Honorverse ramblings and musings

SWM wrote:[edit]Another point--Manticore is part of the Haven Quadrant, which appears to be a much larger volume than a Sector (compare to Maya Sector). The Haven Quadrant appears to include the entire Republic of Haven, all of the Manticoran Alliance, possibly Silesia, and possibly Erewhon. It is not clear from the text whether Sector or Quadrant have formal definitions and formal borders.

Based on the root definition of quadrant, it is possible that the Haven Quadrant is literally 1/4 of explored space, the entire region northeast of Sol, with borders along galactic north and east from Sol.[/edit]

If the definition of the Haven Quadrant goes back, pretty much, to "thataway!", then the Manticore Wormhole Junction may be responsible for making "the Haven Quadrant" so much larger.
Want to go to Haven? Beowulf-Manticore-Trevor's Star.
Want to go to Manticore? Beowulf-Manticore.
Silesia? Beowulf-Manticore-Gregor or -Basilisk.
Anderman Empire? Beowulf-Manticore-Gregor.
Erewhon? Beowulf-Manticore-Henessey-Terra Haute-Erewhon. Or Joshua-Erewhon if you want to head out to the boonies kinda.

If the Talbott Cluster isn't getting sucked into it in Solarian usage, it could just be inertia by now.

And echoing Theemile upthread a little - expect all these usages to be approximate and often downright messy. Outside our own professional jargon, it's how we speak.

cthia wrote:Shadow of Freedom

She considered that last point for a moment, then grimaced as she thought about the rank insignia sitting in the upper drawer of the desk behind her. The ones she would be allowed to officially pin onto her uniform collar in two days. -Henke

This makes me think about what Honor endured at the hands of Rear Admiral Styles in hell, err on Hades.

Suppose Honor didn't have her Grayson rank to fall back on and somehow her promotion to Admiral in the RMN was set to be official in a week or so more.

Would she have had to wait that week out, a week she did not have; or what, exactly?

Well, as she was a Commodore at that time, a normal promotion would have made her a Rear Admiral and thus still junior to him. The extraordinary promotion to full Admiral only came about because of the Greatest Prison Break Ever.

On the other hand, Caparelli did say he felt that Honor should have made Vice Admiral "but for the caliber of her political enemies" before she got captured. If that was the case, Styles would never have dared open his mouth so loudly.

In the worst case that Styles became the senior Allied officer on Cerberus... I'm sure someone would have fragged him. Or he'd have gone off in the first captured ship. Then it's a toss-up whether the Allies send enough prisoner transport capacity to satisfy Honor before the local StateSec HQ sends their task force out and the prisoners get home that way.

I think if a promotion's schedule was known to a prisoner before capture, they can assume the rank once that date passes, especially if there are witnesses. It did happen to Alistair McKeon - captured as a Captain, escaped as a Commodore.

Throughout the series there's always talk of reparations being paid. Should the League pay reparations, who would they pay reparations to, exactly? Manticore, for three destroyers? To the families of murdered officers? Both? Other?

Aside:
I'm back and I'm hitched. With better half. Jumped the broom. Bought the goat though the milk was free. lol


The warm weather coming off Morocco off the African coast makes flowers flourish and presents the loveliest dwellings with breathtaking flowered balconies. Sidewalk cafes with bright blue stairs, adjacent to pristine clean white buildings and bright rustic red railings. Such picturesque settings. Steep streets gives you a workout on La Palma, but you hardly notice through the smiles on your face and your company's. It's like walking in my parents' footsteps. No wonder they fell madly in love. Fuerteventura casts a spell on you!

Just like the League. We have our own mothballed ships.


SARDIP -Stricken Aircraft Reclamation and Disposal Program. 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG), but is more commonly known as the Boneyard.

http://www.dm.af.mil/units/amarc.asp

Storm From the Shadows

"They can't all be true," she protested quietly. "The rumors, I mean. Manticore's only one tiny little star system, Daud! All right, so it's a rich little star system, and it's got a hell of a lot bigger navy than anybody else its size. But it's still one star system, however many other systems it may be in the process of annexing. Are you seriously suggesting that they've managed somehow to put together a better, more effective R and D establishment than the entire Solarian League?"

"They don't have to have done that," he said flatly. "The League could be ahead of them clear across the board, but that doesn't mean the Navy is.

If that is true, how long would it take to implement many of those advancements from 'clear across the board?' R&D really is the most chokingly restrictive bottleneck isn't it?

How long did it effectively take Foraker to jury-rig many of her solutions? And their first uses were fatal for many of the RMN's spacers.

If the SLN can quickly incorporate many of their better advancements and attack in force -- "surprise" -- then perhaps they can do some serious damage before the GA rebalances.

cthia wrote:Storm From the Shadows

cthia
in the Favorite Passages thread wrote:Aboard the attacking MDMs, computers consulted their pre-launch instructions, and suddenly jammers and decoys began to blossom. The Solarian counter-missiles were basically sound pieces of technology, but despite the SLN's belated awareness that something peculiar had happened to missile combat out in the Haven Sector, it was only beginning any sort of serious attempt to upgrade its active anti-missile defenses. Worse, neither the hardware nor the officers groping towards some new defense doctrine had profited from the last two decades of savage combat which had refined their Manticoran and Havenite counterparts. Their counter-missiles' software wasn't as good, the doctrine for their use was purely theoretical, without the harsh Darwinian input of survival, and the officers doing their best—not just aboard Jean Bart, but aboard all of Byng's battlecruisers—had no true concept of the threat environment into which they had intruded.

If that is true, how long would it take to implement many of those advancements from 'clear across the board?' R&D really is the most chokingly restrictive bottleneck isn't it?

Part of the problem is that the Solarian Weapons R&D is privately funded and without any real connection to reality -- the Honorverse equivalent of putting Lord Skimper in charge of R&D.

Examples of Solarian R&D have been seen, most notably in the Cromarty Assassination. The assassin missiles worked very well except they only worked very well in those tightly restricted set of circumstances. As a general issue weapon, they'd be next to useless.

The Infamous Charles peddles Solarian weapons tech which is innovative, performs well in his carefully scripted demonstrations, but would be totally worthless as general issue equipment.

One has to assume that Solarian military R&D is very much like the RMN's Juene Ecole of the early novels; throw out as many ridiculous ideas as possible and see which sticks to something. They have no conception of operational realities, nor does SLN's senior leadership, so they have no conception of what needs improvement or how to improve it.

Congratulations! May you be as happy together as my wife and I have been. Glad you had a good time admiring the flowers, even if you had to pay for the goat .
Cheers
John

cthia wrote:Throughout the series there's always talk of reparations being paid. Should the League pay reparations, who would they pay reparations to, exactly? Manticore, for three destroyers? To the families of murdered officers? Both? Other?

Aside:
I'm back and I'm hitched. With better half. Jumped the broom. Bought the goat though the milk was free. lol


The warm weather coming off Morocco off the African coast makes flowers flourish and presents the loveliest dwellings with breathtaking flowered balconies. Sidewalk cafes with bright blue stairs, adjacent to pristine clean white buildings and bright rustic red railings. Such picturesque settings. Steep streets gives you a workout on La Palma, but you hardly notice through the smiles on your face and your company's. It's like walking in my parents' footsteps. No wonder they fell madly in love. Fuerteventura casts a spell on you!

Snipping what Weird Harold already covered well -

cthia wrote:How long did it effectively take Foraker to jury-rig many of her solutions? And their first uses were fatal for many of the RMN's spacers.

Foraker as a tac officer used lousy hardware very, very well. SLN tac officers have pretty good equipment - where it suffers is mostly being designed for a 100-200 year old combat environment - that they have no personal experience using for serious combat, nor institutional experience against peer or better enemies, even in sims.

Foraker as an operations officer used familiar technologies in innovative, risky ways that paid off. Innovation and risk are anathema in the SLN. No one knows how to use them.

Foraker as the mother of the Republican Navy used a cobbled-together tech base - Haven's pushed up by the bootstraps tech base, plus bits of Solarian transfers - to provide lower-tech answers to RMN LAC's and MDM's.

The SLN's tech base is not its problem. Its problem is that it has no idea how to identify the Forakers it has - witness the fate of Lt. Askew, the closest thing to a Foraker we've seen there - and no idea how to take its tech base and turn it into effective military hardware used within an effective, modern military doctrine. Its entire officer corps is promoted and organized without regard for fighting or thinking about fighting. Worse, it doesn't understand and cannot admit to those structural, institutional problems. Think of it as... a vast country club membership that is certain that it is the best fighting force anywhere, that (despite being a country club - even because of all its country club features) any instance of someone else fighting better than they do is a peculiar aberration that can be fixed with some new widget or blamed on them not fighting fair. This is not an organization that knows how to pick better hardware, or that knows how to develop a doctrine for its use, and it is not one that can even recognize that problem.

If the SLN can quickly incorporate many of their better advancements and attack in force -- "surprise" -- then perhaps they can do some serious damage before the GA rebalances.

Well, yes, sure. Similarly, the ninja hamsters from another universe could do a lot of damage too. It would be that surprising, after all, so there's that huge element of surprise going for it.

The SLN doesn't move quickly. It has a hard time identifying advancements. "Longer range missiles are important" is finally seeping through, when it's been obvious to everyone else for 30 years. And for those longer range missiles, it's essentially had to have them given to them by other parties that could recognize that for them.

All that said, the SLN could, yes, do some serious damage still - not by fighting smart on any large scale, but just by being so large that it will overwhelm the opposition in some place or another in some operation launched by someone who's luckier or smarter than the SLN has any right to expect that it would have promoted that far. And they've got enough people with some of the basic competence in operating hardware built with the best general tech base (for a tactical environment that is grossly dated) that some of them will start using it cleverly and some officers will identify, appreciate, and be able to promote that. But any time that happens, it represents an exception to hallowed SLN practice, not its smooth function.

Indeed, everyone.

But the SLN does have, at least, a few half-a-brains left -- that together could form a whole.

Storm From the Shadows

"But what I do want you to do is to keep your eyes and your mind open. I've got a strong suspicion that there are even more of those system-defense observer reports out there than ever made it to us in the first place. Unless I'm mistaken, they've been being tossed as 'obvious nonsense' somewhere between their originators and us. But if you and I both start very quietly looking around, maybe we'll be able to turn some of them up. And maybe, if we manage that, we'll be able to start drawing at least some of the conclusions we're going to need if the shitstorm hits."

"Surely the Manties aren't that stupid," she said softly, in the tone of someone trying to convince herself. "I mean, no matter how many technological advantages they may have, they have to know they can't fight the entire Solarian League and win. Not in the long term. They're just plain not big enough—not even if they make this annexation of Talbott stand up!"

"Maybe they are that stupid, and maybe they aren't," al-Fanudahi replied. "Frankly, though, if they really did send this Admiral Gold Peak off to New Tuscany to press the demands they say they did, I'm not so sure they aren't ready to go nose-to-nose with us, however stupid that might be. And even if you're right, even if they can't possibly win in the end—and I'm inclined to think you are right about that—God only knows how many thousands of our own people are going to get killed before they lose. Somehow, I don't think that either you or I will sleep too soundly at night if we just sit back and watch it happen. Nobody's going to take any warnings from me seriously at this point, but you and I need to start pulling the truth together now, because if this blows up in our faces, somebody is going to need the closest thing to accurate information we can give them. And, who knows? Whoever that 'somebody' is, he may even realize he does."

Now, I understand that the League is working against the constipation of its own system. And trying to free that blockage can become a smelly ordeal. However, there are a few brains left in the League and if there has been a few quiet eyes on things -- gathering info and considering contingency plans against available tech in the private sector (as this passage indicates) then someone may step up to the plate. After all, necessity is the mother of invention.

Question. Who are the SDF? Where exactly do they sit on the scale of SLN military experience between Battle Fleet and OFS?

And where would the SDF have witnessed Manty tech, Monica?

JeffEngel wrote:Snipping what Weird Harold already covered well -

cthia wrote:How long did it effectively take Foraker to jury-rig many of her solutions? And their first uses were fatal for many of the RMN's spacers.

Foraker as a tac officer used lousy hardware very, very well. SLN tac officers have pretty good equipment - where it suffers is mostly being designed for a 100-200 year old combat environment - that they have no personal experience using for serious combat, nor institutional experience against peer or better enemies, even in sims.

Foraker as an operations officer used familiar technologies in innovative, risky ways that paid off. Innovation and risk are anathema in the SLN. No one knows how to use them.

Foraker as the mother of the Republican Navy used a cobbled-together tech base - Haven's pushed up by the bootstraps tech base, plus bits of Solarian transfers - to provide lower-tech answers to RMN LAC's and MDM's.

The SLN's tech base is not its problem. Its problem is that it has no idea how to identify the Forakers it has - witness the fate of Lt. Askew, the closest thing to a Foraker we've seen there - and no idea how to take its tech base and turn it into effective military hardware used within an effective, modern military doctrine. Its entire officer corps is promoted and organized without regard for fighting or thinking about fighting. Worse, it doesn't understand and cannot admit to those structural, institutional problems. Think of it as... a vast country club membership that is certain that it is the best fighting force anywhere, that (despite being a country club - even because of all its country club features) any instance of someone else fighting better than they do is a peculiar aberration that can be fixed with some new widget or blamed on them not fighting fair. This is not an organization that knows how to pick better hardware, or that knows how to develop a doctrine for its use, and it is not one that can even recognize that problem.

If the SLN can quickly incorporate many of their better advancements and attack in force -- "surprise" -- then perhaps they can do some serious damage before the GA rebalances.

Well, yes, sure. Similarly, the ninja hamsters from another universe could do a lot of damage too. It would be that surprising, after all, so there's that huge element of surprise going for it.

The SLN doesn't move quickly. It has a hard time identifying advancements. "Longer range missiles are important" is finally seeping through, when it's been obvious to everyone else for 30 years. And for those longer range missiles, it's essentially had to have them given to them by other parties that could recognize that for them.

All that said, the SLN could, yes, do some serious damage still - not by fighting smart on any large scale, but just by being so large that it will overwhelm the opposition in some place or another in some operation launched by someone who's luckier or smarter than the SLN has any right to expect that it would have promoted that far. And they've got enough people with some of the basic competence in operating hardware built with the best general tech base (for a tactical environment that is grossly dated) that some of them will start using it cleverly and some officers will identify, appreciate, and be able to promote that. But any time that happens, it represents an exception to hallowed SLN practice, not its smooth function.

A very poignant point. Which necessitates that the Forakers should step up to the plate and identify themselves -- in which my previous post seems to give indication of possibly happening. Great navies are an amalgamation of great single individuals and one great naval officer can make a difference -- placing the Salamander on referenced exhibit.

One of the main problems I see on behalf of the SLN is the unwillingness of competent officers to want to risk their careers thinking, and accepting facts, outside of the box for fear of professional suicide. They are ineffective against their own institutional arrogance. Yet, it would only take key members within the SLN to 'put it on the line' and be damned, for the sake of the League's survival. That isn't such a difficulty now nor can it any longer be so quickly thought of as professional suicide. Their disastrous battles has seen to that.