Sonja Hemphill

crewdude48 wrote:Did you ever hear this one; military justice is to justice as military music is to music.

They have to consider the good of the service as well as innocence and guilt. That compromise both punished the guilty and was the best for the RMN and Manticore as a whole.

dreamrider wrote:
Hmm...I'm Mesan Alignment, and Honor Harrington knows that we staged the Yawata Strike and the Blackbird Strike

or

I'm Mesan Alignment, and the 'Friends of Honor' club otherwise known as the Grand Alliance is convinced that we offed Honor Harrington.

I'm not feeling the material difference here.

dreamrider

Tim wrote:

cthia wrote:
I must apologize to Sonja Hemphill. I think most of us have been too hard on her. So we assumed she had a weapons development fluke, but as RFC has pointed out, as did Sonja herself, Fearless was simply meant to be a testbed. It is only human to remember one's controversial snafus (justified or no) than their many successes

Sorry disagree. At the least Honor should get Hemphill in a dark alley will no witnesses and kick the 'H' put of her and inflict as much damage up to but just short of death.

Hemphill did not do her duty and vote to convict and sentence Northhollow to death. That allowed Northhollow to have Tinkersley murdered.

This is my Treecat side coming out.

“When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”


― C.S. Lewis

cthia wrote:An aside:
I'm not quite so sure that Pavel Young being convicted of all charges would have saved Tankersley. Young had entirely too much financial clout and a political vise-grip (North Hollow files) that his anger, and fear of dying, melding with Honor being the cause of it all, would have brought about the same results. Only now, Honor would not have been able to exact her own brand of appropriate justice on a scum that had too good a death.

munroburton wrote:

cthia wrote:An aside:
I'm not quite so sure that Pavel Young being convicted of all charges would have saved Tankersley. Young had entirely too much financial clout and a political vise-grip (North Hollow files) that his anger, and fear of dying, melding with Honor being the cause of it all, would have brought about the same results. Only now, Honor would not have been able to exact her own brand of appropriate justice on a scum that had too good a death.

Weren't the other charges carrying the capital penalty? If convicted, he would have been executed. Even if his father still keeled over after hearing that verdict, Pavel's inheritance of the Earldom wouldn't save him - it'd just pass on to his brother after the firing squad was finished.

crewdude48 wrote:On the other hand, I think the heart attack might have come from the whipsawing of emotion. Sward direction meant Pavel was found guilty, but it tuns out only of the minor charges and would only get a slap on the wrists, but he is being discharged in disgrace. I think that it was that whipsawing of emotion that did him in.

Dimitri probably wasn't long for this world anyway, and seeing his eldest in front of a firing squad wouldn't have done him any favors, but if he had survived, even for a few more months, Paul probably would have been fine; I don't think Dimitri was the type of person who would take petty revenge like Pavel was. He was still a horible human being, mind you, but he was much more cogent of what other people might do to him that Pavel ever was.

The E wrote:

crewdude48 wrote:On the other hand, I think the heart attack might have come from the whipsawing of emotion. Sward direction meant Pavel was found guilty, but it tuns out only of the minor charges and would only get a slap on the wrists, but he is being discharged in disgrace. I think that it was that whipsawing of emotion that did him in.

And the realization that all the bullying and blackmailing in the world were insufficient to produce the result he wanted would be any less stressful?

No, I think that the elder Young's fate was pretty much sealed the moment it was clear that a guilty verdict of some kind was going to be handed out.

crewdude48 wrote:If that was the case, his hart attack would have happened when he saw the direction Pavel's sward was pointing. The fact of the matter is that if Pavel was guilty of any one count, he was obviously guilty of them all. Dimitri should have automatically assumed that his son was going to die when he saw that there was a guilty verdict. If he lived through that, he probably would have lived through them voicing what he already knew was coming. It was that plunging recognition, followed so closely by soaring hope, then dropping into deep dispair that did him in.

Jonathan_S wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:The point of all of the above is that Honor was a superior, pragmatic tactician who insisted (correctly) that tactical doctrine must be based upon the actual capabilities of the tonnages and weapons one has rather than on the tonnages and weapons one wishes one had. She didn't think the jeune ecole was doing that. For that matter, Hemphill probably didn't think most of the jeune ecole was doing that. Those members of it who didn't know about Gram or the work already ongoing on Ghostrider were basing their hopes on those incremental systems superiorities which were public knowledge (at least within the RMN), and that incremental superiority was insufficient to make the jeune ecole's rejection of "conventional" tactical wisdom effective. Even Hamish Alexander, who was in a better position than most to know what was happening behind the scenes, had no concept of everything that was being worked out in Gryphon orbit. Both he and Honor (and Hemphill, really) would have agreed that in the absence of Gram, victory had to be found in some development or adaptation of existing tactical thinking that took into account the increased lethality of the laserhead.

I'd nitpick that in the absence of Gram the development or adaptation might have been (at least partly) strategic; not just tactical.


I'm wondering if going to a heavy deep raiding approach might have paid off for Manticore in a hypothetical first Havenite ware that lacked pods.

Basically try to make that lack of decisive battles an asset rather than a limitation. Seek battles in places where there is unlikely to be a heavy enough force to defend the infrastructure (which can't run), and where you can turtle up and run if you do get surprised by a heavier force.

Add that to the fact that Haven has a lot more vulnerable rear areas that the Manticoran Alliance. It'll take a lot more forces to even begin to provide an equivalent level of defnese.


Of course to free up the ships to do this would essentially require Manticore to give up on advancing on Trevor's Star. At least unless or until Haven drew significant forces back to cover their rear areas.

This would be a huge change in strategy, and one that hadn't been employed before. And it does tie up a lot of valuable units in transit; totally out of contact with higher. (Not to mention the logistical demands; especially without having the use of Trevor's Star and it's wormhole). But without pods, and with only single drive missiles, its a lot harder to crush a raiding force even if you do mousetrap them with superior numbers; so the raiders should be more likely to escape a trap than Honor's ships were in Cutworm/Sanskrit.

Also, without pods Haven doesn't have a cheap (or quick building) option to defend systems against any raid that can drive off or crush a BB or below picket. They either have to deploy wallers of their own or accept the loss of one orbital infrastructure after another. And even in the height of Robspierre's dictatorship there has to be a limit to how long Haven can politically (if not economically) survive the systematic destruction of the orbital infrastructures of third tier systems.

I could certainly be wrong on that specific strategy working, but in the absence of decisive new weapons innovative strategy, not just tactics, should play a major role.