Honorverse ramblings and musings

Forgot to post this from one of my Romanian friend's discussion.

The practice of tubing babies readily opens the Venus flytrap for business again. Conceivably, Honor could have immediately gotten pregnant again.

Don't know how fool-proof Honorverse contraceptive methods are, but accidents aren't fool-proof. Honor as a case in point. Although, I don't know if Honor would have recovered if she missed her very next cycle.

Can you imagine the two of them going right back to Emily in thirty days? ...

"Ah, Em' Honor and I have other um um um ... news."

"Sounds like I better be sitting my chair down."

cthia wrote:Forgot to post this from one of my Romanian friend's discussion.

The practice of tubing babies readily opens the Venus flytrap for business again. Conceivably, Honor could have immediately gotten pregnant again.

Don't know how fool-proof Honorverse contraceptive methods are, but accidents aren't fool-proof. Honor as a case in point. Although, I don't know if Honor would have recovered if she missed her very next cycle.

Can you imagine the two of them going right back to Emily in thirty days? ...

"Ah, Em' Honor and I have other um um um ... news."

"Sounds like I better be sitting my chair down."

Apparently the 10 year implants worked pretty well. Naomi Kaplan apparently never got preggers, even though wshe was by all accounts, active. One person does not constitute a proof, and it is possible that there were accidental pregnancies, but given that the RMN seemed to rely on them, probably 99.9999% effective. I would guess that most "accidental pregnancies" were more a case of bureaucratic screw up (HH), or deliberate forgetfulness on the part of the woman.

Fire sprinklers have a limited amount of water they put out, particularly in high rises where it needs to be pumped uphill by the building fire pumps. Typically this means it can only handle a small number of sprinklers activating at once, like 5-6. However outside the building there are the fire department connections. Once you get a series of big fire engines pumping a huge amount of water at high pressure into the the system the sprinkler system can cover a lot more area.

Aren't the megatowers in the Honorverse divided into sections with really massive fireproof (and effectively blastproof) walls between them? I think the problem of containment is solved in those towers.

SWM wrote:Aren't the megatowers in the Honorverse divided into sections with really massive fireproof (and effectively blastproof) walls between them? I think the problem of containment is solved in those towers.

They're not strictly separated, and if there are blast doors, that at least isn't something you can count on lasting whether or not things are maintained. (And I doubt they're installed outside of military installations and extremely high-security locations anyway.)

The towers are internally divided somewhat, so you won't have free-and-easy access between all sections. How much such divisions you'd find would vary; I don't recall it being a galactic standard.

Fire control would get a lot of help with some divisions internally and concentration of sprinkler systems (and emergency vehicle access) at/to the openings between major sections. It would also help police in case of controlling major disorders - you control the exits from a tower zone, you can contain the riots/revolutionaries.

Certainly the structure-bearing walls and supports aren't going to come down, but my impression is that leaves a whole lot of freedom to re-arrange internal spaces and routing from A to B, so you wouldn't be able to count on such walls offering terribly effective internal segmentation, not unless you designed the tower to begin with so that it would always being internally segmented, or you've got sufficient control over tower refurbishment and rearrangement to prevent that.

Firestopping isn't something that "just happens". If you don't have people whose job is to ensure that fire safety measures are taken you will find power, data, water and sewer risers and pathways provide a perfectly wonderful path for toxic gasses and ultimately fire to spread far faster and more efficiently that you would ever expect.

JeffEngel wrote:I do figure that internal fire suppression - and fire fighters working from inside the tower - is likely to be more important, just because counter-grav won't help the worst of the problem:

Honorverse towers are not just tall, they're thick, and you've got lots and lots of internal volume a great big distance from the outside. And when you go in, kicking down walls to get to people or fires isn't an option. The tower is essentially an artificial mountain, honeycombed with useful spaces. Some of the internal walls are practical for demolition and reconstruction, but quite a lot of them - any intended to support structure - are really, really hard.

If you had a raging inferno inside one of those, you wouldn't have to worry about the tower itself, just its contents, and you wouldn't have breaking through anything as an option in the firefighting. Trying to contain it - to prevent more damage to the contents elsewhere in the tower - would amount to fire fighting around the edges inside and pushing it back.

Of course that very thickness (kilometer wide donuts) means it's very unlikely for an entire floor to ablaze before the firefighters get there. So they should be able to use lifts (or counter-grav fire trucks) to get to areas on the same level(s) as the fire, but still outside the current fire zone, then connect hoses to the tower's internal fire mains and work their way in horizontally - attacking the edges of the fire.

Fighting a fire on the 400th floor isn't so bad if the fire doesn't have time to spread to more than, say, 1/5th of that floor by the time fire fighters respond.


So the construction, fire doors, and internal sprinklers should slow the fire's spread; giving time for firemen to arrive and set up to push the fire back.

We take it for granted, living in a star system with a single inhabitable planet, and without other inhabitable planets wormhole transits away.

In the Honorverse, if a child says she is running away, who the heck knows where she'll end up. If your child is kidnapped, that's one heck of a multi-system Amber alert.

Fooling around on your mate is easier when you can rendezvous off-planet.

Escaped convicts can be anywhere.

Detectives, investigators, must do lots of travel.

Can you imagine infomercials?
(Allow six months for delivery, 2500 Credits S&H charges. 10,000 Credits Piracy insurance sold separately)


And aircars, "Can you remember what city I parked my car in?"

Considering the movie Armageddon. With Honorverse technology, would we have a different avenue of resolution to the impending disaster available to us?

And heaven help the genuine absent-minded professors. My wife used to work with one at a research institute's London HQ. Brilliant mind, but hopeless with mundane matters. He even had to ring his wife once to ask which car he'd used to get to HQ that day because he couldn't find any of his cars in the car park. She told him that he'd gone to London by train!
Cheers
John

cthia wrote:We take it for granted, living in a star system with a single inhabitable planet, and without other inhabitable planets wormhole transits away.

In the Honorverse, if a child says she is running away, who the heck knows where she'll end up. If your child is kidnapped, that's one heck of a multi-system Amber alert.

Fooling around on your mate is easier when you can rendezvous off-planet.

Escaped convicts can be anywhere.

Detectives, investigators, must do lots of travel.

Can you imagine infomercials?
(Allow six months for delivery, 2500 Credits S&H charges. 10,000 Credits Piracy insurance sold separately)


And aircars, "Can you remember what city I parked my car in?"