Shanejayell
Yuri Fan without a Pause
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- He
That's the in-universe reason. Don't yell at me over it.
Full slow ahead! - Ralson reads Honor Harrington: A Rising Thunder
- Thread starter Ralson
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- Books
slybrarian
Creature of Fable
- Location
- A Far and Sunless Land
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Because like I said, they are worse than the Cylons at secret genocide plans.
But no one would know they had done it because of their fancy stealth ships. Also, they control the League and it is at war with Manticore.
- Location
- National Capital Region, USA
Not yelling at you, it's not your fault. I'm just annoyed that even in-universe its a weak excuse. Mesa is SO EBUL they do mind control, subversion and treason, and plot mass genetic slavery of humanity....but Whoa! Nuking you main enemy's capitol and breaking the "No-WMD-Strikes-On-Civilian-Planets" rule is a bridge too far? When you practically control/manipulate the enforcer of the rule? Sigh...
Man, why even do it that way?
Rogue elements in the Haven fleet didn't agree with the actions of the government in siding with the bastards who've killed so many of them. There appears to have been a coup onboard one of their smaller warships, who went on a suicide run against Manticore.
So sad.
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- She/Her
Being a giant evil conspiracy commanded by an army of Hitler clones though is totally legit.
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- She/Her
The Solarian League doesn't meddle in internal politics. Democracy, autocracy, quantum superposition, Planet Hitler, it's all good.
slybrarian
Creature of Fable
- Location
- A Far and Sunless Land
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Conveniently, they even have repeatedly used former SS ships for other operations so clearly they can get some.
I await the day David Weber comes out and just says that what he's doing is avant-garde modern art and everyone fell for it.
Coiler
ROURKE
Freudianslip
Son of a chipwich
Perhaps it's an Atlanta Nights-esque attempt to see how low the bar will go.
While these books are an impressive display of Things Not Happening, he'd have to step up his moral repugnance game quite a ways to beat out Tom Kratman.
Sure, but the triple-ripple *worked*, and we've also had ships damaged by proximity explosions if they're big enough.
It'd be a completely different type of counter-missile, but it's possible.
We've also had it beaten in that the worlds are going to uptech eventually, even if it's as former league states, who could hold grudges. You don't want to set a precedent of world-nuking when someone in the reasonable future may be in a position to return the favor.
Plus consider it'd alienate allies and the like. Would Haven and the Andermani want to stay tied to that?
They realize it'll be traced back to them sooner or later. Stealth is a 'no one knows who did it now,' but Mesa isn't foolish enough to think it'll never be discovered who the only group to possess stealth ships is.
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- He/Him
Mesa already violated the Edict by blowing up that city on Sphinx.
The SL doesn't care. They're not even looking into it.
David Weber said:
The SL doesn't care. They're not even looking into it.
E.I.G.
Robo-Bird
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- It/They
... so there is not a single reason that [secret evil behind it all] isn't just wiping out the upstarts messing with their plan.
Or the [strawman faction] could never stop this in the first place, which makes more sense as it seems a planet could get lost, travel across parsecs of space, and reappear in another star system with a brand new high tech doom-fleet without anyone getting the memo that it disappeared in the first place until after they started shooting at people.
Because they have no communications ability.
Right lets explore that as if it actually mattered*:
It apparently takes a time period of days just to travel between parts of a given interstellar power, and another few days to actually get a message delivered because bureaucracy (that sounds like the best reason we are getting).
This should mean that the typical turnaround time for an incident to be responded to is weeks. This means that if they didn't act like brain-dead automatons they would need local leaders with the authority to act in the name of the nation on site for any issue that cannot wait that time.
This also should limit empire size, the largest area you should be able to control is based on how far you can project power. So the area a single group can control is a function of how much power and authority they can place on any given site. If they can put a viable force that has loyal leaders in every star system then they can get very large, they can only control a smaller area if they have to rely on sending fleets around in response to threats.
This should also impact trade, the knowledge of what products are desired is going to be days out of date, and more critically anything that is being ordered across large distances has weeks of time just for you to know that someone has made an offer if it is sent by communication.
So there is no way that you can afford to have anything that will be needed in less than that time be produced outside of the area. Food in particular should only be heavily preserved, or non-perishables as there should be no reason for goods to take longer to transfer than messages.
*... I need something to stave off the madness of this thread.
Btw, while the Solarians are the big guaranteer, I do not get the impression that they are the only ones that care by a long stretch.
Not as I understand it- that was collateral from destroying a valid military target. It wasn't their missiles or anything, it was the station falling.
The edicts are not 'no major planetary damage may occur,' it's 'you must not attack a planet for that purpose (baring very specific circumstances)'. If you shoot something military and it falls but your weapons don't come near the planet themselves, that's not considered a purposeful breach.
Not as I understand it- that was collateral from destroying a valid military target. It wasn't their missiles or anything, it was the station falling.
The edicts are not 'no major planetary damage may occur,' it's 'you must not attack a planet for that purpose (baring very specific circumstances)'. If you shoot something military and it falls but your weapons don't come near the planet themselves, that's not considered a purposeful breach.
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The thing I just posted says accidental hits on population centers are still violations.
Also, if intent was so important, the SL would be investigating to determine intent. Instead it doesn't give a fuck because lol.
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It's not even an accidental hit is the point. It hit a military target. Many minutes later, that target fell.
No weapons hit the planet.
The edicts are not supposed to be a ban against hitting anything, even very legit military targets, near a planet.
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They hit something in orbit. It's pretty simple physics to figure out where it would land on the planet. A big spacestation dropping on a population center is a weapon and was foreseeable.
You might as well say dropping a nuke on a military base is alright even if that base is on the outskirts of a city. "Hey, we just hit a military target. The fallout isn't our responsibility."
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No one thinks the rule is supposed to be a ban against hitting stuff in orbit period. If you build a military shipyard in orbit, your opponent is supposed to be careful, but it is still a military shipyard.
If there were a few more tugs around, probably nothing of significance would've crashed. So it was not a given the casualties would happen.
Also, on the military base? We are told the rule is, 'you must order their surrender. If they do not, then your strike must be precise.' Under the assumption that orbital superiority is an I Win button and should be treated as such with nigh automatic surrender if achieved, and the Edicts are a way to keep civilians out of the line of fire, not a way to make everyone put their bases near civilians for protection.
The edicts do allow orbital firing in some cases after all.
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This doesn't really hold water. If the Mesans had used a few more Bigatons, nothing would have fallen out of orbit. Had they timed their attack more carefully, it would have blown the debris into a higher orbit. Instead, they were sloppy and they dropped a huge chunk of it onto a planet. Seriously, how do you do that by accident? It's not like it's hard to know how such a large piece of hardware is moving. Set your 'nukes' to go off under it so that the attack will actually propel it upward, and bam, done.
And when you say after an attack that the victim could have done more to prevent their injuries, this does not absolve the perpetrator of the assault from responsibility for their deeds. Victim blaming doesn't hold water. You don't urge the citizens of Fukushima to have iodine pills in their first aid kits and respirators to prevent inhalation if the reactor melts down, breaches containment and spews radiation onto the landscape. So don't blame the citizens of Sphinx and their Treecat Overlords for not having enough tugs. Would they still have been irresponsible had they been killed by a missile that failed to detonate or activate it's range safties and entered their atmosphere at .99 C?
Up slows it's orbit and causes stuff to fall down too. And it's a big station, knocking some up will, via leverage, fling stuff down.
Stuff went in every direction, and attacks were set to penetrate missile defenses were any raised... also they were largely laserheads anyway, weren't they? So that's a melting effect rather than a directed explosion.
The attacks were aimed for destruction, which is ok-by-the-rules. Nothing we've seen indicates it was aimed for a purposeful de-orbit, it was just a small bit of a large whole that ended up that way (remember these stations were gigantic), and frankly if it was aimed to do so things could've been a lot worst.
In a 'who is responsible for the attack and casualties' sense? Yes. No one would disagree that this is an ignoble attack and a gigantic act of war.
But I am quite sure the Edicts are written with the idea of "If we are too strict, people will simply hide their stuff too close to planets/civilians and make attacks on such necessary to win wars," which leads to very very bad places.
This is talking lawyer-terms here, and not talking all responses. A world attacked in such a fashion could probably appeal to the League or other neighbors to intervene simply on 'aggressors attacking us' terms and get Frontier Fleet (or whoever else is outraged) there most of the time just fine, but the Edict is written to make sure it's not abused in a way that'd end up upping casualties due to it becoming in-fashion to orbit shipyards as closely above population centers as possible, purely as a ruthless tactic.
The Solarians themselves want to be able to wage conflict without being badly handicapped by the edicts, after all. Make it too loose, and too many accidents happen (*something* falling is likely to happen fairly often, even if normally much less,), and you end up having to either come down hard on forceswho truly did only make minor errors / just had bad luck ("We shot a ship in high orbit, it blew up, we didn't notice, an hour later it hit a tiny village"), or bending the rules to not come down in those cases, which waters the whole thing down.
It's not a matter of irresponsibility- they weren't irresponsible in the slightest.
It's "Did the attackers violate the letter, or even spirit, of the edicts?" And the answer is, no, the Edicts allow attacks on military targets in orbit as long as the attack is careful enough with it's weapons to not hit anything with the weapons that's on the banned target list ( people on the ground), and debris of a legitimate target does not count as a deliberate attack unless, say, it's thrown down on purpose or something.
And, if I was a lawyer in the early days of the Solarian league? I'd very much see the human shield possibility and thus argue against it including non-purposeful debris that happened despite focusing entirely on military targets.
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They are the only ones who should care, though. Being the big kids on the block and the undisputed hegemon which likes playing in the little kids' pools to make sure upstarts stop existing (until Honor casts "Retcon Backstory" repeatedly and they become quantum strawmen) they are the ones with the absolute most to lose if the Edict breaks. If it doesn't... the numbers for Honorverse and the wackiness of their FTL sensors (only work with active wedges) means that without said Edict enforcement by something which might be capable of absorbing a first strike and then ruining your face, Mutually Assured Destruction becomes the name of the game.
Who the fuck's going to enforce the Edict at this point? No power besides the Solarian League has the sheer weight of industry and population to ensure that anyone who does a first strike with massed RKKV attack will lose, without using their own RKKVs in second-strike...
At which point it's "everyone has nukes and MAD is the name of the game, and everyone dies horribly the moment someone does something stupid to break MAD."
Because there is no fucking way Manticore could stop the Masadans from wiping them out if they spent their money on RKKVs instead of shitty failships.
I seem to distinctly recall the bad guys twirling their tiny little moustaches over the possibility of the debris "accidentally" hitting the planet. In fact, I still have the Mission ePub in Calibre, let me just-
They are the ones who have the most strategic/tactical reason to care. Still, many others still have the logical pragmatic vested interest, plus there's everyone who has a moral/ethical interest.
I think there's only *one* person/group, the pirate-dictator, who didn't see the point to them.
Pretty much the only option is coalitions working together, ala like when pretty much everyone in the Silesian league turned on the dictator-pirate guy. Sure, if you're the only one who wants to counter it, you're facing a potential hit, but if a number of powers nearby jumps on the initial offender... well, that reduces the possibility of being hit.
Oh I think they could stop the Masadans! You still have to launch the RKKVs from something after all (aforementioned failships in this case), and have time to get them up to speed sans wedge, so they aren't completely invisible, and it'd have no stealth system ... they'd manage to make a failRKKV launched from a failship.
But basically I'm in agreement, MAD sucks for all.
Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
tankdrop24
Tread First into Hell
- Location
- The Center of the Universe: Toronto, Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Aside III: "Open Your Eyes, Sheeple!"
I called the baddies Hitler for a cheap laugh, but that comparison is actually highly inappropriate.
The Mesans (pronounced "Masons," ho ho) are the exact sort of conspiracy the Nazis liked to project onto their enemies. They weren't the first organization to do so (fear of jewish/masonic/etc conspiracies stretch to at least the middle ages) nor the last (Glenn Beck's chalkboard) but they were probably the most large-scale. The message is generally the same: 'There exists a foe who cannot stand up to the overt, heroic strength of our superior fighting man, but through subterfuge and media control gains covert dominance over society, and seeks to engineer disaster to transition into overt control.'
The solution is always simple: Rise up and destroy the (wealthy scapegoat):
Modern incarnations tend to avoid the antisemetic angle, though not always. The Mesans, certainly, seem purely Freemason-analogues, with no intentionally Jewish character. They're a pretty straightforward New World Order conspiracy theory made flesh. A key element is that they don't merely scheme and manipulate, but in fact erode the very foundations of society, carefully creating unmanly degeneracy which must be rooted out.
But always, the solution is the same. Direct military action. Draw your sword and smash them.
Hitler believed Bolshevism was a tentacle of a vast conspiracy. Marx had Jewish ancestry, as did many other influential socialists and communists. Therefore, to Hitler, the entire movement was a sham, and the Russia was a degenerate order rotten with conspiracy. (And Slavic, too) The sheer size, population, and industrial power of the Soviet Union was irrelevant. Insidious, covert control could not stand before overt, Aryan strength. One swift kick, and the whole decaying edifice would come crashing down.
This is how a crazy, racist conspiracy theory led to the largest land war in the history of the human race.
It's easy to draw parallels here. In any sane universe, Solaria should be able to crush Manticore. However, it is so beset with corruption, with cartoonish bureaucracy, so infested with conspiracy, that one swift kick will bring it crashing down.
This makes me wonder if these novels are actually in-universe Propaganda for Manticore. They're fight a losing war against a slightly inferior but far more numerous Solarian League, so they publish novels claiming their enemies are impotent and are controlled by an evil conspiracy responsible for everything bad.