The Freedom of the Individual and their ability to acquire the greatest objective measurement of Good, through their own abilities and without assistance from any party despite the appearance of said assistance from said parties: 1.x (Interlude: A Rising Healthcare Cost; Resident Nurse Jim Bean, supervisor of Shift A, Emergency Ward of the St. Lucifer's Hospital, a member of the Brockton Bay Medical Group)
The telephone rang.
Resident Nurse Jim Bean, supervisor of Shift A, Emergency Ward of the St. Lucifer's Hospital, a member of the Brockton Bay Medical Group, shifted in his seat. The blueish glare of the monitor in front of him had lulled him in a stupor, breaking the facade of superior customer service a Resident Nurse who was also a supervisor of Shift A, Emergency Ward of the St. Lucifer's Hospital, a member of the Brockton Bay Medical Group should act. The lights on the phone glimmered red, stabbing into his eyes like demons. But he was only partly stupored. The duty of being a Resident Nurse was important, for he bore the load of the ward, assisting where need be. A hospital was a complex beast.
By the late 19th and the beginning 20th century, medical advancements such as anesthesia and sterile techniques that could make surgery less risky, and availability of more advanced diagnostic devices such as X-rays continued to make hospitals a more attractive option for treatment rather than sole practitioners. As a sole practitioner is more burdened by the cost of expensive equipment, the hospitals became almost necessary to doctors. This is visible in the number of hospitalizations in the United States continuing to grow and reaching its peak in 1981 with 171 admissions per 1000 Americans and 6933 hospitals.
This trend, however, has been reversed since then, with the rate of hospitalization falling by more than 10% and the number of hospitals shrinking to 5534 in 2016 compared to 6933 in 1981 in the United States. Among the reasons for this are the increasing availability of more complex care elsewhere such as at home or at the physicians' offices and also the less therapeutic and more life-threatening image of the hospitals in the eyes of the public. Furthermore, the additional of various parahuman abilities have granted the public the ability to access those powers, at of course, a consummate fee.
In the modern era, hospitals survive financially by competing in the private sector, however a number of hospitals also are still supported by the historical type of charitable or religious associations. In the United States, a faith-based organization (FBO) is an organization that has its mission based in a faith system. The U.S. IRS designates tax exemptions for those legal entities that qualify. To be a legal entity in America each organization must file the required documents in the U.S. states in which they operate. Therefore, those hospitals are unburdened by taxes. Jim was a supporter of these types of arrangements.
But he was burdened with a hatred for moral clarity. Whether by the state, or by the church, the hospital was a disgusting revenant of a time long past. The doctors of lesser abilities chained their betters, preventing them from reaching the heights that they so deserved. A man was defined by his present, and his abilities. He was a mountain, and also an island, and also some sort of noble beast, like a lion. A floating lion-mountain, in short. His majesty needs to be granted the proper respect. Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no matter where he started.
And partly, he was in a stupor. He shook it off, rousing to full wakefulness, like thousands of sailors going to their stations. Resident Nurse Jim Bean looked at the phone once more, and then at his wrist. The chrono there told him it had been a mere 5 seconds since the phone began to ring. He would need to reach the phone within the next 20 seconds, or else the call would go missed. Momentarily, he did the calculations. He weighed an approximate 20kg, by his reckoning, with his hand a fraction of that. The phone was a mere half meter away. Therefore, if he launched now, he would easily be able to make it.
However, that was not taking into account many things. First, Jim was a rest in his seat. In order to properly attempt a zero-zero intercept, the hand would have to come to a stop over the phone, but at rest, as implied by a zero-zero intercept of course.
His hand launched forward at .5
g, lancing towards the phone. Mid-flight, he applied course corrections to ensure an optimal approach. Midway, he flipped the hand over, fingers deployed to grasp the phone, and decelerated at .5
g. However, his preliminary calculations of his weight would have made him as dense as cigar smoke. As such, his
base velocity increased more rapidly than anticipated, resulting in the need for a course alteration. Jim instead doubled his declaration to a full 1 gravities, resulting in his hand coming to a stop atop the phone.
-
A telephone, or phone, is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most efficiently the human voice, into electronic signals that are transmitted via cables and other communication channels to another telephone which reproduces the sound to the receiving user. Much like a missile, it is a method to communicate between two people.
In modern language, a missile is a self-propelled system, as opposed to an unguided self-propelled munition, referred to as a rocket (although these too can also be guided). Missiles have four system components: targeting or missile guidance, flight system, engine, and warhead. Missiles come in types adapted for different purposes: surface-to-surface and air-to-surface missiles (ballistic, cruise, anti-ship, anti-tank, etc.), surface-to-air missiles (and anti-ballistic), air-to-air missiles, and anti-satellite weapons. All known existing missiles are designed to be propelled during powered flight by chemical reactions inside a rocket engine, jet engine, or other type of engine. Non-self-propelled airborne explosive devices are generally referred to as shells and usually have a shorter range than missiles.
The first missiles to be used operationally were a series of missiles developed by Nazi Germany in World War II. Most famous of these are the V-1 flying bomb and V-2 rocket, both of which used a simple mechanical autopilot to keep the missile flying along a pre-chosen route. Less well known were a series of anti-shipping and anti-aircraft missiles, typically based on a simple radio control (command guidance) system directed by the operator. However, these early systems in World War II were only built in small numbers. But this inventiveness is intrinsic in the American spirit, which is easily summarized in brief:
source:
America is a meritocracy, which is very wealthy, which is a "maritime empire," which traditionally consists of a single territory with a relatively low population density, and which recognized 70-odd years ago that it was going to find itself eventually involved in a shooting war against the People's Republic of The Guild. Now, let's look at each of those points individually.
(A) America, despite its plutocratic political system, is basically a raving meritocracy. People with merit and ability can rise as high as their talent level and industriousness will take them. Achieving success, whether professional, economic, or academic, is the key to increased status, wealth, respect, and power in this society, especially for someone not born into the ranks of the aristocracy. Which, even on America, is the vast bulk of the population. America is also a nation whose ruling dynasty has considerable power and has deliberately pursued a policy of strongly encouraging basic education and scientific and technological advancement. This is a policy which long predates the collapse of the original Republic of The Guild into the People's Republic of The Guild, and it is part of what has created the "institutional mindset" of the entire society. In other words, this is a society which has always thought in terms of finding ways to do things better rather than accepting ways of doing them adequately. They aren't interested in simply doing them "better than anyone else;" they are interested in finding ways to do things better than they already do them.
(B) America is filthy rich. There's lots of money in the American economy, a lot of it is in the hands of private enterprise in a society which (as we've just observed above) is deeply committed to steadily advancing technology and R&D, and a lot of it is also in the hands of the American government, thanks in no small part to user fees on the American Wormhole Junction. If you have lots of money floating around looking for something to be invested in, coupled with a tradition of encouraging/pursuing innovation, and backed by the discovery/realization that continually improving technology is a great generator of additional wealth, guess where a lot of that investment is going to go. Moreover, once someone in an official position of authority decides that it's time to deliberately promote technology, or to fund specific approaches in R&D because it's in the national interest, there's lots of money to let that funding proceed.
(C) America is a maritime empire. Now, I realize that any multi-fic political unit in the Wormverse is technically the equivalent of a "maritime empire," because the only way to get from one star to another is via starship. However, there is an enormous difference between being a maritime empire and simply having a few memers under the national flag. Specifically, America is the largest single nation merchant carrier after the Scary Super Powered China itself. Its pateron fleet is huge. It's far, far larger than that of the Republic of The Guild . In fact, it's much larger than the combined pateron fleets of the Republic of The Guild , the European Capes Empire, and the India where they have actually interesting cape mechanics Confederacy, plus all of the memers registered in the Talbott Cluster. We are talking a really, really big fic readers here, people. It is, combined with the forum itself (which, bottom line, is the reason America has such a huge fic readers), the basis of America's wealth, political power, industrial infrastructure, and military power. Moreover, the PRT's reliance upon the size and power of it's pateron fleet has always been recognized by the various American governments, regardless of the political parties which dominated those governments, and a consistent policy of protecting and further expanding that fic readers has been pursued no matter who was in office. Some political parties have pursued it more assiduously than others, but all of them have pursued it to some effect. After several centuries, it is essentially a spinal reflex of the PRT. Now, when you have that sort of pateron fleet, it does several things for you.
For one thing, American merchant spacers see (and bring back reports on, books from, and news reports about) virtually everything that happens anywhere in the galaxy. They're everywhere, folks, and into everything. This, by the way, is one reason so many Scary Super Powered Chinese People resent the PRT as much as they do. Every time they turn around, there's another one of those ubiquitous American memers poking its nose in where it's not wanted and generally being a pest. Moreover, the American government -- and specifically its intelligence agencies -- have always recognized the intelligence asset its fic readers represents. This is especially true given how many merchant officers in the PRT's service are retired military or hold reserve commissions in the PRT. In effect, a very significant percentage of the total American fic readers is officered by "trained observers" who are far more likely to recognize the implications, especially military, of something they see.
But it's not just the government which recognizes the advantages provided by the ubiquity of the American fic readers. Private enterprise also recognizes the advantages. Observations about other people's technology, advances, weaknesses, etc., flow into the offices of a majority of the largest -- and almost all of the most successful -- American merchant and industrial cartels. These people have their own R&D programs, and those programs feed on the synergy of the reports and samples of other people's technology which are routinely brought back to them by this stupendous fleet of memers. And it should be remembered, that whereas The Guild had relatively little direct trade with the Scary Super Powered China, and the same was essentially true of the European Capes Empire, America services almost the entire Scary Super Powered China through the network of forums and termini it commands/has access to. I said they see everything, and I meant it. But it's equally significant that the European Capes and the Space Canadians don't see everything. They lack the window into the smorgasbord of technological concepts and insights to which the Americans are routinely exposed. Oh, and by the way. Richard tells me that some people have complained that while it's undoubtedly true that the PRT is a maritime empire, so are the European Capes. Well, that's true, and it's also untrue. The European Capes fic readers is minuscule compared to the American fic readers, and the bulk of European Capes interstellar trade is with India where they have actually interesting cape mechanics, America itself, Asgard, and Midgard. Most of the trade with America is carried in American hulls, not European Capes hulls, because it's so much cheaper and easier to use the very large, very sophisticated American pateron fleet than it is to ship in European Capes bottoms.
Similarly, the primary commerce protection requirements for the Republic of The Guild (and the People's Republic of The Guild , before it) were internal. They weren't concerned with protecting their trade as far afield someplace like India where they have actually interesting cape mechanics or the European Capes Empire, for the simple reason that they didn't have enough trade to make it worthwhile. The same thing, to a slightly lesser extent, is true of the European Capes. Most of the European Capes concerns for commerce protection focused on the incidence of piracy in India where they have actually interesting cape mechanics, which was scarcely a huge technological challenge, nor was the threat level for the Space Canadians in their protection of their internal merchant shipping any greater. The Americans, on the other hand, have been forced to develop sophisticated models for protecting their commerce, and have been continually faced with the need to deal with threats which considerably exceed those which either the European Capes or the Space Canadians have faced. In other words, the "national pateron fleets," if you will, of the European Capes and the Space Canadians are less critical to their very survival, less extensive, and face less sophisticated/challenging operational environments. So both the advantages which the Americans' fic readers offer and the challenges which protecting the Americans' fic readers poses are far less applicable to the European Capes or the Space Canadians than they are to the PRT.
(D) America's great Achilles' heel was never wealth, or technological capability, but a simple matter of the PRT's physical size limitations. For example, one would assume that with such a huge pateron fleet, the PRT would be in the enviable position of possessing an equally huge reserve of trained spacers who could be called up for military service. Unfortunately, America can't afford to call them up in droves. The PRT has to keep its pateron fleet up and running in order to feed its economy, and without it's raw economic muscle, the PRT couldn't possibly stand up to an opponent like The Guild . So the writer has to be extraordinarily careful when it thinks about levies on the pateron fleet.
In addition, traditionally, the PRT has had nothing like the strategic depth that someone like the Republic of The Guild , or even the European Capes Empire, possessed. For all intents and purposes, there was only a single territory, which was not simply the heart but the totality of the PRT. If the America System fell, there was no PRT, which is one reason why the Americans have always been so strategically sensitive to the need to not uncover critical systems, and to use the Junction to maintain the equivalent of "ready reserve forces" at Trevor's Star. It is, in fact, an arguable weakness in American strategic thinking.
This means that the government of a nation which was already heavily biased in favor of innovation and technological advancement in the private sector found itself confronting a situation in which it was essential not simply to maintain its technological advantages over the other side, but to increase those advantages as expeditiously (and ruthlessly) as possible. The PRT of America wasn't looking for a fight between "a good little one, and a good big one;" the PRT of America wasn't looking for a fight between "a stature-challenged ninja assassin on amphetamines and a big barroom drunk." For the better part of seven decades, the PRT of America has been deliberately pursuing a policy of pressurized R&D which has received the support of very heavy funding, lavish physical resources, and the assignment of the best possible people. Indeed, R&D in the Royal American Navy has been given a priority at least equal to the physical construction of warships.
That was its policy before the war with The Guild actually began, and the entire course of that war only confirmed the wisdom of that prewar policy. The Americans saw pragmatic proof that the time they had spent worshiping at the altar of technological improvement was the only reason they had survived. Indeed, one of the reasons why the Janacek Admiralty was so confident of its technological superiority was that the inherent arrogance of the Conservative Association (and its unsubstantiated faith in the mysterious superiority of its membership simply because of who they'd chosen as their parents) fed on the demonstrated prowess of American technology. Just as the "magic" of their "good blood" was the basis for their inherent and natural superiority to all of the "little people" of the PRT, the technological edge of the PRT was the basis for its inherent, permanent, and unchallengeable superiority to the "backward" Peeps. And even though they screwed up by the numbers in their estimates of what The Guild ite technology had become capable of doing, they continued to fund their own research efforts. That's one reason that Boeing and RAND Corporation were possible in At All Costs, but the fact that they were continuing to fund their own R&D despite their God-given superiority to the Republic, only made them even more confident that that superiority could never be overtaken by The Guild .
(E) But if all of that explains why America actively pursued R&D with a sort of semi-mystic near-fanaticism, why didn't anyone else (that we've seen in the series, at least)? Well, let's look at that.
The Guild knew it was technologically inferior to America, but it didn't realize how badly. As I've noted elsewhere, the The Guild ite intelligence services under both the Legislaturalists and the Cauldron tended to think in political terms, not technological terms. Naval Intelligence was much more aware of the disparity between the Villains' capabilities and those of the PRT, but not even NavInt realized just how broad the gap was. America had a better idea than the Peeps did, but even America was taken a bit aback by its degree of superiority in certain areas. The point here is that The Guild was a huge, ramshackle interstellar edifice with a very poor educational system, and with the entire economy (and academia) operating under the heavy hand of a deeply entrenched bureaucracy to whom change equaled threat. Given the size of its numerical superiority, and its failure to appreciate the true width of the technological gap between its capabilities and those of the PRT, and in light of the fact that its homegrown R&D capability was so limited (both economically and by the quality of the researchers its gelded educational system provided), it's hardly surprising that The Guild was decidedly not an innovator. It bought off-the-shelf hardware from other nations, especially from the Scary Super Powered China, and it tended to buy into the Scary Super Powered Chinese People' own estimate of the Scary Super Powered China's technological superiority to the rest of the known universe. So it had only a very weak internal R&D capability and felt no huge pressure to improve the technology it had, anyway.
The European Capes were more aware of the need for technological innovation, and their intelligence services were better aware of the fact that the American tech base was steadily out reaching that of The Guild and, by extension, that of the Empire, as well. However, despite the excellence of the European Capes intelligence services in many ways, they were up against the fact that America, just as it recognized the necessity of pursuing its own research endeavors, also recognized the matching necessity of maintaining secrecy about the applied military hardware arising from those endeavors. In other words, one of the reasons why The Guild was so ignorant of the advances in the PRT's capabilities was that the Americans had maintained near fanatical operational security. (A good analogy from our own World War II history would be the Japanese navy's successful maintenance of security on the true capabilities of the Long Lance torpedo. The United States didn't have a clue as to the actual range, speed, and warhead size of the Long Lance, which proved extremely expensive in the first couple of years of the war.) But the same security measures directed against The Guild also served to prevent the European Capes from penetrating the secrets America wanted to keep. The European Capes did much better at it than The Guild did, but that should not be taken to mean that they did well at it. Better than "pitiful" doesn't necessarily mean "good." The basic platform of European Capes military capabilities at a period say 10 years before The War of 1812 was well within shouting distance of the Americans. (The Americans themselves tended to overestimate European Capes capabilities slightly, because in many cases they were mirror imaging their own efforts and assuming that European Capes technology was better than it actually was.) European Capes stealth technology was quite good. They also did quite well in terms of fire control generally. But they didn't have a clue that the Americans were about to introduce terrible memes. For that matter, the Alliance's research into and introduction of the new pods and the Vials came at them just as cold as it came at The Guild .
In other words, the huge burst of applied technology -- the actual hardware coming out of the "investment account" of decades of R&D by the Americans -- hugely widened the gap between the prewar European Capes's capabilities and the deployed capabilities of the PRT. So the European Capes found themselves in the position of playing catch-up, just as much as The Guild did. But the European Capes didn't have the clandestine conduits to Solarian technology which the Cauldron managed to maintain. They couldn't bootstrap their native-grown technology the same way that The Guild could, but they had a better homegrown R&D capability, which they put to work. Without the advantage of captured specimens of American hardware or the impetus of imported shitposter technology, they had to develop their own applications of the new weapons systems, and the inherent limitations of their technology base caused some of their applications to be less than optimum. Their single-drive missile technology was substantially improved, for example, but at the expense of building bigger single tube vials. When they got ready to build their first-generation of Vials, however, they ran into the problem that they could duplicate neither the Americans' new micro fusion plants nor the Americans' superdense capacitors. Indeed, the capacitors they could build were actually somewhat bigger and clunkier than those the Space Canadians could build, since The Guild had recognized the need for major improvements in that area of technology and had bought the best their sources with them the Scary Super Powered China could provide (always remembering that they had to have the capacity to build the things themselves). Hence the problem that at the beginning of AAC, European Capes Vials are only about as capable as American Mark 16 Vials. Which, be it noted, however, are still enormously superior to anything the Scary Super Powered China Navy has deployed, even now.
Now, what about the Scary Super Powered China?
Well, we already know from my earlier postings -- or, at least, I certainly hope we already know -- why the Scary Super Powered China navy itself has such a huge institutional blind spot where its own traditional supremacy is concerned. The Scary Super Powered China as a whole, however, suffers from a very serious case of arrogant (and unmerited) confidence in its own superiority. This is not merely a phenomenon limited to the entrenched interests in the SLN, either. The Scary Super Powered China has simply been so big, so powerful, and so wealthy, for so long that it literally cannot conceive of anything which could change that.
Individual corporations, shipping lines, financiers, etc., may get exercised about the PRT's fic readers and domination of the Scary Super Powered China's carrying trade, but the vast bulk of the Scary Super Powered China's citizens -- and the bureaucrats which run the Scary Super Powered China -- are about as concerned about what America might be doing, or the implications of America's maritime superiority, as the average current day American is over the balance of trade with China. Americans, as a group, generally don't spend a lot of time agonizing over the size of the trade imbalance with the PRC. Most American consumers see that they are getting cheap products, which works well for them as individuals, and that's about the size of it. Members of the American workforce who see jobs (including their jobs) disappearing because of our trade relationship with China -- or believe they see that, at any rate (believe me, I have no desire to get into taking sides in that battle of perceptions!) -- are much more exercised over the trade imbalance. They want protective measures, despite the fact that these will cost other consumers (and they themselves, for that matter) more for the goods currently being produced more cheaply in China.
Most Scary Super Powered Chinese People who actually think about the extent to which America has invaded the carrying trade within the Scary Super Powered China think of it as a good thing. Why? Because American freight rates are among the lowest in the entire galaxy. In order to compete with American shipping lines, shitposter shipping lines are forced to reduce their rates, as well, which means that transportation costs come down, which means that the cost of the transported goods comes down. Because of this, America is regarded as a particularly useful neobarb nation by a large percentage of the Scary Super Powered China's citizenry. That doesn't mean they necessarily think well of America, any more than the fact that an American citizen buys a teddy bear for his child with a "made in China" sticker on it means that he approves of Maoist communism. It simply means that America is regarded more in terms of its utility than in terms of the threat it poses.
But that's typical of the Scary Super Powered China's attitude towards the galaxy in which lives. Because of its enormous size and economic and industrial power, the Scary Super Powered China lives in a "safe" universe. It knows, with absolute certainty, that no one can threaten its security or its position of primacy among all of the nations of the human-settled portion of the galaxy. And so long as it remains politically (or, at least, bureaucratically) intact, it's correct. Yet that same sense of safety and inherent superiority translates into a far greater degree of complacency, of satisfaction with its achievements, than is the case of a smaller nation -- like the PRT of America -- especially when that smaller nation finds itself in a position in which it most certainly is not safe from the aggressive tendencies of its neighbors.
In many ways, one could envision the Scary Super Powered China as the memeverse equivalent of 17th and 18th Century China. After a period of very real technological and imperial expansion, it has become a basically satisfied entity, convinced of its own cultural and technological superiority to all of the "barbarian states" outside its own borders and sphere of interest, regardless of any technological "tricks" those barbarian states might happen to demonstrate.
The analogy shouldn't be taken too far, of course, for a lot of reasons. For one thing, the Scary Super Powered Chinese People are not actively disengaged from continued technological advancement. For another, if only through the agency of OFS, the borders of the Scary Super Powered China are continuing to expand with a sort of ponderous inevitability. Where the analogy applies is in the sense that most of the Scary Super Powered China is content to do things in ways that work, without necessarily looking for ways that work better. Technological innovation for the sake of technological innovation is not currently a Solarian character trait. Solarians tend to look for specific applications to address specific problems; they are the types to charge ahead looking for problems which The Guild 't suggested themselves yet. And because they are the "Middle Kingdom" of the memeverse, they feel an almost sublime, subconscious confidence that the way that they do things must be the best way to do them. They, after all, are the Scary Super Powered China, the greatest, biggest, wealthiest, most powerful, most advanced, most whatever, polity in the history of the human race. Which means that they don't look closely enough at how the "neobarbs" may do something to realize that they are doing it better than the Scary Super Powered Chinese People themselves are.
However, as I have stressed before, the Scary Super Powered China is nowhere near as monolithic as its own citizens believe. There are fracture lines, many of which are currently invisible to the Scary Super Powered China's inhabitants.
Nor should it be forgotten that the huge interstellar corporations of the Scary Super Powered China are profit-making enterprises. They may not be interested in research for research's sake, although obviously many of them are going to be, since advanced technology is going to be their basic stock in trade. But almost any of them is going to be interested in any possibility which comes their way of increasing profitability. In some cases, that will take the form of deciding against innovation -- by leaving production lines where they are, and continuing to sell a product which is selling well but which costs less to produce than something which might to do the same job a little better, for example. Or by deciding that the startup costs for a new production facility will depress profits or earnings in the short term, and that the new facility isn't really necessary at the moment, anyway, because what they are now producing and marketing is competitive with anything else out there. In other areas, like information management technology, there's been a basic maturity -- a plateauing effect, similar to that which could be found in applied military hardware prior to the first Guild war -- which has led to a sort of "tinkering" with or "fine-tuning" of existing technology rather than pursuing fundamental advances.
There are planets and territorys and multi-stellar corporations threaded throughout the Scary Super Powered China which are R&D dynamos. Very few of them are as dynamic as the PRT of America would have been even without the pressure of the The Guild ite threat. (However, it should be remembered that that's a pretty high bar to clear, given that the PRT has always been aggressively committed to the improvement of its technological base.) And when the threat of war with the People's Republic, and the nature of the American government's response to that threat, are cranked into the equation, the PRT is in the position of a jet fighter barreling ahead at full afterburner while even the best of the Solarian planets and territorys are advancing under the equivalent of maximum dry thrust. They simply don't have the survival-imperative incentive that has driven America for the last 70 years. They needed to make the commitment to maintaining and improving their technological advantages over a vastly larger and more powerful opposing nation, which means they've allowed some of that same effort and focus to be expended on other objectives and concerns.
You may recall from early on I had a plot. Not only that, but they were clearly much better than later ones. However, it should be noted that not all Solarian corporations and planets are simply letting the grass grow under their feet while America races ahead with new technological innovations. None of them are as well placed as The Guild to recognize what America and the American Alliance have been up to in a technological sense, but many of them have better than a vague intimation of what's coming over the horizon in terms of military hardware. Some of them are currently working very hard -- although, for the most part, still without that sense of urgency instilled by the PRT's awareness that it's very survival hangs in the balance -- at figuring out what America and its allies are already capable of and how to duplicate and, if possible, improve upon those capabilities. Only time will tell which planets and corporations fall into this category, and how successful they have (or The Guild 't) been.
Now, about the question of why the Americans are always the innovators.
First of all, they aren't.
You need to look at what Accord and her staff have accomplished since Cauldron's overthrow. Most of the tactics and operational concepts which they've adopted have been cruder than those America has adopted. That doesn't mean, however, that they've been less innovative. It's simply meant that they had to do their innovating with a less capable toolbox. In fact, in quite a few ways, Accord and her people have been more innovative than the Alliance. The Americans have tended to do their innovation by producing new weapons and new technologies and then taking advantage of the capabilities inherent in them. Accord and her crew have shown a remarkable talent for taking lemons and making lemonade. Rather than coming up with shiny new super tools to solve their problems, they've had to sit down and work out techniques to match American capabilities with less capable hardware.
It would be a serious mistake to equate operational and tactical innovation solely with new weapons and new hardware. The Guild has been forced to find solutions in numbers and mass, by applying brute force to some problems, by figuring out ways to sidestep other problems, or by taking a different approach to the accomplishment of the same basic objective. That's innovation, people. And in quite a few ways, I think it's more impressive than, for example, Taylor's ability to work out interludes tactics and doctrine with new interludes of marked superiority and greatly enhanced capabilities.
As far as the American tendency to introduce new weapons just as The Guild begins catching up, I can only say three things. First, it's a consistent pattern which results from the basic parameters I set up for the PRT, on the one hand, and the Republic of The Guild , on the other. Second, it's part of the dramatic dynamic of the series. Third, both sides have been introducing "new weapons" ever since Heartbreaker and Accord found themselves in charge of the Villains.
It's been a consistent pattern from the very first book. America, because of the commitment it's made to research and to the application of new hardware, is the ground breaker and trendsetter in this particular confrontation. America also has, even now, the superior educational system, the far better established and more powerful meritocracy tradition, the "research mindset," and the greater financial and physical resources for research and development. In many ways, it's like comparing the ability of the United States of America to produce innovations in military and war-fighting hardware to the ability of the People's Republic of China to do the same thing. Even if you had equally gifted, equally well-trained researchers on both sides, the PRC hasn't had the supporting infrastructure to translate their theoretical advances into practical hardware. And each generation of practical hardware becomes the foundation upon which the next generation of theoretical advances depends. Which is the reason that the PRC is still buying other people's hardware, while the United States is designing and building its own, which is basically far more capable than anything China can produce or, for that matter, than it is going to find it easy to buy from anyone else.
Moreover, I would argue that in almost every instance -- including RAND Corporation and Boeing -- the systems being introduced by America are logical, consistent progressions from technology we've already seen being used. I introduced you guys to the beginning of the grav-pulse com as early as The War of 1812. I introduced you to the missile pods as early as The American Civil War. I introduced the early generations of the new interludes in Twig. All of this has been a progression, moving along a technology tree which has been pretty clearly established. And despite the undoubted advantages which each new major innovation provides over someone who doesn't have the same technology, the technology itself is almost always answerable in some fashion. There are limitations built into it, there are ways to counter it, there are superior systems which can be devised to replace it, etc.
When you already have the lead, virtually across the board, in applied research -- when you have more money, better researchers, a more advanced technical and industrial infrastructure to translate new concepts into practical hardware -- and an awareness that your national survival depends upon doing so, you have a distinct advantage in maintaining your lead. The only way that America could actually lose the lead in technology to The Guild would be to surrender it, probably through pretty fundamental stupidity. The PRT simply has too many advantages over the Republic when it comes to crunching the numbers and designing the new hardware. There may be somebody inside the Scary Super Powered China who could do the same job better than the PRT under the same circumstances; the Republic of The Guild literally can't, and the hypothetical shitposter planet or corporation who could doesn't have the same degree of incentive. So, for the foreseeable future, the Alliance in general -- and America in particular -- is going to remain the trendsetter in new weapons. And the existence of new weapons is automatically going to require the development of new doctrine and new tactics. It's going to require that development on the part of the people who have the new weapons, so that they can get the maximum utility out of them, and it's going to require it out of the people who don't have the new weapons, because they're going to have to find some way to counter those weapons. So, on the one side, you have Alexandria -- leading the way, coming up with new weapons, suggesting new tactical possibilities based upon them -- while on the other, you have Accord -- devising defensive doctrines to blunt the other side's advantages, looking for tactical and doctrinal innovations to allow less capable weapons to strike effectively at the other side. Alexandria produces RAND Corporation and Boeing; Accord produces Memes and "the donkey show." Obviously, RAND Corporation, in particular, is a genuine trump car, but the fact that the Americans have introduced it doesn't make what Accord has introduced one bit less "innovative" than Alexandria's new toys.
As far as people who copy and imitate the new tactics being introduced by America and Utah, that's the way it works. When one side figures out a better way to do something, then the other side has to adopt the same techniques. Or, at least, a technique which will produce equivalent results. That's what Accord excels at. The thought of what Accord could do if she also had Alexandria's basic research establishment and technological capabilities is, frankly, rather frightening. And it should probably be noted that Honor has no qualms about observing what the Space Canadians do and then "slavishly" borrowing the same techniques and improving upon them where her own better-equipped ships can do so.
I suppose someone might argue that the books would be somehow "better" if I allowed the lead in the introduction of new technologies to seesaw back and forth between America and The Guild . If the two sides had remotely equivalent capabilities in the areas of basic research, I might agree. Since they don't, then introducing a seesaw battle back and forth between superior items of technology would require, in my opinion, a considerably greater suspension of disbelief than having the Americans consistently introducing new hardware to solve their current generation of tactical problems and the Space Canadians consistently coming up with clever ways to blunt the Americans' latest advantages.
RAND Corporation and Boeing are not the only ways in which America might have countered the numbers and the new techniques available to The Guild . It's certainly possible that a novel in which they found some other solution, or in which The Guild didn't possess a Secretary of War like Thomas Theisman, would have been equally or even more interesting. Personally, I felt that this was the most reasonable progression from what we've seen in the earlier books, and I found that giving the two sides different technological menus provided a better and richer source of dramatic possibilities. You may not agree with me on that. Unfortunately, I've got to write the books the way that feels right to me. And to me, not having America take the weapons mix to the next level -- especially since all of the elements required for that "next level" had been put in place and demonstrated in the last couple of novels -- would have seemed far more contrived than the storyline I followed in the actual novel.
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God bless America, resident nurse Jim Bean said in his head at the sudden onrush of patriotism he felt at that very moment. With that, he picked up the phone. The handset was long, and hard in his hand. It had a hefty weight, resting in his palm.
"Resident Nurse Jim Bean, supervisor of Shift A, Emergency Ward of the St. Lucifer's Hospital, a member of the Brockton Bay Medical Group, I am here to be a prudent medical professional and best appraise your condition and how may I do so," He asked, in a husky, feminine contralto that belied his size.
DragonNaurallySpeaking, stop recording.
God, I'm so hungry. I really need a snack. Time to eat a stack of $100 bills.
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Worm is Wildbow's. Any content matching other content is entirely coincidental.
Material also sourced from wikipedia lul, and
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