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Honorverse ramblings and musings

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Re: Honorverse ramblings and musings
Post by Weird Harold   » Mon Jul 24, 2017 4:00 pm

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cthia wrote:The MAlign are restricted to procreating within class. I would imagine alphas with alphas. Betas with betas, etc. Yet the alpha through gamma lines have a population equal to that of the slave lines who, if allowed to procreate, have no restrictions within the line, yet the population of the alpha through gamma lines are still equal to the population of the slave lines. That does not compute less my computer's broken.


Nitpick: The MAlign are restricted to procreation at the direction of the "Long Range Planning Board." If the LRPB decided that a particular Slave line has something they want in an Alpha line...

Also the lumping of Alpha, Beta and Gamma lines into one comparison to the slave population hides the actual distributions -- which are unstated in textev anyway.

Extrapolating from RW racial supremacists, I'd guess that about 5% of Darius' population is Alpha Lines, 10% is Beta Lines, and 20% is Gamma Lines. It is difficult to be "superior" if there isn't someone to be superior to. The more inferiors there are, the more "superior" a star line can be. Note in my estimations, that Betas are Twice as "Superior" than Gammas and Alphas are twice as "Superior" than Betas -- I think that fits with the MAlign philosophy, despite their stated goal of "uplifting all of mankind."
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Re: Honorverse ramblings and musings
Post by Jonathan_S   » Mon Jul 24, 2017 4:55 pm

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cthia wrote:
I'm not sure I completely agree with that Jonathan. It is certainly a factor on present day earth, but in the Honorverse, factoring in prolong, couples most likely have children at some point, as Honor's parents said they were meaning to. Although Honor's parents are Commoners and are less affluent than the average Manticoran I'd presume. Certainly for the most part of their lives. People want heirs, especially affluent people. And of course, there is a significant difference in age of respective settlements.

That would be an insanely large nursery to produce such numbers in a couple centuries from the initial settlement and the significant time needed to effect research and begin to produce stock from "successful" genetic "experimentation" and to be government run to boot. And talk about dysfunctional beings caused by a lack of bonding and natural human love and warmth.

And remember, the MAlign were practicing quite a bit of winnowing inferior births.

You are most likely right about the average size of Manticoran families opposed to the MAlign. You have to be for the numbers to have better than a snowballs chance in hell to make sense. But the average number of MAlign families would have to be significantly high.

And again, if the MAlign can simply "ramp up" births then why such a shortage of personnel for the MAN?

I get the impression that the heavy winnowing is something that happens mostly in the MAlign's cutting edlge experimental breeding - trying to push the edge and see how new gene clusters work out.

Staffing up a planet would likely involve lots of much lower risk breeding - using genetics that have by and large survived the risky trial stages and been officially incorporated in the various Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta clusters of genomes. So I don't think there would be quite as much 'wastage' as you seem to be assuming.


Also, prolong's effects on family growth are still shaking out, it's a pretty new technology in the grand scheme of things. Yes, more people probably find time for a couple of kids over their centuries of life - but we've also seen examples where people (Honor's parents) just kind of kept procrastinating on their next kid(s) for decades -- knowing they wanted more but somehow just putting it off a little more until they turned around and realized it had been over 30 years. So it'll probably still take a while for the population to really expand just due to Prolong.


And personnel shortage for the MAN is mostly a matter of rapidly changing priorities without sufficient contingency planning. There were enough people who could have been training at Darius, but they didn't train them (yet) because the original plan wasn't to pull the wraps off the MAlign for another several decades.
Their training programs appear to have been set-up on that basis - they didn't have or need hardly any navy 40 years ago and didn't expect to need one ready to go for at least another 30-40 years.

But Detwiler upset the entire timetable when he decided that Apollo was too alarming to stick to the schedule - and the Manticore-Haven fragile ceasefire too good an opportunity to pass up.

So he basically went to war with the initial cadre that in the original plan would have been seasoned and then used to train the main bulk of the naval personnel - which would have been ready as or before their naval shipbuilding also hit its war footing stride and turned out all the ships for them to serve on.
Oops.
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Re: Honorverse ramblings and musings
Post by saber964   » Mon Jul 24, 2017 6:05 pm

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cthia wrote:The population of the Darius System, with only one planet Gamma, is significantly greater than the combined population of the entire three planets of the Manticore System that has been settled, what, three times longer and is (iinm) much richer and is not cut off from humanity or have restrictions set upon their potential mates. And Tester knows that Manticore, with its wars and ravenous butcher bill and need to keep Bupers fed, has even more motivation to increase its population.

Unless the disparaging difference to account for the odd bookkeeping is the unpublished accumulative Manticoran butcher bill which doesn't seem plausible amidst the most successful and powerful navy.

Manticore population = 1.5 B.
Sphinx population = 1.2 B.
Gryphon = 600 M.
----------------------------------
3.3 B

Darius has a total population of 3.9 B.


Heck, the population of Haven is only listed as several billion. 'Course their lack of a much larger population could quite possibly be attributed to their insane butcher bill. LOL



You forgot the population of the Unicorn belt which is another 300 million. So The Manticorain system has a population of 3.6 billion people and 12 million treecats.
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Re: Honorverse ramblings and musings
Post by kzt   » Mon Jul 24, 2017 6:17 pm

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Jonathan_S wrote:So he basically went to war with the initial cadre that in the original plan would have been seasoned and then used to train the main bulk of the naval personnel - which would have been ready as or before their naval shipbuilding also hit its war footing stride and turned out all the ships for them to serve on.
Oops.

Well, in terms of getting the MAN experience in combat operations it worked great. It was a bit of strategic fiasco.
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Re: Honorverse ramblings and musings
Post by JohnRoth   » Mon Jul 24, 2017 9:17 pm

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kzt wrote:
Jonathan_S wrote:So he basically went to war with the initial cadre that in the original plan would have been seasoned and then used to train the main bulk of the naval personnel - which would have been ready as or before their naval shipbuilding also hit its war footing stride and turned out all the ships for them to serve on.
Oops.

Well, in terms of getting the MAN experience in combat operations it worked great. It was a bit of strategic fiasco.


Combat operations? The only danger those ships were in was if someone's Plot Device turned out to be able to detect the Spider Drive in operation at a half light-hour or so. Otherwise they got some experience in Naval Operations. The 99% boredom part as they go from hither to yon.
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Re: Honorverse ramblings and musings
Post by cthia   » Mon Jul 24, 2017 10:20 pm

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Weird Harold wrote:
cthia wrote:The MAlign are restricted to procreating within class. I would imagine alphas with alphas. Betas with betas, etc. Yet the alpha through gamma lines have a population equal to that of the slave lines who, if allowed to procreate, have no restrictions within the line, yet the population of the alpha through gamma lines are still equal to the population of the slave lines. That does not compute less my computer's broken.


1. Nitpick: The MAlign are restricted to procreation at the direction of the "Long Range Planning Board." If the LRPB decided that a particular Slave line has something they want in an Alpha line...

2. Also the lumping of Alpha, Beta and Gamma lines into one comparison to the slave population hides the actual distributions -- which are unstated in textev anyway.

3. Extrapolating from RW racial supremacists, I'd guess that about 5% of Darius' population is Alpha Lines, 10% is Beta Lines, and 20% is Gamma Lines. It is difficult to be "superior" if there isn't someone to be superior to. The more inferiors there are, the more "superior" a star line can be. Note in my estimations, that Betas are Twice as "Superior" than Gammas and Alphas are twice as "Superior" than Betas -- I think that fits with the MAlign philosophy, despite their stated goal of "uplifting all of mankind."
Do pardon my numbering scheme for ease of reply.

1. You have a point. Though I was under the impression that they extracted that something through genetic means -- targeting that something they wanted in the labs and not by any traditional "missionary" means.

2. True. Though that does not affect the total population of each.

3. Makes sense to me and I like the breakdown. It is also in keeping with my notion of the premiere lines population to be lagging behind the rest -- their guinea pig status as it were.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: Honorverse ramblings and musings
Post by cthia   » Mon Jul 24, 2017 10:29 pm

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kzt wrote:
Jonathan_S wrote:So he basically went to war with the initial cadre that in the original plan would have been seasoned and then used to train the main bulk of the naval personnel - which would have been ready as or before their naval shipbuilding also hit its war footing stride and turned out all the ships for them to serve on.
Oops.

Well, in terms of getting the MAN experience in combat operations it worked great. It was a bit of strategic fiasco.


That means no contingency plan if they are stumbled upon, discovered, uncovered, their party crashed, their system found... etc. What are they to fight with if Darius is incidentally found and attacked? Very unMAlign-like of them to leave themselves hanging out on a malignant limb or skating on thin malignant ice.

Besides, it seems it would be prudent to give the initial pioneering officers a chance at as much experience as possible and to make MAlign rank, even if in decades of mock simulations and war games. It doesn't fit well with their overall scheme of giving themselves plenty of time for everything.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: Honorverse ramblings and musings
Post by ldwechsler   » Mon Jul 24, 2017 11:32 pm

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Weird Harold wrote:
cthia wrote:The MAlign are restricted to procreating within class. I would imagine alphas with alphas. Betas with betas, etc. Yet the alpha through gamma lines have a population equal to that of the slave lines who, if allowed to procreate, have no restrictions within the line, yet the population of the alpha through gamma lines are still equal to the population of the slave lines. That does not compute less my computer's broken.


Nitpick: The MAlign are restricted to procreation at the direction of the "Long Range Planning Board." If the LRPB decided that a particular Slave line has something they want in an Alpha line...

Also the lumping of Alpha, Beta and Gamma lines into one comparison to the slave population hides the actual distributions -- which are unstated in textev anyway.

Extrapolating from RW racial supremacists, I'd guess that about 5% of Darius' population is Alpha Lines, 10% is Beta Lines, and 20% is Gamma Lines. It is difficult to be "superior" if there isn't someone to be superior to. The more inferiors there are, the more "superior" a star line can be. Note in my estimations, that Betas are Twice as "Superior" than Gammas and Alphas are twice as "Superior" than Betas -- I think that fits with the MAlign philosophy, despite their stated goal of "uplifting all of mankind."


The idea that one line is twice as superior to another is ridiculous. We have seen the Mesalliance and seen its best. The Detweilers are certainly alpha. Probably a lot of the other top leaders.

Yet they are hardly that brilliant. HAd they been they would have won centuries earlier. Honor, not part of their line, seems pretty much as on top of things as they are.

No one we've seen in the whole group seems as smart as WEB DuHavel. We keep hearing how smart they are. Yet they seem to make a lot of dumb mistakes that originally seemed clever.

By moving Byrd to a Frontier posting, they made certain that the Manties at least knew something was up. They've dropped clues all around.

They are breeding for smarts, yet we don't see all that much of it. There's no doubt they are very smart. But somehow they always seem to mess up...just a bit.
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Re: Honorverse ramblings and musings
Post by Weird Harold   » Mon Jul 24, 2017 11:54 pm

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cthia wrote:Do pardon my numbering scheme for ease of reply.


Not a problem.

cthia wrote:1. You have a point. Though I was under the impression that they extracted that something through genetic means -- targeting that something they wanted in the labs and not by any traditional "missionary" means.


They do rely on in vitro fertilization and artificial wombs, but they also use random chance and natural childbirth along with cloning and pretty much any technique you can think of.

cthia wrote:2. True. Though that does not affect the total population of each.


It affects the ratio of Ubermensch to normals since the Beta and Gamma lines are middle managers and bodyguards -- and other sorts of high level servants of the Alpha Lines and Detweiler genome.

cthia wrote:3. Makes sense to me and I like the breakdown. It is also in keeping with my notion of the premiere lines population to be lagging behind the rest -- their guinea pig status as it were.


The Star Lines and Detweiler genome aren't intended to compete numerically with "normals." They are the "Ubermensch" designed to rule all of humanity and the middle managers and specialists to keep the Untermensch docile.
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Answers! I got lots of answers!

(Now if I could just find the right questions.)
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Re: Honorverse ramblings and musings
Post by George J. Smith   » Tue Jul 25, 2017 4:33 am

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[quote Cthia]

Snip

That means no contingency plan if they are stumbled upon, discovered, uncovered, their party crashed, their system found... etc. What are they to fight with if Darius is incidentally found and attacked? Very unMAlign-like of them to leave themselves hanging out on a malignant limb or skating on thin malignant ice.

snip

[quote\]

ISTR a passage in one of the books where Benjamin says or muses, if the SKM as it was at the time found out where Darius was, there were facilities in place to give them a rather more than warm welcome.

I shall have to search through the books after the discovery of the wormhole to the Talbott cluster.
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A man should live forever, or die in the attempt
Spider Robinson Callahan's Crosstime Saloon (1977) A voice is heard in Ramah
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