Honor Harrington/Headscratchers

• How do live-fire exercises work, precisely? I can see it doing well enough with energy weapons, but I've seen too many ships fire real nuclear missiles after having been caught in the middle of a live-fire exercise to quite believe it.
  • My understanding is that the missiles don't have live warheads so much as live drives- that is, the missile fire and PD isn't simulated by computers, but you actually fire the missiles, shoot real PD at them, and then simulate any damage. As to the sudden shift from live fire to real, there's two possibilities that come to mind: 1) The missile warheads are deactivated in an exercise but still there, or 2) the magazines have both exercise and live warheads. Tac officers swap between contact nukes and laser heads as the situation requires, as I recall.
  • IIRC Storm from the Shadows states that warheads are attached when loaded into the tubes.
  • It's my understanding (from the vague things I heard from my USN officer father) that modern navies, with the advent of "intelligent" projectiles (which modern missiles & torpedoes are) already do live-fire exercises, with all the standard guidance systems but dummy warheads (possibly with self-destruct mechanisms to avoid actual damage, although that's entire my own guesswork), damage being assessed by computer systems. So I simply assumed the computers that make this possible advance on scale with the rest of technology. As far as the switch-over, I guess it's not a good idea to send out a warship (especially a bunch of them) with no actually effective weapons, right?

• Is there any distinction whatsoever between Liberals and Progressives, or between Centrists and Crown Loyalists?
  • There are lots. Liberals in Manticore are, in fact, radical socialists, who believe that isolationism and welfare state are the things to go for. True, they are indeed quite liberal socially, but not in the economics or matters of state. After Montaigne takeover of the party, they shifted towards the etatism and expansionism in their foreign policy (a move that was brewing inside the party for a long time, but was checked by New Kiev and her cronies), but still remained pretty much socialist. Progressives, on the other hand, are essentially opportunists (though not to the New Men extent). They don't really have any strong political conviction except some vague left-leaning sympathies, and thus usually side with Liberals, but mostly they care about power and influence. Centrists are Exactly What It Says on the Tin, and Crown Loyalists hold dear the belief that whatever is good for the Crown is good for Manticore. Given that Elizabeth and her inner circle are, in fact, Centrist to the last man (and woman), this makes then Centrist too.
  • The Centrist and Crown Loyalists have not always gotten along, but much of the current set of politics is the result of the Lord's coliaition's to keep power being opposed by the Crown. Gryphon, for instance, is a hotbed of Crown Loyalists rather than centralist interests because they traditionally oppose the power of the Lords, leading to the one internal armed conflict within Manticore's history, and the Crown Loyalists had the support of the Army and the crown against the Lords.
  • There are also hints of change now as the Lords lose power to the Commons where the static influences keeping the same power blocs in control for years are now dying out.

• How do warships keep themselves stocked in food, particularly with regards to such non-nutritious frivolities as celery?
  • Honorverse ships are big. So they just have really big cellars. It's also entirely possible that enviro dept keeps hydroponic gardens on a bigger ones.
  • The HMAMC Wayfarer in Honor Among Enemies has a hydroponics garden where Nimitz and Samantha rendezvous that grows tomatoes. Honor also complains (as a narrator) about the tedium of having to sign off on hydroponics inventories. However, it's pretty clear from some of the things eaten on ships (including meats, cheeses, and wines) that they ships probably carry some food in storage.
  • Even then most ships have crews in the range of what Aircraft carriers have today, and similar logistic arrangements.

• One of the constantly recurring themes is that Silesia is so messed up because nobody has the small ships required to police it. Then, after that situation is resolved finally, the authors finally mention that there is are hyper capable combatants that are smaller than destroyers, just nobody has built them in 50+ years.
  • Silesia is so messed up not because there are no ships to police it, but because it doesn't have a government worth a shit, but still counts as a sovereign nation from a political standpoint. There are mentions in novels that Manticoran attempts to police it were often met by protests and complaints, both by Andies, who felt that Manties were encroaching on what they wanted to grab themselves, and by Sillies as well -- mostly by the corrupt governors who didn't like the attention it brought to their schemes. The matter of ships is incidental to the political problem of Silesia being a failed state.
  • Another matter is frigates themselves. These are very peculiar ships (essentially, a LAC with hyper generator) and simply aren't very practical. The bulk of a HG in a LAC-sized hull prevents installation of any significant armament, and their endurance isn't anything to write home about too -- remember that "modern-style" LACs were made only by introduction of a Grayson-pattern fission piles, with their greatly reduced fuel consumption. So frigates came out tiny, unprotected, weakly armed and short-legged, and thus of little use in any fleet action, and even for piracy interdiction they were of questionable use, given that most pirates in Silesia were disgruntled local PDFs or militias, which often had access to a "real" warships upwards of a destroyer.
  • Also important to remember, given that the Honorverse started as the Napoleonic Wars In Space!, that Silesia is clearly an Expy of 18th century "Germany". The Andermani probably stand in for Prussia, which had been steadily growing in power and reasserting hegemony lost in the Germanic states since the de facto break up of the HRE. The other alternative is that the AE is a stand-in for Russia (perhaps hinted at by the Harris' government reluctance to invade it at long distance), and the actions in War of Honor are a vague mirror of the Moscow campaign (although in that case you'd have to imagine the original plot got even more heavily rewritten than we know it did, and Midgard/Asgard was supposed to play a bigger part). Or it could be a combination of both. Anyway, to get back to the original point, 18th century Germany was a bunch of principalities and dukedoms with the clout and economy to support a few hundred men each, or a few thousand if they actually fought a war and called out the levies, none of whom trusted each other. Scale that up, and you've got a ton of fiercely independent planetary governments with a couple of frigates and maybe a destroyer apiece, determined not to recognize each other as having any claim on them but holding a vague allegiance to something that historically sort of existed once - and half of them are corrupt. I've also come to the conclusion that, much as he likes showing his work, Weber is often more interested in the political "atmosphere" of minor characters or areas. than how exactly some of the side details work out.
    • I think Silesia is in a large part a stand-in for, well, Silesia -- a certain part of land that could be either salled Germanized Poland or Polonized Germany, had not part of it historically been Czech. ;) It was long disputed between Kingdom of Poland (when it existed), various states in Germany and kingdom of Bohemia, with Austria (through the latter) and France (by the virtue of its historical ties with Poland) having often as much pieces in the game as others. AE is definitely Prussia, though.

• Treecats can "talk" to humans now. Great. So how about showing us more of the effects this is having on human and treecat society as a whole? How about showing more human/treecat conversations even? Prior to Mission of Honor, hardly any treecat speech was even rendered into English—it was almost entirely Intelligible Unintelligible gestures. I'd like to see more treecat/human conversations, appearances on talk shows, scientific research, etc. This is one of the biggest sociological breakthroughs to happen on Manticore in decades, and it's hardly even mentioned anymore.
  • For what it's worth, in At All Costs, it's mentioned a few times that there is a big study being done exactly along these lines. So it is happening, but Weber's more concerned with space politics than the 'cats' integration into society as a whole.

• Why doesn't Paul just say 'oops, no thanks' when Summervale challenges him? Or at least, when he finds out he's a paid duelist, cancel the duel? Does Manticore really force people to go through with their duels even if it's likely one side was paid?
  • Honor Before Reason (pun intended). If he found out after accepting what kind of man Allen Summervale was, it most likely wouldn't serve as an excuse to bow of the current duel without solid proof that he'd been hired for that duel. At which point, it would be tantamount to admitting publicly that Summervale's accusations that Honor sacrificed her command for him and that she was just desperate for any man to love her were right. It would probably destroy his career (since accepting and then backing down from duels is considered an act of cowardice) and send her reputation down in flames.
    • Allen Summervale was a totally swell guy, please-and-thank-you. It's not good to put libel on one of the highest Kingdom nobles and Her Majesty's PM (and unofficial uncle) at that. ;) His distant cousin Denver Summervale, on the other hand....
  • Also, if he hadn't accepted the duel in the first place, he might have been subject to discipline and charges for striking Summervale in anger, which might have been true if he broke off the duel as well. "Fighting words" is rarely a defense when Paul could have challenged him to a duel himself for his insults to Honor. Duels are meant to be a more "civil" alternative to just waling on someone who insults you. Given the results, it looks like just saying, "Fuck you," and continuing the beat down might've been smarter, but hindsight's 20/20.
    • The ending to the chapter states, in somewhat vague terms, that Paul had to accept the duel for some reason. To this troper, this seems at odds with the claims made elsewhere that duelling was viewed as barbaric and anachronistic by the society at large.
      • WordOfGod went into more detail but essentially it came down to a few factors. Since Paul had attacked Denver he could be charged with assault and battery, however by challenging him Denver was effectively renouncing his option to press criminal charges (essentially you can press charges or challenge someone to a dual but you can't do both and once you select one the other is off the table) so by accepting the challenge Paul was providing legal protection for himself from the consequences of his assault. Additionally, refusing the challenge when it was offered would be regarded as cowardly since it would mean he was willing to assault someone when he had the advantage but was not willing to stand up to them in a "fair" fight, and being branded a coward would be extremely bad for his naval career (and potentially spill over onto his friends and family). Now the sensible thing to do would have been to not assault Denver in the first place however once he had accepting the duel was actually his best option in terms of minimizing both legal and societal repercussions.
      • In addition to the above, he actually had a decent chance of winning, Paul is a trained killer after all. Summervale beat him, but Paul put a bullet through him in the process, the duel could very well have ended up with it being Summervale being shipped off to the morgue and Paul leaving the field for immediate medical attention.
    • Paul was a "trained killer"? Since when? He might've been in the navy, but he was an engineer, not a foot soldier.
      • Paul was a black belt in Coup de Vitasse (or however you spell it) which definitely gave him the ability to kill someone hand to hand. Additionally the RMN does give all of it's officers significant training with small arms at the academy and while we don't know any specifics about whether Paul maintained his training it's not unreasonable to assume he did given his personality. Probably not to the degree that someone like Honor or a marine would but he probably spent some time on the shooting range.
    • Maybe, but calling him a "trained killer" makes it sound like he's some unstoppable badass when...he wasn't. He was an engineer, and I don't remember anything about his personality that suggested he would be particularly proficient with firearms.
    • Paul was first introduced as an executive officer aboard a hyper-capable warship. He knows how to shoot, as evidenced by the fact that he did shoot Summervale at a distance when he wouldn't have had time to aim. He never had a chance as high as 50-50 but his chances weren't as low as some people seem to imagine.

• There's a Thomas Theisman mentioned all the way back in Honor of the Queen. Remind me, is that the very same Thomas Theisman who shot Saint-Just and is Peep Secretary of War now? Going back over the old books feels odd in light of how Haven and warfare has changed.
  • That Thomas Theisman who commanded the second cruiser that Peeps "lent" to Masadans, the Alfredo Yu's second-in-command? Yep, that's the very same guy. Twenty years is quite a long time, doncha think?
    • Theisman takes exactly as long to go from being a cruiser's CO to a four-star admiral as Honor herself takes to go from being a cruiser's CO to a four-star admiral, so, not that hard to believe. Remember, he's supposed to be her Havenite counterpart.
  • He also made an appearance in A Short Victorious War commanding PNS Sword during their attack on Helen Zilwiki Sr.'s convoy.
  • Thomas Theisman was just an ordinary naval officer who was put in a position, quite by chance, where he could fix his country. It's expressly stated many times that he never wanted to be involved with the dirty politics of Haven, which was mistaken as not caring about the state of Haven's politics.

• The prevalence of Stealth in Space, particularly in the first two books, is bothersome. Yes, a ship that shuts down its impellers will not show up on your grav detectors. Yes, the radar blip from a ship looks the same as the radar blip from an asteroid. But a ship would also have to produce heat, and lots of it. It would shine like a beacon in the thermal infrared. Why don't any of the ultra-sophisticated sensor suites on Honorverse ships include plain old thermal detectors?
  • If you've turned your engines off and and reduced all electronics emissions to minimal levels, it would be logical to turn any heat-sinks off as well. Since the engines are specifically stated to be in the middle of the ship, lost heat should be relatively low. The sunny side of an asteroid wouldn't be any hotter. Sure, the interior of the ship will warm somewhat, but it's a favourable trade-off in exchange for not getting killed.
    • The ship will still be at considerably more that the ambient temperature of the space around it and will show up. Also, turning off/disabling the heat-sinks would be a quick way to cook everybody aboard (the problem with modern spacecraft is dissipating heat, not keeping warm and they don't have mucking great fusion reactors).
      • From what I understand, Honorverse ships mostly dump most of waste heat back into the ship's power systems, and store the ensuing energy in their capacitor banks which help provide power to things like energy armaments, missiles, impellers, artificial gravity and hyper generator. The rest is radiated using the smart paint on the hull, which can be manipulated to reduce or increase emissivity to either make it look natural or radiate on the side not facing the enemy. Of course this is pure conjecture coming from my reading of the various sources, so I may be wrong, and Weber has not said anything definitive about that.
        • Waste heat is called waste specifically because you cannot salvage it and reuse it for powering something else, or, alternately, chose not to due to complexity of the engineering involved (that's why current cars largely don't utilize the waste heat of exhaust gases, which is pretty high -- it would make engines prohibitively expensive). The Laws of Thermodynamics pretty much ensure that at least some heat can never be made to do useful work. Weber's warships, though, would generate so high amounts of waste heat that it would constitute a major problem hasn't it been somehow addressed. MWW, however, chose to avoid the matter -- either because he's not sure of his math, or just haven't invented a convincing way of dealing with it.
  • Because impellers are fair easier to see, can be seen at faster than light, and normally would not be shut down on a warship anywhere near hostiles since they give shielding. Further, according to Webber, they have some methods of selectively venting the heat to help in stealth along with active denile fields if you don't have an impeller up. Much of why Oyster Bay works is because Impellers were over focused on.
    • Not exactly because of that, though this has played its role. Remember, Oyster Bay had its own equivalent of Ford island radar station -- they did notice the "sensor ghost" that was one of the Mesan ships, but found nothing when they'd tried to investigate it. It's true that the impeller signatures are somewhat overfocused on even by the best of the best, but with their tech the EM emissions are much more difficult to track, and thus on the distances involved hardly anyone try, unless they have the compelling evidence that they should, like hyper footprints or something. And because spider drive doesn't use Warshawski sails or impellers, the hyper footprint of such equipped ship is much weaker than usually, even if the active stealth isn't counted in.
  • It is stated in Mission Of Honor that stealthed ships can emit their waste heat in a direction of their choice. If you are stealthing around the edge of the system then emitting your heat toward deep space would be a good idea for example.
    • That would probably work, if you knew where all of the enemy lookouts were. There's also the issue of radiator area, though, and the sad fact is that the narrower a cone you want to radiate your waste heat into, the bigger the radiator needs to be.
    • Modern (2011) era telescopes will take about 4 hours to find something the size of an asteroid radiating the heat of over 200 Kelvins greater than background energy. If one was willing to double check with light speed sensors or say, use a FTL sensor net to take light speed readings, spotting anything where the crew wasn't submerged in liquid helium should be relatively straight forward 2000 years from now. Chalk it up to Handwavium and move on.
    • If an active sidewall can stop a multi-gigawatt gamma-ray laser pulse, then it obviously blocks waste heat emitted from the inside as well. Shazam, you are now emitting waste heat only at whereever you choose to open a sidewall port -- especially now that RMN ships have bow and stern sidewalls.
      • A sidewall doesn't stop laser fire, it deflects it so that the laser beam will miss the ship it's protecting. A sidewall would likewise deflect outgoing radiation, but not block it.
    • Isn't a sidewall essentially a weak Impeller band? It's a stressed gravity band and would show up on Gravatic sensors.
• For all the chatter about how experienced the PN is, it's bothersome that they never win anything. On Basilisk Station is excusable. The conflict is ship to ship, and only one outcome is possible. The Honor of the Queen does a decent job in this regard. But in the next couple books - once the fleet war starts - it seems like the Peeps ought to score a few more wins than a surprised cruiser and - finally, in the fifth book - stopping White Haven. At the very least, the supposed massive tonnage difference ought to have made an appearance well before At All Costs, and to my memory it doesn't. As it is, the PN's competence, as a fleet, before Theismann takes over is at best an Informed Ability.
  • Be fair, by the time the 5th book rolled around, the Manties and the Peeps had only actively been shooting at each other since the end of the 4th book (they fought their opening battles in the third book, then there was a sort of breather period in the 4th book while everybody waited to see how Pierre's coup was going to shake out). Manticore didn't declare war on Haven until Pavel Young, Eleventh Earl of North Hollow (of all people) threw in with the factions of the Mantie government that wanted to press the war on Haven rather than sue for peace with the new government. Just because he was a Complete Monster didn't mean he wasn't Genre Savvy enough to see that the war was going to happen one way or another. IIRC, the way the balance of power worked was that the Manties had far superior quality of forces, but the Havenites had far superior size of forces, and the tech and training difference just wasn't there to let the Manties try to steamroll the Peeps without getting piled on. Hence, a much more protracted style of war with lots of small skirmishes and periodic major battles (oddly enough, about two major battles per book, in fact, accounting for the fact that later books tended to have multiple battles happen simultaneously as both sides got more adventurous.
  • Also, the Havenites do pull out a successful strategy from time to time. Oddly enough, they seem to do better when they use tactics more akin to what you'd expect the Manties to use: using lots of feints and raids to make the Alliance spread their forces around instead of letting them keep them together. It helps that their navy is so mind-bogglingly huge (at least compared to anyone except the Solarian League) that they can literally just throw squadrons of smaller ships into the meat grinder to keep the Manties on their heels, while the Manties are constantly struggling to produce enough picket ships to protect their own shipping.
  • The Havenites were also crippled by the fact that most of their senior officers were purged in the aftermath of Pierres coup, resulting in most Havenite admirals in the early years of the war lacking the skills and experience to do to their jobs. Add the that the civilian commissars which had the final say on how battles were conducted, the P Ns incompetence is fairly explicable.
  • Also, in the early years of the war the Havenite's numerical advantage was effectively dissipated by having to assign vessels to protect dozens of systems (many of which were likely to revolt even without Manticoran intervention if left unsupervised). Meanwhile Manticore only really needed to defend Manticore itself, and to a lesser extent Grayson, Basilisk, and Grendelsbane. As a result their was a rough parity, or even an advantage for Manticore in terms of the number of ships available for offensive action. Later in the series White Haven does remark that it was becoming harder to sustain offensives once Manticore found itself having to tie of ships to guard conquered territory.

• In Flag in Exile, Honor's pinnace is shot down and crashes into the spaceport's runway. As a safety feature, the pinnace ejects its hydrogen tanks -- one of which hits the terminal, explodes, and kills more people than were in the pinnace in the first place. If such accidents are possible, why aren't all buildings within a mile of the runway made out of spaceship armor, or something equally tough?
  • Possible explanation, it's mentioned that the ability to eject the hydrogen tanks is something built into military small craft but not civilian shuttles. If Harrington spaceport is a primarily civilian installation it might not really be designed to accommodate shuttles that eject bombs while crashing (a not unreasonable assumption, Honor lands there since it's her steading but Harrington steading as a whole does not seem to feature naval infrastructure so in all probability military small craft are very rare there). A modern analogy would be a damaged bomber making an emergency landing at a civilian international airport, they could presumably provide basic servicing (i.e. get the pilot out, refuel and tow it) but would lack the facilities to safely remove any bombs onboard.
  • As a military vessel, an emergency procedure is probably designed to save the ship (and its crew) and probably not too worried about ancillary damage. Compare with the emergency procedure (that sometimes works) of ejecting of an overloading ship's reactor - in an emergency you'll do it but it's equivilent to detonating a nuclear bomb, so you really hope you don't do that near any civilian areas (or anything at all, for that matter).
  • Real-world combat aircraft carry a feature that allows the pilots to automatically eject anything hanging from the under-wing hardpoints -- such as bombs, missiles, or spare fuel tanks -- in case of an emergency. This feature is obviously pretty damn harsh on anyone who happens to be directly underneath the aircraft at the time, but the designer put it in anyway because its not intended for use directly over friendly airfields. The basic design assumption was that the most likely place a military aircraft is going to suffer combat damage is when it's, y'know, actually in combat. So, both of the above tropers are entirely correct.

• Any number of things can go wrong during a construction project, even if nothing has been sabotaged. This is why 20th century construction workers wear hard hats. So why, when Skydomes was assembling a new crystoplast dome over a school, were people allowed to stand right under the giant crystoplast panel as it was being installed?
  • As I recall, that panel wasn't "being installed," that panel had already been installed, and that's just when it fell because of the sabotage.

• In one of the books (I believe it was Flag in Exile) it's mentioned that upon Manticore's founding, the colonists 'borrowed' the concept of Seperation of Church and State from the North Americans. But if Manticore was settled mostly by people from the 'Western Hemisphere' (and specifically Europe), then it would have people from countries like France (which invented the concept). And every other European country that ratified the Declaration of Human Rights for that matter. Why would Manticore have to borrow the concept if it should basically already have it several times over?
  • Because the primary cultural ancestor of the Star Kingdom of Manticore is Great Britain, which does have a state religion - the Anglican church.
• In On Basilisk Station, we're told that cutters use reaction thrusters because they're too small to have impellers and inertial compensators. If so, then how do they make the impeller-driven, man-portable surface-to-air missile that's used in The Short Victorious War to assassinate Constance Palmer-Levy?
  • It's not the impellers that Cutters are too small for, it's mostly the compensators which have to be a certain size. Even ship-to-ship missiles are smaller than Cutters and they have impellers too. But that's because missiles don't have crews and thus don't have people getting pulped by insane G forces.
  • Additionally missile drives are single use drives that can't be started and stopped repeatedly (hence why MDMs have multiple drive modules). Presumably this allows them to be more compact than the impellers used on vehicles which have a more demanding duty cycle.

• Did Weber ever explain why the combatants of the Honorverse don't have home-on-radar and home-on-jam SEAD weapons like we currently do?
  • Because they have? They're just relatively inefficient, due to the ship-based missile defense being supported by the ship's massive computers and thus being able to trick the relatively unsophisticated homing heads. The Too Dumb to Fool aspect of the current home-on-radar heads are actually characteristic to the current single-point emitters, and Weber's AMD widely utilizes decoys that may hold position kilometers from the ship's hull. Thus home-on-radar and home-on-jam heads don't really have the critical advantage over the normal ones, and those are noted multiple times to be somewhat ineffective against modern AMD. The birth of a podnaught and later Apollo were the attempts to break this pattern, the former by simply oversaturating the missile defense, where many or even most of the missiles would be lost to it, but some would get through, and the latter to give the attack birds head the same computing support the countermissiles routinely enjoy.
  • The other side of it is that missiles have to attack from a specific angle. The missile has to be able to detect the orientation of the target ship to avoid attacking it's wedge. A simple homing warhead would make it to easy to just roll ship and interpose the wedge between the ship and the missile.
  • As a side note there is one point in Honor of the Queen where Rafe is able to do exactly that against Thunder of God. However it's noted that the only reason it works is that the Masadans are letting the computer's run their ECM, a trained human would be able to spot it and compensate.

• Why does Albrecht Detweiler want people to believe the Detweiler line has died out? Only a few people even know who he is anyway and those that do it would have to be obvious that Ben, Colin et al are his relatives since they're his clones! Who exactly is it meant to be a secret from?
  • I presume it's mostly intended to be hidden from people outside the alignment. The original Detweiler was the main proponent of "improving" humanity and letting it be believed that his family has died out makes it easier for outsiders to believe that Mesan society as a whole no longer cares about that and is instead simply maintaining the status quo.
  • OP here, and I get that it's probably about keeping the circle of people "in the know" as small as possible (as the President of Haven said prior to his assassination "Any secret know to more than two people is automatically compromised") but I don't really see why he's acting the way he is. As it stands, he can make the League dance to his tune (apparently) so his plan has to be about not just running the whole shebang but be seen to be in charge (or at least, for his kids to be in charge, it'd probably take a while). But if he stays in the shadows you can't be seen to have won and stick it to those snooty Beowulfians. Maybe it's just the time isn't right?
    • Probably. A large chunk of the Alignment's plan is based on the fact that their opponents either don't believe they exist or if they do know don't actually know who they are. For example the Renaissance Factor is going to become a major part of their plan but they are being VERY careful to avoid any ties to Mesa. Having Albrecht Detweiler pop up as the leader of one of the league's successor states is going to immediately alert the Grand Alliance that the Renaissance Factor are bad guys (something they probably won't immediately realize otherwise) and is potentially going to convince other planets that Haven and Manticore may just be telling the truth about Mesa manipulating the League. No doubt the Alignment's plan does involve eventually revealing everything and saying "I told you so!" but doing it to early is just going to result in giving the good guys and obvious target and convincing some otherwise unaligned groups to sign up with the good guys.

• If Grayson has the technology to build orbital cattle farms (complete with pollutant-free atmosphere and grazing lands) why don't they just build them on the planet save the cost of climbing out of the gravity well?
  • Physics. It easier to build larger open spaces outside of a gravity well than in it. Remember that before the introduction of Manticoran technology Grayson lacked the materials to build large domes in a gravity well.
    • You don't really need domes for farms, so you wouldn't need any new materials, but I can see how construction would be easier. Still I find it hard to believe the initial savings wouldn't be eaten up in no time by effectively sending your food on a round-trip into orbit and back. Probably obsessing over the wrong part of the story.
    • Yes, on Grayson, you definitely need domes for farms. Remember that the air there is incredibly toxic, and any food grown in that air would be too.
    • Sorry for the misunderstanding, I was trying to point out the difference in construction materials required for roofing and isolating farms and doming whole townships off. The first of which while still forbiddingly expensive would be possible with modern technology and thus should have been in Grayson's reach for much (if not all) of it's existence as a colony. The second we couldn't do (and why would we want to?) and might conceivably have been impossible on Grayson before Manticore tech-transfers.
    • Something to keep in mind though is that lifting mass out of a gravity well is absurdly easy in the series due to practical and cheap anti-gravity tech. While it's established that Grayson did not have anti-gravity tech for it's entire history (see Honor's comments about Grayson cities verus Manticoran cities) there isn't anything that says they didn't have it when they started building space farms; in fact there are some hints that the space farms are a relatively recent idea (as in the last few centuries). Now Grayson's tech level did drop a lot between their founding and the civil war so it seems likely that the original Grayson farming industry was planetside but with the introduction of anti-gravity tech once they made contact with the rest of the galaxy it may well have been cheaper and easier for them to move a good portion of that into space (or at least all expansion of it in space). Once they joined up with Manticore and got access to their materials technology the balance tilted and it became more cost effective to start expanding their planetside farming again.

• It's stated as an ironclad fact that prolong recipients will live 200-300 years. The treatment was invented less than 200 years ago, so how can they possibly know that? NO ONE whose received prolong should have died of old age yet.
  • Its an estimation based on the work of a whole bunch if Beowulfian bioscientists I presume. There is probably only so much you can stave off aging before prolong loses its effectivity.
  • They also have quick heal which (presumably) speeds up bodily processes. So maybe they created a cell culture, used prolong on it and then used quick heal (or some variant) to age it a few centuries in a much shorter period?
    • Second-Gen Prolong was created in Beowulf a minimum of 180 years before Mission of Honor, according to the wiki. It was around that time that First-Gen was becoming available in Manticore. Presumably, First-Gen had been initially developed a century or more before that on Beowulf, and thus gone through more R&D, refining, and long-term testing, both during the development phase and before being mass-marketed to other star nations, which would've taken a fair amount of time to work its way through their own scientists, doctors, and politicians, not to mention the months and/or years of back-and-forth travel time, given the more primitive (and thus slower) nature of starships that long ago, even with Wormhole Junctions. Enough time, or thereabouts, for some of the very first First-Gen (or even cruder Original/Zero-Gen) Prolong Recipients to have died of old age, and for comparative studies to have applied that data to Second and Third-Gen.

• In Mission of Honor, Pritchard points out the absurdity of deep-cover generation sleeper agents, by wondering how it would work if one died before informing their children of their secret mission to subvert the society they'd belonged to for their entire life. It's a very good question. How exactly do the Mesan agents who've been undercover for centuries and generations work?
  • Presumably they are inserted as extended family groups and not just mom, pop, and the 2.4 kids. So even if several adults die off in a generation, custody of the children simply goes to more adults 'in the know'. Also, Mesa knows who its sleepers are; if any of them die, "relatives from off-planet" can be sent in.
  • The real trick would be to raise the kids with the right mindset so that when they do have it explained to them it seems to them like a good idea. For example raising them with attitudes such as mild racism/classism would help foster a feeling of superiority compared to the rest of society (as the other poster mentioned, having multiple families involved would provide more coverage for this). This could then be reinforced by sending them off-planet for their college education (providing the Alignment with the ability to gather scions of multiple lines together for careful covert indoctrination). Additionally the sleeper lines are not going to be deep inside the onion so they probably don't even realize that Alignment is involved with Mesa. If we assume that then the deep cover agents could easily believe that they are part of a long term plan to improve their own societies so the stuff they do isn't about betraying their society but helping it.
  • And on top of all that, Mesa is the king of breaking eggs to make omelets. Its entirely in-character for them to enact a policy with a built-in 'breakage' rate for people -- so long as they're not 'losing' more sleepers each generation than they can afford to pay for, they won't care. Unless its a Detweiler, no individual person in Mesa is more important than keeping the Mesan machine as a whole in good working order; that is ultimately the root of every evil thing Mesa does, the belief that human beings are commodities rather than people.
    • Confirmed in the latest novel, Uncompromising Honor -- more than one Mesan family of long-term sleepers has been 'lost' when a suitable candidate could not be selected and successfully indoctrinated in a given generation, and what Mesa does then is simply write off the entire family line and never contact them again. Although entirely unknown to anyone outside the Alignment's inner circle, one of the 'orphaned' Mesan-descended family lines is the Harrington family. And so Honor's ridiculous genetics is finally given a canon explanation.

• While I disagreed with the frequent complaint that the later books are slowing down compared to the earlier books - I like the talky parts! - I can't help but wonder if Weber might be starting to take the piss a bit with it. I mean, they've almost started moving backwards - it takes a quarter of Rising Thunder to get to the point where Mission of Honor ended. Why?
  • Because Rising Thunder is only the first half of the originally intended book. The title pretty much nails it. The Thunder is RISING but the storm is not yet there. Annoying as hell? Pretty much, but lets wait for Shadow of Freedom, where shit will probably hit the fan like its beeing shot from a pulser. Also, I'd assume a lot of that is filler (not meant negatively) as the two parts of the planned book might not be enough for a standalone. The Thing which you're refering too did read a bit like it was originally planned for a Torch-Book and just drafted into the main series.
    • I don't think he would need filler. You could cut any one of his more recent books in half and have plenty enough for a full length novel. The paperbacks for some of them are over 1000 pages in some cases.
    • What, MWW's gonna drop the "Honor pun" in every even book?

• The Renaissance Factor is problematic. Basically, Albrecht (and his allies) have assembled a group of Bond villains to run the Galaxy. But aren't the sort of people who want to take over the Galaxy exactly the sort to want to backstab each other to get to the top? If it's not bad enough that they'll want Albrecht's top job, they also know that his "sons" are there to succeed him! Even if the Factor succeeds, aren't they inevitably going to fall out whoever gets to be on top? Granted it's unlikely ever to be a problem (since in all likelihood, they're not going to win and even if they did, it would end the series).
  • The Renaissance Factor honchos are implied to (or outright stated, I don't remember clearly) be the high-placed Alignment officers, or at least deep enough into The Onion. Given that Alignment managed to keep the charade up for centuries, and only managed to blow the cover once due to Isabel Bardasano getting the Idiot Ball, we may only conclude that their indoctrination works, and RF won't be a problem for Detweilers, and will, instead, follow his lead closely and sincerely.
    • That doesn't help though - you have a group of people who throughout their lives are told "You're better than everyone else" and have a Superiority Complex as a result. The idea that they will meekly follow the Dettweiler line in all things is hard to swallow, particularly if (as seems likely) things start going wrong for them. Albrecht should be constantly having to suppress plots against his rule. The fact that his "sons" are on the Board makes it worse because it shows that his fellow Board members are unlikely to succeed him even if Albrecht dies. While it's possible that he's bred in an automatic loyalty to the Dettweilers into all his followers, it seems unlikely he's achieved such a omnipresent level of genetic tinkering.
    • They haven't just been told, "You're better than everyone else." They've been told, "You're better than everyone else and Albrecht Dettweiler is in charge," or some variation.
      • Indeed, all Alignment members are brought up with the Rule #1: "Dettweiler is The Boss, and don't you dare doubt it. Or else..." If we are to believe that these are the people who managed to keep the loyalty of their sleeper cells for generations, such simple rule shouldn't be very duifficult for them to enforce.

• The Solarian League (prior to the Solarian/Manticore War, at any rate) has always been portrayed as a 400lb gorilla, because of its massive military - in fact it has two massive fleets (Battle Fleet and Frontier Fleet) plus various system defence forces, such as Beowulf's SDF (National Guard equivilents, I guess). But how did this happen? Countries with big armies tend to have big central authorities simply because they carry a big stick (for example, IRL the biggest armies are the US, China, UK, India - all of which have a relatively strong central authority. Of the top ten, only Germany (#5) has a relatively weak central authority) and somebody has to order it around. If they don't, they won't develop them (or starve them for funds) because governments can always find better things to spend money on than guns if there isn't a war going on. Were they worried about an alien attack?
  • The League does have a central government. It's just that, because Core Worlds, while drafting League Constitution, were afraid of it having too much authority, and thus didn't design it in. But they also forget to put up the measures limiting its powers, if it, by chance, appears on its own. So when this inevitably happened, in the form of various bureaucratic committees, it was essentially unchecked by any popular representation (as League Assembly, by design, is powerless), or, for that matter, any other mechanism, and free to run the things as it's pleased. So the League doesn't have a government only in the sense of democratic, accountable one. In the sense of unbridled bureaucratic machine run rampant it has it aplenty.
  • Second, the only active arm of League Navy is Frontier Fleet, which has a very limited amount of wallers. Battle Fleet, OTOH, while large in numbers, until recently was just a collection of old DD/SDs (and a lot of actual BBs for that matter) accumulated over the centuries, more than three quarters of that numbers actually being in mothballs. The active part of Battle Fleet also wasn't all that active, really, mostly just sitting in parking orbits at its bases, twiddling their thumbs and, maybe, running the sims if they were particularly devoted to duty. This type of Navy doesn't actually have that high keeping cost, and given that for at least five centuries it deterred anyone by it's mere existence, it was the money well spent.
    • While I accept what you say, somebody has to pay the taxes to maintain all those wallers (and Battleships). Even if the people don't have a "No taxation without representation" moment, you can bet that the big corps (other than Manpower, obviously) would be lobbying for lower taxes and/or better control over how the budget is spent. The way the League seems to be built it has the political oversight of something like the EU or the UN - both of which are notable for not having an army of their own. If you look at the history of the USA, you can see how its army has grown in lockstep with the growth of its central authority (especially, but not exclusively, the Civil War). DW even admits this in series with Protector Benjamin & Grayson, that as the GSN grows it needs a stronger Executive (ie. Protector) to take control!
    • I repeat myself: the fact that the League's executive isn't responsible before its population and prefers to work in shadows, doesn't mean it it doesn't exist. "The Mandarins" basically are this executive. And as for the financing side I believe you're too much grounded in the American model. "No taxation without representation" isn't actually that widespread a motive, and Solarian citizenry have their representation anyway — it's just that this representation doesn't mean jack shit, and everybody knows and accepts that. IIRC, the budgetary provisions for the League were explicitly set into its constitution, and you're absolutely right that the Mega Corps want to have their say in how this budget gets spent (because even if the taxes are minimal, the overall amount due to the size of the League is tremendous). Only they're do it not through the lobbying and parliamentary wrangling, but by directly going to The Government — in fact The Rising Thunder explicitly says that the multistellars are actively in bed with The Mandarins and Kolokoltsov is fearing their reaction to the Navy's recent blunders. All in all, the League political setup heavily reminds me of the way how the Soviet Union was set: a rubberstamp toy parliament, a powerful uncontrolled clique at the top, and the peculiar economic setup where everything gets determined not by the money, but by the subtle network of favors and connections, which give the access to the resources such as governmental contracts and tax breaks.

• Maybe I'm misunderstanding the Biology but the Grayson population imbalance strikes me as odd, specifically my understanding of the genetics suggests that the problem genes should have been mostly bred out in a few generations. According to Lady Harrington in Echoes of Honor the reason so many males are stillborn is that a mutation in the X-chromosome causes any males with it to be unable to come to term (since females have two X chromosomes they'd have to have the mutation on both to be affected). Let's use the designation X' to represent an X chromosome with the mutation now the worst case possibility is that all females in the population are carriers: XX'. So we have a population of females XX' and males XY (males can't be carriers since a male carrier is dead). Now when they breed we have four equally likely combinations: X'Y (dead male), XY (live male), XX' (carrier female), XX (non-carrier female). So the second generation would have about twice as many females as males and half the females would be carriers. Now half of the third generation would have a carrier female for it's mother and half would have a non-carrier female. The half with a carrier-female mother would have the same distribution as the second generation but the other half would only have live males or non-carrier females. So the third generation would be about: 12.5 X'Y (dead male), 37.5% XY (live male), 12.5% XX' (carrier female), 37.5% XX (non-carrier female). So the third generation would have about 42% males/58% females. The trend would continue with each successive generation having a smaller number of women carrying the mutated X-chromosome and closer to a 50/50 gender split until by the time of the stories it should be gone almost entirely.