Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington

[Terralthra]

You didn't like "Welcome to Siberia", Mr. Bean? I thought it was hilarious.

[Simon_Jester]

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.'

Sorry, I got the planets backward: I knew Weyland orbited the planet which orbits Manticore-B, but my brain hiccuped when it came to stating which planet that actually was.

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.

The problem is that when you're doing counterintelligence work, the first rule is to NEVER let anyone find anything out if you don't have to, and to never give anyone a hint you don't have to.

"We know that some of this money is going to something called "Gram." Okay, what does "Gram" mean? [does advanced space-google search, checks Havenipedia disambiguation page, et cetera]

"Okay, it's a unit of mass, a town in Denmark, a museum in Michigan, the name of several famous people who are mostly Danish, a sword in Norse mythology, a name in Tolkein... and we know the Manties like mythology... [clicks Havenipedia links]... hm, Gram-the-sword was made by Weyland the smith, could the program have something to do with HMSS Wayland?"

If they know you have the nasty habit of giving programs meaningful names, intelligence agencies actually have the money to hire a guy to just follow up and examine leads like that, on the off chance one of them will at least give them a clue about what kind of questions to ask in the next round of poking and prodding.

Interestingly, this can make a grandiose name like Operation Raging Justice work too, because someone looking at the name won't learn anything except "the people running this organization are pompous idiots." Names like Operation Iraqi Freedom are bad, because they immediately tell anyone who's listening that this is for invading Iraq. Which doesn't just tell you that Iraq's getting invaded, they already knew that, it tells you immediately that any resources or funds allocated to OIF are going to invading Iraq, and not to any other purpose. If you care about stopping people from knowing all the details about how your forces are distributed and so on, this is a problem.

Intelligence analysis can, potentially, make a lot of hay out of things like this.

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.

Looks like they were invented in the 1830s or earlier, tried out from the 1830s to the 1850s, and are starting to be fielded in, as I recall, the 1860s. They were preceded by improvements in technology that made long range nuclear shaped charges ("sidewall burners") possible, and it seems likely that the trends in antimissile technology were first driven by that, with the laser head just being the icing on the cake.

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.

By now, putting two and two together, I'm guessing that what started this was the "sidewall burner." Those things have standoff ranges of five to ten thousand kilometers. On the one hand, that is far enough that autocannon have no realistic chance of engaging the missiles, and to seriously complicate the targeting picture for point defense lasers. The countermissile is a much more effective 'area effect' antimissile weapon, because its wedge will kill any missile that gets within a hundred kilometers or so. And it can score those kills a lot farther out.

On the other, it also means huge numbers of missiles can theoretically target the same opponent effectively without just all running into the same cloud of buckshot or being reduced to skeet because they have to charge to within a dozen kilometers of a target firing beams down their throats. If shipboard beam defenses can engage missiles ten thousand kilometers out, they have basically no chance of missing at a few percent of that range. So the increased standoff range of the "sidewall burner" means missiles are more likely to focus on a single target and actually hope to hurt it, which in turn means that fleet area defense matters more... which makes countermissiles more appealing.

The combination of better and better point defense lasers, plus countermissiles, makes the missile defense problem even worse for a contact nuke, and it was already abysmal. So you see an arms race: ships get loaded down with more countermissiles, and missile designers struggle to further increase standoff range and increase warhead effectiveness. The laser head does both- for whatever reasons, the beams from a laser head are better at penetrating sidewalls and doing real damage than the old "burner" mode.

[Ahriman238]

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

I read the first 4 anthologies, and generally speaking they weren't worth the time or effort. The one exception is the 4th, which was pure gold. We have my two favorite bits of HH material, Fanatic and A Ship Named Francis (I'm pretty sure that's the one Terralthra keeps referring to as Welcome to Siberia. And it really is freaking hilarious.) Then you have the Crippler story I already described by Zahn, Promised Land (Grayson women held captive on Masada plan an escape) Let's Go to Prague, and the titular Service of the Sword, about a Grayson snottie serving on a Manticoran cruiser.

[Terralthra]

"Fanatic" is also excellent, serving as a great follow-on from "From the Highlands", "Promised Land" introduces Queen Elizabeth III's brother and his eventual wife, which is useful for understanding Crown of Slaves.

[Batman]

Regarding the codename of 'Gram' and intel/counterintel, where does it stop? 'Huh, a weapon named after sword that could cut through anything. Maybe it's a new superweapon that can defeat sidewalls'.' 'Yeah, or maybe they've intentionally nicknamed it to make us believe that while the real superweapon that can defeat sidewalls is the one named 'Pineapple'.'
Yes, the Havenites know how to use spacegoogle, but so do the Manticorans, they know the Havenites do, and so on. A patently obvious code name may be perfectly safe because it is patently obvious and thus nobody sane would ever use it.

[Mr Bean]

Regarding the codename of 'Gram' and intel/counterintel, where does it stop? 'Huh, a weapon named after sword that could cut through anything. Maybe it's a new superweapon that can defeat sidewalls'.' 'Yeah, or maybe they've intentionally nicknamed it to make us believe that while the real superweapon that can defeat sidewalls is the one named 'Pineapple'.'
Yes, the Havenites know how to use spacegoogle, but so do the Manticorans, they know the Havenites do, and so on. A patently obvious code name may be perfectly safe because it is patently obvious and thus nobody sane would ever use it.

Keep in mind we do know of Operation Buttercup, so it is obvious they went to random names at some point in the future for exactly this sort of reason.

[Terralthra]

Regarding the codename of 'Gram' and intel/counterintel, where does it stop? 'Huh, a weapon named after sword that could cut through anything. Maybe it's a new superweapon that can defeat sidewalls'.' 'Yeah, or maybe they've intentionally nicknamed it to make us believe that while the real superweapon that can defeat sidewalls is the one named 'Pineapple'.'
Yes, the Havenites know how to use spacegoogle, but so do the Manticorans, they know the Havenites do, and so on. A patently obvious code name may be perfectly safe because it is patently obvious and thus nobody sane would ever use it.

Keep in mind we do know of Operation Buttercup, so it is obvious they went to random names at some point in the future for exactly this sort of reason.

For operations, sure. Cutworm I/II, Sanskrit, Buttercup, etc. Weapons on the other hand...Apollo, named for the archer of the gods, is the FTL missile telemetry link. Mistletoe, named for the sneaky and harmless-seeming plant which killed Baldur, is the stealthed recon-drone fitted with a warhead for taking out fixed system defense infrastructure. Ghost Rider, for the EW warfare components and MDMs, is also fairly indicative of the purpose of the weapon. Keyhole I/II, the counter-missile telemetry drones, is named for a way to look through a door, while the platform itself, allows their telemetry to "look through" the wall of wedge interference from CM drives. Project Anzio, the CLAC development project, is named after a US WWII aircraft carrier Their operation names are randomized; their weapons projects are...not so much.

[Simon_Jester]

Regarding the codename of 'Gram' and intel/counterintel, where does it stop? 'Huh, a weapon named after sword that could cut through anything. Maybe it's a new superweapon that can defeat sidewalls'.' 'Yeah, or maybe they've intentionally nicknamed it to make us believe that while the real superweapon that can defeat sidewalls is the one named 'Pineapple'.'
Yes, the Havenites know how to use spacegoogle, but so do the Manticorans, they know the Havenites do, and so on. A patently obvious code name may be perfectly safe because it is patently obvious and thus nobody sane would ever use it.

The catch is that the spacegoogle step of the process is just there to give a list of "maybe it's an X" options, which would then be cross-checked by followup operations or by just looking at other information Havenite intelligence already has.

It's... kind of a risk.

One possibility is that the Manties rotate the code-names of their weapon systems frequently as those weapons approach development, which reduces the vulnerability, and use the names like "Keyhole" and "Mistletoe" only as they are nearly ready for operational deployment. That doesn't happen with Gram, but that's still in the early days.

[Simon_Jester]

Going to take a quick interlude to borrow some stuff from the technical manual that details various ship classes the RMN had in service during the Havenite War which date back to before and at the start of the buildup of the 1860s. This provides a sort of... representative sampling of what they had to fight with at this time, though it obviously does not include ship classes which were totally scrapped before the war even began.

This lays out the approximate size and weight of the ship classes, their theoretical maximum acceleration, their safe normal-conditions acceleration of 80% of theoretical max, their broadside and chase armament, and the period during which they were in service.

Highlander-class Light Attack Craft
Mass: 11250 tons
Dimensions: 138 x 23 x 21 meters
Acceleration: 409.3 G
80% Accel: 327.5 G
Broadside: 12 missile boxes, 1 laser, 3 point defense
Chase: 1 laser
Service Life: 1843-1912

The Highlander-class was commissioned in 1843 PD as a system defense picket and customs patrol unit. It had heavier beam armament than most contemporary classes, though contrary to typical RMN doctrine of the time, the lasers were optimized for point defense fire as well as the antiship role. The one-shot missile launch cells were built directly into the hull, allowing for system checks and routine maintenance without vacuum gear by the crew, although this increased costs and made them somewhat less suited to rapid re-arming than previous external launchers.

When the Highlander-class was first placed into service, light attack craft were primarily used as home system pickets and scouts, freeing up hyper-capable hulls for interstellar deployment or for concentrated rapid reaction system defense formations. As King Roger's naval buildup progressed, Manticore system hyper-limit picket duty was shifted to destroyers cued by reconnaissance satellites and passive system arrays. Starting in 1887 PD, the Highlander-class was retired. A number of hulls were stripped of armament, modified heavily and transferred to Astro Control Service as search and rescue platforms. An additional small number were retained purely as training craft attached to Saganami Island Naval Academy.

Comments:
A fairly typical example of a prewar LAC class. Standard armament is a few relatively low powered energy weapons and a 'box launcher' missile battery on each side of the craft, which has no magazine and just fires the missiles straight out of tubes built into the sides of the hull, sort of like a ballistic missile submarine, with its missile tubes sticking out the upper deck.

Incidentally, LACs are roughly, in general terms, the same size as real ballistic missile submarines, albeit bigger and fatter around the middle, which is probably not a surprise since they don't have a submarine pressure hull.

Note that the Highlander has no countermissile launchers whatsoever; whoever designed the thing did not expect it to need to shoot down incoming missiles at long range. There are several reasons for this, probably. One is that in 1840 there was no such thing as a working laser head, so the LAC's defensive lasers have plenty of time to engage an incoming laser. Another is that these LACs are necessarily "eggshells armed with sledgehammers;" in theoretical combat, their only real mission is to lob a salvo of missiles from their broadside cells, then run the hell away, because even one hit from a typical antiship weapon would crush them like a bug. They have basically zero survivability in energy-range combat, which IMO helps to explain why the energy weapon mounts they do have are so suitable for shooting missiles.

We will see LACs of this type (albeit built with Grayson technology) again in Honor of the Queen.


Noblesse-class Destroyer
Mass: 68250 tons
Dimensions: 351 x 41 x 24 meters
Acceleration: 525.4 G
80% Accel: 419.5 G
Broadside: 4 missile tubes, 3 lasers, 2 countermissile launchers, 3 point defense
Chase: 2 missile tubes, 1 laser, 1 countermissile launcher, 2 point defense
Number Built: 60
Service Life: 1819-1907

The Noblesse-class destroyer, a contemporary of the Courageous-class light cruiser, was the oldest destroyer still in service when the war with Haven began. In many ways, it was built as as a scaled-down version of the Courageous, armed with the same outdated missile tubes [by 1905 PD standards] and general weapon balance, though without the powerful beam armament carried by its larger cousin.

Although originally scheduled for decommissioning by the turn of the century, the RMN's need for light combatants extended the class beyond its planned service life, and many of the ships remained in service until 1907 PD. Although they were still suited for antipiracy work, they had become obsolete with the rapid technological developments stimulated by the war and all were decommissioned as the Culverin-class started coming off the building slips.

Comments:
Note that the destroyer's hull is three times longer and twice as wide, but not taller. The extra width probably goes into mounting bigger, heavier weapons (like missile tubes with built-in mass drivers for tossing shipboard missiles out at greater speed). This is a fairly typical specimen of an RMN destroyer in the 1840s; Daimyo could easily have been one of these.

Also note that despite being about six times heavier, the Noblesse has a higher acceleration than a LAC of the 1840s. This is one of the things that made prewar LACs so shitty; their impeller drives were relatively weak and could not propel the craft at theoretically possible high speeds.

It sounds like these would have all been constructed in the early 19th century, and were probably finished by the time Roger wrote his letter, or about to be.


Falcon-class Destroyer
Mass: 70500 tons
Dimensions: 355 x 42 x 24 meters
Acceleration: 523.6 G
80% Accel: 418.8 G
Broadside: 3 missile tubes, 4 lasers, 3 countermissile launchers, 4 point defense
Chase: 1 missile tube, 2 lasers, 2 countermissile launchers, 2 point defense
Number Built: 88
Service Life: 1851-1916

The Falcon-class destroyer, was a product of the same design study that yielded the Apollo-class light cruiser and the Lightning-class frigate, the last frigate class to be built by the RMN. The notable feature of the Falcon-class is that it is a beam-heavy platform relative to its contemporaries, designed to close quickly and engage an enemy at short range.

The first flight Falcons suffered from the same substandard construction practices which caused the Apollo class's structural weaknesses, and all but two required substantial refits.

Unlike the far more successful Apollo, both the Falcons and Lightnings were widely considered to be too fragile to survive an eenergy engagement... Although possessed of impressive firepower for their size, there were grave concerns about their ability to defeat something of their own rate. Although the last of the Lightnings was decommissioned before the turn of the century, the Falcons lasted until the [postwar] fleet drawdown of 1916 PD.

Comments:
This would be a pretty modern unit by 1860 PD standards. Not so heavily armed, especially in the missile department, but it's got better antimissile defenses. The main problem the design suffers, by the description, is that it's too physically fragile: even an enemy destroyer would be able to wreck it too easily.

Note how even though these ships are relatively fragile and unsatisfactory, the RMN keeps using them anyway because it can't afford to scrap eighty destroyers in the middle of a war when it needs all the escorts and support platforms and so on that it can get.


Havoc-class Destroyer
Mass: 84500 tons
Dimensions: 377 x 44 x 26 meters
Acceleration: 519.8 G
80% Accel: 415.8 G
Broadside: 5 missile tubes, 3 lasers, 3 countermissile launchers, 3 point defense
Chase: 2 missile tube, 1 lasers, 2 countermissile launchers, 2 point defense
Number Built: 83
Service Life: 1861-present

The Havoc-class was built as a successor to the Falcon-class destroyer. In many ways, its design presaged the move away from beam-heavy combatants to missile-heavy combatants. Designed as a general purpose destroyer, the Havoc-class was able to perform all of the traditional destroyer missions and served many of them well. This was especially true in Silesia, where its mix of defensive armaments and adequate broadside made it a natural for antipiracy operations. The skipper of a Havoc will generally attempt to keep the range open against its usual opponents, where the Havoc's superior electronics and deep magazines provide it the greatest edge. Beam armament is modest at best, and a Havoc commander who approaches too aggressively places his command in danger.

As the buildup of light units accelerated and after hull numbers reached an unwieldy four digits, with HMS Havoc being redesignated as DD-01 in 1873 PD. While the majority of the class are still in service, the combination of a small cramped hull and subpar defenses has relegated the Havocs to rear area duties and less important remote stations. With the latest round of EW refits, they remain well suited for antipiracy operations, even if they are unsuited for combat against the Republic of Haven Navy.

Comments:
These were probably in the process of being designed and built as Roger III took the throne. Notice that just as the previous class had more laser mounts than missile launchers, here the reverse is true. Also, the Havoc is much larger, bulkier, and somewhat better protected. This trend persists throughout the timeframe of the story; missile combat becomes constantly more significant, and lighter combatants have to be made bigger and bulkier just to remain survivable in the face of the new threat.

Also, evidence that Manticore had built at least one thousand destroyers by the 1870s. A lot of them had probably been aged out of service, though.


Courageous-class Light Cruiser
Mass: 88250 tons
Dimensions: 389 x 40 x 31 meters
Acceleration: 519.6 G
80% Accel: 415.7 G
Broadside: 7 missile tubes, 2 lasers, 2 grasers, 3 countermissile launchers, 3 point defense
Chase: 2 missile tubes, 1 laser, 2 countermissile launchers, 2 point defense
Number Built: 62
Service Life: 1820-1909

The Courageous-class light cruiser was the oldest light cruiser class in the RMN's inventory at the start of the war. These cruisers were originally scheduled to be decommisioned in 1897 PD, but remained on the active list for another ten years in light of the Navy's growing demand for light combatants in Silesia, coupled with a shortage of yard space for the construction of replacements. The Courageous-class was designed for commerce escort and antipiracy duties, where it could make best use of its heavy offensive armament. Although scarcely larger than a modern destroyer, the Courageous mounts a broadside of seven lightweight missile tubes and was one of the few units of its size to mount grasers in its beam broadside.

The heavy offensive armament of the class came at a cost, however. It is virtually unarmored, even by light cruiser standards, and the designers opted to save even more mass by reducing crew spaces and bunkerage to levels well below current standards. The reduction in cruise duration between resupply evolutions has rendered the Courageous less suited to its intended role than its weapons fit might indicate, and in that respect it was a disappointing replacement for the classes it superseded.

Despite the age of its offensive systems and its endurance issues, the Courageous class has a good performance record. It was still a strong performer in missile combat and, if it could keep the range open, was a match for most contemporary light cruisers. However, the combination of reduced endurance and cramped crew accomodations make it unpopular with crews. The surviving ships had a series of major upgrades over the years, but hardware supply constraints have caused them to fall behind the more modern classes. They were being replaced on a hull-for-hull basis by the Valiant-class as the war began, and the last unit was decommissioned in 1909.

Comments:
So, Courageous-class cruisers have cramped living accomodations. No wonder Honor and her crew were cranky all the time in On Basilisk Station.

Also, it's worth emphasizing that the Courageous is actually no larger or heavier than the destroyers being built forty years later. The main reason it can cram in so many more weapons is the near total lack of armor. The distinction between destroyers and light cruisers in Manticoran service has more to do with their role. Destroyers picket star systems, escort fleets, and so on; light cruisers are more far-ranging.


Apollo-class Light Cruiser
Mass: 126000 tons
Dimensions: 438 x 46 x 35 meters
Acceleration: 517.8 G
80% Accel: 414.2 G
Broadside: 5 missile tubes, 6 lasers, 4 countermissile launchers, 4 point defense
Chase: 2 missile tubes, 1 lasers, 3 countermissile launchers, 3 point defense
Number Built: 132
Service Life: 1856-present

The Apollo-class is a beam-centric light cruiser designed for antipiracy operations. Built as the result of an 1846 design study, the focus of the design was overall protection and antimissile defenses on extended duration deployments far from resupply, primarily in places like Silesia, but also with an eye towards future fleet scouting requirements.

The first seven ships built to the design study's specifications were delivered between 1851 and 1856 PD. The RMN had awarded the Jordan Cartel a production contract lasting through the 1860s, but three of the first twelve ships failed their full power trials due to structural flaws. The subsequent scandal forced the cancellation of all naval contracts with the Jordan Cartel, following a lengthy investigation of charges of fraud and substandard building practices. Even before the investigation concluded, the Navy had turned construction over to the Hauptman Cartel. Following the investigation, Hauptman was also awarded possession of the remaining Jordan hulls for salvage of parts and systems. Aside from the first two, all of the remaining hulls have been built by the Hauptman Cartel, which received contract renewals in the mid-1860s and early 1870s.

The Apollos are designed to fight a closing battle while maneuvering into beam range, and have electronic countermeasures and sidewalls as strong as some older heavy cruisers. They also boast heavier armor than most light cruisers. At close quarters, nible maneuvering and a heavy energy broadside should make an Apollo more than a match for any ship of its type. However, the beam armament has come at the expense of the missile broadside, leaving only five tubes in each broadside, with disadvantages that became truly obvious only after the widespread introduction of the laser head towards the end of the nineteenth century. The Apollos have undergone three major refit cycles to update their electronics and fire control systems. The remaining units of the class are expected to be decommissioned soon, though wartime requirements may extend their service life yet again.

Comments:
The Apollo-class. Bigger, tougher, and all-around nastier than the Courageous-class, and about 30000 tons heavier while we're at it. However, weaker in missile armament. Apollos are moderately badass; we see one in action in Honor of the Queen.

Basically, up until the rise of the laser head, everyone saw "beam-heavy" and "missile-heavy" as equally valid ways to design a warship, because the typical space battle involved two sides flinging missiles at each other (to limited effect), until closing to energy range and fighting a nasty, decisive battle. So either the ship can be designed to bull through to short range, shoot down every missile fired its way, and start blasting away with beam weapons (like the Apollos). Or it can be designed to keep the enemy at bay and pelt them with missiles, hoping to take a big enough piece out of them that they'll be easy meat in an energy-range battle (like the Havocs).

Either strategy remains more or less valid until we start seeing massed missile massacre battles during the Havenite War.


Truncheon-class Heavy Cruiser
Mass: 223000 tons
Dimensions: 471 x 57 x 48 meters
Acceleration: 513.2 G
80% Accel: 410.6 G
Broadside: 5 missile tubes, 5 lasers, 3 grasers, 2 countermissile launchers, 6 point defense
Chase: 2 missile tubes, 1 laser, 1 graser, 1 countermissile launcher, 2 point defense
Number Built: 77
Service Life: 1809-1905

The Truncheon-class heavy cruiser was designed in concert with the Warrior-class as a less expensive option to make up total designated build numbers. Despite having been authorized and placed on the books a full year earlier than the Warrior, budget cuts delayed the first Truncheon for fifteen years after the Warrior-class entered operational service. With several squadrons of the ancient Acherner-class long overdue for retirement when the Truncheon finally did enter service, however, and in light of production problems with the Warriors, the original production run was lengthened in 1822 PD.

Two divisions of Flight I Truncheons were refitted in the early 1830s as marine operations support cruisers... room for a full battalion of marines and support staff plus specialized command and control equipment... [blah blah decommissioned eventually]

Comments:
Welcome to the wonderful world of budget cuts. The Truncheon looks like it turns out to be even worse for modern combat than the Warrior, with even fewer missile tubes; it's probably no coincidence that the last of them were decommissioned the same year the war started.


Prince Consort-class Heavy Cruiser
Mass: 246500 tons
Dimensions: 487 x 59 x 49 meters
Acceleration: 512.1 G
80% Accel: 409.7 G
Broadside: 8 missile tubes, 3 lasers, 2 grasers, 5 countermissile launchers, 4 point defense
Chase: 2 missile tubes, 1 laser, 3 countermissile launchers, 2 point defense
Number Built: 175
Service Life: 1851-1919

The Prince Consort-class of heavy cruisers holds the record as the largest class of heavy cruisers in the RMN, though it is likely to be overtaken by the next flight of Saganami-Cs coming off the building slips in 1922 PD. The class was originally authorized as the Crown Prince class, but the name changed before the first was delivered.

Individually the Prince Consorts are powerful and effective units, but their design was a compromise in two ways. First, they were designed with just enough internal bridge volume to accommodate their original equipment, which caused a great deal of frustration as future refits and equipment upgrades had to be crammed wherever they fit, making for an even more cramped interior working space. Second, to get as much firepower into space as quickly and at as low a cost as possible, BuShips omitted a proper flag deck and its support systems in exchange for additional tonnage dedicated to broadside weaponry. Due to the shortage in flagships of any kind, this required Prince Consorts to be assigned to task force and fleet formations where other ships in the squadron could provide the space for a flag officer and staff.

Like most Manticoran designs, the Prince Consort enjoyed a healthy advantage in medium to long-range missile duels against foreign opponents, where it could make the most of its superior seeker systems and electronic countermeasures. At closer ranges, where the disparity in missile qualities evened out, much of that advantage disappeared. While many of the class saw active service throughout the war, the growing numbers of more capable heavy cruisers being built gradually displaced the last of them.

Comments:
Another of the 'transitional' 1850s designs. More missiles and drastically more countermissiles; it seems likely that whoever designed this thing at least had a clue that missile standoff attack ranges were increasing, so you could no longer count on point blank range shots with point defenses.

The point about flag accommodations is significant. One thing often forgotten in SF and especially versus is that ships need more than just weapons and engines; they need the facilities to allow crews to keep track of what's going on and direct a battle effectively. In the case of the Prince Consorts, a pretty solid warship is made drastically less effective by its inability to serve as a flagship for a naval task force, which limits options to use it for independent commands. Tacking on a few thousand more tons would tend to relieve this problem, but... well.

Below we have the dedicated 'cruiser leader' class designed to work with that.


Crusader-class Heavy Cruiser
Mass: 234500 tons
Dimensions: 479 x 58 x 48 meters
Acceleration: 512.6 G
80% Accel: 410.1 G
Broadside: 6 missile tubes, 3 lasers, 1 graser, 5 countermissile launchers, 4 point defense
Chase: 2 missile tubes, 1 laser, 3 countermissile launchers, 2 point defense
Number Built: 25
Service Life: 1851-1919

The Crusader-class heavy cruiser was designed as a supplement to the Prince Consort building program. As the Prince Consorts did not have flag facilities, BuShips authorized a program which would have built the Prince Consorts in groups of seven and paired each group with a Crusader providing flag services to make a full eight-ship squadron. In addition to a flag bridge, the Crusader-class mounts a full auxiliary command deck, in addition to a number of other system and habitability upgrades.

"Flag facilities" in modern naval parlance means the extra computational support, communications equipment, and watchstanders necessary to link a formation spread over tens of thousands of kilometers into a coherent tactical fighting force, as well as the long-range communications arrays necessary to coordinate the action of detached units across a star system. While any modern combat control system can perform this function at some level, dedicated personnel and facilities are required to optimize the use of a modern squadron's resources.

The original building program failed to allow for a realistic overhaul cycle, with the result that at least 25% too few flagships had been projected from the beginning, and the Admiralty's decision to cut funding for them in the intervening years only made the problem worse. The shortage of Crusaders went largely unremarked at the time, but as the signs of war between Manticore and Haven grew, the forward redeployments of cruisers and battlecruisers as raiders highlighted the shortages of flag decks in heavy cruiser squadrons. The crucial importance of appropriate flagship facilities lay in the close coordination required of a modern squadron in combat.

As squadron flagships, the Crusaders performed admirably over their lifetimes. The weapons fit was weaker than that of the Prince Consorts, but even by modern standards this class had excellent command and control facilities, rivalling those of far larger ships. It was less capable in solo operations as it was was not intended to operate outside a squadron. Aside from enhancements in targeting and penetration aids, the offensive power was comparable to that of the Warrior-class heavy cruiser, despite a more than ten percent increase in tonnage over the older class.

Additional advances in automation reduced the personnel and space required to build the same command and control capability into follow-on ships. With the Star Knight and Saganami-classes and their variants being built in large numbers, the need for a class of lightly armed dedicated flagships was dwindling. Almost the entire class had been relegated to the Reserve by the time of Operation Buttercup, and it was finally scrapped during the Janacek build-down.

Comments:
Notice that adding the flag facilities bulks up the weight of the ship by six thousand tons AND requires them to remove something like 25% of their offensive weaponry. Things like communications cost.

Also note some more of those 'reality intrudes' problems in the overhaul cycle: they want one Crusader to boss each squadron of seven Prince Consorts, but any given Crusader spends a certain amount of its time in drydock for maintenance and upgrades and so on. So just having a 1:7 ratio is not good enough, not really; you'd need to have some replacements available.

That or you'd need to constantly reshuffle your cruiser squadrons so that a whole squadron would be disbanded and reshuffled whenever its flagship had to go into the shop for any real length of time, which is a pretty bad idea.


Redoubtable-class Battlecruiser
Mass: 784750 tons
Dimensions: 686 x 87 x 78 meters
Acceleration: 491.5 G
80% Accel: 393.2 G
Broadside: 18 missile tubes, 6 lasers, 6 grasers, 9 countermissile launchers, 9 point defense
Chase: 6 missile tubes, 1 graser, 6 countermissile launchers, 6 point defense
Number Built: 118
Service Life: 1786-1918

With over 125 years of service and four major deployed design revisions, the Redoubtable-class is the longest serving battlecruiser class in the RMN. The Redoubtable's birth dates back to the aftermath of the Ranier War and the Battle of Carson and the RMN's shift from a predominantly system-defense force to one that could perform power projection missions. A major new shipbuilding effort was required, and over the next century, the RMN's battlecruiser strength grew from a few dozen to over two hundred. The Redoubtable was the pinnacle of the Star Kingdom's battlecruisers during that early period.

Designed for closing engagements against lighter opponents and peers, the design had extremely heavy chase armament for its time, as well as heavy face-mirrored armor over the hammerheads. Even today the Redoubtable's antiquated (by current Manticoran standards) fire control systems have proven to be more than adequate against most Havenite opponents.

Nonetheless, the Redoubtables, while a solid and frequently updated design, were clearly showing their age towards the end of the First Havenite War. Maintenance and reliability had become recurring issues as components last manufactured a century ago were replaced by modern substitutes, and ships of this class were retired from frontline duties as rapidly as Reliants could be commissioned to replace them. The last were decommissioned or sold to Alliance members shortly before the war resumed.

Comments:
I suspect "face-mirrored" is an intended parallel to historical 19th century "face-hardened" armor. Face-hardening makes it more likely that armor-piercing shells will fail to punch into a steel plate; I imagine "face-mirroring" means that the armor is designed to reflect laser weapons, and that the outermost layer of the armor is intended to do this as well as possible. Somehow I doubt the technique works well on gamma-ray lasers, because gamma rays do NOT reflect well.

Also, we note that the RMN before Roger III's buildup had something like 200+ battlecruisers, which suggests a combined tonnage of 150 million tons or more, significantly more than the tonnage of all the RMN capital ships combined. That in turn tells us something about their priorities; this is what the RMN spent the bulk of its time and money working on.

And they probably had good reason to do so. Very few star nations in the Honorverse actually own anything bigger than a battlecruiser, so a squadron or two of RMN battlecruisers would usually be big, tough, powerful ships by the standards of their immediate neighbors, and any minor nations that got pushy about commerce regulation or privateering.

The vastly larger, more expensive, less flexible classes of heavy capital ships are useful only for meeting similar formations of capital ships, and in general for busting heads in a direct fashion- they're too big to be used as escorts, scouts, or anything of that nature. So pre-1860 Manticore only built enough to immediately secure the home system against an attack of the scale it thought most likely to happen (i.e. one squadron or less of enemy capital ships), and then concentrated the bulk of its effort on the battlecruiser force and other, smaller units.


Homer-class Battlecruiser
Mass: 834000 tons
Dimensions: 700 x 89 x 79 meters
Acceleration: 490 G
80% Accel: 392 G
Broadside: 20 missile tubes, 8 lasers, 8 grasers, 1 grav lance, 4 energy torpedo tubes, 9 countermissile launchers, 9 point defense
Chase: 4 missile tubes, 2 grasers, 4 countermissile launchers, 6 point defense
Number Built: 86
Service Life: 1863-present

Like the Redoubtable, the Homer-class battlecruiser was built as something of a brawler, mounting an extensive energy broadside, augmented (in later flights) with a grav lance and an array of energy torpedoes for extremely close engagements. Like many Manticoran designs, the Homer's passive protection relied on sidewalls in preference to thicker skin armor, on the theory that sidewalls could be upgraded more readily than hull armor as technology advanced.

Because of experience with the Service Life Extension Program refits for earlier classes, the Homers were built for ease of upgrade. Paradoxically, this was one of the principle justifications for the delay in their prewar refits, as the RMN knew it could be done comparatively quickly. Until the start of the First Havenite War, updates to the electronics and fire control systems were repeatedly deferred in favor of funneling more resources into the Reliant-class building program. With the onset of hostilities, the Homers received defensive armament and compensator upgrades, to increase their ability to get in close, where their short-ranged armament could be used to greatest effect.

In operational service, the mixture of beams and missiles makes the Homer an unremarkable combatant outside of energy range, and only the pressing need for battlecruisers in the wake of the present resumption of hostilities has kept the class in service this long. All surviving units were pulled out mothballs and quickly pressed into service in the wake of Operation Thunderbolt, even as building programs accelerated to build more modern units.

Comments:
"Later flights" would be Homers built in, say, the 1870s and on. Note that on a ship this large (roughly ten times Fearless's size) the grav lance/energy torpedo armament isn't nearly so hard to fit in, which probably helps to explain why anyone bothered.

Also, this is the first time I've heard of the RMN favoring sidewalls over armor, but it makes sense, as does the overall emphasis in the description that's being placed on designing ships for ease of upgradeability. If I ever write SF, I'll be bearing it in mind, because it isn't anywhere near as simple in reality as most fiction presents it.


Ad Astra-class Dreadnought (1878 refit)
Mass: 3895000 tons
Dimensions: 1064 x 154 x 144 meters
Acceleration: 450.8 G
80% Accel: 360.7 G
Broadside: 18 missile tubes, 14 lasers, 12 grasers, 6 energy torpedo tubes, 8 countermissile launchers, 18 point defense
Chase: 6 missile tubes, 6 lasers, 2 grasers, 2 countermissile launchers, 8 point defense
Number Built: 11
Service Life: 1632-1913

The design of the Ad Astra-class was refined over a few decades of operational experience with the Manticore-class battleship [later renamed the 'Thorstens-' SJ], a locally built, Solarian-licensed design. At almost twice the tonnage of the Manticores, they were the first Manticoran capital ships uncompromisingly designed for power projection as opposed to system defense. Reality fell somewhat short of expectations, however, as a succession of isolationist foreign policies resulted in a hyper-capable battle fleet that was firmly anchored to the Manticore system. Their first actual out-system deployment wasn't until 1674 PD, when they accompanied the First Battle Squadron to Silesia after the Battle of Carson, to force the Confederacy to sign the Cherwell Convention.

Nearly three hundred years old when the first one was decommissioned in 1908 PD, the Ad Astra-class was the longest-serving single class in the history of the RMN. Subject to several major refits, and rebuilt virtually from the keel out in 1878, the ships decommissioned in the early days of the war bear little resemblance to the original ships laid down in the seventeenth century.

A full two squadrons (sixteen hulls) were originally planned, but only eleven ships were actually built. The first four ran afoul of cost overruns and multi-year delays in construction as the yards were expanded to handle hulls of their size, and a bitter budgetary debate in Parliament in 1651 PD suspended the entire program for almost half a century before the funding could be found to complete the class.

In the late 1880s, the entire class was modernized, despite the fact that the lead unit was over two centuries old. The original autocannon were replaced with modern point defense laser clusters, the armor was thickened in a few critical locations in response to the laser head threat, and electronics and missile launch systems were upgraded. Little could be done about the limited number of counter-missile launchers, a standard feature when these were built but a critical weakness in the era of the laser head.

Despite these shortcomings, the class continued well into the twentieth century, when the last units decommissioned midwar to provide crews for the final flight of Bellerophons.

Comments
1) This confirms the idea that the Manticore-class battleships (referred to as the Thorstens in Roger's 1846 letter) mass just about exactly two million tons. Also, they would have to have been deployed around 1550-1600 PD, for there to be "a few decades" of experience with them before the Ad Astras were designed, even assuming severe construction delays before the first Ad Astra was commissioned in 1632.

2) The Cherwell Convention bans the interstellar trade in genetic slaves. Having an Ad Astra or two "accompanying the First Battle Squadron" implies a squadron-level force of capital ships, probably more of the Manticores with a couple of Ad Astras as formation leaders and extra muscle. At the time, Haven and Manticore were allied on enforcement of the Convention, so it is possible the Havenites sent ships as well...

3) Massive, decade-long delays in construction of warships aren't unprecedented in real life. Countries like the USSR had this issue between WWI and WWII, when a number of ships under construction were delayed or stopped because of the Revolution and massive economic dislocation caused by the Russian Civil War.


Royal Winton-class Dreadnought
Mass: 5814750 tons
Dimensions: 1216 x 176 x 164 m
Acceleration: 431.9 G
80% Accel: 345.5 G
Broadside: 20 missile tubes, 18 lasers, 16 grasers, 6 energy torpedoes, 12 countermissile launchers, 28 point defense mounts
Chase: 6 missile tubes, 6 lasers, 2 grasers, 4 countermissile launchers, 10 point defense mounts.
Number Built: 21
Service Life: 1846-1916

Over seventy years after the last RMN ship of the wall had been completed, the Admiralty realized at the turn of the nineteenth century that it needed to modernize Home Fleet. While the previous classes had all seen service life extension programs and heavy refits, two centuries of advances in naval warfare had rendered them obsolete, despite their modernized weapon systems.

The design study for the Royal Winton and Samothrace classes began in 1812 PD, building on the Navy's experiences with the existing wall of battle. The Royal Winton-class dreadnouhgt was designed to completely replace the RMN's handful of battleships, joining the Ad Astras to provide a total of two active battle squadrons of dreadnoughts each led by a division of superdreadnoughts, with sufficient hulls to rotate through regular refits without any reduction in deployable forces.

Half again as massive as the Ad Astras, the Royal Wintons were nearly as large as the old Manticore-class superdreadnoughts and, by any objective standard, their combat ability was equal or better as well.

While nothing could compare to the glacial construction pace the Ad Astras had encountered, both the Royal Wintons and the Samothrace-class superdreadnoughts suffered their share of "growing pains" as the Navy and civilian shipyards learned how to design a ship of the wall for series production. The class was broken into three distinct flights, each with a slightly different weapons fit, and even within a given flight no two hulls were exactly identical.

Comments:
Proportionate to their tonnage, roughly as well armed as the (updated) Ad Astras- actually inferior in terms of missile capacity. Obviously still designed under a paradigm where beam weapons are at least as important as missiles. This was a quite modern and impressive capital ship by 1850 PD standards, though, and no doubt quite capable of standing up to the Havenite fleet of its day on a ton-for-ton basis.

In 1846 there were apparently only three Royal Wintons under construction. The reference to "series" production suggests that all 21 ships of this class were built in a set number of construction slips. So after the first three were finished, another set would be laid down, and then another. The reference to three distinct "flights" suggests that there were in fact three waves of construction, with slight modifications to the design after each flight.

The reference to a force level of two battle squadrons plus two divisions of capital ships would mean 16 dreadnoughts and 4 superdreadnoughts active at any one time. With the planned three Samothraces referenced in Roger's letter, that would mean 2 superdreadnoughts down for maintenance at any one time; a comparable level of availability among the dreadnoughts would require 24 of them, which would require 13 Royal Wintons to go along with the 11 Ad Astras.

Note that this is pretty realistic; in real life it is hard to get much better than two-thirds availability among modern warships, and even that can be a challenge. For example, the US Navy has (as I recall) eleven supercarriers, three on patrol at any one time, three heading out to station, three in port and going through routine maintenance, and one or two in deep refits with their nuclear reactors getting worked on which can't even think about sailing out to battle any time in the next year or so.

The question is: if they built 21 of the things, in three waves, but only needed 13 to get the job done... where did the other 8 come from? Me, I'm guessing that the third flight of Royal Wintons was laid down shortly after King Roger took the throne, but before they got around to designing the following class of dreadnought.


Manticore-class Superdreadnought
Mass: 6515000 tons
Dimensions: 1263 x 183 x 171 m
Acceleration: 424.8 G
80% Accel: 339.9 G
Broadside: 22 missile tubes, 18 lasers, 24 grasers, 12 countermissile launchers, 24 point defense mounts
Chase: 4 missile tubes, 2 lasers, 6 grasers, 6 countermissile launchers, 12 point defense mounts.
Number Built: 3
Service Life: 1742-1905

The original design requirements for the Star Kingdom's first superdreadnought called for a ship "fit to engage and defeat any ship of the wall now in commission or under construction," and for their time, their design proved more than sufficient in that regard. With greatly improved active defenses and twice the graser broadside of the Ad Astra class, the Manticore-class was a powerful, modern unit that compared favorably to even the most advanced Solarian design of the day.

HMS Manticore and her sister ships Sphinx and Gryphon were commissioned over a period of fifteen years, while their old battleship namesakes were redesignated HMS Thorson, Perseus, and Bellerophon, respectively.

The trio was originally intended to form the core of a modernized capable wall of battle along with the Ad Astra-class dreadnoughts. The initial units rode the tail end of the wave of construction that followed the Battle of Carson, and a total of nine ships was originally planned.

HMS Manticore was scarcely a decade old when she first saw combat, during the rather misnamed "San Martin War." Given that the war began and ended with a single battle, and an uneventful one at that, there was little to learn from the experience. Worse in some ways, the brief skirmish actually hampered additional efforts to secure funding, as victory had been achieved so easily and no navies in the region were viewed as a threat that warranted more than the three ships already in commission. Instead of the planned additional construction, the existing dreadnoughts and battleships underwent a modernization and service life extension program. The three ships of the Manticore-class served as flagships for the two mixed battle squadrons of Home Fleet, with one in the yards for maintenance at any given time.

While an effective design for their time, the class was over 150 years old by the start of the First Havenite War. HMS Sphinx and Gryphon had already been decommissioned as their namesakes led new, modern classes, and while HMS Manticore had been refitted as a flagship and saw the opening salvoes of the war, she was decommissioned in late 1905 and her name given to a new Gryphon-class hull.

Comments:
We see that even back in the 1700s PD, if Manticore cared enough to use the very best, they were rich and competent enough to get it. Of course, "the best" at that time was pretty lame by 1900 PD standards.


Samothrace-class Superdreadnought
Mass: 7253750 tons
Dimensions: 1309 x 190 x 177 m
Acceleration: 416.6 G
80% Accel: 333.3 G
Broadside: 28 missile tubes, 22 lasers, 18 grasers, 6 energy torpedo tubes, 18 countermissile launchers, 26 point defense mounts
Chase: 6 missile tubes, 6 lasers, 4 grasers, 6 countermissile launchers, 18 point defense mounts.
Number Built: 7
Service Life: 1848-present

The Samothrace-class was the second class of superdreadnoughts built by the Royal Manticoran Navy, and (not surprisingly, given that almost exactly a century separated the new classes) it was a marked improvement over the Manticore-class. While the increased combat power was a decided advantage, the true reason for the construction of this class was, originally, to provide modern flagships for the two active battle squadrons of Home Fleet.

The plans called for a total of three hulls to be built to allow for regular maintenance cycles and still retain a division of superdreadnoughts in every squadron. However, the cost of these units, coupled with the actual and projected costs of the Royal Wintons, caused Parliament to cut funding, dropping the planned construction to a single hull.

However, the Navy had been steadily increasing the number of units below the wall [battlecruisers and lighter- SJ] for over a century since the discovery of the Matapan Terminus, with a major push by First Space Lord Frederick Truman in the preceding few years. With both Parliament and the senior uniformed officers of the Navy focusing on the commerce protection mission, the so-called "Gun Club" advocates were outnumbered and outvoted.

When King Roger began his buildup shortly after his coronation, one of the first actions he took was to renew construction of the two cancelled hulls, plus allocate funding for four more while the builder's plans were finalized for the King William-class. As one shellshocked member of the Opposition remarked following the King's remarkable success in this initial foray: "The Admiralty asked for three, we offered one, and His Majesty compromised on seven." It would not be the last armament battle that remarkable monarch would win.

In the late 1890s, the entire class was pulled from service and refitted extensively as command ships. Technological advances, even in the short time since their construction, allowed their defenses to be substantially upgraded while at the same time providing space for extensive command and control facilities. Many of these ships have seen wartime service as task force and fleet flagships, even after more modern classes had been placed in reserve, simply because of their command and control equipment.

Comments:
Note the drastically upgraded missile and countermissile batteries compared to the Manticores of a hundred years earlier. Still quite weak on missiles compared to the later classes, but obviously a big step toward missile-oriented warfare.

Also, again we see the role of dedicated command and control equipment in warship design; it's not as simple as "put guns firing X biggawatts of power on hull, profit."

[Ahriman238]

Ho hum, time to get the lead out. On to Honor of the Queen.

"If he starts giving you a song and dance, let me know. I'm having lunch with Admiral Thayer. I may not have my official orders yet, but you can bet she's got an idea what they're going to be."

Venizelos grinned back in understanding, for he and his captain both knew Antrim had been playing an old yard trick that usually worked. When you didn't want to carry out some irksome bit of refit, you just dragged your feet until you "ran out of time," on the theory that a ship's captain would rather get back into space than incur Their Lordships' displeasure with a tardy departure date. Unfortunately for Commander Antrim, success depended on a skipper who was willing to let a yard dog get away with it. This one wasn't, and while it wasn't official yet, the grapevine said the First Space Lord had plans for HMS Fearless. Which meant this time someone else was going to buy a rocket from the Admiralty if she was late, and Venizelos rather suspected the CO of Her Majesty's Space Station Vulcan would be less than pleased if she had to explain the hold-up to Admiral Danvers. The Third Space Lord had a notoriously short fuse and a readiness to collect scalps.

Commander Antrim of Vulcan puts off dealing with a requested node replacement, trying to avoid the considerable effort and expense ($5 million from the taxpayers) to deal with it, and hoping Honor's sense of urgency to get back in black and under orders will let him skate by. She turns it on him by making clear it will be his ass on the line if Fearless isn't ready to leave dock.

Fearless's running lights blinked the green and white of a moored starship, clear and gem-like without the diffraction of atmosphere, and she felt a familiar throb of pride. The heavy cruiser's white skin gleamed in reflected sunlight above the ruler-straight line of shadow running down her double-ended, twelve-hundred-meter, three-hundred-thousand-ton hull. Brilliant light spilled from the oval of an open weapon bay a hundred and fifty meters forward of the after impeller ring, and Honor watched skinsuited yard techs crawling over the ominous bulk of Number Five Graser. She'd thought the intermittent glitch was in the on-mount software, but Vulcan's people insisted it was in the emitter assembly itself.

Green and white lights for a ship in dock. The new Fearless is of the same class as Warlock, 300,000 tons and 1,200 m (3,937 ft.) long. 1.2 km or 0.7 miles would also be appropriate.

She was also, Honor knew, genuinely concerned about her only child's lack of a sex life. Well, sometimes Honor was a bit worried about it, but it wasn't as if she had all that many opportunities. A starship's captain simply could not dally with a member of her crew, even if she had the desire to, and Honor was none too sure she did. Her sexual experience was virtually nil—aside from a single extremely unpleasant Academy episode and one adolescent infatuation that had trickled off in dreary unhappiness—because she'd simply never met a man she cared to become involved with.

Not that she was interested in women; she just didn't seem particularly interested in anyone—which might be just as well. It avoided all sorts of potential professional difficulties . . . and she rather doubted an overgrown horse like her would provoke much reciprocal interest, anyway. That reflection bothered her a bit. No, she thought, be honest; it bothered her a lot, and there were times her mother's version of a sense of humor was less than amusing. But this wasn't one of them, and she surprised them both by putting an arm around her and squeezing in a rare public display of affection.

Honor's nonexistent love life and social awkwardness, both byproducts of her razor focus on her career and things that interest her (like martial arts) and a couple of bad early experiences. The first was almost getting raped by Pavel Young, the second her first real boyfriend who turned out to be dating and bedding her for a laugh.

Still, I like that early Honor is incredibly awkward at things that don't relate directly to her duties. It makes her a more flawed, and thus interesting, character.

She didn't get to see them as often as she would have liked, which was one reason she'd been so happy when Fearless was sent to Vulcan for refit, instead of Hephaestus. Vulcan orbited Honor's own homeworld of Sphinx, ten light-minutes further out than the capital planet of Manticore, and she'd taken shameless advantage of the fact to spend time at home, wallowing in her father's cooking.

I believe Simon already spoke of Hephaestus' little Sphinxian brother, but just in case I included it. Sphink 10 light minutes further from the sun than Manticore.


One of the drawbacks of the prolong treatment, especially in its later, more effective versions, was that it stretched out the "awkward periods" in physical development, and Honor, he admitted, really had been on the homely side as a girl—at first glance, at least.

Part of her awkwardness is blamed on this, the painfully long adolesence that's the price of admission to a prolonged life.

"Admiral, I don't like politics," she said frankly. "Every time you get involved in them, things go all gray and murky on you. 'Politics' were what created the mess in Basilisk in the first place, and they darn near got my entire crew killed!" She shook her head. "No, Sir. I don't like politics, I don't understand them, and I don't want to understand them!"

"Then you'd better change your mind, Captain." There was bite in Courvosier's suddenly chill voice. Honor blinked in surprise, and Nimitz raised his head on her shoulder, bending his own grass-green gaze on the cherubic little admiral. "Honor, what you do in your sex life is up to you, but no captain in Her Majesty's service can be a virgin where politics are concerned—and especially not where diplomacy is concerned."

She blushed again, much more darkly, but she also felt her shoulders straighten just as they had at the Academy when then-Captain Courvosier had laid down the law. They were both a long way from Saganami Island, but some things never changed, she realized.

Courvosier is absolutely correct of course. Whatever Honor's personal feelings, she will be involved in diplomacy and politics, because part of her job is representing Space Blighty in the furthest reaches of the galactic arm.

"Not a lot," she admitted. "I haven't gotten my official orders or download yet, so all I know is what I read in the papers. I've checked The Royal Encyclopedia, but it hasn't been much help, and their navy's not even listed in Jane's. I gather Yeltsin doesn't have much to pique our interest, aside from its location."

"I assume from that last remark that you at least know why we want the system in our camp?" Courvosier made the statement a question, and she nodded. Yeltsin's Star lay less than thirty light-years to galactic northeast of the Manticore binary system. It also lay between the Kingdom of Manticore and the conquest-bloated People's Republic of Haven, and only an idiot—or a member of the Liberal or Progressive Party—could believe war with Haven wasn't coming. The diplomatic confrontation between the two powers had grown increasingly vicious in the two and a half T-years since the PRH's brazen attempt to seize the Basilisk System, and both of them were jockeying for position before the inevitable open clash.

That was what made Yeltsin's Star so important. It and the nearby Endicott System had the only inhabited worlds in a volume forty light-years across, squarely between the two adversaries. Allies, or (perhaps even more importantly) an advanced fleet base, in the area would be invaluable.

Apparently Manticore has a Royal Encyclopedia, with a disappointingly sparse section on Grayson (that'll change) and even a version of Jane's Fighting Ships (the MMMCCIXth edition, I presume.)

Grayson is 30 light-years, or about 4 days flight, from Manticore and occupys a very strategic location between Manticore and Haven. Grayson and Masada are the only viable forward fleet bases for 40 light-years around a nearly straight-line area between the two.

Finally, I do appreciate Weber making an effort and saying total idiots OR liberals and progressives, rather than total idiots INCLUDING liberals and progressives.

"You have to understand that Yeltsin's Star has been settled far longer than Manticore," Courvosier began in his best Saganami lecturer's voice. "The first colonists landed on Grayson, Yeltsin's single habitable planet, in 988 P.D., almost five hundred years before we arrived on the scene." Honor's eyes narrowed in surprise, and he nodded. "That's right. In fact, Yeltsin hadn't even been surveyed when they left Sol. For that matter, the entire cryo-process had been available for less than ten years when they shipped out."

"But why in God's name come way out here?" Honor demanded. "They must've had better astro data on systems closer to Sol!"

"They did, indeed, but you've already hit their motivation." She frowned, and he smiled thinly. " 'In God's name,' Honor. They were religious zealots looking for a home so far away no one would ever bother them. I guess they figured five-hundred-plus light-years was about far enough in an era before hyper travel had even been hypothesized. At any rate, the 'Church of Humanity Unchained' set out on a leap of faith, with absolutely no idea what they were going to find at the other end."

"Lord." Honor sounded shaken, and she was. She was a professional naval officer, and the mere thought of all the hideous ways those colonists could have died was enough to turn her stomach.

"Precisely. But the really interesting thing is why they did it." Honor quirked an eyebrow, and Courvosier shrugged. "They wanted to get away from 'the corrupting, soul-destroying effect of technology,' " he said, and she stared at him in disbelief.

"They used a starship to get away from technology? That's—that's insane, Sir!"

"No, not really." Courvosier leaned back against a table and folded his arms. "Mind you, that was my own first thought when the FO handed me the background on the system, but it actually made sense, in a crazy sort of way. Remember, this was way back in the early fourth century of the Diaspora, when Old Earth was finally getting a real handle on pollution, resource depletion, and overcrowding. Actually, things had been getting better for at least two hundred years, despite the eco-nuts' and 'Earth First' groups' efforts to kill the various space initiatives. The Earth-Firsters probably had a better case, given the resource demands STL colony ships made on Sol's economy, but at least they recognized the spinoff advantages. Deep-space industry, asteroid mining operations, orbital power collectors—all of them were on line at last, and the quality of life was climbing system-wide. Most people were delighted, and the Earth-Firsters' only real complaint was that it could have climbed even faster if people would only stop building interstellar colony ships.

"On the other hand, there were still crackpot groups—particularly the extreme 'Greens' and the Neo-Luddites—who didn't distinguish between the colonizing efforts and any other space activity. They insisted, each for their own reasons, that the only real solution was to throw technology out on its ear and 'live the way man was intended to live.' " Honor snorted in derision, and he chuckled.

"I know. They'd have looked pretty sick if they'd tried it, especially with a system population of over twelve billion to feed and house, but most of the idiots were from more developed nations. Extremists tend to grow more extreme, not less, as problems get closer to solutions, you know, and these extremists didn't have any real concept of what a planet without technology would be like, because they'd never experienced it. Besides, after three centuries of preaching the evils of technology—and their own societies' 'greedy, exploitative guilt'—the 'Greens' were techno-illiterates with no real relevance to the world about them, and most of the Neo-Luddites' job skills had been made redundant by new technologies. Neither background really qualified them to understand what was happening, and sweeping, simplistic solutions to complicated problems are much more appealing than tackling the real thought that might actually solve them.

"At any rate, the Church of Humanity Unchained was the product of a fellow named Austin Grayson—the Reverend Austin Grayson from someplace called the State of Idaho. According to the Foreign Office, there were hordes of lunatic fringe groups running around at the time, and Grayson was a 'back to the Bible' type who got caught up in the ban-the-machine movement. The only things that made him different from other crackpots and bomb-throwers were his charisma, his determination, and his talent for attracting converts with real ability. He actually managed to assemble a colony expedition and fund it to the tune of several billion dollars, all to take his followers away to the New Zion and its wonderful, technology-free Garden of Eden. It was really a rather elegant concept, you know, using technology to get away from technology."

History of Grayson, and Earth in the relatively early point of the Diaspora. I find it fascinating how the Luddites and Enviromentalists buckled down more and more, as more and more of the problems they objected to were solved in ways they didn't approve of. Even the Earth-First movement that objected to the massive expenses of colony ships, even while recognizing their contributions to space industry and exploration. I'd much rather read a story about these times than another one about treecats.

"Unfortunately, they got a nasty surprise at journey's end. Grayson's a pretty nice place in many ways, but it's a high-density world with unusual concentrations of heavy metals, and there isn't a single native plant or animal that won't kill any human who eats it for very long. Which meant, of course—"

The major problem with Grayson, it has heavy metals everywhere. Which is survivable, unless you're a Luddite fleeing technology.

Exactly. Not that they were willing to admit it. In fact, Grayson never did admit it. He lived another ten T-years after their arrival, and every year the end of technology was just around the corner, but there was a fellow named Mayhew who saw the writing on the wall a lot sooner. According to what I can dig out of the records, he more or less allied with another man, a Captain Yanakov, who'd commanded the colony ship, and the two of them pulled off a sort of doctrinal revolution after Grayson's death. Technology itself wasn't evil, just the way it had been used on Old Earth. What mattered wasn't the machine but the ungodly lifestyle machine-age humanity had embraced."

He rocked on his heels in silent thought for a moment, then shrugged.

"At any rate, they abandoned the anti-machine portion of Grayson's theology and concentrated on creating a society in strict accordance with God's Holy Word. Which—" he darted a quick glance at Honor from under lowered brows "—included the theory that 'Man is the head of Woman.' "

Given the choice between their principles and survival, the Graysons develop a little doctrinal flexibility. Then, almost certainly in reaction, they double down on the religious fundamentals in other aspects of their culture.

"Damn it, Honor, you're too Manticoran! And," he added with a sudden genuine laugh, "God help us all if your mother ever ended up on Grayson!"

Actually, when Allison Chou Harrington went to Grayson she and the locals got along swimmingly and she put her medical expertise to good use, setting up a world-class genetics clinc to kick Grayson's high infant mortality rate off a cliff.

Then again, Grayson had had almost twenty years by that point to get used to Honor and other Manticorans, and were just a few years shy of turning out their first female midshipman.

"Of course you don't," Courvosier sighed. "But, you see, women on Grayson have no legal rights, Honor—none at all."

-snip-

"Precisely. They can't vote, can't own property, can't sit on juries, and—especially!—can't serve in the military."

Believe it or not, reading this book as, I believe a 13-year-old, I said "This is going to be the girl power book, isn't it?"

"That wasn't quite as funny as I thought it would be. But the situation's even less funny. You see, Masada, the habitable planet of the Endicott System, was settled from Grayson, and not exactly voluntarily. What started as a schism over the retention of technology turned down other paths once it became clear they couldn't survive without it. The original pro-Tech faction became 'Moderates,' and the anti-Techies became 'the Faithful.' Once the Faithful were forced to accept that they couldn't get rid of the machines, they turned to creating the perfect godly society, and if you think the present government of Grayson is a bit backward, you should see what they came up with! Dietary laws, ritual cleansing for every imaginable sin—law codes that made any deviation from the True Way punishable by stoning, for God's sake!

"In the end, it came to open fighting, and it took the Moderates more than five years to beat the Faithful. Unfortunately, the Faithful had built themselves a doomsday weapon; if they couldn't have a godly society, then they'd blow up the whole planet—in, of course, exact accordance with the obvious Will of God."

The Admiral snorted in pure disgust and shook his head, then sighed.

"Anyway, the Grayson government—the Moderates—cut a deal with them and exiled them lock, stock, and whipping post to Masada, where they set about creating the society God Had Intended. It saved Grayson, but the Faithful have grown more intolerant, not less. There are a lot of points about their so-called religion that I can't get definitive information on, but I do know they've chopped the entire New Testament out of their Bibles because if Christ had really been the Messiah, technology never would have arisen on Old Earth, they wouldn't have been kicked off Grayson, and Woman would have been put in her proper place throughout the human community."

I heard once that after this book came out Weber got a big stack of hate mail, on the principle that people who reject the New Testament are Jews, the villains here are nasty, nasty religious fundamentalists, and therefore Weber is an Anti-Semite. Weber says they were just supposed to be generic fundamentalists, not a particular group, and I'm inclined to believe him. Whatever his faults, David Weber is a long way from being Tom Kratman.

In-universe, you have to admire the stubborn persistence of people who move to a location where the water, plants, animals and dust in the air AREN'T toxic, and what nothing more than to go back to where they are. I mean, really, who thinks the Faithful didn't get the best deal there?

"Unfortunately, they also seem to believe God expects them to fix all the things that are wrong with the universe, and they're still set on making Grayson toe their doctrinal line. Neither system has, you should pardon the expression, a pot to piss in, economically speaking, but they're too close together, and they've fought several wars over the centuries, complete with the occasional nuclear strike. Which, of course creates the opening both we and Haven are trying to exploit. It's also why the Foreign Minister convinced me that we need a fairly well known military type—like your humble servant—to head our delegation. The Graysons are only too well aware of the threat Masada presents to them, and they're going to want to know the person they're negotiating with is aware of it, too."

He shook his head and pursed his lips.

"It's a hell of a mess, Honor, and I'm afraid our own motives aren't as pure as the driven snow. We need a forward base in that area. Even more importantly, we need to keep Haven from securing one that close to us. Those factors are going to be as obvious to the locals as they are to us, so we're bound to get involved in the local conflict, in a peacekeeping role at the very least. If I were the Grayson government, that would certainly be the point I'd insist on, because the basic credo of Masadan theology is that someday they will return to Grayson in triumph and cast down the heirs of the ungodly who exiled their forefathers from their rightful home. Which means Grayson can really use a powerful outside ally—and that as soon as we started courting them, the Peeps started sucking up to Masada. Mind you, they'd probably prefer Grayson to Masada, too, but the Graysons seem a bit more aware of just how fatal it can be to become a 'friend' of the People's Republic.

What everyone's up to. Nice to admit this is a touch more complicated than good guys and bad guys (for however long that lasts.)

Honor released the hanging rings and whipped through a flashing, somersault dismount. She was far from a professional-quality gymnast, but she landed almost perfectly and bowed with extravagant grace to her audience—who regarded her with a tolerant eye from his comfortable perch on the parallel bars.

Among other things, Honor does gymnastics as part of her workout routine.

She reset the gym to the regulation one-gee maintained aboard all RMN ships, and the 'cat swarmed down from the bars. He'd never been able to understand why she insisted on cranking the gym's gravity clear up to the 1.35-gees she'd been born to. It wasn't that Nimitz was lazy, but in his uncomplicated view exertion was something to be endured, not chased after. He regarded the lower standard shipboard gravity as the greatest invention since celery, and if she had to exercise, she might as well do something he enjoyed, as well.

Honor likes to workout late in the evening, when there aren't people to squawk about her dialing the room's gravity to Sphinx levels. Also it seems individual rooms can have their gravity adjusted pretty easily. At a couple points in short stories they talk about how ships from around the old Fearless' day would have one or two "Axials" large corridors running the length of the ship where the gravity was turned so low a person could run at speeds appropriate for a car, to facilitate the moving of missiles and large machine parts, and let crew scramble very rapidly to action stations.

That deisgn feature was phased out, ostensibly because such large corridors represented a structural weakness. Honor and a couple others are convinced it's because someone in the Admiralty was sick and tired of people running into each other with enough force to break bones.

She laughed again and tossed the ancient frisbee back. There was too little space for the kinds of intricate flight paths she could manage on a planet, but Nimitz buzzed with gusto. He'd been a frisbee freak ever since the day he'd seen a much younger Honor's father playing the same game with his golden retriever, and, unlike a dog, he had hands.

Nimitz loves playing frisbee.

She palmed the lights up and crossed to her desk, resolutely refusing to let the knee-to-ceiling view port distract her until she finished her chores. She did allow herself to pause and check the treecat-sized life-support module clamped to the bulkhead beside her desk. It was the latest model, with all sorts of whistles and bells, increased endurance, and added safety features, yet it was also new. She'd made regular checks on its readouts a part of her daily routine, but until she felt completely familiar with all its features, she intended to check it every time she passed it, as well.

Part of Honor's nightly routine is checking up on Nimitz's new life-support shoebox, which she also does periodically. The captain's quarters of a Star Knight are apparently against the hull, as she gets a most generously sized window, where her cabin on the old Fearless didn't get a view.

All in all, she was more than pleased with how Fearless had performed over the last two and half T-years.

-snip-

"You're welcome, Ma'am." MacGuiness completed the ritual with a smile. The chief steward had followed her from her last command, and they'd settled into a comfortable routine over the past twenty-seven months.

Eh, technically it's more like two and a quarter years, but I'm not hugely bothered by it. Nice to get a rough idea how long it's been since the first book.

Officially, she wasn't here expressly to support Admiral Courvosier's mission. Instead, she was senior officer of the escort assigned to a convoy whose ultimate goal was the Casca System, twenty-two light-years beyond Yeltsin's Star. Neither Yeltsin nor Casca were in a particularly good galactic neighborhood, for the single-star policies out here tended to be hardscrabble propositions. Many had bitter personal experience of piratical raids, and there'd always been a temptation to better their lots with a little piracy of their own against the passing commerce of wealthier star systems. The situation had gotten far worse of late, and Honor (and the Office of Naval Intelligence) more than suspected that Haven's interest in the region helped account for that—a suspicion which, in turn, explained why the Admiralty had provided the convoy with an escort of two cruisers and a pair of destroyers.

Honor's mission is convoy escort, half of the convoy going to Grayson, and the other half further out to the Casca System. I'd suspect Haven too, both of these systems are within 10 days travel from Manticore in a warship, which you'd think would be terrible places for pirates to be.

She finished the last report and leaned back, sipping her cocoa while Nimitz curled on his bulkhead-mounted perch. She wasn't particularly impressed with one or two members of Admiral Courvosier's staff of Foreign Office experts, but so far she had nothing to complain about where her own duties were concerned, aside from the chunks of time her new job was eating up. And that, she told herself yet again, was her own fault. Andreas was perfectly capable of running the ship without her, and she felt fairly certain she was spending too much time worrying over the convoy's day-to-day operations. Delegating had always been the hardest thing for her to do, yet she knew there was another factor this time. Keeping her hands off while Andreas managed Fearless and freed her to worry about the rest of the squadron was precisely what she ought to be doing, and she didn't want to. Not because she distrusted his competence, but because she was afraid of losing the thing every Navy captain most craved—the active exercise of her authority and responsibility as mistress after God in one of Her Majesty's starships.

Honor both has trouble delegating, but admits to herself that it is a flaw. Probably, no definitely could have been a lot better realized over the course of the series. Micromanaging officers are one of the "joys" of the service.

Also, Honor is the senior officer of the convoy escort, which also includes the light cruiser Apollo, and destroyers Madrigal and Troubador making this her first squadron command. Partly, as mentioned above, this heavy escort is a response to the increase in piracy, and partly to show the flag at Grayson.

Fearless and the ships of her convoy rode the twisted currents of a grav wave which had never attained the dignity of a name, only a catalog number. Honor's cabin was barely a hundred meters forward of Fearless's after impeller nodes, and the immaterial, three-hundred-kilometer disk of the cruiser's after Warshawski sail flickered and flashed like frozen heat lightning, dominating the view port with its soft glory as it harnessed the grav wave's power. Its grab factor was adjusted to a tiny, almost immeasurable fraction of its full efficiency, providing a minuscule acceleration which was exactly offset by the forward sail's deceleration to hold Fearless at fifty percent of light-speed. The cruiser could have sustained a velocity twenty percent higher, but the hyper bands' heavier particle densities would have overcome the freighters' weaker radiation shielding long before that.

Warshawski sails disc shaped and extending 300 km from the hulls.

Their current grav wave was barely a half light-month deep and a light-month wide, a mere rivulet beside titans like the Roaring Deeps, yet its power was enough to send her ship leaping to an effective five thousand gravities' acceleration in less than two seconds.

Accel possible while in a grav wave.

Her merchantmen, she told herself. Her charges—slow, fat, clumsy, the smallest of them six times more massive than Fearless's three hundred thousand tons but totally defenseless, and stuffed with cargoes whose combined value was literally beyond comprehension. Over a hundred and fifty billion Manticoran dollars' worth of it headed for Yeltsin's Star alone. Medical equipment, teaching materials, heavy machinery, precision tools, and molycirc computers and software to update and modernize the Graysons' out-of-date industrial base—every penny of it paid for by Crown "loans" which amounted to outright gifts. It was a sobering indication of how high Queen Elizabeth's government was willing to bid for the alliance Admiral Courvosier sought, and it was Honor's responsibility to see it safely delivered.

No Navy skipper enjoyed convoy duty. Freighters lacked warships' powerful Warshawski sails and inertial compensators, and without them they dared not venture much above the delta bands of hyper space, whereas warships ranged as high as the eta or even theta bands. At the moment, for example, Honor's convoy was cruising along in the mid-delta bands, which translated their .5 C true velocity into an effective velocity of just over a thousand times light-speed. At that rate, the thirty-one light-year voyage to Yeltsin's Star would require ten days—just under nine, by their shipboard clocks. Left to herself, Fearless could have made the same crossing in less than four.

The extent of the Manticoran Crown's largess to Grayson to grease the wheels for this alliance.

Delta band of hyperspace gives you a 2000x increase to apparent speed. Again, merchants can make the trip between Manticore and Grayson in 10 days, warships inside 4.

Fearless was young, one of the Royal Manticoran Navy's newest and most powerful heavy cruisers. The Star Knight class often served as squadron or flotilla flagships, and BuShips had borne that in mind when they designed their accommodations. Admiral Courvosier's flag cabin was even more splendid than Honor's, and the captain's dining cabin was downright huge by Navy standards. If it wasn't big enough to seat all of Honor's officers—a heavy cruiser was a warship, and no warship had mass to waste—it was more than large enough to accommodate her senior officers and Courvosier's delegation.

Room for all senior officers and then some, but not all officers, in the dining cabin. Honor, as usual keeps a working supper, a habit IIRC she picked up from Courvosier.

Wolcott blushed, reminded of her responsibility as junior officer present, and rose. The rest of the guests fell silent, and her spine straightened as all eyes turned to her.

"Ladies and Gentlemen," she raised her wine, her voice deeper and more melodious—and confident—than Honor had expected, "the Queen!"

"The Queen!" The response rumbled back to her, glasses rose, and Wolcott slipped back into her chair with obvious relief as the formality was completed. She glanced up the table at her captain, and her face relaxed as she saw Honor's approving expression.

Three thousand years into the future, and still as British as John Bull and blood pudding.

"Indeed?" Houseman smiled the superior smile Honor loathed. "I realize military people often lack the time for the study of history, but an ancient Old Earth soldier got it exactly right when he said war was simply the continuation of diplomacy by non-diplomatic means."

"That's something of a paraphrase, and that 'simply' understates the case a bit, but I'll grant that it sums up the sense of General Clausewitz's remark." Houseman's eyes narrowed as Honor supplied Clausewitz's name and rank, and other conversations flagged as eyes turned toward them. "Of course, Clausewitz came out of the Napoleonic Era on Old Earth, heading into the Final Age of Western Imperialism, and On War isn't really about politics or diplomacy, except inasmuch as they and warfare are all instruments of state policy. Actually, Sun Tzu made the same point over two thousand T-years earlier." A hint of red tinged Houseman's jowls, and Honor smiled pleasantly. "Still, neither of them had a monopoly on the concept, did they? Tanakov said much the same thing in his Tenets of War just after the Warshawski sail made interstellar warfare possible, and Gustav Anderman certainly demonstrated the way in which diplomatic and military means can be used to reinforce one another when he took over New Berlin and built it into the Anderman Empire in the sixteenth century. Have you read his Sternenkrieg, Mr. Houseman? It's an interesting distillation of most of the earlier theorists with a few genuine twists of his own, probably from his personal background as a mercenary. I think Admiral White Haven's translation is probably the best available."

Not that Honor has time to study history. Apparently Ham (or his father, I guess) translated a book of Gustav Anderman's.

And I know Houseman is supposed to be an ivory tower intellectual, but you think he'd at least have the survival instinct and good manners not to condescend about the military while surrounded by military officers.

"Reasonable people negotiating in good faith can always reach reasonable compromises, Captain. Take our situation here, for example. Neither Yeltsin's Star nor the Endicott System have any real resources to attract interstellar commerce, but they each have an inhabited world, with almost nine billion people between them, and they lie less than two days apart for a hyper freighter. That gives them ample opportunity to create local prosperity, yet both economies are at best borderline . . . which is why it's so absurd that they've been at one another's throats for so long over some silly religious difference! They should be trading with one another, building a mutually supported, secure economic future, not wasting resources on an arms race." He shook his head sorrowfully. "Once they discover the advantages of peaceful trade—once they each realize their prosperity depends on the other's—the situation will defuse itself without all this saber rattling."

And whatever color is the sky in your world, where everyone is a rational actor driven primarily by enlightened economic self-interest? I know, he's an economist, and supposedly a great one, it's not unexpected he'd see things through that lens. Still, I doubt either Grayson or Masadans would be very impressed by his opinon of their "silly religious differences."

Ah, but the real reason I quoted this was to note that Grayson and Masada have 9 billion people between them. Later we'll learn that Masada has a substantially larger population than Grayson, though details are scarce.

"our entire involvement in this region stems from our own failure to find a common interest with the People's Republic, and it is a failure. There's always some way to avoid confrontation if one only looks deep enough and remembers that, in the long run, violence never solves anything. That's why we have diplomats, Captain Harrington—and why a resort to brute force is an indication of failed diplomacy, nothing more and nothing less."

Major Tomas Ramirez, commander of Fearless's Marine detachment, stared at Houseman in disbelief from further down the table. The heavyset, almost squat Marine had been twelve years old when Haven conquered his native Trevor's Star. He, his mother, and his sister had escaped to Manticore in the last refugee convoy through the Manticore Wormhole Junction; his father had stayed behind, on one of the warships that died to cover the retreat. Now his jaw tightened ominously as Houseman smiled at Honor, but Lieutenant Commander Higgins, Fearless's chief engineer, touched his forearm and jerked a tiny headshake.

Strangely enough, Ramirez's daddy comes up again in, what, 6 more books?

And again with Houseman having zero ability to see that his audience isn't buying what he's selling.

"All right, people," she said. "Thank you all for coming. I'll try not to use up any more of your time than I have to, but, as you all know, we'll be translating back into n-space for Yeltsin's Star tomorrow, and I wanted one last chance to meet with all of you and the Admiral before we do."

Conference aboard Fearless while in hyper. Implying some ability to move between ships in FTL.

Heads nodded, though one or two of Honor's officers had been a bit taken aback initially by her taste for face-to-face meetings. Most senior officers preferred the convenience of electronic conferences, but Honor believed in personal contact. Even the best com conference, in her view, distanced the participants from one another. People sitting around the same table were more likely to feel part of the same unit, to be aware of one another, and spark the sorts of ideas and responses that made a command team more than the sum of its parts.

Apparently a lor of squadron and station commanders are content to handle meetings via conference call. At the same time, almost every named commander I can recall had face-to-face meetings, even Yancy Parks.

"First, of course, is the absolute importance of securing our relationship with Grayson. The government hopes we'll come home with a formal alliance, but they'll settle for anything that brings the Yeltsin System more fully into our sphere of influence and decreases Haven's access here.

"Second, remember that anything we say to the Grayson government will be filtered through their perception of the Masadan threat. Their navy and population are both smaller than Masada's, and whatever certain members of my own delegation may think—" a soft chuckle ran around the table "-they have no doubt that Masadan rhetoric about returning to their planet as conquerors is completely serious. It hasn't been that long since their last shooting war, and the current situation is very, very tense.

"Third, and in conjunction with the military balance of power in the region, remember your single small squadron masses seventy percent as much as the entire Grayson Navy. Given the relative backwardness of their technology, Fearless, alone, could annihilate everything they have in a stand-up battle. They're going to realize that, whether they want to admit it or not, but it's essential that we not rub their noses in their 'inferiority.' Make them aware of how useful we could be as allies, by all means, but don't let yourself or any of your people condescend to them."

Three things Courvosier wants everyone to get about this mission. I'm most interested in the last portion, that this squadron of mostly light ships represents 70% the Grayson navy by tonnage, and Fearless alone oculd anihilate them.

"We've got four Mandrake-class freighters to drop off at Yeltsin's Star, but we're not supposed to actually turn their cargoes over to Grayson until Admiral Courvosier's people have begun negotiations and released them. I don't anticipate any problem in that regard, but that means they'll remain our responsibility until we do hand them over, and that means we're going to have to leave at least some of the escort to keep an eye on them. In addition, of course, we're supposed to be a show of force, a sort of pointed reminder to the Grayson government of just how valuable the Navy can be to their security vis-a-vis Masada—or, for that matter, the Peeps.

"On the other hand, we've got five more ships going on to Casca. We'll have to send along a reasonable escort, given the reports of increased 'pirate' activity in the area, so my present thought is to keep Fearless here, as our most impressive unit, and send you and Apollo on to Casca in company with Troubadour, Alice." Commander Truman nodded. "With Alistair to scout for you, you should be able to handle anything you run into, and that will give me Jason and Madrigal to support Fearless. It'll take you a bit over a T-week to get there, but I want you back here ASAP. You won't have any freighters to slow you down on the return voyage, so I'll expect you back in eleven days.

The squadron will have to split up, some leaving with the convoy, some staying to protect their ships in Grayson until they're formally turned over at the end of negotiations. Also setting the stage for Honor's big goof in this book.

"In the meantime, Jason," she moved her eyes to Alvarez, "you and I will operate on the theory that the Graysons know what they're talking about where Masada is concerned. It wouldn't be very bright of them to try anything against us, but unlike certain members of the Admiral's delegation, we're not going to take their rationality for granted." Another ripple of amusement flowed around the table. "I want our impellers hot at all times, and assuming we can arrange local leave, I don't want more than ten percent of our people dirt-side at any one time."

So this is what ships on alert look like, impellers on standby, no more than 10% of the crew on shore leave, so they can be quickly recovered and if need be the ships can do without.

"Ambassador Langtry's been on Grayson for over three local years, and his advice was that making a point of explaining that we have female military personnel might be counterproductive. They're a proud, touchy lot—not least, I suspect, because, scared as they are of Masada, they know the real balance of power between them and the Kingdom as well as we do and resent their weakness. They don't want to be our supplicants, and they go out of their way to refuse to admit they may be. At any rate, Sir Anthony felt they might see it as some sort of slur, as if we were pointedly telling them how uncivilized we consider them. On the other hand, we transmitted a list of our ships and their COs to them, and their colonists came predominately from Old Earth's Western Hemisphere, just as our original settlers did. They certainly ought to recognize feminine names when they see them."

With respect to Sir Anthony, it couldn't hurt to give them a little reminder, Yanakov clearly knew there women in the Service even if he hadn't thought it through very carefully, so clearly it's come up.

Later we see Yanakov's stunned reaction to Honor the woman captain and, yeah, I call bullshit. They sent ahead a manifest with the names of the escort captains, and in the very next chapter we hear all about how both Haven and Manticore have provided detailed accounts of their version of the events at Basilisk. You want to tell me it never came up that Honor was a woman, or that the Graysons didn't connect Honor Harrington, commander HMS Fearless with Honor Harrington, commander HMS Fearless?

I wouldn't be overly surprised if some desk-jockey assigned Honor to this detail specifically because she might refute Haven's lies about the source of hostility between them and Manticore.

Yu had to know how critical he and his ship were to Masada's plans—or, at least, to the plans he knew about—and a third of Thunder of God's crew were still heathens filling the specialist roles no Masadan could. They looked to Yu for their orders, not Simonds, and not simply because he was the captain of their ship. Simonds had survived thirty years of internecine political and doctrinal warfare within Masada's theocracy, and he knew perfectly well Yu had his own superiors and his own agenda. So far, that agenda had marched side-by-side with the Faith's, yet what would happen on the day that was no longer true?

A third of the crew are Haven, because no Masadan could replace their technical specialists.

Yu waited with punctilious courtesy until Simonds had taken his own seat, then dropped neatly into the indicated chair, and the Sword swallowed the bitter bile of envy at how easily Yu moved. The captain was ten years older than Simonds and looked half his age. Looked? Yu was half Simonds' age, physically, at least, for his people were so lost to God they saw no evil in tampering with His plan for their species. They used the prolong process liberally, among their military and ruling families, at least, and Simonds was disturbed by how much he envied them. The temptation to drink from that spring of youth was a deadly one.

Always interesting to see new perspectives on something most characters easily accept, in this case, prolong.

The translation from n-space to hyper was speed critical—at anything above .3 C, dimensional shear would tear a ship apart—but the reverse wasn't true. Which didn't make high-speed downward translations pleasant. The energy bleed as the convoy crossed each hyper wall would slow them to a crawl long before they reached the alpha bands, and shear wasn't a factor as far as hardware was concerned, but the effect on humans was something else again. Naval crews were trained for crash translations, yet there was a limit to what training could do to offset the physical distress and violent nausea, and there was no point in putting anyone—especially her merchant crews—through that.

Limits of translating into hyper, which don't really apply to exiting. Mind, translating either up or down decelerates far faster than any ship could do normally (has to be an exploit somewhere there, but I can't see it.) Anyway, crash translations are rough on people and equipment, and even normal translations can be uncomfortable, see Honor and all the old space hands working hard to look blase about the whole thing.

Fearless hit the gamma wall, and her Warshawski sails bled transit energy like an azure forest fire. Her velocity dropped almost instantly from .3 C to a mere nine percent of light-speed, and Honor's stomach heaved as her inner ear rebelled against a speed loss the rest of her senses couldn't even detect.

That really is some decel.

Her readouts stopped blinking. The visual display was suddenly still, filled once more with the unwinking pinpricks of normal-space stars, the sense of nausea faded almost as quickly as it had come, and HMS Fearless's velocity had dropped in less than ten minutes from ninety thousand kilometers per second to a bare hundred and forty.

See above.

Her lips twitched at the familiar thought, and she glanced at her astrogation repeater. Stephen had done his usual bang-up job, and Fearless and her charges floated twenty-four light-minutes from Yeltsin's Star, just outside the F6's hyper limit. Even the best hyper log was subject to some error, and the nature of hyper space precluded any observations to correct, but the voyage had been relatively short and DuMorne had shaved his safety margin with an expert touch.

Limits of hyper-navigation.

Two hundred gravities was a leisurely lope for Fearless, less than half of what she could have turned out even at the eighty percent "max" power settings the Manticoran Navy normally used, but it was the highest safe acceleration for Honor's freighters.

200 G (2 kps squared) accel for freighters.

"Numbers and formation match the Manticoran convoy, Sir. Of course, we only have them on gravitics now, not light-speed sensors. We won't hear anything from the com for another eight minutes or so."

Gravitic sensors spot the convoy 8 light-minutes out, but are insufficient for confirming the convoy's identity and intetions.

Grayson looked oddly patchy in the visual display as Fearless and her brood settled into their parking orbit, and Honor had been amazed on the trip in-system by the scale of Grayson's spaceborne industry. For a technically backward system, Yeltsin's Star boasted an amazing number of bulk carriers and processing ships. None of them appeared hyper capable, and the largest massed barely a million tons, but they were everywhere, and some of the orbital structures circling Grayson itself were at least a third the size of Hephaestus or Vulcan back home. No doubt the scale of the orbital construction projects also explained the plethora of energy sources and drive signatures plying between Grayson and the local asteroid belt, but the sheer numbers of them still came as a shock.

Even a third of Hephaestus is really big. Of course, there's a very good reason Grayson space is so full of industry, and habitation, the surface isn't that great.

Old-fashioned electric arc and laser welders glared and sputtered, despite the wastefulness of such primitive, energy-intensive techniques compared to modern chem-catalyst welders. Hard-suited construction crews heaved massive frame members around, overcoming mass and momentum by brute muscle power without the tractor/counter-grav exo-suits Manticoran workers would have used as a matter of course, and it took her a while to realize (and even longer to accept) that some of them were using rivet guns. The local orbital power receptors were huge and clumsy and looked none too efficient, and her sensors said at least half the structures out there were using fission power plants! Fission plants weren't just old-fashioned; they were dangerous technical antiques, and their presence baffled her.

Grayson vs. Manticoran tech, chem-catalyzer welding gear, mini-tractor beams or gravity manipulation to move things etc. Honor is shocked that anything so primitive and dangerous as fission is used.

That wasn't an orbital habitat after all. Or, rather, it wasn't a habitat for people. She watched the herd of cattle graze across a knee-high meadow on what had to be one of the most expensive "farms" in the explored galaxy, then shook her head again—this time with slowly dawning comprehension. So that was why they were building so many orbital installations!

Orbital farms. That's all I have to say.

She turned back to the planet, and the peculiar splotchiness of its coloration really registered for the first time. Grayson's land surface was the life-breathing green of chlorophyll, with very few patches of desert, but most of it was a rich, blue-toned green, darker than anything Honor was used to seeing. Lighter patches, with suspiciously neat and regular boundaries, broke the darkness up, but the lighter areas were centered on what were obviously cities and towns, and all of those habitations were well inland. Grayson's seas were a deep and sparkling blue, painfully similar to those of Honor's native Sphinx, yet there were no cities along those bright, white beaches, and she nodded to herself as she realized why.

Grayson was, as Admiral Courvosier had said, a lovely planet. Its colors had a rich, jewel-like tone rare even among life-bearing worlds, and despite its thirteen and a half light-minute orbital radius, its brilliant star and minimal axial tilt gave it surface temperatures and weather patterns any resort planet might envy. But beautiful as it was, Grayson had never been intended as a home for man. It was considerably smaller than Old Earth, yet its mass was almost Earth Standard, for it was rich in heavy elements. Dangerously rich. So rich its plant life fixed arsenic and cadmium, mercury and lead, and passed those same elements on to the herbivores who ate it. So rich its seas weren't merely "salt" but a brew of naturally occurring toxins that made merely swimming in them potentially lethal. No wonder Grayson's people lived inland, and Honor hated even to think of the unremitting struggle they must face to "decontaminate" the soil that supported those lighter green patches of terrestrial food crops.

What an awesome place for a vacation home! Right, captain?

Most of them were light attack craft, purely sublight intrasystem vessels, the largest massing barely eleven thousand tons. The LACs were dwarfed by their light cruiser flagship, yet however large she might be beside her diminutive consorts, the cruiser was only a little over ninety thousand tons, barely two-thirds the size of Alice Truman's Apollo. She was also thirty years old, but Honor's last command had been even smaller and older, and she could only approve of the crisp deft way the Graysons had maneuvered to rendezvous with her own command. Those ships might be old and technically inferior, but their crews knew what they were doing.

Most of Grayson navy are 11,000 ton LACs, roughly 4% the mass of Fearless the flagship is a cruiser a bit smaller than the old Fearless and similarly aged.

His cutter shivered as one of the cruiser's tractors locked on, and his pilot cut his thrusters as they slid into the bright cavern of Fearless's boat bay. The tractor deposited the small craft neatly in a cradle, the docking collar nestled into place, and the pressure signal buzzed, indicating a solid seal.

Lieutenant Andrews and his staff fell in behind him as the Admiral swam down the access tube, and he smiled as he saw the Manticoran rating stationed diplomatically by the scarlet-hued grab bar just short of the tube's end. The rating started to speak, but stopped himself as he saw Yanakov already reaching for the bar. The Grayson Navy used green, not scarlet, but the Admiral recognized the meaning of the color code and swung himself nimbly across the interface into the cruiser's internal gravity. He stepped out of the way, moving forward to make room for his staff, and the shrill of the bosun's pipes greeted him as he cleared the tube hatch.

Again with the airplane tubes, when the shuttle touched down on a docking cradle already a part of Fearless. Whatever, apparently a brightly-colored grab bar means the same thing in any language.

The damned ship was crewed by children! The oldest person in sight couldn't be over thirty T-years old, and most of them looked like they were barely out of high school!

Trained reflex took his hand through an answering salute even as the thought flashed through his mind, and then he kicked himself. Of course they weren't children; he'd forgotten the prolong treatment was universally available to Manticorans. But what did he do now? He wasn't that familiar with Manticoran naval insignia, and how did he pick the senior officers out of this morass of juvenile delinquents?

The many small awkward moments of dealing with prolong.


EDIT: on reflection, it seems the Grayson flagship is roughly the same size, maybe a hair bigger than the old Fearless.

Also, the Masadans clearly never learned to create operation plans that wouldn't ping spacegoogle. their main attack plan for Grayson is called Jericho.

[Terralthra]

She reset the gym to the regulation one-gee maintained aboard all RMN ships, and the 'cat swarmed down from the bars. He'd never been able to understand why she insisted on cranking the gym's gravity clear up to the 1.35-gees she'd been born to. It wasn't that Nimitz was lazy, but in his uncomplicated view exertion was something to be endured, not chased after. He regarded the lower standard shipboard gravity as the greatest invention since celery, and if she had to exercise, she might as well do something he enjoyed, as well.

Honor likes to workout late in the evening, when there aren't people to squawk about her dialing the room's gravity to Sphinx levels. Also it seems individual rooms can have their gravity adjusted pretty easily. At a couple points in short stories they talk about how ships from around the old Fearless' day would have one or two "Axials" large corridors running the length of the ship where the gravity was turned so low a person could run at speeds appropriate for a car, to facilitate the moving of missiles and large machine parts, and let crew scramble very rapidly to action stations.

That deisgn feature was phased out, ostensibly because such large corridors represented a structural weakness. Honor and a couple others are convinced it's because someone in the Admiralty was sick and tired of people running into each other with enough force to break bones.

As hilariously demonstrated in "A Ship Called Francis"...

Their current grav wave was barely a half light-month deep and a light-month wide, a mere rivulet beside titans like the Roaring Deeps, yet its power was enough to send her ship leaping to an effective five thousand gravities' acceleration in less than two seconds.

Accel possible while in a grav wave.

And that's a WEAK grav wave.

"Reasonable people negotiating in good faith can always reach reasonable compromises, Captain. Take our situation here, for example. Neither Yeltsin's Star nor the Endicott System have any real resources to attract interstellar commerce, but they each have an inhabited world, with almost nine billion people between them, and they lie less than two days apart for a hyper freighter. That gives them ample opportunity to create local prosperity, yet both economies are at best borderline . . . which is why it's so absurd that they've been at one another's throats for so long over some silly religious difference! They should be trading with one another, building a mutually supported, secure economic future, not wasting resources on an arms race." He shook his head sorrowfully. "Once they discover the advantages of peaceful trade—once they each realize their prosperity depends on the other's—the situation will defuse itself without all this saber rattling."

And whatever color is the sky in your world, where everyone is a rational actor driven primarily by enlightened economic self-interest? I know, he's an economist, and supposedly a great one, it's not unexpected he'd see things through that lens. Still, I doubt either Grayson or Masadans would be very impressed by his opinon of their "silly religious differences."

In fairness, in both Field of Dishonor and Honor Among Enemies, both a fellow top-level economist and the richest man (and one of the richest women) in the Star Kingdom separately think Reginald Houseman is an idiot of the highest, most-educated-to-the-point-of-arrogance, order.

And again with Houseman having zero ability to see that his audience isn't buying what he's selling.

Foreshadowing, really.

"All right, people," she said. "Thank you all for coming. I'll try not to use up any more of your time than I have to, but, as you all know, we'll be translating back into n-space for Yeltsin's Star tomorrow, and I wanted one last chance to meet with all of you and the Admiral before we do."

Conference aboard Fearless while in hyper. Implying some ability to move between ships in FTL.

As demonstrated later in this book, anything inside the hyper field comes with the ship translating. If it's a pinnace, it can maneuver freely in hyper, but can't get out of hyper on its own, and unless it has alpha nodes, is fucked if it encounters a grav wave.

The translation from n-space to hyper was speed critical—at anything above .3 C, dimensional shear would tear a ship apart—but the reverse wasn't true. Which didn't make high-speed downward translations pleasant. The energy bleed as the convoy crossed each hyper wall would slow them to a crawl long before they reached the alpha bands, and shear wasn't a factor as far as hardware was concerned, but the effect on humans was something else again. Naval crews were trained for crash translations, yet there was a limit to what training could do to offset the physical distress and violent nausea, and there was no point in putting anyone—especially her merchant crews—through that.

Limits of translating into hyper, which don't really apply to exiting. Mind, translating either up or down decelerates far faster than any ship could do normally (has to be an exploit somewhere there, but I can't see it.) Anyway, crash translations are rough on people and equipment, and even normal translations can be uncomfortable, see Honor and all the old space hands working hard to look blase about the whole thing.

Rather than being exploitable, it's a problem (along with the impossibility of making an alpha translation above .3 c) that people have been trying to overcome pretty much since hyperspace has been discovered. So far as anyone can tell, there's no way to avoid losing ~92% of your previous band (or n-space) velocity making a translation in either direction. Until they had Warshawskis (both the detectors and the sails), all colonization vessels went out in n-space, because the drawbacks of a) instant death when encountering a grav wave and b) having to make up such a large amount of delta-v far outweighed the benefits.

That wasn't an orbital habitat after all. Or, rather, it wasn't a habitat for people. She watched the herd of cattle graze across a knee-high meadow on what had to be one of the most expensive "farms" in the explored galaxy, then shook her head again—this time with slowly dawning comprehension. So that was why they were building so many orbital installations!

Orbital farms. That's all I have to say.

In the grand scheme of things, orbital farms aren't that ridiculous. Even in an environment less... strenuous than Grayson, being able to climate-control your growing space and have a year-round growing season is a pretty big win, assuming you have the orbital construction infrastructure to build the habs in the first place, and assuming you aren't going to just ship the results back down the well when they're grown. Orbital ranches (almost by definition, only 10% as efficient in energy terms per calorie of consumables) are perhaps less easy to justify.

[Ahriman238]

As hilariously demonstrated in "A Ship Called Francis"...

I have no idea what you're talking about. They were practicing compensator adjustments in movement, the ship went right and Captain Zemet went left. So the captain has said, and so that is what happened. The captain is a professional, there's no way he would've wiped out while sledding on a potato sack, even if he was to participatei n such an activity, which he didn't, and even if such an activity took place, which it certainly did not.

In fairness, in both Field of Dishonor and Honor Among Enemies, both a fellow top-level economist and the richest man (and one of the richest women) in the Star Kingdom separately think Reginald Houseman is an idiot of the highest, most-educated-to-the-point-of-arrogance, order.

Quite likely. He was sent as an economic expert to advise Courvosier and the Graysons, but rapidly promoted due to untoward circumstances.

In the grand scheme of things, orbital farms aren't that ridiculous. Even in an environment less... strenuous than Grayson, being able to climate-control your growing space and have a year-round growing season is a pretty big win, assuming you have the orbital construction infrastructure to build the habs in the first place, and assuming you aren't going to just ship the results back down the well when they're grown. Orbital ranches (almost by definition, only 10% as efficient in energy terms per calorie of consumables) are perhaps less easy to justify.

Oh I think it's a really cool idea. Just not economically feasible until you can get spacelift as easily as trucking cross-country.

[Terralthra]

In fairness, in both Field of Dishonor and Honor Among Enemies, both a fellow top-level economist and the richest man (and one of the richest women) in the Star Kingdom separately think Reginald Houseman is an idiot of the highest, most-educated-to-the-point-of-arrogance, order.

Quite likely. He was sent as an economic expert to advise Courvosier and the Graysons, but rapidly promoted due to untoward circumstances.

He wasn't even really sent as that. He was sent as a sop to the Liberal party.

In the grand scheme of things, orbital farms aren't that ridiculous. Even in an environment less... strenuous than Grayson, being able to climate-control your growing space and have a year-round growing season is a pretty big win, assuming you have the orbital construction infrastructure to build the habs in the first place, and assuming you aren't going to just ship the results back down the well when they're grown. Orbital ranches (almost by definition, only 10% as efficient in energy terms per calorie of consumables) are perhaps less easy to justify.

Oh I think it's a really cool idea. Just not economically feasible until you can get spacelift as easily as trucking cross-country.

Pretty sure even at the time of The Honor of the Queen, Grayson has counter-grav, no?

[Simon_Jester]

Commander Antrim of Vulcan puts off dealing with a requested node replacement, trying to avoid the considerable effort and expense ($5 million from the taxpayers) to deal with it, and hoping Honor's sense of urgency to get back in black and under orders will let him skate by. She turns it on him by making clear it will be his ass on the line if Fearless isn't ready to leave dock.

It's a pleasant surprise to me that those nodes only cost five million to replace, although that may include the possibility of refurbishment/salvage of the old one. My impression is that Manticoran dollars are meant to be roughly equal in relative value to turn-of-the-millennium US dollars, after all...

Green and white lights for a ship in dock. The new Fearless is of the same class as Warlock, 300,000 tons and 1,200 m (3,937 ft.) long. 1.2 km or 0.7 miles would also be appropriate.

Must've missed the Great Resizing in that reference. Check those length figures I listed for earlier CA classes; a Star Knight is only 523 meters long according to the book I've been getting my references from.

[Side note: the Star Knights are only about ten years old at this point. Almost frighteningly shiny and new by RMN standards, where they're still using battlecruisers over 100 years old as a major chunk of their fleet, and will keep using 300-year-old dreadnoughts throughout most of the First Havenite War]

One of the drawbacks of the prolong treatment, especially in its later, more effective versions, was that it stretched out the "awkward periods" in physical development, and Honor, he admitted, really had been on the homely side as a girl—at first glance, at least.

Part of her awkwardness is blamed on this, the painfully long adolesence that's the price of admission to a prolonged life.

Other people seem to get along all right. Although I can see the idea that if the person in question is awkward and bony and fills out a bit in their (biological) twenties and thirties, that would make at least some sense.

Apparently Manticore has a Royal Encyclopedia, with a disappointingly sparse section on Grayson (that'll change) and even a version of Jane's Fighting Ships (the MMMCCIXth edition, I presume.)

House of Steel lists RMN ship classes under the pretense of being from "Jayne's;" I assume this came out of much the same impulse to parody that led some friends of mine to come up with "Jayne's Frightening Ships" for a game we were playing once.

Finally, I do appreciate Weber making an effort and saying total idiots OR liberals and progressives, rather than total idiots INCLUDING liberals and progressives.

Really? I think it would have been less of a dig to just say "only a complete idiot," leave it at that. As it is, the line reminds me of Mark Twain's "suppose you are a fool, and suppose you are a U.S. senator... but I repeat myself."

History of Grayson, and Earth in the relatively early point of the Diaspora. I find it fascinating how the Luddites and Enviromentalists buckled down more and more, as more and more of the problems they objected to were solved in ways they didn't approve of. Even the Earth-First movement that objected to the massive expenses of colony ships, even while recognizing their contributions to space industry and exploration. I'd much rather read a story about these times than another one about treecats.

Hm. Trying to remember if there's one of those in the pipeline. Anyway, I suspect that the 'environmentalist' movement in question had gotten very very slimmed down by this point, i.e. to something like 5% of the population or less. Also, we may be getting a somewhat garbled version of history, given that this is being presented 1500 years after the fact on another planet. Sure, Courvosier did his homework, but it's like reading up on the Fall of the Roman Empire- even if you had excellent and detailed records ready to hand, there's still the endless problem of figuring out how to interpret the events you know happened through the lens of your own modern perspective.

For a highly secular society like Manticore's, which doesn't really understand religious fundamentalism or deeply anti-technology environmentalism, conflating the two to a higher degree than was historically correct would be... unsurprising.

[Also, to me this dates the story very effectively as '90s SF; nowadays you don't hear nearly so much about Luddite antagonists to progress, or if you do they are portrayed in a more ambiguous light]

The major problem with Grayson, it has heavy metals everywhere. Which is survivable, unless you're a Luddite fleeing technology.

Well, it's at least marginally survivable with genetic modification, at any rate.

I heard once that after this book came out Weber got a big stack of hate mail, on the principle that people who reject the New Testament are Jews, the villains here are nasty, nasty religious fundamentalists, and therefore Weber is an Anti-Semite. Weber says they were just supposed to be generic fundamentalists, not a particular group, and I'm inclined to believe him. Whatever his faults, David Weber is a long way from being Tom Kratman.

It doesn't help that Masada in particular was a fortress where a bunch of Jewish extremists forted up against the Roman Empire, then committed mass suicide and killed their families when it looked like the Romans were going to capture the place. So it actually is, explicitly, a reference to violent ultrareligious Jewish history.

Though I never knew about the hate mail. Interesting.

In-universe, you have to admire the stubborn persistence of people who move to a location where the water, plants, animals and dust in the air AREN'T toxic, and what nothing more than to go back to where they are. I mean, really, who thinks the Faithful didn't get the best deal there?

Certainly not the Graysons, who mention that later.

What everyone's up to. Nice to admit this is a touch more complicated than good guys and bad guys (for however long that lasts.)

Well sort of; it's pretty blatantly obvious even here that the Graysons are the good guys and the Masadans bad, in relative terms. To be fair, if Manticore had decided to court Masada first, Haven would have tried to make Grayson a client state.

Then again, Grayson was arguably the more appealing choice as a client state all along, because they're more likely to adapt successfully to modern, technologically sophisticated neighbors. Sure, the Masadans have slightly greater military strength (sort of), but that's irrelevant to either of the great powers, which could pulverize either fleet in an afternoon with a battlecruiser division.

Honor likes to workout late in the evening, when there aren't people to squawk about her dialing the room's gravity to Sphinx levels. Also it seems individual rooms can have their gravity adjusted pretty easily. At a couple points in short stories they talk about how ships from around the old Fearless' day would have one or two "Axials" large corridors running the length of the ship where the gravity was turned so low a person could run at speeds appropriate for a car, to facilitate the moving of missiles and large machine parts, and let crew scramble very rapidly to action stations.

That deisgn feature was phased out, ostensibly because such large corridors represented a structural weakness. Honor and a couple others are convinced it's because someone in the Admiralty was sick and tired of people running into each other with enough force to break bones.

Also because of the potato sack races.

That said, there is a serious effort to make more modern warships more survivable in the background of the late 19th and early 20th century design evolution. That's one of the reasons the tonnage figures keep bulking up, it's why all those missile defense weapons are getting layered on, and so on. The new Star Knight-class Fearless has well over three times the mass, but only about double the offensive armament, of the old one for this reason.

[PS- looking at the list of Grayson warships that is ALSO in this book of mine, I have a strong suspicion that the Francis of A Ship Called Francis and good old HMS Fearless the first were the same class. ]

Part of Honor's nightly routine is checking up on Nimitz's new life-support shoebox, which she also does periodically. The captain's quarters of a Star Knight are apparently against the hull, as she gets a most generously sized window, where her cabin on the old Fearless didn't get a view.

Windows on spaceship... ugh. Then again, the Star Knights do have a modest superstructure perched on the dorsal part of the hull. It is possible, even likely, that one of the big things they put there is crew accommodations, including officer quarters. It's more or less centrally located, and based on the strength of 'oceangoing warship' metaphors in the Honorverse, that superstructure would probably NOT be heavily armored. So using transparent (but still steel-strong) materials to provide an actual window on a spaceship would not be completely unreasonable for the design, and the Honorverse has materials up to the job.

Honor's mission is convoy escort, half of the convoy going to Grayson, and the other half further out to the Casca System. I'd suspect Haven too, both of these systems are within 10 days travel from Manticore in a warship, which you'd think would be terrible places for pirates to be.

It surely would have been, fifty years ago. However:
1) Yes, Haven may be quietly funding and supporting some of those pirates.
2) There are a lot of steps pirates based out of a hardscrabble colony world could take to keep up plausible deniability. Like, say, flying for two weeks in a random direction before actually bothering to rob anyone.
3)

On a side note, the relative poverty of the star systems on a direct line between Manticore and Haven probably helps to explain why Haven finally says "to heck with it" and tries to tackle Manticore and its allies all in one go, rather than pursuing divide-and-conquer tactics. There's just not a lot of economic value to be had out here except from Manticore, and the immense wealth of Manticore's own merchant marine and Junction does not translate into immense wealth for other star systems in the same region of space.

Hm. That casts my analogy of Manticore as Space Dubai in a new light- the prosperous trading port surrounded by conditions of relative poverty and primitivism. Actually, it's interesting to imagine this conflict as Militarized Dubai (population 2 million, GDP ~82 billion dollars) versus North Korea (population 25 million, GDP ~40 billion dollars).

In that case, the Solarian League would have to be played by a cross between the US (for size/GDP) and Qing China (for technological stagnation and bureaucratic overgrowth).

Honor both has trouble delegating, but admits to herself that it is a flaw. Probably, no definitely could have been a lot better realized over the course of the series. Micromanaging officers are one of the "joys" of the service.

Yeah, that would have been good. On the other hand, naval officers are supposed to learn more about how to delegate as their career rolls on. By the time we see her in the most recent books (~1920 PD) she should have learned from her mistakes; after all, 15-20 years is plenty of time in real life to turn a good captain into a good admiral.

The cusp point for Honor should have been when she got randomly handed two light battle squadrons in the Grayson Navy during Flag in Exile... it really should have shown at that point that she wasn't used to that level of responsibility, to having the scope of her command suddenly balloon from two thousand people up to fifty thousand.

For another, the micromanagement would be interesting because sometimes it would serve to her advantage- for instance, it worked rather well in On Basilisk Station, because it made it easier for her to pick up the load caused by her subordinates' slacking off, and let her kick the necessary rear to actually get them into motion.

Not that Honor has time to study history. Apparently Ham (or his father, I guess) translated a book of Gustav Anderman's.

Or, for that matter, some more distant ancestor; there have been about a dozen Earls White Haven, after all. Though it's certainly common enough in a Napoleonic/Victorian social milieu for serving military officers to find the time to translate historical texts.

And I know Houseman is supposed to be an ivory tower intellectual, but you think he'd at least have the survival instinct and good manners not to condescend about the military while surrounded by military officers.

He's used to an audience where that sort of thing plays rather well, and he's kind of a cartoon liberal, as depicted in 1993 by someone who [filling in the blanks with sheer unsupported inference] is basing him off of people who wanted us to 'just get along' with the Soviets in the '80s... and whose ideas about the military were largely the result of Vietnam-era disgust.

This is one respect in which a 20 to 30 year age/calendar gap can make a LOT of difference, as can being in a different place on the political spectrum. Today, people in the US tend to view the military through a War-on-Terror lens, instead of a Cold-War lens.

"All right, people," she said. "Thank you all for coming. I'll try not to use up any more of your time than I have to, but, as you all know, we'll be translating back into n-space for Yeltsin's Star tomorrow, and I wanted one last chance to meet with all of you and the Admiral before we do."

Conference aboard Fearless while in hyper. Implying some ability to move between ships in FTL.

The thing is, hyperspace in the Honorverse is basically the same as normal space, just with higher particle densities, more grav waves, less (no?) stars, and that funky spatial-compression thing going on that allows ships to achieve apparent FTL speeds as measured in our own sidereal universe, while still traveling at sublight in the universe they occupy at the time.

Any spacecraft that can move in normal space can move in hyperspace, with the caveats that it won't be able to move between hyperspace 'bands' or return to the sidereal universe without its own hyper generator. And that if it sticks its nose into a grav wave without having Warshawski sails, it will get ripped to pieces and killed.

Any mechanism of propulsion that works in normal space also works in hyperspace, with the caveat that if you use anything other than Warshawski sails while occupying a grav wave, you will get ripped to pieces and killed.

Even impeller-drive missiles still work... as long as you don't send them into a grav wave, where they will get ripped to pieces and killed.

[spot the pattern, kids!]

In Honor Among Enemies, the entire climactic naval battle sequence is fought entirely in hyperspace, and the physical parameters of the action aren't any different than they are in other battles.

Apparently a lor of squadron and station commanders are content to handle meetings via conference call. At the same time, almost every named commander I can recall had face-to-face meetings, even Yancy Parks.

Who is Yancey Parks?

Anyway, yeah, that's true. Even if we project real life forward with little social change, I'm betting that in a few thousand years no one will be even remotely surprised by people choosing to use Space Skype to have their conferences. On the other hand, I suspect that successful organizations will still use actual physical meetings, unless VR manages to create an experience that is really indistinguishable from said physical meetings.

Three things Courvosier wants everyone to get about this mission. I'm most interested in the last portion, that this squadron of mostly light ships represents 70% the Grayson navy by tonnage, and Fearless alone could annihilate them.

If Manticore is at the high end of what a single-system polity in the Honorverse can afford in terms of military technology (Space Dubai), Grayson is at the low end (Space Ouagadougou, or worse). Flipping through that same book, the GSN has maybe 150 thousand tons of LACs, four 65-thousand ton destroyers, one 83-thousand and two 92-thousand ton cruisers. Something like 600-700 thousand tons, and Honor's Star Knight-class alone tips the scales at around 250 thousand tons... of much more advanced hardware.

Later we see Yanakov's stunned reaction to Honor the woman captain and, yeah, I call bullshit. They sent ahead a manifest with the names of the escort captains, and in the very next chapter we hear all about how both Haven and Manticore have provided detailed accounts of their version of the events at Basilisk. You want to tell me it never came up that Honor was a woman, or that the Graysons didn't connect Honor Harrington, commander HMS Fearless with Honor Harrington, commander HMS Fearless?

Not having actually read the relevant passage in years... hm. It is not credible that Yanakov would just forget the relevant information, since this is the senior admiral of the GSN we're talking about. So yeah, shenanigans.

Although it's certainly understandable that Yanakov would have a moment when he actually sees a female military captain, like holy cow this is real. I imagine you'd get a similar reaction out of a WWII naval officer or whatever, even after you actually phoned ahead and said "yeah, the commander of our carrier battle group is a woman. He's going to hear the words coming out of your mouth, but he'll still react very strongly to seeing it with his own eyes.

A third of the crew are Haven, because no Masadan could replace their technical specialists.

Context: this is the Havenite 'delegation' to Masada: basically, the Havenite government loaned Masada two warships, a destroyer (ho-hum) and a battlecruiser (uh-oh). Yu is the captain of the battlecruiser.

Limits of translating into hyper, which don't really apply to exiting. Mind, translating either up or down decelerates far faster than any ship could do normally (has to be an exploit somewhere there, but I can't see it.)...

The main catch is that the increased speed seems to just... cease. There's no way to draw extra energy out of it or anything.

On a side note, it's a damn good thing for survival in the Honorverse that this rapid loss of velocity occurs. Otherwise it would, for example, be very very easy to come roaring out of hyperspace at half the speed of light, and stage a nuclear-tipped drive by shooting of a planet before its defenders have gotten their boots on.

Grayson looked oddly patchy in the visual display as Fearless and her brood settled into their parking orbit, and Honor had been amazed on the trip in-system by the scale of Grayson's spaceborne industry. For a technically backward system, Yeltsin's Star boasted an amazing number of bulk carriers and processing ships. None of them appeared hyper capable, and the largest massed barely a million tons, but they were everywhere, and some of the orbital structures circling Grayson itself were at least a third the size of Hephaestus or Vulcan back home. No doubt the scale of the orbital construction projects also explained the plethora of energy sources and drive signatures plying between Grayson and the local asteroid belt, but the sheer numbers of them still came as a shock.

Even a third of Hephaestus is really big. Of course, there's a very good reason Grayson space is so full of industry, and habitation, the surface isn't that great.

The sheer volume of Grayson space industry before they meet up with Manticore does a lot to explain why they become an actually significant ally later in the series. They have a huge base of trained manpower accustomed to working in space, probably equal or better per capita than Manticore does. So when they are provided with modern technology, they rapidly adapt it to the production of spacegoing warships.

Grayson vs. Manticoran tech, chem-catalyzer welding gear, mini-tractor beams or gravity manipulation to move things etc. Honor is shocked that anything so primitive and dangerous as fission is used.

Also, Honor is basing this on a limited understanding of history. Basically, in the Honorverse fusion power emerged at a point when fission had already become unpopular for the same reasons it has problems in real life. So fission became "antiquated dangerous clunker" technology all at once... while the Graysons have long since gotten used to it.

On a side note, having a Chernobyl or two happen on Grayson would probably actually be much less of an problem. They're already used to having to scramble to leach toxic heavy metals out of their crops and air; making those toxic heavy metals also be radioactive only makes things a bit more inconvenient.

What an awesome place for a vacation home! Right, captain?

Beautiful scenery, just don't go outside without a filter mask. This is also later reflected in Grayson art, with the idea of fairyland beauty that is at once magnificent and untouchable. I remember that scene.

Most of Grayson navy are 11,000 ton LACs, roughly 4% the mass of Fearless the flagship is a cruiser a bit smaller than the old Fearless and similarly aged.

The LACs are typical-sized for any other navy, but behind in technology, obviously. Austin Grayson, the aforementioned flagship, may be a lot younger than Fearless, but it sure wouldn't win against her in a cage match, either...

Also, the Masadans clearly never learned to create operation plans that wouldn't ping spacegoogle. their main attack plan for Grayson is called Jericho.

They're partly suffering from the sort of grandiosity that leads to things like Operation Raging Justice, I think. Only more so, because to them this really is a huge existential conflict, the most important thing in their universe since, oh, the days of Moses and the Ten Commandments. And I'm not sure Grayson actually has much intelligence penetration of Masadan society, so the risk of some spy finding out what's going on is less significant.

Besides, the Masadans probably don't have spacegoogle.

[Simon_Jester]

In the grand scheme of things, orbital farms aren't that ridiculous. Even in an environment less... strenuous than Grayson, being able to climate-control your growing space and have a year-round growing season is a pretty big win, assuming you have the orbital construction infrastructure to build the habs in the first place, and assuming you aren't going to just ship the results back down the well when they're grown. Orbital ranches (almost by definition, only 10% as efficient in energy terms per calorie of consumables) are perhaps less easy to justify.

Actual edible arsenic-free meat would be at a huge premium on Grayson. Heck, most farm animals would probably just die from exposure to heavy metals themselves. You can't eat the seafood, you can't eat the native animals, your cattle/pigs/whatever will tend to die... about the only thing you COULD keep easily would be farmed fish or things like chicken and rabbits that you can raise entirely indoors and feed off the scraps from your existing vegetable crops.

[Grayson cuisine should be VERY vegetable-oriented for these reasons, IMO]

So as a gesture of grand exorbitance, after re-establishing contact with interstellar civilization, the ambition of importing cattle, when beef has been practically unknown for centuries, and raising them on an orbital farm facility is... actually credible, I think, though it's more likely that you'd get factory farming.

[Ahriman238]

Well sort of; it's pretty blatantly obvious even here that the Graysons are the good guys and the Masadans bad, in relative terms. To be fair, if Manticore had decided to court Masada first, Haven would have tried to make Grayson a client state.

I was thinking more of Manticore and Haven, who both would much rather have Grayson for an ally but would settle for Masada if need be. And both are getting involved for their own reasons, and freely admit as much to locals.

[PS- looking at the list of Grayson warships that is ALSO in this book of mine, I have a strong suspicion that the Francis of A Ship Called Francis and good old HMS Fearless the first were the same class. ]

Quite likely, Francis Mueller was one of a bunch of aging Manticoran ships sent to Grayson in preference to the breakers to fill out the Grayson Navy and get people trained in Manticoran hardware until their own construction could catch up. Then it went back to being an obsolete wreck, the perfect ship for your Siberia.

It surely would have been, fifty years ago. However:
1) Yes, Haven may be quietly funding and supporting some of those pirates.
2) There are a lot of steps pirates based out of a hardscrabble colony world could take to keep up plausible deniability. Like, say, flying for two weeks in a random direction before actually bothering to rob anyone.
3)

What's three?

On a side note, the relative poverty of the star systems on a direct line between Manticore and Haven probably helps to explain why Haven finally says "to heck with it" and tries to tackle Manticore and its allies all in one go, rather than pursuing divide-and-conquer tactics. There's just not a lot of economic value to be had out here except from Manticore, and the immense wealth of Manticore's own merchant marine and Junction does not translate into immense wealth for other star systems in the same region of space.

Pretty much, as made explicit in the Sinister Meeting (tm) that opened the third book. Frankly, they've devoured almost everything worth the expense of conquering in the local sector, leaving them just three options. Manticore is preferred for a variety of reasons, being a single-system like most previous conquests and the economic gem of local space. Silesia is a possibility, but then they'd have to deal with the deep seated economic and political problems, and the high likelihood of starting a shooting war with the Andermani. Finally, they could move to the galactic "south" and try nibbling on the Verge, with the near certainty of pissing off OFS and getting into a shooting war with the Solarian League.

Or, for that matter, some more distant ancestor; there have been about a dozen Earls White Haven, after all. Though it's certainly common enough in a Napoleonic/Victorian social milieu for serving military officers to find the time to translate historical texts.

I assumed it was him or his dad because they're the ones we know to be admirals.

Who is Yancey Parks?

Admiral Yancy Parks, commanding officer, Hancock Station. He was Mark Sarnow's superior, actually shipped in with reinforcements to the station to assume command. He turned out to be a decent sort who made one really bad call that made perfect sense given what he knew at the time. He also felt himself being unfavorably compared to Sarnow all the time, and regarded him and Honor as dangerous hot heads and jingoists. The larger part of that being that for weeks and weeks he snubbed Honor by not inviting her to staff meetings.

Not having actually read the relevant passage in years... hm. It is not credible that Yanakov would just forget the relevant information, since this is the senior admiral of the GSN we're talking about. So yeah, shenanigans.

I'm so absentminded sometimes, here's your moment.

Yanakov returned the handclasp while his staff assembled itself behind him. Then he glanced around the crowded gallery once more and stiffened. He'd known Manticore allowed women to serve in its military, but it had been an intellectual thing. Now he realized almost half the people around him—even some of the Marines!—were female. He'd tried to prepare himself for the alien concept, but the deep, visceral shock echoing deep inside him told him he'd failed. It wasn't just alien, it was unnatural, and he tried to hide his instinctive repugnance as he dragged his eyes back to Courvosier's face.

"On behalf of my Queen, I thank you," his host said, and Yanakov managed to bow pleasantly despite the reminder that a woman ruled Manticore. "I hope my visit will bring our two nations still closer together," Courvosier continued, "and I'd like to present my staff to you. But first, permit me to introduce Fearless's captain and our escort commander."

Someone stepped up beside Courvosier, and Yanakov turned to extend his hand, then froze. He felt his smile congeal as he saw the strong, beautiful, young face under the white beret and the tight-curled fuzz of silky brown hair. Yanakov was unusually tall for a Grayson, but the officer before him was at least twelve centimeters taller than he was, and that made it irrationally worse. He fought his sense of shock as he stared into the Manticoran captain's dark, almond eyes, furious that no one had warned him, knowing he was gaping and embarrassed by his own frozen immobility—and perversely angry with himself because of his embarrassment.

"High Admiral Yanakov, allow me to present Captain Honor Harrington," Courvosier said, and Yanakov heard the hissing gasp of his staff's utter disbelief behind him.

That could have gone better, perhaps if Anthony could have brought it up tactfully once more before boarding? I get they didn't want to seem to be rubbing the Grayson's noses in their cultural differences, but that's a bit far in the other extreme.

On a side note, having a Chernobyl or two happen on Grayson would probably actually be much less of an problem. They're already used to having to scramble to leach toxic heavy metals out of their crops and air; making those toxic heavy metals also be radioactive only makes things a bit more inconvenient.

Well, there's a silver lining, the enviroment isn't going to get much harder or more dangerous.

Way, way later we see a Grayson ceremony to honor everyone who died in space, both naval defenders of the wars against Masada and Haven, and those who died setting up all this impressive orbital industry.

They're partly suffering from the sort of grandiosity that leads to things like Operation Raging Justice, I think. Only more so, because to them this really is a huge existential conflict, the most important thing in their universe since, oh, the days of Moses and the Ten Commandments. And I'm not sure Grayson actually has much intelligence penetration of Masadan society, so the risk of some spy finding out what's going on is less significant.

Besides, the Masadans probably don't have spacegoogle.

Maybe, but they're culturally close enough that the phrase "Operation Jericho" would tighten the sphincter of any Grayson spy who did manage to hear it.

[Black Admiral]

Apparently a lor of squadron and station commanders are content to handle meetings via conference call. At the same time, almost every named commander I can recall had face-to-face meetings, even Yancy Parks.

Who is Yancey Parks?

Commander of Hancock Station during The Short Victorious War, as I recall.

Later we see Yanakov's stunned reaction to Honor the woman captain and, yeah, I call bullshit. They sent ahead a manifest with the names of the escort captains, and in the very next chapter we hear all about how both Haven and Manticore have provided detailed accounts of their version of the events at Basilisk. You want to tell me it never came up that Honor was a woman, or that the Graysons didn't connect Honor Harrington, commander HMS Fearless with Honor Harrington, commander HMS Fearless?

Not having actually read the relevant passage in years... hm. It is not credible that Yanakov would just forget the relevant information, since this is the senior admiral of the GSN we're talking about. So yeah, shenanigans.

Although it's certainly understandable that Yanakov would have a moment when he actually sees a female military captain, like holy cow this is real. I imagine you'd get a similar reaction out of a WWII naval officer or whatever, even after you actually phoned ahead and said "yeah, the commander of our carrier battle group is a woman. He's going to hear the words coming out of your mouth, but he'll still react very strongly to seeing it with his own eyes.

I have reread it recently, and it's explicitly cast as visceral shock; Yanakov was aware of the situation, but doesn't seem to have fully connected that the "Captain Harrington" commanding the RMN escort is the same Captain Harrington involved in the Basilisk incident until he actually met her (and he's actually extremely angry and frustrated with himself for not being able to get over that, and the fact of her gender, and just deal with her as professionally as he would any GSN officer).

[Mr Bean]

Apparently a lor of squadron and station commanders are content to handle meetings via conference call. At the same time, almost every named commander I can recall had face-to-face meetings, even Yancy Parks.

Who is Yancey Parks?

Yancey Parks Vice Admiral Manticore Navy. Key character in a short and victorious war who's in charge of the Hancock system in that book. I think he shows up three or four books later on the wrong side of the Haven counter-attack but other than that he's a one and done guy.

Also, the Masadans clearly never learned to create operation plans that wouldn't ping spacegoogle. their main attack plan for Grayson is called Jericho.

They're partly suffering from the sort of grandiosity that leads to things like Operation Raging Justice, I think. Only more so, because to them this really is a huge existential conflict, the most important thing in their universe since, oh, the days of Moses and the Ten Commandments. And I'm not sure Grayson actually has much intelligence penetration of Masadan society, so the risk of some spy finding out what's going on is less significant.

Besides, the Masadans probably don't have spacegoogle.

Getting an agent into Masadan would be hard. Remember they had a great big knock down drag out war which the Faithful lost and lasted years. At the end of it there were less than 50,000 left in the last few Faithful strongholds. And all of them were shipped off to Masadan after the war ended and there has been no mixing since then unless you count pure space based wars. Any agents would have to slip into a totalitarian regime and already know the rules of said regime before arriving. Remeber that Grayson men are out numbered by women 3 to 1 meaning any male agents would have to explain where their home is and where are their chattle (Wives). It's not like you can sneak into a planet since Masadan climate means big cities and rigid guidelines. At best you'd have to somehow scout the planet, ID someone and find a replacement. But it comes back to how do you scout the planet if your agents would instantly be pegged for outsiders?

[Simon_Jester]

And back to mid-1867 PD:

"Your Majesty," the Duke of Cromarty's tone was a bit more formal than it was in his private working sessions with King Roger, "the Liberals and the Conservatives will pitch three kinds of fit if you force the issue at this point. You know they will."

"Then they'll just have to get over it," Roger said flatly. "This sh-" he paused, glancing at Dam Rachel Nageswar, the Foreign Secretary. "This crap," he continued after a moment, "has dragged on too long already, Allen. I want it settled. We need it settled."

[snip two paragraphs of filler]

Cromarty sat across the table in his usual place. Jacob Wundt, Roger's Lord Chamberlain and one of his closest advisers, as he'd been Queen Samantha's, sat to the king's left; Dame Rachel sat to Cromarty's left; and Dame Elisa Paderwesky, Roger's tough-as-nails ex-Marine chief of staff, sat to the King's right. It was a small group, all of its members drawn from Roger's most trusted inner circle, and every one of them was looking back at him...

The problem ought to have been an absurdly simple no-brainer, but could the Liberals and the Conservatives see it that way? No, of course they couldn't!

Roger's attitude toward politics. His ability to actually ram things through under the handicap of that attitude (or perhaps because of it) does a lot to explain how Space Dubai winds up with a military powerful enough to defeat Space North Korea.

The math on the Manticoran Wormhole Junction had always insisted it had additional termini which had not yet been discovered. The fact that it was already the biggest junction in known space actually made finding those additional termini more difficult, not less... the ones already discovered masked their undiscovered fellows' much fainter signatures... Other hyper-physicists pointed out that over seventy T-years had elapsed between the rapid-fire discovery of the Junction's first three termini in Beowulf, Trevor's Star, and Hennesy and the discovery of the Gregor Terminus in 1662... and that the Matapan Terminus hadn't been discovered until 1796, a hundred and thirty T-years after that! Those hyper-physicists had been confident in the existing math and, shortly after Roger had assumed the throne, their confidence had been justified by the discovery of a sixth terminus, associated with the G5 star Basilisk, two hundred and ten light-years out from the Manticore Binary System.

Timeline of the discovery of the Junction termini. Finding the Beowulf and Trevor's Star links in the late 1500s PD would have been a huge boon for Manticore, and probably for Haven. For astrographic purposes, it put them within the 'inner sphere' of heavily populated and long-explored worlds near stars, because it meant that flying to Manticore was as easy as flying to Beowulf, and flying to Haven was not much harder. The Gregor and Matapan termini haven't received much coverage in Weber's writing, but at least served to expand the list of destinations to which a Solarian freighter would want to go by way of the Junction, if nothing else.

At the moment, there wasn't much human settlement out that direction, but warp bridges had a tendency to change things like that, and Basilisk's position offered some very interesting possibilities where trade with Silesia and the Andermani was concerned...

Discussion of a 'triangle trade' that runs through the Junction from Manticore to Gregor, then from Gregor to various places in Andermani or Silesian space on their way to Basilisk, then back to Manticore through the Junction. Or, potentially, the other way around.

But there was a kicker in Basilisk's case. The Basilisk System had an inhabitable planet. And that planet, Medusa, was already inhabited. Worse, it was inhabited by an alien species... and the aliens in question were decidedly pre-space. That minor fact had created a furor in the ranks of the Manticoran Liberal Party, and it had also spawned a bizarre alliance between [everyone who isn't a Centrist or Crown Loyalist. -SJ]

...

"I appreciate that it's going to be a problem," he said now, meeting Cromarty's eyes across the table. "I also think we've only made it worse by pussyfooting around iit up until now, though. And I think it may be time to remind the Star Kingdom in general about some ancient history and Axelrod. You know damned well that things haven't changed that much where human greed is concerned over the last three hundred T-years!"

This references an incident in early Manticoran history, where the Solarian corporation Axelrod got an early head-start on the technology of locating and exploiting wormholes... and tried to seize control of the Manticore Wormhole Junction for itself, back in the days when Manticore was a "sleepy, peaceful, isolated star nation."

...One of the things he most valued about [Nageswar], almost more than her indesputable expertise... was her willingness to disagree with him when she thought he was wrong...

Nageswar was a Crown Loyalist, part of Roger's ongoing- and frustratingly gradual- remaking of his Cabinet. Cromarty's Centrists, unfortunately, still couldn't command a majority in the House of Lords, even with Crown Loyalist support. That meant sharing out cabinet posts among the major political parties... and that Cromarty's premiership hung in perpetual jeopardy, at least in theory. Officially, with both Conservatives and Liberals in the Cabinet, there was no Opposition in Manticore at the present time. In fact, the restiveness of the other parties meant that political analysts routinely spoke of the Conservatives and Liberals as being in opposition even while they sat in a "coalition" Cabinet.

Situation in Parliament in 1867. This is based largely on the balance of power in the House of Lords, remember. Where the only way to remove a member is to wait for them to die. In a society where (as of 1867 PD) everyone under about the age of fifty-five has prolong. Oi.

Unfortunately for them, the monarch was head of government in the Star Kingdom, not simply head of state. In theory, Roger didn't need the Cabinet at all, although God only knew what sort of political crisis he could provoke by deciding to rule by decree! But while he couldn't compel the House of Lords to support a prime minister not of its choosing, neither could the House of Lords compel him to accept a prime minister not of his choosing. That sort of standoff would lead to effective paralysis of government in the Star Kingdom, of course, but the Opposition had realized early on that Roger, unlike his mother, was perfectly prepared to accept that paralysis in the short term if he had to...

Roger is a hereditary ruler who can expect to be on the throne for centuries, barring accident, and who believes his nation's survival hinges on pursuing certain foreign policy and military buildup choices. So yeah, it doesn't actually bother him very much if the government goes into lockdown for a few weeks.

It is repeated that the House of Winton has the powerful support of its subjects in reserve; I can only surmise that the main reason for this is that it's the only thing in the Manticoran constitution powerful enough to deliver ass-kickings to the House of Lords, which would otherwise rule largely unchecked. Ironically, in the long run Elizabeth III and the 1920 PD-era reforms that give the Commons more power might actually reduce the House of Winton's popularity, given that. Speaking of whom...

That connection of the Winton Dynasty with the Star Kingdom's commoners had been renewed with his marriage to Queen Consort Angelique, who'd won Manticore's collective heart... ...and it had been underscored afresh by the birth of Crown Princess Elizabeth Adrienne Samantha Annette Winton, exactly one T-year ago next month. If the Opposition pushed him to it, if its leaders provoked a government shutdown, there wasn't much question what would happen in the House of Commons in the next general election. It might take a year or two, but the outcome would be the decimation of the Opposition parties' representation in the lower house. And while that might not much concern the Conservative Association, which was overwhelmingly a party of the aristocracy, it definitely loomed large in the thinking of Sir Orwell Lebrun's Liberals and Janice MacMillan's Progressives.

Roger didn't much like to contemplate that sort of constitutional crisis, either, although part of him was tempted to go ahead and embrace it, even provoke it. At the moment, the People's Republic of Haven was still the better part of two hundred light years away from the Manticore Binary System...

King Roger III is half-tempted to provoke such a crisis precisely because he thinks Manticore can afford the infighting now if it means not being hamstrung at a critical moment down the road by political opposition. However, his cooler-headed side prevails.

Nageswar lays out the reactions of various planets on the other end of various Junction termini to the renegotiation of the Junction control treaty that, apparently, Manticore needs to modify to reflect the newly discovered Basilisk terminus. She notes that it would be very bad PR if, after the great and prosperous system of Beowulf practically bent over backwards to cooperate with Manticore on the treaty, it was then rejected in the Lords.

Further digression on how Beowulf used to have good relations with both Manticore and Haven, including strong agreement on suppression of the genetic slave trade. However, after Haven enacted the Technical Conservation Act, relations between Haven and Beowulf cooled, to the advantage of Manticore.

The Junction Treaty had been negotiated by Queen Elizabeth II's government shortly after the initial discovery of the Junction and its first three known termini... There were times Roger wished his [great to the ninth]-grandmother had been just a little more ruthless when that treaty was signed, but he supposed he really couldn't complain about how well it had served the Star Kingdom's interests for the last three hundred T-years.

The problem was that Manticore had ceded shared sovereignty over the termini to Beowulf, San Martin, and Hennesy. There'd been no legal requirement for Elizabeth to do that. While any star system was free to claim sovereignty over anything within a six light-hour radius of its primary, claims to anything more than twelve light-minutes from the primary were conditional. In order to establish sovereignty, the system's claim was subject to challenge under international law unless it could demonstrate its ability to maintain "a real and persistent police power" over it... Essentially, whoever had the military wherewithal to hold it got to keep it, and if that whoever happened not to be the local star system, that was simply too bad.

Beowulf, obviously, was perfectly capable of policing their own junction terminus, then as now. They'd probably have been better equipped to police Manticore's central junction than Manticore itself was, for that matter. Trevor's Star and Hennesy, not so well equipped.

...times had changed (and not for the better) over the past seventeen T-years. Now [Roger] needed the authority- the recognized authority, domestically as well as abroad- to act unilaterally, in whatever fashion seemed necessary, to ensure the Junction's security, and that included ensuring the security of those secondary termini of it, as well.

Beowulf and Hennesy had recognized that, and both of them had specifically recognized Manticore's undivided sovereignty over their associated termini. Roger had sweetened the deal by increasing their percentage of transit fees and adding a secret clause which amounted to a mutual defense treaty, but in return he had the right to employ Manticoran warships to protect either of those termini by force if he felt it was necessary. He doubted very much that it ever was going to be necessary in Beowulf's case [and Beowulf routinely handles security on their terminus for about 55 years after this- SJ], but... [Hennesy] had already required Manticoran assistance once, in the Ingeborg incident which had cost the RMN the life of Admiral Ellen D'Orville in 1710 PD, after all. But whether either of them ever actually needed Manticoran assistance to defend their termini, the precedent was important to establish, since he fully intended to extend it to Basilisk and any of those other as-yet-undiscovered termini the math predicted. And as Nageswar had just pointed, the Republic of Gregor wasn't going to make much of a stink when he "requested" the same terms from it. It had far too many internal domestic problems... And the Matapan System, thank God, had neither habitable planets nor inhabitants, so there'd never been any question over who that terminus belonged to, lock, stock, and barrel.

So, the termini so far: Beowulf, which is just as rich and sophisticated as Manticore and probably the single biggest shipping destination for the Junction in terms of traffic. Hennesy, who we know little about except that they are militarily weak, Gregor, likewise, we know that they are politically messed up, and Matapan, which is an uninhabited system. But what about...

Trevor's Star... already half-surrounded by Havenite conquests or proxies, San Martin wasn't about to risk pissing off the PRH, despite its traditional friendship with Manticore- or perhaps because of that friendship- by signing an agreement which would give the Star Kingdom the unilateral right to forward deploy battle squadrons to the Trevor's Star Terminus whenever it felt like it. The San Martinos were working hard to build a navy which would at least give the People's Republic pause, but not even the contacts Baron Big Sky had managed to cultivate in the SMN were optimistic about their ability to do so. And there was no way in the universe San Martin was going to look like it was cozying up to Manticore when that was likely to convince the PRH to go ahead and nip the potential threat of its military in the bud.

The problems of being a San Martino at a time like this. Sucks to get caught in the middle.

...anything which might entangle the Star Kingdom in interstellar power rivalries was anathema to the Conservatives. Even worse from their perspective, Roger suspected, would be the possibility of actually adding additional voters to the Star Kingdom. The constitutional mechanisms which had been crafted to conserve political power in the House of Lords when the Star Kingdom was created were beginning to wear uncomfortably thin, in their opinion. The last thing they wanted was to open the door to "outsiders and foreigners who don't understand how our system works..." and who might have the effrontery to side with the Commons against them.

The Conservatives' objection to anything that might involve the SKM annexing systems outside the Manticore Binary System. The Liberals, on the other hand, object to the idea of the technologically advanced Manticorans exploiting the Bronze Age Medusans, arguing that Manticore has a "moral responsibility to guarantee the security of their natural resources- like the Basilisk Terminus- rather than using an iron fist to despoil the native sentiments itself."

Roger himself has no particular intention of exploiting the Medusans, but feels that since the Medusans have absolutely no way of securing the terminus themselves, or for that matter even perceiving its existence, Manticore might as well step in. He also feels that under normal international law even if the Medusans WERE a starfaring culture Manticore would STILL have a reasonable claim to the Terminus, although this in turn strikes me as a bit hypocritical given the uncharitable thoughts he was thinking about the Axelrod Corporation a few pages ago.

So this presents Roger with a political problem. He wants to secure the terminus for military reasons. So far, so good.

But to do that, he feels that he needs to control the system, which could otherwise easily end up in the hands of someone like the Andermani or (gasp) Hereditary President Harris of the PRH, who would merrily exploit the natives to hell and gone, while using the planet Medusa as a base to contest control of the Terminus. To be fair, within about thirty years Haven is working on a scheme to do exactly that, so he has a point.

However, the problem is that the whole "yeah, we now own this planet full of random three-legged Bronze Age guys" does not go over very well among the Star Kingdom's political parties. Now what is he going to do?

"Oh, believe me, I understand that! But I've got an ace up my sleeve."

Roger smiled thinly, and Cromarty experienced a distinct sinking sensation. He'd seen that smile before.

"An ace up your sleeve?" he repeated carefully.

"Oh, yes. She's called Elizabeth."

"Your Majesty?" Cromarty blinked at the total non sequitur, and Roger chuckled. But then the King's expression turned hard.

"You tell Lebrun that if he wants a fight over this, he can have it..." [snip belligerent rambling] "I'm willing to throw Lebrun a bone if that's what it takes." Roger replied. "So I'm willing to specifically not claim sovereignty over the planet Medusa itself, to recognize the Medusans as the original inhabitants and rightful owners of the star system, precisely as the Ninth Amendment recognizes the treecats on Sphinx, and to set aside, say, five percent of all revenues generated by traffic through the Basilisk Terminus for the benefit of the Medusans. At the same time, however, we're going to assert sovereignty over the star system as a whole and directly- officially annex the terminus itself."

"I'm... not certain how that would stand up under interstellar law, Your Majesty." Nageswar's eyes were half-slitted in intense thought. "I don't think I've ever heard of anyone claiming a star system while specifically not claiming the only inhabitable planet in it. I doubt there's any precedent to support it."

"Then we'll make precedent," Roger told her.

"Lebrun will argue that it's easy to promise not to take over the planet now," Cromarty pointed out. "Then he'll trot out that aphorism about power corrupting and suggest that while, of course you wouldn't do any such thing, Your Majesty, that's not to say some future Manticoran government wouldn't."

Come to think of it, Lebrun has a point. This is kind of an amusing and goofy solution to the problem; Nageswar's reaction seems spot-on to me: "Wait what?"

On the other hand, it's probably about the best you could manage in this situation, when you have natives living on an inhabited (and largely irrelevant) planet, in a system that is strategically important for reasons that have nothing to do with the planet, and which is being bickered over by various huge interstellar nations whose concerns and technologies are totally beyond their comprehension.

To make this happen, Roger has a truly bizarre plan.

"I see. And just what did you have in mind for Beth's [first] birthday, Sir?"

"Oh, it's very simple." Roger showed his teeth. "I'm going to exercise one of the Crown's- and Commons' prerogatives. We're going to make Elizabeth Duchess of Basilisk."

Despite decades of political experience, Cromarty's jaw dropped, and Nageswar's eyes widened. Roger tipped back in his chair, listening to the buzzing purr from the treecat draped over his back.

"Between the Centrists and the Crown Loyalists, we have a clear majority in the Commons," he pointed out, "and patents of nobility are created by the Crown with the Commons' approval, not the Lords. I intend to make Beth Duchess of Basilisk- not Medusa- and I intend to enfeoff her with a percentage of all transit fees through the terminus. Only a tiny one, just enough to give her a personal claim on the terminus. But when we draw up the patent of nobility, we'll include the entire star system except for Medusa. The Lords can't reject the patent, although they might theoretically refuse to seat her as Duchess of Basilisk, I suppose, if they're feeling really stupid. But since they can't, as far as everyone here in the Star Kingdom is concerned, the baby princess they adore will be the rightful duchess of the star system in question. Now," he looked around the conference room with that same, thin smile, "does anyone sitting around this table really think even Summercross would be stupid enough to buck that kind of public attitude? Lebrun might, but Summercross' advisers will insist he drop the issue like a hot rock." He shook his head. "I imagine we'll still have to do some horse trading, make some concessions to assuage the Liberals' concerns over the Medusans, but tell my daughter she can't have her first-birthday present when everyone else in the Star Kingdom wants to give it to her?"

He shook his head again, his smile positively sharklike.

"Nobody's going to want to come across like that kind of Scrooge, people. Nobody."

Wacky feudal hijinks!

It says a great deal about the Star Kingdom that this appears to have (more or less) actually worked. Although it obviously didn't work perfectly, given the status quo that persists regarding the Basilisk Terminus, Medusa, and the Manticoran presence there as of 1900 PD.

[Simon_Jester]

Well sort of; it's pretty blatantly obvious even here that the Graysons are the good guys and the Masadans bad, in relative terms. To be fair, if Manticore had decided to court Masada first, Haven would have tried to make Grayson a client state.

I was thinking more of Manticore and Haven, who both would much rather have Grayson for an ally but would settle for Masada if need be. And both are getting involved for their own reasons, and freely admit as much to locals.

Hm. Good point.

It surely would have been, fifty years ago. However:
1) Yes, Haven may be quietly funding and supporting some of those pirates.
2) There are a lot of steps pirates based out of a hardscrabble colony world could take to keep up plausible deniability. Like, say, flying for two weeks in a random direction before actually bothering to rob anyone.
3)

What's three?

...Oops. Well, off the top of my head, (3) could be... well. Manticore may not want to dangle battlecruiser squadrons out in this region of space to play gunboat-diplomat at a time when war could kick off at any moment. Anything less than a major fleet base with multiple squadrons of the wall is vulnerable to being snapped up by a Peep surprise attack; see what almost happens to Hancock Station in The Short Victorious War for an example.

Light forces assigned to convoy escort are easy to spare, and are not vulnerable to a Pearl Harbor scenario because they're moving around.

Medium-heavy units with a total mass of, say, several million tons (a battlecruiser squadron, one or two of the wall) are easy to spare, but so vulnerable to surprise attack that they invite defeat in detail.

And truly heavy formations, say a squadron of dreadnoughts, are tough enough to have a good chance of surviving attack. But they are also few enough that dispersing them to suppress piracy in the region would invite defeat in detail if Haven decides to, say, throw several dozen superdreadnoughts with battleship escort right at Manticore proper.

This makes the kind of operation Manticore traditionally uses to suppress piracy, which probably involves a squadron or two of battlecruisers showing up and going "AHEM" at the pirates' home system, a bit less practical in the space between themselves and Haven.

Who is Yancey Parks?

Admiral Yancy Parks, commanding officer, Hancock Station. He was Mark Sarnow's superior, actually shipped in with reinforcements to the station to assume command. He turned out to be a decent sort who made one really bad call that made perfect sense given what he knew at the time. He also felt himself being unfavorably compared to Sarnow all the time, and regarded him and Honor as dangerous hot heads and jingoists. The larger part of that being that for weeks and weeks he snubbed Honor by not inviting her to staff meetings.

Gotcha. Anyway, I think the RMN makes a point of the physical tradition of having meetings in person when possible. However, in every generation there are probably at least some officers who point out, not without reason, that it would be easier to use Space-Skype. Also, there are some conditions under which having such a meeting face to face would be totally impossible, such as while a convoy is moving in a grav wave. Because if you try to get out of your spaceship in a pinnace to go to a neighboring ship while inside a grav wave, you will get ripped apart and killed.

That could have gone better, perhaps if Anthony could have brought it up tactfully once more before boarding? I get they didn't want to seem to be rubbing the Grayson's noses in their cultural differences, but that's a bit far in the other extreme.

One possibility is that Anthony did alert the Grayson foreign ministry, who did not then proceed to alert the chief of the Navy. Or is that precluded by something I missed?

Maybe, but they're culturally close enough that the phrase "Operation Jericho" would tighten the sphincter of any Grayson spy who did manage to hear it.

Possibly. Then again, the Masadans are such a bunch of self-righteous loonies that they probably name stuff Jericho this and Smiter of Amalekites That and so on all the time.

I have reread it recently, and it's explicitly cast as visceral shock; Yanakov was aware of the situation, but doesn't seem to have fully connected that the "Captain Harrington" commanding the RMN escort is the same Captain Harrington involved in the Basilisk incident until he actually met her (and he's actually extremely angry and frustrated with himself for not being able to get over that, and the fact of her gender, and just deal with her as professionally as he would any GSN officer).

To be fair, "Harrington" isn't exactly the world's most unique and distinctive name. And Yanakov may have implicitly assumed that female RMN personnel were rare, such that if you hear "Captain Harrington" but no other information, he might think it was just another Harrington. While Langtry, on the other hand, would assume that if he said "Captain Harrington," everyone would know he meant that Harrington and no other.

Even when one of the people involved is a professional hired to understand the other's culture, confusion can still happen.

[Batman]

Given the Manties were at least somewhat familiar with the Grayson attitude towards women in general and women in the military in particular it does seem rather sloppy of them not informing their host that the freaking squadron commander is a woman.
The rest of the sequence plays out pretty much as was to be expected, but unless their research into Grayson society was really shoddy, that was one big blooper by the SKM.

[Ahriman238]

Given the Manties were at least somewhat familiar with the Grayson attitude towards women in general and women in the military in particular it does seem rather sloppy of them not informing their host that the freaking squadron commander is a woman.
The rest of the sequence plays out pretty much as was to be expected, but unless their research into Grayson society was really shoddy, that was one big blooper by the SKM.

Whereas Haven skirted around the whole issue nicely by quietly reassigning women out of ships that make any contact with Grayson or Masada and letting them assume what they wanted. Shortly we get the Haven people musing that Manticore never had that option, being ruled by a Queen they'd offend local sensibilities anyway, so why hide gender equality.

Not that concealing that sort of major cultural gap is going to work on any sort of long-term basis, but Haven isn't interested in long-term alliance here, just making sure Manticore doesn't get their forward base.

Manticore apparently had a full-time diplomat on Grayson (a lieutenant, huh?) the same who accompanies Yanakov to Fearless and advised the diplomatic mission not to make a big deal of having women serve. That guy sort of failed at his job, which is to have quiet and tactful discussions of uncomfortable subjects so there aren't massively embarrassing public blow-ups.

[Terralthra]

Just for accuracy's sake, she got one light battle squadron in Flag in Exile; six captured and refitted ex-Havenite SDs. The other five went off to retake Candor and Minette from the PRN's Operation Stalking Horse.

As far as teleconferences vs. in-person meetings...even the officers we know prefer in-person meetings (e.g. Honor, Mark Sarnow) have teleconferences too.

[Black Admiral]

Manticore apparently had a full-time diplomat on Grayson (a lieutenant, huh?) the same who accompanies Yanakov to Fearless and advised the diplomatic mission not to make a big deal of having women serve. That guy sort of failed at his job, which is to have quiet and tactful discussions of uncomfortable subjects so there aren't massively embarrassing public blow-ups.

Manticore does have an ambassador on Grayson, but he wasn't with the GSN party touring Fearless; the Lieutenant Andrews I suspect you're thinking of is Admiral Yanakov's GSN aide. And, yes, Manticore's ambassador to Grayson did advise that a big deal shouldn't be made of the RMN and RMMC having female personnel, but it seems like (from Yanakov's explanation to Courvosier later) the Grayson side of things thought they were better prepared to deal with the reality of that situation than they were. They'd hardly be the first to make that particular mistake.

[Ahriman238]

Ok, you're right. I conflated Lt. Andrew with Sir Anthony.