Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington

[Terralthra]

Look, I've made my case. If the apologists don't want to admit there is a problem and will cover their asses by saying things like "Well, nobody predicted the US would be a superpower in the 30s" which is just...patently untrue. Well, if they're willing to make the case using such flimsy and dead-wrong evidence, I don't see much point in arguing-it'll just wind up going in circles because nobody is willing to admit that there are flaws in the setting.

If you have evidence proving my argument incorrect, you could...use it? Making allusions to evidence you're not actually presenting makes it seem like...you don't have any, and is essentially a burden of proof fallacy.

Referring to anyone who disagrees with you as an "apologist" is poisoning the well, and saying that because people disagree with you on one or two things, they "aren't willing to admit there are flaws" is begging the question.

That's only three fallacies. Surely, if you really wanted to be passive-aggressive, you could've fit a couple more into three sentences?

[Mr Bean]

Speaking of admitting guilt
My information on Bolthole was totally and utterly out of date and wrong.
FYI:Terralthra=correct on that

My bad

[Simon_Jester]

Many people in the League were probably paying lip-service attention to the "podunk war between two third-rate star nations," but rather than think of it as a threat to the Junction, they thought that at worst, the SKM would maintain the status quo, and any other outcome (SKM's surrender or complete destruction) would be better than the status quo ante. There's no threat to the Junction if the worst possible outcome is the same as it was before the war, and every other potential outcome is better, in a short-sighted sort of way. Even during the height of the war, the SKM never actually closed the Junction to Solarian traffic, so...what's the big deal, to the average Solly, who does not particularly care about whose flag the merchantmen bringing them cargo flies?

Well, military regulations on traffic would delay shipping, and increased duties on transits through the Junction for the duration of the war would increase costs. So shipping firms have reason to care and be annoyed by the war... but they will tend to blame their problems on Manticore anyway.

And the average person still would not care.

Rather than NK v. Dubai, think of it as if some nation perceived as, say, Italy is in the US were to go to war against Iran...

This is true- from the Solarian's perspective, the North Korea versus Dubai example breaks down, because that analogy was never intended to address that aspect of the situation.

Honestly, all I meant with that was to convey a sense for the scale of the conflict relative to the overall scope of civilized space. Manticore and Haven are very different polities- the first far richer, the second far larger and arguably more militarized. But the Solarian League is vastly larger and richer (and has a stronger military to boot) than both of them combined- even if they're temporarily behind in wartime technology.

I find the argument that people in-universe are unable to look at a map and realize what I, someone who has only lightly perused this material, has, unsatisfying in every way. Societal inertia doesn't cut it, this should be bloody obvious to anyone who thinks, but since David Webber wrote it, nobody does any thinking. Large blocks of the setting are like this, poorly thought out, handwaved, or otherwise just...well, just unsatisfying.

Take Bolthole for instance-if it was a deep space platform, far from any system, constantly on the move-not accelerating, but moving-then it would be a much harder and more interesting target than it is as just another star system that had a few hundred million people and is as far away from trouble as possible-yet somehow is almost perfectly secret. I mean, does nobody talk about it? Do people not converse, gossip, brag? Do the workers keep their traps shut, and the transport crews and the crews of the ships that train there?

On the other hand, a deep-space platform would have to import everything, so there would be more shipping traffic and more attention would be drawn. An actual star system with existing infrastructure can draw on the mineral and energy resources of the system, and thus doesn't need to import nearly as much materials.

This can be built up into a massive "this system builds ships" equivalent to the "closed cities" of the USSR: people living there either not allowed to leave, or are required to keep the place secret Or Else. People from outside cannot approach without permission. If the location is remote enough that you'd have to travel for days by ship to reach it, that will probably do the job.

Being remote, okay, yeah, I can see that-but it's not bloody invisible. It's gotta be sitting inside a light-cone at least 15 light years across where you can tell that something's going on 'Over There' even if you're not sure WHAT.

If Haven controls the space for several light-decades around Bolthole in all directions, it seems unlikely that anyone would ever be in a good position to exploit this light-cone. Ships have limited operational endurance, and it's questionable whether they could physically fly from bases around Manticore (or Trevor's Star) and even reach Bolthole without refueling from some kind of tanker ship. The evidence (such as the entire plot of Echoes of Honor suggests that physical distance is good enough to stop anyone from finding Bolthole if it's handled properly.

Look, I've made my case. If the apologists don't want to admit there is a problem and will cover their asses by saying things like "Well, nobody predicted the US would be a superpower in the 30s" which is just...patently untrue. Well, if they're willing to make the case using such flimsy and dead-wrong evidence, I don't see much point in arguing-it'll just wind up going in circles because nobody is willing to admit that there are flaws in the setting.

Conversely, are YOU prepared to admit that while there most certainly are flaws in the setting, they may not be exactly the same flaws you think they are?

The League's apparent indifference to the Manticore-Haven War, in light of the Junction's importance to League shipping, is a major plot hole. The idea that a star system can be secretly built up as a shipyard is not.

[Batman]

I dunno. Prior to Laocoön the piddling little dispute between Manticore and Haven only really affected the League by virtue of increased transit fees. Annoying to be sure but hardly reason to waste serious money on investigating their hardware more closely when everybody in the League knew they couldn't possibly be better than what the League had, and the League had the numbers advantage something fierce.

[Vehrec]

Look, I've made my case. If the apologists don't want to admit there is a problem and will cover their asses by saying things like "Well, nobody predicted the US would be a superpower in the 30s" which is just...patently untrue. Well, if they're willing to make the case using such flimsy and dead-wrong evidence, I don't see much point in arguing-it'll just wind up going in circles because nobody is willing to admit that there are flaws in the setting.

If you have evidence proving my argument incorrect, you could...use it? Making allusions to evidence you're not actually presenting makes it seem like...you don't have any, and is essentially a burden of proof fallacy.

Referring to anyone who disagrees with you as an "apologist" is poisoning the well, and saying that because people disagree with you on one or two things, they "aren't willing to admit there are flaws" is begging the question.

That's only three fallacies. Surely, if you really wanted to be passive-aggressive, you could've fit a couple more into three sentences?

Look, I'm just really freaking tired of people showing up out of the woodwork to quote unsatisfying platitudes from Webber to handwave away the problems in his setting. I've seen it on other sites, and I can see it happening here as well. So no, I really don't see much point in arguing with you because I'm already convinced that you won't concede a single point to me.

But if you want proof that people knew the US was a big player? Well, look at Great Britain's warplans in the early 20s. All of them constructed on the opinion that war with the new Great Power was inevitable, and that their battlefleets would inevitably clash-right up until the Washington treaty, which was basically the US saying 'Look, we can outbuild all of you, we just don't want to.' In the 20s, Germany turned to the US to moderate and control the effects of it's reparations payments, and even before that in the first world war, Germany turned away from unrestricted submarine warfare when it was clear that the United states would enter the war on the allied side if it continued.

[Terralthra]

But if you want proof that people knew the US was a big player? Well, look at Great Britain's warplans in the early 20s. All of them constructed on the opinion that war with the new Great Power was inevitable, and that their battlefleets would inevitably clash-right up until the Washington treaty, which was basically the US saying 'Look, we can outbuild all of you, we just don't want to.' In the 20s, Germany turned to the US to moderate and control the effects of it's reparations payments, and even before that in the first world war, Germany turned away from unrestricted submarine warfare when it was clear that the United states would enter the war on the allied side if it continued.

Would those be British plans like the Ten Year Rule, under which Great Britain assumed from 1919 that it would not engage in any great war in the next ten years, and led to a ~70% reduction in military spending from 1919 to 1921 (before the Washington Naval Treaty was negotiated)? That doesn't sound to me like GB thought war with the US was inevitable. They thought an arms race was likely, but from 1919, they assumed, explicitly, that there would be no great war in the next decade.

[Jedipilot24]

Would those be British plans like the Ten Year Rule, under which Great Britain assumed from 1919 that it would not engage in any great war in the next ten years, and led to a ~70% reduction in military spending from 1919 to 1921 (before the Washington Naval Treaty was negotiated)? That doesn't sound to me like GB thought war with the US was inevitable. They thought an arms race was likely, but from 1919, they assumed, explicitly, that there would be no great war in the next decade.

Funny that you would mention that as the Solarian League is, according to Pearls of Weber, essentially operating on the '100 year' rule. Unlike the RMN, the SLN doesn't rotate it's senior officers, which means that it's been a long time since any of them had any contact with reality, even more so for the Battle Fleet officers as the SLN hasn't fought a war in centuries. The war between the SKM and Haven only lasted for less than 20 years, which is a drop in the bucket from the League's perspective. Indeed, from the SLN's point of view, the fact that it lasted even that long has to be because both sides are incompetent idiots.

And because no one actually wants to fight something as big as the League, the 100 year rule actually works for them. Or did at any rate.

[Terralthra]

Well, there's a distinction here between the SLN's point of view on the RMN, and the League's point of view on the SKM/SEM. Both are frequently held out as plot holes on Weber's part, but they are subtly different. Vehrec (afaik) isn't arguing that the SLN's viewpoint on the RMN (that it, like every other space navy, is a roadbump before the overwhelming numbers of the Battle Fleet) is a major plothole. He's arguing that the League's view of the SKM/SEM (that it's just another practically neobarb single-system (or now overgrown expansionist single-system) power, which can't compare to the inconceivable size of the League's economic, research, political, etc. machine).

As is astrographically obvious to the external observer, control of the Manticore Wormhole Junction (and through it, proxy control of the Erewhon junction and several other wormholes) gives the SKM/SEM an unparalleled position at the metaphorical heart of the explored and colonized galaxy's economy, research, etc. Weber argues that the League's general perception (and much of the citizenry of the SKM, even) is biased by over a millenium in which the League has been the center of the human race "as everyone knows", and that a millenium+ of constant cultural reinforcement that the League holds that position is difficult for any one person to contradict, even internally, despite the evidence in front of everyone.

Vehrec questions this argument, and says "no one could be that stupid". S/he is not the first to say that, and it's a valid perspective. Weber (and myself, I have to say) respond that lots of people have been more stupid in real life, taking cultural biases that are far less old (hence less engrained) for granted and ignoring mounting evidence against them. Knowledge of the junction is only 400 years old, compared to the nearly 2 millenia of League dominance over colonized space (which is on top of 10+ millenia of recorded history before than in which Old Terra was the only planet in humanity's sphere, making it by definition the central planet). I think that until and unless Manticore really takes the power it has in control of the Junction and demonstrates it (as it is with Operation Laocoön), people might not sit up and take notice of just how much power it has, when nearly two thousand years of history says "League = #1". Vehrec disagrees, and that's fine. I can understand his perspective.

The SLN's perception of the RMN (and RHN/IAN/GSN) grows partially out of this view of the League as the center of gravity for the human race, but is not strictly a matter of cultural bias. The SLN hasn't had a serious challenge to its supremacy ever, hasn't even had a minor challenge in centuries, and is by far the biggest (in terms of tonnage) navy. It's bigger than all the others combined. The RMN's ability to stand up to it on even a 1:1 basis is less than 30 years old (probably less): at the outset of the first SKM/PRH war, the Solarian League could still have utterly crushed both of their navies at once without using even a quarter of their reserve Battle Fleet. Until and unless the SLN gets its ass handed to them repeatedly, it's liable to go on thinking exactly what it's always thought of any other navy, especially with Mesan manipulators influencing it to that opinion from the inside, both in person and by manipulation of intelligence analysis.

[Mr Bean]

Point of order Terralthra
1921 PD is when things come to a head between Manticore and the Solarians.

Operation Buttercup with the 2nd Generation LAC's and carriers, the MDM's the third generation inertia compensators and the first stage of Ghost Rider was only 1914 PD

It's not been thirty years it's been less than seven years since Manticore was in a position to defeat ten times their number of pre 1901 PD ships. And it's only been a single year since the latest generation Invictus class ships with Keyhole II and the Apollo missiles. It took Manticore fourteen years of war to produced missiles that broke the 8 million kilometer limit on missile range to get to 40 million kilometers. In less than eight years they reached one hundred and fifty million kilometers in range.

This is not a full generation of ignorance it's less than ten years time.

*Edit
Unless you meant 1:1 as in a Manticore SD could fight and match a Solarian SD which case yes it's been eighteen years or so since Manticore raced pass the Solarians in technological edge.

[Terralthra]

The latter is what I meant: it's been <30 years since RMN ships starting being able to stand up to SLN ships on a ton-for-ton level, after over a millenium of complete naval dominance by the SLN.

[CaptainChewbacca]

One thing that makes me wonder is if the Solarian League falls apart, how many worlds near Beowulf are going to come running to the SEM's banner for protection.

[Simon_Jester]

Protection against what?

Honestly, even if the League falls apart, the League "remnant state" immediately around Sol will probably retain a fleet roughly the size of, oh, the RMN. That's enough to protect them against most things that would be likely to attack them, not counting unexpected and random attacks by the Mesan Alignment that they can't predict because no one knows about it.

Nor would they actually need Manticoran supermissiles to secure themselves against anyone but, well, Manticore. Because nobody except Manticore even has the damn things.

Also...

I dunno. Prior to Laocoön the piddling little dispute between Manticore and Haven only really affected the League by virtue of increased transit fees. Annoying to be sure but hardly reason to waste serious money on investigating their hardware more closely when everybody in the League knew they couldn't possibly be better than what the League had, and the League had the numbers advantage something fierce.

Up until 1913 PD, that "knowledge" was well-founded: again, a Solarian SD would have had a quite good chance of taking on a Manticoran ship of the wall and winning, or at least pounding the Mantie into a half-wrecked state, up until the advent of the MDM and Ghost Rider.

The League should definitely have put more effort into analyzing the war situation and identifying the new Manticoran superweapons. But prior to the fielding of the MDM, it's doubtful that Solarian observers could have gotten into position to observe any capabilities that were obviously superior to the League's own.

Would those be British plans like the Ten Year Rule, under which Great Britain assumed from 1919 that it would not engage in any great war in the next ten years, and led to a ~70% reduction in military spending from 1919 to 1921 (before the Washington Naval Treaty was negotiated)? That doesn't sound to me like GB thought war with the US was inevitable. They thought an arms race was likely, but from 1919, they assumed, explicitly, that there would be no great war in the next decade.

The reduced military spending was in large part forced on the British- remember that the 'baseline' for their military spending level in 1919 was mobilization for total war fighting World War I. That kind of spending isn't sustainable in peacetime, and in Britain's case in particular the economic cupboard was bare. They had a serious economic crisis in the years after the war, so it's no surprise that their military spending crashed. That was why they were so eager to make the Washington Treaty work: they were in no shape to afford anything like the pre-WWI arms race, not in the postwar economic climate.

Funny that you would mention that as the Solarian League is, according to Pearls of Weber, essentially operating on the '100 year' rule. Unlike the RMN, the SLN doesn't rotate it's senior officers, which means that it's been a long time since any of them had any contact with reality, even more so for the Battle Fleet officers as the SLN hasn't fought a war in centuries. The war between the SKM and Haven only lasted for less than 20 years, which is a drop in the bucket from the League's perspective. Indeed, from the SLN's point of view, the fact that it lasted even that long has to be because both sides are incompetent idiots.

And because no one actually wants to fight something as big as the League, the 100 year rule actually works for them. Or did at any rate.

I think that argument takes things too far. Sure, the League Navy is full of complacent people who haven't fought a serious battle in a century or more. But they do have certain ongoing missions that actually have to be carried out, usually by Frontier Fleet.

They have to suppress piracy and raiding against Solarian commerce. They have to keep an eye on prospective client states, and victims. And make sure they're providing the support and protection their current client states call for. And they probably wind up routinely intervening in interstellar wars between the little states on their border, for all sorts of reasons.

Battle Fleet's complacency explains why the SLN is not doing the job of preparing for war with a peer competitor. Which is, honestly, not really its mission as of 1900 PD. Its real mission, what it does for a living, is to patrol the frontiers, deal with all manner of issues that do not present an existential threat to the League, and maintain an overall 'presence' in the areas which border the League.

Oh- and while they're at it, maintain a big enough mothballed fleet to deter any uppity nations on the frontier from trying to nip off chunks of the League's periphery.

But to carry out that mission at all, they have to monitor what is going on. They have to have a custom of actually bothering to observe wars on the frontier, or they will be surprised when "holy crap, where did those guys get a division of beat-up old battleships" winds up costing the SLN a cruiser or two. The League as a whole is not threatened by such blunders- but the careers of individuals within the SLN are, especially of the Frontier Fleet officers who actually do the bulk of the real work in the service.

And it really is surprising and inappropriate, now that I think about it, that such a custom of bothering to observe wars does NOT seem to be in place when it comes to the Manticore-Haven War.

[Mr Bean]

But to carry out that mission at all, they have to monitor what is going on. They have to have a custom of actually bothering to observe wars on the frontier, or they will be surprised when "holy crap, where did those guys get a division of beat-up old battleships" winds up costing the SLN a cruiser or two. The League as a whole is not threatened by such blunders- but the careers of individuals within the SLN are, especially of the Frontier Fleet officers who actually do the bulk of the real work in the service.

And it really is surprising and inappropriate, now that I think about it, that such a custom of bothering to observe wars does NOT seem to be in place when it comes to the Manticore-Haven War.

There are observers and are mentioned several times. However they are pre buttercup not on ships anymore having been kicked off by both sides. And what reports that are sent home are pure word of mouth since neither side allows them to have ships in place in systems to sit there with sensors. All they might have is merchant sensor logs of solarium freighters except said ships run at the first sight of battle.

What about Solarium spies you say? Utter shit, it's mentioned several times that the solarium intelligence gathering services are anything but competent. Given that there are several hundred world and no strong central government any and all spying efforts are local to league members. And the ones who do have an inside track (Beowulf, Mesa) or side interest (the future rebel planets) are not exactly shouting things from the rooftops.

[Simon_Jester]

I'm not disputing the declared fact that the League (as opposed to its member states) has no effective intelligence-gathering services in position to look at the Manticore-Haven War.

I'm pointing out that yes, this really is a serious failing on the part of the League in general and the SLN in particular, especially the Frontier Fleet component. Frontier Fleet is huge and by all rights and sanity ought to be willing to fund an Office of Naval Intelligence purely out of its own resources, just to get realistic appraisals of what's happening on various frontier systems, so that it doesn't accidentally send destroyers or CLs into a situation that demands battlecruisers.

And this organization should at least have a goddamn clue to such an extent that it notices when the People's Navy is getting blown away from ten times their effective weapons range by Manticore Missile Massacres, and report this fact to people of authority in less than five years.

After all, the Solarians already knew (presumably) that Havenite weapon systems might be behind the curve but weren't grotesquely so. At least the weapons contractors did, and presumably Frontier Fleet at least occasionally checks in with them and has some back channels. So if Havenite SDs are suddenly getting slaughtered by the dozens, you'd think that Frontier Fleet, if no one else, would have people whose responsibility it was to monitor this and look into it. Especially when as far as I can tell, it was entirely public knowledge by the end of the war that Manticore had developed missiles of unprecedented power and range, and was blowing away entire fleets with them.

There's no excuse for the SLN's intelligence arm to not at least have people sitting in bars on Manticore buying drinks for veterans of Eighth Fleet and getting a vague sense of what the hell happened.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, we've had a lot of discussion without much posting; I'm guessing Ahriman's school system is firing up and he's as busy as a one-handed paperhanger. Lord knows I am, but I'm taking some time here... this passage is from February, 1877 PD, in House of Steel.

"...So while no one can possibly fault His Majesty's willpower, moral courage, and determination to do the right thing, I think it is legitimate to ask whether or not his commitment to confronting the People's Republic militarily is the best option available to us." Joseph Dunleavy looked into the pickup, his expression suitably serious and just a touch troubled. "Obviously, when a star nation has been expanding its borders by force of arms, as well as voluntary annexations, for so long, it's necessary, as one Old Earth politician expressed over two thousand T-years ago, to 'Speak softly, but carry a big stick.' My concern, and that of those who approach these things from the same perspective as I do, is that His Majesty is giving too much emphasis to the stick and not enough to speaking softly."

Liberal Party talking head on the Manticoran equivalent of Crossfire, outlining his basic objection to Roger's foreign and military policy. Dunleavy is a former professor of political science at a major university, and has been a senior Liberal Party foreign policy advisor for the past ten years or so. Across the table from him is... a woman named, I swear to god, I am not making this up, [groan]...

Hillary Palin.

"'Speaking softly' hasn't done any of the rest of the Peeps' victims a single bit of good, as far as I'm aware."

[snip paragraph about the show]

"I'll agree with you that a big stick is necessary to get the Peeps' attention," she went on, "but I'm pretty sure the two of us differ on whether the best negotiating ploy is to simply keep it handy or break their kneecaps with it."

Dunleavy rolls his eyes and has an internal monologue on [groan] Palin's background:

...a nano and materials engineer... founded an industrial applications firm specializing in the development of advanced composits and (according to unconfirmed reports) radically advanced anti-energy weapon armors. No one had ever been able to prove the reports were true- the RMN was fiendishly good at protecting its technology after all- but Palin, Holder, and Mitchell, Ltd., had sold its patents to the Navy for upwards of seven billion dollars almost twenty-five T-years ago, when she first stood for election to the House of Commons as the Liberal Party's candidate for the Borough of South Thule on Sphinx.... she'd shifted her membership from the Liberals to the Centrists eleven T-years ago over the Basilisk annexation- and won reelection quite handily two more times since, despite the change in party affiliation...

Besides, if those rumors about the nature of her patents were true... she had a vested interest... in supporting the knuckle-draggers who thought warheads were the answer to any problem whenever they demanded yet another superdreadnought.

To be fair, it's not like Dunleavy is actually wrong about that.

Also, side note, but why do I get the feeling that South Thule is meant to be a stand-in for Alaska? [groans harder]

On a more serious versus-comparison note, we see here a brief mention of armor technology in the Honorverse. We're looking at nanotechnologically built-up layers of composites, intended to reflect and absorb energy from beam weapon attacks. LOTS of energy. Incidentally this makes them a real bear to cut up and work with during repairs and constructions.

Destroyers and light cruisers have very little of this armor as a percentage of their tonnage; heavy and battle-cruisers have somewhat more, and "ships of the wall" have a very large amount. Although given the stated mass and surface area of the things, it can't be more than... hm. Something like a Gladiator-class SD has roughly two hundred thousand square meters of surface area on each broadside, so even if it's about one third armor by weight, that only leaves about five tons of armor plate to cover each square meter of hull. If the ship were armored with iron that would be a roughly meter-thick later of armor. These composites may be more or less dense, but not by that much- I'm sure they're heavier than an equal volume of balsa wood, and lighter than an equal volume of osmium bricks.

You'd be able to get a little more effective protection against fire coming in directly on the plane of the ship's decks by taking advantage of the fact that Honorverse hulls are roughly circular in cross-section, so that the armor near the "top" and "bottom of the ship's broadside profile is sloped. This would in principle let you strip some of the armor off those surfaces and still get equivalent protection against incoming zap. Which in turn would let you put heavier armor along the centerline of the broadside profile, which is all to the good since that seems to be where Honorverse ships park their main battery broadside weapon mounts.

It seems likely that this technology works rather well against conventional laser weapons; you can do a lot with good material science to control a material's responses to visible light. Which would help to explain why lasers are pitched as "lighter" weapons than grasers when there is no obvious reason this should be true. The composites might (purely as speculation) reflect so much energy from a weaponized optical laser pulse that, in sufficient thickness, they render the ship disproportionately resistant to kiloton/second or even megaton/second laser fire. IF that were true (purely speculatively) it would make optical laser weapons a bad (or at least inefficient) way to kill a heavily armored ship.

Gamma ray beams do not reflect worth a damn when they hit something made out of atoms, be it nanotech composite or otherwise, so a gamma ray laser would be a more efficient tool for blasting through such a heavy layer of anti-laser armor. Then the challenge is to design the armor as an ablative substance that will absorb high energy gamma ray (and X-ray) photons, in the frequency ranges it is most likely to encounter, preferably while preserving its resistance to laser weapons. The only way I know to do that with armor made out of real atoms is to make it out of dense, heavy elements, like tungsten, uranium, or lead. If the Manticorans have a different trick I couldn't begin to guess what it is.

Anyway.

Manticoran politicians always had to be careful about how they criticized the royal family. The Star Kingdom had a lively tradition of freedom of speech and even livelier political debate, and as the head of government as well as head of state, the monarch was expected to take his or her lumps along with everyone else. But there were limits to how those lumps could be administered. The sort of character assassination by innuendo and the politics of personal destruction which tended to rear their ugly heads from time to time in Parliamentary contests could not be applied to the reigning king or queen. Not unless the person foolish enough to make the attempt was prepared to kiss his own political career goodbye, at any rate. The Manticoran voting public was sufficiently cynical... to recognize... [politics as usual]... but there were some things it was not prepared to tolerate.

Which, in Joseph Dunleavy's opinion was completely irrational and gave people like Hillary Palin [groan- SJ] a grossly unfair advantage when it came to reasoned debate of public policy issues. All she had to do was tar him by implication with attacking Roger III personally, and his argument was cut off at the knees so far as anyone but the Party's fully committed base was concerned. And that, Dunleavy thought, as as unfortunate as it was unfair, given the fact that King Roger was clearly... significantly less than rational where the People's Republic of Haven was concerned.

So, the Manticoran public accepts a fair amount of political ambition and spin-doctoring, but freaks out when someone criticizes the royal family too sharply. Hm. Reminds me of Thailand.

It's hard not to sympathize a bit with Dunleavy here, viewing this from the point of view of a First World citizen who lives in a republic. Roger's a decent guy and all, but he didn't really do anything to earn the intense devotion of his subjects. He happens to have good reasons to get serious about building up the RMN to meet the ongoing long term threat. But from the point of view of an outside observer he could easily come across as Captain Ahab to Haven's great white whale.

Come to think of it, Ahab got his ship sunk pursuing his obsessive vengeance against the whale, which would probably only make the analogy more ominous to that outside observer.

Dunleavy goes on to acknowledge that the PRH is a serious threat, with an expansionist, militarist government. He denies and calls "idealistic but unfortunately misguided" the opinion that Manticore should engage in unilateral disarmament to defuse tensions. BUT...

"I and other members of the Liberal Party don't see eye-to-eye with [the Centrist government] on all matters," he continued. "Specifically, in terms of foreign policy, we believe that the Star Kingdom has a moral responsibility- to itself and to the galaxy at large- to go the extra kilometer in its efforts to avoid what would inevitably be the biggest, bloodiest, and most destructive war in the last millenium of human history. It's entirely possible, little though any of use like to contemplate such an outcome, that war is inevitable. That the so-called 'Big Navy' advocates are correct, and that only the actual use of military force will be sufficient in the end to bring to a halt the People's Republic's expansion...

...granting all of that, do we not have a responsibility- indeed, given the difference between our open, representative political system and the closed, military-dominated system which has plunged... Haven into darkness, do we not have a greater responsibility than Haven- to do all we can to prevent such a hugely destructive, bloody conflict?... we owe the galaxy better than to simply abandon any hope of stopping short of war. It doesn't matter what the People's Republic does or doesn't owe to itself or to anyone else; we owe ourselves the knowledge that we didn't simply follow a brutish, militaristic, repressive regime into the maw of warfare without first making every possible effort to avert that outcome."

Palin [groan] responds that

...the Peeps- and I include their civilian leadership in this, as well as the military; Joe's mistaken if he thinks there's any actual difference between them- believe in the use of 'brute force.' And, on the face of it... it's been working pretty well for them for the last thirty T-years or so.

To be fair, she has a point there too.

She goes on to outline the same issues that the Ominous Conference of Havenite Rulers reviews in the main line novels- that by this point, Haven is so firmly committed to the plan of annexing foreign star systems to fuel the economy of the capital world and a few key industrial centers that it couldn't really stop even if it wanted to, because that would blow up the domestic economy and probably result in the overthrow of the Legislaturalist government.

Then a snip from Dunleavy's reply:

[snip]...Have you actually listened to yourself? I don't believe I've heard you refer to the Havenites by anything other than the pejorative, jingoistic label of 'Peep' since this broadcast began. That kind of polarization reveals a demonization of our potential adversaries which is symptomatic of the Cromarty Government's tunnel vision where the People's Republic is concerned. It's very possible, perhaps even probable, that the simplistic view of the PRH's entire leadership as jackbooted thugs isn't as invalid as I would like it to be. But at this time, we have to find some means of engaging them in debate... [snip] They can gain so much more by trading with us... [snip] We need to find a way to convince them to take that path, demonstrate where their true self interest lies, rather than continuing blindly on the road of conquest and repression.

Palin [groans at name] replies.

"We've tried talking to them, Joe. For that matter, there was a time when we had a very close, cordial relationship with the Republic of Haven... [snip] But that relationship is gone. Their markets are closed, sealed off by a combination of trade restrictions and punitive import duties... [snip] It's possible we may be able to talk them into stopping short of our own frontier, short of the Junction, but the only way we'll convince them is by presenting an argument they can't ignore... [snip]

The most dangerous error a foreign policy maker can commit is to assume the people on the other side of a confrontation... [snip] are 'just like us.' That, under the surface, they share the same basic values, the same view of the galaxy. And, even more dangerous, that they interpret events, relationships, and opportunities the same way we do. Because the truth is, Joe, that not everyone does... and the Peeps don't.

She goes on to talk a little more about the idea that the Havenite government are rational actors acting under very different constraints and conditions, and thus do things that seem fundamentally irrational to Manticorans.

Now, to me this reads like a fairly mature and responsible political discussion, with a few fundamental faults. One being that Dunleavy is locked in a permanent holding pattern of "yes, but;" he's conceded the facts but persists in interpreting them differently so as to reach (probably) the same basic conclusion he would have arrived at thirty years ago when Haven had just begun beating people up for money. One might wonder if this has anything to do with prolong.

The other is that [groan] Palin does actually seem to have an issue saying anything but "well, little as I like to admit it, we're probably going to have to bash the Peeps' heads in to get their attention." Of course, in the event, she turns out to be right, and the RMN has to do exactly that. So meh.

Cut to Allen Summervale (Duke Cromarty, the PM) reviewing the talk show exchange along with Roger.

"She's doing quite well, I think..." [snip] "In fact, she's doing better than I would, given the fact that I can't stand Dunleavy." The Prime Minister smiled without much humor. "Unlike a lot of his fellows, I think he's completely sincere in his beliefs. Arrogant and closed-minded, perhaps, and totally convinced of his own rectitude, but sincere and genuinely concerned about how many people will get hurt in any war against the Peeps. He's desperately determined to prevent that from happening- I have to give him credit for that, however irritating I personally find him. The problem is that he's walled that sincerity of his in with so many preconceptions reality just can't get through to him, and this in a man who's been shaping the Liberals' foreign policy for decades! Not to mention how damned supercilious he can be with anyone who dares to disagree with him, given his own indisputable brilliance. In his presence, I have a tendency to forget about our splendid traditions of freedom of speech and open, civil debate. In fact, I might as well admit he tends to make my pistol hand twitch."

Ah yes, the charming effects of the quaint Manticoran dueling custom on political mindsets. One cannot help but note that Cromarty comes across here as having long since given up on trying to convince Dunleavy, or anyone like him, of anything. That may partly be because they're all rather ossified in the mindset of the 1830s and 1840s (when they were young).

On the other hand, in a sense this kind of thing makes the Liberals totally justified in saying that Cromarty (and Roger) are thinking with their muscles (missiles?).

There's some more discussion about the political situation. Manticoran public opinion is gradually shifting in favor of the Centrists' hardline view on Haven, and continues to strongly favor King Roger III personally and trust him to keep the nation safe. However, there is rather less support for Roger's desire to build up a "Manticoran Alliance" that gets Manticore tangled up in the defensive problems of small, poor, comparatively random star nations like Zanzibar, which we will hear more about later.

In hindsight, the main advantage of securing all those allies was that it stopped Haven from just gratuitously attacking Manticore directly by securing bases painfully close to the home system, and gives Manticore jumping-off points for a counteroffensive designed to take the war into Haven's space. The disadvantage is that the Manticorans are stuck distributing all kinds of ships and advanced weapons into the hands of various foreign nations, some of which have their own serious political problems, some of which just turn into big defense commitments that soak up time and manpower, and at least one of which later goes on to actively sell out the high-tech weapons in question to the Havenites. It's kind of a mixed bag, and I can see both sides, but in the strategic paradigm of the time Roger is probably right to be seeking allies.

Cromarty further observes that the Conservatives have nothing to lose from popular opinion shifting, as they have effectively no representation in the Commons. The Liberals DO have something to lose, maybe even a lot, and Cromarty predicts that they'll shift their opposition from Roger's (now popular) buildup to the (still not so popular) Alliance question.

Roger replies to this, then remarks that he "doesn't like" the way the Liberals are pushing to give Haven "more access" to the Basilisk terminus. Haven is asking for this on the grounds that they do put a lot of shipping through the junction and have an interest in the Silesian trade, but Roger doesn't like it because he feels that the Havenites do that in part to keep an eye on Manticore by sending ships to poke around its space. Besides which, Havenite foreign trade is (if you ask Roger) something of a basket case...

...For that matter, both ONI and SIS are sure they're snagging data dumps from agents right here on Manticore in the process [of transiting the Junction]. And that doesn't even consider how much they want to keep the San Martinos aware of their presence by routing a few billion tons of shipping through Trevor's Star every year. Not to mention the fact that those freighters they're sending back and forth to the League are basically payoffs to people like Technodyne in return for the technology they can't produce anymore. They're nervous about the R and D they know about, and they'd be a hell of a lot more nervous if they knew about Gram. That's the reason they're grabbing every bit of tech from Technodyne they can, whatever that asshole Kolokoltsov is saying. You know that as well as I do, too. Their so-called legitimate trade in Silesia's a money loser for them too, now isn't it? In fact, it's basically only a way for them to cover at least the majority of their information-gathering expenses as they go swanning through Manticoran space with those remarkably sensitive 'civilian grade' sensor suites their freighters mount!

Roger is getting a wee bit paranoid, no? Foreign merchantmen are spying on the people they pass through? Gasp! Who could have suggested such a scheme? Oh, wait. Roger III of Winton.

More seriously, Roger's concerns here are reasonable, since Haven (like Manticore) does use merchant ships as cover for intelligence activities. And, for that matter, has some merchant ships with ridiculous and powerful weapons that make them a military threat in their own right, as we learn when Honor's ship gets shot full of holes by such a 'merchant ship' in the first mainline novel.

So is it really paranoia if Haven actually IS out to get you?

More discussion on how Haven is trading with Solarian weapons manufacturers for equipment. The way their internal economy runs means that they have a serious foreign exchange problem, which they cope with by essentially bartering with Technodyne of Yildun and similar companies. Using their copious forced labor programs and power to loot whole planetary economies, Haven can provide Yildun with materials in exchange for a healthy sample of their weapons... by way of the Junction. These 'export version' Solarian weapons are considerably better than anything Haven can produce for itself "after so many decades of self-inflicted infrastructure damage."

In other words, the Havenite government is not stupid, they know Manticore is doing some kind of R&D work, and they're trying to counter as best they can. Which is admittedly not very well, since they've basically torpedoed their own academic establishment to the point where they are just plain not up to First Galaxy standards in science and advanced technology.

However, as of 1877 PD Haven either already has bought or is about to buy a working laser head design from Astral Energetics, now that the Andermani have it (see above; I think I rambled about this in one of my posts on the ships of the RMN). Roger doesn't know that Haven has one, but that doesn't mean they don't, since it's not like Haven is short of places to test-fire a lazormissile without anyone noticing.

Roger remembers happily that the secret weapons of Project Gram are located around Gryphon (yes, Gryphon, not Sphinx) orbiting Manticore-B, and are comfortably out of effective sensor range of any sneaky bastard Havenite surveillance ships near the junction. He's been collaborating with Klaus Hauptman on this, Hauptman being the man who effectively owns the "Unicorn Belt" asteroid fields that Adcock's team is using to test the weapons.

So despite what we've seen of him so far, Hauptman is not made of pure suck. Sort of.

Roger ends this section by resolving to create a permanent naval station in Basilisk. No fortifications, he promised- but he's going to at least station some light units there to keep an eye on things, particularly "any 'civilian Peep freighters' that happen to pass through." Cromarty foresees more political trouble, but doesn't really say anything about it.

[Simon_Jester]

A little more:

We have a scene in May 1878 PD, Roger III talking to his daughter Elizabeth just after her twelfth birthday. Various bits of banter, a few facts to extract, of no great importance...

-Landing, the capital city of the Manticore Binary System doesn't have snow even in winter- tropical climate.
-Even royal resources do not extend to transplanting giant trees over interplanetary distances on a whim, although honestly they could probably do this in the Honorverse if they really wanted to, given the sheer ridiculous size and flexibility of their cargo-handling ships.
-Elizabeth is starting to develop an interest in history.
-Elizabeth is, actually, getting serious about studying politics and history enough that she can be a useful support to King Roger. She is (at twelve!) aware of and concerned about how stressed and heavily worked her father is; I can only imagine that hammering through all this military buildup against an increasingly polarized and antagonized opposition isn't doing wonders for his blood pressure.

Another segment in August 1883, five years later...

Roger and Elizabeth speaking about Elizabeth's younger brother, Michael:

Don't worry! I'm not going all gooey on you. But it's true. And I think he's having a harder time with adolescence than you did. In fact, I'm sure he is. Your mom and I discussed it with Doctor Sugiyama earlier this year, and Mikey's having heavier sledding with the prolong therapies than you did. Frankly, I was a little surprised by what Sugiyama had to say about it, to be honest. Your mom and I are both first-generation prolong, and we didn't have to go through the hormone adjustments and monitoring you and Mikey have- we were both pretty much through that phase before we got the initial treatments in the first place, and I don't think either of us really understood just how different it was going to be for someone like you, with the third-gen therapies. They explained it to us... [snip] unfortunately, Mikey's experiencing it right along with us. Sugiyama's working on balancing dosages, but he doesn't want to medicate Mikey's mood swings if he doesn't have to.

Third-generation prolong treatments have to start in relatively early adolescence, and can interact... badly with the hormonal changes associated with puberty. I recall references to having third-generation prolong stretch out puberty into the late teens... argh!

Also note that the generation numbers have nothing to do with whether your parents or grandparents got prolong; Roger was the first Winton to get prolong, received first-generation treatments- and his children are getting the third-generation set. Off the top of my head I can't think of anyone with second-generation prolong, though. Hm.

Other notes: Elizabeth is thinking about a naval career, but realizes that with war more likely to happen soon than in her father's youth, she wouldn't have a realistic shot at a combat posting, which makes it seem kind of pointless. Instead she decides to major in a (challenging) poli-sci program, where she meets chemistry student Justin Zyrr (four years her senior and a grad student). They fall in love. Aww.

Elizabeth has been adopted by a treecat, at fifteen no less. Also...

Anyone who'd ever been adopted knew that people who argued treecats were no more than clever animals were completely and totally wrong, and the notion that an intelligent, empathic, and at least potentially telepathic alien species was deliberately attaching itself to the human monarchs of the Star Kingdom in what could only be described as a bond of emotional dependency was enough to make any good conspiracy theorist paranoid.

Not without reason. The treecats are very protective of their adoptees, which has saved multiple Wintons' lives since their empathic abilities let them spot anyone approaching the adoptee with hostile intent. Elizabeth herself is convinced that her 'cat, Ariel, is helping moderate her temper, anxieties, and worries, which is obviously a valuable service for any adolescent, and I feel sorry for the treecats. Especially since Elizabeth shares in full that bad temper the Wintons tend to share.

[Hm. We hear that the Wintons are to some extent gene-tweaked for mental traits. We hear that Honor and many of the Harringtons have some mental genetic enhancements. We hear that on Earth the Final War was provoked in large part by the excessive aggression of the genetically enhanced Scrags. Gee, I wonder if this is a coincidence, this aggressive behavior by genetic augments...]

Oh great, now I'm picturing James Kirk shouting "ELIZABETH!!!"

Anyway. Elizabeth is cheerfully scheming to reel in Justin, and on the whole things are going rather well.

We cut to another scene featuring Jonas Adcock again (he's got to be what, eighty now? Ninety?). Adcock thinks approvingly about his daughter-in-law, Princess Elizabeth, who is only just past eighteen. Privately he's still concerned, though, that she is NOT an appropriate person to sit in on highly classified briefings. Can't blame her, although there are good reasons why you'd want to do that with responsible heirs to the throne in a monarchy. Accidents can happen.

The reason for the meeting in question is that the Office of Naval Intelligence has concluded that the PRH is going to attack Trevor's Star within about the next six months. Earl Gold Peak, from the foreign office, lays out the situation:

"...I hate to say it, but there's a huge degree degree of... fatalism, I guess I'd have to call it, in the San Martin leadership. They've been trying to build up their military, but everyone knows they haven't got the chance of a snowball in hell if- when- the Peeps come after them. I think they'll probably fight, even knowing they can't win, but that's the problem. They'll hurt the Peeps a lot worse than the Peeps probably think they can, but the San Martinos know they can't win in the end, and they've got their heads so far down, leaning so hard into the wind, that they just aren't open to any other possibilities. In fact, it's almost as if they're afraid to consider any other possibilities because of how much worse it will hurt when they find out they were right to be pessimistic all along."

King Roger states that he's aware of the situation. Most of the Manticoran Alliance members agree that Trevor's Star is going to fall, and feel that the Alliance is NOT ready for war with Haven. Roger gives actual fleet strength figures:

We're a hell of a lot better off than we were a couple of decades ago, but so are the Peeps, and they're still a hell of a lot bigger than we are. We have seventy-six of the wall; they have twice that many. And they've got somewhere north of three hundred and fifty battleships for rear area security... while we don't have any anymore.

In other words, the balance of tonnage favors the Havenites something like... maybe as much as five to one. Ouch. Moreover, Manticore is as yet nowhere near equipped with a serious technical/tactical advantage that could even up the score a la Buttercup.

However, Roger feels the need to do something to make the Havenites seriously reconsider their situation and buy some more time- give Haven pause to consider that war with Manticore would pose them with serious problems. He already planned to go along with the Queen to visit San Martin in October 1883 PD. Roger proposes to take advantage of that visit to suggest a mutual defense treaty between Trevor's Star and Manticore.

Roger is explicit in saying that he believes Manticore is unprepared for war with Haven at that point. But he also thinks that there's a good chance they'll respond to a serious confrontation over Trevor's Star by 'blinking:' by changing the strategic equation, he forces Haven to recalculate and alter their war preparations for when they do go after Trevor's Star.

As a practical matter, this strikes me as a questionable strategy, but for Manticore it would be a huge advantage to fight the war from a forward-deployed position at Trevor's Star, instead of having to fight from their own backyard. As it was, it took several years of intense naval combat to recapture Trevor's Star. And the expense of maintaining defenses on the Manticore Wormhole Junction while they knew Haven could attack through Trevor's Star at any time was a great burden on the Manticoran war preparations. I can see why Roger would be willing to risk war to preserve the security of Trevor's Star.

In September, Roger and Adcock discuss this again:

"In a way, yes, Roger replied... [snip] I don't want to, not yet, but we genuinely can't afford to lose Trevor's Star at this point. A logistically secure forward base well behind the enemy's front lines? One we could reinforce faster than they could? One that would give us forward basing for raids on their shipping and infrastructure?" He shook his head, his expression grim. "I know we're still outgunned, but Gram and our open R and D have given us a substantial qualitative edge. And much as I'd love to wait until we had more of Gram's programs into the developmental stage, or even ready to deploy, I just can't sacrifice the strategic advantage of being able to deploy that far forward. My God, Jonas! It would put our advanced fleet base less than two weeks from the Haven System itself, instead of almost two damned months!

Worth noting that this calculation still applies in the mainline novels. Holding Trevor's Star is a huge advantage for Manticore; it lets them instantly reinforce the fighting front, and gives them an uncuttable line of supply where they just teleport the supplies right into the middle of enemy space. It gives the RMN a base close enough to Haven that they could credibly launch a direct, brute force attack against the Haven system, which forces the Havenites to place a lot of ships to deal with the threat of raids deep into their space.

A great opportunity- if you can take it.

Plus, holding Trevor's Star is an economic prize for Haven, as discussed earlier, and bad for the morale of the Manticorans. Roger further reflects that the Manticorans do have a substantial technological advantage. Haven is still using the... call it laser head 1.0, a version too bulky to mount on destroyer or cruiser-weight missiles, and inferior in its striking power to Manticore's laser heads, which are several update cycles ahead. Manticoran missile targeting and ECM are greatly superior (we see this in the mainline novels). Adcock has of course played a substantial role in ensuring that this be so.

We also see the first references to something called "Mjolnir." More on that later. We see that Manticore's ONI actually has rather good information on the state of Havenite technology (poor), including actual technical manuals for some of their systems. And that Manticore has been able to maintain security on Gram, if not on its open research projects.

Why is Haven failing to get as much information from Manticore as Manticore gets from Haven...? Weber tries to explain it:

It helped that all indications were that the Peeps saw espionage more as an offensive than a defensive tool. They appeared to be far more focused on gathering political information, looking for dissidents who could be subsidized to destabilize opponents, using blackmail, extortion, and even assassination to weaken their targets at the critical moment. Their covert operations people were among the best in the galaxy when it came to that sort of mission... [snip] They focused on short-range, intensive efforts to penetrate, undermine, and then critically weaken the objective immediately on their targeting screens, and they appeared to assign their very best people to those sorts of ops, which left only limited personnel, resources, and funding for their chronically understrength long-range operations

Hm, I'm sure Haven having a well-practiced cadre of spies who are experts in assassination, destabilization of opponents' political structures, and black ops won't turn out to be useful to their interests! Let's time-warp forward thirty-five years and ask Victor Cachat, shall we?

The conversation turns again to Jonas and Roger's belief that he's going to need- soon- to pull Jonas from the covert, top-secret project Gram and throw him into the overall R&D pool to actually take these concepts and turn them into useful weapon systems. We get references to "the new fusion bottles, the new shipboard armors, the new LAC notions Sonja's playing around with, and- especially- the new shipkillers." Mjolnir is once again referenced as a game-changer, one that would force everyone, including Manticore, to build entirely new ship designs around them, without letting Haven know it's going on.

So what is Mjolnir anyway?

...every admiral in the galaxy knew missiles were little more than nuisance weapons, employed against a modern ship of the wall's missile defenses. Oh, with the emergence of the laser head-armed missile, the threat had begun to shift, over the last dozen years. But a ship of the wall's armor was so massive, its defenses were so good, and laser heads were so light compared to the throughput of shipboard energy batteries, that naval designers and builders had contented themselves with merely incremental improvements in missile defense.

Basically, evolution of dreadnought/SD designs in the 1850-1885 PD timeframe just means bolting on a few more point defense lasers and countermissile tubes, and swapping some lasers for missile tubes. Nothing too serious.

Anyway, I'm going to have to summarize this because it rambles. Mjolnir has to do with the missile drive itself. Missile drives are designed to burn themselves out in a matter of a couple of minutes, and their acceleration has to be set at launch to 'burn' for that short period of time before the drives blow out.

The original concept behind Mjolnir is, well, staging the missiles like so many chemical rockets. This initially gets a "you must be joking" reply because there's no place to put extra drives on an Honorverse missile- the geometry of the missile is determined by the drive geometry, and you can't really "stack" multiple missile engines behind a single warhead the way a real life staged ICBM would.

The power requirements are also a bear, so that the missile would have had to be absurdly large, I'm guesstimating a thousand tons from the vague information I'm seeing here about "bigger than any existing recon drone."

Fortunately for Roger, Adcock, and Project Gram, all this time Manticore has been working on miniaturizing their power storage and generation technology. And Project Gram has been poking away at the problem of insulating impeller drive nodes from mutual interference... so that all the nodes for a multi-drive missile could be mounted on the same pair of rings, but with only a few of them active at a time. Thus, the missile can engage one set of nodes, burn them out, engage the next, burn that out too, and so on...

And there you have it- the origins of the multiple drive missile, and possibly the first actual description of what "multiple drives" means I've seen yet. Manticore manages to crack the problem of screening impeller nodes from the G-forces generated by neighboring nodes, at much closer distances than ever before, allowing them to pack more nodes into the same space. Then they have to monkey around with fire control and so on to make the missiles effective attack weapons at the truly absurd ranges this makes possible... But when the smoke clears, by the mid-1880s the design team at least thinks they've developed a missile that could be launched from interplanetary ranges, in immense numbers, and maul the hell out of an enemy fleet that has literally no way of fighting back unless they can somehow crack the secrets of Manticoran power storage and node insulation technology. In principle that gives them a weapon which will make fleet battles like dynamiting fish in a barrel, at least until and unless Haven figures it out.

No wonder they name the thing after the hammer of Thor.

Roger goes on to tell Adcock that he's planning to create a new command- the "Weapons Development Board-" and put Adcock in charge of it. This is designed as a transitional situation between the very covert and very small Gram, and the somewhat less covert, much larger effort it will take to introduce radical new weapon concepts (like Mjolnir) and turn them into working weapons.

They remain conscious of the need to bring people with line command experience into the WDB- White Haven the younger is specifically mentioned here. But Roger feels he can't spare a bright young tactician like White Haven at this time... because he's worried about being at war with Haven in six months. Tradeoffs again; you need good tacticians to use existing weapons and to refine new ones.

There's a bit more, but nothing major or worth reporting before the next scene, which is its own affair.

[Terralthra]

Allison Chou Harrington and (if I recall correctly) Alistair McKeon are both second-gen prolong recipients.

[Ahriman238]

Well, we've had a lot of discussion without much posting; I'm guessing Ahriman's school system is firing up and he's as busy as a one-handed paperhanger. Lord knows I am, but I'm taking some time here... this passage is from February, 1877 PD, in House of Steel.

I wish. No, I've been gearing up to another MTEL in hopes of someday soon landing a proper teaching job. That, and I'm being entertained by how little this thread needs my input, quite a reversal for me.

But I suppose I ought to raise something.

Michaels didn't reply at once, for Masterman was an anachronism. The scion of a prominent Legislaturist family, he was also a career diplomat who believed in the rules of diplomacy, and Special Ops had decided he shouldn't know about Jericho, Captain Yu, or Thunder of God on the theory that he could play his role far more convincingly if they never told him it was a role.

Haven decided not to tell their ambassador The Plan, so he could be sincerely convincing.

"Grayson doesn't know what happened in Basilisk. They've heard our side and they've heard Manticore's, but they know each of us has an axe to grind. That means they're going to take both versions with more than a grain of salt, Captain, but their own prejudices against women in uniform will work in our favor. They'll want to believe the worst about her, if only to validate their own bias, and the fact that we don't have any female officers will be a factor in their thinking."

"But we do have female officers," Michaels protested.

"Of course we do," Masterman said patiently, "but we've carefully not assigned any to this system. And, unlike Manticore—which probably didn't have any choice, given that their head of state is a woman—we haven't told the locals we even have any. We haven't told them we don't, either, but their sexism cuts so deep they're ready to assume that unless we prove differently. So at the moment, they're thinking of us as a good, old-fashioned patriarchal society. Our foreign policy makes them nervous, but our social policies are much less threatening than Manticore's."

Haven also decided to be tactful and not assign women to Endicott/Yeltsin, letting the locals assume they have them in the service.

"Of course you do, and so do I, but the Graysons don't. I'm quite aware the entire thing was a show trial purely for foreign consumption, and to be perfectly honest, I don't like it. But it's done, so we may as well use it. All any Grayson knows is that a Haven court found Captain Harrington guilty of the murder of an entire freighter's crew. Of course Manticore insists the 'freighter' was actually a Q-ship caught red-handed in an act of war—what else can they say?—but the fact that a court pronounced her guilty will predispose a certain percentage of people to believe she must have been guilty, particularly since she's a woman. All we have to do is point out her 'proven guilt' more in sorrow than in anger, as the natural result of the sort of catastrophe which results when you put someone with all of a woman's frailties in command of a ship of war."

Michaels nodded slowly. He felt a twinge of guilt, which surprised him, but Masterman was right, and the locals' prejudices would make them far more likely to accept a story no civilized planet would believe for a moment.

"You see, Captain?" Masterman said quietly. "This will let us change the entire focus of the internal Grayson debate over Manticore's overtures from a cold-blooded consideration of advantages to an emotional rejection based on their own bigotry. And if I've learned one thing over the years, it's that when it comes down to raw emotion against reason, emotion wins."

More playing to the audience, in contrast to Manticore's coming with (realtive) honesty and good faith. Of course, the argument that passion triumphs over reason is well demonstrated.

" . . . and this is our combat information center, gentlemen." Andreas Venizelos was short by Manticoran standards, but he stood centimeters taller than the Grayson officers in the compartment as he gestured about himself at the shining efficiency.

Graysons are short, this is mentioned frequently.

Admiral Yanakov managed not to gawk, but his palms itched as he took in the superb instrumentation. The holo tank was over three meters across, and the flat-screen displays around him showed every ship within ten light-minutes of Grayson. Not with single, annotated light codes for groups of vessels, but as individual units with graphic representations of mass and vector.

10 light-minute (180 million km) gravitic sensor range for Grayson and Manticoran ships both, but the Manties have far better sensor resolution.

The holo tank blinked to life, extending its upper edge almost to the deckhead, and the clustered Grayson officers made a soft noise of approval and delight. Small light codes drifted beside every dot: arrows denoting headings, dotted lines projecting vectors, numerals and letters defining drive strength, acceleration, and active sensor emissions. It was how God Himself must see the stars, and pure envy for this ship's capabilities tingled in Yanakov's brain.

-snip-

"As you can see, Admiral," she continued in that same, even voice, "we project the probable weapons range for each warship. Of course, a display with this much detail can be a liability for actual tactical control, so we use smaller ones on the bridge to avoid information overflow. CIC, however, is responsible for deciding which threats we need to see, and—"

CIC holo-tank, which is used to decide what data is important enough to slug to the bridge holo-tank. Direction, projected course, wedge strength, active sensors, accel/decel and probable weapons ranges are all included and easy to pick out.

"Oh, that's bullshit, Bernard!" Mayhew led the way across the domed terrace into the palace, followed by his blank-faced personal Security man. "You've heard Manticore's version of Basilisk, and you know as well as I do what Haven wants in this region. Who do you think is telling us the truth?"

"Manticore, of course. But what you or I believe isn't the issue. Most of my people are only too ready to see any woman as potentially dangerous in a command slot. Those who don't automatically assume they must be loose warheads are horrified by the thought of exposing women to combat, and real conservatives, like Garret and his crowd, are reacting on pure emotion, not reason. They see her as a calculated insult to our way of life—and if you think I'm making that up, you should have heard a little conversation I had with my ops officer! Under the circumstances, Haven's version of what happened only validates all three groups' concerns. And don't come down too heavily on my people, either! Some of your civilian types are even worse than anybody in the military, and you know it. Hell, what about Jared?"

The Haven ambassador, it seems, was spot-on.

"But we can't afford to see this thing go down the tubes over something as stupid as cultural prejudice, Bernie. Manticore can do a lot more for us than Haven can: they're closer, their technology's better, and they're a hell of a lot less likely to absentmindedly gobble us up one fine day."

All wonderful qualities in an ally.

"I have, but you're the historian. You know how the Council's cut back the Protector's constitutional authority over the last century. Prestwick is a decent sort as Chancellor, but he doesn't really want to open the door to resumption of direct rule by Yours Truly. I happen to think we need a stronger executive to deal with all that's about to come down on us, but I may be a bit biased by who I am, and whatever I'd like to have, the fact is that I'm pretty much reduced to the power of prestige. Admittedly, the Mayhew Clan still boasts a fair amount of that, but a disproportionate share of it's with the conservatives—and the conservatives, as you yourself just pointed out, think accepting any outside help 'will threaten the Grayson way of life'! I've got the Council in line so far, and I think I've got a majority in the Chamber, but it's slim—very slim—and if the military doesn't sign on, I'll lose it. You've got to get your people to see reason about this."

The Protector (effectively, King) of Grayson has been reduced to a symbolic figurehead able only to leverage a bit of prestige. Or rather a lot of prestige, but still sharply limited in actual political power.

They circled slowly, hands weaving in deceptively gentle, graceful patterns. Both were black belt in coup de vitesse, the martial art developed to combine Oriental and Western forms on Nouveau Dijon eight centuries before, and a hush enveloped the gym as other exercisers turned to watch them.

Honor felt her audience, but only distantly as her senses focused on Babcock with crystal, cat-like concentration. Coup de vitesse was a primarily offensive "hard" style, a combination of cool self-control and go-for-broke ferocity designed to take advantage of "Westerners'" larger size and longer reach. It wasn't too proud to borrow from any technique—from savate to t'ai chi—but it was less concerned with form and more with concentrated violence. It made far less effort to use an opponent's strength against her than most Oriental forms did and laid proportionately more emphasis on the attack, even at the occasional expense of centering and defense.

A classmate from the Academy unarmed combat team who preferred the elegance of judo to the coup had once likened it to fencing with two-handed swords, but it worked for Honor. And, like any of the martial arts, it wasn't something one thought through in the midst of a bout. You simply did it, responding with attacks and counters which were so deeply trained into you that you didn't know what you were doing—not consciously—until you'd already done it. So she didn't try to think, didn't try to anticipate. Babcock was too fast for that, and this was a full contact bout. She who let herself become distracted would pay a bruising price.

Honor's sport.

"Actually, Basilisk is precisely why the Admiralty chose you, Honor." She looked up in surprise, and he nodded. "You know I had my own reservations, but Their Lordships believed—and the FO agreed—that Grayson would see what happened there as a warning of what could happen here. And just as they tapped me because I've got a reputation for strategy, they picked you because you've got one for tactics and guts . . . and because you're a woman. You were meant to be a living, breathing symbol of just how ruthless Haven can be, on the one hand, and how good our female officers can be, on the other."

"Well," Honor squirmed at the thought that she might have a "reputation" outside her own service, "I think they made the wrong call, Sir. Or, rather, Haven's turned it around on them. I'm a liability to you. These people can't get past who I am to think logically about what I am."

And there, laid out, is the reason for picking Honor in the first place. So Grayson could be introduced to female commanders using one of the most famed and capable they have.

"Nonetheless, I think I should remove myself from the equation, Sir. At least until you get the ball rolling in the right direction."

"You do?" Courvosier arched his eyebrows, and she nodded.

"I do. In fact, I sort of thought that might be wiser from the moment Yanakov and his people came on board Fearless to greet you. That's why I didn't go ahead and send Alice and Alistair straight on to Casca as I'd originally planned."

"I thought that might be the case." The admiral considered her soberly. "You're thinking about taking the other merchies to Casca yourself?" She nodded. "I'm not sure that's a good idea, Honor. The Graysons may see it as running out, as proof a 'mere woman' can't take the heat."

"Maybe. But I don't see how it could create any more negative reactions than my presence seems to be generating. If I take Apollo to Casca with me, it'll leave Jason Alvarez as SO. He doesn't seem to be having any problems with his opposite numbers—except for the ones who think he must be some kind of sissy for taking orders from a woman. Maybe by the time I come back, you'll have made enough progress with these people that my mere presence won't queer the deal for you."

"I don't know. . . ." Courvosier plucked at his lower lip. "If you take Fearless and Apollo out of here, our 'show of force' will get a lot weaker. Have you considered that?"

"Yes, Sir, but they've already seen both ships, and they'll know we're coming back. That should be sufficient, I'd think. And I'm not the only woman stuck in their craws right now. Alice is my second in command-two women, both senior to any of our male officers." She shook her head. "Better to get both of us out of the way for a while, Sir."

And here's Honor's great big mistake. She decides to go escort the convoy so her presence won't disturb negotiations anymore, taking her only other cruiser (which also has a female captain) with her AND Mckeon's destroyer for scouting, leaving the single destroyer Madrigal to show the flag.

This is sort of forgiveable given how uncomfortable she's making the Graysons, her desire not to hamper her Kingdom's diplomacy and get the other female captain out. Still, it does neglect the other part of her mission, a show of force for Masada.

"Not absolutely, but we've been tracking them for about three hours, and they just passed turnover for the belt. That far out from Grayson, and on that heading with that acceleration, Tracking's pretty confident they aren't headed anywhere in this system, so they must be the convoy. And if they are, these—" five light codes glowed green "—are almost certainly the freighters, which means these—" three more dots glowed crimson in a triangle about the first five "—are the escorts. And if there're three of them, they're probably the cruisers and one of the tin-cans."

"Um." Theisman rubbed his chin. "All you've got is drive sources, not any indication of mass. That could be both of the cans and the light cruiser," he pointed out in his best devil's advocate's voice. "Harrington could be holding her own ship on station and sending the others off."

Meet Tom Theisman. He'll be sorta important later. Also, they can get mass estimates at close range, but still have to guess whether a military grade impeller belongs to a cruiser or a destroyer.

The exec nodded unhappily. One thing the People's Navy had learned since Basilisk was that Manticore's electronics were better than theirs. How much better was a topic of lively wardroom debate, but given that Captain Honor Harrington's eighty-five-thousand-ton light cruiser had taken out a seven-point-five-million-ton Q-ship, prudence suggested that Haven err on the side of pessimism. At least that way any surprises would be pleasant ones.

See, Haven officers can learn from history.

[Simon_Jester]

Yes. The Masadan battle plan would have more or less fallen apart if even one additional Manticoran ship had been present- the GSN would have taken less casualties, and the Masadans would have been utterly massacred trying to swarm a pair of Manticoran ships instead of just the one destroyer.

[Ahriman238]

Yes. The Masadan battle plan would have more or less fallen apart if even one additional Manticoran ship had been present- the GSN would have taken less casualties, and the Masadans would have been utterly massacred trying to swarm a pair of Manticoran ships instead of just the one destroyer.

True, but Honor couldn't have known that at the time. Which wouldn't stop it from occuring to her late at night to wonder how much she really needed that destroyer for scouting. Still, I'm not in the habit of taking people, real or imagined, to task for things they couldn't have known about. Not since I read The Vengeance of Dragons anyway.

I was planning originally on doing this in 5 chapter lumps. I'll probably get back to that shortly. For now, here's the one where Yanakov invites Courvosier to supper to discuss Grayson history, and why things are the way they are.

High Admiral Yanakov stood to greet his guest, and Courvosier's eyebrows twitched as he saw the two women at the table, for the richness of their clothing and jewelry proclaimed that they were two of Yanakov's wives. It was almost unheard of for a Grayson wife to appear at even a private dinner unless the guests were among her husband's closest friends, and Yanakov knew Courvosier knew that . . . which made their presence a message.

See, Graysons can be diplomatic too. Sort of. The message still requires Courvosier to understand a bit of Grayson culture, so it likely would have been lost on someone like Houseman.

"Please don't be afraid to eat freely, Admiral," Yanakov said as a plate was set before his guest. "All these foods are from the orbital farms. Their metal levels are as low as anything grown on Manticore or Sphinx."

Good, good. Nice both that he got low-metal content food for the off-worlder, and that they both think at least briefly about it.

Grayson cuisine reminded Courvosier of a cross between Old Earth Oriental and something he might have encountered in New Toscana on Manticore, and this meal was excellent. Yanakov's chef would have rated a full five stars even at Cosmo's, and the table conversation was nothing like what he'd imagined it would be. Yanakov and his officers-all Graysons, in fact—had been so stiff and unnatural—or half-openly contemptuous—in the presence of his own female officers that he'd developed a mental picture of a dour, humorless home life in which women were rarely seen and never heard, but Rachel and Anna Yanakov were lively and eloquent. Their affection for their husband was unmistakable, and Yanakov himself was a totally different man, out from behind the barriers of formality at last, comfortable and confident in his own setting. Courvosier had no doubt the evening was intended, in part at least, to show him the more human side of Grayson, yet he felt himself relaxing in the genuine aura of welcome.

Soft music played while they ate. It wasn't the sort of music Courvosier was used to—Grayson's classical music was based on something called "Country and Western"—but it was curiously lively, despite an undertone of sadness. The dining room was large, even by Manticoran planetary standards, with a high, arched ceiling and rich, tapestry-like wall hangings and old-style oil paintings. Religious themes predominated, but not exclusively, and the landscapes among them had a haunting, bittersweet beauty. There was a sense of the lost about them, like windows into Elfland, as if the loveliness they showed could never be wholly home to the humans who lived upon this world and yet could never be anything but home, either.

And between two of those yearning landscapes was a huge bay window . . . double-paned and sealed hermetically into its frame, with an air filtration intake under it.

Grayson art, music and food, along with sweeping views of a beautiful, untouchable and deadly landscape. They have some serious hang-ups but they're not totally uncultured.

"I realize that, yet you must understand that we're still feeling our way into the proper modes. Under Grayson custom, it would be the height of impropriety for me to invite any woman into my home without her protector." His blush deepened at Courvosier's quirked eyebrow. "Of course, I realize your women don't have 'protectors' in the sense that our own do. On the other hand, I have to be conscious of how my own people—my subordinates and the Chamber delegates—would react if I violated custom so radically. Not just how they might react to me, but how they might regard your own people for accepting the invitation. And so I invited you, who my people see in some ways as the protector of all your female personnel."

Even the best intentioned of people find the culture gulf a bit awkward, because if Yanakov treats Honor as her culture dictates, he alarms and alienates his own people. Quite aside from it feeling strange to him with his life and his experiences.

"I realized that even before you arrived, and I thought we were ready to deal with it. I thought I was ready. But we weren't, and Captain Harrington's departure shames me deeply. I realize our behavior was responsible for it, whatever the official story may be. That's what . . . galvanized me into inviting you tonight."

As someone said, they thought they were ready and could take it... and they weren't and couldn't.

"This world isn't kind to its women," he said quietly. "When we arrived here, there were four women for every adult male, because the Church of Humanity has always practiced polygyny . . . and it was as well we did."

He paused and sipped at his brandy, then sighed.

"We've had almost a thousand years to adapt to our environment, and my tolerance for heavy metals like arsenic and cadmium is far higher than your own, but look at us. We're small and wiry, with bad teeth, fragile bones, and a life expectancy of barely seventy years. We monitor the toxicity of our farmland daily, we distill every drop of water we drink, and still we suffer massive levels of neural damage, mental retardation, and birth defects. Even the air we breathe is our enemy; our third most common cause of death is lung cancer-lung cancer, seventeen centuries after Lao Than perfected his vaccine! And we face all of that, Admiral, all those health hazards and consequences, despite nine hundred years—almost a millennium—of adaptation. Can you truly imagine what it was like for the first generation? Or the second?"

He shook his head sadly, staring down into his brandy.

"Our first generation averaged one live birth in three. Of the babies born living, half were too badly damaged to survive infancy, and our survival was so precarious there was no possible way to divert resources to keep them alive. So we practiced euthanasia, instead, and 'sent them home to God.' "

He looked up, his face wrung with pain.

"That haunts us still, and it hasn't been that many generations since the custom of euthanizing defectives, even those with minor, correctable flaws, stopped. I can show you the cemeteries, the rows and rows of children's names, the plaques with no names at all, only dates, but there are no graves. Even today there are none. The traditions of our founding die too hard for that, and the first generations had too desperate a need for soil which would support terrestrial food crops." He smiled, and some of the pain eased. "Our customs are different from yours, of course, but today our dead give life to gardens of remembrance, not potatoes and beans and corn. Someday I'll show you the Yanakov Garden. It's a very . . . peaceful place.

"But it wasn't that way for our founders, and the emotional cost to women who lost baby after baby, who saw child after child sicken and die, yet had no choice but to bear and bear and bear, even at the cost of their own lives, if the colony was to survive—" He shook his head again.

"It might have been different if we hadn't been such a patriarchal society, but our religion told us men were to care for and guide women, that women were weaker and less able to endure, and we couldn't protect them. We couldn't protect ourselves, but the price they paid was so much more terrible than ours, and it was we who had brought them here."

Grayson history, and why they’re so overprotective of women, while at the same time treating them like they’ll snap if given any sort of power or authority. Also, the Honorverse has a vaccine against cancer, at least lung cancer. I have no idea how that’s supposed to work. Unless it’s some kind of nanotech and they just say ‘vaccine’ to people so they can wrap their minds better around preventative medicine.

"We were religious zealots, Admiral Courvosier, or we wouldn't have been here. Some of us still are, though I suspect the fire has dimmed—or mellowed, perhaps—in most of us. But we were certainly zealots then, and some of the Founding Fathers blamed their women for what was happening, because, I think, it was so much easier to do that than to bleed for them. And, of course, there was their own pain when their sons and daughters died. It wasn't a pain they could admit, or they would simply have given in and died themselves, so they locked it deep inside, and it turned into anger—anger they couldn't direct at God, which left only one other place it could go."

"At their wives," Courvosier murmured.

"Exactly," Yanakov sighed. "Understand me, Admiral. The Founding Fathers weren't monsters, nor am I trying to excuse my people for being what they are. We're no less the product of our past than your own people are. This is the only culture, the only society, we've ever known, and we seldom question it. I pride myself on my knowledge of history, yet truth to tell, I never thought this deeply about it until I was forced up against the differences between us and you, and I suspect few Graysons ever really delve deep enough to understand how and why we became what we are. Is it different for Manticorans?"

The root cause of most of the anti-female prejudice on Grayson, far more complicated than "the Bible says." Also, many Graysons have mellowed out, to varying degrees. And even the most reactionary Grayson is a pillar of feminism next to a Masadan moderate.

I do love the acknowledgement that part of joining the wider galactic community is being force to reexamine your own cultural assumptions.

"The mortality rate was high among men, too, and there'd been fewer of them to begin with, and biology played another trick on us. Our female births outnumber male by three to one; if we were to sustain a viable population, every potential father had to begin begetting children as soon as possible and spread his genes as widely as he could before Grayson killed him, so our households grew. And as they grew, family became everything and the patriarch's authority became absolute. It was a survival trait which tied in only too well with our religious beliefs. After a century, women weren't even people—not really. They were property. Bearers of children. The promise of a man's physical continuation in a world which offered him a life expectancy of less than forty years of backbreaking toil, and our efforts to create a godly society institutionalized that."

Females still substantially outnumber men, frequent reproduction was key to survival in the first generations and since they were already fundies with a strong sense of family, things moved predictably.

"Precisely. The Faithful, who clung to the original doctrines of the Church and regarded technology as anathema." Yanakov laughed mirthlessly. "It's hard for me to understand how anyone could have felt that way—I don't imagine it's even possible for an outsider! I grew to manhood depending on technology, crude though it may be compared to your own, for my very survival. How in the name of God could people so much closer to extinction believe He expected them to survive without it?

"But they did—at first, at least. The Moderates, on the other hand, believed our situation here had been our own Faith's Deluge, a disaster to make God's true Will clear at last. What He wanted from us was the development of a way of life in which technology was used as He had intended—not as Man's master, but as his servant.

"Even the Faithful accepted that at last, but the hostilities already existed, and the factions grew even further apart. Not over technology, now, but over what constituted godliness, and the Faithful went beyond conservatism. They became reactionary radicals, chopping and pruning at Church doctrine to suit their own prejudices. You think the way we treat our women is backward . . . have you ever heard of the Doctrine of the Second Fall?"

Courvosier shook his head, and Yanakov sighed.

"It came out of the Faithful's search for God's Will, Admiral. You know they regard the entire New Testament as heretical because the rise of technology on Old Earth 'proves' Christ couldn't have been the true Messiah?"

This time Courvosier nodded, and Yanakov's face was grim.

"Well, they went even further than that. According to their theology, the first Fall, that from Eden on Old Earth, had been the fault of Eve's sin, and we'd created a society here that made women property. The Moderates might interpret what had happened to us as our Deluge, might have believed—as we of Grayson believe today—that it was part of God's Test, but the Faithful believe God never intended us to face Grayson's environment. That He would have transformed it into a New Eden, had we not sinned after our arrival. And as the first sin was Eve's, so this sin, the cause of our Second Fall, was committed by Eve's daughters. It justified the way they treated their own wives and daughters, and they demanded that all of us accept that, just as they demanded we accept their dietary laws and stonings.

"The Moderates refused, of course, and the hatred between the factions grew worse and worse until, as you know, it ended in open civil war.

"That war was terrible, Admiral Courvosier. The Faithful were the minority, and their hardcore zealots were only a small percentage of their total number, but those zealots were completely ruthless. They knew God was on their side. Anything they did was done in His name, and anyone who opposed them must therefore be vile and evil, with no right to live. We were still far from having rebuilt an advanced tech base, but we could produce guns and tanks and napalm—and, of course, the Faithful built their doomsday weapon as a last resort. We didn't even know of its existence until Barbara Bancroft, the wife of their most fanatical leader, decided the Moderates had to know. She escaped to us—turned against all the Faithful believed—to warn us, but her courage had its cost in fresh tragedy as well."

History of the Schism. Another reason the lot of women on Masada is even worse is because of Bancroft, canonized by the Graysons and demonized by the Masadans. Of course, this means a woman has saved all of Grayson before, but they accepted her culturally as a one-off, a woman with a courage and strength that transcended her gender, a figure out of legend rather than an example for young women to aspire to.

"My own ancestor, Hugh Yanakov, commanded our colony ship, and he tried to hang onto at least a limited space capability, but the First Elders had smashed the cryo installations immediately after we planeted. It was their equivalent of burning their boats behind them, committing themselves and their descendants to their new home. I doubt they would have done it if they'd been more scientifically educated, but they weren't. And since the ship couldn't take us away, our desperate straits left us no choice but to cannibalize it.

"So we were here to live or die, and somehow, we'd lived. Yet by the time of the Civil War, we'd reached the point where we could once more build crude, chem-fueled sublight ships. They were far less advanced than the one which had brought us here, with no cryo capability, but they could make the round trip to Endicott in twelve or fifteen years. We'd even sent an expedition there and discovered what today is Masada.

"Masada has an axial inclination of over forty degrees, and its weather is incredibly severe compared to Grayson, but humans can eat its plants and animals. They can live without worrying about lead and mercury poisoning from simply breathing its dust. Most of our people would have given all they owned to move there, and they couldn't. We didn't have the capability to move that many people. But when the Civil War ended with a handful of fanatics threatening to blow up the entire planet, we could move them to Masada."

He laughed again, harshly and more mirthlessly even than before.

"Think about it, Admiral. We had to cast them out, and the only place to which we could banish them was infinitely better than where all the rest of us had to remain! There were barely fifty thousand of them, and under the peace settlement's terms, we equipped them as lavishly as we could and sent them off, and then the rest of us turned to making the best we could of Grayson."

There was some serious lack of planning and preparedness in the Grayson colony mission, like smashing all the cyro gear before doing any check for sustainability beyond "ah-yup, thar's water innit. Prob'ly air too."

And rebuilding spaceflight to the point of making there and back-again sublight flights to a nearby system is nothing to sneeze at. Neither is moving 50,000 people via these ships.

"Women are no longer property, and we've evolved elaborate codes of behavior to protect and cherish them, partly, I suspect, in reaction against the Faithful. I know many men abuse their privileges—and their wives and daughters—but the man who publicly insults a Grayson woman will probably be lynched on the spot, if he's lucky, and they're infinitely better treated than Masadan women. Yet they're still legally and religiously inferior. Despite The Mother of Grayson, we tell ourselves it's because they're weaker, because they bear too many other burdens to be forced to vote, to own property . . . to serve in the military."

More of the differences between Grayson and Masada regarding women.

"And that's why your Captain Harrington frightens us so. She terrifies us, because she's a woman and, deep down inside, most of us know Haven's lied about what happened in Basilisk. Can you imagine what a threat that is to us?"

"Not completely, no. I can see some of the implications, of course, but my culture is too different to see them all."

"Then understand this much, Admiral, please. If Captain Harrington is as outstanding an officer as you believe—as I believe—she invalidates all our concepts of womanhood. She means we're wrong, that our religion is wrong. She means we've spent nine centuries being wrong. The idea that we may have been in error isn't quite as devastating to us as you may think—after all, we've spent those same nine centuries accepting that our Founding Fathers were wrong, or at least not completely correct. I think we can admit our error, in time. Not easily, not without dealing with our current equivalent of the Faithful, but I have to believe we can do it.

"Yet if we do, what happens to Grayson? You've met two of my wives. I love all three of them dearly—I would die to protect them—but your Captain Harrington, just by existing, tells me I've made them less than they could have been. And the truth is that they are less than Captain Harrington. Less capable of her independence, her ability to accept responsibility and risk. Just as I, they're products of a civilization and Faith that tells them they're less capable in those respects. So what do I do, Admiral? Do I tell them to stop deferring to my judgment? To enter the work force? To demand their rights and put on the same uniform I wear? How do I know where my doubts over their capability stop being genuine love and concern? When my belief that they must be reeducated before they can become my equal stops being a realistic appreciation of the limitations they've been taught and becomes sophistry to bolster the status quo and protect my own rights and privileges?"

Ah, Weber, somehow you do things like this and I forget all your flaws for a bit.

But yes, it's not just a girl power "chauvanistic pigs think women suck" story, this is treated as a complex, emotionally-charged social issue. The sort that won't be completely sorted out for generations, maybe.

"Our lives are shorter than yours—perhaps your people gain wisdom while you're still young enough for it to be of use to you?"

"Not really." Courvosier surprised himself with a chuckle. "Knowledge, yes, but wisdom does seem to come a little harder, doesn't it?"

More aside commentary on prolong, and the lifespan of Graysons. It's actually an interesting question that deserves more attention, how much of wisdom is simple life experience? People can grow old, and never become wise. How much is self-knowledge? How much is making mistakes and learning from them? A Manticoran lives at least twice as long as we do, barring an accident or violence, and so more like 5 times as long as a Grayson, is it unreasonable to expect that much more life and experience to mean something?

We've seen one problem with prolong is entrenched attitudes can last far longer, as people fixed in their ways remain a part of the debate far longer. What about the people who live 200 years and learn to change their minds? Towards the end of their lives, do they even resemble anything they might have imagined in their youth?

[Simon_Jester]

Part of the problem is that prolong hasn't actually existed for more than a hundred years or so in the setting; this may be Weber's way of avoiding the issue, or it may be his way of avoiding the predictable outcome of every freaking character having a horde of 150-year-old relatives kicking around.

Also, current Grayson life expectancy is more like seventy, which is pretty much where we are in real life give or take a few years. It was more like forty back in the 'dark ages' of Grayson, a period during which they were having very serious trouble even keeping industrial infrastructure running.

[Mr Bean]

It's a time of change that's why the Honorverse books are interesting because these are the generations who will grow up with parents that will be with them for another two hundred years. Third generation treatments like Honor may have four hundred years of heath and prologue is literally in a circumstance where the very first Gen 1 Prolong recipients like Earth White Haven still have another forty to fifty years before the treatment "wears off".

Did not know this until looking into it but Prolong works to stop degradation and decay of cell lines but it's a temporary fix with an estimated two hundred year life cycle half life. When it wears off you can't use it again but you start aging normally from that point. So you spend 200 years at age 40 then get to grow older from there. Or age 30 for Gen 2 or Age 20 for Gen 3. However it's noted several times that just because your body is physically that age for that long you stop looking it by simple weathering.

Or in other words spend thirty years fighting a war and you might expect to pick up a few stress lines. Even if future science has ensured your organs think your still forty for the last thirty years.

[Terralthra]

" . . . and this is our combat information center, gentlemen." Andreas Venizelos was short by Manticoran standards, but he stood centimeters taller than the Grayson officers in the compartment as he gestured about himself at the shining efficiency.

Graysons are short, this is mentioned frequently.

Mentioned, but also changing in later books. It's not mentioned outright (I don't think), but a large reason for the short height is the combination of heavy metal toxicity and malnutrition. Modern medicine helps ameliorate it. Carson Clinkscales, Honor's flag lieutenant in In Enemy Hands, is 190cm, and it's mentioned that he's a giant by Grayson standards, but the younger a Grayson character is, the less short they're remarked as being.

They circled slowly, hands weaving in deceptively gentle, graceful patterns. Both were black belt in coup de vitesse, the martial art developed to combine Oriental and Western forms on Nouveau Dijon eight centuries before, and a hush enveloped the gym as other exercisers turned to watch them.

Honor felt her audience, but only distantly as her senses focused on Babcock with crystal, cat-like concentration. Coup de vitesse was a primarily offensive "hard" style, a combination of cool self-control and go-for-broke ferocity designed to take advantage of "Westerners'" larger size and longer reach. It wasn't too proud to borrow from any technique—from savate to t'ai chi—but it was less concerned with form and more with concentrated violence. It made far less effort to use an opponent's strength against her than most Oriental forms did and laid proportionately more emphasis on the attack, even at the occasional expense of centering and defense.

A classmate from the Academy unarmed combat team who preferred the elegance of judo to the coup had once likened it to fencing with two-handed swords, but it worked for Honor. And, like any of the martial arts, it wasn't something one thought through in the midst of a bout. You simply did it, responding with attacks and counters which were so deeply trained into you that you didn't know what you were doing—not consciously—until you'd already done it. So she didn't try to think, didn't try to anticipate. Babcock was too fast for that, and this was a full contact bout. She who let herself become distracted would pay a bruising price.

Honor's sport.

Worth noting that Honor's skill in the coup de vitesse is mentioned, if not explicitly by name, in On Basilisk Station, when her being a member of the unarmed combat team at Saganami Island comes up when discussing the attempted rape by Young.

"Nonetheless, I think I should remove myself from the equation, Sir. At least until you get the ball rolling in the right direction."

"You do?" Courvosier arched his eyebrows, and she nodded.

"I do. In fact, I sort of thought that might be wiser from the moment Yanakov and his people came on board Fearless to greet you. That's why I didn't go ahead and send Alice and Alistair straight on to Casca as I'd originally planned."

"I thought that might be the case." The admiral considered her soberly. "You're thinking about taking the other merchies to Casca yourself?" She nodded. "I'm not sure that's a good idea, Honor. The Graysons may see it as running out, as proof a 'mere woman' can't take the heat."

"Maybe. But I don't see how it could create any more negative reactions than my presence seems to be generating. If I take Apollo to Casca with me, it'll leave Jason Alvarez as SO. He doesn't seem to be having any problems with his opposite numbers—except for the ones who think he must be some kind of sissy for taking orders from a woman. Maybe by the time I come back, you'll have made enough progress with these people that my mere presence won't queer the deal for you."

"I don't know. . . ." Courvosier plucked at his lower lip. "If you take Fearless and Apollo out of here, our 'show of force' will get a lot weaker. Have you considered that?"

"Yes, Sir, but they've already seen both ships, and they'll know we're coming back. That should be sufficient, I'd think. And I'm not the only woman stuck in their craws right now. Alice is my second in command-two women, both senior to any of our male officers." She shook her head. "Better to get both of us out of the way for a while, Sir."

And here's Honor's great big mistake. She decides to go escort the convoy so her presence won't disturb negotiations anymore, taking her only other cruiser (which also has a female captain) with her AND Mckeon's destroyer for scouting, leaving the single destroyer Madrigal to show the flag.

This is sort of forgiveable given how uncomfortable she's making the Graysons, her desire not to hamper her Kingdom's diplomacy and get the other female captain out. Still, it does neglect the other part of her mission, a show of force for Masada.

It's actually Courvosier who suggests pulling Troubadour as well, for political reasons. He says that it would be too pointed to remove both female-captained ships and leave both male-captained ships.

[Batman]

I'm rereading the series as I'm following this thread and all I can say is after all these years, space combat without podnoughts and MDMs feels weird.
And I'm not sure I agree with Courvosier. Whether or not they take Troubadour along, they are removing both female captains from the system.
Even without the benefit of hindsight I think it would have been the smarter move to leave Apollo and Truman behind. Honor gets to run away to soothe her feelings about jeopardising the mission, and the Graysons still have to learn to deal with the fact that yes, the RMN/SKM has women in positions of power *cough Queen Elizabeth?*cough*.
I think this is a compound failure of Honor desperately wanting to get away for feeling she was undermining the negotiations and Courvosier letting her get away with not only pulling both female captains out of the system but sending Troubadour in a useless attempt to pretend that it's not just the female captains that are leaving.

[Crazedwraith]

Seriously the only reason why it turns out to be a fatal mistake was the bad luck that the Masadans and peeps were planning their ambush and take-over operations for that specific week. I mean there's no evidence that the Graysons or MKN expected things to go down in the immediate future.

Also the Peep Captain seemed to think the plan would go down fine even if Harrington's entire taskforce was there. But then Madrigal's effectiveness did surprise him as well.