10ebbor10
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Oh yeah, that gets acknowledged once.
That said, IIRC, it gets acknowledged by honor being the voice of reason convincing other traditionalists that the wonderweapons are real.
Let's Read: David Weber's Honor Harrington
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That said, IIRC, it gets acknowledged by honor being the voice of reason convincing other traditionalists that the wonderweapons are real.
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At this point, it sounds like it's kind of a nitpick.
Imagine if there were ten novels centered on Aivars Terekhov, as opposed to being part about him and mostly about the cast of lower-deck characters around him. I'm pretty sure that then, his steward would probably get a lot more attention, about as much as MacGuinness.
I really don't think that MacGuiness is remotely the biggest or most serious problem with Honor Harrington, and I don't really even think he's A serious problem at all.
I don't see any evidence that she is, as you claimed, getting specially privileged service compared to other RMN officers.
Granted, we do see the service given to her much more often, but that's also because, well, she's the frickin' main character of the series, of course she gets several times more screen time than any other character! And she's particularly likely to get scenes that boil down to "one character sitting in a room alone and thinking," which is exactly when you expect the steward or some other tertiary character to show up and Do A Thing just to break up the monotony.
To be fair, the RMN is explicitly an "aristocratic privilege" institution. It is entirely possible, even likely, that they will have some institutions that are heavily shaped by the desire of aristocratic scions to have things that a service like the USN wouldn't have. This includes personal servants for officers, or a deliberate redefinition of the role of 'steward' and the conventions around its role as a posting to ensure that a well-liked steward can indeed follow a senior officer from post to post.
"Things don't work this way in the real US Navy" is not a sufficient argument that there is something wrong with the writing in having the RMN do them differently. For instance, the US Navy is particularly 'dry,' averse to any kind of alcohol aboard ship. This is not because it's objectively disastrous to have, say, beer and wine on a warship. It's because the US Navy's policies on the matter were forced into place by a specific temperance fanatic and the subsequent Prohibition era, to the point where they sort of got locked into the idea that this was a hill they intended to die on. Another military service that simply does not trace much institutional tradition to the USN would almost certainly be less straitlaced.
It always amused me that in Book Six, Honor Among Enemies, as she was flying Wayfarer, the first podlaying missile combatant to see major action in the modern era...
Honor gets a look at an Andermani capital ship, and her thought is "gee, I think that design is maybe too missile-heavy and might suffer in beam combat."
And I'm like, oh, that's just cute. It's the same way I feel about Weber presenting the "all-graser" armament of Grayson cruiser/battlecruisers as some kind of significant innovation. It's like, buddy, you've just written beam weapons as entirely obsolete in an era where typical enemy weapon ranges are 50x or so longer than the distance any beam can reach. Nobody cares about the grasers anymore.
Honestly, the objectively superior move might be to replace most of a ship's energy armament with lighter, quicker-firing lasers that may not be as fast-firing as a point defense cluster but are still credible as secondary missile defense weapons. A ship is far more likely to fire its beam weapon broadside as desperate final antimissile defense than it is to fire it in anger at an opposing warship, after all.
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True, I wonder if the "right" thing to do would be to ditch large warships and focus on deploying pods (and missiles) on the target area? You could have unmanned pod carriers whose function would be just to put the pods within striking distance of the enemy installation, station, shipping lane or whatever, recon assets, and then maybe specialised manned command craft to feed targeting data and commands to the missiles. Or, if you're targeting something static and aren't worried about having to change plans on the spot, you can forget the manned component and just let the missiles loose to search and attack the target on their own.
That way the pod and missile carriers just need to last long enough to deploy their payload and might even be expendable if that helps, while the manned craft can focus on speed and defensive systems to keep their crews alive and coordinating the attack.
The idea here would be to find the best way to spam those missiles, locate valuable enemy assets, and overwhelm their defences as soon as the war starts. Something more like an ICBM launch than naval war in space.
10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
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This isn't particularly relevant, because the increase in missile range means that any ship will have launched it's entire arsenal of missiles hours before the enemy even comes in range.
Meanwhile, pods aren't really compatible with smaller warships, because they're pretty big. A standard manticoran missile pod includes it's own fusion reactor, as many mass drivers as it has tubes and it's own tractor beam.
(How those things are economically viable is anyone's guess. They're reuseable, I think).
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Ok, so find a way to stick an FTL drive on the pods or make an automated pod carrier if that isn't possible, the idea here is to do way with the warship part of the system and find a better and cheaper way to saturate the target area with missiles, streamlining and automating where possible.
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What, exactly, about the Honorverse makes you think that this is a promising or likely direction for improvement of their technology?
I understand why you think it would be 'better' but to me it sounds as if you're saying something like "cars would be a lot more efficient if they didn't need those pesky wheels and could just levitate above the ground." It's true but it's not something you can reasonably expect the engineers to deliver for you.
I wonder what actual Napoleonic-era style naval warfare in space would be like. Impeller "sails" that have to be configured and altered to fit conditions and allow maneuvering, where damage might cripple a ship. 3-dimensional movement in a system, where gravitic waves emanate from the star, and ships maneuver along or against them. .Projectile-firing weapons in broadside, although they'd need a computer to fire them. Even boarding actions, since "close" no longer means <1000 km.
It seems like a logical evolution with the way missiles work in the Honorverse?
Being able to put out a lot of missiles is better than having energy weapons since big missile salvos will just overwhelm your enemies.
And someway, somehow, it's better to put those missiles into autonomous pods and deploy them instead of having launchers and magazines built into the ship. Gutting most of the ship's systems to fill it with pods is a step forward and will let you carry more missiles and launch bigger salvos.
So, why bother having a super-dreadnought at all if it just exists to deploy pods, why not streamline it into a pod delivery system, possibly unmanned?
This is a setting lacking good automation for combat situations. We are repeatedly shown that a trained human who is alert will whup an out of the box program.
It's a setting with very sharply limited FTL communications. How far away are you throwing these pods from? Where is the human in the loop?
And, just in general, you want a fallback option rather than depend on everything to work correctly, so maybe have a spare weapon or three for if your pod systems stop working. The enemy gets a vote after all.
It's a setting with very sharply limited FTL communications. How far away are you throwing these pods from? Where is the human in the loop?
And, just in general, you want a fallback option rather than depend on everything to work correctly, so maybe have a spare weapon or three for if your pod systems stop working. The enemy gets a vote after all.
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The ships also have a lot of targeting and ECCM on them as well, and a lot of processing power to figure out enemy missile defenses, pods dont carry any of that.
I honestly absolutely HATE the classification system of HH, I mean if Weber wanted he could have just ported the rules and tech of starfire along with the stupid classification system which fit the WW2 paradigm more.
In Starfire there are dreadnoughts, superdreadnoughts, monitors (bigger than superdreadnoughts), super monitors and in the later books devastators (bigger than super monitors) than super devastators (to be fair the books where they appeared weren't written by Weber)
In fact father you finish reading HH I highly recommend Weber's Starfire. IMO it's much better in several ways and the combat is exquisite. It's peak Weber IMO a strange time when his editor wasn't shafted constantly.
I am also puzzled why he didn't go for age of sail ratings. Would have been much cooler with 3rd rate ship of the walls (wallers) blasting each other with smaller post ships or 6th rate frigates doing escort stuff. Maybe the League could have 9 million ton 1st rates for showboating. It would have fit the general theme of HH bigger ship=win
(excepting the fact that with 3 smaller ships with faster acceleration you can pull of a multi-axis attack so that one is always crossing the T of the SD or BC or Waller, but nooooo sweet innocent child that won't work and is stupid)
In Starfire there are dreadnoughts, superdreadnoughts, monitors (bigger than superdreadnoughts), super monitors and in the later books devastators (bigger than super monitors) than super devastators (to be fair the books where they appeared weren't written by Weber)
In fact father you finish reading HH I highly recommend Weber's Starfire. IMO it's much better in several ways and the combat is exquisite. It's peak Weber IMO a strange time when his editor wasn't shafted constantly.
I am also puzzled why he didn't go for age of sail ratings. Would have been much cooler with 3rd rate ship of the walls (wallers) blasting each other with smaller post ships or 6th rate frigates doing escort stuff. Maybe the League could have 9 million ton 1st rates for showboating. It would have fit the general theme of HH bigger ship=win
(excepting the fact that with 3 smaller ships with faster acceleration you can pull of a multi-axis attack so that one is always crossing the T of the SD or BC or Waller, but nooooo sweet innocent child that won't work and is stupid)
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This seems like a good idea as X-ray lasers have the same range as Grasers
(right? I don't remember)
And as a bonus you have lots of extra LIDAR emitters and telescopes.
In fact in the direction that current HH is going it's a wonder why anyone bothers with more than 2 energy mounts and not just stuff the broadsides with CM tubes and PDLs.
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Shipboard beam weapon ranges (laser, graser, or otherwise) are generally presented as being in the range of several hundred thousand kilometers, but significantly less than a million.
The effective range of the bomb-pumped lasers on a missile warhead have been fairly consistently stated as being around 25000 kilometers in the early series, and if there's been increases of standoff range, they've been more like "plus twenty percent" and less like "ten times the range."
Thus, it is safe to say that antiship beam weapons still massively outrange the beams projected by missile warheads.
Does that address what you were saying?
I think it would be an entirely reasonable response to MDM-era warfare, but you really would need to be sure the ship will never get into beam range of an old-style enemy vessel.
I was actually questioning if X-ray laser range was shorter than a graser because if it is then it's better to have some grasers to get the first hit in with how devastating energy beams are.
In fact just put them on a LAC instead of a graser. I swear it's like Weber heard gamma rays spread out more slowly and penetrate nearly any base matter and then ignored that he made normal X-ray lasers just as devastating but without being larger.
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[blinks]
Oh. Oh god. Is this that thing where the weapons that in the actual books are just called "lasers," you keep calling "X-ray lasers?"
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Only on missiles. Shipmounted lasers aren't. Probably. Or at least they're pumped a different way than setting off a nuke inside the hull.
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They actually are all x-ray lasers, everyone just says 'laser' instead of 'xraser' because by the time of the books that's just the norm.
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The thing is, well. This is my opinion, and some of it might be only my opinion, but I came by it honestly:
We get the narration explicitly saying in the mainstream novels that the missile warheads project beams of X-rays from time to time. And also it is a fairly broadly known detail about bomb-pumped lasers that they project X-ray beams.
Meanwhile, so far as I can determine, it is NEVER explicitly stated in the narration that light antiship beam weapons, such as are typically found on destroyers or cruisers, project X-ray beams. So far as I know, references to this are not present except maybe in passing once or twice, or published in one of the last few books, which many of us have not read or have not read as closely because of the declining quality of the series.
So most Honorverse readers will hear "X-ray laser" and think of the missile warheads, but not the light antiship lasers.
Referring to light antiship lasers as "X-ray lasers" is thus a very reliable way to cause confusion among Honorverse fans. It's like calling cars "carriages" and then explaining that technically "car" is shorthand for "automobile carriage." It's strictly true from an etymological point of view, but will add more smoke than light to the conversation.
We get the narration explicitly saying in the mainstream novels that the missile warheads project beams of X-rays from time to time. And also it is a fairly broadly known detail about bomb-pumped lasers that they project X-ray beams.
Meanwhile, so far as I can determine, it is NEVER explicitly stated in the narration that light antiship beam weapons, such as are typically found on destroyers or cruisers, project X-ray beams. So far as I know, references to this are not present except maybe in passing once or twice, or published in one of the last few books, which many of us have not read or have not read as closely because of the declining quality of the series.
So most Honorverse readers will hear "X-ray laser" and think of the missile warheads, but not the light antiship lasers.
Referring to light antiship lasers as "X-ray lasers" is thus a very reliable way to cause confusion among Honorverse fans. It's like calling cars "carriages" and then explaining that technically "car" is shorthand for "automobile carriage." It's strictly true from an etymological point of view, but will add more smoke than light to the conversation.
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That's true. The phrase used to describe this kind of payload for the whole of the series is 'laser head.'
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Yes. The thing is, scenes describing 'laser head'-tipped missiles detonating will often discuss how they send forth beams of specifically X-rays, or otherwise make it clear that the warheads use bomb-pumped lasers that anyone familiar with that technology knows will be an X-ray beam.
It would be very easy to read all the first 12-13 mainline Honorverse novels and see no reason to think that light shipboard beam weapons (the ones used in laser clusters and that make up most of the firepower on things like destroyers) are projecting, say, infrared or visible-light laser beams.
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I understand why a reader might not make the inference. That said, if in 12-13 books the only types of specified military laser are gamma ray or x-ray then it's not really a safe assumption there is a third spectrum of light in use that is never mentioned. These books are exhaustively detailed so you'd think that would come up.
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It just doesn't seem like such a safe assumption to have made to justify jump down the throat of someone who is correctly describing the setting's technology, I guess.
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So, a tech bible excerpt that's basically an appendix at the back of a short story anthology, one that was published after though not all the way after the main series started to go south in a bad way.
I feel a little embarrassed at having completely overlooked this technical detail, but it doesn't change the fact that for the median reader of the series, using "X-ray laser" instead of the book's own usage of just the word "laser" will confuse rather than clarify matters if we're talking about the light shipboard beam weapon class.
In practice, this confusion will simply happen.
A missile warhead's X-ray laser beams are generated by a specific method that is not used for shipboard weapons of any kind, because nobody wants to detonate a fusion bomb aboard their own ship in order to fire their guns.
So I don't think the conclusion "therefore, by Occam's Razor, shipboard lasers that work based on entirely different operating principles also use the X-ray spectrum" would be entirely supported.
The problem is that it is a truthful description while violating the standard usage conventions of the setting and novels themselves.
As I said, it's like calling a car a "carriage" and then acting confused or smug when someone else incorrectly expects there to be horses attached because clearly as everyone knows, "car" is simply a shortening of the more descriptive phrase "auto-mobile carriage."
Calling a Honda Civic a 'carriage' is factually correct but not helpful.
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