Roguevictory wrote:cthia wrote:Shannon Foraker vs Sonja Hemphill.
Elizabeth and Eloise are right. There will be problems to overcome for an alliance to succeed. Some may be insurmountable. Others hilarious. Some will be both, but they all have their measure of importance and must be solved.
Some problems are even unforeseen, like the first formal working day between Foraker and Hemphill. Sonja is brilliant no doubt, but she can have some weapons development flukes. Someone has to be the leader as far as which R&D projects should be pursued. Foraker would have questioned Sonja about gutting Fearless and installing a grav lance. "Really Sonja?"
Which is the most tech savvy?
In all fairness in the combat environment of the time, aka pre-missile pod and MDM, the gravlance was a good idea as long as it was put on a ship that could survive to close to effective range and maintain enough non grav lance weaponry to fight effectively like a DN or SDN, or probably a heavy BC. And in a fleet action even the grav lance modded light cruiser could be dangerous. Honor proved that in the war games, The thing was no one in their right mind would have deployed Fearless to fight alone if they had a choice and unfortunately Honor got put in a position where Fearless had to fight alone.
This is absolutely a fair assessment, although Sonja did know the better and improved missiles were en route and in the pipeline and so should have realized (in fact, did realize) that energy range combat was probably going to become less of the end-all and be-all of capital ship combat. However, some people seem to have missed the point at which Sonja personally apologizes to Honor for the one-hand-behind-her-back way she had to fight at Basilisk. Recall that she said then (and she was being honest) that she never intended the conversion as anything other than a real-life testbed for her armament theory. This was supposed to be a one-off, only used in maneuvers to see how it worked, weapons mix. And, for that matter, Sonja had nothing at all to do with having Fearless swept under the rug to Basilisk; that was Janacek, her cousin, looking out for the family name. She was pissed her brainchild wasn't working out better, and I think it's been established that tact was never her strong suit, especially before the war, so it's not surprising that Honor felt Hemphill blamed her [Honor] personally for what had happened, but that isn't actually the case if you go back and read carefully.