Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington

[Mr Bean]

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.

The kick off if I recall is the attack on Trevor's Star. It was the big assault on a star system that wanted nothing to do with Haven and who fled to open space and via the Junction in 1880 PD. It's a plot point back in the 90's that the people who escaped from the assault on Trevor's star wanted nothing more than to go after Haven but they took twenty years between this very obvious your next Manticore to assaulting Manticore itself.

*Edit
Also Trevor's Star was supposedly far more brutal than Haven was expecting. Had they kept going on to Manticore they could have taken them.

[Simon_Jester]

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.

By the end of the buildup they are laying down several new capital ships a year- which is easily enough to build up a fleet of a few hundred such ships in half a century. The same book I'm quoting actually lists the service duration of pretty much every ship class in the RMN during the war, although it doesn't make it explicit during what years they were under construction.

Based on what we see and can infer, the 1850 RMN had 14 dreadnoughts, 4 superdreadnoughts, and 11 ancient battleships. Two squadrons of the wall (allowing for downtime for a few ships in refit) probably IS enough to defeat any probable direct attack on the home system. Remember that the RMN didn't actually expect to be attacked by any major regional power. And that for that matter, none of the other regional powers actually have a large fleet with lots of multimillion ton capital ships, except for Haven which only just got around to building them.

Two squadrons of the wall represents an atypically high investment in ships for a single-system polity in the Honorverse that does not expect to be attacked. The Manticorans could afford to build more, but simply do not have any serious strategic threat that justifies doing so until, oh... 1820-1830 PD at the earliest.

Also remember that they no doubt had a host of battlecruisers, cruisers, and destroyers for the commerce protection and raiding roles, which would have increased total fleet tonnage noticeably. Sure, they wouldn't be too effective against enemy ships of the wall, but no one in the quadrant had that many ships of the wall until the Havenites went conquistador.

So major buildup of dreadnoughts has to wait until Roger takes the throne in 1857; the fall of Trevor's Star and the coronation of Elizabeth III just accelerates the process. And that acceleration might have happened anyway, since a big part of what Roger had to do was spend a decade or two to build up infrastructure that would allow him to get capital ships in a hurry. The RMN needed more experience designing the things, and they needed to physically construct the yard facilities to build more of them faster.

[Batman]

We're talking about going from 14DDs and 4SDs in 1850 to 188SDs and 121DDs in 1904 (as per the 1994 version of 'Short and Victorious War') and as you said yourself that's after eventual King Roger pushed through the construction of both the necessary infrastructure and the ships themselves.

[Simon_Jester]

By convention, dreadnoughts are "DN," but yeah.

Put it this way. The real Royal Navy was laying down five or six capital ships a year in the years immediately prior to World War One. This was a pretty intensive commitment, but they could actually have done more in theory, had they worked over time to expand their building capacity along with laying down ships in existing yards.

Start with 5 ships/year as a baseline...

Now, the first wave of capital ship production after Roger's accession to the throne, not counting a few minor projects like building a few more Samothraces, started in 1867 PD. That gives the Manticorans a period of roughly 35 years of laying down ships, and 300 ships to build.

At an average rate starting at something like five and culminating in something like twelve capital ships laid down per year, this is actually attainable. Just as an arbitrary example:

5 ships each year for 5 years = 25
6 ships each year for 5 years = 30
7 ships each year for 5 years = 35
8 ships each year for 5 years = 40
9 ships each year for 5 years = 45
10 ships each year for 5 years = 50
11 ships each year for 5 years = 55

Total is 280 ships, in 35 years, which puts us pretty close to what Manticore actually built. What matters is getting a serious, dedicated start on construction- this is the part where Roger III had to bust some heads politically, as we see. Once the building program had momentum on its side, keeping up a gradual expansion just isn't that much of a problem.

[Batman]

That presumes all those ships are finished in the year they're laid down, but given that an assumed average build time of 4 years (I seem to dimly recall that for SDs from somewhere in the main books) merely extends that schedule to 39 years, yes, not all that outrageous.
It's just that when you look at those figures side-by-side (1850 vs 1904) it looks pretty preposterous at first glance.
And yes, DN, my bad.
You do have to admit that if those had been DDs the RMN would be in pretty dire shape

[Mr Bean]

Don't forget the RMN has the yard space and experience in building super dreadnaught sized vessels. At least super freighters that big.

[Batman]

The question was never if Manticore could build SDs. They obviously could by the time of the War given they turned them out by the numbers up to and including podnoughts, my sole problem was with the at first glance (to me, anyway) extreme discrepancy in DN/SDN numbers between 'I shall build my House of Steel' and the numbers given in 'A short Victorious War'. Manticore's ability to build those kinds of ships I never questioned, I was just somewhat unconvinced they could do so at a rate to explain that discrepancy.

[Mr Bean]

The question was never if Manticore could build SDs. They obviously could by the time of the War given they turned them out by the numbers up to and including podnoughts, my sole problem was with the at first glance (to me, anyway) extreme discrepancy in DN/SDN numbers between 'I shall build my House of Steel' and the numbers given in 'A short Victorious War'. Manticore's ability to build those kinds of ships I never questioned, I was just somewhat unconvinced they could do so at a rate to explain that discrepancy.

Keep in mind the shame slips can be converted between the two. Manticore has the option to slow down or stop super freighter construction for more SDs.

That's the point I was aiming for.

[Batman]

Ah. Okay. That makes more sense now, so thank you.
I'm not sure I agree with that though. Tonnage isn't the only limiting factor on what a shipyard can and can not turn out. While wet navy/space analogies are always iffy at best, there's plenty of commercial ships (usually crude oil tankers) that equal if not outright dwarf the US' vaunted supercarriers at least tonnage-wise, there's scarce shipyards that can actually build carriers because they have completely different design requirements. The may have plenty of slips sized for SDs, if and when they get production of SD components underway, that's all.

[Mr Bean]

Ah. Okay. That makes more sense now, so thank you.
I'm not sure I agree with that though. Tonnage isn't the only limiting factor on what a shipyard can and can not turn out. While wet navy/space analogies are always iffy at best, there's plenty of commercial ships (usually crude oil tankers) that equal if not outright dwarf the US' vaunted supercarriers at least tonnage-wise, there's scarce shipyards that can actually build carriers because they have completely different design requirements. The may have plenty of slips sized for SDs, if and when they get production of SD components underway, that's all.

Except space is identical since what do you need to build in space...
Area to hold the materials, crew quarters and the tools to move things around. The reason why earth shipyards can't turn from crude oil tankers has to do with training, experts on hand, the facilities to transfer the amount of material required and the storage space onsite. And the specialized training that comes from handling armory grade steel VS container ship style steel. The wielding is totally different the fitting is totally different.

Manticore lacks many of this issue since the metallurgy has advanced to the point you might as well build everything out of the same material. Sure battle craft are going to have honeycomb layered armor and all the fittings might require special training but hell Manticore has gotten to the point in the future that schooling ends in your mid to late twenties plus advanced schooling.

Minor point, think about that... twenty years of schooling. Starting at six and running to twenty six years old as the expected standard PLUS college or specialist school which is another four years to twelve years.

*Edit
I'm wandering off topic, short version...
Manticore has the existing materials and trained personnel to churn out at least sixty superdreadnaught hulls a year with the ability to finish those hulls with something other than just the basic exteriors and the engines dependent on how massive the training program.

[CaptainChewbacca]

My ability to do technical analysis isn't as great as whats here, but I just wanted to say that I really appreciate the discussions going on in this thread.

[Simon_Jester]

That presumes all those ships are finished in the year they're laid down, but given that an assumed average build time of 4 years (I seem to dimly recall that for SDs from somewhere in the main books) merely extends that schedule to 39 years, yes, not all that outrageous.
It's just that when you look at those figures side-by-side (1850 vs 1904) it looks pretty preposterous at first glance.

It looks preposterous, but on the other hand we tend to forget just how much you can get done in fifty years if you're determined.

The question was never if Manticore could build SDs. They obviously could by the time of the War given they turned them out by the numbers up to and including podnoughts, my sole problem was with the at first glance (to me, anyway) extreme discrepancy in DN/SDN numbers between 'I shall build my House of Steel' and the numbers given in 'A short Victorious War'. Manticore's ability to build those kinds of ships I never questioned, I was just somewhat unconvinced they could do so at a rate to explain that discrepancy.

The previous rate of construction (average of something like one capital ship per decade for centuries) was the product of not really giving a shit, and there being no realistic threat that needed anything much bigger than a battlecruiser to cope with. There's at least one place later in the companion volume where it says that having even one squadron of battleships/dreadnoughts/whatever instantly catapults you into being one of the top few dozen fleets in human space. The Manticorans as of 1800 PD have two squadrons of very large capital ships, plus about one and a half more of old and 'small' ones that only weigh two million tons (still more than, say, an entire squadron of cruisers).

That makes them pretty badass by the standards of the people in their own neighborhood, and way too strong for anybody in their right mind to try and tackle head-on. They can afford to be complacent.

However, the 1800 PD standards are those of nations which are not engaged in dedicated military buildups and which are not prepared to fight total wars against each other. In the 1850-1900 timeframe the rules change, and suddenly the Manticorans get serious about building capital ships.

Ah. Okay. That makes more sense now, so thank you.
I'm not sure I agree with that though. Tonnage isn't the only limiting factor on what a shipyard can and can not turn out. While wet navy/space analogies are always iffy at best, there's plenty of commercial ships (usually crude oil tankers) that equal if not outright dwarf the US' vaunted supercarriers at least tonnage-wise, there's scarce shipyards that can actually build carriers because they have completely different design requirements. The may have plenty of slips sized for SDs, if and when they get production of SD components underway, that's all.

Which is why they don't actually get all that many capital ships laid down in the first ten years or so of Roger III's buildup. And why the mobilization doesn't really hit full stride until after Elizabeth III takes the throne, something like 15-20 years after that.

In 1850 PD, Manticore could probably turn out one or two dreadnought-sized ships a year if it really tried, which it isn't. In 1870, that number has not improved much, or only to 3-4 a year. In 1890 it's gotten quite a lot better, and by 1900 they can manage something like 12 a year or more.

[Simon_Jester]

OK. Next scene of I Will Build My House Of Steel, set in March 1855 PD.

"I'm telling you, Roger, she's brilliant, we agree on that, all right?! But she knows she's brilliant, and she has about as much tact as... as..."

Jonas Adcock shook his head, obviously unable to come up with the simile he wanted, then threw up both hands.

"Hell, she doesn't have any tact! In fact, I don't think she's ever even heard the word!"

"Now, now, Jonas!" Roger shook his own head reprovingly. "You know perfectly well she has to have heard the word used at least in passing as much as, oh, two or three times just at the Island!"

"Then she sure as hell wasn't paying attention." Adcock growled.

Sonja Hemphill, but now fifty years younger and more fiery than we see her in On Basilisk Station.

"Should I assume from your obvious despair that she's... stepped on someone's toes again?"

"I'm astonished young Alexander didn't wring her neck," Adcock said bluntly. "Or that the two of them didn't spend their lunch hour down at the dueling grounds, for that matter!"

Several factoids. One is that "young Alexander" is the future Earl of White Haven, also about fifty years younger and more fiery.

We see evidence that the rivalry between Hemphill and White Haven has been going for a long, long time, which helps to explain White Haven's initial refusal to accept that Hemphill's Weapons Development Board had come up with a revolution in military affairs with Ghost Rider, the MDM, and the pod-launcher combatant.

Also, yet more references to dueling in Manticoran society. Oi.

Roger asks what the hell happened:

"The usual," Adcock sighed. "Mind you, this time it was all Sonja's own fault. Not that she was prepared to admit it! She ran into him when he dropped by Section Thirteen to discuss the latest 'burn' settings on the Mark Ten."

He paused, raising his eyebrows, and Roger nodded his understanding. Section Thirteen was internal Navy-speak for "Bureau of Weapons, Missile Development Command, Warhead Division," which happened to be housed in Section 13-065-9 of HMSS Hephaestus, and the Mark Ten was the latest-generation heavy shipkiller warhead of the RMN. Like all such modern weapons, it could be used in 'boom' or 'burn' mode: as a contact nuke or as a sidewall 'burner,' designed to take down that critical defense before warships closed for the decisive energy duel. The Mark Ten was a very advanced warhead- markedly superior to current-generation Solarian warheads, in fact- which had raised the standoff range in sidewall-burning mode to almost eleven thousand kilometers.

Observations:

1) We see that even in 1855, the RMN bases important military R&D facilities on the Star Kingdom's great orbital stations. This will remain true for the decades to come, and prove very important over the long haul.

2) We see that Manticore already has at least one type of weapon which is superior to its Solarian counterpart: the standoff attack mode of its nuclear-tipped missiles. Reading between the lines, the Sollies probably haven't bothered to push development of their missile warheads all that aggressively, at least not in the big capital-ship missiles used only by their (generally mothballed) Battle Fleet. Since the 1800s were a period of radical advances in nuclear warhead design, this kind of kicks them in the balls later on.

3) Discussion of "sidewall burner" missiles. Given what I know about nuclear weapon design, I'd say that the "sidewall burner" is the direct logical ancestor of the laser head- a shaped nuclear charge, apparently one making use of gravitics to allow the nuclear blast to be shaped to a degree far beyond what we could achieve today by normal means. Thus, essentially the whole blast of the nuclear warhead can be bent into a highly directional jet, which can slam into the (~100 km wide) sidewall of a starship from about ten thousand kilometers away.

We also see that this is expected to stand at least a realistic chance of knocking down starship sidewalls, which strongly implies that you can 'burn down' a sidewall if you pump enough raw energy into it. However, since these are roughly hundred-megaton nuclear bombs we're talking about, and even in 1855 a typical capital starship fires them in broadsides of 20 or 30, and since this is still not expected to reliably knock down the sidewalls of enemy ships before the fleets close to energy range... well, we can reasonably estimate the firepower needed to knock down a sidewall as being in the gigatons, I think. Multiple, repeated strikes by sidewall burners would probably be needed. Not good.

The focusing can also be switched off to give a more or less omnidirectional nuclear blast, the "boom" mode, but this requires getting much much closer to the target, which means charging straight into the teeth of the enemy's missile defenses. Not good.

This is somewhat unsatisfying from the point of view of the missileer, because it means missile barrages are still a very indecisive weapon. Shipboard beam weapons are more decisive, because their focused beams of energy can actually penetrate straight through a sidewall and deliver an effective, destructive beam to the ship underneath it.

Now, is there a way to combine the force of a nuclear warhead and the range of the missile carrying it, with the tight-focused intense beams associated with shipboard energy weapons? Let's find out...

"Well, Sonja was over there to see Commander Mavroudis about something completely separate, but she overheard the question and made some remark about how 'obsolescent' dual mode warheads are becoming."

Obviously Hemphill must have thought they were getting obsolete for a reason. I wonder why...

[Adcock] looked at Roger again, this time expressionlessly, and Roger groaned.

"Tell me she didn't say anything about Python!" he begged.

"No," Adcock said judiciously. "Not in so many words, anyway. But she'd said enough to make Alexander curious, and he asked her what she was talking about. At which point she realized she wasn't supposed to be talking about Python to anyone- Mavroudis was doing everything but send her semaphore messages from behind Alexander's back to shut up about it- and fell back on simply giving him a smug, Sonja, I-know-something-you-don't-know look. Which convinced him she didn't have a clue what she was talking about- that it was just Sonja being Sonja again- and he made a relatively scathing observation about people who happened to be obsessed with shiny toys and what a pity it was they couldn't expend the same amount of mental effort on weapons, instead."

"Oh, Lord."

Roger's tone was almost mild, his expression that of a man watching two ground cars slide unstoppably toward each other on a sheet of ice, and Adcock chuckled sourly.

Project Python was a top secret effort being pursued by Section Thirteen with very quiet, under-the-radar input from the Concept Development Office's researchers. Based on the original, failed effort by Abreu and Harmon, a Solarian defense contractor, Python represented an attempt to develop a workable "laser head:" a weapon which would generate bomb-pumped X-ray lasers and punch them straight through sidewalls from far greater standoff ranges than any sidewall burner had yet attained. If it worked, it would enhance the lethality of missile combat enormously and offer the possibility of radically altering accepted tactics. Unfortunately, it was still a completely black program no one was supposed to know a thing about.

"Give her her due," Adcock said after a moment. "She obviously realized she should never have opened her mouth about it, and she wasn't about to breach security, even when Alexander whacked her up aside the head. But that doesn't mean her temper was any better than usual. She let him have it right back, and they were off to the races in a bloodbath that didn't have any one single thing to do with hardware or weapon systems anymore. One of the little drawbacks of having known each other since they were weaned, I suppose." He shook his head. "Mavroudis says it took him ten minutes to separate them... and it felt like ten hours! He also asked me if I could put her on a leash in the future."

"Oof!"

Now, I hope that "Alexander whacked her up aside the head" is metaphorical, it sounds like it and he isn't actually that violent a person in person. Plus that probably would have led to a duel. But we learn quite a number of things here.

1) In 1855, the RMN is beginning to work on a top-secret project to build a working laser head. They're not there yet but they're getting there.

2) This program is a very classified military secret, and Hemphill is in on it.

3) Hemphill is professional enough to catch her mistake and avoid saying anything about the classified program. Granted, this is a pretty low standard, but there it is.

4) Hemphill already has a habit of getting a superior attitude toward people around her, and Alexander/White Haven finds this totally infuriating.

5) Being Manticoran aristocrats, Hemphill and Alexander have known each other not just since the naval academy, but since childhood, or so it seems. So their rivalry goes waaaay back. This kind of thing is a very real problem in the RMN, and for that matter in real life militaries, so there it is.


In the following paragraphs, we find out that Commander Sebastian D'Orville, Hemphill's superior officer on the Concept Development Office staff, gave her a very firm talking-to, and that he doesn't much like her either. Come to think of it, this D'Orville is the same guy who commands Home Fleet in those 1900 exercises where he schools Hemphill and repeatedly 'blows up' Honor's grav lance cruiser Fearless.

There's some more snippy stuff about how Janacek is an evil idiot who opposes capital ship construction, that he's being catty about Alexander's advancement through the ranks of the officer corps, and that Alexander is getting increasingly pissed off about this.

Note that Hemphill and Alexander BOTH have a father or grandfather with prominent standing in the fleet. Hemphill is even Janacek's first cousin. Nepotism is a serious problem in the RMN, and it is fortunate that some of their military 'dynasties' tend to produce competent officers, or they'd have been pretty much screwed in the war with Haven.

Yadda yadda... after some remarks about young Hamish Alexander:

Unfortunately, his very interest in history made him far more conservative than Hemphill where the potential for a true technological "equalizer" was concerned, especially without any access to the sorts of projects Adcock's small, secretive command was contemplating. It wasn't that Alexander opposed R&D; it was simply that he felt Hemphill had far too much faith in pie-in-the-sky future super weapons which threatened to prevent concentration on the improvement of existing technologies. He'd pointed out more than once that the best was the worst enemy of the good enough, and argued that the Navy had to build innovative tactical and operational doctrines around hardware it knew was attainable if it was going to confront an opponent like the PRH. It couldn't afford to depend on stumbling across some radical transformation of war-fighting technology which had somehow managed to elude the rest of the galaxy for the past couple of T-centuries; instead (as he'd told to Sonja on more than one scathing occasion), the emphasis should be on improvement of known technologies...

The problem, Roger thought, is that we need both of them because both of them are making very valid arguments. Sonja really is too convinced she's going to come up with a silver bullet if she just throws enough ideas at the bulkhead until one of them sticks. She's not interested in how we get the best use out of the systems we've already got, because she's so confident she's going to be able to replace them with something so much better. And Hamish is too stubborn- and smart, and outside the loop of what we're looking at over here- to pin his hopes on something that may never materialize. No wonder the two of them are at each other's throats! But at least he doesn't think Sonja's a cretin with delusions of godhood the way he sees Janacek. Or not yet, anyway. I suppose that's always subject to change if this... spirited discussion of theirs goes on long enough.

Alexander will go on to become one of the leading RMN traditionalists, emphasizing tactical innovation over technical innovation- no surprise, since he knows more about tactics than about new technologies, and didn't have access to classified military R&D projects during his early career. For Hemphill it's the other way around; she's a mediocre tactician at best, but good with weapons design, and when all she has to work with is the hammer of 'invent better weapon,' every problem looks like a nail to her.

Roger and Adcock reflect on what to do with the disciplinary problem presented by Hemphill and Alexander's feud. Roger himself reflects that most of the really conservative admirals are out or heading out at the top levels of the RMN, clearing the way for people to at least try to begin coping with the Havenite threat. Or the idea that there even IS a Havenite threat.

"May I ask how your mother is?"

Adcock's voice was quiet, and Roger looked at him sharply...

"Not good," he admitted in an equally quiet voice. "We're trying to keep it as quiet as we can, but she's not responding well." His jaw tightened. "Damn it, Jonas! She's not even eighty, and we've got the best medical establishment in the damned galaxy just through the Junction at Beowulf!"

Adcock nodded silently, and Roger felt a flush of shame. Jonas was fifty-eight, already, himself... and without prolong he had perhaps another forty years of life left to look forward to.

Queen Samantha's health is starting to fail. A typical life expectancy without prolong but with the best modern medical care of 1850 PD is around 90-100 years. I suspect that 120 or 130 is the new 100, in terms of "dear god this person is old" age. Obviously prolong changes the rules.

Roger is actually unhappy at the prospect of leaving the Concept Development Office to be king, although he's obviously more upset at the prospect of his mom dying of old age when he's got like 250 years left to live, barring accidents.

The rest of the section is another meeting between Roger and Angelique Adcock. We learn that Roger's got a bodyguard detachment of the Queen's Own, who tend to monitor his surroundings. We learn that Angelique has a passion for the outdoors, which she has rekindled in Roger. And that the prospect of being Queen Consort is "a full-time job," which would basically smother Angelique's own career... but that Angelique has already decided to marry him.

It's a pity about that, not exactly the ideal of women's lib, but they really do love each other very much.

[To be fair, much the same problem applies to a Prince Consort when a queen is on the throne in Manticore, or so it seems at least. I can't recall anyone talking about Elizabeth III's husband actually doing anything interesting for a living, for example...]

[Mr Bean]

Becoming King's/Queen's consort is like become vice president without the tiny benefit of possibly becoming President yourself.

[Simon_Jester]

My impression is that it's really more like becoming First Lady (or, theoretically, First Gentleman or whatever we'd call, say, Bill if Hillary Clinton had won in 2008).

The position has no actual authority, and you can't act as a proxy for your spouse the way the vice president often acts as a proxy for the president. But it's important as a social and ceremonial thing, and if you decline to make your regularly scheduled social/ceremonial appearances you will raise a whole heap of trouble, both for yourself and for your spouse.

[Terralthra]

Well, to that, remember that while the monarch is the head of state, the PM is head of government (unlike a President, who is both). So, much of the King's or Queen's work is ceremonial, and having a proxy or proxies for that (not just the consort, mind; the Princesses and Princes are often used as such as well, c.f. Crown of Slaves) is very helpful.

[Ultonius]

I would imagine that the Crown Prince/Princess of Manticore has a role similar to that of a vice-president in a parliamentary republic: representing the head of state at ceremonial and diplomatic events when he/she is unavailable or the occasion does not require their presence.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Has anyone ever commented on the exact roles of the various Grand Duchies in the Star Empire? I believe the main partners in the original colonial expedition became the Grand Dukes of Sphynx, Gryphon, and Manticore themselves.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, to that, remember that while the monarch is the head of state, the PM is head of government (unlike a President, who is both). So, much of the King's or Queen's work is ceremonial, and having a proxy or proxies for that (not just the consort, mind; the Princesses and Princes are often used as such as well, c.f. Crown of Slaves) is very helpful.

The monarch has considerably more political power in Manticore than in real post-Victorian Britain (Victoria changed the game by having that kind of power, but declining to use it for so long that it became the 'new normal' that the monarch effectively abdicated all power over the government to her ministers).

Indeed, the balance of power in Manticore is more like that of 18th century pre-Napoleonic Britain: the monarch is a policy-maker of real, serious power (as Roger III demonstrates and his daughter continues the trend), and spends a significant fraction of their time actually governing, while the House of Lords is the dominant political arm in the state and sets the tone of political events.

That said, you're right about the ceremonial angle and the importance of proxies, you are completely right. Also, bear in mind that the monarch is a major player in policy, but has this power in no small part because the monarchy is in many ways more popular than the House of Lords. This means that having a stable, functional royal family is a direct support to the monarchy's political power- a royal divorce would hurt the monarch's popularity and therefore their political options. Roger III himself takes advantage of the opposite effect, more on that later.

[Simon_Jester]

October 1857 PD:

The last couple of months would have tried the patience of a saint, and whatever manifold virtues Roger III of Manticore might possess, sainthood was not among them...

No one was fooled, however; one look at Monroe's flattened ears and twitching tail was enough to warn even the densest that His Majesty was not amused.

Roger is now king, has been for a few months, and he's in a bad mood. Also, treecats don't conceal emotions at all well (being telepaths, it would be pointless among themselves), and tend to behave in ways that reflect the emotional state of their owner.

Allen Summervale, the Duke of Cromarty and the Star Kingdom's present Prime Minister...

Allen is in as prime minister, and will spend much of the next sixty years in that position, though not all of it. He is a fairly successful coalition-builder, and his Centrist (read: "designated right-about-Haven") Party forms the anchor of those governments.

Now he nodded a greeting to the others seated around the table- First Lord Castle Rock, Second Lord Jerome Pearce, First Space Lord White Haven, Second Space Lord Big Sky, Fourth Space Lord Lomax, and sitting at the very foot of the table, monumentally junior to everyone else present, Captain (JG) Jonas Adcock

I think this is the same list of movers and shakers the Admiralty had during the last years of Queen Samantha's reign. Also, King Roger III has Adcock present at a high-level naval staff meeting. It won't be the last time Adcock acts as a trusted consulting figure on naval matters for the royal family; in fact, Adcock will be doing that job for the rest of his natural life as far as I can remember.

Roger let Cromarty settle, then smiled (more or less)... "Allen and I have just come from a Cabinet meeting," he said in a dismayingly pleasant tone. "At that Cabinet meeting, I was informed that while everyone deeply regrets my mother's death, they're simply delighted with the superlative degree of training, insight, and experience, gained at her side, which I bring to the Throne. My ministers inform me that Parliament has total faith in my judgment and that my people's hearts are with me as I take up the weight of government. And I have personal messages from the leaders of every political party promising cooperation and support as I take up the burden of government."

He showed his teeth in what was technically a smile.

"And I can go piss up a rope as far as increasing the Navy budget is concerned."

That last line isn't literally accurate, but is a substantially accurate summary. Obviously, Roger III is going to have some tough patches to work through if he wants to build up the RMN into a force capable of squaring off against Haven for the future of the Haven Quadrant.

Also, political politicians are political.

"I'm beginning to understand, however, why there were so many times Mom just needed to vent. She didn't want anyone to offer solutions or advice; she just needed to rip off some heads- figuratively, at least- where it wouldn't do any political damage. I'm still working on that. And I've discovered there are times I really begin to regret the fact that I don't have any royal headsmen in reserve!"

Some observations:

1) The Winton family don't all have a bad temper that requires them to vent now and then, but it sure seems like all the monarchs do.
2) Actually, senior political figures in the Honorverse ALL vent like this, which may be rather realistic (think about Nixon on some of the Watergate tapes), but is also Weber's preferred device for handling exposition on political situations. Unfortunately this means that most of the political obstacles in the series are understood only through the lens of their enemies blowing off steam about them, which does NOT cast them in a good light.
3) The ruler joking about what they'd do if they were an autocrat is another recurring element. I can't remember what Pierre, who actually CAN have his political opponents shot, jokes about instead.

"All right," he said. "Allen is quite correct; no one told me outright that I can't have what I want, whatever they may have had to say about 'potentially insuperable difficulties' and the desirability of considering 'scaling back' my perhaps 'overly ambitious' plans. The short version of it is that Parliament in general and the House of Lords in particular remain unconvinced that the People's Republic of Haven poses a credible threat ot the Star Kingdom. This despite eleven T-years of steady military conquest, the creation of an old-fashioned police state that routinely 'disappears' its own citizens and 'pacifies' new conquests with pulser darts and old-fashioned torture, a covert action arm responsible for an estimated thousand assassinations and acts of 'domestic terrorism' a year to destabilize intended victims, and a steadily increasing rate of expansion. Indeed, it was pointed out to me by Mr. Lebrun- tactfully, I assure you- on behalf of the Liberal Party that the closest edge of Havenite-claimed space is still better than two hundred and fifty light-years from the Manticore Binary System. It may amaze all of you to discover that I was already in possession of this information. Oddly enough, however, neither Mr. Lebrun nor the rest of the Opposition leadership seemed to be aware that that meant the People's Republic is now less than fifty-four light years from Trevor's Star."

Trevor's Star is, as Ahriman noted, one of the endpoints of Manticore's knot of wormholes. It lies more or less on a direct line between Haven and Manticore, and I assume it was probably the biggest single portal for trade between Haven and Manticore. Probably, while we're at it, the biggest portal for trade between Haven and the Solarian League, since the easiest way to go from Haven to Sol is to hop the roughly 100 light-years to Trevor's Star, teleport 200 light-years to Manticore, teleport 475 light-years to Sigma Draconis (Beowulf), then fly the remaining 40 light-years to Sol. Handy, being able to turn a 800 light year journey into a 140 light year journey.

Obviously, Trevor's Star is of massive strategic importance to Haven; insofar as it's the shortcut to and from Haven it is also of massive strategic importance to Manticore. Anyone who controls the Trevor's Star terminus of the Junction can use it to teleport about 200 million tons of warships to the junction on literally no notice whatsoever, hence the concern. The system is currently controlled by the inhabitants of the high-gravity planet San Martin, the only habitable planet orbiting Trevor's Star, as of 1857 PD.

...Big Sky [who runs the Office of Naval Intelligence, among other things] shrugged...

"Sometimes I think some of my people haven't quite twigged to that yet, either, Your Majesty. We're working on it, but there's what I can only call an entrenched unwillingness to consider new truths. I've ordered a complete top-down review of all our existing analyses where the Peeps are concerned, but it's going to take a while, and there are a lot of professional rice bowls involved." He shrugged again. "I've got a feeling some fairly drastic housecleaning's going to be in order in the aftermath."

"I'm sure you're right," Roger half-grunted. "And we need a lot better coordination between your people and the San Martinos than we've been getting under the old management, too..." "Havinghurst dragged her heels over it for years, but we've got to establish some kind of information exchange with them, even if they're not about to anything to tick off the Peeps. We need a look inside their thinking, not just what their diplomats are saying openly!"

Difficulty of getting the Star Kingdom's intelligence analysts to re-assess the situation in light of Haven's conquering spree, and of building up a working relationship with San Martin, which is obviously on Haven's hit list, but is understandably reluctant to do anything to risk moving higher up on that list and becoming the A-number-one target for their fleet. Speaking of which...

...The people of San Martin... had traded with Manticore for over three hundred T-years. That relationship had not always been particularly close or amicable- in fact, they'd come perilously close to a shooting war a T-century ago... things could have turned very ugly following the "San Martin War" of 1752.

When a radicalized San Martin government had sought to cure its fiscal ills by "nationalizing" the Trevor's Star Terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction and seized it by force in blatant violation of the Junction Treaty of 1590, a powerful task force under the command of Vice Admiral Quentin Saint-James had been dispatched to get it back again. Saint-James' masterful strategy had diverted the entire San Martin Navy to hold the terminus it had seized... only to leave San Martin itself, three light-hours from the terminus, fatally exposed.

To summarize, Saint-James jumped out over San Martin, yelled "surprise," pointed a laser cannon at the San Martino government's head and compelled a surrender, while San Martin's navy was busy being parked around the terminus. This is sort of equivalent to showing up in Earth orbit with a pile of nuclear bombs while Earth's defense force is busy keeping an eye on Neptune. Oops.

Only eighty people were killed in the war, which given that it would have been fought with nuclear missiles and massive laser guns is pretty impressive. Saint-James managed to negotiate an orderly resolution to the conflict, and actually arranged "a major reduction in transit fees for for San Martin-flagged merchantmen using any of the Junction termini for a period of 25 T-years" just to show there were no hard feelings. War over, resolved amicably, and this Saint-James person sounds pretty cool all things considered.

San Martin and Manticore became friends after that, and San Martin became very prosperous, which in turn made it the most inviting target in the quadrant for Havenite conquest, not counting Manticore itself. The 1857 San Martin government is trying to avoid enraging the elephant in the room (Haven), and Roger III thinks it "imperative that the Royal Manticoran Navy establish some sort of quiet, under-the-radar conduit with the San Martin Navy."

Of course, one reflects that part of San Martin's reluctance may be because Manticore doesn't actually have the weapons and equipment it would take to stand up to Haven at this point in time, so allying with them might make things worse if it causes Haven to, say, launch their entire battlefleet in a direct offensive against Trevor's Star right now.

Second Space Lord Big Sky agrees with Roger III about setting up some channels, but it's probably going to take a while. But he is also concerned about the possibility of leakers in his own organization, and points out that people in the San Martin Navy would be taking severe professional or even personal risks to form these channels.

Roger... glanced at the First Space Lord.

"Admiral White Haven?"

"...he's clearly entitled to make whatever changes he deems necessary after his review." White Haven shook his head. "There won't be any heel-dragging on the uniformed side when he does it, I assure you. And I don't care whose cousins, nephews, or nieces get stepped on in the process, either. You're right about the need to get our foot down on all that nepotism, Your Majest. Especially if we're going to be expanding our officer corps any time soon.

Admiral White Haven, uniformed head of the RMN, whose son just happens to be one of the fastest-rising stars among the RMN's tactical officer corps, criticizes nepotism.

Granted, granted, young Hamish Alexander does know what he's doing, but still...

Roger III talks for a while about the difficulties of getting (especially) the House of Lords to actually back him on a military expansion and more aggressive security policy. "Allen, unfortunately, is going to have the exquisite pleasure of dealing with that," and so Summervale does for about the next fifty years.

Roger has some internal monologuing about how stupid it is that people don't see Haven as a threat when they've already conquered half the distance from Haven to Trevor's Star in eleven years.

...It was the Junction which gave the citizens of the Star Kingdom of Manticore the highest per capita income of any star nation- including the Solarian League-[/i] in history... the Star Kingdom's absolute income was minute in comparison [to the League], but even in purely economic terms, the Junction would be worth at least a dozen, probably more like two or three dozen- star systems like the ones the Peeps had already gobbled up.

Manticore is rich, rich, rich, mostly because of carrying traffic through the Junction. Remember what I said about how using the Junction to travel from Haven to Sol cuts like 650 light years off your trip? Now picture the advantages of being the middleman in that trade, and in various other similar trades, and in being able to skim transit fees off every ship that passes through the Junction, and being able to have a totally disproportionate share of the interstellar carrying trade because your ships pay greatly reduced transit fees.

Obviously, Haven will want all these advantages badly, since they're basically a license to print money. Trevor's Star would also be a big prize for them, although not as stupidly big as Manticore itself.

I said I'd build my house of steel, Pablo, he thought, remembering a long-ago day aboard HMS Wolverine in Manticore orbit, and I damned well meant it.

Roger III has no intent of letting Haven get away with this, obviously.

"All right," he said again. Allen, you and I are going to find the cash to increase our shipbuilding budgets by a minimum of 25% over the next fiscal year. When we present the Estimates to Parliament next year, that will be part of them. And if our good friend Baron Seawell doesn't believe he can support that, then I will regretfully accept his immediate resignation and find a new Chancellor of the Exchequer. If the Conservative Association doesn't like that, all they have to do is get behind my budget proposal. And if they want to find out just how prepared I am to get down and dirty over this, you invite them to make a fight over it, instead. They won't like what happens if they do."

Duke Cromarty didn't look very surprised, but neither did he look particularly happy, and Roger smiled thinly before he turned his attention to Castle Rock, Pierce, and White Haven.

"I want our construction schedules revised, starting right now, in accordance with that increase in budget. I want medium and light platform construction cut back hard. We've had the better part of two decades of fat years where our commerce protection programs are concerned; now it's time we build ourselves some wallers. I don't know if we'll be able to squeeze the budget for superdreadnoughts, so I want you to plan a fallback budget- for at least the first couple of fiscal years- to build dreadnoughts, instead, but I don't want to hear about battleships. They're too small to be survivable, and I'm not sending our people to die in fleet engagements because we couldn't be bothered to build effective warships for them."

...

"In addition to the new construction, we're about to start investing heavily in our infrastructure. You're not going to be able to use the full budget increase Aleen and I are going to hammer out of Parliament just on superdreadnoughts and dreadnoughts, because we don't have enough building slips. So we're going to fix that, too...

OK, this is the beginning of the Manticoran naval buildup right here. Some observations.
1) Roger III is BOTH de-emphasizing construction of destroyers, cruisers, and battlecruisers (ships of below one million tons) in favor of capital ships (of over five million tons), AND scaling up the overall budget for construction.
2) Roger is really quite determined to do this, and is not going to take "go piss up a rope" for an answer.
3) The RMN at this time does not have enough capital ship building slips to build all the ships that this budget increase could pay for- which also implies that as soon as the slips actually get built, capital ship construction will speed up sharply, after only a period of a few years. This is what I was talking about earlier, Batman.
4) Roger wants the heaviest individual capital units he can get, and considers "battleships" (basically anything below 4-5 million tons) to be too light. But he's willing to compromise on size and expense to get numbers, up to a point.

"...I can probably count on the Conservatives and the Progressives to support [building infrastructure] at least that much, if only because of all the porkbarrel contracts..." He smiled again, even more thinly than before. "They're perfectly welcome to think that way, as long as the money gets appropriated. Of course, they may be just a little surprised by the degree of personal oversight I intend to exercise on where that money goes afterward. And the King's Bench will be exercising it right along with me. So will the Judge Advocate General and the Inspector General from your side. And understand me about this: if the Opposition- or anyone else, including anyone in uniform- wants to drag his feet or try to feather his own nest out of this, he will be hammered. Nor am I above using the threat of indictments to... leverage the support we need in Parliament. I'll cheerfully send any bastard who tried to embezzle or misappropriate to prison for a long, long time, but I'm less concerned about prison sentences than I am about stopping malfeasance and graft and driving this building program through. I want that clearly understood by every investigator and prosecutor assigned to look for criminal activity."

More on exactly how Roger expects to get all this buildup done; the issue of people trying to use the rebuilding money for graft will pop up again later.

The other thing that's going to happen is that we're going to take advantage of all the spadework Dame Carrie [Lomax] has had Captain Adcock doing over at BuWeaps and the CDO. I know a lot of people are skeptical about the feasibility of our financing an independent R&D program on the scale Captain Adcock and I have been talking about."

He looked directly at White Haven. The First Space Lord had been supportive of Lomax's under-the-radar efforts, and he'd backed Project Python firmly enough, but he clearly continued to cherish some doubts... about the idea that the Star Kingdom... could possibly somehow develop breakthrough war-fighting technologies which had evaded the Solarian League's R&D efforts.

Roger lays out some more reasons why he thinks this is practical.

One, he argues that the overall Manticoran technical base is as good as anything in a League system, as demonstrated through Manticore's close ties with Beowulf.

Two, he argues that the League actually has incentives NOT to undergo any major changes in military technology. This is arguably true. They've got something like ten thousand superdreadnoughts in mothballs, most of which are decades if not centuries old, and the cost of replacing all of those ships would be mind-boggling. League security doctrine revolves heavily on being able to dust off those ships and pulverize any conceivable opponent, Lord only knows what they'd do if some new enemy pulled a superweapon out of their ass that made all ten thousand reserve ships obsolete overnight! This does not give them much incentive to innovate and make the existing ships obsolete. Plus, of course, the League has its own problems with nepotism and crony capitalism, at least as bad as Manticore's and probably more so.

Third, he argues that the merchant fleet should be actively involved in this process by providing reports on what foreign militaries are doing, although I'm not sure how this actually makes it easier for Manticore to develop entirely new weapons. I suppose it might help them develop a weapon before Haven gets wind of it, anyway.

"In addition to that, we're going to take all of the work Captain Adcock and his people have done and put it to work," Roger said, seeing no need to mention that he'd been one of Adcock's people, since everyone sitting around that table already knew it. "We're going to hide it on Weyland, and we're going to call it 'Gram,' and Captain Adcock will command it.

The Manticoran 'secret weapons' program moves from the "dirty-paper" phase of sketching out concepts on napkins, to a more serious R&D program.

Weyland orbits Sphinx, the habitable planet orbiting Manticore-B, and is comfortably out of range of any sneaky people coming through the Junction and looking at Manticore or Gryphon. It is the smallest and least developed of the three major Manticoran space infrastructure bases. This makes it a pretty good place to hide a secret weapons program.

Adcock, in addition to having masses of experience with weapons design, is by now a very professionally obscure person, which means foreign analysts are unlikely to 'notice' him and think "where is he, what is he doing?" That makes it a little easier to keep the program a secret, compared to putting someone like Hemphill in charge whose existence and professional ambitions are probably a little better known.

The project name "Gram" refers to the legendary magic sword which the hero Siegfried used to kill the dragon Fafnir. It was made by the legendary smith Weyland, and was sharp enough to do improbable things like chop anvils in half. Which is thematically appropriate, although questionable in some ways. The whole point of a code name is to NOT tip off the enemy to something like "This project is about Weyland making the ultimate dragon-slaying weapon" when you are in fact developing an ultimate weapon at a station called Weyland. On the other hand, this is the future, so when most people hear 'gram' they probably think of the unit of mass, not about a sword in a 3000-year-old myth.

Roger is determined to keep Gram off the books and as top-secret as top-secret can be. He encourages everyone else in the RMN to start socking away money for it, to pressure Parliament to increase the 'black' R&D budget for it, and to funnel money from above-board R&D programs BuWeaps already has, into Gram.

Understand me on this- if I have to dispose of Crown Lands and fund this out of the Privy Purse, that's what I'll do. We're looking at the short end of a disastrous war of attrition unless we come up with a qualitative equalizer. I don't know what we'll find, and for that matter I can't guarantee that we will find our own Gram, but I can guarantee that if we don't find it, we lose. And, My Lords, the House of Winton does not lose, when the security and the freedom of the Star Kingdom of Manticore and its citizens are at stake."

The final sentence came out with slow, dreadful emphasis...

End of scene. About ten years pass before the next one.

[Jedipilot24]

October 1857 PD:
Weyland orbits Sphinx, the habitable planet orbiting Manticore-B, and is comfortably out of range of any sneaky people coming through the Junction and looking at Manticore or Gryphon. It is the smallest and least developed of the three major Manticoran space infrastructure bases. This makes it a pretty good place to hide a secret weapons program.

Actually, Weyland orbits Gryphon; Vulcan orbits Sphinx. In 'The Honor of the Queen' Honor is happy that her ship is sent to Vulcan for refit because that means she can spend time with her parents. In 'Echoes of Honor' Weyland is introduced as orbiting Gryphon.

Gryphon is the planet orbiting Manticore-B; this is a plot point in 'Field of Dishonor.'

[Batman]

Given that a lot of modern day europe probably has no clue that 'Gram' refers to a sword and half the people there knowing the Siegfried saga expect his sword to be called 'Balmung' thanks to the Nibelungenlied I doubt that codename would be all that compromising now, leave alone 2000 years down the line.
I initially wanted to comment that I expected laser heads to have appeared far earlier than the 1850s, what with them being the standard by the early 1900s, but then I remembered what happened in the real world-both between 1900 and 1950, and 1950 and 2000. Or what happened in the Honorverse once the war got actually underway.

[Mr Bean]

I initially wanted to comment that I expected laser heads to have appeared far earlier than the 1850s, what with them being the standard by the early 1900s, but then I remembered what happened in the real world-both between 1900 and 1950, and 1950 and 2000. Or what happened in the Honorverse once the war got actually underway.

To note it's JUST as Honor is being deployed as a midshipwoman that they stop trying to mix and match contacts and missile heads. There was some sort of massive jump in anti-missile technology to deal with laser heads that had the side effect of putting contact heads out of commission.

[Batman]

Huh. Guess that's what I get for not reading the anthologies.

[Mr Bean]

Huh. Guess that's what I get for not reading the anthologies.

Most of them are not worth it, except for the odd story. The stand out is Changer of Worlds
You get From the Highlands which is the introduction of the other Zilwicki daughter and the great Nightfall which is the McQueen failed coupe attempt. Service of the Sword is 50/50 with Fanatic and Service of the Sword and the rest are either bad or take it or leave it.

The first two anthologies are totally not worth it. The last two are not worth it. So track down the 3rd and 4th and ignore the rest. The side stories of Crown of Slaves and Torch of Freedom make for decent reading while shadow of Saganami and Storm from the Shadows are excellent reads. I'd put Shadow and Storm as better than the mainline books.