Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington

[Batman]

The real advantage of SD(P)s is their ability to "roll pods" and stack up massive salvoes consisting of, say, 20-30 pods per capital ship in a formation, and do so repeatedly. With each salvo having the potential to overwhelm an entire task force's point defense. Normal ships with internal launchers don't seem to be able to do that, although it's not clear to me why they can't.

We've seen them stacking salvoes with internal launchers as early as 'Honor Among Enemies' if not sooner so it doesn't seem to be a case of they can't, and you answer your own question in that very post-at the time, they simply don't have the control links to make it worthwhile.
Also, don't forget that stacking up those kinds of salvoes takes time even for a podlayer, leave alone a ship using internal tubes. Time you can easily afford if you outrange the enemy six ways from sunday thanks to MDMs, or even if the other side has them too, because the long flight times still means plenty of time to build up the salvo. When you and the enemy not only have roughly the same missile range, but that range is short enough that by the time you've built a podnaught-style salvo with internal launchers your enemy's missiles are in attack range so yours are about to become scrap metal, you probably try to get yours underway ASAP and salvo density becomes a secondary consideration.

[Jedipilot24]

The real advantage of SD(P)s is their ability to "roll pods" and stack up massive salvoes consisting of, say, 20-30 pods per capital ship in a formation, and do so repeatedly. With each salvo having the potential to overwhelm an entire task force's point defense. Normal ships with internal launchers don't seem to be able to do that, although it's not clear to me why they can't.

We've seen them stacking salvoes with internal launchers as early as 'Honor Among Enemies' if not sooner so it doesn't seem to be a case of they can't, and you answer your own question in that very post-at the time, they simply don't have the control links to make it worthwhile.
Also, don't forget that stacking up those kinds of salvoes takes time even for a podlayer, leave alone a ship using internal tubes. Time you can easily afford if you outrange the enemy six ways from sunday thanks to MDMs, or even if the other side has them too, because the long flight times still means plenty of time to build up the salvo. When you and the enemy not only have roughly the same missile range, but that range is short enough that by the time you've built a podnaught-style salvo with internal launchers your enemy's missiles are in attack range so yours are about to become scrap metal, you probably try to get yours underway ASAP and salvo density becomes a secondary consideration.

If you mean the double broadside, then yeah; we've seen that as early as 'The Honor of the Queen' but only destroyers and light cruisers are fast enough at the helm to pull it off.

[Batman]

I fail to see what the ship's roll rate has to do with it given it's not a question of 'how fast can we get the missiles in space' but of 'how long do we tell it to wait before firing up its drive' and I don't see why that delay can't be pretty much be as long as you want to. And yes, 'Honor Among Enemies' explicitly states the single salvo double broadsides are due to delayed drive activation.

[Mr Bean]

I fail to see what the ship's roll rate has to do with it given it's not a question of 'how fast can we get the missiles in space' but of 'how long do we tell it to wait before firing up its drive' and I don't see why that delay can't be pretty much be as long as you want to. And yes, 'Honor Among Enemies' explicitly states the single salvo double broadsides are due to delayed drive activation.

Because ships are moving and while you can tractor a few missiles on a heavy cruiser you can't exactly stack thirty missiles in your wedge and wait for the chance to shoot. Also pods are designed to be as easy to move around as possible so you have a choice of directions other than "the same direction you were going before you started stacking pods or missiles". Even Podnaughts seem to be locked into very few course changes once they deploy pods. Many times reference is made that a force trailing pods is obvious since all of it's course changes and accelerations are slow and careful. Mostly because they are hauling around muti megaton weapons around with gravity tractors which seem to be pretty low performance.

[Batman]

Um-that's a limitation of how many tractor beams they have to keep the already launched missiles chugging along. It has absolutely nothing to do with the roll rate affecting how deep they can stack salvoes.

[Simon_Jester]

I did not know that keyhole had it's own point defense lasers. Wonder if that's it's own development or copying the Peep tactics of using LAC's offensively and on the defense. Launching them early to add their own wedges and counter missiles to shield the bigger ships only to launch forward as the fleets cross.

I'm pretty sure it's a native Manticoran idea. For one, because Keyhole was showing up only very shortly after the first demonstration of Havenite LAC doctrine. Second, because there's a very logical reason to put point defense on the Keyholes; they're extremely expensive drones, and their sheer mass and value makes it worthwhile to mount strong defenses on them to keep them from getting blown up the first time an enemy missile decides to pull a home-on-jamming.

We've seen them stacking salvoes with internal launchers as early as 'Honor Among Enemies' if not sooner...

Huh? I mean, I know ships, especially the lighter ones, can launch double broadsides, rolling on the long axis and launching two salvoes timed to arrive at the target at the same time. But any 'stacking' more extensive than that, I have no memory of.

[This also refutes one of Irbis's claims; it's not that ships can't fire missiles from both sides, it's that they can only engage so many targets and control so many missiles]

Also, don't forget that stacking up those kinds of salvoes takes time even for a podlayer, leave alone a ship using internal tubes. Time you can easily afford if you outrange the enemy six ways from sunday thanks to MDMs, or even if the other side has them too, because the long flight times still means plenty of time to build up the salvo.

Agreed. But the point is, the SD(P)'s increased volume of fire doesn't really matter very much in and of itself; what matters is the ability to stack salvoes effectively. Which, I quite agree, relies on having the MDM.

Again, that's part of the point in my reply to Irbis: the SD(P) and MDM don't represent revolutionary advantages taken separately. It's only when they're taken together, when the SD(P) is further enhanced with extra piles upon piles of telemetry links, and when the whole package is combined with Ghost Rider's fire control, that they provide a decisive tactical advantage.

Looking at each component of the overall weapon system separately, it's easy to see where there is grounds for skepticism.

I fail to see what the ship's roll rate has to do with it given it's not a question of 'how fast can we get the missiles in space' but of 'how long do we tell it to wait before firing up its drive' and I don't see why that delay can't be pretty much be as long as you want to. And yes, 'Honor Among Enemies' explicitly states the single salvo double broadsides are due to delayed drive activation.

I think there's supposed to be some kind of hardware limitation on that, because the missiles' onboard capacitor rings are charged from the launching ship, and are NOT designed to remain charged indefinitely. Which is why we don't see ships using their missiles as mines, plopping them down and telling them to fire up their drives at some time minutes or hours in the future.

Missile pods can do that because they store enough onboard power to let them 'charge up' and fire their missiles at leisure.

If the amount of time a missile can 'wait' before firing up its main drive is measured in seconds, it could easily explain why only destroyers and cruisers are capable of firing double broadsides: they're the only ships that can spin around on their long axis fast enough to bring their other broadside to bear in time to launch. For a ship that takes 60 seconds to roll about its long axis and has a 20 second cycle time on its broadside launchers, rolling to fire double broadsides would be a losing proposition... unless you're trying to stack a salvo AND you have 30-second or more 'hang time' on your missiles.

[Batman]

A double broadside is technically stacking. Not much of it admittedly but it shows they can do it and, barring other limitations (of which there are plenty as has been shown in this very thread) there's nothing to stop them from piling up salvoes until their magazines are empty.
And I'm not sure why a capacitor would run dry just because of a time limit. As long as the missile is just sitting there waiting for all its friends to join it in the missile salvo of doom, what exactly is it expending charge on?
Sorry, but 'several minutes of 47,000g's worth of acceleration? Sure, no biggie' but just hanging in place for the few minutes it takes up to build a serious missile salvo is a no can do?

[Mr Bean]

Sorry, but 'several minutes of 47,000g's worth of acceleration? Sure, no biggie' but just hanging in place for the few minutes it takes up to build a serious missile salvo is a no can do?

Fusion engines don't start from nothing, the capacitor ring is used to kick in the engine which is single use until MDM's. But MDM's are all single use it's just stacked engines.

Also electronics, capacitors at least our capacitors can't hold a large charge for any length of time. It's not batteries that ignite the engines but capacitors and those tend to leak voltages very fast. Maybe future science that's improved but considering the amount of voltages needed to kick start a theoretical real fusion reactor your talking about millions possibly billions or trillions of volts.

[Jedipilot24]

A double broadside is technically stacking. Not much of it admittedly but it shows they can do it and, barring other limitations (of which there are plenty as has been shown in this very thread) there's nothing to stop them from piling up salvoes until their magazines are empty.
And I'm not sure why a capacitor would run dry just because of a time limit. As long as the missile is just sitting there waiting for all its friends to join it in the missile salvo of doom, what exactly is it expending charge on?
Sorry, but 'several minutes of 47,000g's worth of acceleration? Sure, no biggie' but just hanging in place for the few minutes it takes up to build a serious missile salvo is a no can do?

I'm looking at the two incidents of double broadsides, one from 'The Honor of the Queen' and the other from 'Honor Among Enemies'. In both cases the destroyer has a launcher cycle time in the area of 15-17 seconds. It doesn't say if there's a specific limit on how long a missile can be set for delayed activation but let's look at the different scenarios:
In 'The Honor of the Queen' the destroyer is stationary and part of an ambush of a moving fleet; this gives the ambushers a very narrow window of engagement, which it means that it only has time for one double broadside and only the destroyer is fast enough on the helm to do it within the window.
In 'Honor Among Enemies', the destroyer is carrying out an unplanned (but very realistic) convoy drill and does at least one double broadside and perhaps more than one. Again no mention of how long a missile can be inactive.
I get the feeling that this is a tactic that only a lighter ship can pull off and it sounds like it would require very good coordination between the helmsman and the tactical officer.
Although it might be theoretically possible to 'pile up' more than one unfired salvo, I don't see why you would do so in an actual fight because the more time you spend stacking unfired salvos, the more time the enemy has to shoot at you unopposed and possibly get in a lucky hit. Better to just hit them with double broadsides and give them something to worry about than to allow them a free shot. There's also the issue of fire-control limitations.

[Simon_Jester]

A double broadside is technically stacking. Not much of it admittedly but it shows they can do it and, barring other limitations (of which there are plenty as has been shown in this very thread) there's nothing to stop them from piling up salvoes until their magazines are empty.
And I'm not sure why a capacitor would run dry just because of a time limit. As long as the missile is just sitting there waiting for all its friends to join it in the missile salvo of doom, what exactly is it expending charge on?
Sorry, but 'several minutes of 47,000g's worth of acceleration? Sure, no biggie' but just hanging in place for the few minutes it takes up to build a serious missile salvo is a no can do?

It might be that the capacitors, once charged, are inherently unstable, and if they don't start dumping energy out via the drive almost immediately, there's a risk that they'll fail or short out explosively. I mean, lithium-ion batteries are volatile enough; how much worse would these be? Not only would that cause the missile to fail, it would cause it to fail close to other missiles from the same salvo that might be damaged.

[Terralthra]

If it takes you longer than your broadside tubes' cycle time to heel over and bring your other broadside to bear, then you're actually losing overall throw weight compared to just firing broadsides. That's why only small ships roll to bring both to bear, with the first broadside on a slight delayed activation. If a ship's tau/2 time > 15 seconds, fuck it, why roll?

As for why they don't fire a broadside, have them delay their drives by 15-17 seconds, then launch another, there's a trade-off between having larger salvoes with more defensive engagement time for each and smaller salvoes with less engagement time. Missile defense in the Honorverse is all about saturation, which means both throw weight and cycle time. If you can't get a big enough throw weight in a single salvo, then it's better (generally) to fire multiple broadsides of the same throw weight in a shorter amount amount of time than it is to have a longer gap between each double throw. Note that even if they have the time before they're fired on to do so, they flush all pods as part of one salvo, instead of, assuming they have three salvoes possible before being reached by enemy fire, splitting the pods into three waves that fire with each broadside.

They have a couple paragraphs in one of the books talking about throw weight, and why various tactics to improve it don't end up catching on. The reason they don't fire a broadside, reload, and fire again with the same launchers, then have them all light off drives together, (and why they don't have curved tubes on the top/bottom keels) is that the first broadside has a reasonable kick from the launchers that is a non-insignificant portion of terminal velocity. In order to have the two broadsides land together as one broadside, those missiles need to accelerate more slowly so the second one can catch up (or it essentially becomes two slightly staggered broadsides; not as saturating). But, once the second set does catch up, they're going faster than the first set, so now the second set needs to slow down to catch up, with the overall result that the point defense engagement window for the double broadside is much bigger than with two individual broadsides. Once the range is "knife fight", most battles have the ships go to rapid unsynchronized fire on everything; the range is too close for effective, coherent point defense, so getting the most missiles into space as quickly as possible is paramount, regardless of the salvo size.

Not sure which book that infodump is in. It might've been in Short Victorious War, because I think it also talks about why missile pods weren't considered effective for so long: without the larger (and more power-intensive) tubes of shipboard launchers, the pod-launched missiles didn't have the initial velocity of the ship-launched ones, so the same "one wave has to slow down for the other to catch up, then the other wave has to slow down so it doesn't completely overhaul the first" problem occurred. Hemphill had a research project to miniaturize the shipboard launchers so that LACs could mount bigger missiles. It never succeeded as she hoped, but it did allow missile pods to carry full-size launchers equivalent to shipboard ones.
Spoiler

Notably, the idea that only advanced ships (meaning ships which are "new" as of the engagements with the Solarian League) can fire both broadsides simultaneously is proven incorrect by First Cerberus. In that battle, the ESN flotilla splits the gap between the combat ships and the troop-carriers and fires one broadside of energy and missiles towards the combat ships, while the "rear"-facing broadside blows the hell out of the troopships and their escort. Both broadsides fired simultaneously.

[Simon_Jester]

The limit on firing with both sides engaged has more to do with fire control. The sensor and comm arrays that a ship uses to go "here is the enemy, now tell the missiles where to go" are physically bolted to the ship. Therefore, to get a really good sensor plot and accurately guide a lot of missiles to the target, the ship needs to point its broadside in the general direction of the enemy.

More sophisticated ships like SD(P)s and the Saganami-C class make more use of tethered sensor platforms, and have more command and control capability for their missiles, so they have more freedom in which direction they point a missile barrage and still expect it to hit the target.

[Simon_Jester]

Ahem.

I've decided that since I was goofy enough to buy House of Steel, the companion volume I quoted to give the lowdown on the SD(P), I'm going to do this style of analysis on the novella of the same title which is parked in the front of that novel. It documents the professional life of King Roger of Manticore, Elizabeth III's father, the man who directed the naval buildup which made the RMN strong enough to square off against Haven in the mainline Honor Harrington novels.

It also gives some insight into the evolution of naval technology leading up to the series, and to the background characters of people like Sonja Hemphill. I will probably be snippeting and ellipsis-ing my quotes, though, because Weber's prose style makes my head hurt sometimes, as does his habit of having his protagonists waste time dwelling on how stupid and obnoxious his antagonists are.

[Simon_Jester]

Let's start with the following letters written to a journal of proceedings of the Royal Manticoran Navy, from "December 1844 Post Diaspora," where On Basilisk Station begins in 1900 PD. Honor, for the record, was born in 1859 PD. The first is written by Crown Prince Roger, a junior naval officer at the time (sort of like Prince Harry joining the army in today's Britain). The second, by Janacek, who's been introduced in On Basilisk Station, as I recall.

This can be seen as laying out what the situation for the RMN was like before Haven went a-conquering, and how they had to transition from the relatively peaceful commerce-protection role they'd occupied into a force designed for massive battlefleet clashes like the ones we see in the main novels.

Any comments I wish to make, I will insert between paragraphs as footnotes. Some of the footnotes are rather lengthy, because I'm a windy bastard. The letters follow.

---

Lieutenant R. Winton

Commander Janofsky ("Commerce Protection and Societal Disintegration," Proceedings, No. 3673) is to be commended for the clarity with which he makes his points. The continuing slide into even more pronounced and widespread civil disorder, privateering, terrorism, and outright piracy in the territory of the Silesian Confederacy must give any navy pause. Commander Janofsky rightly points out the increasing cost, not simply in financial terms but also in manpower and platform availability, inherent in maintaining existing levels of security for Manticoran merchant traffic in and through the Confederacy. Indeed, his arguments assume even more cogency when one considers the still greater costs associated with any expansion of our secured trading zones, patrol regions, and roving piracy suppression missions.

Where Commander Janofsky's analysis may break down, however, is in its intense focus on commerce protection as the Navy's primary mission. I would suggest that it would be appropriate for Her Majesty's Navy to consider the potential requirements of additional missions. Not to put too fine a point on it, we in the Navy have narrowed our professional focus to a potentially dangerous degree, concentrating on the mission in hand rather than stretching our imaginations to consider other challenges and threats.

The function of the Royal Manticoran Navy, as currently defined (see "Naval Security and the Star Kingdom's Fundamental Interests," Office of the First Space Lord, 01-15-249 AL) is to "(1) defend and secure the Manticore Binary system, its planets, its population, and its industrial base; (2) defend and secure the central terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction and the industrial and economic base associated with it; (3) defend, protect, and expand Manticoran commerce and the Manticoran merchant marine; and (4) in conjunction with (3) enforce the Cherwell Convention for the suppression of the interstellar genetic slave trade." It should be noted that, in fact, this formulation establishes that commerce protection comes only third in the hierarchy of the Navy's missions. In addition, it is, I think, significant that in Commander Janofsky's article the first two of these four objectives are taken as givens. That is, Commander Janofsky's emphasis is on how to provide for the third and (by extension) fourth of them, which appears to assume that the first three* are already provided for.

*[sounds like a typo to me, I think Weber meant 'two.' Carrying on- SJ]

That assumption may be in error.

At this time, Her Majesty's Navy's wall of battle consists of eleven Thorsten-class battleships (the youngest 250 years old) and eleven Ad Astra-class dreadnoughts (the youngest of which is a century old, and three of which are presently mothballed while awaiting long overdue repair and refit). The Thorstens, while find ships in their day, are barely half the size of younger, more modern battleships,* with far lighter armaments and much weaker defenses than their more recent counterparts, and as the Ad Astras' delayed and badly needed refits indicate, even they are far from the equal of more modern units. We are currently in the process of building the first three Royal Winton-class dreadnoughts, which will be superior vessels for their tonnage when completed, and a single superdreadnought: Samothrace. This ship will also be a modern, first-rate unit upon completion, but it is worth noting that the build number for the Samothraces was originally to have been a mere three ships... and- in the event- was actually reduced to only the name ship of the class with an "intent" to request additional units in later Naval Estimates.

*I have a lot to say about this, see note [1] at the bottom of the post. -SJ

While it is true that the Royal Wintons and the Samothrace will provide a significant boost in the defensive capacity of the Fleet against threats to the home system and, in conjunction with the junction fortresses, to the security of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction, they can scarcely be classed as a true wall of battle when procured in such minute numbers. Moreover, it would appear that even less thought has been given to the development of proper doctrine for their employment than to developing a procurement policy which would maximize platform numbers and capability. Nor would it appear that any thought has been devoted at this time to their potential usefulness for power projection. One cannot avoid the conclusion that the mere existence of this relative handful of new and powerful ships is regarded as adequately providing for "the Star Kingdom's fundamental territorial security" and the protection of its subjects. The question is whether or not that faith is merited.

At this time, the Navy has clearly adopted the traditional tactical, operational, and strategic paradigm which has been developed over the past several centuries by the Solarian League Navy. It is scarcely surprising that the largest, most powerful, and most successful naval force in galactic history should be seen as an appropriate model from which lessons and best-practices approaches might be drawn. It might, however, behoove the Star Kingdom of Manticore to bear in mind that, as the paucity of our wall of battle demonstrates, we are not the Solarian League. Despite the unquestionable prosperity and generally very high standard of living which the Star Kingdom has attained due to the many favorable factors stemming from its possession of the Junction, the Star Kingdom remains a single-system polity. As such, it must lack the population base, the sheer economic and industrial breadth, and- above all- astrographic depth of the Solarian League. The unpalatable truth is that we have only a single star system to lose in any confrontation with any potential adversary.

The Star Kingdom overlooks that vulnerability at its peril. While three hundred T-years have passed since Axelrod of Old Terra financed the attempt to seize the Manticore Binary System before the Junction had been plotted, surveyed, and mapped, it is a lesson we would do well to remember. The very source of our wealth and industrial and economic power must make the Star Kingdom an attractive target to any aggressive adversary who believes he possesses sufficient combat power to take it. If that conclusion is granted, then the Navy's primary mission- "to preserve the Star Kingdom's fundamental territorial security-" requires the creation and maintenance of a genuine battle fleet capable of deterring any such ambition. Moreover, that battle fleet cannot, as is the case for the Solarian League Navy, depend upon sheer, irresistible numbers and the strategic depth available to the League. It must be demonstrably and visibly capable of defeating any attack not simply short of the Manticore Binary System's hyper limit, but short of the Junction itself. And that leads inevitably to a requirement on the part of that battle force of the capacity to project power against- to take the war to- that hypothetical aggressor.

In light of that requirement, I would submit that Commander Janofsky's eloquent appeal for additional light units, the doubling of our cruiser force, the establishment of formal naval stations and forward enclaves within Silesian territory, and additional tactical, training, and financial support for the Confederacy Navy, while fully logical from the traditional commerce-protection perspective, should be reconsidered. The Royal Manticoran Navy's record in commerce protection is second to none. It is a mission we fully understand, one which we have the training, the doctrine, and- for the most part- the means to carry out. Indeed, what we do, we do very well.

What we have not done, and what we must do, is to acquire the capability to discharge the rest of our mission and our obligation. We must recognize that we cannot, as a single star nation of extraordinary wealth, afford to ignore the temptation we must present to less prosperous but militarily powerful star nations. As the ancient pre-space philosopher Machiavelli pointed out, gold will not always get you good soldiers, but good soldiers can always get you gold. The Star Kingdom, and the Junction, are that gold, and it will require good soldiers- or, in our case, a qualitatively superior navy- to protect it. We cannot continue to embrace a vague, poorly articulated strategic and tactical doctrine based on an uncritical acceptance of the Solarian model as the best and highest available to us. We must accept instead that we will not be able to match the numbers of platforms an adversary may bring against us, and we must capitalize upon the most precious tactical resource we have: the tradition of independent judgment and responsibility taking we have inculcated into our officer corps ever since the days of Edward Saganami and Ellen D'Orville. We must value that initiative properly, cultivate it, and integrate it into our operational and tactical doctrine at every level. And we must provide that initiative with the tools it requires- the innovative approach to weaponry and war-fighting technologies- to make it fully effective.

Initiative thrives upon exploitable asymmetrical relationships, upon the ability to oppose qualitative superiority to quantitative predominance. It is not sufficient for us to accept the gradual, stable evolution of war-fighting technologies which has typified naval doctrine and capabilities for the past several centuries as inevitable. It is time that we began significantly investing in an aggressive search for new capabilities, innovative applications, to provide an officer corps trained to think for itself with levers it can use to offset its almost inevitable numerical inferiority when confronted by a powerful aggressor. Our wall of battle's ship strength must be increased, but it will never be possible for the Star Kingdom to produce, man, and maintain naval forces on the scale of a star nation such as the Solarian League or even the People's Republic of Haven. Since we cannot have the most numerous navy in space, we must instead strive to have the most efficient one.

Commander Janofsky's call to bolster our forward deployed presence in Silesia is clear, logical, and concise. Despite that, however, one cannot avoid the conclusion that from the perspective of our primary mission, it is time and past time for the Navy to look to its wall of battle and the acquisition of the true war-fighting capability absolutely essential for any single-star system nation to adequately defend itself against a much larger multi-star system nation.

(ED: Lieutenant Winton is currently assigned to HMS Wolverine, serving as her executive officer.)

From "On the Event Horizon: Letters from the Deck Plates," Proceedings of the Royal Manticoran Navy Institute, Issue number 3675, 12/10/249 AL.

---

Captain E. Janacek

Lieutenant Winton's comments on Commander Janofsky's article (see "On the Event Horizon," Proceedings, No. 3675) are as perspicacious and insightful as one might readily anticipate from a member of his family and an officer whose career to date has demonstrated not only intelligence and ability but diligence and dedication. Nonetheless, there are certain pragmatic realities to which he has attached insufficient weight.

While it is true that the Navy's current mission formulation rightly emphasizes the security of the home system, it is also true that the actual work of the Navy requires a concentration upon the mission in hand, and the mission in hand is, in fact, commerce protection, as commander Janofsky so ably pointed out. At this time, there is no realistic threat to the security of the Manticore Binary System itself or to the Manticore Wormhole Junction. The completion of the Royal Winton class will provide the Navy with a powerful, flexible deterrent force capable of holding its own against any projected threat. Lieutenant Winton is quite correct to underscore the incalculable advantage of our officer corps' flexibility, initiative, and independence of thought. That advantage, couple with the enormous increase in combat power represented by the Royal Wintons and HMS Samothrace* and backed up by our older but still perfectly serviceable dreadnoughts, is fully adequate to the mission of protecting our home space and our fellow subjects from any realistic threat. And while Lieutenant Winton is also correct to emphasize that initiative and operational innovation are most effective when provided with the tools they require to concentrate combat power as flexibly as possible, the diversion of funds needed for critical expansion of our commerce protection capabilities into problematic quests for some sort of technological "equalizer" must be considered a questionable policy. The Royal Navy is well informed upon the capabilities of other navies, including that of the Solarian League itself. At this time, it would be both rash and, in this writer's opinion, quixotic to believe that what Lieutenant Winton correctly points out is a single-system polity could somehow single-handedly devise or discover a technological breakthrough (one hesitates to call it a panacea) which has hitherto evaded all of the galaxy's other naval powers.

*To be fair, the addition of these four ships to the Manticoran wall of battle increased their total tonnage by about 25% in what was probably less than ten years, which sounds pretty impressive when all of your existing ships are between 100 and 300 years old.

The wall of battle we now possess- or will possess, when all units of the Royal Winton class are completed- will be fully adequate to our immediate security needs. Those security needs may, indeed, change in the future, as Lieutenant Winton suggests, and at that time a reexamination of our posture and capabilities may well be in order. Surely, however, considering that no navy in history has ever possessed an unlimited budget and that the fiscal realities (which must include a realistic appreciation of Parliament's willingness to spend money) are unlikely to change in that regard in the case of Her Majesty's Navy, it makes little or no sense to spend scarce dollars on capital ships we do not presently need. Nor can we afford to expend dollars urgently required for pressing presence mission requirements in Silesia on problematical, ill-defined, unpredictable, and dubious efforts to somehow short-circuit or telescope the inevitable and steady evolution of war-fighting technologies which has been clearly established over the last three T-centuries.

With all due respect to Lieutenant Winton's persuasively and eloquently argued position, it is neither reasonable nor appropriate for a single star system of ultimately limited resources to divert its focus from the provision of the best-tailored and most operationally potent force it can practically provide in order to pursue hypothetical technological "equalizers" to be employed against a theoretical adversary fleet which does not even currently exist.

(ED: Captain Janacek is currently attached to the Admiralty, serving as Second Space Lord Havinghurst's deputy chief of staff for Intelligence.)

From "On the Event Horizon: Letters from the Deck Plates," Proceedings of the Royal Manticoran Navy Institute, Issue number 3676, 13/10/294 AL.

More on this in Footnote 2. -SJ

---

[1] The content in Roger Winton's letter suggests a mass of just about two million tons for the Thorsten-class. Little or no more, and probably not much less. In other words, not remotely big enough to be a credible capital ship by 1850 PD standards, let alone those of 1900-1920 PD. These ships were probably scrapped before the events of On Basilisk Station. I will cover the Ad Astras and HMS Samothrace later.

This paragraph contradicts something later in the same book, which states that the RMN had three "Manticore-class" superdreadnoughts in service, roughly contemporary with the Ad Astras but about 50% larger (although still weaker than Samothrace)

Doing the math, this means that the RMN wall of battle as of ~1850 PD was... eleven battleships, eleven dreadnoughts, and four superdreadnoughts, totallying about 110 million tons. Speaking in rough terms, a fifth of that tonnage was the totally obsolete paleobattleships, two fifths was the Ad Astra-class dreadnoughts, one fifth was the existing Manticore-class superdreadnoughts that Winton's letter somehow doesn't mention even though the tech bible part of the book does, and the last fifth was the four new ships being built as of 1844 PD.

If no further construction had taken place, by 1900 PD, the People's Republic would probably have been able to roll right over the RMN with three superdreadnought squadrons plus escorts... and they had a lot more than three such squadrons.

[2] What this illustrates is that the existing RMN was very heavily involved in escorting its own merchantmen, beating up pirates (which were blatantly on the rise as the Silesian Confederacy became a 'failed state,' and which were also scattered throughout the fringe regions of human space traversed by Manticoran ships taking advantage of their far-flung network of wormhole contacts. The naval 'establishment' of ~1850 PD viewed this as the main mission of the RMN, being as how it made up the great majority of what they'd been doing for the past 300 years or so.

King Roger was very radical in his early advocacy for building up the Manticoran battlefleet, and had to overcome considerable opposition at first.

[Simon_Jester]

OK, gonna do a chunk of the story. The actual story starts on Page 13 of House of Steel...

...Promotion was glacially slow, and likely to get more so as the prolong therapies began extending officers' careers. There was more cronyism than Wyeth liked to think about as well, though it was nowhere near as much a problem in the Royal Manticoran Navy as in some navies...

Thirteen T-Years out of the Island, and he's still only a lieutenant, Wyeth thought. Of course, I was four T-years older than he is now before I made lieutenant, but not all officers are created equal, whatever the Island likes to pretend. I can think of at least a dozen of his classmates who're senior to him by now, and not one of them is as flat out good at his job as Roger is.

And that, he reflected, was particularly ironic given the fact that cronyism, patronage, and raw nepotism accounted for most of those accelerated promotions... and that it was only the lieutenant's own fierce refusal to play those games which prevented him from being senior to all of them.

Wyeth, commander of the destroyer HMS Wolverine, thinking about Crown Prince Roger's career. Obviously, promotion is slow in the peacetime mid-1800s RMN. No surprise there; the fleet is not expanding at a significant rate, and as noted, prolong is only JUST starting to show up and create a huge blob of unaging officers. Roger is 35 years old at this point (using the Honorverse wiki for his birthdate).

Note that taking roughly 10-15 years without passing the rank of lieutenant is not all that unusual by the standards of, say, the Napoleonic-era Royal Navy. In that era, patronage was a big issue, there were only a limited number of ships to award to ranking officers, and there were challenging professional exams you had to pass to get promotions. Officers began as midshipmen at an early age (early teens)... but could easily have to wait into their 20s or even 30s before being promoted beyond lieutenant. A lot of officers never made it at all.

Also note, Roger (later King Roger III) stubbornly refuses to pull strings to get promoted to higher ranks. A man of unusual character; the Manticoran royal family has been successful in large part because it deliberately cultivates such character in its membership.

...Hard enough to blame them, some ways. Promotion's slow enough and plum command slots are thin enough on the ground to make just about anyone figure he'd better use whatever edge he can if he wants to get command of a major combatant before he's too old and senile to remember what to do with it when he's got it!

Wyeth thinking about then-Captain Edward Janacek's use of creative string-pulling to further his career. This kind of favoritism and patronage, known to the Napoleonic British as "interest," is a really common feature of this sort of system. It takes either wartime or a very, very hardcore commitment to meritocracy to beat it. Fortunately for real life, pretty much all Western countries are that committed to meritocracy.

It was an ignoble thought, and Wyeth knew it. Worse, he'd found himself thinking it more often as more and more of the officer corps became prolong recipients. The therapies had reached the Star Kingdom barely fifteen T-years earlier, and Wyeth had been too old to receive them. In fact, Roger himself had been close to the upper age limit when the treatments became available. But Pablo Wyeth was already fifty-two T-years old; the chance that he would make flag rank before his age-mandated retirement was virtually nil, whereas an arrogant prick like Janacek- just young enough to sneak in under the wire for prolong- would probably make it within the next five or six T-years... and then have something like a century in which to enjoy it.

Wyeth thinking about the promotion problem. Do I recall Ahriman saying that the social effects of prolong were inadequately explored in the series?

"We've been thinking in one direction for so long that two-thirds of our senior officers are so invested in it they don't even realize they're not looking at what's really happening."...

"Oh?"...

"It doesn't take a genius to realize how juicy a target the Junction is," Winton said. "Hell, Sir! All it really takes is a working memory! There was a reason I mentioned Axelrod of Old Terra in my letter."

Conversation between Wyeth and Winton. Winton does most of the talking. Wyeth goes on to muse that Winton is trying to see a 'bigger picture' than most of the Admiralty brass, which is focused on the chaos in Silesia and the Andermani Empire's attempts to grab a bigger share of power and commerce within Silesia. Winton, on the other hand, is starting to worry about the beginnings of a naval buildup that is happening 300 light-years away, in a star system called Haven... That said, Wyeth thinks he's being kind of over-fretful about it. Probably.

...Lieutenant Winton was also Crown Prince Roger of Manticore, only a single heartbeat away from the crown. As such, he received regular in-depth intelligence briefings unavailable to any other junior officer. Or to the commanding officers of any of Queen Samantha's destroyers, if it came to that.

Wyeth considers the possibility that the routine intelligence briefings Winton gets might have something to do with why Winton is so worried about Haven. Wyeth encourages Roger to be patient in his advocacy for a stronger battlefleet:

Well, you're young," he said out loud. "You'll have time to wear them down."

"I hope so, Sir." His executive officer sounded grimmer than usual, Wyeth thought. "At the moment, though, I'm feeling like a character out of an Old Earth fairy tale."

"Really?" The commander chuckled. Ancient fairy tales and fables happened to be a hobby of his, and Winton knew it. "Let me see... if we asked Captain Janacek, I'm sure he'd be able to come up with quite a few. Like the little boy who cried "Wolf!", for example. Or did you have Chicken Little in mind?"

"Actually, sir, I was thinking of the Three Little Pigs. Especially the last one."

"So you're trying to convince the rest of the Navy that it's time to build a house out of bricks instead of straw- is that it?"

"Mostly, sir." Winton nodded, looking down at his hands as they stroked the purring cream-and-gray treecat in his lap. "Mostly." He looked up, brown eyes dark and very level. "Except that if I'd been the third Little Pig, I'd have held out for something even better. I think steel would've worked very nicely, actually."

This is the end of the 1844 scene. "I will build my house of steel" is the title of the story and arguably Roger III's catchphrase. Given the symbolism of the RMN's fleet it's appropriate.

Also, Roger III has a treecat. His name is Monroe. Actually, a lot of Manticoran monarchs have treecats; the treecats themselves are intelligent enough to have figured out that bonding with the "two-legs'" monarchs gives them a good position to understand developments in human society, foresee threats to their way of life, and make themselves look cute and cuddly to important human political figures.

Also, the Wintons are generally a pretty intelligent, forceful bunch, and treecats like that sort of person anyway.

---

The next scene takes place in mid-1850 PD.

"Sir Casper was talking about you just yesterday, Roger dear." Samantha Winton, Queen Samantha II of the Star Kingdom of Manticore, said as she looked across the breakfast table at her son.

"I'll just bet he was," her daughter Caitrin said, rolling her eyes, and the treecat perched in the highchair beside Samantha made a soft sound that echoed his person's mingled amusement and exasperation."

"Don't encourage her, Magnus," the Queen told him, and spared him a brief, quelling glance before she turned her gaze upon her younger offspring.

Queen Samantha has a treecat too. See previous.

Almost twelve T-years younger than her brother, Caitrin looked absurdly young to someone her mother's age, thanks in no small part to how youthful she'd been when prolong reached the Star Kingdom. She and Roger both had the Winton look- the dark complexion, the brown eyes, the strong chin- but neither of them was quite as dark as Samantha, who looked remarkably like a throwback to the days of King Roger I... Roger was the serious, thoughtful worrier- the sort who was constantly looking to the future, trying to anticipate oncoming storms and shape his course to deal with them. Caitrin wasn't really the mental gadabout she often liked to portray, but there was no denying that she was far more inclined to take things as they came rather than rushing to meet them.

And she was far, far more... irreverent about the venerable traditions and responsibilities of the House of Winton. She took them seriously, but she refused to admit she did. Of course she wasn't even thirty T-years old yet; there was time for her to grow properly stodgy, Samantha supposed.

An example of Weber's writing style; if he spent as many words on character dialogue as he does on describing how his viewpoint characters perceive other characters in the same scene, he'd probably do a better job of establishing them.

Also, we are introduced to Princess Caitrin, at this point just short of thirty. In the main novel series she is, of course, 50 to 70 years older than that and quite a lot more mature, having fallen into the role of wise old aunt and trusted advisor-confidante to Elizabeth III. Caitrin is also mother of Michelle Winton-Henke, one of Honor's closest friends.

In the main novels she is sort of a stand-in for the Queen Mother, given that Elizabeth III's mother is dead.

"And what, may I ask... did your estimable Prime Minister have to say about your scapegrace eldest offspring, Mother? No, let me guess. He took the opportunity upon the occasion of my birthday to once more point out that it's time I began producing an heir to the throne. Annnnnd, he also took the opportunity to suggest it's time I stopped playing and settled down to a serious career in politics."

Roger, 'guessing' what the prime minister thinks of Roger's current life and career as a naval officer. At this point Roger is 41 (minus a day), so by pre-prolong standards the prime minister would be right to worry. Of course, Roger can reasonably expect to live for 200-300 years, barring accidents, which changes the game somewhat.

Roger sipped coffee, taking his time, letting the moment subside a bit before he lowered his cup again. Queen Samantha would be seventy in another T-year, herself... and she'd been far too old for prolong when it reached the Star Kingdom. It was as awkward as it was painful for any child to adjust to the thought that his parents had no more than ninety or a hundred years of life while he himself might well live twice or even three times that long. And it was awkward for the parents, too. Their attitudes and expectations had been shaped by the life expectancies they'd faced growing up. It was hard for many of them to stand back, realize how different their children's perspectives had to be...

See above.

"...I'm not really interested in giving up the Navy just yet. Especially now."

The atmosphere in the pleasant, sunlit dining room seemed to darken. Samantha sat back in her chair at the head of the table, and her treecat companion abandoned his own meal to flow down into her lap and croon to her softly.

"I'm doing all I can, Roger," she said quietly.

"I know that, Mom." Roger shook his head quickly. "And I know it might help in some ways to have me available to trot out for deBut I'm not as good a horse trader yet as you are, and I think- at the moment, at least- that I can do more good arguing the case from inside the Service." ... "If we're really going to make the changes you and I both agree we've got to make, someone's got to... convince the Navy's senior officers good idea."

"Have you tried a sledgehammer?" his sister asked more than a little bitterly. "It's been six T-years since that first letter of yours in the Proceedings, Rog, and I haven't noticed any radical realignments, have you?"

"At least some of them are starting to listen, Katie." ... "I admit it's an uphill fight, but since the Peeps finally started coming out into the open, a few of my seniors- and quite a few more of my contemporaries- are starting to actually think about it."

Haven becoming more militaristic in the 1840s is apparently causing enough alarm to break the complacency of a fair-sized chunk of the Manticoran officer corps.

P.S.: only Roger ever calls Princess Caitrin "Katie," apparently. I skipped that sentence.

Long-ass chunk of exposition on Havenite politics and history follows:

It was hard for a lot of people, even now, to accept what had happened to the Republic of Haven. Partly, she supposed, that was because it hadn't happened overnight. In fact, it had been an agonizingly slow process, one drawn out for the better part of two T-centuries, long enough for it to turn into an accepted part of the backdrop of interstellar politics. And it had all been internal to the Republic, after all... Unfortunately, the process- and its consequences- were no longer a purely internal matter... Even her best analysts were split over how and why it had happened, yet the consequences were clear enough for those who had eyes to see them...

In her more charitable moments... she actually sympathized with those who failed to see the danger. Haven a threat to interstellar peace? Clearly the entire notion was ridiculous! Why, for almost three T-centuries, the Republic of Haven had been the bright, shining light, the example every system in and out of the Haven Quadrant wanted to emulate. A vibrant, participatory democracy, a steadily burgeoning economy serving the most rapidly expanding cluster of colonies in the galaxy, and a growing, energetic star nation whose future seemed to hold no limits. That was how everyone, including the Star Kingdom of Manticore, had seen it for ten to twelve generations.

And then, somehow, it had all gone wrong.

The critical moment, she thought... had been the Havenite "Economic Bill of Rights" in 1680, with its declaration that all of the Republic's citizens had an "unalienable right" to a relative standard of living to be defined and adjusted as inflation required by statute by the Havenite legislature. It had sounded like such a good idea. Who could possibly argue with it? Yet there'd been a subtext to it, an agreement struck between corrupt politicians, self-serving bureaucrats, an entrenched civil service, and the professional political operatives who controlled the "Dolist" voting blocs. One that gave those politicians a permanent grip on power, patronage, and office- and on all the wealth, graft, and special privileges that came with them- in return for giving the new class of "Dolist managers" the power to distribute that legally defined standard of living. What should have been- what had been sold to the Republic as- an exercise in political fairness had become a license to steal and to corrupt as the sprawling machinery of a governmental bureaucracy turned into a machine that churned out money and personal license for the powerful and the politically connected.

Weber's description of the decline of Haven, 2013 version. I cannot help but think that the way he couches this has changed over the years; the way he characterized it in the '90s had a lot more "bread and circuses" in it, with the implication that the Havenite populace had committed the same stereotyped foolishness feared by the Republican Revolution of 1994 (a US political thing): they'd voted themselves a steady dole of welfare support.

Now, it's made more explicit that corruption and dealmaking between political leaders and the people responsible for handing out the welfare checks had to do with the process.

...an economic burden the Republic's economy might have been able to bear under other circumstances turned into a fiscal black hole. Effective oversight of spending had become a bad joke... more and more of the ever-swelling government's largess had been siphoned into fewer and fewer pockets through one bogus swindle after another even as the legally mandated standard of living required ever increasing expenditures, and deficit spending had become a way of life, gobbling up Haven's legendary productivity as the Republic plunged steadily deeper and deeper into debt.

Sometimes I can't tell if Weber actually expects this as a predictable outcome of letting Democrats run the government, or whether he's presenting it as a specific failure mode of "welfare state plus corrupt kleptocrats."

Perhaps the slide could have been arrested, the rot could have been cleaned away, but that would have required an open commitment to reform, a willingness to admit it wasn't working. Unfortunately, those who'd come to depend on the existing system as the only game in town wouldn't have liked that very much, and no one could predict where that sort of reaction might lead. And worse even than that, admitting it wasn't working would have led to a public look into the reasons it wasn't, and too many powerful people and their families had far too much to lose to let anything like that happen.

Which meant they'd had to find another solution to their problem.

The galaxy at large knew very little about the top-secret meetings between the leaders of the Legislaturalists, Haven's de facto hereditary political rulers, and the handful of most powerful Dolist managers... in 1791. Even Samantha knew far less about it than she wished she did, and it had taken years for Manticoran intelligence to piece together what she did know... everything which had happened since, especially in the last fifteen or twenty T-years, convinced her [that Haven was turning into a conquest-oriented tyranny]

...the Havenite "Constitutional Convention" of 1795 had radically rewritten the Republic's Constitution, ostensibly to fix the government overreach which had produced the crumbling economy, but actually to create the People's Republic. The new constitution had maintained the facade of democracy even while it limited eligibility requirements, office qualifications, and the franchise- officially in order to reduce voter fraud and restrict the political clout of special interest groups- so severely it had become literally impossible to elect a representative who wasn't a Legislaturalist... The official language only authorized the government to punish "hate speech" and language which "attacked another's dignity on the basis of political, religious, or economic differences." Of course, the courts had taken a rather broader view... but it had really only been officially codifying what had gradually become the normal, accepted state of affairs over the previous T-century.

So under the guise of limiting corruption, the Legislaturalists lock the political system so tightly no one else has any actual power or chance of limiting their control. And they write the hate-speech laws in a way that allows their pet judiciary to use it to effectively outlaw any serious criticism of their system.

The PRH proceeds to do all the same domestic policy stuff as before, and thus completely fails to address their internal problems in any obvious way... because they had a different solution in mind.

It hadn't happened overnight. In fact, they'd managed to hide their increased military spending well enough no one had even noticed for the first ten or fifteen T-years, and once people did start to notice, they'd managed to pass it off as a means to "prime the economic pump" through government funded "jobs production" and "skill training programs." Oh, there'd been "wild rumors" about huge numbers of Havenite battleships being secretly constructed, but no one had believed them.

So, starting around... I don't know, 1810 or 1820, Haven start producing large numbers of 'battleships.' By 1800s PD standards, that would probably mean a ship of three to four million tons, armored and equipped to resist the typical weapons fire of 1800 PD. A bit light for serious and intense combat... but just the thing to casually roll over the defenses of single-system polities that do not themselves have any powerful, heavy warships or anything like the Manticoran junction forts.

These battleships are still around when the Manticore-Haven War breaks out in 1905 PD, but are pretty blatantly obsolete. Their weapons and sensors are based off of old Havenite technology. Though one gets the feeling that 1800 Havenite weapons may have been relatively closer to those of the Sollies or Manties at the same time than the 1900 Havenite weapons were; I can discuss that in more depth if anyone wants. They're just plain not big enough to survive much fire from the big honking beam weapons of a 1900-era ship of the wall, or massed fire from capital ship missiles.

Haven has a shitload of them, but doesn't get much mileage out of them. They're good at being parked in rear areas to discourage Manticoran battlecruiser raids, since the typical PN battleship outweighs the typical RN battlecruiser by about four or five to one. They're occasionally used as disposable, expendable capital ships for raiding attacks against Manticoran systems, which... often backfires. Those battleships simply are not built to stand up if they run into capital-class opposition.

This becomes very obvious at the Fourth Battle of Yeltsin, when Honor manages to sucker a force of 24 Havenite battleships into beam weapon range of her own fleet of 19 battlecruisers (which are individually rather tiny) and 6 superdreadnoughts (which aren't).

Splat.

Also, remember the obsolete Manticoran battleships I mentioned in the previous post? Those are as weak and puny and old relative to these Havenite battleships I'm talking about now, as those Havenite ships are to the high-end superdreadnoughts of the actual war.

In any case, the practical upshot is that the Havenites spent the early 19th century Post Diaspora building up a very numerous battlefleet that was well equipped to beat up on the little guys of the galaxy, albeit not armed with ships individually large or heavy enough to go toe-to-toe with the best.

Despite everything, Haven was still the golden image. Its economic and fiscal woes had to be temporary, just until the Republic caught its breath and got its house back in order... despite any transitory fiscal dislocations, its laudable commitment to economic fairness remained the model everyone else wanted to emulate.

Several of the other star nations in the Haven Quadrant had done just that, following the Republic into statist economies and guaranteed standards of living. And to be fair, most of those other star nations' governments had avoided the death spiral of the People's Republic for the simple reason that they'd been relatively honest governments. They'd managed to provide their own equivalent of the Basic Living Stipend without completely destroying their economies... they'd managed to pay for their social programs without plunging themselves ever further into debt... Unable to pay for everything without destroying their own economies, they'd cut back even further on military spending, relying for protection against outside aggression on Haven, the traditional guarantor of interstellar peace and order in the Haven Quadrant. In fact, many of them had actually been relieved by the expansion of the People's Navy, since its ability to protect them provided such a hefty 'peace dividend' for the rest of their national budgets.

Until 1846, that was.

This is something not really revealed prior to this story being published. Haven has 'daughter' planets near it which were either colonized from Haven, or settled by people affiliated with Haven. Haven itself was the most successful planet in its immediate region. Which is why the whole volume, Manticore included, is known to most of humanity as the "Haven Quadrant;" from a Solarian point of view in 1700 or 1800 PD, Manticore was a stopover place whose wormholes you used to go to Haven.

Many of the planets close to Haven imitated some or all of Haven's social policies, but did so far more successfully, and would probably have been just fine if Haven itself hadn't decided to turn cannibal and start munching on the economies of the nations around it, in order to support its own fundamentally corrupt and insolvent system.

This represents an interesting development beyond the primitive level Weber is often criticized for, the level of "LOL welfare state libruls on the rampage."

Less than eighteen T-months after Roger's letter to the Proceedings, the rest of the Haven Quadrant- or as much of it was willing to face reality, at least- had discovered the real reason for the People's Republic's military buildup.

In the last four T-years, the People's Republic had "annexed" no fewer than eleven independent star systems. Most of them had been Havenite daughter colonies, and the majority of them had "spontaneously sought" inclusion in the new, greater, interstellar People's Republic of Haven. The thing that amazed Samantha was that there were actually people- quite a lot of them, in fact- who accepted the "spontaneous" nature of those star systems' eagerness to join the PRH.

To sum up, this is the start of the Havenite conquistador phase, which ran clear from the mid-1840s up until they slammed head-on into the Manticoran Alliance sixty years later. It was the practical reality that informed the entire reigns of Roger III and Elizabeth III, the careers of people like Hemphill and White Haven, and the entire lifetime of someone like Honor Harrington (who, as of this scene in the book, isn't due to be born for nine years yet).

The PRH started off with campaigns of subversion and espionage in the target star systems, probably aided by its strong economic, cultural and political ties to those systems. For these quick annexations, Haven really didn't have to do much more than wave its battleships menacingly in the general direction of the targets to get them to sign on. The obvious analogy would be, say, the Nazi annexation of Austria.

Systems like Lovat (which fans of the series will recognize, and which will be mentioned in more detail later) were probably part of this initial wave of expansion.

It wouldn't take very much longer for all of Haven's daughter colonies to be gathered to her bosom, Samatha Winton thought grimly... And if there was anyone in the entire galaxy who believed the People's Republic would stop then, she had some magic beans she wanted to sell them.

"We're running out of time, Roger," she told her son quietly. Monroe stopped nibbling on his bacon and looked up, grass-green eyes dark, ears flattening as he, too, sensed Samantha's emotions. "Our Navy's bigger and stronger than anything else in the Quadrant, but it's not big enough to stand off the entire Havenite fleet, and I can't get those idiots in Parliament to realize it!"

Treecat sensing emotions (again). More to the point, we see that Queen Samantha knew perfectly well what was going on and was unable to get much of a naval buildup to respond to Haven's behavior. To be fair to the opposition, at this time Haven's conquests were taking place in Haven's literal backyard, at least 250 light years from Manticore, and were being done under a plausibly-deniable cover of 'peaceful annexations.' Things get more blatant later on.

I think I'll stop here for now.

[Mr Bean]

Hmm need to review this today, never touched the book your speaking of.

[Mr Bean]

Okay a few comments now that I've read up.

On Haven
I believe what Weber was trying to show has much less to do with Democrats running the goverment and more with corruption hollowing out systems from within. Sure the mid 90s version is much more crude than the 2013 edition. But the point remains the same that Haven fell because the powerful got together with the idealistic to turn that engine of progress into just another money making operation.

In the same way that the Republican in me is horrified when I hear some other conservative say goverment should be run like a business. That's a horrifying prospect as we see in places like Florida when goverment is run like a business. Business don't like competition, business need to maximize profits, and businesses want to attract investment and grow to meet new demands. Now mate this with the goverment need of creating rules and enforcing laws and you see the ability to create it's own demand and pass laws to force people to use their products. Oh and pass laws to empty out the marketplace of other competitors.

This is of course not the first time the long slow side of Haven was retconned. They were the great other in the late 90s early 2000s but by that point with the introduction of the Haven officers we met when Honor was arrested, we got a good view of those who knew the Legislaturists.

On Treecats
In one of the collections of short stories books one of the first few Monarchs of Manticore was joined with a treecat when it saved her life from an assassin. As that story is told from the prospective of the Treecat we find out that they really were not thinking of infiltrating the royal family to begin with. But after that incident those Treecats who happen to like the taste of human emotions were always present whenever a state visit from someone important came to their planet.

*Edit the 3rd has nothing to do this but I always did like that touch that Treecats like those that bond with humans are rare in Treecat society. And it seen as somewhat of a condition since these Treecats inventively seek out humans to find one they like the taste of so to speak.

[Simon_Jester]

Okay a few comments now that I've read up.

On Haven
I believe what Weber was trying to show has much less to do with Democrats running the goverment and more with corruption hollowing out systems from within. Sure the mid 90s version is much more crude than the 2013 edition. But the point remains the same that Haven fell because the powerful got together with the idealistic to turn that engine of progress into just another money making operation.

I agree with you, in essence- I think Weber's depiction of Haven's Legislaturalist and Pierreist era has evolved over time here, from thinking "unbridled welfare state obviously bad suppresses initiative RAR" toward "corruption hollows out system from within," as you say.

This also ties into the way that in the early novels (say, books four and five) the revolutionary Pierrists are basically shown as a bunch of bloody maniacs trying to wreck their own side, but in later novels even Pierre is shown more sympathetically, and it is made clear that they are working their asses off to reform a fundamentally broken system, even while "riding the tiger" of revolutionary sentiment that allowed them to overthrow the broken system in the first place.

But if you stopped reading the books in 1998 or whatever, you would not know that there were 'daughter systems' within the political orbit of Haven which had adopted similar policies without turning into corrupt hellhole parodies of the Brezhnev-era USSR (or worse). Because nobody mentioned these, so far as I can remember, until this new story that is now coming out, though it was alluded to in a few places.

This is of course not the first time the long slow side of Haven was retconned. They were the great other in the late 90s early 2000s but by that point with the introduction of the Haven officers we met when Honor was arrested, we got a good view of those who knew the Legislaturists.

The change started with Honor Among Enemies, published in 1996, IMO. The two main Havenite characters there are Javier Giscard and Warner Caslet. Giscard is an antagonist, but a tough, determined one who's at heart not a bad guy, or at least no more so than, say, the captain from Das Boot. His political commissar, Eloise Pritchart, is also fairly prominent... but she's One Of The Good Guys in a real sense, because she's not a political hack trying to undermine Giscard. She is, in point of fact, in bed with Giscard.

Caslet, now, is a genuine goddamn hero in that novel, and gets his ass kicked for attempting to white-knight save a merchantman from pirates... which turns out to be Honor's Q-ship. Shannon Foraker might well have said "oops."

And we do not see much of the generic evilness and oppression of the Committee's political order in this era, while seeing a number of other evils and threats- I would say this is where Weber begins rehabilitating Haven with sympathetic characters, the ones he later uses to overthrown the Republic.

[Ahriman238]

Wyeth thinking about the promotion problem. Do I recall Ahriman saying that the social effects of prolong were inadequately explored in the series?

You do. A person with prolong therapy can live out a lifetime, with a career of his choice and all the time in the world to explore it's delicate nuances, and look back on it all as his youthful folly.

Also, Roger III has a treecat. His name is Monroe. Actually, a lot of Manticoran monarchs have treecats; the treecats themselves are intelligent enough to have figured out that bonding with the "two-legs'" monarchs gives them a good position to understand developments in human society, foresee threats to their way of life, and make themselves look cute and cuddly to important human political figures.

Also, the Wintons are generally a pretty intelligent, forceful bunch, and treecats like that sort of person anyway.

I'm not convinced thats all of it.

After the eighth book we know that Honor and her Harrington forebears (including the very first person to bond with a treecat) are genetic tweaks for heavy gravity and one of many experiments in boosted intellect that never seem to go anywhere (IIRC, Weber says in the very scene this facet is introduced that what we call intelligence is genetically a massive bundle of really complex traits, a couple of which may be mutually exclusive.) and we also know the Wintons have had some genetic tampering down the line, though the royal genome is apparently heavily classified. Even the Graysons are unknowing "genies" and pay to this day for the desperate, ignorant hack-job done to allow their short-term survival.

So of the dozen or so people we see bond with treecats over the course of the series, there's exactly 1 that we don't know is genetically altered, whats-his-name, Samantha's partner from Honor Among Enemies. I'm thinking only a very few humans can bond with treecats too.


WRT Haven, the original explanation for Haven sure sounded like "evil welfare" which is one reason I'm surprised I've heard him take very little crap over that. As time goes by, he doesn't even need to retcon, just elaborate. Even simply adding new factors in Haven's slide from enlightened liberal stronghold to expansionist empire with hereditary leaders and concrete jungle will deemphasize what was previously presented as the sole cause.

I don't know, at the time he was a generic villain but Coglin feels a lot more human on rereading. And in the book upcoming we have the introduction of Tom Theisman, the very picture of a Good Havenite. So having the villains, with some exceptions, obviously, being mostly people doing their jobs who happen to be on the wrong side is very much a long-running thread of the series.

[Terralthra]

"Mostly, sir." Winton nodded, looking down at his hands as they stroked the purring cream-and-gray treecat in his lap. "Mostly." He looked up, brown eyes dark and very level. "Except that if I'd been the third Little Pig, I'd have held out for something even better. I think steel would've worked very nicely, actually."

This is the end of the 1844 scene. "I will build my house of steel" is the title of the story and arguably Roger III's catchphrase. Given the symbolism of the RMN's fleet it's appropriate.

Also, Roger III has a treecat. His name is Monroe. Actually, a lot of Manticoran monarchs have treecats; the treecats themselves are intelligent enough to have figured out that bonding with the "two-legs'" monarchs gives them a good position to understand developments in human society, foresee threats to their way of life, and make themselves look cute and cuddly to important human political figures.

Also, the Wintons are generally a pretty intelligent, forceful bunch, and treecats like that sort of person anyway.

Also, the Wintons have a genetic enhancement set similar to the set the Harringtons have (spoiler, sorta). Part of that enhancement set is a slight, general, and consistent "intelligence" (really, cogitation speed) boost, and Honor's mother Allison, a premier geneticist, theorizes that that same intelligence boost also makes both the Harringtons' and the Wintons' "mind-glow" more appealing.

It was hard for a lot of people, even now, to accept what had happened to the Republic of Haven. Partly, she supposed, that was because it hadn't happened overnight. In fact, it had been an agonizingly slow process, one drawn out for the better part of two T-centuries, long enough for it to turn into an accepted part of the backdrop of interstellar politics. And it had all been internal to the Republic, after all... Unfortunately, the process- and its consequences- were no longer a purely internal matter... Even her best analysts were split over how and why it had happened, yet the consequences were clear enough for those who had eyes to see them...

In her more charitable moments... she actually sympathized with those who failed to see the danger. Haven a threat to interstellar peace? Clearly the entire notion was ridiculous! Why, for almost three T-centuries, the Republic of Haven had been the bright, shining light, the example every system in and out of the Haven Quadrant wanted to emulate. A vibrant, participatory democracy, a steadily burgeoning economy serving the most rapidly expanding cluster of colonies in the galaxy, and a growing, energetic star nation whose future seemed to hold no limits. That was how everyone, including the Star Kingdom of Manticore, had seen it for ten to twelve generations.

And then, somehow, it had all gone wrong.

The critical moment, she thought... had been the Havenite "Economic Bill of Rights" in 1680, with its declaration that all of the Republic's citizens had an "unalienable right" to a relative standard of living to be defined and adjusted as inflation required by statute by the Havenite legislature. It had sounded like such a good idea. Who could possibly argue with it? Yet there'd been a subtext to it, an agreement struck between corrupt politicians, self-serving bureaucrats, an entrenched civil service, and the professional political operatives who controlled the "Dolist" voting blocs. One that gave those politicians a permanent grip on power, patronage, and office- and on all the wealth, graft, and special privileges that came with them- in return for giving the new class of "Dolist managers" the power to distribute that legally defined standard of living. What should have been- what had been sold to the Republic as- an exercise in political fairness had become a license to steal and to corrupt as the sprawling machinery of a governmental bureaucracy turned into a machine that churned out money and personal license for the powerful and the politically connected.

Weber's description of the decline of Haven, 2013 version. I cannot help but think that the way he couches this has changed over the years; the way he characterized it in the '90s had a lot more "bread and circuses" in it, with the implication that the Havenite populace had committed the same stereotyped foolishness feared by the Republican Revolution of 1994 (a US political thing): they'd voted themselves a steady dole of welfare support.

Now, it's made more explicit that corruption and dealmaking between political leaders and the people responsible for handing out the welfare checks had to do with the process.

I'm not sure how much of that is "new" exposition or retconning. Since this thread started, I've been reading through the entire series (including short story collections and such) in chronological order. I'm up to 2003 now (currently on The Service of the Sword). The idea that the system started really failing specifically due to corruption and deal-making between the Dolist Managers and Legislaturists is at least mentioned in some of the exposition in A Short, Victorious War, and expanded on in some of the others.

Despite everything, Haven was still the golden image. Its economic and fiscal woes had to be temporary, just until the Republic caught its breath and got its house back in order... despite any transitory fiscal dislocations, its laudable commitment to economic fairness remained the model everyone else wanted to emulate.

Several of the other star nations in the Haven Quadrant had done just that, following the Republic into statist economies and guaranteed standards of living. And to be fair, most of those other star nations' governments had avoided the death spiral of the People's Republic for the simple reason that they'd been relatively honest governments. They'd managed to provide their own equivalent of the Basic Living Stipend without completely destroying their economies... they'd managed to pay for their social programs without plunging themselves ever further into debt... Unable to pay for everything without destroying their own economies, they'd cut back even further on military spending, relying for protection against outside aggression on Haven, the traditional guarantor of interstellar peace and order in the Haven Quadrant. In fact, many of them had actually been relieved by the expansion of the People's Navy, since its ability to protect them provided such a hefty 'peace dividend' for the rest of their national budgets.

Until 1846, that was.

This is something not really revealed prior to this story being published. Haven has 'daughter' planets near it which were either colonized from Haven, or settled by people affiliated with Haven. Haven itself was the most successful planet in its immediate region. Which is why the whole volume, Manticore included, is known to most of humanity as the "Haven Quadrant;" from a Solarian point of view in 1700 or 1800 PD, Manticore was a stopover place whose wormholes you used to go to Haven.

Many of the planets close to Haven imitated some or all of Haven's social policies, but did so far more successfully, and would probably have been just fine if Haven itself hadn't decided to turn cannibal and start munching on the economies of the nations around it, in order to support its own fundamentally corrupt and insolvent system.

This represents an interesting development beyond the primitive level Weber is often criticized for, the level of "LOL welfare state libruls on the rampage."

The close systems/first conquests being daughter colonies which were similar in political/economic terms, but weren't decaying into a death spiral like the PRH, was mentioned as early as Ashes of Victory, and, I think, a bit earlier than that.

[Simon_Jester]

Wyeth thinking about the promotion problem. Do I recall Ahriman saying that the social effects of prolong were inadequately explored in the series?

You do. A person with prolong therapy can live out a lifetime, with a career of his choice and all the time in the world to explore it's delicate nuances, and look back on it all as his youthful folly.

I think the reason that doesn't become a focus is that the series is heavily built around war and conflict, not so much around the underlying aspects of civil society.

It'd be interesting, though, to see 60-year-olds joining the Navy as midshipmen or whatever because they've decided they need a career change and dammit, the war is important! Conversely it'd be interesting to see senior admirals decide they've been Navy men long enough and go become a baker- not to retire, just to do something different. That doesn't happen much in real life.

Of course, both these things might well be discouraged under conditions of war mobilization, where you really do want experienced people doing what they do best.

I'm not convinced thats all of it.

After the eighth book we know that Honor and her Harrington forebears (including the very first person to bond with a treecat) are genetic tweaks for heavy gravity and one of many experiments in boosted intellect that never seem to go anywhere (IIRC, Weber says in the very scene this facet is introduced that what we call intelligence is genetically a massive bundle of really complex traits, a couple of which may be mutually exclusive.) and we also know the Wintons have had some genetic tampering down the line, though the royal genome is apparently heavily classified. Even the Graysons are unknowing "genies" and pay to this day for the desperate, ignorant hack-job done to allow their short-term survival.

So of the dozen or so people we see bond with treecats over the course of the series, there's exactly 1 that we don't know is genetically altered, whats-his-name, Samantha's partner from Honor Among Enemies. I'm thinking only a very few humans can bond with treecats too.

Hm. That's a good point, come to think of it- although it's made explicit that there are a lot of treecats bonding with humans who stay on Sphinx, and I doubt they're all gene-tweaked Meyerdahls. There's also a number of Sphinxians with treecat partners in the Queen's Own Regiment- for obvious reasons; in real life I'm sure the Secret Service would maim to get a few treecats on presidential protection duty.

Given the absence of explicit evidence, I'd prefer not to assume that treecats only bond with genetically modified humans, but it's an interesting theory.

Honor herself (or is it her dad?) speculates that the intelligence-enhancing genetic modifications make humans "brighter" or "tastier" to treecats- I believe those exact words are used. However, that certainly doesn't preclude the possibility that normals can attract them.

WRT Haven, the original explanation for Haven sure sounded like "evil welfare" which is one reason I'm surprised I've heard him take very little crap over that. As time goes by, he doesn't even need to retcon, just elaborate. Even simply adding new factors in Haven's slide from enlightened liberal stronghold to expansionist empire with hereditary leaders and concrete jungle will deemphasize what was previously presented as the sole cause.

The "evil welfare" story was always pitched as backstory, and I think Weber got enough credit for humanizing his antagonists that it didn't get completely out of hand. Plus, we never really get a good close look at Havenite civilian society in his mid-1990s books, except maybe for a handful of scenes in The Short Victorious War while Pierre is plotting his coup. That's a good thing, because it gave Weber time to mature as an author and develop Haven as a nation after his initial "welfare bad makes country insolvent causing them to go conquistador" plan.

If it were John Ringo or (God forbid) Tom Kratman or whatever writing the stories, we'd probably have hundreds of pages of hamhanded nonsense set in the slums of Nouveau Paris, with the author merrily trying to hammer away at us and 'teach the lesson' that welfare never does anything good for anyone ever and that the urban lower class of Haven are a bunch of worthless ignorant criminals who deserve to be stabbed with white phosphorus bayonets or whatever.

Weber is one hell of a lot more politically moderate and basically reasonable; his main problem is just that he sucks at depicting actual politics with intelligent, worthwhile human beings on both sides of the debate. It doesn't help that Manticoran politics boils down to a one-dimensional "building up the military is right because huge enemy fleets are massing against us, being a pacifist is wrong (see previous), and domestic policy is irrelevant."


Side note: domestic policy kind of IS irrelevant to Manticore's immense economic leverage, come to think of it. The best example of this I can think of in real life is Dubai, which is an immensely rich city-state despite having a lot of basically medieval legal and cultural customs, because it's a huge container port and oil export point in a highly strategic location. The difference is that Manticore's basic cultural template is that of a First World democracy, so they're much nicer as a society from our point of view... but ultimately, they could be a complete hellhole and still have a very high per capita GDP, as long as they were able to retain control of the Junction.

Also, the Wintons have a genetic enhancement set similar to the set the Harringtons have (spoiler, sorta). Part of that enhancement set is a slight, general, and consistent "intelligence" (really, cogitation speed) boost, and Honor's mother Allison, a premier geneticist, theorizes that that same intelligence boost also makes both the Harringtons' and the Wintons' "mind-glow" more appealing.

Oh, it was Honor's mom? OK.

Weber's description of the decline of Haven, 2013 version. I cannot help but think that the way he couches this has changed over the years; the way he characterized it in the '90s had a lot more "bread and circuses" in it, with the implication that the Havenite populace had committed the same stereotyped foolishness feared by the Republican Revolution of 1994 (a US political thing): they'd voted themselves a steady dole of welfare support.

Now, it's made more explicit that corruption and dealmaking between political leaders and the people responsible for handing out the welfare checks had to do with the process.

I'm not sure how much of that is "new" exposition or retconning. Since this thread started, I've been reading through the entire series (including short story collections and such) in chronological order. I'm up to 2003 now (currently on The Service of the Sword). The idea that the system started really failing specifically due to corruption and deal-making between the Dolist Managers and Legislaturists is at least mentioned in some of the exposition in A Short, Victorious War, and expanded on in some of the others.

Well... put it this way. The idea that 'Dolist Manager' political machines would collude with corrupt politicians to preserve an insolvent welfare state is very much in keeping with "RAR welfare bad!" sentiment. This exact idea is why certain figures on the American right started going after ACORN in 2009, because in their frame of reference that is exactly what ACORN was: a system for mobilizing masses of impoverished, welfare-dependent voters to support politicians who would take advantage of their dependency to win elections.

What distinguishes Weber in a positive way is that he mostly avoided rubbing people's faces in the idea that big government is the root of all evils, assuming he actually believes that which I am not even claiming. He presents a welfare system as being not-fundamentally-wrong, but exploitable toward corrupt ends, just as he has his archvillains of the whole series be based on a Planet of the Corporations even as people like Klaus Hauptmann can use their wealth either for evil or for (quite a bit of) good.

The close systems/first conquests being daughter colonies which were similar in political/economic terms, but weren't decaying into a death spiral like the PRH, was mentioned as early as Ashes of Victory, and, I think, a bit earlier than that.

Huh? OK, I missed a lot of it. I'm sure it was developed in At All Costs, because the Battle of Lovat is a pivotal moment in the novel and I'm quite sure Weber was unable to resist the urge to drop a page or two of exposition about the system in there.

[Batman]

On treecats only bonding with genies-to my knowledge, other than being a prolong recipient, Hamish Alexander is an ordinary off-the-shelf human, yet Samantha bonded with him. Other than the routinely mentioned general rarity of bondings, nothing extraordinary is made of that that I can recall.
Also, both the late Miranda Follet and one of the Mayhew daughters (I forgot which) got themselves a serious case of treecat, and while all Graysons are genies by default, their modifications have nothing to do with the ones the Winton/Harrington lines got.
I'd say it's pretty much as Weber said in the series-some modifications make a human mind 'tastier' for the cat so they're more likely to bond with them, but they'll bond with ordinary human just as readily if and when they find one they find worthy.

[Terralthra]

I'm not convinced thats all of it.

After the eighth book we know that Honor and her Harrington forebears (including the very first person to bond with a treecat) are genetic tweaks for heavy gravity and one of many experiments in boosted intellect that never seem to go anywhere (IIRC, Weber says in the very scene this facet is introduced that what we call intelligence is genetically a massive bundle of really complex traits, a couple of which may be mutually exclusive.) and we also know the Wintons have had some genetic tampering down the line, though the royal genome is apparently heavily classified. Even the Graysons are unknowing "genies" and pay to this day for the desperate, ignorant hack-job done to allow their short-term survival.

So of the dozen or so people we see bond with treecats over the course of the series, there's exactly 1 that we don't know is genetically altered, whats-his-name, Samantha's partner from Honor Among Enemies. I'm thinking only a very few humans can bond with treecats too.

Hm. That's a good point, come to think of it- although it's made explicit that there are a lot of treecats bonding with humans who stay on Sphinx, and I doubt they're all gene-tweaked Meyerdahls. There's also a number of Sphinxians with treecat partners in the Queen's Own Regiment- for obvious reasons; in real life I'm sure the Secret Service would maim to get a few treecats on presidential protection duty.

Given the absence of explicit evidence, I'd prefer not to assume that treecats only bond with genetically modified humans, but it's an interesting theory.

Honor herself (or is it her dad?) speculates that the intelligence-enhancing genetic modifications make humans "brighter" or "tastier" to treecats- I believe those exact words are used. However, that certainly doesn't preclude the possibility that normals can attract them.

Eh, not exactly, Ahriman. Justin, Elizabeth's consort, is adopted by Monroe, her father's 'cat, and he's clearly not of the Winton line (else she couldn't marry him). Harold Tschu (Honor's engineer on Wayfarer) is adopted. Samantha then ends up adopting Earl White Haven. Miranda LaFollet and one of Benjamin Mayhew's children are also adopted when the treecats colonize Grayson. A couple other adoptees are mentioned in some of the short stories, and there's no connection there made to the Royal Family, though it's always possible those who are Sphinx-native are Meyerdahls.

Somewhere in In Enemy Hands, Echoes of Honor or Ashes of Victory, Honor talks to someone (Alistair McKeon?) about her metabolism and mentions that a fair number of Sphinx second-wave (minor nobles/yeoman, the "second shareholders") were heavy-grav generic genies, but doesn't specify whether they're Meyerdahl. I think there's a fraction expressed, but I can't remember it.

Also, the Wintons have a genetic enhancement set similar to the set the Harringtons have (spoiler, sorta). Part of that enhancement set is a slight, general, and consistent "intelligence" (really, cogitation speed) boost, and Honor's mother Allison, a premier geneticist, theorizes that that same intelligence boost also makes both the Harringtons' and the Wintons' "mind-glow" more appealing.

Oh, it was Honor's mom? OK.

Yeah. Mom's a geneticist. Dad's a neurosurgeon.

The close systems/first conquests being daughter colonies which were similar in political/economic terms, but weren't decaying into a death spiral like the PRH, was mentioned as early as Ashes of Victory, and, I think, a bit earlier than that.

Huh? OK, I missed a lot of it. I'm sure it was developed in At All Costs, because the Battle of Lovat is a pivotal moment in the novel and I'm quite sure Weber was unable to resist the urge to drop a page or two of exposition about the system in there.

I am pretty sure it's mentioned before that in Ashes of Victory when White Haven (in charge of Operation Buttercup) is brooding when 8th Fleet has to pause to reload and rearm before trying for Lovat in the first place (and is stopped by PRH Operation Hassan). Nonetheless, sometime even before that, one of the brief-histories-of-the-PRH mentions the nearby conquests being daughter colonies which are ideologically similar.

I haven't gotten to At All Costs in my re-read. I have to finish The Service of the Sword, and plow through Crown of Slaves and The Shadow of Saganami before I get there (reading in chronological-by-publish-date order). As an aside, "Welcome to Siberia" in The Service of the Sword is fucking hilarious. I highly recommend it.

[Simon_Jester]

Anyway, starting another post. This begins on Page 26, with Samantha talking to Roger.

"...And I think he does have a good point, as much as you're going to hate hearing this, about assignments that deploy you outside the home system."

Roger stiffened. He'd finally attained lieutenant commander's rank and command of his first hyper-capable ship. He was reasonably sure, despite his well known attitude toward nepotism and "family interest" that who he'd been born helped explain why his first hyper-capable unit had been a modern destroyer instead of one of the RMN's more elderly frigates, but he knew he'd done well in his two deployments to Silesia. Three pirates, one "privateer," and two slave ships would cause no more harm thanks to Captain Winton and HMS Daimyo.

Basically, since Roger still isn't married and has no kids, and since Caitrin doesn't either, the succession would run into problems if Roger's ship got blown up in Silesia, which could totally happen. And has happened, to stronger RMN ships than that destroyer.

Also, we see more evidence of the RMN's actions in Silesia, fighting pirates and slavers, but also 'privateer' ships which are licensed by various rebel factions, warlords, and corrupt local governors within Silesian space. This has been going on for a long time by this point in 1850 PD, and will continue until Manticore and the Andermani Empire finally get sick of it and annex the place around 1915.

Roger reluctantly acquiesces to this; as Queen Samantha puts it, "I'm sorry, but it's one of those unpleasant consequences of the nice house and all the people so eager to take care of us." Samantha arranges for Roger to be transferred to a posting within the Manticore system itself.

Page 27 has some infodumping about the senior Admiralty figures of 1850 PD, which I'll summarize.

Well into his seventies and facing mandatory retirement within the next four T-years, Truman wasn't fond of people who rocked the boat...

Sir Frederick Truman is the First Space Lord, the senior uniformed admiral of the RMN, and one of those conservative "fossils" referenced earlier, who doesn't like the idea of building up a huge battlefleet at a time when Silesia is turning into a Third Galaxy hellhole in desperate need of policing. Sir Frederick Does Not Like young Roger.

The Trumans are a "Navy family," with a huge number of Trumans showing up as flag officers and captains of varying rank. One relative, possibly Sir Frederick's great-granddaughter, we will meet in Honor of the Queen: Alice Truman, a capable RMN captain who goes on to pioneer doctrine for the LAC carrier concept, and is also the first to fire the advanced "Ghost Rider" missiles in anger at Second Hancock.

Also, mandatory retirement for RMN officers as of 1850 PD is between 75 and 80 years old. Wow. Obviously, geriatrics is more advanced in the future of the Honorverse. Equally obviously, this requirement is removed once the first generation of prolong kids (who apparently got the treatment around 1820 PD) start reaching that age, because it becomes entirely pointless.

Sir Abner Laidlaw, the Baron of Castle Rock... was the First Lord of the Admiralty, which, given the Navy's primacy, made him the civilian cabinet minister responsible for the Star Kingdom's overall military posture. He was two T-decades younger than Truman...

The Manticoran equivalent of the Secretary of Defense, in effect. Castle Rock was more or less handpicked by Queen Samantha, because of his background as one of the first intelligence officers to point out that hey, Haven is building a whole mess of gratuitous battleships, maybe we should look into that. A lot of Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) people, including the 1850-era chief of intelligence, Second Space Lord Havinghurst, wound up looking stupid because of this.

So Castle Rock has a lot of enemies, including Conservative politicians (who don't like to have the status quo stirred up by Manticore mobilizing to build a whole bunch of capital ships and get ready to fight Haven), officers of his own fleet who he made look stupid, and Liberal/Progressive politicians (who don't like to see Haven painted as the evil enemy, don't particularly like either the military or intelligence agencies, and don't like to see massive amounts of money spent on forts and dreadnoughts that could instead be spent on domestic programs). Samantha likes him anyway, but you can't help but wonder if she's making her life needlessly difficult.

...He [Roger] had much more sympathy for the rank-and-file members of the Liberal Party, but their refusal to look beyond their own narrow political horizons was eroding that steadily. Marisa Turner, the Earl of New Kiev's older daughter, was a case in point. The only thing wrong with her brain, in Roger's opinion, was her refusal to actually use it,yet her birth, wealth, and her father's position in the party meant she was inevitably going to become one of the LIberals' leaders over the next ten to fifteen T-years, and she flatly refused to admit Haven could possibly have any territorial interests outside its immediate astrographic neighborhood.

Little Marisa is going to grow up to be the head of the Liberal Party in the timeframe of the main novel series, and hoo boy is she a piece of work, leading her own party into disaster after repeated pigheaded attempts to ignore the obvious and generally play the 'stupid liberal' stereotype to the hilt.

Note that the Earl of New Kiev, and his daughter the Countess, are leading figures in the Liberal Party despite being unelected members of the House of Lords. The Lords are the dominant chamber of Manticore's legislature. They write appropriations bills (in the US the House of Representatives does this), budget and tax laws (likewise), have final approval over any amended form of those bills, and moreover the Prime Minister has to come from the Lords, not the Commons.

So the Lords are the dominant branch of Parliament in Manticore; to quote Weber's own infodump site: "Ultimately, the powers of the Lords trump the power of the Commons, which was precisely how the Founders (who were all about to become nobles under the new Constitution) wanted things set up." The practical result of that is that politics in the Lords dominates Manticore's military and diplomatic posture, but since the Lords never come up for reelection, members of the Conservative and Liberal parties in the Lords are free to be complete fucking morons and still retain their seats. It's enough to make you (or Queen Elizabeth III) want to pound your head on the wall.

Lord Grantville institutes reforms in 1920 PD intended to change this, when he replaces the disastrous High Ridge goverment, but those changes are only beginning to take effect as of the latest novels in the series.

Anyway, they go on to talk about the political problems associated with this- Truman would be just as glad to use the safety issue to kick Roger out of the Navy entirely, the Wintons don't want to be seen pulling strings to get the career outcome they desire for Roger (even while doing exactly that, for the best of reasons...) There's some grousing between Roger and Caitrin about how unfair it is that politicians are hypocritical, then...

Rear Admiral of the Green Sir William Spruance was Fifth Space Lord, the head of the Bureau of Personnel. As such, he'd have to sign off on any reassingment, especially one which cut short a programmed tour of command for someone as... visible as a member of the Winton dynasty, no matter where the idea for it had come from.

Spruance is also more receptive to the "Haven is dangerous, let's build some dreadnoughts" idea than many of his fellow Space Lords, so Roger and Samantha decide to use him as a back channel to get the reassignment through without having to deal with the trouble they'd have if they suggested it directly to the First Space Lord or the First Lord of the Admiralty.

Being cynical for a moment, let's hear it for jumping the chain of command! I sometimes wonder if Weber is conscious of times when he writes his own characters in a way that has them acting in an arguably hypocritical or unethical way, in pursuit of some desirable long term goal. I hope so.

Roger continues:

If I have to give up Daimyo, then I know what I want instead, and I think we can probably convince Sir William to give it to me."

"And that would be what, precisely?"

"Well, I don't want a dirt-side command, that's for sure. And I'm sorry, Mom, but I'd cut my throat if they stick me in BuPlan."

His shudder was only partly feigned. Vice Admiral Bethany Havinghurst, as head of the Bureau of Planning, also headed ONI, which meant she was responsible for the intelligence analyses Admiral Truman used to justify his emphasis on Silesia, instead of worrying about the "remote possibility" that the People's Republic might someday become a threat to the Star Kingdom. The possibility of becoming a staff weenie shuffling papers somewhere in the bowels of BuPlan- and with an idiot like Edward Janacek as his direct superior- held no appeal at all.

Roger has contempt for the 1850-era intelligence system of the RMN. Arguably, once again a case of irony- he doesn't like them because they support conclusions he does not share. On the other hand, he turns out to be right and they turn out to be wrong, so your mileage may vary.

"That's what you don't want," his mother observed. "What is it you do want, dear?"

"BuWeaps," he said, and his voice was suddenly very, very serious. "Lomax isn't who I'd have chosen to head BuWeaps, Mom, but she's at least a little more open-minded than Truman or Havinghurst. I think she's too conservative in her approach, under the circumstances, but she's not part of the 'old boy and girl' network the way Truman and Low Delhi are. I'd like to get more hands-on experience with our R and D programs, and BuWeaps is small enough- way too small, in fact, given what's going on- that a lieutenant commander would be at least a moderately middle-sized fish. I think I could actually do some good over there."

"More than at BuShips?" Samantha asked shrewdly.

"Lots more than at BuShips," Roger grimaced. "Low Delhi's an idiot. Or his policy recommendations are idiotic, at any rate."

That wasn't something he could have said to a fewllow Navy officer, of course, nor was it anything he'd ever say in public, but that didn't make it untrue. Third Space Lord Robert Hemphill, the Baron of Low Delhi, headed the Bureau of Ships, responsible for the construction and maintenance of the Navy's space stations and vessels, and he did not respond well to criticism, however constructive.

"In fairness... The problem is he's got too much invested on a personal and professional level in the building policies Truman's been driving through for the last several T-years. He's not going to recommend any radical changes, ad BuShips is too damned big. I'd disappear into it and never be seen again- professionally speaking, that is- until my coronation!"

Robert Hemphill is Sonja Hemphill's father. We see where she got some of her issues from...

Also, we see that BuWeaps designs and invents weapons, and BuShips builds the actual ships. Makes sense. In 1850 PD, BuShips is pretty big because Manticore does have a fairly large fleet and network of space stations for a one-system polity. BuWeaps, on the other hand, is tiny, because at this stage in the game Manticore isn't really relying on its own native R&D capability to arm its ships. I doubt Manticore's weapon systems are noticeably in advance over, say, those of the Solarian League at this point in time.

Roger goes on to admit that none of the Space Lords are bad guys and gals. As he puts it, they're patriotic, they're trying to do the right thing, it's just that they're all heavily bought into this model of the RMN as a commerce protection fleet armed with (mostly) light starships for patrolling the spacelanes, protecting freighters, and busting pirate heads. Some of them (like Sir Robert Hemphill) are frankly afraid of change, and most of them don't perceive the rising power of Haven as being Manticore's problem.

Then Roger starts talking about the strategic problem Manticore faces if it eventually wants to go toe-to-toe with Haven. Specifically, they can't.

"...like I said in that first letter... we can't go toe-to-toe with the kind of navy Nouveau Paris can build if it really puts its mind to it. We're a hell of a lot richer on a per-capita basis than almost anyone else in the galaxy, but we're just not big enough, and unless we want to start conquering people ourselves, there's no way we're going to get big enough in the time I'm afraid we've got."

His mouth twisted as if he'd bitten into something sour.

Haven has already conquered about a dozen star systems by this point, and most or all of them have enough industrial and economic muscle to contribute significantly to Haven's military strength. Manticore can't outbuild them now, even if it could have matched their buildup back when it first started, which is possible but uncertain.

"We've got what's probably the biggest, most efficient single-system shipbuilding infrastructure in known space, but it's overwhelmingly oriented around building civilian ships for private owners. Hephaestus and Vulcan can churn out freighters like nobody's business, but we don't have the scale of military building capacity Haven's already built up, and all of your reports suggest they're still increasing that capacity while we still haven't even started increasing ours yet. And even if that weren't true, they're getting bigger with every system they gobble up. Even with the BLS's drain on their economy, they'll probably be able to lay down at least twice as many ships as we'll be able to, especially when we're stuck with peacetime budgetary constraints and they're already operating on a war footing.

I would note on the side that it's not as if every one of the systems Haven conquers contributes that much to their military strength, given that the Havenites don't manage to outnumber Manticore by dozens to one or anything ridiculous like that at the start of the war. What I think they're really doing is letting the PRH keep the economy of the capital planet, and a few other industrial centers, ticking over while those industrial centers churn out warships in numbers that would be greatly excessive for any single-system polity. They do this by effectively strip-mining the economies of some of the conquered nations to support the war-footing economies of their core shipyard systems, as well as the BLS stipends on Haven itself.

In the long term this is a crappy idea, but it seems to work for them in the 19th century PD, probably because they keep absorbing new systems fast enough that it doesn't really matter if they can take a developed star system and reduce it to "Second Galaxy" or even "Third Galaxy" levels of wealth in a generation- within the span of a generation they will have absorbed a few dozen more systems to do it all over again, while still being able to support the handful of shipyard systems (and Haven's Dolists) they need to keep going.

"We've got to build up our wall of battle, but even if Parliament was willing to give you [Queen Samantha and Sir Abner] the budgets you're asking for, we still couldn't match the People's Navy's numbers. That means we've got to have qualitative superiority, and enough of it to offset their numerical superiority... we've got to find a way besides sheer tonnage to give us that qualitative edge, which is why I say Dame Carrie [head of BuWeaps] is more conservative than I'd really like. I think we need to be pushing the envelope, working to find some kind of technological equalizer, and she's not really in favor of blue-sky concepts.

Roger goes on to say that Carrie Lomax's view is understandable, quoting her as saying about Samothrace that "A ship of the wall is too important, too big a financial investment and too big a piece of our Navy's combat potential, to be an experiment." Roger observes that it is Lomax's job to avoid arming the fleet with a mix of weapons that don't actually work as planned (say, with a horde of light cruisers armed with grav lances... ). Her big weakness, in Roger's eyes, is that she doesn't seriously believe that a single-system nation like Manticore can realistically hope to invent any new weapons technology that the Solarian League hasn't already figured out.

[quote-"p.33"]"And you seriously think we could push farther and faster' than the League?" Samantha asked.

"I think we damned well better find out whether or not we can, Mom..."[/quote]

---

The next scene takes place in September 1850 PD. Roger has been reassigned to BuWeaps as planned. Admiral Lomax meets her, and basically tells him to cut the nonsense about how "he's not here to make waves," she's perfectly aware that he has Ideas about the future of the RMN, that he's not just one more lieutenant commander, that he's probably got a reason for getting himself transferred here in the first place, and that this is probably going to give her some headaches. Given some of the other people already working for her, she's got experience with headaches, as we'll see in a moment.

Commander Winton, I'd like you to meet Commander Adcock," Lomax said a bit dryly. "I think you're going to be working for him. Jonas, Commander Winton. I'm sure you're likely to recognize him from the HD and the 'faxes, but we're not supposed to know who he is. Or, since we actually have working brains, we're supposed to pretend we don't know who he is."

Her expression was humorous, but something in her blue eyes made it plain she was serious, and Adcock nodded. Then he turned to Roger and extended his right hand. "Welcome aboard... Commander Winton," he said.

We meet Jonas Adcock, who turns into Roger III's right-hand man for weapons development.

Moving on, we discover that this is the first time Adcock has met a treecat in his life, that he's an immigrant to Manticore who has trouble with the whole concept of monarchy being a leeeetle outside his comfort zone, and that the Wintons have learned from experience that it's best to establish normal working relations with commoners around them right off the bat, as a way to avoid "an ass-kisser screwing everything up at some point."

Adcock's lips twitched and he shook his head.

"I don't think you'll have that particular problem in our shop, Commander. Since at the moment, 'our shop' consists of you, me, a young fellow named Sebastian D'Orville, and half a dozen enlisted personnel."

Adcock reveals that the office Roger's been transferred to is a very tiny thing that sounds like some random makework. However, the reality is that Adcock got thrown out of BuShips for being too radical, and transferred to BuWeaps when it was under Lomax's very conservative predecessor. He then proceeds to "brief [Roger] fully" on what his little office actually does. It turns out that Lomax is sensible enough not to openly push for radical new weapons concepts when her bosses at the top are hostile to the concept- we learn here that Sir Frederick Truman has squashed the idea of building more of the Samothrace-class superdreadnoughts, at least for the moment. But she does want to actually make sure R&D goes on regardless.

So she's created "what she's rather grandiloquently dubbed the 'Concept Development Office.'" That is, Adcock and his small staff, who don't show up on the organizational charts, don't have an actual research budget Lomax would have to fight over, and don't get to play with hardware at the moment. But they do get to go on a five X year mission to explore strange new worlds seek out new life and new civilizations boldly read technical journals that no Manticoran has read before!

More precisely, they're engaged in extensive research and review of the existing literature on weapons, ONI's technical reports on foreign developments, the reports of RMN reservists on merchant ships, the files on every R&D program the BuWeaps is actually allowed to work on, the files of the programs they weren't allowed to work on, and the military and technical journals of Manticore, Beowulf, and the League as a whole.

And the reason we're doing that, Commander Winton, is because it's our job to look at everything whatever the source, and to assume nothing about practicality or feasibility until we've put it under a microscope and looked at it molecule by molecule. For example, this-" he tapped the reader on his desk- "is Aberu and Harmon's internal report on that 'laser head' they tested back in '33. the Sollies turned it down, and I can see why, based on the tests. But we're not going to simply take their word for how useless it was, because that's our job: to come up with blue-sky ideas, concepts, possibilities... for brand-new research projects. Off the books ideas and concepts that Dame Carrie doesn't have to fight with Admiral Truman or Admiral Low Delhi about because none of them are official... it's just possible we might turn up a few worthwhile nuggets, while we're at it. And I wouldn't be so very surprised, actually, knowing Dame Carrie as well as I do, if she didn't see your assignment to our little workshop as a way to generate friends in high places- possibly even very high places- when the time comes to dust off some of these more preposterous ideas and see what happens."

Laser heads? Pfffft! Those'll never amount to anything!

So this is the embryonic form of the Manticoran superweapon-building establishment- three officers and a double handful of staffers doing a review of the literature. Obviously these guys aren't responsible for inventing the laser head, the modern pod, the MDM, or any of the other stuff that lets Manticore stage its missile massacres with depressing regularity. But they were the 'think tank' that brought a lot of those ideas to the attention of BuWeaps' scientists and engineers, so that later someone would have a coherent report to dust off and know where to start looking when it was their turn to design laser heads or the like.

---

The next scene takes place about two years later in 1852 PD, beginning with Roger saying to Adcock "Jonas, have you seen this article on fusion bottle density?" Jonas Adcock then introduces Prince Roger to his sister, Angelique. Roger falls head over heels pretty fast, so does she. There's some joking back and forth.

On Page 43 Roger reflects that Adcock has a remarkable gift for synthesizing different ideas and developments into a workable whole. It is revealed that the Adcocks are immigrants from a system called Maslow, which was located in the general neighborhood of Haven. It is also revealed that the Queen's Own shadows members of the royal family and monitors people closely on a routine basis, no surprises there if you know about the shenanigans the Secret Service gets up to.

Samantha, aware of how much Roger had discovered he liked Adcock, had refused to take their [security's] advice without discussing the situation with Roger, first, and that was how Roger had come to know that Jonas Adcock's family was from the Maslow System, deep in the Haven Quadrant. In fact, Maslow had been a staunch ally of the Republic of Haven for over three hundred T-years, and in light of Haven's current expansionism, the mere notion of the heir associating with a Maslowan expatriate had produced instant paranoia within the bowels of Palace Security.

Roger sticks up for Adcock, pointing out that Adcock's background gives him zero (or less than zero) probability of being a Havenite spy. Maslow was busily emulating Haven's social policies in the 1700s...

Nor had it helped that professionals like Sebastian Adcock [Jonas's father] had been given the chance to see the writing on the Havenite wall. In particular, they'd seen the Republic's Technical Conservation Act of 1778, which had classified an entire series of professions and skill sets as "national assets" and made any attempt to emigrate by someone who possessed them an act of treason. The TCA had been Haven's answer to its economy's steady hemorrhaging of people with marketable skills as that economy crunched into decline, and more than one Maslowan professional had feared their own government would follow suit, probably sooner, rather than later...

Maslow had, indeed, passed its own Technical Conservation Act in 1815. Sebastian Adcock had become a "national resource" who had no right to use his skills and abilities except as directed by his government.

Not even Palace Security or the SIS had been able to determine exactly how the Adcocks managed it, but two years later, in 1817, Sebastian, Annette, and their four children... had reached Manticore. How they'd gotten out of Maslow was a mystery, and one they'd refused to discuss with anyone, which led Roger to suspect there were people still on Maslow who'd helped them. But what was clear was that they'd left everything they owned behind, arriving in the Star Kingdom literally with nothing more than the clothing on their backs.

Jonas Adcock proceeded to study really hard and get into the RMN's naval academy at Saganami Island; his father started as a laborer on Hephaestus, one of Manticore's major orbital industrial centers, and thirty years later he was running the place. Impressive, huh?

Anyway, we see a few bits here on Haven's politics. Well before even THIS story starts, Haven was obviously enacting oppressive Soviet-style measures to preserve its base of educated technical specialists, and some of the surrounding star nations were following suit. One speculates that this sort of thing would tend to discourage people from pursuing careers in technical fields in Havenite space. It also has the effect of making a lot of technical specialists either try to flee or get arrested and thrown into gulags while trying to do so. Both outcomes are equally bad from the point of view of maintaining Haven's technical base. Plus, it is at least suggested that there are quite a lot of immigrant "ex-Havenites" who escape to Manticore or other systems on the periphery of Haven's sphere of influence, which would in turn tend to jump-start their technical bases, much as all the physicists who came to America as refugees from fascism helped jump-start the Manhattan Project.

Talk about your backfires. Of course, as part of their overall sweep of aggression, Haven absorbs/conquers Maslow as well...

Not, unfortunately, without a certain degree of bloodshed among Maslowans who didn't want to become Havenites. That much had leaked out before the news blackout slammed down completely. No open reports were getting out at this point, but Manticoran intelligence still had some assets on the planet, and Roger suspected that he knew more about just how ugly the situation on Jonas' original homeworld actually was at the moment than Jonas himself did.

Ouch. Haven clamps down a harsh internal security regime on its conquests (literally, the organization is called "Internal Security," or InSec for short). This appears to include all the usual Gestapo/KGB/Stasi crap, networks of informants, bugs, executions of dissidents, and so on.

The Legislaturalists spent sixty years building up InSec into a rather terrifying organ of oppression. When Pierre overthrows them, of course, he reorganizes and purges it to the new "State Security." StateSec is basically a case of "meet the new boss, same as the old boss," including in many cases the same actual thugs still working for the new organization. The main difference is the change in leadership, and the ability of StateSec to punish and kill military officers in a way InSec never could. And of course that StateSec will bellow revolutionary slogans in your ear while administering your regularly scheduled state-mandated beating, instead of just beating you.

Fast-forward a month or two...

---

"-So I'm afraid I can't quite agree with you there, My Lord," Roger Winton said politely, looking across the palatial conference table at Jackson Denham, the Baron of Seawell and the Star Kingdom's Chancellor of the Exchequer.

"Indeed, your Highness?" Seawell arched his eyebrows, then let his eyes flick very briefly... toward the head of the table before he focused intensely on Roger's expression "I'm afraid I don't follow your logic. Perhaps you could explain it a bit more clearly?"

Roger made himself smile calmly, despite a frisson of anger. He kept his own eyes on Seawell, without so much as a glance in his mother's direction.

"I'm not questioning your current figures, My Lord," he said. "My problem is with your projected future numbers. Specifically, the ones you're showing for trade in the Haven Quadrant. I think the underlying assumptions are far too optimistic given what we've seen out of the People's Republic's current economy."

"Those assumptions are based on quite a few decades of computer time, Your Highness," Seawell pointed out. "And the analysis they support is the product of some highly experienced analysts."

[Roger thinks nasty thoughts about how stupid Seawell is and how biased his analysts must be]

"I understand that, My Lord, but I'd also like to point out that everything coming out of our human intelligence sources in the People's Republic suggests Haven is in the process of adopting highly protectionist economic policies, and I don't see any mention of that in this analysis." He tapped the display in front of him, still smiling pleasantly. "Instead, it assumes current trend lines will continue, rather than dip sharply, and I think that's highly unlikely. According to Dame Allice's current figures, for example, our carrying trade to the People's Republic has fallen by almost nine percent over just the last three quarters. Would you care to comment on that, Dame Alice?"

Roger is starting to attend political meetings along with his mother. Also, we see that Haven is adopting protectionist policies; in particular, they're in the process of nationalizing their independent shipping lines, and locking Manticoran merchant traffic out of Havenite space. Since the Manties themselves make no bones about how their merchant ships full of naval reservists are among their greatest intelligence assets, somehow I'm not surprised.

But that's just a side-effect of an overall Havenite shift toward a sort of interstellar mercantilist economy. They're deliberately closing out foreign sources of goods and services from their conquered subject-planets, to force the subject-planets to rely on goods produced by their core industrial worlds. Which is a big part of their policy of 'looting' the conquered systems, and thus maintaining the productive economies they need in their core systems to keep the overall structure running... and keep paying the BLS to the very large population of Haven itself.

After the meeting, Samantha compliments Roger on how well he handled the meeting. Roger looks at his mother...

Roger smiled, but there was a carefully hidden darkness behind the smile as he looked at his mother. She'd aged noticeably over the last couple of years, and something inside him raged at her increasing frailty, the slight bend in her spine that defied everything the doctors could do. It wasn't right- it wasn't fair!- for her to be visibly fading in front of him when she was barely thirty T-years older than he was.

More consequences of prolong. Roger is about 44, and can expect to live for a couple more centuries, barring accident. His mother is around 75, and all the geriatric advances of two thousand years in the future notwithstanding, old age is catching up with her.

He also reflects grimly that treecats tend not to survive their human partner's deaths- they commit suicide out of grief instead. This means that partnering with humans prior to around 1820 PD was a death sentence for the treecat, because treecat natural life expectancies are much longer than those of humans. Prolong changes this.

Their conversation goes on, though. Samantha and Roger reflect that Haven's thuggish occupation practices and continuing conquests make it harder and harder for people to deny that Haven is a threat to someone, even if it's no threat to Manticore in particular.

Also, more comments on how the unelected nature of the House of Lords means that it's easier for the Manticoran political parties to wind up with foolish leadership. Because the core of a party's strength is usually in the Lords, it doesn't really matter if they screw up or do something dumb, because their support base in the Lords is still there. Elected politicians have to be cannier about this sort of thing.

One consequence of this is that the 'sensible' faction in Manticoran politics has to endlessly refight the same battles, with the same people, over the same issues. Because no matter how many times an idea is discredited in Manticoran politics, it never really dies until there are no longer enough votes in the House of Lords to support it.

That's a thing I've largely forgotten in the years since I read the series intensively is just how much Manticore's political hierarchy handicapped it. It's pretty clear that after the end of the Pierre regime, the reborn Republic of Haven probably has the better government!

The fact that Leonard Shumate, the Earl of Thompson, was Prime Minister instead of Cromarty [yes, that Cromarty- SJ] was a demonstration of that unhappy truth. Roger had nothing against Thompson. In fact, he liked the earl a great deal, and Thompson was a Crown Loyalist... putting together a majority in the House of Lords- essential for any prime minister- had required some unhappy horsetrading. That was how Jackson Denham had ended up as Chancellor of the Exchequer, traditionally the second most powerful seat in the Cabinet, and how Alfredo Maxwell, a Liberal, had ended up as Home Secretary while a Centrist like Dame Alice had been forced to settle for Trade.

Shifts in the Manticoran cabinet. The monarchy can't get the cabinet they wish they had, because with three major and two minor political parties, all with significant representation in the Lords, it is practically impossible to form anything but a coalition government. As a result, the Liberal and Conservative parties can usually get senior members as cabinet officials of just about any government, even a nominally Centrist/Crown Loyalist one with results ranging from "consensus politics good" to "gridlock and idiots in high places bad."

But at least we got White Haven as First Space Lord. That's something, he told himself.

This is Murdoch Alexander, father to Hamish Alexander, who we meet in the main series. This White Haven is a very determined, stubborn man, but he's intelligent and has a good grasp of strategy, Roger thinks...

Or it's closer to mine, at least. Of course, that's the dictionary definition of "better," isn't it?

That thought brought him a much-needed chuckle, and he grinned at his mother...

Roger is not entirely without a sense of humor regarding his own tendency to think people who disagree with him are stupid.

...his mother agreed [with something else]. "I just hope the Havenites give us the time for it, Roger."

"It's going to be a while yet," Roger told her, and she looked at him. She let him see the worry in her eyes, and he smiled gently. She'd been worrying about it too long, he thought. And she was afraid she was going to run out of time- that she was going to run out of time- before she accomplished everything her responsibilities to her kingdom required of her.

"We've got at least another twenty or thirty T-years, I think," he continued. "That's part of the problem, actually. The people who want to pretend the sky isn't falling can do exactly what Janacek and Truman have been doing for the last ten or twelve T-years and point out that there's no immediate threat. The problem is they keep acting as if we've got some kind of unlimited savings account of time. That if the threat isn't 'immediate' right this moment we'll always have time to prepare before it becomes 'immediate.'" He shook his head, then shrugged. "The good news is that we're starting to get the people we need in place to do something about it. Like Admiral White Haven and Admiral Lomax."

Ongoing shift in the high command of the RMN, and a reflection on the nature of long term grand strategic planning. Also the nature of military preparations; mobilization takes time, and you can't pull a well-equipped military out of your back pocket to confront a new threat in a matter of seconds.

If anything, Roger is underestimating how much time it'll take for Haven to directly threaten Manticore, although a really major crisis does take place around 25 years later, so he's not totally off base.

Roger and Samantha go on to discuss Roger's relationship with Angelique Adcock. We learn several things:

-The Winton dynasty has a customary requirement that the crown prince(ss) always marry a commoner, not an aristocrat. This arguably does a lot to preserve their popularity with the general public.
-Angelique Adcock has serious misgivings about marrying the King. Not Roger Winton, the King. Because that entails living in a publicity fishbowl, more or less giving up her career ambitions for the full time job of Queen Consort, et cetera. Also because she's afraid of somehow becoming an embarrassment or a problem for Roger. The Mantie equivalent of the tabloids is Not Helping with this.

Anyway, I think I'll leave it at that. Next time, we run into a couple of familiar characters, in an unfamiliar capacity...

[Batman]

The 'marry a commoner' bit has been with the series pretty much from the start of it.
And while I know we're talking half a century, the Manty military buildup between those stories and the main novel lines seems extreme. Of course the paucity of the RMN barely noticeable probably made of rice paper partitionswall of battle does so too, compared to the fleet numbers we see later in the series.