Let's Read: David Weber's Honor Harrington

Simon_Jester · Oct 28, 2020

dptullos said:
Yes, but the natural result of Raj Whitehall behaving somewhat realistically is that his soldiers commit horrific atrocities more or less constantly. YMMV, but he's a seriously delusional villain rather than an actual hero, a lunatic who believes that he can "unite" Bellevue by filling enough mass graves.

What actually happens is that the Civil Government falls back into civil war five minutes after Raj Whitehall dies, because you can't miraculously fix a Byzantine culture of constant treachery in one generation.

I mean, I suppose that depends on whether Central, the computer that's feeding him advice is real or a figment of his own imagination? If the computer's real, it presumably has a plan, and presumably also has the ability to keep picking new proxies after Whitehall dies. Plus, Whitehall is a young man; he's got time to get the ball rolling in the right direction.

I suppose there's a valid alternate interpretation of the storyline in which Raj Whitehall just has delusions of being in touch with one of God's angels (a pre-Fall computer!), and his plans and strategies are just the result of him being good at planning and strategy, and it is really all going to fall apart because key elements of his long-term plan for uniting and restoring Bellevue are figments of his own imagination.

...

But this just underlines my core point, which is how utterly fucked any attempt to write historical or alternate-historical fiction is under the constraints we seem to be collectively placing it under:

1) A leadership figure who isn't washed clean of the sins of what was merely average bad behavior by past standards gets condemned as a villain protagonist, but
2) A leadership figure who is washed clean of those sins and behaves in a way that wouldn't be seen as especially problematic in the modern day gets condemned as unrealistic.

This puts contradictory pressures on authors, which they cannot hope to satisfy. They can't write protagonists with modern values in the past, because those values would be anachronistic. They can't write protagonists with past values in the past, because they'll be accused of all the things we accuse authors of when they portray Characters Doing Bad Things without immediately coding them as unutterably foul villains.

Until fairly recently, defense was better than offense. A fully prepared wall of battle could advance through missile fire without taking more than a few hits, and superdreadnoughts are tough. Tactically, this created extremely indecisive fleet battles, where the outnumbered side would bail on the engagement because they could do basic math.

In theory, you could just build an all-missile fleet and run away before the enemy gets to energy range, but there's one problem with this strategy; the enemy knows where you live. Haven's preferred method of conquest is to launch an enormous fleet attack on a planet, forcing their fleet to either stay and fight or abandon their worlds to Havenite occupation. Before the era of improved missiles and missile pods, an all-missile force would be utterly powerless to do more than inflict minor casualties on a Havenite fleet approaching Manticore.

No one except Manticore is willing to move away from the traditional gun-heavy shipbuilding model, and Manticore is only doing it because they are desperate.

If you look at the tech bible stuff where they list Havenite designs... the Havenite ships actually seem to be more biased in favor of missile and antimissile systems than the Manticoran ones, at the start of the series.

This doesn't actually surprise me; if true, it reflects Havenite combat experience, which exists on a scale the Manticorans cannot duplicate. Manticore's combat experience within living memory comes from pirate hunts and wargaming; Haven has fought dozens of wars of conquest, presumably including things like "their battleships actually fire shots in anger." It wouldn't surprise me that their recent designs (which reflect redesign and optimization to fight the kind of battles they've been fighting for years) are shifting to emphasize missile combat.

...

Of course, in fairness to YOUR take, Haven normally expects to be ganging up on enemies it greatly outnumbers! This makes missile combat even more advantageous, and beam combat even more disadvantageous. A large fleet can hope to win a missile engagement and never take more than superficial damage, because it can drown the enemy's missile defenses in volume of fire, while shooting down nearly all the enemy's missiles. A similarly unequal beam combat between fleets still results in at least some ships on the more numerous side getting badly hurt, because of how powerful the individual beams are relative to the ships' ability to resist fire.

So Haven may theoretically be overemphasizing missiles in its designs because if lopsided combat experience, usually fought against less numerous enemies that lack a solid core of capital ships... But that's still not the same as 'no one is foolish enough to place their trust in missiles.'

Of course, Haven could just win the war by gathering most of their ships into a giant "Conquest Fleet" and proceeding through hyper to attack Manticore directly. Mahan's strategy of concentrating your ships into one giant fleet was often impractical in our world, where the enemy could simply refuse to give battle, but it is considerably more reasonable in a setting where Haven's giant doom fleet could simply smash through to Manticore and end the war in one battle. They don't do this to Manticore, even though it worked on everyone else, because...reasons.

I think the big reason is because they didn't have jumping-off bases close enough to Manticore to make it a reasonable safe proposition. You're essentially talking about an earlier version of what the Havenites pulled in Operation Beatrice, and the problems with that were:

1) It was very much a death-or-glory gamble based on the assumption that Manticore was about to punch Haven out of the war one system at a time with their new superweapon anyway.

2) It was based on an utterly overwhelming Havenite numerical advantage, even greater than Haven enjoyed at the start of the previous war. That is, Manticore basically only had enough capital ships left for three fleets: Home Fleet, the Trevor's Star defense force, and Honor's fleet that could go out raiding and engaging in offensive operations. Haven had hundreds and hundreds more ships than them, enough that it could present reasonably credible defense forces in its core systems and still be able to attack in overwhelming numbers.

...

Also, a massed charge into the enemy's strongest defenses at the very start of a war is always a gamble because you cannot know if they have secret weapons or more ships than you thought. If Manticore has a secret weapon or two (which they in fact do) then the worst possible way to find that out is when your entire fleet slams straight into their fixed defenses in a home system that is lavishly equipped with that secret weapon. Conversely, launching probing attacks on the periphery, forcing the enemy to spread out their forces and deploy their best weapons to defend secondary targets means you get a better sense for what the enemy can and cannot do, and what surprises they have in store.

Note that the worst case scenarios the Havenites ran into during their opening attacks of the war were at precisely the places where unexpected RMN reinforcements showed up and their forces flew into a surprise trap made worse by Manticore having missile pods and rudimentary FTL comms.

Belisarius being somewhat anachronistic is a necessary part of the reader actually viewing him as a protagonist.

Belisarius winning every single battle against the Evil But Incredibly Stupid A.I. is Eric Flint being a bad author who can't stand for his heroes to lose to the Evil Aristos.

Honestly yes, but then part of Flint's core message with the whole series is "equality, diversity, and flexibility are objectively superior to supremacism, purity, and rigid order."

Having the racial-supremacist, racial-purist, rigidly-ordered Malwa beating Belisarius, the designated champion of... not that... Well, let's just say that even insofar as it's realistic, it muddles the message. We have enough trouble with enough works of fiction where misaimed racist fanboys have an excuse to identify with totalitarian fuckwits.

The Belisarius series is (for a series released during the Bush administration) a commendably aggressive deconstruction of this, in my opinion; the true bad guys are fash-coated fashes with fash filling and they're just shit all around and that's the point.

dptullos said:
Magic A.I. can accomplish a lot, but Center's achievements have been relatively simple and straightforward tasks, like defeating armies and overthrowing governments. The kind of thing that happens all the time, even without an A.I. around to tilt the scales.

Actually changing society is infinitely more difficult than just taking one Big Man and replacing him with a different Big Man. One of the suggestions at the end of the last Whitehall book was the abolition of slavery, which is just a hard no. If the Big Man suggested it, people would actually think he was joking. Slavery is natural and proper and ordained by the Spirit of the Stars, and it's downright silly to even suggest getting rid of it.

Upon reading the novels, the take is

"Center has a plan, but the first step of the plan is to put control of the Civil Government (the Byzantine Empire expy) firmly in the hands of Center's proxies. Once Center has control of a major nation-state, or at least control of the people who run the place, then Center can start reshaping government policy, introducing more advanced technologies that will disrupt the existing socioeconomic order and power structure."

Because just to be clear, 'Center' is literally a big machine in the catacombs under the city. You can potentially drag someone down to Center and have them effectively brainwash that person into compliance with Center's objectives, at least as far as I can tell. Whitehall willingly cooperates with Center because he's totally on board with the whole "unite Bellevue, restore star travel" objective, but I'm pretty sure that there's nothing stopping Center from selectively mind-controlling people, given the abilities it displays.

So it's quite possible that over the long haul, with a Center-manipulated proxy on the throne (Center has one in the can waiting for Whitehall's coup to succeed) and Whitehall willingly supporting Center's agenda as the focus of the military's devotion and loyalty... Center can do a lot to reshape Bellevue to its wishes.

I'm not saying it would work, but I can imagine it working.

Now, back to the actual discussion! I actually forgot about the battleships, which makes it much, much worse. Weber wanted Manticore to win against an enemy a hundred times their size, but it turns out that people don't actually have a chance of winning against an enemy a hundred times their size.

This isn't Space America against Space Soviet Union, or Space Britain against Space France. This is Space Denmark against Space Soviet Union.

The actual listed size disparity as measured in fleet strengths is nowhere near 100:1, by the way. Like, it's just... not. I don't remember the ship count, but it's something more like 1.5:1 or 2:1 as of The Short Victorious War.

That doesn't invalidate your core points, but we shouldn't overstate the strength of the conclusion.

Mahan was actually wrong in our universe, since the enemy can just refuse to give you your Gloriously Decisive Battle. I mean, why would the smaller fleet come out to fight a decisive engagement against a stronger enemy? Japan kept trying to beat us with Mahan, but we kept holding back and waiting for reinforcements.

In the Honorverse, though, you can't exactly hide when the enemy is approaching your home system. All Honorverse tactics should revolve around a decisive attack upon the enemy's key point.

To be fair, what Haven was actually trying to accomplish was "draw Manticore into a series of battles at secondary locations that would deplete their forces, weakening them for the kill-shot to the home system."

There IS a good reason to at least TRY to soften the enemy up before firing that kill-shot, if the enemy gives you the opportunity. Because with something approximating Lanchester-Law naval combat rules in place, it is very much to your advantage to reduce the total number of enemy units you fight in the decisive battle. If you outnumber the enemy 1.5:1 at the decisive battle, you win... but you will lose a significant fraction of your starting forces during the battle. If you outnumber them 3:1, having defeated half their fleet in detail in the opening phase of the war, you still win... and lose fewer forces, while being less vulnerable to the enemy pulling a miracle weapon out of their hat at the last moment.

Drawing the enemy out at secondary locations is also helpful because you're less likely to have to contend with fixed or quasi-fixed STL defenses (giant sublight monitors like the Junction 'forts,' swarms of LACs, fixed fortification missile pods and ground-based launchers on planetary/lunar/asteroid bases).

Now, in theory you can just ignore all this and punch straight through- it's just more of a gamble.

Night · Oct 28, 2020

dptullos said:
This doesn't usually work, though, since naval ships are quite free to remain within a harbor, protected by artillery, minefields, and/or land-based air power. They're also free to run away if they see they're seriously outnumbered.

There aren't a lot of locations that the enemy has to defend with their entire fleet, and those locations are usually not places you want to attack. Mahan's theory was attempted by the Japanese, who sought a "Kantai Kessen", or Decisive Battle with the Americans. America dealt with this by refusing to fight on their terms.

This is all very wrong, because the Japanese misunderstood Mahan, and so are you. He proposed that proper objective of the fleet was to be able to destroy the enemy fleet, not that one should seek decisive battle in which to do this to the exclusion of all else. Mahan was a historian, and he knew that the truth is naval battles are rarely if ever decisive. In all of history there have arguably been only two, after all; Actium and Tsushima. (Japan's obsession with the single decisive battle had a lot more to do with Tsushima than it did with Mahan.) The destruction of the enemy fleet is valuable not in itself, but because it secures the sea for your use and denies it to them. Locking them in port because they will destroyed if they sortie does the same. This is precisely why the Standards are considered Mahanian expressions; fight them, and lose, or hide from them, and lose.

eyl · Oct 28, 2020

Simon_Jester said:
What I'm getting at is that even within the series proper, shipboard beam armament doesn't seem to actually DO very much except under specialized circumstances, whereas everyone is constantly fighting missile duels all the damn time. To the point where I think that the naval architects on both sides should have been seriously questioning the relative balance of importance and space and tonnage devoted to beam versus missile versus anti-missile armament, even BEFORE the revolution in military affairs brought on by the MDM.

I'm not sure the climactic battles of the early series bear this out:

Book 1: The battle is resolved by energy weapons.
Book 2: While Thunder of God is destroyed by a missile salvo, it was a sucker punch and probably wouldn't have worked (at least not at that range) if it had a capable crew instead of Masadans who weren't very familiar with it (and I think it was undercrewed as well).
Book 3: I don't remember the final battle that well, but IIRC the long-range exchanges were inconclusive until reinforcements showed up, at which point IINM the Havenites surrendered. Incidentally, this book also gives an example of the power of energy weapons - after the long missile exchanges we've seen elsewhere, four Havenite battlecruisers accidently enter a dreadnaught's energy range and are immediately destroyed.
Book 4: No naval combat
Book 5: The actual battle is resolved by energy weapons; Theisman then elects to retreat as he'll need to enter Honor's energy range to defeat her, and he doesn't want to take the losses.
Book 6: I don't really remember how the last battle played out but this book marks the point at which missiles started becoming more dominant with the introduction of the concept which would lead to the podnaught.[/spoilers]

dptullos · Oct 28, 2020

Avernus said:
"Deep strikes" came later, and in fact it's commented in-universe that their pre-war attempts at building a defense in depth were based on obsolete thinking. The "everyone fights the last war" effect.

Fair. It is unreasonable to expect perfect planning, and people do tend to fight the last war.

It seemed odd that Haven wouldn't go for a single decisive strike when that was their strategy against everyone else. However, they may still be using the old rulebook for multisystem wars.

Ithillid said:
Points out that Mahan lived before air power.

This is a good point. It is unfair to judge Mahan's theory by the standards of a later time, because he wasn't writing for a later time.

Entropy Judge said:
If they stay in the harbor, you choke their trade, choke their industry, bombard their coast - either you ruin the nation, or the fleet comes out to fight.

This...is a very British way of seeing the world. It's worth noting that Britain has controlled the seas in every European war, and that British control of the seas has did not "ruin" the nations that they fought. Revolutionary France beat Britain, Prussia, Austria, and Spain at the same time, despite British control of the seas, Napoleon France conquered all the way to Poland, and Germany in both World Wars managed to be quite successful without ruling the sea.

A nation is more than the people who live within a mile of the shore.

Simon_Jester said:
So Haven may theoretically be overemphasizing missiles in its designs because if lopsided combat experience, usually fought against less numerous enemies that lack a solid core of capital ships... But that's still not the same as 'no one is foolish enough to place their trust in missiles.'

This is a good point.

Simon_Jester said:
Also, a massed charge into the enemy's strongest defenses at the very start of a war is always a gamble because you cannot know if they have secret weapons or more ships than you thought. If Manticore has a secret weapon or two (which they in fact do) then the worst possible way to find that out is when your entire fleet slams straight into their fixed defenses in a home system that is lavishly equipped with that secret weapon. Conversely, launching probing attacks on the periphery, forcing the enemy to spread out their forces and deploy their best weapons to defend secondary targets means you get a better sense for what the enemy can and cannot do, and what surprises they have in store.

You're right here. The PRH is making flawed decisions with limited information, like everyone else, and they don't want to start with a death-or-glory gamble when they think they can win some smaller battles and gradually work their way up to Manticore. They're wrong, but they aren't unrealistically wrong, and I'm being overly critical.

I'll address the Belisarius/Whitehall/historical fiction issues in another post, to keep this one from getting too large.

Night said:
This is all very wrong, because the Japanese misunderstood Mahan, and so are you. He proposed that proper objective of the fleet was to be able to destroy the enemy fleet, not that one should seek decisive battle in which to do this to the exclusion of all else. Mahan was a historian, and he knew that the truth is naval battles are rarely if ever decisive. In all of history there have arguably been only two, after all; Actium and Tsushima. (Japan's obsession with the single decisive battle had a lot more to do with Tsushima than it did with Mahan.) The destruction of the enemy fleet is valuable not in itself, but because it secures the sea for your use and denies it to them. Locking them in port because they will destroyed if they sortie does the same. This is precisely why the Standards are considered Mahanian expressions; fight them, and lose, or hide from them, and lose.

Okay, I was wrong about Mahan because I understood him through the Japanese, who were also wrong about Mahan.

Dahak · Oct 28, 2020

Simon_Jester said:
I mean, I suppose that depends on whether Central, the computer that's feeding him advice is real or a figment of his own imagination? If the computer's real, it presumably has a plan, and presumably also has the ability to keep picking new proxies after Whitehall dies. Plus, Whitehall is a young man; he's got time to get the ball rolling in the right direction.

Central spent the entire series training Thom Poplanich to be Governor. Who has the advantage of having been a relative of the governor who got overthrown by not Justinian.

Raj was never intended to be and never wanted to be.

Melchiorgk · Oct 28, 2020

dptullos said:
Fair. It is unreasonable to expect perfect planning, and people do tend to fight the last war.

It seemed odd that Haven wouldn't go for a single decisive strike when that was their strategy against everyone else. However, they may still be using the old rulebook for multisystem wars.

I can think of a few reasons inside the setting that makes Haven's plans make a bit more sense. It is basically a combination of factors.

Manticore is simply "farther" than most of their normal targets. Haven mostly lacks a nearby staging point, which means long supply lines, coordination, and timing issues.
There is a short way - through a Junction Wormhole. However, putting enough metal through the wormhole to decisively win will shut it down for days or even longer. Haven gets one shot, and if anything goes wrong, they lose everything they sent.
1. This also limits the immediate usefulness of the Junction since one of the ends have been disabled.
2. Having access to a second Junction Wormhole helps defray the issue, which is the point of the first book.
If memory serves, simply securing the orbitals does not secure you the planet. Orbital bombardment is against the rules per the Solarian League. Not clearing out all of the defending ships can bring serious risk to your ground troops.
1. Admittedly, most planets do consider losing the orbitals to basically losing the ground war, and fold at that point to avoid civilian deaths and infrastructure damages.
2. Manticore has THREE planets you have to seize, plus star yards.
Taking the Manticore and its Junction is a VERY public affair. There is always a ton of trade going through, from multiple polities. Manticore is basically the highest profile target Haven can hit in the foreseeable future.
1. Everyone will know that Haven performed the attack and the results, quite possibly before Haven knows.
2. There are a ton of third-parties in the area that can confuse targetting. Any disruption or destruction of them will cause criticism from their parent systems. This is bad because the Solarian League is one of those, and they can launch attacks at most of the Haven systems simultaneously.
3. Any screw-ups will get recorded by SOMEONE in the system and reported back. So the less potential factors the better.
4. Later disruptions caused by returning Manticore units from other systems is going to, again, draw public criticisms.
If Haven is successful, they prove the Junction can be taken by sufficient force. If they do a poor job doing it, it might give the next group an excuse to try.
1. The Solarian League is noted to be peeved about Manticore's control of the Junction. If another polity, i.e. Haven, takes over the Junction poorly, causing a disruption of trade, the League may feel 'obligated' to step in and seize control themselves since none of the other polities seem to be able to keep things running properly.

dptullos · Oct 28, 2020

Simon_Jester said:
I mean, I suppose that depends on whether Central, the computer that's feeding him advice is real or a figment of his own imagination? If the computer's real, it presumably has a plan, and presumably also has the ability to keep picking new proxies after Whitehall dies. Plus, Whitehall is a young man; he's got time to get the ball rolling in the right direction.

I'm not assuming that "this was all a dream". I think that would be a pretty awful story.

What I am assuming is that...well, here's the thing. This is not a children's story. I'm perfectly okay with fairy tales ending with "And then they all lived happily ever after", because that's how fairy tales work. I'm not going to criticize them for that.

One thing that stories tend to forget is that non-protagonist characters have meaningful agency. Whitehall has lots of ideas of how he would like things to work, but so does everyone else. Their ideas are very likely to be in conflict with his ideas, and the fact that he has soldiers with guns just means that people will pretend to agree with him, not that he'll actually win hearts and minds.

Simon_Jester said:
But this just underlines my core point, which is how utterly fucked any attempt to write historical or alternate-historical fiction is under the constraints we seem to be collectively placing it under:

1) A leadership figure who isn't washed clean of the sins of what was merely average bad behavior by past standards gets condemned as a villain protagonist, but
2) A leadership figure who is washed clean of those sins and behaves in a way that wouldn't be seen as especially problematic in the modern day gets condemned as unrealistic.

This puts contradictory pressures on authors, which they cannot hope to satisfy. They can't write protagonists with modern values in the past, because those values would be anachronistic. They can't write protagonists with past values in the past, because they'll be accused of all the things we accuse authors of when they portray Characters Doing Bad Things without immediately coding them as unutterably foul villains.

Look at The Killer Angels. Chamberlain is an actual historical character, and he doesn't share all the beliefs and values of a twenty-first century person. But while he doesn't hate the men on the other side, he does hate everything they stand for, the slavery and aristocracy and the war they wage against the fundamental truth of America, the proclamation that all men are created equal. That's how you do it right.

I don't mind reading villain protagonists. I don't mind villainous characters. I do mind it when authors actually start to believe that their characters are more real and important than everyone else, not just from their own perspective, but as an objective truth of the universe.

A lot of alternate history falls into the trap of "if you just change one thing..." But reality doesn't work that way. People have thoughts and goals, and they work to achieve those thoughts and goals, and so individual agency, while very real, runs into the problem that everyone has individual agency.

America was going to beat Japan. Germany was going to lose World War Two. I can understand the narrative temptation to claim that things didn't have to work out this way, but things happen for a reason. It is usually safer to work in a fictional universe, where a mob of historians cannot descend to point out everything you did wrong.

You can write good historical fiction; just look at The Killer Angels. I don't know about good alternative history; too many writers seem to assume that societies are fragile, when in fact human interactions have a terrible inertia.

Simon_Jester said:
"Center has a plan, but the first step of the plan is to put control of the Civil Government (the Byzantine Empire expy) firmly in the hands of Center's proxies. Once Center has control of a major nation-state, or at least control of the people who run the place, then Center can start reshaping government policy, introducing more advanced technologies that will disrupt the existing socioeconomic order and power structure."

Because just to be clear, 'Center' is literally a big machine in the catacombs under the city. You can potentially drag someone down to Center and have them effectively brainwash that person into compliance with Center's objectives, at least as far as I can tell. Whitehall willingly cooperates with Center because he's totally on board with the whole "unite Bellevue, restore star travel" objective, but I'm pretty sure that there's nothing stopping Center from selectively mind-controlling people, given the abilities it displays.

So it's quite possible that over the long haul, with a Center-manipulated proxy on the throne (Center has one in the can waiting for Whitehall's coup to succeed) and Whitehall willingly supporting Center's agenda as the focus of the military's devotion and loyalty... Center can do a lot to reshape Bellevue to its wishes.

It would be interesting to read a story where a hyperintelligent A.I. tries to do this, only to discover that people have their own ideas. Just as they did during the Fall, when there was an entire Federation full of advanced technology and supercomputers like Center.

The mistake of too many science fiction authors is to assume that technology is the single decisive factor in shaping socioeconomic order and power structure. Technology does influence society, but there are a great many ways that socioeconomic systems can cope with those changes. For a strictly hierarchical and autocratic society like the Gubernio Civil, North Korea is a more likely outcome than Denmark.

Things go according to plan. Then Raj Whitehall dies. Then an ambitious general along the periphery launches a coup, just as Byzantine generals were fond of doing. He takes the palace, kills everyone with Center in their brain, and declares himself Governor. The old system is back, just as it was before, except now they have nicer weapons and methods of transportation.

One fundamental issue is that the military has no devotion or loyalty to anything except a successful warlord, which traps the Civil Government in a negative feedback loop. Successful generals take the Chair, so the Governor doesn't want to have successful generals. The best example of this is Raj Whitehall, a seemingly trustworthy and honorable man who took the Chair from Governor Barholm. No matter what Raj says, the actual lesson for every ambitious officer is "The Chair belongs to the winner." The lesson for a future Governor without Center in their head is that it's better to lose a province or two than to allow a general to be too successful.

"Unite Bellevue" and "restore star travel" are both military goals. If Center had found a philosopher instead of a straightforward soldier, they would ask tricky questions like "What does 'unite' mean?" or "Didn't you have star travel before you knocked yourselves back to the Stone Age?"

Dahak said:
Central spent the entire series training Thom Poplanich to be Governor. Who has the advantage of having been a relative of the governor who got overthrown by not Justinian.

Raj was never intended to be and never wanted to be.

My personal headcanon is that Raj's body isn't cold before people start murdering each other for the Governor's Chair.

consequences · Oct 28, 2020

If a planet doesn't surrender, you're explicitly allowed to start blowing up military and IIRC government infrastructure with targeted kinetic strikes. Where exactly the line is, or how comprehensive your control over the system needs to be isn't entirely clear.

And the real reason for no one acting anywhere close to optimally as always is Weber's wargame background rearing its ugly head yet again, compounded by an addiction to drama. You have to have a winnable but really hard fight, or a series of such leading to a climax or the ~~players~~ readers lose interest and wander away.

dptullos said:
My personal headcanon is that Raj's body isn't cold before people start murdering each other for the Governor's Chair.

I don't know, that sounds like a pretty awful story.

Sulemain · Oct 28, 2020

Terra Novan said:
Eh, while that is historically correct and I like the series, I'd still say that Belisarius was a bit too modern-ish in his morality.

Raj Whitehall (based on Belisarius) is closer to how RL Belisarius would have acted - willing to let his men indulge in a controlled manner if it was 'rightfully earned', even if he finds it personally distasteful, but if you ever harm the Civil Government civilian without permission, go beyond the tolerance, or abuse those who surrendered peacefully, he will come down with a force of the Spirit.

Fundamentally, once an army has stormed a city, it takes a hell of a lot of effort to actually stop it sacking said city.

dptullos · Oct 28, 2020

consequences said:
If a planet doesn't surrender, you're explicitly allowed to start blowing up military and IIRC government infrastructure with targeted kinetic strikes. Where exactly the line is, or how comprehensive your control over the system needs to be isn't entirely clear.

And the real reason for no one acting anywhere close to optimally as always is Weber's wargame background rearing its ugly head yet again, compounded by an addiction to drama. You have to have a winnable but really hard fight, or a series of such leading to a climax or the ~~players~~ readers lose interest and wander away.

I have no real objection to Rule of Drama. Weber doesn't go wrong by ignoring realism, which is often overrated; he goes wrong by giving his protagonists more and more special awesome stuff until they can't lose.

consequences said:
I don't know, that sounds like a pretty awful story.

I have a great deal of salt for that series, which seems to me to combine the worst elements of the Great Man theory with some truly awful ideas. Soldiers can build a throne of bayonets easily enough, but the idea that the best way to restore "civilization" is to "unite" everyone through the glorious power of mass murder...

Simon_Jester said:
Honestly yes, but then part of Flint's core message with the whole series is "equality, diversity, and flexibility are objectively superior to supremacism, purity, and rigid order."

Having the racial-supremacist, racial-purist, rigidly-ordered Malwa beating Belisarius, the designated champion of... not that... Well, let's just say that even insofar as it's realistic, it muddles the message. We have enough trouble with enough works of fiction where misaimed racist fanboys have an excuse to identify with totalitarian fuckwits.

The Belisarius series is (for a series released during the Bush administration) a commendably aggressive deconstruction of this, in my opinion; the true bad guys are fash-coated fashes with fash filling and they're just shit all around and that's the point.

Sorry about spacing out my replies; I tend to write a lot, and I don't want to cram it all into one response.

There are two problems with Flint's core message. The first problem is that heroes who are objectively superior to villains in every way tend to make for fairly uninteresting stories, and a message that works in a thirty-minute children's cartoon doesn't function as well in a large series of books.

The second problem is that it isn't true. The saying "truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne" exists for a reason. Much (though not all!) of human history involves supremacism, purity, and rigid order beating equality, diversity, and flexibility like a red-headed stepchild. I would never argue that Good hasn't had some major wins, but Evil is hardly taking a fall like they do in Flint's books.

I completely agree that misaimed racist fanboys will cheer for any villain with a cool uniform, but the solution can't be "So therefore my villains will have awful uniforms and will suck at everything forever".

The Malwas wanted to conquer the world; to start with, they wanted to conquer India, the Middle East, and Europe. And then they wanted to occupy those societies and reshape their cultures to fit their obsession with "purity". No matter how much of an awful fash-coated fash with fash filling you are, you can't conquer and occupy that much of the world for an extended period if you're bad at everything.

I can sympathize with the reluctance to create impressive, intimidating villains that fascists will cheer for, but if you're villains are complete scrubs, then it isn't much of an accomplishment when the hero beats them.

OP, please let us know if the discussions of other books are a derail.

Entropy Judge · Oct 28, 2020

dptullos said:
This...is a very British way of seeing the world. It's worth noting that Britain has controlled the seas in every European war, and that British control of the seas has did not "ruin" the nations that they fought. Revolutionary France beat Britain, Prussia, Austria, and Spain at the same time, despite British control of the seas, Napoleon France conquered all the way to Poland, and Germany in both World Wars managed to be quite successful without ruling the sea.

A nation is more than the people who live within a mile of the shore.

Try 20+ miles. Before taking into account aircraft, of course, or any rivers deep enough that your smaller ships can sail up those rivers. Or Island nations. Or nations like China where significant portions of the nation's industry/economy are near the coast. And ignore the fact that if an enemy controls the coast, they can land an army on the coast.

Also, conveniently ignoring that Mahan's entire thing was control of the sea. Like, it was pointed out earlier that destroying the enemy wasn't the objective in and of itself the way the Japanese thought it was - destroying (or locking up) the enemy fleet secures the sea. Which lets your trade system grow and stifles your enemy's.

And never mind that WWI Germany was literally starving by the end of the war. That Imperial Japan's everything depended on control of the seas so they could get and use resources they didn't have at home. That Napoleonic France conquered Europe from Spain to Poland ... but couldn't conquer an island 20 miles from their own shores.

consequences said:
Where exactly the line is, or how comprehensive your control over the system needs to be isn't entirely clear.

Uncontestedly holding the orbitals, IIRC.

dptullos · Oct 28, 2020

Entropy Judge said:
Try 20+ miles. Before taking into account aircraft, of course, or any rivers deep enough that your smaller ships can sail up those rivers. Or Island nations. Or nations like China where significant portions of the nation's industry/economy are near the coast. And ignore the fact that if an enemy controls the coast, they can land an army on the coast.

Britain controlled the seas throughout the war with Revolutionary France. Revolutionary France fought Prussia, Austria, Britain, and Spain at the same time. Revolutionary France did not lose the war.

While Britain was destroying Napoleon's navy at Trafalgar, Napoleon was destroying Russian and Austrian armies at Austerlitz. When Napoleon returned in triumph, having conquered most of Europe, he was not defeated by British control of the sea.

Britain did land an army on the French coast during the Revolutionary Wars. They accomplished nothing. The British had effective control of the sea throughout most of the Revolutionary War, but the Americans still won.

I fail to see how control of the sea gives you control of the land up to twenty miles from the coast. Sailing ships up a river strikes me as a particularly dangerous proposition, especially if your enemy is prepared, though I do not doubt it could be useful in some circumstances. And if we take aircraft into account, we should consider that aircraft can go from the land to attack ships just as surely as they can go from ships to attack targets on the land.

I am not disputing that controlling the sea can be very important. I am definitely not disagreeing that for an island nation, control of the sea can be vital for survival. However, I do strongly disagree with the idea that control of the sea is as much of an advantage as you seem to think it is.

Imperial Japan was an island nation, and we were fighting in the Pacific, so control of the sea was absolutely essential in that war. WWI Germany was starving at the end of the war. However, they weren't starving at the beginning of the war, and if it hadn't been for the land power of France, all of Britain's naval dominance wouldn't have done a thing to keep the Germans from conquering Europe.

Napoleon was absolutely unable to conquer an island twenty miles away from the French coast, because he had no navy. Britain was supremely ineffective at stopping France for nearly twenty years because all of their naval power couldn't stop Napoleon from conquering Europe from Spain to Poland. Though Spain was a huge mistake. Napoleon's Empire would have collapsed in the end because it was too large and faced too many rebellions, but before that could happen he decided to invade Russia, with entirely predictable consequences.

It was the invasion of Russia that did Napoleon in, not the British. The Empire played a valuable supporting role in Napoleon's downfall, but most of the heavy lifting came from Continental powers.

Entropy Judge · Oct 28, 2020

dptullos said:
However, I do strongly disagree with the idea that control of the sea is as much of an advantage as you seem to think it is.

I happen to be basing my posts on my understanding of Mahan's work. Which, as I'm sure you are aware, was primarily about the influence of sea power on nations and history. While I am certain he was not wholly unfamiliar with the concept of land warfare, it was very much not the focus of his work, which was, as I recall, titled, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. Divided into several titles or time periods, I'm sure.

So if it seems I am relatively dismissive of land-warfare-based arguments, it is because I am attempting to debate the theories developed by Mahan as far as I understand them, which tend to be related more to naval engagements and conduct and not land warfare.

So, Napoleon! Lost control of the seas to the British, which meant that France could no longer gather as much wealth from naval trade as it had before, whether from trade with fully-fledged nations or by drawing upon its colonies for wealth. Meanwhile, Britain, as it controlled the seas, was able to benefit from trade with other nations (including other European nations) and draw upon the wealth of its colonies. This enabled it to fight France for approximately two decades, to fund other European nations, and to gain the position of ruler of the seas (as France and to a much lesser degree Spain were rivals of Britain in this regard). Napoleon's gutting of the navy allowed the British a significant advantage, whereas if France had gained naval superiority, it could have increased its wealth, solidified its hold on the continent, and actually defeated Britain.

Twenty miles of land from the coast: The Kongo-class battlecruisers of the First World War had Vickers 14" guns with a maximum range of 35,450 meters, which - assuming I haven't made a mistake with the math - comes out to something like 22 miles. Ergo, if Japan controls the coast, it can freely bombard territory within the range of its guns, which, for the Kongo-class, is approximately twenty miles. (I'm assuming the Nagato- and Yamato-class ships have higher range.)

Regarding Riverine Warfare: Rivers are very helpful for trade, particularly in less-industrialized areas. However, it is very worth considering that even in the First World War, Destroyers carried 3.5" guns or thereabouts, and could sustain some hits from slightly heavier rounds. They are effectively highly mobile field artillery, but much harder to stop. Sure, they can be damaged or sunk, which blocks the river for the defender at minimal cost to the aggressor, and the defenses deployed to stop the destroyer(s) might well have been preferably utilized elsewhere, as resources are not limitless nor instantly transferrable.

Simon_Jester · Oct 28, 2020

eyl said:
I'm not sure the climactic battles of the early series bear this out:

Book 1: The battle is resolved by energy weapons.
Book 2: While Thunder of God is destroyed by a missile salvo, it was a sucker punch and probably wouldn't have worked (at least not at that range) if it had a capable crew instead of Masadans who weren't very familiar with it (and I think it was undercrewed as well).
Book 3: I don't remember the final battle that well, but IIRC the long-range exchanges were inconclusive until reinforcements showed up, at which point IINM the Havenites surrendered. Incidentally, this book also gives an example of the power of energy weapons - after the long missile exchanges we've seen elsewhere, four Havenite battlecruisers accidently enter a dreadnaught's energy range and are immediately destroyed.
Book 4: No naval combat
Book 5: The actual battle is resolved by energy weapons; Theisman then elects to retreat as he'll need to enter Honor's energy range to defeat her, and he doesn't want to take the losses.
Book 6: I don't really remember how the last battle played out but this book marks the point at which missiles started becoming more dominant with the introduction of the concept which would lead to the podnaught.[/spoilers]

Yesbut.

1) This was specifically Honor tricking an enemy into being stupid enough to close to beam range against her, after they'd already decisively broken her ship in missile combat. If her ship hadn't been armed with such a stupid short-range armament scheme, Honor could have ripped Sirius to pieces with missiles and never needed to troll him into getting close to begin with.

2) Honor fights at a major tonnage disadvantage and still manages to inflict significant damage with missiles, even ignoring the crippling nuke hit she only got in because of the Masadans being incompetent. The finishing salvo that blows up Thunder of God wouldn't have worked against an alert opponent, but only because it was fired from far beyond its powered drive endurance; White Haven's battlecruisers could have trivially ripped the Masadan BC apart in missile combat if only they'd been close enough to do it.

3) In the finishing battle the RMN missile attacks inflict significant damage on a far heavier and more powerful Havenite force, while Havenite missiles devastate the RMN force. Neither side uses beams at all. In the specific incident you describe, yes a Manticoran dreadnought blows four Havenite battlecruisers out of space with grasers, but the circumstances that made it possible involved a fluke encounter battle of a freakishly unlikely kind. You can't plan your ship design paradigm around events like that, and it would be madness to do so.

5) See (1). Thurston is systematically tricked into allowing an engagement he would never have allowed had he known what he was dealing with, made possible only by the RMN's then little-known compensator advantage.

I acknowledge the underlying point that it's possible, with the right tactics or circumstances, for energy weapons to come into play, and that beam combat is nearly always decisive when it happens at all. But at the same time, I think the choices of which kinds of energy weapons are being deployed, and of what emphasis is placed on the beam armament, is ill-chosen in light of which is the primary threat to ships' survival.

At a minimum, if the goal is just to have enough beam armament to deter the enemy from trying to bull through your missile range and zap you out of space, then all those grasers the ships pack are overkill, and lighter, quicker-firing lasers would help increase short range antimissile defense too.

consequences · Oct 28, 2020

The final fight in The Honor of the Queen was in fact decided by energy weapons. Thunder of God did some damage with its spinal battery, but had helpfully crossed its own T under deadstick missile fire from the other side and died to Fearless's return fire with energy guns.

Simon_Jester · Oct 28, 2020

Mahan

dptullos said:
This is a good point. It is unfair to judge Mahan's theory by the standards of a later time, because he wasn't writing for a later time.

To be fair, if air power had been A Thing in Mahan's day, he'd probably have said essentially the same thing about air power that he does about sea power: that high military priority should be assigned, both offensively and defensively, to eliminating the enemy's air force and securing air superiority.

The mindset he criticized would have promoted something like "send heavily escorted convoys of bombers and transport planes around the sky as needed and build lots of air raid shelters, but make only limited efforts to actually destroy enemy planes," which would be kind of stupid.

The point of Mahan is to establish the concept of "sea superiority," analogous to "air superiority," as something that you should try to secure first in order to secure all the benefits that come with it. This was relevant in the context of the era because the corresponding concept in land warfare DOESN'T normally work! Like, you can't just win a few land battles, break the enemy field army, and then be free to achieve all your (reasonable) objectives more or less at will. You have to worry a lot more about supply lines being held constantly open, about the consequences of leaving hostile fortresses behind you, of even being able to break into enemy defenses after defeating open-field armies... it's a lot. In Mahan's day, thinking about land warfare was often very centered on fortresses and how to capture them, in other words.

A Mahan-like doctrine on land ("forget the enemy's forts and supply lines, first just kill their soldiers, then deal with that stuff") wouldn't work. But at sea, it works, because ships don't gain huge advantages from the tactical defensive and because when they're sunk they're hard to replace.

This...is a very British way of seeing the world. It's worth noting that Britain has controlled the seas in every European war, and that British control of the seas has did not "ruin" the nations that they fought. Revolutionary France beat Britain, Prussia, Austria, and Spain at the same time, despite British control of the seas, Napoleon France conquered all the way to Poland, and Germany in both World Wars managed to be quite successful without ruling the sea.

A nation is more than the people who live within a mile of the shore.

Mahan wasn't British, he was American.

And eventually Napoleon lost, as did Germany in both World Wars. Napoleon was constantly inconvenienced by the fact that he could never knock Britain out of the war without Britain's consent, and that Britain would go on aiding and propping up his continental enemies for as long as it took, making it much easier for said enemies to recover from defeats and much harder for him to put them down. Germany was starving to death from a blockade by the time they gave up in World War One; in World War Two they were grossly disadvantaged by inability to import goods from overseas compared to the Allies, who had nearly unlimited supplies of things like rubber and oil that could best be had that way.

Sea power won't let you win every imaginable war. But if you ARE in a sea war, and want to win it, Mahan's advice applies. Britain just happens to have a bigger vested interest in winning naval wars than most other nations. France could get beaten like a drum in every sea war it ever fought for centuries and still be a major European power. Britain couldn't.

Fiction, non-Honorverse

Dahak said:
Central spent the entire series training Thom Poplanich to be Governor. Who has the advantage of having been a relative of the governor who got overthrown by not Justinian.

Raj was never intended to be and never wanted to be.

Right.

Well, unless we accept the "headcanon" @dptullos appears to have come up with, where Central isn't real or doesn't actually do anything significant.

Because the only way to rationalize that with the actual plot of the novels is if Raj is delusional, and presumably killed Thom Poplanich in a psychotic break. But... that's not actually what happens in the novels, that's just the same old "what if the protagonist hallucinated the entire plot" that you can use to retcon out of existence any plotline that you don't like. I mean, to be fair, he says...

dptullos said:
I'm not assuming that "this was all a dream". I think that would be a pretty awful story.

Well yes, but one of the fundamental premises of the entire story is "Central is not only real, but also actually objectively capable and can live up to its hype." Like, when it calculates out a sequence of events favorable to itself or its chosen champion, it's right, in the same sense that when NASA calculates the trajectory of a space probe, they're correct about where the space probe is going to go. I mean, Central isn't perfectly accurate like Newtonian mechanics, but it's genuinely meant to be capable of crunching the numbers to figure out how a society will evolve.

Once you accept that premise, then it follows pretty logically that while Central could just be huffing its own cyber-farts and actually unlikely to accomplish anything good by inspiring Raj and Thom to do its bidding... that's not the way to bet.

What I am assuming is that...well, here's the thing. This is not a children's story. I'm perfectly okay with fairy tales ending with "And then they all lived happily ever after", because that's how fairy tales work. I'm not going to criticize them for that.

One thing that stories tend to forget is that non-protagonist characters have meaningful agency. Whitehall has lots of ideas of how he would like things to work, but so does everyone else. Their ideas are very likely to be in conflict with his ideas, and the fact that he has soldiers with guns just means that people will pretend to agree with him, not that he'll actually win hearts and minds.

I mean you're not wrong as such, but again, this is a case where the protagonists have been given a pretty powerful combination of tools to help them navigate the transition between "I have united much of the known world by force of arms" and "our polity now has legitimacy and is doing some good by giving people a better standard of living and the cultural tools to enjoy a better life."

It's not that no one exists who could conceivably try to stop Center (and its proxies, Raj and Thom) in the aftermath of the novels. But they're going to be fighting a pretty significant uphill battle if they really want to derail Central's plans.

After all, we know the process of uplifting from primitive conditions, bigotry, and slavery, into something more civilized and enlightened is possible. We know it's possible because it's happening to us. Having a supercomputer with built-in psychohistory models trying to help like-minded supporters navigate the transition doesn't ensure that it will happen... but it's got to help.

You say that the Gubernio Civil is more likely to end up like North Korea than like Denmark. Well, where the hell do you think Denmark came from? Denmark was once a vaguely monarchical tribal landscape full of rather thuggish people- slavers and reavers- murdering each other with axes. They changed. I get that societies have inertia, but societies also change, and the idea that change is possible or can be deliberately engineered has validity.

You don't have to wait for the mysterious Hegelian world-spirit to tell you it's time for things to get better, for things to get better. Taking matters into your society's own collective hands is possible, and in theory so is having a small number of individuals do the same... if they had the right tools and resources that don't exist in real life. Exploring what those tools would look like is a legitimate function of science fiction.

Look at The Killer Angels. Chamberlain is an actual historical character, and he doesn't share all the beliefs and values of a twenty-first century person. But while he doesn't hate the men on the other side, he does hate everything they stand for, the slavery and aristocracy and the war they wage against the fundamental truth of America, the proclamation that all men are created equal. That's how you do it right.

I don't mind reading villain protagonists. I don't mind villainous characters. I do mind it when authors actually start to believe that their characters are more real and important than everyone else, not just from their own perspective, but as an objective truth of the universe.

First, Chamberlain is much closer to us in history than most. He's from only a century and a half ago. It's easy to paint him as someone we could call "one of the good guys." It's harder to do that, the farther back you go, or if the story is one that doesn't let you (for instance) largely ignore a character's sexism or classism or whatever because they're in a war zone for the whole novel.

The other complication is that when you only accept historical and quasi-historical figures as allowed to be villains, while disdaining the idea of presenting them as heroes, you are vastly limiting the set of stories that can be told, in a way that I would argue impoverishes art to no useful end.

It would be interesting to read a story where a hyperintelligent A.I. tries to do this, only to discover that people have their own ideas. Just as they did during the Fall, when there was an entire Federation full of advanced technology and supercomputers like Center.

I mean, yes... but that doesn't mean that the countervailing story isn't or shouldn't or can't be told, or isn't credible. It may not be to your own liking, but that may be more because of you having a contrarian pushback against the ideas the story expresses, than because it's just objectively bad.

Like, you say, "yeah, it's going to fall apart as soon as Whitehall dies, becuase there won't be anyone after him with Center in their head capable of holding things together and preventing opportunists from taking over Center's project." Well, why not? Having Center in your head is a significant advantage. Thom and Raj have their whole lives to recruit more people and put Center in their heads. Why shouldn't they pick select successors, a whole bunch of them, including people Center itself picks, and keep doing this? I don't see a reason based on what happens in the series.

So sure, civilizations are robust, but if you have the tools to exert persistent pressure on a big robust thing, eventually it changes course.

Progress is possible, and I see this is a pro-progress message.

[shrugs]

It's fine for you to not like it because you prefer to see the opposite, the idea that civilizations are antinomian and resist being simply 'ruled' or 'put into order.' I respect that. Just... bear in mind that it's OK to think the opposite, y'know?

Honorverse

Melchiorgk said:
I can think of a few reasons inside the setting that makes Haven's plans make a bit more sense. It is basically a combination of factors...

If memory serves, simply securing the orbitals does not secure you the planet. Orbital bombardment is against the rules per the Solarian League. Not clearing out all of the defending ships can bring serious risk to your ground troops.

Admittedly, most planets do consider losing the orbitals to basically losing the ground war, and fold at that point to avoid civilian deaths and infrastructure damages.

Weber said (as I recall) in a forum post that the customary rules of space warfare were that a planet was expected to surrender if the orbitals were held and no immediate reinforcement was inbound. If they didn't, proportionate, discriminate orbital bombardment was allowed, with a certain amount of divided responsibility for civilian casualties. The side holding the orbitals is expected not to just casually blow up metropolitan areas, but the side holding the ground is expected to not put their primary defense weapon mounts and command centers inside metropolitan areas where they'll have to be blown up from orbit.

On the other hand, as soon as you seriously bomb a planet, you have to worry about Eridani Edict violations, so it's always going to be a case where anyone who fears the League will err on the side of caution.

Simon_Jester · Oct 28, 2020

dptullos said:
There are two problems with Flint's core message. The first problem is that heroes who are objectively superior to villains in every way tend to make for fairly uninteresting stories, and a message that works in a thirty-minute children's cartoon doesn't function as well in a large series of books.

The second problem is that it isn't true. The saying "truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne" exists for a reason. Much (though not all!) of human history involves supremacism, purity, and rigid order beating equality, diversity, and flexibility like a red-headed stepchild. I would never argue that Good hasn't had some major wins, but Evil is hardly taking a fall like they do in Flint's books.

I completely agree that misaimed racist fanboys will cheer for any villain with a cool uniform, but the solution can't be "So therefore my villains will have awful uniforms and will suck at everything forever".

I'm not saying it should be done every time. But seeing it done ONCE was fucking REFRESHING. Because it's not like they actually "sucked at everything forever," they just... were merely mediocre, shall we say, see below. And it was refreshing seeing powerful forces outmaneuvered, seeing the fundamental principles of autocracy and supremacy brought to naught, et cetera, et cetera.

Like, I know I don't have much progressive credibility here on SV, everyone thinks of me as a filthy centrist. But a surprising amount of what I do have, I trace back to some of the morals Flint tried to pound on in those books. I read them at an impressionable age, and maybe I like them too much as a result- but I feel like I'm a better person for it.

The Malwas wanted to conquer the world; to start with, they wanted to conquer India, the Middle East, and Europe. And then they wanted to occupy those societies and reshape their cultures to fit their obsession with "purity". No matter how much of an awful fash-coated fash with fash filling you are, you can't conquer and occupy that much of the world for an extended period if you're bad at everything.

I can sympathize with the reluctance to create impressive, intimidating villains that fascists will cheer for, but if you're villains are complete scrubs, then it isn't much of an accomplishment when the hero beats them.

I mean. The Malwa aren't really scrubs. They'd succeed in conquering the world if it weren't for Aide coming along. Their army was good enough to conquer the Middle East and Europe up to Constantinople in less than two generations if they hadn't run headlong into a forewarned Byzantine Empire that started a crash project to invent gunpowder and prepare an army that within only a few years would be fighting back with an average tech level of roughly the Napoleonic Wars.

But that, plus a general who spends like four entire damn novels systematically dodging away from his enemy's strengths and striking at their weak points, avoiding ever directly confronting the full might of the foe on any but the most advantageous possible terms... Well, that turns out to be enough to stop them. And even then, the remnant rump state of the Evil Empire is itself a very powerful empire, now ruled by a member of the Evil Dynasty who just happens not to be personally vile like most of his peers, but who by the same token is likely competent enough to be a serious threat in the future to anyone who gets in his way.

I don't think the Malwa actually do that badly, all things considered.

dptullos · Oct 28, 2020

Entropy Judge said:
Says a great many valuable things about Mahan.

I agree with most of what you say, and Simon_Jester has expressed my remaining reservations better than I can. Sea power is a thing, and it is a very valuable thing.

One of the big takeaways from the discussion is that naval strength favors the status quo much more than armies. You need a large merchant marine for sailors, and you won't have a large merchant marine if their navy captures your ships. You need skilled sailors and captains, and if you lose enough naval battles your crews will be imprisoned or dead. You have to build very expensive ships, and if those ships get sunk you have to start all over.

To a large extent, France can't overcome their naval disadvantage. To create a proper Navy, they would need to train their crews at sea, which they can't do because of the British blockade. To break the British blockade, they would need trained crews, which they can't have because...

At some point France just gives up, and Brittania rules the waves.

Simon_Jester said:
Fiction, non-Honorverse

Well yes, but one of the fundamental premises of the entire story is "Central is not only real, but also actually objectively capable and can live up to its hype." Like, when it calculates out a sequence of events favorable to itself or its chosen champion, it's right, in the same sense that when NASA calculates the trajectory of a space probe, they're correct about where the space probe is going to go. I mean, Central isn't perfectly accurate like Newtonian mechanics, but it's genuinely meant to be capable of crunching the numbers to figure out how a society will evolve.

Once you accept that premise, then it follows pretty logically that while Central could just be huffing its own cyber-farts and actually unlikely to accomplish anything good by inspiring Raj and Thom to do its bidding... that's not the way to bet.

If we fully accept the premise that Center is real, and that it can calculate a sequence of events like this...what the hell happened to the Federation? There were a whole lot of supercomputers back then, but the Federation- the society that Center wants to restore- nuked itself back to the Stone Age.

I think of Center is a generally benevolent and more capable version of Link, the A.I. in the Belisarius series. Link also believes that it can manipulate and direct human history, but there are huge numbers of people and it only has one body. Every autocratic government is playing a gigantic game of Telephone, as subordinates receive orders which they pass to their subordinates which they pass to their subordinates, and at every stage orders are misunderstood or selectively interpreted according to the biases and agenda of the people on the ground. Center can be a perfectly hyperintelligent being, but it can't be everywhere at once. It can't manage everything. It has to trust things to subordinates, and if there's one thing we see in the series it is that 99% of high-ranking officers or officials in the Gubernio Civil are sycophantic, backstabbing weasels who would murder their own mother for wealth and power.

Personnel is policy, and if all of your underlings are awful people who grew up in an awful society, your well-intentioned policies end up being pretty awful.

Simon_Jester said:
You say that the Gubernio Civil is more likely to end up like North Korea than like Denmark. Well, where the hell do you think Denmark came from? Denmark was once a vaguely monarchical tribal landscape full of rather thuggish people- slavers and reavers- murdering each other with axes. They changed. I get that societies have inertia, but societies also change, and the idea that change is possible or can be deliberately engineered has validity.

You don't have to wait for the mysterious Hegelian world-spirit to tell you it's time for things to get better, for things to get better. Taking matters into your society's own collective hands is possible, and in theory so is having a small number of individuals do the same... if they had the right tools and resources that don't exist in real life. Exploring what those tools would look like is a legitimate function of science fiction.

I suspect that you are right, and this is largely a matter of taste. I have developed an affection for stories that explore the limits of power, while Flint's stories- and, in a very different way, the Whitehall stories- explore the possibilities of power.

I push back against the "small number of individuals" because science fiction does have a tendency towards the protagonist as autocrat, laying down their vision for society. I think that imposing your views is often successful, at least in the short time, but that in many ways power makes it harder to actually convince others. Denmark took a really, really long time to become a decent place to live, because a lot of things had to change very gradually. The promise of rapid progress through power is that it won't take eight centuries for Denmark to become a place you'd want to live; the cost is that you're reinforcing a preexisting tendency to agree with the man who is holding the gun.

I also just don't like Raj Whitehall. He is not badly written, but he is very much a product of his culture, and I don't get the impression that he actually cares about the people he hurts along the way. Sure, he knows in the abstract that Center wants this kind of thing to stop, peace, journey to the stars, but he looks on quite casually as the families of his enemy are sold into slavery. It's a strange kind of doublethink, where he simultaneously knows that the world shouldn't be this way while thinking that of course there's nothing wrong with chattel slavery.

Simon_Jester said:
Like, you say, "yeah, it's going to fall apart as soon as Whitehall dies, becuase there won't be anyone after him with Center in their head capable of holding things together and preventing opportunists from taking over Center's project." Well, why not? Having Center in your head is a significant advantage. Thom and Raj have their whole lives to recruit more people and put Center in their heads. Why shouldn't they pick select successors, a whole bunch of them, including people Center itself picks, and keep doing this? I don't see a reason based on what happens in the series.

The heart of my objection to this is that, in the long term, no plan survives contact with the enemy. And when it comes to dispassionate long-term planning, humanity is definitely the enemy.

All of Thom's changes make a lot of people angry, because that's what changes do. In his grandson's time, the Colony revolts because they don't like being ruled by foreigners. The general sent to suppress the revolt is assassinated by an ambitious subordinate, who declares that he will Make the Civil Government Great Again. No more reforms! The ruling class in the former Brigade territories revolt because they don't like the land reforms, protests break out in major cities because workers hate industrialization...

If Center's only goal was to maintain a perpetual ruling dynasty, I think Center could totally do that. But Center wants to change the world, and changes cause chaos. They make enemies. They disrupt orderly systems of control. There was a sequel series by Tony Daniel featuring an Evil Center that just wants to maintain "Stasis", and Center and Raj and their new friend have to fight it together. But the Evil Stasis Computer had a far more reasonable plan than Center, which wants to turn the world upside down and somehow remain in charge throughout the radical changes it will bring.

Simon_Jester said:
I'm not saying it should be done every time. But seeing it done ONCE was fucking REFRESHING. Because it's not like they actually "sucked at everything forever," they just... were merely mediocre, shall we say, see below. And it was refreshing seeing powerful forces outmaneuvered, seeing the fundamental principles of autocracy and supremacy brought to naught, et cetera, et cetera.

I withdraw my objections. If you want to read a story where good triumphs over evil and a bunch of seriously awful people receive their just desserts, Eric Flint is your man. I don't usually appreciate his particular flavor of exuberant optimism, but that's a matter of taste.

You have forever destroyed your credentials as a cynic and a filthy centrist. Embrace your new identity as a hippie idealist!

Simon_Jester said:
I mean. The Malwa aren't really scrubs. They'd succeed in conquering the world if it weren't for Aide coming along. Their army was good enough to conquer the Middle East and Europe up to Constantinople in less than two generations if they hadn't run headlong into a forewarned Byzantine Empire that started a crash project to invent gunpowder and prepare an army that within only a few years would be fighting back with an average tech level of roughly the Napoleonic Wars.

But that, plus a general who spends like four entire damn novels systematically dodging away from his enemy's strengths and striking at their weak points, avoiding ever directly confronting the full might of the foe on any but the most advantageous possible terms... Well, that turns out to be enough to stop them. And even then, the remnant rump state of the Evil Empire is itself a very powerful empire, now ruled by a member of the Evil Dynasty who just happens not to be personally vile like most of his peers, but who by the same token is likely competent enough to be a serious threat in the future to anyone who gets in his way.

I don't think the Malwa actually do that badly, all things considered.

I've just established that I withdraw all my objections to the Belisarius series, and I stand by that statement. However, I will not allow you to say a single word denying the awe-inspiring incompetence of the Malwa Empire.

The Malwa are scrubs. Their army is made up largely of ill-trained peasants commanded by incompetent aristocrats, the only good parts of their army are Kushans (defect to Belisarius), Rajputs (defect to Less Evil Tyrant), and Ye-Ti. I'll give them credit, the Ye-Ti are pretty good.

They have a gigantic head start, but the Byzantines still manage to out-tech them, build a better army, and crush them in every single battle. I mean, I know that the Byzantines have access to future knowledge, but the Malwa have had access to that knowledge for decades longer than they have, and they are still worse in every single way.

Now, I am not going to be a sneery asshole about Belisarius. I did promise. He is a fun character, and he beats up Evil in creative and entertaining ways.

One of his favorite statements in the books is that "No plan survives contact with the enemy." Throughout the course of his books, all of his plans survive contact with the enemy. The closest he comes to defeat is against Honorable Enemy Rana Sanga, and he still doesn't lose that battle.

Of course Belisarius wants to dodge away from his enemy's strengths and strike at their weak points. Every competent general since Og picked up a flint spear has wanted to do that! Belisarius is different because he is consistently able to succeed in engaging the enemy on his terms, which is not quite so common. If your foe consistently lets you fight on the terms you choose, without moving the fight onto the terms they choose, then they will probably lose every battle. Which is what happens in the Belisarius books.

Now that I think about it, I can see the appeal of the Belisarius books, so I'm not going to cast shade on them. But the Malwa are delightfully incompetent, with villains who have nicknames like "the Vile". Flint even emphasizes that other monsters get names like "the Terrible" or "the Dreadful" to emphasize that while those guys inspire fear as well as hatred, people just look on "the Vile" with contempt and derision.

Terra Novan · Oct 28, 2020

Dahak said:
Central spent the entire series training Thom Poplanich to be Governor. Who has the advantage of having been a relative of the governor who got overthrown by not Justinian.

Raj was never intended to be and never wanted to be.

I admit that, while I liked the series, that was a rather implausible part. Thom was literally thought to be a dead man for several years, and even Raj noted that he wouldn't have lasted long as a governor, being more of philosopher then a politician. At least Raj was a professional soldier with combat experience, and Center just magnified what he already had (and stopping him from making a mistake).

The sequel The Chosen does it better by having the military character (Jeffrey Farr) and civilian/spy character (John Horsten) working together at the same time, with Center and Raj advising them in head and connecting their minds via sci-fi communication.

HeWhoAdds · Oct 28, 2020

I wonder if you couldn't read Center's description of his goals and motivations as an AI supercomputer deliberately framing his goals and motivations in a way such that someone of Raj's background and beliefs would readily accept. Like, if you're a AI from an hyperadvanced Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communist utopia, it might not be in your best interests to tell your primary means on interacting with the outside world (who is an aristocrat) that you intend to demolish all aristocracy.

IIRC the Federation was (according to Center) destroyed in an apocalyptic war with an Islamic state/group of some kind? Which is all kinds of problematic, but it's easy to see how a futuristic AI supercomputer might frame a much more complicated conflict whose context would be difficult to understand for someone from a largely preindustrial society as analogous to the most important geopolitical conflict that they have experience with?

I guess my point is that it's entirely possible that Center's plan doesn't actually hinge on remaining in control of the Civil Government in perpetuity. But it seems reasonable to me that Center might suggest that its plans DO hinge on that to secure Raj's loyalty, as he is ideologically committed to the survival of Civil Government.

Terra Novan · Oct 28, 2020

dptullos said:
There was a sequel series by Tony Daniel featuring an Evil Center that just wants to maintain "Stasis", and Center and Raj and their new friend have to fight it together. But the Evil Stasis Computer had a far more reasonable plan than Center, which wants to turn the world upside down and somehow remain in charge throughout the radical changes it will bring.

The 'reasonable plan' you mentioned involved the AI inciting the nomads once in several centuries to pull a Mongol and annihilate the settled civilization.

Not to mention that it is established from the beginning that Stasis is pretty miserable for humans, what with Abel's mother dying from tooth infection.

And as Center notes, while Zentrum can keep the humans in stasis, the universe is not a static place. It is an equivalent of climate change denialism, IMO.

HeWhoAdds said:
IIRC the Federation was (according to Center) destroyed in an apocalyptic war with an Islamic state/group of some kind? Which is all kinds of problematic, but it's easy to see how a futuristic AI supercomputer might frame a much more complicated conflict whose context would be difficult to understand for someone from a largely preindustrial society as analogous to the most important geopolitical conflict that they have experience with?

While still problematic, the Islamic state part happened well into the past, long before the collapse of the Federation. It was used to explain why there are Muslims on Bellevue, that they arrived on the planet after the 'Final Jihad' which apparently devastated Earth and destroyed Mecca (and also ended Sunni-Shia schism), carrying the fragments of Kaaba with them, and was the one who first colonized the Bellevue before the arrival of Federation.

Frankly, they have a reason to be miffed, considering that it is all but outright stated that the Federation annexed and colonized Bellevue over the objection of its Muslim inhabitants.

dptullos · Oct 28, 2020

Terra Novan said:
The 'reasonable plan' you mentioned involved the AI inciting the nomads once in several centuries to pull a Mongol and annihilate the settled civilization.

I didn't say "nice plan" or "sane plan", just that there was a kind of horrifying logic to it. The A.I. wanted things to stay the same forever, so it had foreign invaders kill anyone and reset things the way it wanted. The plan had worked repeatedly before, and it's fairly easy to ensure the outcome of a war when you are commanding both sides.

Terra Novan said:
Not to mention that it is established from the beginning that Stasis is pretty miserable for humans, what with Abel's mother dying from tooth infection.

Zentrum- that was Evil Center's name- doesn't care about the welfare of individual humans.

Terra Novan said:
And as Center notes, while Zentrum can keep the humans in stasis, the universe is not a static place. It is an equivalent of climate change denialism, IMO.

Zentrum was fairly nuts. It believed that it could keep the world the same, no changes allowed, and it would hit the reset button from time to time to ensure that Stasis endured. If that killed a hundred thousand people, that was a small price to pay.

Center believes that it can supervise and direct the course of human civilization, which is a far more difficult task that just imposing a harsh set of laws about technology, enforcing them strictly, and then killing everyone in charge when things start to get out of control. Center actually thinks that it can steer human civilization like a car, while Zentrum is just trying to beat anyone who steps out of line.

Zentrum is a climate change denier; Center is the guy who believes that the entire history of the human species could be decisively reshaped by a handful of Great Men, and no one else gets a say, they all have to do what the Great Men want. Center isn't trying to run one city, or even a small country; it is trying to direct the course of an entire planet full of irrational, frustrating, unpredictable human beings.

HeWhoAdds said:
I wonder if you couldn't read Center's description of his goals and motivations as an AI supercomputer deliberately framing his goals and motivations in a way such that someone of Raj's background and beliefs would readily accept. Like, if you're a AI from an hyperadvanced Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communist utopia, it might not be in your best interests to tell your primary means on interacting with the outside world (who is an aristocrat) that you intend to demolish all aristocracy.

IIRC the Federation was (according to Center) destroyed in an apocalyptic war with an Islamic state/group of some kind? Which is all kinds of problematic, but it's easy to see how a futuristic AI supercomputer might frame a much more complicated conflict whose context would be difficult to understand for someone from a largely preindustrial society as analogous to the most important geopolitical conflict that they have experience with?

I guess my point is that it's entirely possible that Center's plan doesn't actually hinge on remaining in control of the Civil Government in perpetuity. But it seems reasonable to me that Center might suggest that its plans DO hinge on that to secure Raj's loyalty, as he is ideologically committed to the survival of Civil Government.

No, from what we see the Federation was destroyed by the Federation. It's one reason I'm so skeptical about Center's plans.

I don't think Center lies to Raj, but I do know that Raj interprets Center's ideas through the context of his own religious upbringing, which uses "computer" as a synonym for "angel". And in a sense, Center does serve the Spirit of Man of the Stars.

Terra Novan said:
While still problematic, the Islamic state part happened well into the past, long before the collapse of the Federation. It was used to explain why there are Muslims on Bellevue, that they arrived on the planet after the 'Final Jihad' which apparently devastated Earth and destroyed Mecca (and also ended Sunni-Shia schism), carrying the fragments of Kaaba with them, and was the one who first colonized the Bellevue before the arrival of Federation.

Sadly, the Sunni-Shia schism is alive and well on Bellevue, and the Colony's Sunni rulers are quite enthusiastic about persecuting Muslim heretics.

One of the issues with the Whitehall series is the Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy. Simon_Jester has some good points about the problems with judging past characters by present standards, but dear God the atrocities never end.

Terra Novan said:
Frankly, they have a reason to be miffed, considering that it is all but outright stated that the Federation annexed and colonized Bellevue over the objection of its Muslim inhabitants.

Another issue with the books is their unapologetic support for "unifying" everyone through lots and lots of murder, at which point we will all be friends and journey to the stars together.

Terra Novan · Oct 28, 2020

dptullos said:
Sadly, the Sunni-Shia schism is alive and well on Bellevue, and the Colony's Sunni rulers are quite enthusiastic about persecuting Muslim heretics.

Those were the Druzes and other minor Muslim sects. Tewfik explicitly noted that Sunni-Shia schism only ended with the Final Jihad.

dptullos said:
One of the issues with the Whitehall series is the Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy. Simon_Jester has some good points about the problems with judging past characters by present standards, but dear God the atrocities never end.

Because the point of the series was protagonists trying to create a better future where such atrocities are unnecessary and justly vilified. But until then, they are stuck with the cruel reality.

dptullos said:
Zentrum- that was Evil Center's name- doesn't care about the welfare of individual humans.

I know. I read both of Duisberg duology.

Shanejayell · Oct 28, 2020

Possibly you should take the discussion to a seperate thread?

It's no longer on topic HERE.

dptullos · Oct 28, 2020

Shanejayell said:
Possibly you should take the discussion to a seperate thread?

It's no longer on topic HERE.

Very true. I apologize for derailing.

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