Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington

[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.

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

Withdrawn then since I thought she was under the effective of painkillers.

[StarSword]

I say file that as "Weber fucked up" and stop beating the dead horse. The pistol duel is believable though (one thing none of you brought up is the fact that her artificial eye has a magnification function that would conceivably let it act as an impromptu sniper scope, though firing from the hip is pushing it).

[Mr Bean]

I say file that as "Weber fucked up" and stop beating the dead horse. The pistol duel is believable though (one thing none of you brought up is the fact that her artificial eye has a magnification function that would conceivably let it act as an impromptu sniper scope, though firing from the hip is pushing it).

Actually I find the duel easy to justify because of three things.

1. It's a duel not a firefight meaning you can practice exactly what's going to happen. The dueling method chosen means the two combatants start facing each other. She knows exactly how far apart they will be standing, how tall Summervale is and as duels are public record she can watch his past duels. She has everything she needs to create a baseline to practice against.

2. She spent two months practicing day in and day out to fight exactly one kind of fight. Based on the description of her training your talking about thousands and thousands of rounds fired. Summervale was not doing this, he was relaxing and enjoying his money. And then after getting his ass kicked by Honor's friends he still thinks little of her come fight day.

3. Honor is a heavy grav world born genie, she's been genetically engineered to live in a world with much higher gravity that Manticore. She's got strength, speed and a bunch of little genetic tweaks to make her a baseline better fighter.

So we combine the fact of she knew exactly what she was facing, he did not. She knew the exact weapon, range she would be at and the size of her target and his style, he did not. And toss in a heavy grav worlder and a genetically enhanced woman who spent weeks preparing for this? Yeah I expected him to die and I don't think it would be a contest

[Batman]

Re S_J and the particle beam thing-sorry, but when someone says charged particle weapon in a SciFi context I assume charged particle/beam/bolt weapon, not kinetic impactors that are merely moving so fast there's no practical difference, so I was wondering if they did use those in one of the anthologies (which I didn't read). I'm with you on the resilience discrepancy between kinetic impactors/'particle weapons' and photonic weapons where sidewalls are concerned, especially as gravity does pick favourites after a fashion. It favours particles with mass and has a hell of a lot more apparent effect on them than it has on massless photons, so sidewalls that can casually shrug off GT level kinetic impacts (on a prewar peep battlecruiser no less) should be able to laugh off laser heads of any calibre described in the series by the truckload.
What I think Weber initially intentioned was for the penaids to allow the warhead to actually penetrate the sidewall somehow (the sequence with the old-fashioned nuke in 'Honor of the Queen' certainly seems to support that theory) but that concept seems to have gotten dropped as the series progressed.
Of course, if memory serves 'The Honor of the Queen' is the only incidence where ships that supposedly succumb to KT-MT lasers casually shrug off GT level kinetic impacts (though it's been a while since I read the series so feel free to correct me).

[Simon_Jester]

Re S_J and the particle beam thing-sorry, but when someone says charged particle weapon in a SciFi context I assume charged particle/beam/bolt weapon...

Quite all right. I used to work for a research group that literally wrote the book (well, a book) on accelerator physics, so the words "neutral charged particle beam" mean something to me they don't to you. The reason I didn't explain all that in the first place is that it took me several paragraphs to explain it.

As I said, I wish Ray Palmer had been here.

A Weber thread is a good place for me to avoid infodumping, if I can get away with it, wouldn't you say?

I'm with you on the resilience discrepancy between kinetic impactors/'particle weapons'...

I wouldn't characterize a relativistic missile impact as a "particle weapon," but in terms of its damage mechanics it is effectively a (very dense) particle beam.

and photonic weapons where sidewalls are concerned, especially as gravity does pick favourites after a fashion. It favours particles with mass and has a hell of a lot more apparent effect on them than it has on massless photons,

By definition, a "relativistic" object is one that has so much kinetic energy that its kinetic energy makes up a large fraction of its total energy. Total energy includes mass.

A highly relativistic particle beam (say, 0.99c) will not behave very differently than a beam of light would, in a gravitational field. It will behave very differently in an electric or magnetic field, however.

What I think Weber initially intentioned was for the penaids to allow the warhead to actually penetrate the sidewall somehow (the sequence with the old-fashioned nuke in 'Honor of the Queen' certainly seems to support that theory) but that concept seems to have gotten dropped as the series progressed.

That's the most sensible justification available; though I can't for the life of me see how you make an effective penaid that can help an X-ray laser through the sidewall, given that it's being fired from a few planetary diameters away.

If you can do that on a missile chassis, grav lances really should be... Wait. Fuck. Fuck. Grav lances are just scaled up versions of missile penaids, that permanently disable a sidewall instead of just creating a hole through it for a few dozen microseconds so the laser pulse can get through. And this requires them to be several thousand times larger...

NOW IT MAKES SENSE.

Sort of. Somehow I doubt Weber thought of this, though you never know.

[Batman]

I think we have a significant miscommunication here. I didn't mean to indicate that penaids somehow allowed a measly KT to MT laser head to successfully fire through the sidewall, I was assuming that penaids allowed the physical missile to bodily go through the sidewall and go off inside of it, which would explain why a ship with sidewalls that can casually shrug off GT level kinetic impacts is in danger by Honorverse level nukes-if the penaids worked (don't ask me how, given the setting my first bet would be some sort of gravity magic) the laser heads would be detonating inside the sidewall.
Of course the rest of the series pretty much gives that idea the finger by routinely stating that laser heads do shoot through sidewalls from the outside.

[Connor MacLeod]

Webers got all sorts of data pertaining to the mechanics plastered about everywhere. I know he discusses penaids and sidewalls and penetration mechanics in some stuff (I had quotes from it sitting on my Hard drive somewhere, I'll have to look) and I know he discussed certain yields of cap ship missle (some 40 megaton warhead) describing how the laser heads were meant to work too. I may have to dig that out.

There's also tidbits scattered about from his web postsings in that 'Pearls of Weber' site but I'm too lazy to go digging up for stuff there, either.

[eyl]

I think we have a significant miscommunication here. I didn't mean to indicate that penaids somehow allowed a measly KT to MT laser head to successfully fire through the sidewall, I was assuming that penaids allowed the physical missile to bodily go through the sidewall and go off inside of it, which would explain why a ship with sidewalls that can casually shrug off GT level kinetic impacts is in danger by Honorverse level nukes-if the penaids worked (don't ask me how, given the setting my first bet would be some sort of gravity magic) the laser heads would be detonating inside the sidewall.
Of course the rest of the series pretty much gives that idea the finger by routinely stating that laser heads do shoot through sidewalls from the outside.

I think that penaids act to momentarily open a hole in the sidewall, rather than enhancing the beam itself, so the actual weapon strength is irrelevant.

[Connor MacLeod]

What I dug out for sidewall penetrators as described 'In Fire Forged':

The gods that govern arms races abhor imbalance, and the sidewall’s impenetrability did not last long. In 1298, research yielded the first practical sidewall penetrator. The term actually describes a bewildering array of different methods and technologies of getting an attack through a sidewall. Early devices took many forms and it is not entirely clear even today which type came first. Research has uncovered at least seven unique “inventors” of the sidewall penetrator. Whoever invented it, the consensus among historians is that the first widely employed devices used a precisely timed reshaping of the missile’s own impeller wedge in the fraction of a second before contact to temporarily “flicker” the target’s sidewall and allow the weapon to pass through unimpeded. This approach had the downside of destroying the attacking missile’s own drive (and much of its afterbody) rendering it both unable to maneuver inside the target’s wedge and removing its primary means of killing the target. The answer was to merge the standoff nuclear weapon with the sidewall penetrator and use the inert missile front end to carry a nuclear charge into the sidewall perimeter. Careful control of the missile’s impeller power curve, proper construction of the afterbody, and a powerful pressor field which threw the payload clear prior to the impeller ring’s vaporization allowed the warhead portion to survive long enough to detonate within the target’s sidewall.

Aside from the obvious improvements in understanding of gravitics, considerable advances in computing were also required to ensure that the nuclear explosive would properly detonate after the warhead was through the first sidewall and before the inert missile body was shredded by the intact opposite sidewall. It was not uncommon in this period for these “sidewall contacting nuclear weapons” or “contact nukes” (as they came to be known) to detonate on the opposite side of the target from the sidewall that they pierced. Weapons that detonated prematurely outside the sidewall still had a chance to overload the generators by the sheer amount of energy dumped into the sidewall by the explosion. This had the happy effect (for the attacker) of weakening the sidewall for follow on attacks. The invulnerability of the sidewall had lasted less than fifty years and was ended forever

Cheap gravitic implosion made it economical to fit devices with previously unheard of yields into a missile body. The pure fuel made it possible to predict the output radiation of the bomb explosion precisely and ultimately control (to a small degree) the spectrum and duration of the explosion’s radiation. Since most nuclear weapon damage to space targets is caused by X-ray radiation from the explosion, the ability to tune that radiation, even slightly, made the defender’s problem significantly more difficult. Missile warhead yields of hundreds of megatons became commonplace in this time period and heavy weapons in the gigaton range were not unheard of. Ship to ship actions once again became brutally short. Warhead designers quickly realized that they could change the compression pattern and sequence of the new gravitic imploders to somewhat shape the resulting release of radiation. In 1669, a series of tests by several navies quietly confirmed the ability of the new warheads compressing fuel in different patterns to produce modest increases in stand-off ranges for impeller missiles in some cases. The necessary software to sequence the imploders and optimize the blast pattern at the moment of
detonation appeared in routine upgrades all over known space, because essentially no new hardware was required. Little remarked at the time, these early nuclear directed energy weapons (NDEW) portended more lethal technologies to come.

That most navies kept building dual mode (sidewall burning and contact nuke) impeller missiles after this point surprises some. Dual mode weapons provided tactical flexibility. Opportunities occasionally arose in large counter-sidewall salvos to get a contact nuke through. Under those conditions, the ability to have a dual mode weapon capable of performing both as a contact nuke and in an anti-sidewall role gave a chance for a decisive strike at the slight cost of the space and mass of sidewall penetrating equipment and extra software. The RMN chose to retain the dual mode capability, and it is became known colloquially to old spacers (such as the author) as “boom” or “burn” presets. Other navies followed the same logic to the same capability.

Though retained, “boom” settings were rarely useful, so missile designers seeking ways to increase sidewall burning effectiveness kept trying for longer standoff range. The development of another generation of powerful practical micronized grav generators marked the next evolutionary step in missile warfare in 1806 with the introduction of the first nuclear gravitically directed energy weapon (NGDEW).
The key components were grav lens arrays derived from those that had dramatically increased shipboard laser/graser effectiveness roughly fifty years earlier. The very first of these arrays was called a “plate array” and simply reflected the bomb’s energy off a flat artificial grav wave similar to an impeller or sidewall behind the warhead. Research continually tightened the focus of the grav arrays as impeller missile standoff ranges grew from tens of hundreds to tens of thousands of kilometers over the ensuing decades. The early grav lens arrays were quite large, however and frequently displaced the sidewall penetrators until further refinements could reduce their sizes. By 1826, a state of the art RMN impeller drive nuclear armed missile could boast a standoff range of 8,000 to 10,000 kilometers in sidewall burning mode.

`

That same year, a small Solarian defense contractor, Aberu and Harmon, developed the unique combination of a state of the art grav lens array with a series of multiple submunitions carrying rods that emitted short wavelength X-ray laser light when exposed to the broadband X-ray pulse from a nuclear explosion. The idea was that these rods would produce intense laser beams which would impact on a target whose sidewall was weakened by the portion of the blast front that did not impact the rods. The slight delay produced by the lasing process ensured that the bomb energy which missed the rods would hit and weaken the target sidewall before the laser beams arrived. Initially called a laser enhanced nuclear gravitically directed energy weapon (LENGDEW), the device quickly earned the handier title of “laser head.”

There was bunches more about lasers and armour design too that i recall but I dont know how much of that I grabbed either lol

[Ahriman238]

I fence, not Katana though, Italian Rapier.

Which one?

The cheap kind.

Sorry if that came off smart-ass, I have a vague notion there are multiple forms of rapier, but I wasn't really involved in getting our equipment (which we share with two fencing classes) and my understanding is that getting a bunch for less than $200 a blade was a bigger priority than any particular style.

Or if you are, in fact, referring to style, we train single-blade Capoferro.

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.

That's so, but at the same time the guy was head-ranting about how he was the Sword of God, deliver to this time, this place by the divine hand so he could strike down this woman. That sure sounds like someone who'd get frustrated if denied a quick and easy victory.

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.

It's something that's actually worked out for me a few times. Not often, and never against someone I already tried it on.

I don't really know anything about katanas, past a couple samurai flicks and the one time in basic fencing class our teacher brought one in. To be clear, I'm not an expert, I'm a guy whose spent the last couple years banging swords with some friends a couple times a month. I've never fought when injured, and only sometimes against someone much more skilled.

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.

I'm afraid I have no answer there.

[Simon_Jester]

I think we have a significant miscommunication here. I didn't mean to indicate that penaids somehow allowed a measly KT to MT laser head to successfully fire through the sidewall, I was assuming that penaids allowed the physical missile to bodily go through the sidewall and go off inside of it, which would explain why a ship with sidewalls that can casually shrug off GT level kinetic impacts is in danger by Honorverse level nukes-if the penaids worked (don't ask me how, given the setting my first bet would be some sort of gravity magic) the laser heads would be detonating inside the sidewall.

Although then the question is why they don't just ram the missile straight into the enemy ship; compared to that, a nuclear warhead would be an anticlimax...

Of course the rest of the series pretty much gives that idea the finger by routinely stating that laser heads do shoot through sidewalls from the outside.

Also, shipboard beam weapons routinely shoot through the sidewalls from the outside all the time. Which either requires that light be Kryptonite to the sidewalls' Superman (and makes baby physicists cry). Or that the ship firing those beam weapons is doing something to ensure that the laser beam actually goes through the sidewall.

I like the idea that there's a two or three or five-ton collar of "penetration aids" around each laser head which is explosively 'fired' forward to generate a momentary disruption of the sidewall that an X-ray laser can get through. You need a somewhat larger (say, hundred-ton) set of penetration aids on a shipboard energy weapon mount to do the same job from a longer range, and lighter penaid sets on a cruiser-weight beam weapon mount might just fail if used to fire against the high-powered sidewall of a capital ship.

Actually building a "penaid" powerful enough to bring down a sidewall semi-permanently requires something like ten thousand tons or more, even from close range... and they call it a "grav lance."

[reads Connor's post...]

Well, shit. I think I just independently re-deduced Weber's explanation, because I'm pretty sure I never had the patience to read those passages in In Fire Forged. Although the part about shipboard energy mounts needing their own shipboard sidewall-breachers may be my own, I cant think of a way to get around it while staying within the approximate laws of physics as we know them.

[Ahriman238]

I think we have a significant miscommunication here. I didn't mean to indicate that penaids somehow allowed a measly KT to MT laser head to successfully fire through the sidewall, I was assuming that penaids allowed the physical missile to bodily go through the sidewall and go off inside of it, which would explain why a ship with sidewalls that can casually shrug off GT level kinetic impacts is in danger by Honorverse level nukes-if the penaids worked (don't ask me how, given the setting my first bet would be some sort of gravity magic) the laser heads would be detonating inside the sidewall.

Although then the question is why they don't just ram the missile straight into the enemy ship; compared to that, a nuclear warhead would be an anticlimax...

My understanding is that kinetic impactors and nukes are no longer used against ships because point-defense evolved to the point where the odds of actually scoring a hit became effectively nil. A laser head only has to get within 8.000 miles to go off, which is a lot more doable.

Of course the rest of the series pretty much gives that idea the finger by routinely stating that laser heads do shoot through sidewalls from the outside.

Also, shipboard beam weapons routinely shoot through the sidewalls from the outside all the time. Which either requires that light be Kryptonite to the sidewalls' Superman (and makes baby physicists cry). Or that the ship firing those beam weapons is doing something to ensure that the laser beam actually goes through the sidewall.[/quote]

Actually, when a ship's energy weapons fire out a 'porthole' is opened in the sidewall for the beam to pass out through (Ms. Midshipwoman Harrington.) Sometimes lasers are distorted passing through the sidewall, even enough to miss the ship completely.

[Batman]

I think we have a significant miscommunication here. I didn't mean to indicate that penaids somehow allowed a measly KT to MT laser head to successfully fire through the sidewall, I was assuming that penaids allowed the physical missile to bodily go through the sidewall and go off inside of it, which would explain why a ship with sidewalls that can casually shrug off GT level kinetic impacts is in danger by Honorverse level nukes-if the penaids worked (don't ask me how, given the setting my first bet would be some sort of gravity magic) the laser heads would be detonating inside the sidewall.

Although then the question is why they don't just ram the missile straight into the enemy ship; compared to that, a nuclear warhead would be an anticlimax...

My understanding is that kinetic impactors and nukes are no longer used against ships because point-defense evolved to the point where the odds of actually scoring a hit became effectively nil. A laser head only has to get within 8.000 miles to go off, which is a lot more doable.

It's a very sensible question in the context of my (apparently mistaken) assumption that penaids allow the missile to move bodily through the sidewall to explode inside. If you design penaids to do that, you obviously expect the missile to live long enough to get through the sidewall, at which point it does indeed seem somewhat silly to put MT to low GT warheads on what is already a multi GT kinetic impactor (not to mention the damage the missile's wedge could do).

Of course the rest of the series pretty much gives that idea the finger by routinely stating that laser heads do shoot through sidewalls from the outside.

Also, shipboard beam weapons routinely shoot through the sidewalls from the outside all the time. Which either requires that light be Kryptonite to the sidewalls' Superman (and makes baby physicists cry). Or that the ship firing those beam weapons is doing something to ensure that the laser beam actually goes through the sidewall.

Actually, when a ship's energy weapons fire out a 'porthole' is opened in the sidewall for the beam to pass out through (Ms. Midshipwoman Harrington.) Sometimes lasers are distorted passing through the sidewall, even enough to miss the ship completely.

The ship firing the lasers opens portholes. I seriously doubt the ones on the receiving end do it so they can be shot to pieces which leaves us with the problem of sidewalls that are virtually invulnerable to kinetic impactors/particle weapons being casually pierced by MT level lasers.
Assuming sidewalls remain invulnerable to kinetic attacks for the rest of the series of course. Those two missiles for 'Honor of the Queen' are the only ones that come immediately to mind and it's not like Weber hasn't retconned other stuff as the series went on (styrofoam starships, anyone?)

[Thanas]

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.

That's so, but at the same time the guy was head-ranting about how he was the Sword of God, deliver to this time, this place by the divine hand so he could strike down this woman. That sure sounds like someone who'd get frustrated if denied a quick and easy victory.

And yet he goes through the same preparations as any sensible guy would, and frustration should not allow Harrington to move three times as quick as he does.

It's something that's actually worked out for me a few times. Not often, and never against someone I already tried it on.

If you are getting a body check on somebody without grabbing his weapon then that guy failed hard.

[Simon_Jester]

My understanding is that kinetic impactors and nukes are no longer used against ships because point-defense evolved to the point where the odds of actually scoring a hit became effectively nil. A laser head only has to get within 8.000 miles to go off, which is a lot more doable.

That's not unjustified, but there are catches.

For example, when Cardones gets a nuclear warhead through Thunder of God's sidewall in Honor of the Queen, he might have done even better to just fucking ram the missile into the sidewall... unless we assume that there really is some special sidewall-penetrating property that lets the missile warhead fly through a sidewall that would laugh off a thirty-gigaton kinetic impactor.

Which Weber has apparently confirmed in In Fire Forged.

Actually, when a ship's energy weapons fire out a 'porthole' is opened in the sidewall for the beam to pass out through (Ms. Midshipwoman Harrington.) Sometimes lasers are distorted passing through the sidewall, even enough to miss the ship completely.

As Batman notes, it is unlikely that the enemy would obligingly open a gap in their sidewalls for your lasers to pass through.

Lasers are sometimes distorted or totally neutralized by sidewall generators, I quite agree. My point is that this should happen to ALL lasers in the Honorverse, including superdreadnought heavy graser mounts, unless those beam mounts include some kind of integrated technology that helps the beam penetrate a sidewall. Like, say, a mini-micro-gravlance that creates a hole several meters across for one millisecond instead of knocking down the whole wall for minutes or hours.

The ship firing the lasers opens portholes. I seriously doubt the ones on the receiving end do it so they can be shot to pieces which leaves us with the problem of sidewalls that are virtually invulnerable to kinetic impactors/particle weapons being casually pierced by MT level lasers.
Assuming sidewalls remain invulnerable to kinetic attacks for the rest of the series of course. Those two missiles for 'Honor of the Queen' are the only ones that come immediately to mind and it's not like Weber hasn't retconned other stuff as the series went on (styrofoam starships, anyone?)

To be fair, a beam weapon that carries 10 MT of energy very well might be able to penetrate where a kinetic impactor at 0.2c would not, even if the impactor has 100-1000 MT of kinetic energy.

It's when the disparity gets even larger than that that things get a bit questionable.

[Mr Bean]

Question:Given the gravity nature of wedges and sidewalls could it be that kinetic impacts are just not useful because of the following

A.Once it's a kinetic weapon it's an unguided weapon since all guidance ends the instant it impacts the wedge
B. Ships are far smaller than the wedges and sidewalls they generate. To the point even the smallest of wedge equipped ships the courier boats have ten kilometers between the leading edge of their wedge and the ship itself.
C. .5C is still not 1C meaning you have twice as long to dodge it with simple accidental movements inside the wedge.

[Ahriman238]

If you are getting a body check on somebody without grabbing his weapon then that guy failed hard.

?

Get advantage of the blade, push their tip out of line and pass forward before they cavazione. It's tricky to pull off, but I wouldn't say anyone who falls for it "failed hard."

"I swear to God I didn't, Sir." Westerfeldt's face was taut. "As far as I know, every one of the rifles we've delivered is still cached in the Shaman's caves. In fact, I ordered a count made at Site One as soon as the shit hit the fan. They haven't completed it yet, but so far the numbers have checked perfectly. I don't think those rifles were ours at all, Sir."

"Oh, crap!" Canning muttered, dragging his hands through his hair and staring at the blotter.
"They must have been Stilty-made, Sir," Westerfeldt said more calmly. "The Shaman's had to hand them out for training sessions. We collect them all afterward, but maybe one of the damned abos took the idea home with him. If we're going to give them weapons that look like they're native-built, then they have to be ones the natives can build, after all. It just never occurred to anyone they might figure out how to make their own gunpowder as well and set up a shop of their own."

The Medusans are primitive, but they're not stupid. Show them a rifle, teach them to use, clean and maintain it, and they'll be able to duplicate it.

And if there was any small hope the situation with advanced weapon might be controlled or contained, it just died gruesomely. Firearms, and in short order artillery, are now a part of Medusan life.

There could be only one "captain" aboard a ship of war, where any uncertainty over who someone was referring to in the midst of a critical situation could be fatal, so Papadapolous received the courtesy promotion to avoid that confusion. And he looked every centimeter a major, despite his captain's insignia,

Courtesy promotion to a Marine Captain, to avoid confusion.

"Ma'am," Papadapolous said crisply, "I still have ninety-three Marines aboard ship. I have battle armor for a full platoon—thirty-five men and women—with pulse rifles and heavy weapons for the remainder of the company. We can handle any bunch of Stilties armed with flintlocks." He stopped, jaw clenched, and added another "Ma'am" almost as an afterthought.

Fearless' Marine complement 93+ men, with 35 suits of power armor.

"Major, my people are Marines. If you know anything about Marines, then you know we do our job."

His clipped voice made no effort to hide his own contempt, and Honor started to raise an intervening hand. But Isvarian lurched to his feet before she got it up, and she let it fall back into her lap as he leaned towards Papadapolous.

"Let me tell you something about Marines, Sonny!" the NPA man spat. "I know all about them, believe me. I know you're brave, loyal, trustworthy and honest." The bitter derision in his voice could have stripped paint from the bulkheads. "I know you can knock a kodiak max on his ass at two klicks with a pulse rifle. I know you can pick a single gnat out of a cloud of 'em with a plasma gun and strangle hexapumas with your bare hands. I even know your battle armor gives you the strength of ten because your heart is pure! But this ain't no boarding action, 'Major' Papadapolous, and it's no field exercise, either. This is for real, and your people don't have the least damned idea what they're fucking around with down there!"

Awesome chewing out by Barney Issvarian. Marine power armor boosts physical strength 10x, though I sort of doubt purity of heart is a factor. A pulse rifle can accurately hit a polar bear-equivalent at 2 km.

Rather more skeptical about shooting a single gnat out of a swarm or strangling Nimitz's bigger and meaner cousins.

"The problem is that your people can undoubtedly trash any of them you see, but you won't see them unless they want you to. Not in the bush. A Medusan nomad could crawl across a pool table without your seeing him if he didn't want you to. And while your body armor may protect you, it won't protect any unarmored civilians."

Apparently whatever training or sensors the RMMC has available, it's of little use in spotting Medusans in their home turf.

Honor stood at the mouth of the boat bay personnel tube, watching through the visual display's bay pickups as her cutter mated with the tube's far end. The small craft moved with deliberate precision in the bay's brightly-lit vacuum, settling its ninety-five-ton mass neatly into the waiting cradle, and the rams moved the tube buffers forward, sealing the tube collar to the hatch. The green pressure light glowed, and she drew an unobtrusive breath as the tube hatch opened.

95 ton cutter, boarding/docking tube suggests the "airplane" float space to Fearless wasn't integral to Hephaestus.

She took it, and hid a smile as she felt his fingers work slightly about her own hand, feeling for the crusher grip. She'd never suspected he might be a knuckle-breaker. It seemed a bit petty for such a powerful man, but perhaps he needed to express his domination in all ways. And perhaps he'd forgotten she was a Sphinxian, she thought, and let him squeeze to his heart's content. Her long-fingered hand was large for a woman's, too large for him to secure the purchase points he wanted, and she let him build to maximum pressure, then squeezed back with smooth power. Her smile was pleasant, giving no indication of the silent struggle, but she saw his eyes flicker at the unexpected steeliness of her grip.

The manifold advantages of being a heavy grav colonist, from a long line of genetically tweaked heavy grav colonists.

Like Honor's own family, the first Hauptman had arrived on Manticore only after the Plague of 22 A.L.—1454 Post Diaspora, by Standard Reckoning. The original Manticore Colony, Ltd., had bid high for the rights to the Manticore System in 774 P.D. precisely because Manticore-A III, the planet now named Manticore, was so very much like Old Earth. Even the most Earthlike world required at least some terraforming to suit it to a human population, but in Manticore's case that had amounted to little more than introducing essential Terrestrial food crops and carefully selected fauna, and despite Manticore's long year and extended seasons, the off-world life-forms had made the transition to their new environment with ease.

Unfortunately, that ease of adaptation had been a two-edged sword, for Manticore had proven one of the very few planets capable of producing an indigenous disease that could prey on humanity. It took forty T-years for a native Manticoran virus to mutate into a variety which could attack human hosts, but once it had, the plague had struck with stunning power.

It had taken more than a standard decade for the medics to defeat the plague, and it had killed over sixty percent of the colonists—almost ninety percent of those born on Old Earth—before they did. The survivors' harrowed ranks had been depleted well below the levels of assured survivability, and far too many of their essential specialists had been among the dead. Yet as if to compensate for the disaster of the plague, fate had given the colony the ability to bring in the new blood it needed.
The original colonists had sailed for Manticore before the invention of the Warshawski sail and gravity detectors had reduced the risks of hyper travel to a level passenger ships could accept. Not even the impeller drive had been available, and their voyage in cryo hibernation aboard the sublight colony shipJason had taken over six hundred and forty T-years, but the mechanics of interstellar travel had been revolutionized during their centuries of sleep.

The new technology had meant new colonists could be recruited from the core worlds themselves in a reasonable time frame, and Roger Winton, president and CEO of the Manticore Colony, Ltd., had anticipated the changes. He had created the Manticore Colony Trust of Zurich before departure, investing every penny left to the shareholders after the expenses of purchasing the colony rights from the original surveyor and equipping their expedition. Few other colonial ventures had even considered such a thing, given the long years of travel which would lie between their new worlds and Sol, but Winton was a farsighted man, and six centuries of compound interest had left the colony with an enviable credit balance on Old Earth.

And so Winton and his surviving fellows had been able not only to recruit the reinforcements they needed but to pay those colonists' passage to their new and distant homes, if necessary. Yet, because they were concerned about retaining political control in the face of such an influx of newcomers, the survivors of the original expedition and their children had adopted a new constitution, converting their colony from one ruled by an elective board of directors into the Star Kingdom of Manticore under Roger I, first monarch of the House of Winton.

History of Manticore. I always found it fascinating how enlightened future folk would choose a monarchy/aristocracy, yet it makes sense if you want to protect your rights as an original settler and sneer that "(I/my family) was here first!"

The Manticore Colony, Ltd.'s, initial shareholders had received vast tracts of land and/or mineral rights on the system's planets, in direct proportion to their original capital contributions. The new constitution transformed them into an hereditary aristocracy, but it wasn't a closed nobility, for even vaster tracts had remained unclaimed. The new colonists who could pay their own passage received the equivalent of its cost in land credits on their arrival, and those who could contribute more than the cost of passage were guaranteed the right to purchase additional land at just under half its "book" value. The opportunity to become nobles in their own right had drawn the interest of an extraordinarily high percentage of young, skilled, well-paid professionals: physicians, engineers, educators, chemists and physicists, botanists and biologists—exactly the sort of people a faltering colonial population required and all too few out-worlds could attract. They'd arrived to claim and expand their guaranteed credit, and many of those so-called "second shareholders" had become earls and even dukes in their own right.

Of those who hadn't been able to pay their own passage in full, many had been able to pay much of the cost and so had received the difference in land credits on arrival. Small by Manticoran standards, perhaps, but enormous by core-world lights. Those people had become Manticore's freeholding yeomen, like Honor's own ancestors, and their families retained a sturdy sense of independence even today.

Yet for all that, the majority of the new arrivals had been "zero-balancers," individuals unable to pay any of their passage, who, in many cases, arrived on Manticore wearing all they owned upon their backs. Individuals like Heinrich Hauptman.

Distinction between noblemen, yeomen and commoners. Okay, so a yeomen is a land-owning commoner. You know what I mean.

"Very well, Commander," he grated. "You've chosen to insult me, whatever legalism you care to cloak that in. I'll give you one more opportunity to back off. If you don't, then I'll by God push you back."

"No, Sir, you will not," Honor said softly, and Hauptman gave a crack of scornful laughter. His body language radiated fury and contempt as he gave his renowned temper full rein, but his voice was hard and cold when he spoke once more.

"Oh, but I will, Commander. I will. I believe your parents are senior partners in the Duvalier Medical Association?"

Despite herself, Honor twitched in surprise at the complete non sequitur. Then her eyes narrowed, and her head tilted dangerously.

"Well, Commander?" Hauptman almost purred. "Am I correct?"

"You are," she said flatly.

"Then if you insist on making this a personal confrontation, you should consider the repercussions it may have on your own family, Madam, because the Hauptman Cartel controls a seventy percent interest in that organization's public stock. Do I make myself clear, Commander?"

Honor stiffened in her chair, her face paper-white, and the steel in her eyes was no longer chilled. It blazed, and the corner of her mouth twitched violently. Hauptman's own eyes gleamed as he misinterpreted that involuntary muscle spasm, and he leaned back, smiling and triumphant.

"The decision is yours, Commander. I am merely an honest merchant endeavoring to protect my legitimate interests and those of my shareholders in this system. If you insist on interfering with those legitimate interests, you leave me no choice but to defend myself in any way I can, however distasteful I may personally find the measures to which you compel me . . . or however unfortunate their consequences for your parents."

Honor's muscles quivered with hate, her fingers taloned in her lap, and she felt her lips draw back to spit her defiance in his face, but someone else's flat, cold voice spoke first.

The first time Honor nearly ended her career then and there by losing her temper. In this case, by nearly belting Hauptman.

"I suggest you reconsider that threat, Mr. Hauptman," Alistair McKeon said.

The sudden interruption was so utterly unexpected that Honor turned to him in amazement. Her executive officer's face was no longer masklike. It was tight with anger, the gray eyes snapping, and Hauptman regarded him as if he were an item of furniture whose presence the magnate had forgotten.

"I'm not accustomed to accepting the advice of uniformed flunkies," he sneered.

"Then I suggest you become accustomed," McKeon replied in that same, hammered-iron voice. "Ever since your arrival in this briefing room, you have persistently attempted to construe Commander Harrington's actions as a personal attack upon yourself. In the process, you have insulted her, the Royal Navy, and the discharge of our duties to the Crown. You have, in fact, made it abundantly clear that neither the law nor your responsibilities under it are as important to you as your own precious reputation. Despite your calculated insolence, the Captain has maintained an air of courtesy and respect, yet when she refuses to ignore her duty as an officer of the Queen or modify it to suit your demands, you have seen fit to threaten not just her personally, but the livelihood of her parents." Contempt blazed in the lieutenant commander's eyes. "I therefore warn you, Sir, that I will be prepared to so testify in any court of law."

"Court of law?" Hauptman reared back in surprise, and Honor felt almost as surprised even through her fury. What was McKeon—?

"Yes, Sir, a court of law, where your persistent attempts to compel the Queen's Navy to abandon its responsibilities will, no doubt, be seen as proof of collusion in treason and murder."

Absolute shock filled the briefing room with silence in the wake of McKeon's cold, hard voice. Hauptman paled in disbelief, but then his face darkened once more.

"You're insane! You're out of your mind! There's no—"

"Mr. Hauptman," McKeon interrupted the sputtering magnate harshly, "forty-seven hours ago, sixty-one Native Protection Agency police were killed or wounded in the pursuit of their duty. They were murdered, by off-world individuals trading with the Medusan natives in prohibited drugs. The laboratory manufacturing those drugs was powered by way of an unauthorized shunt installed in the backup orbital power collector of Her Majesty's Government's enclave on Medusa. That shunt, Mr. Hauptman, which Navy personnel discovered and positively identified not eight hours ago, was not installed after the collector was placed in Medusa orbit; it was installed when the collector was manufactured . . . by the Hauptman Cartel!"

Hauptman stared at him, too shocked to speak, and he continued in the same, grating voice.
"Since that shunt constitutes unimpeachable physical evidence linking your cartel or individuals employed by it with the drug operation, and hence with the murder of those officers, your blatant efforts to divert official attention from your operations here can only be construed as an effort to conceal guilt—either yours, or your employees. In either case, Sir, that would constitute collusion and thus make you, personally, an accomplice after the fact to murder at the very least. And I remind you that the use of Her Majesty's property in a capital crime—particularly one which results in the death of Crown officers—constitutes treason under the law of this kingdom. I respectfully submit—" he didn't sound at all respectful, Honor thought in shock "—that it is in your best interest and the interest of your cartel's future business reputation to cooperate fully with Commander Harrington's efforts to discover the true guilty parties rather than place yourself in a position of grave suspicion by obstructing an official investigation of Her Majesty's officers in this system."

McKeon comes out of his shell long enough to save Honor from herself, using the evidence she knew about, but didn't think to use.

"I am fully aware that you have no intention of forgetting this incident. Neither, I assure you, have I. Nor will I forget your threats. I am a Queen's officer. As such, I will react to any personal attack upon me only if and as it arises, and for myself, both personally and as a Queen's officer, I dislike the custom of dueling. But, Mr. Hauptman, should you ever attempt to carry through your threat against my parents—" her eyes were leveled missile batteries and the tic at the corner of her mouth jerked like a living thing "—I will denounce you publicly for your contemptible actions and demand satisfaction. And when you accept my challenge, Mr. Hauptman, I will kill you like the scum you are."

Honor twists the knife once more before letting Hauptman go. She sure knows how to make friends.

And again with the pistol dueling. Valen, can anyone just challenge anyone for any reason? How is this society still working at all>

He'd antagonized one of the most powerful men in the Kingdom, and she shuddered to think where her confrontation with Hauptman would have ended had she responded without his intervention. The use of the collector tap to turn Hauptman's manipulations back on him had never even occurred to her. She hadn't been thinking clearly enough for that. All she'd felt was hate and disgust and the need to strike back. She knew herself—knew she'd hovered on the brink of physically attacking the man in her fury, and that would have ruined her, whatever the provocation.

Just confirmation that she would have hit him. Not that I think any of you doubt me on this.

He turned back to the huge fireplace and added another log. He adjusted it with the poker, settling the native hemlock (which, in fact, bore very little resemblance to the Old Earth tree of the same name) into the bed of coals, then straightened and replaced the poker in its stand as he checked the wall clock again. It was twelve past comp, well into the twenty-seven-minute midnight "hour" officially called Compensate that adjusted Manticore's 22.45-hour day to permit use of Standard Reckoning time units, and his eyebrow rose again.

Compensate, an official "hour" 27 minutes long so the day can use standard hours.

Okay, so a Manticore day is 22 hours, 27 minutes. A Manticore year is 629.83 Earth days, 673.31 local. Just thought I'd mention it at some point, since I'm figuring ages and time intervals in Manticoran years by multiplying everything by 1.73.

"Before he went out, Hauptman hit every button he could reach back home in Landing. He didn't make much headway with the Duke, but he certainly bent Janacek's ear. And he called in his markers with Countess New Kiev and Sheridan Wallace's 'New Men,' too. I think we've underestimated the contributions he's been making to certain parties' coffers, including the New Men, but he definitely has his hooks even deeper into the Liberals than we'd thought. New Kiev can't give a centimeter—officially—without breaking with the Government and losing her post as Minister for Medusan Affairs. She's not about to do that, but it's pretty obvious she and Wallace were primed to come down on the Navy's entire handling of Basilisk Station. If Harrington had crumbled at this point, they would've been able to claim the Navy, in her person, had bungled and made the Kingdom a galactic laughing stock by first creating interstellar incidents with our neighbors and then proving its irresolution by backing away from its duties under pressure."

Hauptman's preparations before leaving Manticore to twist Honor's arm. I'd forgotten how much the politics touched everything, even in the very first book.

But the point is that all the Opposition parties have been riding their rank and file pretty hard to prep them for some big move once Hauptman bullied Harrington into backing down, and Wallace was going to play hatchet man. He even went as far as to put down his name and 'the state of affairs on Basilisk Station' on the list of next month's Official Questions."

"Oh ho!" Alexander shook his head with a small smile. The Official Questions list gave the Opposition a way to force the Government to allow open (and generally partisan) discussion of things it might prefer to avoid. A prime minister could refuse to answer an Official Question only if he certified, with the backing of the Crown and the Chief Justice of the Queen's Bench, that answering it would jeopardize the Kingdom's security. Even then, the Government had no choice but to permit individual members of Parliament to debate the Question in secret session. Potentially, that made the list an extremely effective parliamentary weapon, but it was a double-edged sword, and the timing could go wrong. Like now. Under the unwritten portion of the Manticoran constitutional tradition, a Question could not be withdrawn, even by its author, once it was on the list.

Apparently Manticore has PMQs. Good for them. It's one of two or three major changes I'd like to see to the US system of government.

"That's always been one of the problems with the picket there, Willie. You see, officially, there is no 'Basilisk Station' to command—not in the sense that there's a Manticore Fleet District or Gryphon Fleet District—thanks to the Act of Annexation and Janacek's own policies. That means the picket's SO isn't in the same position as, say, a squadron commander. In the case of a squadron or an official station or district, a commanding officer is responsible for all operations in his designated command area and for every ship assigned to it. But thanks to the mish-mash we've actually got in Basilisk, where there's no formally specified command area at all, Young's primary responsibility was to act as captain of his own heavy cruiser. It was only the fact that he was the senior RMN officer present that made him the picket commander. Or, to put it another way, Warlock is his 'designated command area,' and his authority beyond her hull is restricted by her current physical location and functions on a strictly ad hoc basis. Oh, if he'd detached himself from Warlock to Fearless in the first place, the Admiralty wouldn't have objected. In fact, that's what he ought to have done. But when he officially 'delegated' the SO's job to Harrington by removing his ship from the picket, he released himself—unilaterally—from any responsibility for or authority over Basilisk Station until his refit is completed. Technically, he can't go back without Warlock without absenting himself from his post unless Lucien cuts him orders to that effect. I can't quite see Lucien doing that, and I can see Jim getting awfully stuffy about the letter of the regs all of a sudden if Young tries to reassume command there without Warlock."

Explanation for why Young can't quit Warlock and go through the Junction to reassert control on Basilisk. Curious what he'd do though, order her to stand down and go back to making a shambles of his duty after Basilisk caught the public eye? Try to claim credit for Honor's successes and hang her out to dry for toes stepped on?

"Don't sweat it, Hamish. I'll pull it off. And once we get Warlock's forward hull opened up, I guarantee she won't leave dock for a good seven weeks. Long enough?"

Context is Ham talking to the Hephaestus CO about "un-expediting" Young's repairs. Andy admits to have done so already, just to watch Young squirm, but decides to grant a request Young made when he first got in, for complete overhaul of the forward impeller nodes, which is apparently a 7 week procedure.

Dame Estelle's sulfurous description of her interview with Countess New Kiev's courier had been one. Honor had never imagined the genteel, composed Resident Commissioner could be so elementally enraged. Dame Estelle had looked ready to bite pieces out of the furniture, but as Honor had listened to her account of the meeting, she'd understood perfectly.

It seemed New Kiev was feeling the heat from the financial community in general and, apparently, from the Hauptman Cartel in particular. From Dame Estelle's remarks, Honor was beginning to suspect that the big Manticoran merchant cartels had contributed rather more heavily to the Liberal Party's political coffers than she'd ever thought. The notion of an alliance between the parliamentary advocates of increased welfare spending and the captains of industry seemed a bit bizarre to Honor, but something was certainly giving them an awful lot of clout with the Opposition, for Countess New Kiev had decided to turn the screws on Dame Estelle to propitiate them.

Honor had been astounded to learn from the commissioner that New Kiev had been told in unambiguous terms to keep her hands off the Navy's operations on Basilisk Station. That must have been a rude shock for her, Honor told herself with secret delight, and it reinforced her own suspicion that someone well up the chain of command approved of her actions. It was also, she reflected, the first time since the Basilisk Annexation that the Minister for Medusan Affairs had been told—rather bluntly, she gathered—that her authority ended at the outer edge of the planetary atmosphere. It was a long overdue assertion of the Fleet's authority and responsibility, although, given the officers and ships normally assigned here, she had little faith it would last.

Politics. New Kiev is the leader of the Liberal Party, and also the Minister for Medusan Affairs, Matsuko's boss. Apparently the position was created as one of the compromises of the annexation and always given to a Liberal as a sop.

Honor could follow some of her reasoning, for as Dame Estelle had pointed out, New Kiev, as one of the leaders of the Opposition, held her present post only because the Ministry for Medusan Affairs was traditionally assigned to the Liberal Party as some sort of quid pro quo left over from the original, tortuous annexation fight in Parliament. But there were limits to how far from the Government line she could stray without losing her position, and it seemed she'd reached them, for her messenger had arrived in Dame Estelle's office with "suggestions," not directives.

The commissioner hadn't cared for those suggestions at all, and as far as Honor could decipher them, they seemed to have consisted entirely of variations on a single theme. Dame Estelle should remember the commercial importance to the Kingdom of its great trading houses. She should strive to adopt a "more conciliatory tone" when dealing with them and "mediate between the Navy's overly rigorous application" of the commerce regulations and the cartels' "legitimate concerns over sudden and abrupt changes in the regulatory climate." Above all, she should "remember the transitory nature of our custodial presence on Medusa" and avoid any actions which would anger the natives or those who would someday trade with them as equals. And, of course, she should "strive to abate" the possibly over-zealous manner in which the present senior officer on Basilisk Station seemed to be wielding her powers over the remainder of the star system.

Very interesting how all this is going on in the background, but driving events we see. Ah, Weber, you're reminding me why I loved these books in the first place. What the hell happened?

"Next, there's the problem of getting our own available strength concentrated. The NPA only has about a five-company field strength, once we allow for essential detachments, and my own company is understrength just now. So, with your permission, Captain, I'd like to recall the Marines currently detached to the customs and inspection parties. I believe the traffic volume has dropped to a level which would permit us to reduce the number of inspection boats and consolidate Navy ratings to crew them, which would release our Marines for possible ground combat. If we can do that, I'd have four full-strength platoons to work with, not three partial ones."

Proposed deployment of Fearless' Marines against a suspected Nedusan uprising. If a full platoon is 35 men, I guess that makes the Marine complement 140.

"Toward these ends, I intend to reconfigure two squads' worth of our battle armor for the recon role. As you no doubt know, Captain—" the Marine's tone suggested that she might not know but chose, diplomatically, to assume that she did "—our powered armor is designed to confer maximum tactical flexibility by allowing us to configure it for specific mission parameters. Normally, we operate with fairly heavy weapon loads, but that limits our endurance in two ways. First, the weaponry itself displaces power cells we might otherwise carry, and second, most of our heavy weapons are energy intensive, which ups the drain on the cells we can carry. It gives us a lot of firepower, but only over relatively short engagement times.

"In the recon role, weaponry is cut back to a bare minimum in favor of additional sensor systems, which simultaneously allows us to add additional cells, reduce overall power requirements, and substantially upgrade sensor capability. A Marine in standard armor configuration has an endurance of less than four hours under sustained combat conditions; in recon configuration, his endurance is over fifty hours, he can sustain speeds of sixty kilometers per hour even through rough terrain, and he can 'see' much better. The trade off is that his offensive power is little greater than that of a Marine in standard battle dress."

I admit, I snickered at "the Marine's tone suggested that she might not know but chose, diplomatically, to assume that she did." There's an interesting way to handle exposition.

Apparently power armor is multi-role, and can be outfitted for different duties as needed. Normally, the firepower to take on similarly armored opponents is more important than suit endurance, which is 4 hours sustained battle. A recon configuration is good for two days, highly mobile (60 mph/96 kph) with adcanced sensors. No heavy weapons, beyond what a Marine would normally carry.

"The third squad of battle armor will be configured for maximum combat capability and stationed centrally within the enclaves. As information on enemy movements comes in, it will be shifted in response. Given the firepower each Marine will represent, I can probably deploy them by sections or even in two-man teams to deal with anything short of a massed charge, and they'll represent my primary striking force." He paused and frowned slightly. "I'd really prefer, in some respects, to use them as my reserve, instead, given their mobility and combat power, but I'm afraid they'll prove too valuable in the offensive role to make that practical.

They're held back in a central location, and sent to any hot spots. How are they not the reserve?

"In the meantime, however, I intend to break up two of my other three platoons and integrate their personnel with Major Isvarian's NPA troopers. Our people have better armor and generally more powerful weapons than the NPA, and they're trained for full-dress combat situations, while the NPA are primarily policemen. I'd like to hand them out on a squad basis, attached to experienced NPA platoon or company-level commanders to supplement their firepower and tactical flexibility. At the same time, I want to cross-attach at least one NPA officer who knows the terrain well to my heavy-armored squad. If possible, I'd like more than one member of the NPA, in case I have to split the squad, since getting maximum utility out of our people will require their knowing exactly where they're going and exactly what the ground will look like once they get there.

Coordinating with the NPA, in an intelligent and professional manner. Be still, my heart.

"My fourth and final platoon and the heavy weapons section will form our central reserve. The heavy weapons section will be on call for the entire force, and Major Isvarian has assured me of sufficient counter-grav to give us good mobility. I hope to detach the section, or even individual weapon teams, on a purely temporary basis, returning them to the reserve as quickly as possible, but we'll have to play that by ear once something breaks. Fourth Platoon, however, will be maintained intact and concentrated for as long as possible to deal with penetrations. Again, Major Isvarian tells me the NPA can provide us with transport both to reach trouble spots and to return Marines to the reserve as quickly as possible once a problem has been dealt with."

Ah, because the real reserves will remain concentrated. Even the NPA aircars allow great mobility compared to Bronze Age armies, of course, the problem is finding where the attacks will hit in time to respond.

"Under the best possible conditions, Captain, we're going to be spread very thin. On the other hand, our communications should be infinitely superior to the enemy's, as will our sensor capability and individual firepower. Major Isvarian and I have considered the known capabilities of the natives' new rifles, and we believe our people should be able to deal with any single group of enemies relatively quickly, even if outnumbered by a very heavy margin. Our greatest fear is numerous, small, simultaneous incursions which would over-extend our forces and slip at least some attackers past us unengaged. That possibility is especially serious in the relatively built up areas of the Delta. Our sight-lines are going to be a lot shorter than in the open field, and so are our engagement ranges and firing lanes. That's why I want those scouts so badly, and it's also the reason we're deliberately spreading our people out so much—to give us shorter response time to any given threat."

Tech advantages, already sort of obvious. They're more worried about a lot of smaller incursions than a massed charge that can be mowed down WWI style.

Any objectionsor suggestions, Captain?

"Only one," she said, and turned to McKeon. "We've just agreed we can cut down on the inspection flights. Can we restrict them to just the boarding shuttles?"

"I don't see any reason why we couldn't," McKeon said after a moment's consideration. "It's what they were built for, after all."

"In that case, I want all three of those pinnaces reassigned from the Government Compound toFearless," Honor told Isvarian. "With all three of them available, we can land Major Papadapolous's entire force in a single assault drop."

"And retain them all aboard ship without giving away our deployment plans in the meantime," Isvarian said with a nod.

-snip-

"It's going to be messier, Ma'am," he warned, "and with all my people up here, there's going to be a lot more room for us to pick up on an incident late or bobble our coordination and let something through into the enclaves. That's what concerns me most, but we're not going to be able to integrate my squads with NPA formations without time for them to train in coordination with their parent units, either, so we're going to lose a lot of flexibility and responsiveness once we're down, too. Still, I think we can probably work something out." He rubbed his jaw, still staring at the holo, then looked up at Isvarian.

"Can you stay aboard another day or so, Major? We're going to have to rethink the entire ops plan, and I'd really value your input."

"I'll be happy to, Nikos." Isvarian rose to join his study of the holo. "And I'm not sure we'll lose quite as much flexibility as you think. We can still plan my people's original positions to tie into your eventual deployments, and maybe we can use First and Second Platoons as squad level reaction forces rather than trying for unit-by-unit integration."

Oh yeah, there's still an informant(s) in the NPA, and they don't want to tip off the bad guys. So in place of the well-thought plan, where they coordinated with the experts on the locals and terrain, they're just going to recall all the pinnaces so they can space-drop all the Marines on a moment's notice.

Well, at least they can deploy the NPA more-or-less as planned, and it's real good of them to be looking for ways to make this work anyway.

Oh, and a pinnace can apparently hold 47 troops, some in power armor.

[Batman]

Ref Bean's last post, too tired to quote.
I don't see why the missile would turn ballistic the moment it hits the the sidewall, and for .5C and 10 kilometers from the edge of their wedge they have like a 15,000th of a second to react? At an acceleration of a thousand gs, which to my knowledge is yet to be seen in Honorverse outside missiles, they could move what, about two inches?

[Mr Bean]

Ref Bean's last post, too tired to quote.
I don't see why the missile would turn ballistic the moment it hits the the sidewall, and for .5C and 10 kilometers from the edge of their wedge they have like a 15,000th of a second to react? At an acceleration of a thousand gs, which to my knowledge is yet to be seen in Honorverse outside missiles, they could move what, about two inches?

Try about half a kilometer, your assuming the honorverse ships are at a dead stop. They are traveling anywhere from .0001C to .4C and accelerating at anywhere from hundreds of thousands of kilometers per hour. That's the wiggle room if the ship drops from 500 gravities to 400 gravities.

Toss in the fact that a kinetic impact is the most vulnerable to be tossed off it's course by a tiny amount. If your city bus sized kinetic warhead can just fly through sidewalls with ease it best do it without getting tossed so much as one tenth of a degree of course or it will miss totally 100 times out of 100.

[Simon_Jester]

In other news, now I want to see Ahriman and Thanas have

Question:Given the gravity nature of wedges and sidewalls could it be that kinetic impacts are just not useful because of the following

A.Once it's a kinetic weapon it's an unguided weapon since all guidance ends the instant it impacts the wedge
B. Ships are far smaller than the wedges and sidewalls they generate. To the point even the smallest of wedge equipped ships the courier boats have ten kilometers between the leading edge of their wedge and the ship itself.

Shipboard energy weapons have only limited trouble targeting and engaging enemies through the wedge, so it can't be that hard to figure out where inside the wedge a ship is and hit it with a shot fired from outside the sidewall.

C. .5C is still not 1C meaning you have twice as long to dodge it with simple accidental movements inside the wedge.

Congratulations. You have time to dodge. Specifically, you have the time it takes a missile travelling at 0.2c to cover, say... let's pick an easy number and call it 120 kilometers.

I'm sure those two milliseconds will make a lot of difference.

---

Courtesy promotion to a Marine Captain, to avoid confusion.

I believe this happens in real life. Also note that in real life, a Navy captain outranks an Army or Marine major- though the senior naval officer aboard a warship need not have the rank of "captain." And if they don't they still get called "captain."

Fearless' Marine complement 93+ men, with 35 suits of power armor.

Even the normal troopers have "skinsuits," body armor which would probably be damn near immune to 20th century chemical firearms, let alone blackpowder weapons.

Awesome chewing out by Barney Issvarian. Marine power armor boosts physical strength 10x, though I sort of doubt purity of heart is a factor. A pulse rifle can accurately hit a polar bear-equivalent at 2 km.

Rather more skeptical about shooting a single gnat out of a swarm or strangling Nimitz's bigger and meaner cousins.

A pulse rifle probably can hit a bear at 2000 meters, assuming the bullets aren't wrecked passing through that much air that fast. But then again that is already possible in real life. The world record for a long range sniper shot is roughly 2475 meters- the trick in accomplishing it is in figuring out where the hell your bullet is going to end up after flying through the air for three seconds or so, through gravity, air density changes, crosswinds, crosswinds that aren't the same at all points along the line of flight...

Apparently whatever training or sensors the RMMC has available, it's of little use in spotting Medusans in their home turf.

I'm a bit skeptical of this, if nothing else because the RMMC would routinely train to fight people sneaking up through bushes.

...Then again, they might assume that's the responsibility of the army, and that Marines only need to worry about operations planetside under rare conditions, in which case maybe their sensors are more designed to pick out things like power sources, and less about spotting a guy hiding in the bushes.

Like Honor's own family, the first Hauptman had arrived on Manticore...

What a lovely time for an infodump!

History of Manticore. I always found it fascinating how enlightened future folk would choose a monarchy/aristocracy, yet it makes sense if you want to protect your rights as an original settler and sneer that "(I/my family) was here first!"

Yes. Especially when you and yours just suffered through a devastating plague and don't want to be displaced by a bunch of upstarts... and you know quite well that you're recruiting many of those upstarts for technical skills that will give them an advantage in terms of income and raw wealth.

Honor twists the knife once more before letting Hauptman go. She sure knows how to make friends.

And again with the pistol dueling. Valen, can anyone just challenge anyone for any reason? How is this society still working at all>

Well, the real Napoleonic society made it work with the following conditions:

One, most people don't have a death wish, so they would not challenge someone to a duel unless they were actually mad enough to risk dying, possibly of something horrible like a punctured gut, over whatever had pissed them off. At that, there was a class of people who were either less afraid of dying or more confident in their own fighting skills, who challenged people more often... these violent assholes were hard to deal with and caused a lot of trouble.

Two, there were definite customs about the conditions under which another person was actually required to accept a challenge. You couldn't challenge someone who was obviously unable to fight back. You couldn't challenge an officer of the law over something they did in the line of duty. You usually couldn't challenge someone unless you were a "gentleman" with established social rank and status. You might HAVE to accept a formal apology as grounds to call off the duel or be considered a murderer, either legally or informally, which often gave the other party a way out.

Any or all of those restrictions might apply to Manticore. Even so, yeah, the dueling custom is one of the stupidest things Weber injected into the setting to make it mock-Napoleonic. Frankly, it amuses me how it seems to have just about entirely disappeared from the novels after Book Five, for whatever reasons.

David Drake does a better job of this; his characters in the Lieutenant Leary series live in a society where dueling happens, but it's handled much more realistically, as part of a society whose elites really do behave like Georgian aristocrats or Roman patricians.

Context is Ham talking to the Hephaestus CO about "un-expediting" Young's repairs. Andy admits to have done so already, just to watch Young squirm, but decides to grant a request Young made when he first got in, for complete overhaul of the forward impeller nodes, which is apparently a 7 week procedure.

At least, it is when you're a hateful toad and the guy doing your repairs is actively dragging his feet.

They're [the heavily armed Marine units] held back in a central location, and sent to any hot spots. How are they not the reserve?

I suspect because they're being explicitly thrown in to attack the enemy first rather than waiting for a crisis to be committed like reserves normally would.

[eyl]

IIRC, shipboard sensors are considerably more capable than those on missiles, possibility accounting for their inability to directly hit a target with missiles. Note that the laser heads aren't as accurate - they basically issue a spray of beams at the target in the hope that one hits.

Also, just how inertialess are the missiles? If the answer isn't "completely", hitting a moving target will become difficult, especially since the missile can't maneuver too close to the target due to wedge interference.

[eyl]

Thanas, I think you're overestimating jsut how faster Honor would have to be to pull it off. Remember that as far as we know, Burdette had absolutely no combat training, let alone experience; his training and experience are those of a tournament fighter. That would leave him ill equipped to continue functioning (at least unhesitatingly) when receiving a serious injury, unless Grayson fencing uses live blades, which seems unlikely (if anything, the opposite; in a sport match, if you or your opponent are seriously injured the proper response would be to stop the fight). So basically she'd need to be quick enugh to get her first stroke off before Burdette, not the whole sequence; it's plausible that shock would freeze him for the critical seconds for the follow-up. Mind you, I wouldn't want to rely on this, going into a duel, but I'm not sure quite how rationally Honor was thinking by that point.

What pushes it into implausabilty for me is the fact that she was exhausted and injured at the time, but maybe they just have very goo painkillers/stimulants in the future.

What Weber should have done to make it more plausible, IMO, are one or both of the following:
1) Have Burdette manage to injure her before she killed him; this would also be a better callback to the earlier training scene, where her teacher points out that she'd have an advantage in a real duel because her instincts are to go for lethal blows, while those same instincts would be detrimental in fencing as in a match the point goes to the first blow landed, regardless of how "lethal" it would be in a real fight.
2) He could, in a later book, make this the first sign of her emerging telempathic sense; basically, her reflexes were "improved" by sensing when Burdette was ready to strike, even if she didn;t recognize the phenomenon at the time.

[Connor MacLeod]

Question:Given the gravity nature of wedges and sidewalls could it be that kinetic impacts are just not useful because of the following

A.Once it's a kinetic weapon it's an unguided weapon since all guidance ends the instant it impacts the wedge

Sort of like how the ship's own wedge configures to the penaid, destroys itself once it gets inside the wall, and becomes ballistic? Well potentially yes, but Weber's made it clear that his missile submunitions could have RCS. for independent manuvering (laser heads do, even up to the individual lasing rods as I recall) so in theory you could make it guided (although whether the targeting/guidance systems would have enough time at a given velocity to strike the ship inside the wedge is, however, another story.) In any case the obvious countermeasure would be for the warhead to go 'buckshot' inside the wedge - most missiles were at least a good 60 tons as I recall, and even if only 1/8th of that is warhead thats a good 7-8 tons of buckshot. 200 40 kg munitions at around oh, 5-10% of c would still have considerable lethality.

Such weapons still share the same problems contact nukes do in-universe (eg they still have to get closer than the standoff weapons do.)

B. Ships are far smaller than the wedges and sidewalls they generate. To the point even the smallest of wedge equipped ships the courier boats have ten kilometers between the leading edge of their wedge and the ship itself.

This diagram is meant to show how the wedge is relative to the ship, so yeah, the ships are far smaller than what they generate. Also I think in one of his out of universe commentary (either in the book or in one of his online posts) ships (or at least warships) have some sort of 'wiggle' room inside the wedge - that is they can move around a bit inside that volume rather than remaining precisely in the center (because if you know the dimensions of the wedge you could probably predict where the ship lies within the wedge.) I tend to view it as the ship lying inside some large solid 'structure' with the bits attaching it to said structure being elastic (or at least, able to adjust their relative lengths. So the ship could 'move around' a little' and still stay connected... or it could lengthen some of those connections and shorten others to shift its position.

C. .5C is still not 1C meaning you have twice as long to dodge it with simple accidental movements inside the wedge.

That assumes the ship and crew can react instantaneously and such. If it takes the crew one second to realize and then move the ship then you have one second to dodge. Its not impossible, but it isn't a guarateed thing. More like 'it helps generate further uncertainty.'

It also must be noted that there are issues with the mobility issues of the ships themselves - EG how they turn, and how fast they turn. Weber has commented that turning on impeller wedge ships can be pretty shitty (90 seconds IIRC for a 90 degree turn for Destroyers, up to some 10 min or more for Dreadnoughts IIRC correctly) and that actually acts against them. They also have to flip over to slow down, so there is the strong idea that impellers only go one way (sort of the 'space sail' thing, I guess.) If they have to do alot of turning or rotation by RCS, the normal outputs probably aren't that fast, as the highest Reaction drive accel they've ever done was 150 gees for a battlecruiser and that carried some hefty preparations and drawbacks (like draining the fuel tanks in under an hour.)

I suspect the big reason why kinetic impactors aren't used is that due to the nature of warfare (The speed of the missiles, the speed of the ships in combat, the nature of the wedge, EW, etc.) they simply cannot guarantee 'skin on skin' contact with ANYTHING. Even their 'contact' nukes typically seem to rely on getting in close before detonating (EG in The Honor of the Queen the Grayson contact nukes got as close as 40-50 metres before detonating, but still nowhere near skin on skin) Even with laser heads, they have to go for a shotgun effect because even a laser head cannot accurately pinpoint where the ship is in the target (I suspect nuclear shaped charges would have similar problems inside the wedge, which is why they aren't used)

One has to remember that the big dynamic for honorverse warfare is that 'huge amounts of matter and energy are expended in the faint hope that some of it will actually strike the target.' Without all the magic forcefields, EW systems, and active defenses in the way, ships are INCREDIBLY fragile. Hits that do manage to get through, even if they are degraded/distorted by the sidewalls - still can inflict horrific damage and often do. And it only takes a handful of laser head hits to do damage. Heck a single contact nuke against an un-wedged target is actually a DEVASTATING weapon in many of the books (esp the first couple) if you can get it close enough - moreso than the laser heads IIRc.

Anyhow, the closest to 'contact' they get is hitting a wedge, but that's also a massively huger target and the fact that anything in contact with a wedge (matter or a smaller wedge) kinda vaporizes.

Against anything that isn't a wedge, though, they have those impeller countermissile, which turn the wedge into its own weapon (how the wedge does damage again is up for debate. most fans I've noted tend to handwave it away as 'gravity damage somehow mumblejumble', whereas I think the wedge acts as some sort of force field 'structure' that imparts some of the velocity/momentum of the projectile - making it a bigger kinetic munition than it actually is, I suppose. ) And even against a target with a wedge, an impact with enough force/momentum probably could damage the ship without bypassing the wedge - its quite clear from the novels that the effects of impacts are transmitted ot ship and crew (THoTQ again and the missiles striking Thunder of God.)

I think the value of kinetic strikes gets over stated because of the vs debates aspect - many honorverse fans try to use Impeller wedge missiles as an 'equalizer' against a far more powerful universe, even though they have never a.) actually achieved skin on skin contact with their own universe ships and b.) much of their targeting and accuracy is against Honorverse ships, which has a highly specialized set of circumstances at play (the slow moving of the ships, the nature of the impeller wedge and the huge ass gravitic signature it creates, and the fact that there are universes that can actually accelerate faster.) And if they have a very precise sort of FTL (ST Warp drive, nBSG jump drives, etc.) they can probably dodge it even without even having superior accel.

[Thanas]

If you are getting a body check on somebody without grabbing his weapon then that guy failed hard.

?

Get advantage of the blade, push their tip out of line and pass forward before they cavazione. It's tricky to pull off, but I wouldn't say anyone who falls for it "failed hard."

Why didn't they punch you in the throat when you exposed your entire body moving forward?

[eyl]

Against anything that isn't a wedge, though, they have those impeller countermissile, which turn the wedge into its own weapon (how the wedge does damage again is up for debate. most fans I've noted tend to handwave it away as 'gravity damage somehow mumblejumble', whereas I think the wedge acts as some sort of force field 'structure' that imparts some of the velocity/momentum of the projectile - making it a bigger kinetic munition than it actually is, I suppose. ) And even against a target with a wedge, an impact with enough force/momentum probably could damage the ship without bypassing the wedge - its quite clear from the novels that the effects of impacts are transmitted ot ship and crew (THoTQ again and the missiles striking Thunder of God.)

While wedges can be used as a weapon to directly damage targets (e.g. the SAM in book five) in the particular case of countermissiles the principle used is wedge interference, IIRC; when the CM's wedge (which is overpowered relative to a "normal" missile) gets close enough to a missile, the interference between the wedges causes both missiles' drives to blow up, destroying the missiles themselves in the process.