- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Why is it so hard for you to say 'oh, I didn't know that' as opposed to acting like your misconception is so completely reasonable that your confusion must be everyone else's problem?
Let's Read: David Weber's Honor Harrington
- Thread starter The Victorian
- Start date
- Books
Why is it so hard for you to say 'oh, I didn't know that' as opposed to acting like your misconception is so completely reasonable that your confusion must be everyone else's problem?
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Because there were multiple people who had the same confusion in a short timespan and I've seen the same thing happen before on similar conversations.
It's like the distinction between 'private property' and 'personal property' in Marxist politics. It's a recurring problem that keeps cropping up in new conversations at least once per person who is introduced to the vocabulary for discussing the concept, and it could be entirely avoided just by using words in a more conventional fashion.
- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I looked at the series of posts and the only person who actually appears to have been confused by the mention of x-ray lasers at the time you got on Aramatha's case was you. To reiterate, the guy correctly identified the type of laser used by warships in this setting and you are trying to give him grief because you didn't know. That's actually kind of weird and you should stop. This is not even accounting for the fact that Amaratha's intended meaning is contextually clear and you just jumped to a conclusion based on, again, a misconception that you had. That's not grounds for you to be trying to police the language used to discuss this extremely technical detail heavy series of books.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I'm sorry, you're right, I was misremembering when the other person's misremembering happened.
I'll stop discussing the point.
So to bring this line of discussion to something more positive. I have a list of classifications that Weber should have used to suit the age of sail narrative much better.
Rated ships of the wall
SD = 3rd rate ship of the line/wall
DN = 4th rate ship of the line/wall
BB = 5th rate ship of the line/wall(in the books it's mentioned that BBs were obsolete because they were slow by like 20Gs and were less sturdy compared to DNs and SDs)
BC = 6th rate Cruiser (cruisers were used by the British admiralty to refer to 4th rates but since apparently ships of the wall include BBs that distinction goes to BCs.)
Post Ships
CA/Heavy = unrated post ship Great frigate
CL/light cruiser = unrated post ship frigate
Sloops
DD = unrated corvette
So what do you guys think? Is it stupid? Is it amazing? I think it gets the point along nicely. Rated ships are ships that can withstand a wall of battle, post ships and sloops can't but serve nicely as escorts and long range patrol ships.
I didn't even touch on brigantines, barques or even schooners. So much wasted potential.
Rated ships of the wall
SD = 3rd rate ship of the line/wall
DN = 4th rate ship of the line/wall
BB = 5th rate ship of the line/wall(in the books it's mentioned that BBs were obsolete because they were slow by like 20Gs and were less sturdy compared to DNs and SDs)
BC = 6th rate Cruiser (cruisers were used by the British admiralty to refer to 4th rates but since apparently ships of the wall include BBs that distinction goes to BCs.)
Post Ships
CA/Heavy = unrated post ship Great frigate
CL/light cruiser = unrated post ship frigate
Sloops
DD = unrated corvette
So what do you guys think? Is it stupid? Is it amazing? I think it gets the point along nicely. Rated ships are ships that can withstand a wall of battle, post ships and sloops can't but serve nicely as escorts and long range patrol ships.
I didn't even touch on brigantines, barques or even schooners. So much wasted potential.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
To be clear, is the idea here to change how the Honorverse's technological paradigm works in any way, or just to change the names of certain categories of warship without changing anything else about them?
The second part.
I used 3rd rates as SDs because 3rd rates were the main combat vessels of the British navy. While 2nd and 1st rates were more unwieldy in seaworthiness so we're not used very often. But if I had to guess maybe a full 9 million ton ship could be rated as 1st.
consequences
Not A Nice Person At All
- Location
- Jerkville
First and second rates under that paradigm could be outright fortresses. It's not like giving them a hyper drive would actually impact them significantly by the very rules that Weber established of it taking less proportional mass the larger the hull gets.
Eh, I think they would still be forts because they can't move in real space like true ships.
consequences
Not A Nice Person At All
- Location
- Jerkville
100 Gs instead of 300 Gs literally in canon with no changes. The parallels just keep lining up perfectly. Add a bit where their warshawkski sails are ungainly and prone to catastrophic failure to reconfigure in the event of a rogue wave, and there you go.
- Location
- Scotland
I don't see why you'd want to do this or what it adds to the story. Fortresses are clearly a stand in for, well, fortresses. Shore barriers and the like. They're not meant to fight in the wall. Trying to rework the rating system to fit them in moves away from the historical system, not towards it. The point of moving to a rate system is not in universe practicality but to more vibe the Hornblower in space. Pushing fortresses into it ruins the vibe.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
The idea that the canonical biggest battleship class* is a "third-rater" because historically only big clunky flagships and failed experiments were bigger strikes me as another place where incompatibility of assumptions between the Honorverse and the historic Age of Sail.
Honorverse ships are, we have reason to think, designed much as real world modern ships are, with lots of computer modeling and extensive, detailed calculation of every aspect of their design, such that their performance parameters are well known, calculated, and very consistent. Age of Sail ships were built according to rules of thumb by craftsmen who were in many cases only semi-literate and certainly not doing extensive calculation in most cases. They were good at what they did, but there would by nature be an element of improvisation and experimentation in constructing any new category of ship, and there was little guarantee that any two ships would be exactly alike.
In the Honorverse, if a category of ship would be impractical because of its great size and being past the point of diminishing returns for mobility, it is simply not constructed. There is no equivalent in their semi-recent history of the Mary Rose or the Vasa, nor should there be. Furthermore, since ships fight with guided missiles and ECM systems rather than with gunpowder cannon at point blank range, single very large ships as "flagships" are a very reckless design concept, asking to be focus-fired into oblivion by massed barrages from the entire enemy fleet.
This largely invalidates a lot of the motives to build the Honorverse equivalent of 100+ gun capital ships in the first place, as these were often seen in real life as flagships or as superheavy combatants to 'anchor' a line of battle consisting of later ships. Both roles are utterly invalid for capital combatants in Weber's overall paradigm. Because, as noted, Weber doesn't really grasp the history of the Age of Sail very well at all, and the points of commonality between the Age of Sail and his setting are nearly all superficial.
Honorverse ships are, we have reason to think, designed much as real world modern ships are, with lots of computer modeling and extensive, detailed calculation of every aspect of their design, such that their performance parameters are well known, calculated, and very consistent. Age of Sail ships were built according to rules of thumb by craftsmen who were in many cases only semi-literate and certainly not doing extensive calculation in most cases. They were good at what they did, but there would by nature be an element of improvisation and experimentation in constructing any new category of ship, and there was little guarantee that any two ships would be exactly alike.
In the Honorverse, if a category of ship would be impractical because of its great size and being past the point of diminishing returns for mobility, it is simply not constructed. There is no equivalent in their semi-recent history of the Mary Rose or the Vasa, nor should there be. Furthermore, since ships fight with guided missiles and ECM systems rather than with gunpowder cannon at point blank range, single very large ships as "flagships" are a very reckless design concept, asking to be focus-fired into oblivion by massed barrages from the entire enemy fleet.
This largely invalidates a lot of the motives to build the Honorverse equivalent of 100+ gun capital ships in the first place, as these were often seen in real life as flagships or as superheavy combatants to 'anchor' a line of battle consisting of later ships. Both roles are utterly invalid for capital combatants in Weber's overall paradigm. Because, as noted, Weber doesn't really grasp the history of the Age of Sail very well at all, and the points of commonality between the Age of Sail and his setting are nearly all superficial.
Dang, when you put it that way, that makes him a more interesting character since he would have suffer lots of meaningful setbacks in his character development beyond the corrupt noble tried to rape me to keep me in my place which composed Honor's backstory in On Basilisk Station.
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Well until the coup.
Shanejayell
Yuri Fan without a Pause
- Pronouns
- He
Oh, I did read Toll of Honor, which was actually better than the last 'main' Honor book, Uncompromising Honor. Basically it's about 1/2 alternate POV on Field of Dishonor, and 1/2 the initial rollout on Pod warfare and how quickly the series went full on MACROSS MISSILE MASSACRE.
I know you deliberately didn't do that in your Honor fanfic series, but now I'm just thinking of a Macross/Honor crossover and going "Hmm."
How would the perspective flip on Honor make her look like an implacable villain?
Not really sure how you can do that with Haven backing religious fanatics they spent the last parts of the book trying to dump before things spun out of control.
Maybe if Manticore had been more realpolitik at times instead of always happening to make the choice which was simultaneously moral and correct in the long term?
Like in Dptullos's Honor Of the Queen where the Manticore ambassador said that it was lucky that Manticore had gotten to Grayson first instead of Haven, because if Haven had managed to woo Grayson, Manticore would back Masada despite their highly regressive society, despite her personal feelings on the matter.
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- Location
- The Old Dominion
Given how the Masadans are written you'd pretty much would have had to rewrite Manticore having a Queen to give that even a chance of happening and even then, I'd suspect they would try to horrid things to Honor who'd almost certainly would have been sent by people trying to send her to her death.
consequences
Not A Nice Person At All
- Location
- Jerkville
Fortresses are already mobile enough to reposition from one edge of the hyper limit of Earth to the opposite side of the system in about 15 hours, or the outer edge of extended missile range to max burn distance in about an hour twenty minutes. They also got made *smaller* in the later books in the only counter example to Unlimited Tonnage Creep Works.
The Hornblower vibe was dead from book one. Maybe this specific bit of it lasted until early in book six.
There is also the fact that Haven isn't exactly being subtle with the whole outright conquering planets thing which can make alliances problematic.
- Location
- Scotland
Again, why do you think it matters if they're technically mobile? The only reason to go with a first-rate, second-rate etc system is vibe and treating your shore battery/sea forts expy as first-rate warships ruins that. And if 'the vibe is dead' as you claim, why in the world would you try to change to a rate based system at all! The only reason to use such a system in your space scifi is vibe!
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