Let's Read: David Weber's Honor Harrington

The Victorian · Jun 24, 2020

So to recap the last chapter, our heroine had just been given her first command - the Fearless - but her excitement quickly gave way to dismay when she discovered that the ship's armaments have been gutted. Well, perhaps not so much gutted as replaced with weapons systems she considers far more dubious. It's interesting to note that this novel seems to distinguish torpedoes from missiles. On earth the difference is that missiles travel through the air while torpedoes travel through the water. I'm not sure what the difference is in space, but I have a feeling that the book will explain it thoroughly at some point.

But why spend all this effort refitting the ship with an untested weapons system? Well, the answer is politics...in particular a squabble between the advocates of two different schools of thought regarding tactics:

There were two major schools of tactical thought in the RMN: the traditionalists, championed by Admiral Hamish Alexander, and Admiral of the Red Lady Sonja Hemphill's "jeune ecole." Alexander—and, for that matter, Honor—believed the fundamental tactical truths remained true regardless of weapon systems, that it was a matter of fitting new weapons into existing conceptual frameworks with due adjustment for the capabilities they conferred. The jeune ecole believed weapons determined tactics and that technology, properly used, rendered historical analysis irrelevant. And, unfortunately, politics had placed Horrible Hemphill and her panacea merchants in the ascendant just now.

Now, I'm most certainly not a tactical genius (in fact, I'm the go-to guy if you want to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory), but it seems to me that "weapons determine tactics" is a rather uncontroversial statement. The line formations of the 18th and early 19th century were largely the result of the weapons at the time - slow firing, inaccurate smoothbore muskets, and such formations would naturally be useless if your opponent were armed with, say a machine gun. Likewise, part of the reason for the stalemate and attrition during the first World War was that tactics had yet to catch up with technology. Of course, I wouldn't say that historical analysis is useless, either.

Also..."Red Lady Sonja"?

We then get three semi-lengthy paragraphs explaining the political situation. There are the Liberals and Progressives, who oppose large military budgets, the Conservatives, who are "xenophobic isolationists" (isn't that an empire type in Stellaris?), and the Centrists and Crown Loyalists who believe that war with the "Republic" of Haven is inevitable.

Unpolitical Honor might be, but she knew which party she supported. The Centrists realized that the Republic of Haven's expansionism must inevitably bring it into conflict with the Kingdom, and they were preparing to do something about it. The Conservatives wanted to bury their heads in the sand until it all went away, though they were at least willing to support a powerful fleet to safeguard their precious isolation.

Well, kudos to the author for defying my expecations and NOT making the conservatives out to be the most bloodthirsty faction. By Honor's own admission, she doesn't "study, understand, or like" politics, and I've always believed that people who say they don't care about politics are implicitly in favour of the status quo, which is an inherently conservative position.

So after that infodump we get another, this time explaining just why Honor dislikes this new weapon arrangement so much.

Gravity sidewalls were the first and primary line of defense for every warship. The impeller drive created a pair of stressed gravity bands above and below a ship—a wedge, open at both ends, though the forward edge was far deeper than the after one—capable in theory of instant acceleration to light speed. Of course, that kind of acceleration would turn any crew to gory goo; even with modern inertial compensators, the best acceleration any warship could pull under impeller was well under six hundred gravities, but it had been a tremendous step forward. And not simply in terms of propulsion; even today no known weapon could penetrate the main drive bands of a military-grade impeller wedge, which meant simply powering its impellers protected a ship against any fire from above or below.

So now we find out why shields are called "sidewalls": because the tops and bottoms of ships are already protected by the ship's own propulsion system. The sidewalls are far weaker than the drive bands, however, and the front and stern of ships are the most vulnerable. This means that, when the battle starts to turn against a fleet, all they have to do is turn on their sides, presenting their impenetrable drive bands to the enemy, and then disengage.

You see what the author has done here? Here's a found a way to have spaceships employ Age of Sail tactics such as broadsides and crossing the T. And it's explained as being a result of the technology in use, which is actually quite clever.

So where does this whole "grav lance" bit come in? Well, it's capable of penetrating a ship's sidewall, but the drawback is that it has a very short range (a "mere" 100,000 km, so at least the novel has a proper sense of scale to these battles), and Honor figures that, by the time they get close enough to use the enemy ship will have long since blown them to smithereens:

It might even make sense aboard a capital ship with the mass to spare for it, but only an idiot (or Horrible Hemphill) would think it made sense aboard a light cruiser! Fearless simply didn't have the defenses to survive hostile fire as she closed, and thanks to the grav lance, she no longer even had the offensive weapons to reply effectively! Oh, certainly, if she got into grav lance range, and if the lance did its job, the massive energy torpedo batteries Hemphill had crammed in could tear even a superdreadnought apart. But only if the lance did its job, since energy torpedoes were as effective as so many soft-boiled eggs against an intact sidewall.

I don't know why, but the phrase "superdreadnaught" made me chuckle. It makes me wonder if there will eventually be a super-duper dreadnought somewhere somewhere down the line...

Thinking the problem over, she ponders having her ship join the screening squadrons in the hopes that enemy would ignore the Fearless long enough to get off a lance shot. Of course, this is the sort of thing that would only work once - the moment the enemy realises what kind of weapon the Fearless possesses they're going to destroy every light cruiser within range.

So now we have a conundrum - a ship that's outdated and which has to get extremely close to use its primary armament. How will our heroine deal with this? Stay tuned!

AKuz · Jun 24, 2020

The Victorian said:
Now, I'm most certainly not a tactical genius (in fact, I'm the go-to guy if you want to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory), but it seems to me that "weapons determine tactics" is a rather uncontroversial statement. The line formations of the 18th and early 19th century were largely the result of the weapons at the time - slow firing, inaccurate smoothbore muskets, and such formations would naturally be useless if your opponent were armed with, say a machine gun. Likewise, part of the reason for the stalemate and attrition during the first World War was that tactics had yet to catch up with technology. Of course, I wouldn't say that historical analysis is useless, either.

One of the things I find most amusing things about this series is that for all that he spend the early books shitting on Hemphill and the Jeune Ecole, But they're right, for most of this series literally the only thing that matters is new and more advanced weapon systems. Is your enemy honestly, actually, literally, no joke, 99% OF THE ENTIRE HUMAN RACE???? Doesn't matter, you have better weapons and will win effortlessly.

Vyslanté · Jun 24, 2020

Mechasaurian said:
You don't like the cat. I get it. Introducing the cat before the actual protagonist was not the right move. But frankly, your response to the cat is coming across as really overblown.

Everyone has a right to have some pet peeves about what they read, after all.

(Pet, like, the cat)

(Master of humor)

(You can find my show every Tuesday behind your nearest dumpster)

Teal · Jun 24, 2020

The Victorian said:
Now, I'm most certainly not a tactical genius (in fact, I'm the go-to guy if you want to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory), but it seems to me that "weapons determine tactics" is a rather uncontroversial statement.

Before you go thinking that this setting up room for Honor's character growth, I gotta tell you Weber's got a fetish for 19th century line formation tactics, and he puts them into every thing he is involved writing, irrelevant of time period.

High science fiction where ships engage in three dimensions at thousands of kilometers? Because of "reasons" they now do so in two dimensions in line formations and firing broadsides.

Also high science fiction but this time the good guys are at roughly WW2 tech levels, and are perfectly capable of both powered flight and building aircraft carriers? Nah, dreadnoughts and observation balloons are clearly the better option!

A west virginia coal town has been transported to 1632 germany, and again not only has working aircraft but the demonstrated capacity to build more? Nah, they're gonna be building dreadnoughts with their swedish allies in five years, and completely forget about the third dimension.

Just roll with it, every mil-fi/sci-mil-fi writier has their own weird tactical or strategic fetish that they exclusively push. Accept it, most authors wouldn't even bother getting into the genre if they couldn't write entire novels on how their one weird school of warfare is the objectively superior choice.

Q99 · Jun 24, 2020

The Victorian said:
Now, I'm most certainly not a tactical genius (in fact, I'm the go-to guy if you want to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory), but it seems to me that "weapons determine tactics" is a rather uncontroversial statement. The line formations of the 18th and early 19th century were largely the result of the weapons at the time - slow firing, inaccurate smoothbore muskets, and such formations would naturally be useless if your opponent were armed with, say a machine gun. Likewise, part of the reason for the stalemate and attrition during the first World War was that tactics had yet to catch up with technology. Of course, I wouldn't say that historical analysis is useless, either.

To be fair, the factions aren't exactly absolute, but more "trying to revolutionize tactics and rewrite the rulebook with new weapons often backfire when your new rulebook doesn't hold up- we should focus on advances in the paradigm we know works and adapt to their advantages there."

Also there's been a bit of tech stasis, military wise. Incremental advancement is the general rule of the game.

Vyslanté · Jun 24, 2020

And of course, in the real life, we know who of the Jeune Ecole or of the Traditionalists where eventually right...

Erandil · Jun 24, 2020

To be honest, I find conflicts like that actually one of the positive sides of the series. Far to often in mil-scifi, or indeed military fiction in general, you have the whole "a-political" and probably brotherhood-like military that is so much better than whatever dis-united political system there happens to exist, happily regurgitating military propaganda and ignoring the fact that militaries always have been strongly political entities. Plus the interaction with the dispute is I think one of the better ways to portray Honors changes as a character in the series and her coming into her own.

(Though sadly like so many things that gets lost the further into the series you get...)

Entropy Judge · Jun 24, 2020

The Victorian said:
Also..."Red Lady Sonja"?

Admiral of the Red. (Although in this case, as mentioned, Red is lower than Green, rather than being higher than White and Blue.)

The Victorian said:
It's interesting to note that this novel seems to distinguish torpedoes from missiles. On earth the difference is that missiles travel through the air while torpedoes travel through the water. I'm not sure what the difference is in space, but I have a feeling that the book will explain it thoroughly at some point.

It has been partially explained by now - energy torpedoes are fast-firing and destructive (and apparently don't require ammunition, since ripping out some of the missile magazines let them cram in four more torpedo projectors) but don't do squat against sidewalls, while missiles can penetrate sidewalls and have a range of roughly a million+ kilometers.

Avernus · Jun 24, 2020

The Victorian said:
Now, I'm most certainly not a tactical genius (in fact, I'm the go-to guy if you want to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory), but it seems to me that "weapons determine tactics" is a rather uncontroversial statement. The line formations of the 18th and early 19th century were largely the result of the weapons at the time - slow firing, inaccurate smoothbore muskets, and such formations would naturally be useless if your opponent were armed with, say a machine gun. Likewise, part of the reason for the stalemate and attrition during the first World War was that tactics had yet to catch up with technology. Of course, I wouldn't say that historical analysis is useless, either.

Basically, the issue was that the Jeune Ecole had a tendency to go for impractical wunderwaffe - like the grav lance - while the traditionalists were, well, traditionalists.

Interestingly David Weber has said that he wishes he'd never introduced the grav lance, since it led to decades of fans obsessively trying to find a way to make it work as promised.

The Victorian said:
I don't know why, but the phrase "superdreadnaught" made me chuckle.

Weber just loves that terminology. If he writes something involving ships, there's usually something called a dreadnaught or superdreadnaught in it.

Kuja · Jun 24, 2020

The Victorian said:
I don't know why, but the phrase "superdreadnaught" made me chuckle. It makes me wonder if there will eventually be a super-duper dreadnought somewhere somewhere down the line...

The Superdreadnought-class S-type, recognizable by its distinct red color scheme and command antenna.

slybrarian · Jun 24, 2020

"Superdreadnought" is one of those Starfire holdovers I mentioned earlier, and is somehow less ridiculous than some of the larger ship classes that game had after it because it was at least vaguely tied to a real thing. In the game as tech advanced new ship sizes became available, but the names for each size was fixed so they added more and more on at the top. The same supposedly happened in the background of this setting, although later retcons made that increasingly dubious. The entire naming system is basically aping the vaguely standardized system seen around WWII, while ignoring that there wasn't anything so fixed before or after.

I think he'd have been better off sticking closer to the Age of Sail system. Call the biggest ships dreadnoughts if you think that's cooler, but then have them be 1st, 2nd, 3rd rate; throw in 'cruisers' in the frigate role and destroyers for small escorts and patrol ships.

Dahak · Jun 24, 2020

The Victorian said:
I don't know why, but the phrase "superdreadnaught" made me chuckle. It makes me wonder if there will eventually be a super-duper dreadnought somewhere somewhere down the line...

Weber has a standard size based classification for ships first in Starfire and then here. The next size up from Super Dreadnought in Starfire is Monitor. Then Supermonitor.

From smallest to largest:

Escort (ES)
Corvette (CT)
Frigate (FF)
Destroyer (DD)
Light Cruiser (CL)
Heavy Cruiser (CA)
Battlecruiser (BC)
Battleship (BB)
Dreadnought (DN)
Super Dreadnought (SD)

As someone who's used to Royal Navy classifications the idea that a Frigate is always smaller than a Destroyer, rather than them both being smaller than cruisers and having different roles (Frigate originally was the independent operations ship while destroyers were the escorts for capitals. Post WW2 Frigates were anti submarine escorts and Destroyers Anti aircraft escorts.) is mildly confusing.

Battlecruisers being smaller than Battleships or Dreadnoughts is hair pulling considering that when launched HMS Hood was the largest warship afloat (The next three were the Repulse class Battlecruisers) dwarfing all the world's Dreadnoughts. (Getting the speed the design required to operate as a flanking and mobile reserve unit needed a longer thinner hull, so a RN Battlecruisers class being larger than the equivalent Dreadnought/Battleship class was normal.)

Seeing as Fearless is an ageing Light Cruiser barely larger than a Destroyer, the RN might be thinking about reclassifying it a Frigate before the refit. The RMN and its opponents however seem like Churchill (c.f. HMS Canopus) to believe if it was a CL when launched it must always be called a CL even if everyone is building bigger DDs.

It is noticeable that both sides get what they are doing to Fearless wrong. This is the sort of thing you should test on a small ship (in this case the obvious alternative would be to scrap her) before rolling it out on the capital units. Having a testbed to try out a new concept makes sense.

Honor has been given a difficult task but she's supposed to be an up and coming captain and she's not one for politics, so looks like a good choice to give the design a fair trial. Plus she's going to be doing this as part of a fleet exercise, which means there will be other more experienced tacticians thinking about what uses can be made of Fearless. (Arguably some of the later exercises should simulate refitting more ships on one side in a similar manner after they've seen the proof of concept)

It does say bad things about the RMN's culture that Honor feels that being asked to demonstrate the advantages and disadvantages of a new weapon system is other than praise for her ability to get the most out of what she has. Compare this to for example the early chapters of Galactic Patrol (since Mil SF draws on the well Lensman dug.) Kim is given command of a new experimentally armed cruiser and the crusty old Admiral briefing him explicitly says that he is the best choice for captain not because, as Kim assumes, that he is expendable but because he is best qualified to make it work since it will require different tactics to make it work and while he lacks experience and the habits that come with it, he makes up for that in adaptability.

In parallel to Honor's thoughts about Furious's load out, Kim can only work out how to get the Britannia's Q-gun to work once. So he makes that one time count and there after is reluctant to assume any wunderwaffen will go uncountered the second time it is used.

The Jeune Ecole's failings on this will be seen in the next few chapters.

The one so far is cramming Fearless full of Energy Torpedos rather than working on the assumption that heavy battlewagons that already carry them will supply the blam (Energy torps having 5 times the range of the Grav Lance) when Fearless brings down shields. Which would leave Fearless's own arsenal intact and make her harder to tell from other CLs. Though they may be assuming that Fearless not needing the Grav lance on a fore or aft aspect shot makes up for that.

slybrarian · Jun 24, 2020

Dahak said:
Weber has a standard size based classification for ships first in Starfire and then here. The next size up from Super Dreadnought in Starfire is Monitor. Then Supermonitor.

From smallest to largest:

Escort (ES)

Corvette (CT)

Frigate (FF)

Destroyer (DD)

Light Cruiser (CL)

Heavy Cruiser (CA)

Battlecruiser (BC)

Battleship (BB)

Dreadnought (DN)

Super Dreadnought (SD)

As someone who's used to Royal Navy classifications the idea that a Frigate is always smaller than a Destroyer, rather than them both being smaller than cruisers and having different roles (Frigate originally was the independent operations ship while destroyers were the escorts for capitals. Post WW2 Frigates were anti submarine escorts and Destroyers Anti aircraft escorts.) is mildly confusing.

Battlecruisers being smaller than Battleships or Dreadnoughts is hair pulling considering that when launched HMS Hood was the largest warship afloat (The next three were the Repulse class Battlecruisers) dwarfing all the world's Dreadnoughts. (Getting the speed the design required to operate as a flanking and mobile reserve unit needed a longer thinner hull, so a RN Battlecruisers class being larger than the equivalent Dreadnought/Battleship class was normal.)

Exactly this. It's the sort of setup that makes perfect sense for a game, but also leads to people looking at Imperial Star Destroyers, repeatedly described in-character as some of the biggest, baddest ships around, and then going, "ackshually destroyers are small escorts so there must be an entire range of star-cruisers, battlecruisers, battleships, and dreadnoughts above them". Meanwhile on-screen cruisers can be smaller or bigger, and the dreadnoughts are a third the size of an ISD.

It is noticeable that both sides get what they are doing to Fearless wrong. This is the sort of thing you should test on a small ship (in this case the obvious alternative would be to scrap her) before rolling it out on the capital units. Having a testbed to try out a new concept makes sense.

Honor has been given a difficult task but she's supposed to be an up and coming captain and she's not one for politics, so looks like a good choice to give the design a fair trial. Plus she's going to be doing this as part of a fleet exercise, which means there will be other more experienced tacticians thinking about what uses can be made of Fearless. (Arguably some of the later exercises should simulate refitting more ships on one side in a similar manner after they've seen the proof of concept)

It does say bad things about the RMN's culture that Honor feels that being asked to demonstrate the advantages and disadvantages of a new weapon system is other than praise for her ability to get the most out of what she has. Compare this to for example the early chapters of Galactic Patrol (since Mil SF draws on the well Lensman dug.) Kim is given command of a new experimentally armed cruiser and the crusty old Admiral briefing him explicitly says that he is the best choice for captain not because, as Kim assumes, that he is expendable but because he is best qualified to make it work since it will require different tactics to make it work and while he lacks experience and the habits that come with it, he makes up for that in adaptability.

In parallel to Honor's thoughts about Furious's load out, Kim can only work out how to get the Britannia's Q-gun to work once. So he makes that one time count and there after is reluctant to assume any wunderwaffen will go uncountered the second time it is used.

The Jeune Ecole's failings on this will be seen in the next few chapters.

The one so far is cramming Fearless full of Energy Torpedos rather than working on the assumption that heavy battlewagons that already carry them will supply the blam (Energy torps having 5 times the range of the Grav Lance) when Fearless brings down shields. Which would leave Fearless's own arsenal intact and make her harder to tell from other CLs. Though they may be assuming that Fearless not needing the Grav lance on a fore or aft aspect shot makes up for that.

I think this is a pretty fair analysis, even if I'm not sure how much Weber intended. I do think it's interesting that later on, Honor and Hemphill are both able to put aside their previous personal animosity and work together to develop other weapon systems, some of which did end up working out in practice, the Q-ships as both proto-podnaughts and proto-carriers being the ones that broke the entire combat paradigm for better and for worse. It's a nice development of them both, assuming it's not a result of Hemphil getting in line of sight and having a sudden mood change.

Q99 · Jun 24, 2020

I imagine that Honor views it as a punishment because she's known to be a protege of the admiral of the opposing faction- Sure, she's good, but she's not enthusiastic. It also puts it in a "if she's perceived as scuttling the test/doing poor on purpose, then that can be used against her faction. If she does well, it benefits the opposing faction," lose/lose in terms of factional politics.

Or alternative it could point to the Jeune Ecole faction not having as many skilled combat officers on it's side and being more comprised of technical and desk types.

Avernus · Jun 24, 2020

slybrarian said:
I think this is a pretty fair analysis, even if I'm not sure how much Weber intended. I do think it's interesting that later on, Honor and Hemphill are both able to put aside their previous personal animosity and work together to develop other weapon systems, some of which did end up working out in practice, the Q-ships as both proto-podnaughts and proto-carriers being the ones that broke the entire combat paradigm for better and for worse. It's a nice development of them both, assuming it's not a result of Hemphil getting in line of sight and having a sudden mood change.

From what I recall the animosity actually wasn't very personal. Honor was pissed at the Jeune Ecole in general more than Hemphill personally, and Hemphill actually felt guilty since it wasn't her idea in the first place to punish Honor by sticking her in Basilisk with a screwed up ship; that was Janacek's idea. She does apologize to Honor about it in a later book; she modified Fearless as a test, it wasn't her idea to stick a re-design that didn't work out into a situation where it had to fight anyway.

ScottishMongol · Jun 25, 2020

Honor Harrington, enlightened Centrist.

Tylonius · Jun 25, 2020

ScottishMongol said:
Honor Harrington, enlightened Centrist.

Ah, so that's why the universe revolves around her.

The Victorian · Jun 29, 2020

So in the last chapter, Honor was rather displeased at the armament of her vessel, the HMS Fearless. Apparently, its only effective means of attack is to get in close, use its grav lance to weaken an enemy vessel's sidewalls, and then finish them off with energy torpedoes. But all that implies that the ship can actually get into grav lance range without being blown to pieces first, which made me wonder...what about stealth? A stealth ship would be ideal for this kind of attack, but as this chapter shows, the author has already thought of that:

t was relatively simple to hide even a capital ship (at longer ranges, anyway) by simply shutting down her impellers and dropping off the enemy's passive scanners, but the impeller drive wasn't magic. Even at the five hundred-plus gravities a destroyer or light cruiser could manage, it took time to generate respectable vector changes, so hiding by cutting power was of strictly limited utility. After all, it did no good to hide if the enemy went charging away from you at fifty or sixty percent of light-speed, and you couldn't hide if you accelerated in pursuit.

So a captain can tried to hide her ship from the enemy, but it would be effectively useless, since it'd never be able to catch up to them or make any kind of offensive manoeuvre in time.

In the mean time, we've got some wargames going on, with Honor on the Defenders side. We also get a description of how things look from inside a ship whose impeller drive is active, specifically that it generates a huge amount of gravitational lensing:

Admiral of the Green Sebastian D'Orville frowned over his own plot aboard the superdreadnought HMS King Roger, then glanced at the visual display. Visuals were useless for coordinating battles at deep-space ranges, but they were certainly spectacular. D'Orville's ships were charging ahead at almost a hundred and seventy thousand kilometers per second—just under .57 c—and the starfield in the forward screens was noticeably blue-shifted. But King Roger raced along between the inclined "roof" and "floor" of her impeller wedge, and the effect of a meter-deep band in which local gravity went from zero to over ninety-seven thousand MPS2grabbed photons like a lake of glue and bent the strongest energy weapon like flimsy wire. Stars seen through a stress band like that red-shifted radically and displaced their images by a considerable margin in direct vision displays, though knowing exactly how powerful the gravity field was made it fairly simple for the computers to compensate and put them back where they belonged.

This is told from the perspective of the Aggressors, whose goal is to "capture" Manticore. But D'Orville isn't going to pass up the chance to wipe out a good portion of the enemy fleet, especially when they've apparently forgotten to bring their dreadnoughts along. We get a description of their formation: a "wall of battle" which I'm going to assume is like the traditional Age of Sail line of battle with a third dimension, because, you know, space. So kudos to the author for remembering that space has three dimensions, though it remains to be seen if this will actually factor into the tactics and strategems shown in the novel.

The battle begins with a barrage of missiles, and for some reason I'm reminded of the old naval strategy game Jane's Fleet Command. If you were facing a fleet of American vessels, you'd have to contend with their extremely-potent Aegis defence system. Since I was a bit rubbish at the game, my main strategy in this case simply to LAUNCH ALL THE MISSILES and hope one of them got through.

Honor thinks to herself that this is going to make the Liberals and Progressives break out in hives, because each missile costs about "a million Manticoran dollars." Well, I guess I should give props to the author for NOT using "credits" as the currency of the future (something that personally bugs me), but is the term "dollar" really going to stick around for the next two thousand years?

Oh, and this is evidently a live fire exercise, because that's apparently the only way to see if the hardware really works. You'd think that, I don't know...maybe they could test these weapons on manoeuvring drones or something, but what do I know? I'm just a reader with an opinion.

Unfortunately, coordinating this battle might involve math (the horror!) and Honor admits to herself that math isn't her strong suit:

But she had other things to worry about as Admiral D'Orville charged towards her, and worry she did, for Honor wasn't precisely the RMN's best mathematician. Despite aptitude tests which regularly said she ought to be an outstanding number-cruncher, her Academy performance scores had steadfastly refused to live up to that potential. In point of fact, she'd nearly flunked out of multi-dimensional math in her third form, and while she'd graduated in the top ten percent overall, she'd also held the embarrassing distinction of standing two-hundred-thirty-seventh (out of a class of two hundred and forty-one) in Mathematics.

Well, I can definitely empathise with you there, captain. I still remember first year calculus and getting absolutely no sleep the night before the final exam. FUCKING NUMBERS WHAT DO THEY MEAN!!!???

All right, all right, this is a Let's Read, not a therapy session. I just need to remind myself that dy/dx isn't real and can't hurt me.

Actually, it turns out that it's not that she's bad at math (she can "solve multi-unit three-dimensional vector intercepts in her head"), but for some reason this never manifested itself in her test scores. Which is completely understandable, because I'm of the opinion that test scores often reflect nothing but your skill at taking tests.

We then cut back to D'Orville, and I must point out that this ebook are a bit wonky in that perspective shifts aren't demarcated with line breaks, but merely a paragraph break. It's a bit jarring.

It turns out the Defenders aren't pouring out as much fire as they could be, which, given their inferiority in numbers, is a more than a bit strange. One of D'Orville's subordinates suggests that they might be walking (flying?) into a trap. Then all of a sudden shit gets real:

"Sir! We've got a new bogey, bearing—"

Captain Lewis's frantic warning was far too late, and the range was far too short to do anything about it. Admiral D'Orville had barely begun to turn towards him when a crimson light glared on King Roger's main status board, and damage alarms screamed as the vastly understrength grav lance smashed into the superdreadnought's port sidewall. It was far too weak to inflict actual generator damage, but the computers noted it and obediently flashed their failure warning—just as an incredible salvo of equally understrength energy torpedoes exploded against the theoretically nonexistent sidewall.

It turns out that the Fearless has just made a devastating sneak attack on the superdreadnought King Roger, utterly crippling it. Of course, since this a fleet exercise, the computer shuts just down the ship's systems to simulate being crippled. The book is a bit vague on just how she managed to get so close undetected (either that, or I simply suck at reading comprehension) but it seems to me that she powered down her impeller drive and then "coasted" along the same vector as the rest of the fleet, hence why they were not able to detect her until she was at close range.

The Defender wall of battle was changing its vector. It went from partial to maximum deceleration, and even as it did the entire formation shifted. Its new course cut sharply in towards the Aggressor task force's, and the range raced downward as Sonja's formation slowed. The separation was still too great for her to achieve the classic ideal and cross his "T," firing her full broadsides straight into his teeth while only his leading units' bow weapons could reply, but the obviously pre-planned maneuver, coupled with the command confusion created by King Roger's "destruction," was enough to let her leading units curl in around his own.

I knew it! I knew were going to be seeing "crossing the T" somewhere in this book!

So has our heroine found a way to make this particular weapon loadout effective? Well, as we'll see in the next chapter, the answer is "no."

Shanejayell · Jun 29, 2020

Yup.

Basicly, it ONLY works if it's a surprise. Once they know her ship is out there, they just kill ALLLLLLL the small ones.

EternalStruggle · Jun 29, 2020

The Victorian said:
Well, kudos to the author for defying my expecations and NOT making the conservatives out to be the most bloodthirsty faction. By Honor's own admission, she doesn't "study, understand, or like" politics, and I've always believed that people who say they don't care about politics are implicitly in favour of the status quo, which is an inherently conservative position.

Well the problem with that is that in Manticoran politics the Centrist Party is for all intents and purposes a conservative party. What's the Conservative Party in Manticore, you might then ask? The aristocrats and reactionaries.

Space Oddity · Jun 30, 2020

EternalStruggle said:
Well the problem with that is that in Manticoran politics the Centrist Party is for all intents and purposes a conservative party. What's the Conservative Party in Manticore, you might then ask? The aristocrats and reactionaries.

This is all very early 90s America, when the Paleocons were coming out of their crypts to explain what America really needed to do now was go back to the grand old days of isolationism, and also, stop helping the poors. Something that let the Neocons paint themselves as the more reasonable alternative.

The Victorian · Jul 1, 2020

So in the last chapter, our heroine had seemingly discovered a winning stratagem, which allowed her to "destroy" the enemy flagship during fleet exercise. However, her triumph is short-lived, because it turns out that this tactic only works once. The moment the enemy figures out what's going on, they immediately target her ship and blow it to pieces.

Before that, however, we get her feelings on coffee:

She never had understood how something that smelled as nice as coffee could taste so foul, and she wondered yet again if perhaps Manticoran coffee trees hadn't mutated somehow in their new environment. Such things happened, but she doubted that was the answer in this case, given the appalling relish with which most RMN officers imbibed the loathsome stuff.

Coffee tastes "foul," you say? Sorry, Captain Harrington, but we cannot be friends.

It turns out that the Fearless had been destroyed in thirteen out of the fourteen engagements (although twice she managed to take someone out with her). This has had an understandably deleterious effect on crew morale, and worse, Admiral Hemphill and Lady ~~Red~~ Sonja look like they're going to put her on their personal shitlists for revealing how ineffective their weapon is. More worryingly, the crew has begun to lose respect for her:

Being "killed" that many times was sufficiently depressing for anyone, but the Aggressor crews had made it far worse with their undisguised gloating in the intervals between exercises. Her crew's loss of confidence would have been bad enough under any circumstances; for a ship with a new captain, it might well prove catastrophic. Perhaps, they thought, Captain Harrington hadn't been so brilliant after all that first day. What if it had been pure luck, not skill? What if they found themselves in a real combat situation and she dropped them in the toilet?

This is, admittedly, a tough situation for a commanding officer to be in. As captain, she has full responsibility for her ship and crew, which means she can't just stand up in front of everyone and declare, "It's not my fault! It's the fault of our armament!" without looking like she's making excuses and shirking that responsibility.

She decides to hold a meeting with the officer staff, and thus we are introduced to:

Lieutenant Commander McKeon, executive officer
Lieutenant Webster, communications officer
Lieutenant Commander Santos, chief engineer
Lieutenant Stromboli, astrogator,
Lieutenant Venizelos
Nikos Papadapolous, captain of the Royal Manticoran Marines detachment (AKA the SPESS MEHREENS!)
Surgeon Commander Lois Suchon
Lieutenant Ariella Blanding, supply officer
Lieutenant Mercedes Brigham, sailing officer (this position is evidently being phased out)

I must say, that's a lot of lieutenants!

Of all these, Honor singles out Lois Suchon for dislike:

Surgeon Commander Lois Suchon faced Papadapolous across the table, and Honor tried not to feel a special dislike for Fearless's doctor. It was hard. Both of her own parents were physicians, and her father had reached Suchon's own rank before retiring, which meant Honor had a pretty fair notion of just how much help a good doctor could be. Suchon, on the other hand, was even more detached than Papadapolous. Doctors were specialists, not line officers in the chain of command, and the thin-faced, petulant Suchon seemed totally disinterested in anything beyond her sickbay and dispensary. Worse, she seemed to regard her responsibility for the crew's health as a sort of nagging inconvenience, and Honor found it very difficult to forgive any physician for that.

The use of the term "line officer" is interesting, because the novel is clearly going for a "Royal Navy in SPACE!" motif, yet the term "line officer" is, as far as I know, a United States Navy term.

We get a half-dozen or so paragraphs detailing our heroine's initial impressions of her officer staff, and I can't help but feel that this could have been paced a bit better. Dumping a huge amount of exposition about the characters' individual quirks might too much for the reader to absorb all at once, and this sort of thing could have been done a bit more organically.

Honor's biggest problem, however, is with her XO, McKeon. He remains distant, with no trace of a rapport between them, which is problematic as the XO is supposed to serve as a bridge between the captain and the rest of the officer staff. He obviously resents her for some reason, and when we switch back to his perspective we get a better of why that is:

He watched Harrington's profile, and dull, churning resentment burned at the back of his throat like acid. The captain looked as calm and collected as she always did, spoke and listened as courteously as ever, and that only made him resent her more. He was a tactical officer himself by training. He knew precisely how impossible Harrington's task had been, yet he couldn't rid himself of a nagging suspicion that he could have done better at it than she. He certainly couldn't have done any worse, he thought spitefully, and felt himself flush guiltily.

Damn it, what was wrong with him? He was supposed to be a professional naval officer, not some sort of jealous schoolboy! It was his job to support his captain, to make her ideas work, not to feel a corrosive satisfaction when they didn't, and his inability to overcome his personal feelings shamed him. Which, of course, only made them worse.

Well, at least he has enough self-awareness to realise that his feelings are petty and irrational. Still, we are verging close to the typical Mary Sue characteristic where the only reason characters dislike the Mary Sue is for thoroughly trivial reasons like jealously.

He realises that, if he doesn't perform his duty as an XO, Captain Harrington will come to believe she cannot rely on him, and he won't get a chance to prove that she can. But he can't bring himself to confess his failures to her, because he always wanted to command the Fearless (despite knowing deep down that he wasn't going to get what he wanted), and admitting failure would be tantamount to admitting that she deserved the command more than he did.

As I said, it's a petty, but rather understandable reason. It must suck to pine after a position of authority, only to have someone come along and take it from you, and then proceed to fail spectacularly again and again in a fleet exercise (even though it wasn't really her fault). It remains to be seen whether McKeon gets over his resentment or whether or it's going to fester.

Cut back to our heroine talking with Webster, the comms officer. He's the third cousin of the "Duke of New Texas" a title that makes me laugh for no particular reason. Unlike the other officers, he's far more affable, and doesn't appear terrified that she's going to rip him a new one for the Fearless' poor showing during the wargames. Apparently he has something called the "Webster chin" which I'm going to assume is something like the Habsburg Jaw.

Unfortunately, this occasion is anything but cheery. It turns out that Captain Harrington is being reassigned to the titular Basilisk Station.

Oh no!

Basilisk Station is so far out of the way that it might as well be exile..."flying a cargo plane full of rubber dog shit out of Hong Kong!" to quote Top Gun. Obviously Admiral Hemphill didn't appreciate being made to look a fool, so she's punishing Honor being sending her off to god-knows-where.

It wasn't as if being sent to Basilisk should be a disgrace. The system was of great and steadily growing economic value to the Kingdom, not to mention its strategic military importance. It was also Manticore's sole extra-system territorial possession, and that alone should have made it a prestigious assignment.

We learn that the Manticore system has three Earth-like planets, and that the system itself a "G0/G2 distant binary." David Weber, you fool! The Morgan-Keenan system requires you need to specify both a star's spectral class AND luminosity class! (Unless, of course, this system is no longer in use 2000 years from now, in which case carry on).

With three Earth-like planets (which seems extraordinarily unlikely, but this isn't hard sci-fi so I'll let it slide) providing plenty of real estate, the Kingdom of Manticore hasn't felt much need to expand, and probably wouldn't have if it weren't for "the converging pressures of the Manticore Wormhole Junction and the Havenite threat."

In no small part, the Junction explained Manticore's wealth. The best effective speed in hyper of most merchantmen was little more than twelve hundred times light-speed. At that apparent velocity, the voyage from Manticore to Old Earth would require over five months; the Beowulf terminus of the Junction, on the other hand, delivered a ship to Sigma Draconis, little more than forty light-years from Sol, in no measurable elapsed time at all.

The commercial advantages were obvious, and the Junction's far-flung termini had become magnets for trade, all of which must pass through the central junction point (and Manticoran space) to take advantage of them. Manticore's tolls were among the lowest in the galaxy, but simple logistics meant they generated enormous total revenues, and the Kingdom served as a central warehousing and commercial node for hundreds of other worlds.

So a station next to a strategically and economically-important wormhole. Definitely getting shades of Deep Space Nine here, though the similarity is probably coincidental. The sole habitable planet in Basilisk Station's system is home to an alien species, which means that, A: The Liberals are horrified at the notion of conquering an indigenous species, the Progressives feared that the annexation would be perceived as a "threat" by the Havenites, and the Conservatives (who really ought to be called "isolationists") just want to avoid getting in mixed up in anyone else's affairs. Naturally this resulted in some bitter political squabbling, with the Crown Loyalists and Centrists only passing the motion to annex the system by the slimmest of margins in the House of Lords (another obvious borrowing from the British political system). And even then, the annexation was subject to all manner of restrictions, such as forbidding the presence of permanent fortifications.

Now, you'd think that the limits on the militarisation of the system would mean that only the best and brightest would get stationed there, but this is not the case:

Under the circumstances, one might have expected the restriction on the number of ships which could be stationed there to call for sending only the very best, particularly since the volume of trade through the newly discovered terminus had grown by leaps and bounds. In fact, and especially since Sir Edward Janacek had become First Lord of the Admiralty, the opposite was the case.

Janacek wasn't the first, unfortunately, to denigrate Basilisk's importance, but his predecessors at least seemed to have based their feelings on something besides personal politics. The pre-Janacek theory, as far as Honor was able to determine, had been that since they were barred from putting in forces which might stand a chance of holding the system, there was no point making the effort. Thus, even many of those who supported the annexation saw the picket as little more than a trip-wire, advanced scouts whose destruction would be the signal for a response by the Home Fleet direct from Manticore. In short, some of them had argued, if any serious attack was ever mounted, there was no point sacrificing any more ships than necessary simply for the honor of the flag.

The chapter closes with the statement that Basilisk Station is more or less the fleet's dumping ground for incompetents and failures.

AKuz · Jul 1, 2020

Suffice it to say, I have... complicated and mostly negative feelings towards how the system's indigenous peoples are being treated.

Tylonius · Jul 1, 2020

AKuz said:
Suffice it to say, I have... complicated and mostly negative feelings towards how the system's indigenous peoples are being treated.

But to be fair, it's probably the only part of the book that is actually accurate to the time period it's aping.

AKuz · Jul 1, 2020

Tylonius said:
But to be fair, it's probably the only part of the book that is actually accurate to the time period it's aping.

Oh yes, but you can probably imagine my own criticisms of colonialism at that time!

Let's Read: David Weber's Honor Harrington

Elven Supremacist

Been Better

The self is a prison

The self is a prison

Recurring Bouts of Misanthropy

Abomination

I'M A SQUIIIID

Creature of Fable

Creature of Fable

Abomination

Elven Supremacist

Yuri Fan without a Pause

Elven Supremacist

Been Better

Been Better