equipment was made in the Republic. In fact, most of it was built by . . . a certain Manticoran merchant cartel, shall we say?" He paused, and this time it was the admiral's turn to smile faintly in understanding. "More importantly, the local security man and the techs operating it are also Manticoran, and they have no idea they're working for us. They believe they're working for a domestic criminal syndicate. We've had to bring in some of our own people to operate the backup lab if it comes to that, but even there, almost all the equipment was manufactured in Manticore. Finally, we've had our Manticoran fall guys maintaining a meticulous set of books for their fictitious employers. If the NPA hits the lab, they'll find records the people working in the lab fully believe to be genuine and which point directly away from us."

Well why the hell isn't the backup lab their primary then? Even running both simultaneously, shouldn't priority go to the more secure one?

The drug lab was meant to be found at some point, they are trying to destabilize the local population and preform half a dozen false flag operations when it's taken out. It's a sweet deal, we have a drug lab to get the natives good and crazy. And when they do find it on accident or by our own design then we get to run a secondary operation against one of the biggest political contributors in Manticore. Plus we have a secondary much more secure plant in case we want to keep feeding drugs to the natives.

He hid an inner smirk as the admiral nodded. Gowan was a very big fish, a retired Dolist manager with powerful friends back home on Haven. It never hurt to spread the credit (and any potential blame) over broader shoulders than one's own, and even NavInt would hesitate to antagonize Gowan.

Wait, is the Haven Ambassador to Manticore a retired Dolist (didn't know you could retire from welfare) a retired manager of Dolists, like for vote-selling or something, or a retired manager overseeing a welfare office?

In this case Dolist means "party boss". Remember pre-revolution Haven was a facade democracy with powerful Dolist party bosses controlling blocks of votes and ensuring that everyone voted the right way for the right party to stay in power. So when he says retired Dolist he means a party boss who managed the day to day oppression and vote rigging. Think Mayor Daley

[Mr Bean]

Starting with the entire population of the Andermani Empire, and Beowulf (which is an awfully odd name for an Asian seed colony.) Still, Honor's Asian-eyes are considered highly exotic. Which seems stranger now I think a planet full of the same is a wormhole trip away.

Beowulf was one of the first colony worlds. Do you see colonists flying billions and billions of miles and renaming the place the instant they got there? No they probably named it before they left and kept the name once they got there.

[Simon_Jester]

Um-I would like some details on the 'affects charged particles differently than uncharged ones', please, because last I checked, Honorverse weapons use a)photons (which to my knowledge have no charge and are generally not regarded as particles) or b)technobabble gravity magic. I don't recall a single use of charged particle weapons in ship-to-ship combat other than the original Fearless ruining Sirius ' day by way of plasma torpedoes in the first novel.

[wishes Ray Palmer were here]

[backs up to explain]

OK. Look.

First of all, you have to consider the way I perceive something like an Honorverse missile coming in at relativistic speeds. The kinetic energy of the missile is measured in... well, my rule of thumb is, at 1% of light speed, a moving object has a kinetic energy of one kiloton per kilogram. That's not quite right but it's close. Obviously the amount increases with the square of the velocity, as long as we don't get up to speeds of around .5c where relativity kicks in with a vengeance.

So take the typical case of a 75-ton missile impacting at... [maths] 0.2c, consistent with acceleration of roughly a hundred thousand gravities for sixty seconds. That is about the performance you get from a single-stage missile drive in the early series. 0.2c corresponds to 400 kilotons per kilogram (roughly), for a total impact energy of thirty gigatons.

Now, thirty gigatons is enough energy to vaporize the missile millions of times over. It is, in fact, enough to reduce the missile to its component subatomic particles. For all practical purposes, a missile traveling at 0.2c is just a nice, compact stream of relativistic particles that all happen to be moving in the same direction, because of some relatively weak forces binding them, which will totally cease to matter as soon as the missile hits anything.

Thus, you won't go far wrong if you model that missile as a beam of electrons and protons packed fairly tightly together, and moving fast enough to have a total impact energy of thirty gigatons.

What is the consequence of such a missile plowing into the sidewall of a warship? If we are to believe Weber, that missile impact has about as much effect on the sidewall as a soft-boiled egg propelled by the arm of a toddler. So clearly, the sidewall is utterly superb at deflecting tremendous amounts of energy, IF we are talking about the kinetic energy of fast-moving charged particles. Such as the kinetic energy of the fast-moving atomic nuclei of an impeller drive missile.

But at the same time, the sidewall can fail to deflect a few hundred kilotons of energy in the form of photons. Which, yes, I am calling "uncharged particles." If you want to argue with that depiction fine, you are not unjustified in doing so. But actually settling whether or not that's the right word to use is a job for quantum field theory, which you can't do any better than I can, so let's not focus on it.

Anyway, practical upshot: thirty gigatons of fast-moving charged particles have no chance of penetrating a sidewall. Several hundred kilotons of photons in a laser beam can penetrate a sidewall. How exactly is this supposed to work?

I can think of ways. Most of them involve using electric or magnetic forces to deflect or stop the charged particles before they hit the target. The electromagnetic field might be incredibly good at stopping charged particles, and yet do absolutely nothing to stop photons from passing through. Or it might be strong enough to somehow distort incoming electromagnetic radiation, but not by much, so that it remains a million times as good at stopping charged particles as it as at stopping light.

But of all the forces I can imagine, Weber picked gravity.

Gravity does not pick favorites. It does not deflect a relativistic particle beam all that differently from the way it deflects light. Not by a big enough difference to explain five or six orders of magnitude of difference in how much energy it can deflect.

That's my problem with sidewalls.

You're right in that there's a lot of fun bits in the Honorverse that aren't well-explored. The 'edict' against genetic engineering and the cultures that came about BEFORE that edict, the way various planetary governments formed during the Diaspora, and even when one planetary power pulled out of the Manticorean Star EMPIRE (it evolves over time) aren't really discussed.

In the first spin-off, hmm, "Crown of Slaves" there's a self-satisfied aristocrat who patronizingly explains that of course there couldn't have been slavery on Pre-Diaspora Earth, because people barely knew anything about genetic engineering back then. Certainly not enough to grow artificial, rights-less people in test tubes.

Contrast this with everyone knowing the House of Winton (Manticoran ruling dynasty) comes from a genetically altered line, or Honor's blase "I'm a genie."

In reverse order:

Honor is saying this to some of her closest friends, as I recall. In this case, Honor knows that the people she's talking to won't immediately freak out and shun her, because they already like and respect her as a person. Hell, she may have already sounded them out about their views on genetic engineering.

I imagine this as being somewhat parallel to the dance that gays go through when deciding to 'come out of the closet' to a friend in a basically enlightened society. They can predict the other person won't react in a bigoted way, and they have a right to expect that the other person won't react in a bigoted way... but unless they already know the other person very very well, there cannot be certainty because there IS ongoing prejudice in society.

Then, thing two, I'm not so sure about the House of Winton part and that being an 'everybody knows' thing. Where's that from?

Thing three and final, it's made pretty obvious that the aristocrat simply assumes that slavery takes the form of purposely designing humans for a purpose and then selling them- and that there would be no motive to do the "and then selling them" if it weren't for the "custom designed" part. Which really shows that the aristocrat in question has never read a bloody dictionary on the subject... but the scene was quite explicit about setting up that aristocrat is a pompous, ignorant jackass.

Yes and no. He tried to reform a lot of things, succeeded occasionally, but the later books show him motivated by the same thing that kept Harris up at night, fear of the mob.

Yes, because those things don't change fast enough. So your point is well taken, there's a large element of "meet the new boss, same as the old boss." And Harris becomes

Yes, I read Shadow of Saganami, for some reason the thing with Van Dort didn't leap to my mind. Though I'm pretty sure the MIM leader was sincere in his convictions and not just about screwing over Van Dort.

Absolutely, I did not intend to imply that Westman was just trying for revenge against Van Dort. However, the whole affair with Van Dort and Suzanne Bannister and Westman helped to make Westman angry and distrustful about Van Dort, and all Van Dort stood for, i.e. the "international" character of Van Dort's trade union. And of the Manticoran annexation efforts which (to Westman) looked a lot like an extension of that same trade union.

So in other words, we've got a great example of prolong having consequences for these people, and of those consequences having far-reaching effects on their psychology and actions for decades upon decades to come.

A pulser has zero recoil and sorry, no, two months is not enough to casually outshoot someone who has been professionally using those weapons for years (possibly decades, I don't remember how long that fellow was playing assassin).

Weber later retcons in that Honor has been casually training with chemical-burning pistols for a long time, but that's a retcon so fuck it.

It's hard to say, I think: if you take an individual with excellent reflexes and physical conditioning, considerable experience firing low-recoil pistols (not zero, but low), and then have them put in several hundred hours of obsessive training with a chemical slugthrower over the course of two months... just how good could they be? Sure, they might not be superheroic gunfighters, but the 'assassin' Summervale can only be training so hard himself.

Shoot him in the face with a pulser. Screw tradition, you're already in the process of setting fire to most of it anyway, and at that point you already saved the entire fucking planet TWICE.

Honor would probably not have had a gun available given the way the scene plays out, and it is very unlikely under the circumstances that anyone would have handed her a gun to shoot Burdette. If she had done that it would probably have kicked off a civil war on Grayson, stupid as that may seem to people who aren't thinking like medieval barbarians.

The thing that really bugs me about that sequence is Benjamin Fucking Mayhew. All the Steadholders can appeal to trial by combat, and by virtue of holding Grayson's highest medal, Honor has the position of Protector's Champion. Fine. You're going to tell me she's the only one?

Um-yes? The books have been pretty explicit about there only being, and there only ever having been, one and only one Protector's Champion?[/quote]Which seems extremely stupid for all the reasons Ahriman describes. In a realistic medieval environment, you'd have some kind of backup plan, such as "in case the champion cannot serve, the head of my royal bodyguards will do the job."

Besides which, it's not as though only one person can be a recipient of the Star of Grayson during a given lifetime, and apparently just having the award was enough to make Honor the champion. Which is nonsensical, because in Grayson's primitive period, the champion would have been an individual actually chosen by the Protector as being capable of serving as such, and only a complete idiot would make that a lifetime position. What if the champion gets sick and never recovers his health, is the Protector then stuck being completely helpless to respond to a challenge for decades?

This makes about as much sense as having a permanent position of poet laureate, but then saying that you have to keep the poet laureate as the ONLY poet for the royal family, even if he gets in an accident and has brain damage and can no longer read and write.

The problem (if we want to call it that) isn't that it doesn't make sense given the narrative. The problem is that it does, and what that says about the way the narrative was shaped. Or so many people will argue.

The problem is that Weber went straight to having Honor save a whole planet in Book Two of his series, which meant that it became logical for Honor to be rewarded on a scale commensurate with what you'd expect to get for saving a planet.

To borrow terms from D&D, she accomplished an epic-level task very early in the narrative, and wound up with epic-level resources accordingly... which in turn hurt the narrative.

She didn't mention that she'd been running the same problem from the other side through her command chair displays, using Cardones's maneuvers in real time, and that she had gotten her shot off.

That's mean. It's not even instructive, since she doesn't mention it to him. Actually, why even have that option if you're not going to actually control the opposing force?

1) It is instructive to Cardones; Cardones learned the lesson that he shouldn't expose himself to enemy fire if he doesn't have to. Cardones knows that 'this time' three seconds was not enough time for the enemy to react, but he also is smart and competent enough to know that this isn't always the case. Hell, Cardones himself might be able to react fast enough to get the shot off in a case like that. So there is nothing to be gained by pointing out that Honor did make the shot; that wouldn't teach anything new to Cardones except "the Old Lady is a good gunner," which is irrelevant.
2) Why have the option? Because it's a good way for Honor to monitor Cardones's actions in real time, from the perspective of the opposing force. That gives her detailed information about what he's doing, which she can then use to grade Cardones's performance and coach him on what he's doing wrong.

Honor routinely exercises her subordinates against both simulated and real opponents, and sometimes takes the role of running the real opponent herself, in later books. That doesn't mean she had to do it this time.

...Fearless had been on station for almost a full Manticoran month now, and there were far fewer than there had been when she arrived five weeks before; a direct result, she suspected, of Ensign Tremaine's campaign against illegal traffic. Medusa was no longer a good place to transship prohibited goods, and the word was getting around. She hadn't realized what a holy terror Tremaine was going to be—he seemed to be developing some sort of ESP where smugglers were concerned...

The extent of their customs work. Nice to make a difference, probably matters little in the long run.

The last time I read On Basilisk Station I thought there was one nice touch here: Honor appears to have no idea that it's really Harkness who's responsible for all the smuggling busts going on; Harkness is entirely below her radar, and she's giving the credit to the young, inexperienced Tremaine.

Limits of character perspective are interesting.

We learn that Honor's yearly salary as a Commander skippering a light cruiser is around $62,500.

This suggests that yes, $1200 Manticoran is enough to buy a classy dinner. Probably several of them.

Haven names all of their military and intelligence operations after the classics. That way if you ever forget what your project is, you can remember that Odysseus is the cunning Trojan Horse plan, and Icarus is the one involving coordinating fleets over impossible distances by having both race to meet insane deadlines. Actually, contrary to all expectations, Icarus was a rousing success. But I'd still like to smack whoever decided to name an incredibly difficult gambit "Icarus."

Haven also named operations "Stalking Horse" and "Dagger," not classics. "Icarus" gives you not a fucking clue what the target or objective of the operation is, likewise names like "Scylla," "Perseus," "Hassan,"

And of course the dreaded "Operation Beatrice-Bravo." I'm sure we all quake in our boots whenever we think of that name.

There's nothing fundamentally wrong with using names drawn from the classics. You want real pomposity, go with the Solarian League and their "Operation Raging Justice." Which personally I think is a lovely commentary on American habits.

Well why the hell isn't the backup lab their primary then? Even running both simultaneously, shouldn't priority go to the more secure one?

Possible answer: by definition, the more productive a drug lab is, the harder it will be to keep it secure. Having a high output from the backup lab would reduce its security and its value as a backup, even though it would also allow... well, higher output.

He hid an inner smirk as the admiral nodded. Gowan was a very big fish, a retired Dolist manager with powerful friends back home on Haven. It never hurt to spread the credit (and any potential blame) over broader shoulders than one's own, and even NavInt would hesitate to antagonize Gowan.

Wait, is the Haven Ambassador to Manticore a retired Dolist (didn't know you could retire from welfare) a retired manager of Dolists, like for vote-selling or something, or a retired manager overseeing a welfare office?

The second option. In short, he's the former boss of a political machine that delivers Dolist votes in return for various benefits and considerations from the PRH's government.

Pierre does pretty much the same thing, which is also how he got one of his kids to rear admiral rank despite not being related to any of the great Legislaturalist families.

What I don't get is that in all these months, with everything Honor tries to coax McKeon into working with her, she never once tries to confront the issue, or even just talk to him about. Maybe it would have made things worse, but by this point the rest of the crew is aware of the problem and she says she's at the end of her rope.

This won't be the last time Honor screws up by failing to directly confront a subtle, amorphous problem in interpersonal relations. For a real breakdown of communications, see how she handles discrimination on Grayson in Honor of the Queen.

I think Weber originally meant to write Honor as something of a 'geek,' with a strong personal focus on known, well understood things (like missile launchers), but who feels uncomfortable with tasks like trying to get inside another person's head and convince them of her good intentions.

Well, crap. Apparently Honor can't recognize a flintlock by sight, calling it a primitive pulse weapon.

Which is frustrating since Weber tried to retcon in proficiency with pre-space firearms as a "thing" for her in the wake of Field of Dishonor. We could handwave, but I think it's just a brute fact that Weber didn't handle this very well.

Starting with the entire population of the Andermani Empire, and Beowulf (which is an awfully odd name for an Asian seed colony.) Still, Honor's Asian-eyes are considered highly exotic. Which seems stranger now I think a planet full of the same is a wormhole trip away.

...I'm not sure Beowulf is all "Asian," with names like Ramirez and Detweiler being among the original settlers. Just because Honor's mom looks Asian, don't assume all the other Beowulfans are.

For that matter, don't assume that "looks Asian" means "all my ancestors for two thousand years back looked Asian." You could just as easily get that physical type by crossbreeding in a large population where everyone has recessive genes for the epicanthic fold, or something like that. Or you could get it from disproportionate genetic drift in a small population- which is one theory for why you find weird stuff like blonde and redheaded Australian aborigines.

[Thanas]

Samurai style sword duel? No biggy. Sure, she's not slept in days, has recently been shot out of the sky and is still seriously hurt, but everybody knows swordfights aren't about who's the better fighter, it's all about who blinks first (I don't know beans about fencing so for all I know this might be actually true, but I seriously doubt the average reader is going to see it that way).

I fence, not Katana though, Italian Rapier.

Which one?

The things Weber discusses in the swordfight segment are real things, though a very... interesting way of explaining them.

Fencing is speed chess, coupled with a small number of what I can only call "readied actions." You step up to the salle, and you're looking over your opponent, planning your first moves and anticipating his first. You have a few contingencies in mind, "If this happens, I move this way" ready for instant execution.

When you change the plan, usually because you went through your planned motions and your opponent is still standing, there is a hitch as you reformulate. There's the smallest fraction of a second (we train to reduce it, swordsmen decide and then act) when you decide to attack but haven't yet, and you aren't attacking or defending, during which you are vulnerable. If an opponent could recognize it, and was waiting to exploit it, like Honor was, he'd hesitate a critical moment to defend. On the other hand, focusing so hard on that should have left her wide open if she'd failed to recognize or exploit it quickly enough. So what she did? Easy money against rookie fencers, hell of a longshot against an experienced opponent, but not technically outside the realm of possibility.

The thing with her move is that she would probably have to be three times as quick as he to do it, as her sword has to traverse a far longer distance than his does. I find it unlikely that somebody with injured ribs, who hasn't slepped in a few days etc. can do movements that expect rapid fluidity of the upper body and heavy lifting. No way, not with broken ribs. (unless you are amped with pain killers but then your reaction time is pretty bad).

So, Mr. Wizard, what should she have done? Well, "When meeting weakness, show strength. When meeting strength, show weakness." is the fencing mantra for a reason. When fighting a more experienced opponent, you should play it defensively. Even a rookie can last a very long time against a master, as long as he keeps giving ground, and it leaves you in the best position to exploit an opening if your opponent gets frustrated, impatient and sloppy, which really doesn't seem like it would take long in Burdette's case.

Burdette is depicted as one of the best tourney fencers there are. If he were that sloppy or impatient, he would not have been one of the best fencers of a society that still actively practices fencing.

On the other hand, I've never had a match when wounded and sleep-deprived, so it's quite likely Honor would be eager to avoid a long fight herself. In that case, variation on a theme, brace to stop his first swing, he'll expect a riposte so don't indulge him. Instead, pass forward (step in) to shove or body check him, then bring the sword into play while he's off-balance. Easy, plays to her strengths and his weaknesses, at a likelihood of success about a thousand times what she actually did.

Body checking or shoving someone doesn't really work vs Katanas, they are usually too quick for that. It doesn't even work that well in rapier unless it is single and you grab the weapon and you are wearing armored gloves, which she is not. Heck, it doesn't even work that well in federfechten unless you are wearing armored gloves.

[Simon_Jester]

The thing with her move is that she would probably have to be three times as quick as he to do it, as her sword has to traverse a far longer distance than his does. I find it unlikely that somebody with injured ribs, who hasn't slepped in a few days etc. can do movements that expect rapid fluidity of the upper body and heavy lifting. No way, not with broken ribs. (unless you are amped with pain killers but then your reaction time is pretty bad).

This suggests that Honor might have been able to do it... if she were a Scrag, the Scrags being descendants of genetically modified soldiers. One of the first things engineered out of them would probably be the extreme sensitivity to pain that prevents physically demanding exertion when one is injured. Something similar goes for some of the more extremely modified "combat lines" in Mesa.

Which I find amusingly ironic.

Burdette is depicted as one of the best tourney fencers there are. If he were that sloppy or impatient, he would not have been one of the best fencers of a society that still actively practices fencing.

True. This situation might cause him to become more stressful and agitated (and thus sloppy) than he would be normally, but not THAT much.

[eyl]

So, Mr. Wizard, what should she have done? Well, "When meeting weakness, show strength. When meeting strength, show weakness." is the fencing mantra for a reason. When fighting a more experienced opponent, you should play it defensively. Even a rookie can last a very long time against a master, as long as he keeps giving ground, and it leaves you in the best position to exploit an opening if your opponent gets frustrated, impatient and sloppy, which really doesn't seem like it would take long in Burdette's case. On the other hand, I've never had a match when wounded and sleep-deprived, so it's quite likely Honor would be eager to avoid a long fight herself. In that case, variation on a theme, brace to stop his first swing, he'll expect a riposte so don't indulge him. Instead, pass forward (step in) to shove or body check him, then bring the sword into play while he's off-balance. Easy, plays to her strengths and his weaknesses, at a likelihood of success about a thousand times what she actually did.

OTOH, that still makes it a question of matching skill, to some extent. We don't know if Grayson fencing includes use of such body checks; if it does, he might well be expecting such a move. Instead, she used her sheer physical strengths over him, by basically speed-blitzing him (taking advantage of her having greater strength and speed, as well as letting him believe she was out of position), pretty much negating factors of fencing skill.

The thing that really bugs me about that sequence is Benjamin Fucking Mayhew. All the Steadholders can appeal to trial by combat, and by virtue of holding Grayson's highest medal, Honor has the position of Protector's Champion. Fine. You're going to tell me she's the only one? What if she was unavailable, suppose she was actually on the frontline instead of beached? Would they try and recall her for this ritual combat? Would the Admiralty let her come? And what would would they do with the delinquent Steadholder til she could arrive? Hold him, making a sham of their law, or let him go and rally his armsmen/people? Suppose she died on her way back, would Mayhew have to concede he had no right to judge Burdette? For that matter, is there some rule that Mayhew himself can't step up to the plate? I don't know anything about his health or training, but he's got to be in better shape for this than a half-dead woman who had never held a sword last year.

To be fair, it's more the fault of whoever put that provision in the Grayson Constitution.

I kind of wish Weber had picked a different flaw that would come up. As it stands, Honor has three major faults as a naval officer at the start of the series:
1) Poor grasp of mathematics- consequence-free.
2) Allows her distaste for politics to override her judgment- has moderate consequences, arguably gets her mentor Courvosier killed in Book Two, Honor of the Queen.
3) Violently short temper when pushed- has major consequences for her career. Her vengefulness and refusal to consider the consequences of her actions after the assassination of her lover in Book Four, Field of Dishonor, gets her kicked out of the Manticoran aristocratic titles she'd earned in previous books, and effectively thrown out of Manticoran naval service. If she weren't in a position to reboot her career by serving in the Grayson military by that point she would really have been screwed.

Her most irritating fault is her tendency to occasionally wallow in angst or low self-esteem, upon which her friends assure her how wonderful/right she actually is (it was really refreshing to see Theisman castigating her for that in the last mainline book).

Side note: Fearless doesn't suffer so much from the removal of her beam armament to make room for the grav lance, because the grav lance/energy torpedo combo is actually very dangerous within practical beam range (1-2 light seconds). The removal of missile tubes is crippling, not just in the context of the novel but overall. The Honorverse series begins just as Manticore is pioneering the military transition from the Beam Age to the Missile Age, so to speak.

I don't know about that. Even one light-seconds is still ten times the grav lance's range, and it's implied it doesn't work 100% of the time. Enemy capital ships can destroy Fearless easily before it gets into range (in the third book, there's a scene where a Manticoran dreadnought destroys several battlecruisers in a single energy salvo).

So given that Fearless is part of Hemphill's fleet at all, she's got no other way to use it, and the point of even bringing it to the fleet exercise is to test what it can and cannot do. It turns out that putting grav lances on light cruisers is a really bad idea, staggeringly bad, against a prepared opponent. Testing that in simulated combat is perfectly reasonable, especially since there are many ways that Fearless might be used. A sensible post-battle analysis might go:

What I don't understand is how it got to the point where they tried it out physically; wargaming the concept in simulators should have shown what a bad idea it was.

Not one even remotely probable, at least not for that result. Remember she didn't just manage to shoot the guy. She methodically executed him. You don't learn that within 2 months.

IIRC, like with Burdette, she basically moved faster than him, rather than outshoot him. I don't find it implausible that she was able to hit him on her first shot, given that A) she'd been training fanatically for two months on that scenario, B) she has experience with slugthrowers (her uncle is apparently a member of the future version of the SCA) and C) given the setup of a duel, she's essentially shooting at an immobile target in the open.

You DID notice the bit about Grayson society being somewhat behind the times so a setup like that would, under the circumstances, be entirely possible?

It's retarded that the Constitution didn't have any provision for cases where the Champion is incapacitated (for that matter, what happens if there is no Champion, which was the case before Honor was awarded that medal?)

Also nice to see that there are things family influence can't save you from, even a Prime Ministers cousin in an aristocracy like Manticore's.

Since the PM is firmly in the "good guy" camp, likely he didn't try to save Denver.

[Thanas]

So, Mr. Wizard, what should she have done? Well, "When meeting weakness, show strength. When meeting strength, show weakness." is the fencing mantra for a reason. When fighting a more experienced opponent, you should play it defensively. Even a rookie can last a very long time against a master, as long as he keeps giving ground, and it leaves you in the best position to exploit an opening if your opponent gets frustrated, impatient and sloppy, which really doesn't seem like it would take long in Burdette's case. On the other hand, I've never had a match when wounded and sleep-deprived, so it's quite likely Honor would be eager to avoid a long fight herself. In that case, variation on a theme, brace to stop his first swing, he'll expect a riposte so don't indulge him. Instead, pass forward (step in) to shove or body check him, then bring the sword into play while he's off-balance. Easy, plays to her strengths and his weaknesses, at a likelihood of success about a thousand times what she actually did.

OTOH, that still makes it a question of matching skill, to some extent. We don't know if Grayson fencing includes use of such body checks; if it does, he might well be expecting such a move. Instead, she used her sheer physical strengths over him, by basically speed-blitzing him (taking advantage of her having greater strength and speed, as well as letting him believe she was out of position), pretty much negating factors of fencing skill.

Have you ever held a sword?

[StarSword]

Haven names all of their military and intelligence operations after the classics. That way if you ever forget what your project is, you can remember that Odysseus is the cunning Trojan Horse plan, and Icarus is the one involving coordinating fleets over impossible distances by having both race to meet insane deadlines. Actually, contrary to all expectations, Icarus was a rousing success. But I'd still like to smack whoever decided to name an incredibly difficult gambit "Icarus."

Yeah, I remember hearing that Jack O'Neill seriously chewed out whoever named the base in Stargate Universe Icarus in the pilot's novelization. Here, though, I think David Weber was being sneaky and "Icarus" was actually supposed to refer to the Manticorans flying too close to the sun.

[eyl]

So, Mr. Wizard, what should she have done? Well, "When meeting weakness, show strength. When meeting strength, show weakness." is the fencing mantra for a reason. When fighting a more experienced opponent, you should play it defensively. Even a rookie can last a very long time against a master, as long as he keeps giving ground, and it leaves you in the best position to exploit an opening if your opponent gets frustrated, impatient and sloppy, which really doesn't seem like it would take long in Burdette's case. On the other hand, I've never had a match when wounded and sleep-deprived, so it's quite likely Honor would be eager to avoid a long fight herself. In that case, variation on a theme, brace to stop his first swing, he'll expect a riposte so don't indulge him. Instead, pass forward (step in) to shove or body check him, then bring the sword into play while he's off-balance. Easy, plays to her strengths and his weaknesses, at a likelihood of success about a thousand times what she actually did.

OTOH, that still makes it a question of matching skill, to some extent. We don't know if Grayson fencing includes use of such body checks; if it does, he might well be expecting such a move. Instead, she used her sheer physical strengths over him, by basically speed-blitzing him (taking advantage of her having greater strength and speed, as well as letting him believe she was out of position), pretty much negating factors of fencing skill.

Have you ever held a sword?

Only a foil.

I'm goig by the description in the book, though.

[Thanas]

I was asking because body checks are a stupid strategy without you grabbing or otherwise immobilizing the blade and because speed-blitzing is about the same - no master swordsmen would ever go into battle thinking "my opponent is this fast".
With regards to Ahriman's point of Honor identifying his intention to strike - if she, a relative novice, was able to easily identify him, why did nobody else who fenced against him? Even then, considering the moves she makes he should be able to avoid them via reflex action quite easily. Speed blitzing is stupid because she is not a jedi, merely 10-15% faster. And still a relative novice.

But we have already had this argument in far greater detail here.

[Simon_Jester]

Not one even remotely probable, at least not for that result. Remember she didn't just manage to shoot the guy. She methodically executed him. You don't learn that within 2 months.

IIRC, like with Burdette, she basically moved faster than him, rather than outshoot him. I don't find it implausible that she was able to hit him on her first shot, given that A) she'd been training fanatically for two months on that scenario, B) she has experience with slugthrowers (her uncle is apparently a member of the future version of the SCA) and C) given the setup of a duel, she's essentially shooting at an immobile target in the open.

Hitting a grown man at twenty paces with your first pistol shot isn't actually that hard, viewed purely as a feat of marksmanship. Pistol duels would have been incredibly lethal in the 1700s if it weren't for how inaccurate and slow-moving the pistol bullets themselves were. The Manticorans (for psychotic reasons) fight similar duels with automatic pistols, which means a much higher death rate.

[Terralthra]

Firing from the hip makes it a little more difficult.

[Marko Dash]

I haven't read the book with the sword duel at Grayson in a while, but hasn't Honor's bootleg telepathy started forming by then and gave her the tip off?

[Thanas]

There is no indication of that in the passage, nor would it magically cause her upper body to heal.

[Mr Bean]

There is no indication of that in the passage, nor would it magically cause her upper body to heal.

Future science? At least in the future it seems their painkillers don't kill reaction times like ours do because in ground actions the marines have autoinjectors that kill feeling without compromising battle readiness.

In fact today we may have some painkillers that don't degrade all reaction times. Alfentanil I've heard for most people does not have as nasty side effects as others because it's only given in tightly controlled doses. Or is there some section in the book calling out her being impacted by the drugs before the fight?

[Thanas]

There is no indication of that in the passage, nor would it magically cause her upper body to heal.

Future science? At least in the future it seems their painkillers don't kill reaction times like ours do because in ground actions the marines have autoinjectors that kill feeling without compromising battle readiness.

Directly countered by the fact that she has not taken any and the fact that she is in heavy pain.