Honorverse ramblings and musings

munroburton wrote:

SWM wrote:The movie isn't going to clear any of this up, because there are neither Rifts nor grav waves anywhere in the book. And the amount of text that takes place in hyperspace is minimal. It is entirely possible that none of the movie will take place in hyperspace at all.

There's that scene where Alice Truman orders her engineer to take the safety interlocks out and redlines her ship all the way to Manticore for reinforcements. Admittedly, in the books it took place before the ship actually went into hyperspace, but I'm expecting something like that scene in the Wing Commander movie, when Admiral Tolwyn orders the fleet to increase reactor output from 110% to 120%, accepting the risk of overloads to arrive at the battlefield before the enemy did. Dramatic! Tension!

HotQ is also full of hyper journeys. Honor's squadron accounts for four of those and the Masadans went back and forth more often, including towing LACs in hyperspace.

Modest diversion, but if the writer for the movie cannot find a place for Alice's quote:

“Flatterer. Go play with your spanners.”

I will be most disgruntled...

munroburton wrote:

SWM wrote:The movie isn't going to clear any of this up, because there are neither Rifts nor grav waves anywhere in the book. And the amount of text that takes place in hyperspace is minimal. It is entirely possible that none of the movie will take place in hyperspace at all.

There's that scene where Alice Truman orders her engineer to take the safety interlocks out and redlines her ship all the way to Manticore for reinforcements. Admittedly, in the books it took place before the ship actually went into hyperspace, but I'm expecting something like that scene in the Wing Commander movie, when Admiral Tolwyn orders the fleet to increase reactor output from 110% to 120%, accepting the risk of overloads to arrive at the battlefield before the enemy did. Dramatic! Tension!

HotQ is also full of hyper journeys. Honor's squadron accounts for four of those and the Masadans went back and forth more often, including towing LACs in hyperspace.

Yes, the book is full of hyper journeys. But we hardly ever see them. The amount of text that occurs in hyperspace is a tiny portion of the book. Most of it is not very relevant to the plot, and I expect that what little of it is incorporated into the movie will be moved to one of the other scenes. Reducing the number of scenes is critical in movies.

And in any case, as I said before, there aren't any rifts or grav waves involved. The movie won't give any illumination on the questions cthia has.

Um, there is a grav wave between Grayson and Manticore. It was simply never shown in the books. It was an "aside" note when traveling in the 3rd chapter?

munroburton wrote:

SWM wrote:The movie isn't going to clear any of this up, because there are neither Rifts nor grav waves anywhere in the book. And the amount of text that takes place in hyperspace is minimal. It is entirely possible that none of the movie will take place in hyperspace at all.

There's that scene where Alice Truman orders her engineer to take the safety interlocks out and redlines her ship all the way to Manticore for reinforcements. Admittedly, in the books it took place before the ship actually went into hyperspace, but I'm expecting something like that scene in the Wing Commander movie, when Admiral Tolwyn orders the fleet to increase reactor output from 110% to 120%, accepting the risk of overloads to arrive at the battlefield before the enemy did. Dramatic! Tension!

HotQ is also full of hyper journeys. Honor's squadron accounts for four of those and the Masadans went back and forth more often, including towing LACs in hyperspace.

SWM wrote:Yes, the book is full of hyper journeys. But we hardly ever see them. The amount of text that occurs in hyperspace is a tiny portion of the book. Most of it is not very relevant to the plot, and I expect that what little of it is incorporated into the movie will be moved to one of the other scenes. Reducing the number of scenes is critical in movies.

And in any case, as I said before, there aren't any rifts or grav waves involved. The movie won't give any illumination on the questions cthia has.

I also had some questions about hyper some posts ago where I stated that I hope the movie would strengthen my grasp of Honorverse hyper travel. You were an integral part of that discussion as I remember. Similar to here, people don't think that the movie will grant any of those wishes.

I think it would be irresponsible of the directors/producers NOT to include those scenes as a staple. Remember, movie bling sells! Movie bling is just another way to say special effects. And special effects, my friend, is as integral and as important to the film industry as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and his Industrial Light and Magic, CGI technology and the like. When it comes to an audience of geeks - and Sci-Fi is geekdom, special effects sells a movie faster than sex. Geeks will remember eye-popping special effects in greater detail than a bevy of naked Victoria Secret models.

Star Trek has always featured the Enterprise going into warp as a staple. For the producer of the Honorverse movie to miss an apropos opportunity to interject special effects (at an appropriate place at that) as far as the ship going into hyper, replete with some sound effects is not worth his weight in Solarian credits.

And as far as needing to limit scenes because of cost or other considerations because you can't afford it. Well, I say, you cannot afford to overlook your main core of sci-fi, Big Bang, Spielberg, George Lucas geek-type addicts who have grown up with generations of eye-popping special effects. And I'm not talking about just throwing special effects in a movie in any old place like seasonings to support a movie that mainly has no substance. I'm talking about spending some special effects dollars in the one place that is needed, apropos and fitting to storyline - hyper jumps, wormhole translations. DOWNWARD translations so that movie goers can see the beautiful brilliant azure bleed of the sails that their dollars will help pay for. A perfect bang for the buck. Lest you want to shoot your movie in the foot. This is Sci-Fi baby!

Special effects is hypnotic. Psychiatrists use the spinning wheels to put us under. Humans get off on pretty lights. Remember the idiots standing under the ships in the movie Independence Day when they opened the laser bay doors? "Preeetty!"

Special effects help hypnotize you into believing the movie is good. Even when it isn't, and it helps movie theaters sell popcorn at $25 a box. You're too busy to ask for change from your $100 bill when you send your buddy at popcorn and he's too much in a hurry to get back to the special effects err movie.

I'm stuck in Cauldron of Ghosts. And the more I read of Mesa, the less I understand it.

There is only a 30% prime population. The other 70% is comprised of slaves and seccies. If ever I've seen a situation primed and ripe for a "government" overthrow. And the economy, so far, is puzzling.

Why there isn't mass political unrest on that planet is beyond me. There's a real need for an Honorverse equivalent of MOSES. "Let my people go."

Will Manticore honor a submission from 70% of the planet for humanitarian relief?

Cauldron of Ghosts

Mesan authorities had no hesitation when it came to using the death penalty as a means of disciplining the population. Lajos wasn’t sure of the exact number, but there’d be at least half a dozen people being executed every month.

R-E-V-O-L-T-!

Is that what Mike&Mesa is all about? I'm still reading.

Afterthought:
Mesa used to be the headquarters of the MAlign for a very long time. It's inconceivable that there isn't more than a few individuals still on planet that doesn't have viable information regarding the Onion. Residual, incidental information. Onions reek. Command the high orbitals and go door to door with the Manticoran Inquisition - treecat led!

Perhaps you can't squeeze blood out of a turnip. But I bet treecats can cut the truth out of an onion. With tears.

cthia wrote:I'm having a hard time viaualising this. So what does a ship do, reconfigure from sails after exiting a grav wave carrying < .16 c speeds across in a downward translation then going to impeller drives only to reconfigure to sails before reaching the other wave?

No wonder they are vulnerable to pirates. But it seems this is the one place where no freighter should ever tread alone without a naval escort. Rather humorous if you think about it, freighters are like little old ladies needing help to cross the street.

But how dangerous is it? I hate being given generalities. Is it as dangerous an undertaking as removing the safety intelocks on the engine?... however dangerous that is.

First, the ship doesn't change hyper bands when it exits the wave. It's sails just become ineffective and it switches to impellers.

I see three different types of risk for hyper travel:
Mechanical - unlike pulling safety interlocks and going to 100% acceleration, or the highest hyper bands, crossing the Selkir rift doesn't have any special mechanical risk. Changing speed, and going from sails to wedge, and back, is a routine safe operation. (I mean you could screw it up; raising a plane's landing gear is safe unless you accidentally do it at 70 mph heading down the runway. But it's generally considered safe)

Navigational - hyperspace is kind of like driving in a fog; limited sensor range. And ships take a long time to accelerate or change their vector radically. So you go slower so your reaction time matches your detection time. Hence the 0.16c speeds. Go that speed and there no real risk. Go faster and if the rogue wave pops up in the wrong spot you might slide into it despite accelerating at hundreds of Gs. So you'd slow from your 0.5c cruising speed while still in the wave (10x higher accel) to your 0.16c safe transit speed and you're good to go.

Naval action - there's some risk there, but even so I think you were overstating the risk then and the risk should be lower now. The Peeps had to deploy a a bunch of cruisers, working together, to have a reasonable chance of even detecting merchant ships crossing the rift. And even they wouldn't be able to maintain a patrol there for long. No pirates are likely to have enough ships to duplicate that, nor could they maintain a patrol there for long if they did. And now with piracy firmly suppressed in Silesian the risks should be even lower.

It's hard to compare different types of risks, but my guess is that even back during the first haven war crossing the rift was significantly safer than screwing with safety interlocks.

cthia wrote:I also had some questions about hyper some posts ago where I stated that I hope the movie would strengthen my grasp of Honorverse hyper travel. You were an integral part of that discussion as I remember. Similar to here, people don't think that the movie will grant any of those wishes.

I think it would be irresponsible of the directors/producers NOT to include those scenes as a staple. Remember, movie bling sells! Movie bling is just another way to say special effects. And special effects, my friend, is as integral and as important to the film industry as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and his Industrial Light and Magic, CGI technology and the like. When it comes to an audience of geeks - and Sci-Fi is geekdom, special effects sells a movie faster than sex. Geeks will remember eye-popping special effects in greater detail than a bevy of naked Victoria Secret models.

Star Trek has always featured the Enterprise going into warp as a staple. For the producer of the Honorverse movie to miss an apropos opportunity to interject special effects (at an appropriate place at that) as far as the ship going into hyper, replete with some sound effects is not worth his weight in Solarian credits.

And as far as needing to limit scenes because of cost or other considerations because you can't afford it. Well, I say, you cannot afford to overlook your main core of sci-fi, Big Bang, Spielberg, George Lucas geek-type addicts who have grown up with generations of eye-popping special effects. And I'm not talking about just throwing special effects in a movie in any old place like seasonings to support a movie that mainly has no substance. I'm talking about spending some special effects dollars in the one place that is needed, apropos and fitting to storyline - hyper jumps, wormhole translations. DOWNWARD translations so that movie goers can see the beautiful brilliant azure bleed of the sails that their dollars will help pay for. A perfect bang for the buck. Lest you want to shoot your movie in the foot. This is Sci-Fi baby!

Special effects is hypnotic. Psychiatrists use the spinning wheels to put us under. Humans get off on pretty lights. Remember the idiots standing under the ships in the movie Independence Day when they opened the laser bay doors? "Preeetty!"

Special effects help hypnotize you into believing the movie is good. Even when it isn't, and it helps movie theaters sell popcorn at $25 a box. You're too busy to ask for change from your $100 bill when you send your buddy at popcorn and he's too much in a hurry to get back to the special effects err movie.

I think it's likely there might be *some* scenes of ships going into hyper or back into normal space, but realistically that's only going to be a small part.

Most likely the major special effects will "normal space" views - planets, perhaps fleets of ships, and, of course, battles.

Surprisingly enough, most of the "battle tech" in the Honorverse isn't what one would call all that "futuristic". The hand weapons the RMN and Marines use are projectile weapons, not energy weapons like the phasers on Star Trek. Think flechette rounds for shotguns. While the grasers and spinal lasers on the ships are energy weapons, still, those are short ranged. The main weapon is the missile. True, it's not a *rocket* powered missile, but still it's not all that different from what we use today, at least in concept.

The most interesting thing I think will be how they show the impeller drive. Realistically, since it's basically a shaped and directed gravity stress induced field, it shouldn't actually be *visible*. The only visible manifestation should be small jinks of individual stars (or other light sources) in the star field as a impeller drive ship moves across it.

cthia wrote:I'm stuck in Cauldron of Ghosts. And the more I read of Mesa, the less I understand it.

There is only a 30% prime population. The other 70% is comprised of slaves and seccies. If ever I've seen a situation primed and ripe for a "government" overthrow. And the economy, so far, is puzzling.

Why there isn't mass political unrest on that planet is beyond me. There's a real need for an Honorverse equivalent of MOSES. "Let my people go."

What was the percentage of people in the USSR that belonged to the Communist Party, or in WW2 Germany that belonged to the Nazi party?

How stable were they against internal revolt?

cthia wrote:I'm stuck in Cauldron of Ghosts. And the more I read of Mesa, the less I understand it.

There is only a 30% prime population. The other 70% is comprised of slaves and seccies. If ever I've seen a situation primed and ripe for a "government" overthrow. And the economy, so far, is puzzling.

Why there isn't mass political unrest on that planet is beyond me. There's a real need for an Honorverse equivalent of MOSES. "Let my people go."

Will Manticore honor a submission from 70% of the planet for humanitarian relief?

Cauldron of Ghosts

Mesan authorities had no hesitation when it came to using the death penalty as a means of disciplining the population. Lajos wasn’t sure of the exact number, but there’d be at least half a dozen people being executed every month.

R-E-V-O-L-T-!

Is that what Mike&Mesa is all about? I'm still reading.

Afterthought:
Mesa used to be the headquarters of the MAlign for a very long time. It's inconceivable that there isn't more than a few individuals still on planet that doesn't have viable information regarding the Onion. Residual, incidental information. Onions reek. Command the high orbitals and go door to door with the Manticoran Inquisition - treecat led!

Perhaps you can't squeeze blood out of a turnip. But I bet treecats can cut the truth out of an onion. With tears.

The Mesan society is structured similarly to that of ancient India, but with only 3 classes. The top are the regular humans. The second are the descendants of freed genetic slaves that managed to acquire citizenship before that option was taken away,and the rest are slaves and other "native" non-citizens.

All the more sophisticated weaponry is in the hands of the upper class - including warships and kinetic bombardment platforms.

There is basically no political influence by anything other than the upper class; so "political unrest" really cannot exist; at least not in the normally understood meaning of the term. After all, a stampede of cattle trying to get away from a slaughterhouse isn't "political unrest" in the eyes of the slaughterhouse management, is it?

That may seem harsh, but the "normal" humans on Mesa don't see genetic slaves, or, for that matter, even freed descendants, as really human rather than just as property (in the case of slaves) or some sort of "sub-sapien" (in the case of freed descendants).

Sure, in theory the lower classes could "rise up"; but, realistically, their chances of success would be small enough to be virtually non-existent. No matter how many upper class they kill or capture on the ground, there's no way to effectively oppose orbital bombardment in retaliation.

And, frankly, if things ever got that far, the "normal" Mesans don't really *need* slaves. Mesa is a technological society. It also was colonized from a technological society (Beowulf). They could use automation, instead, that would, actually, be *less* expensive overall. I suspect the only *real* reason they exist at all was as a cover for the genetic experimentation the Alignment was engaging in.

True, Manpower bred and sold them in large lots (as well as individually as "pleasure toys"); but realistically slavery only works even semi-efficiently in low tech, mostly agrarian, settings.

kzt wrote:

cthia wrote:I'm stuck in Cauldron of Ghosts. And the more I read of Mesa, the less I understand it.

There is only a 30% prime population. The other 70% is comprised of slaves and seccies. If ever I've seen a situation primed and ripe for a "government" overthrow. And the economy, so far, is puzzling.

Why there isn't mass political unrest on that planet is beyond me. There's a real need for an Honorverse equivalent of MOSES. "Let my people go."

What was the percentage of people in the USSR that belonged to the Communist Party, or in WW2 Germany that belonged to the Nazi party?

How stable were they against internal revolt?

Would've worked for them too, if they had the same recourse to solicit humanitarian help from a willing sentimental entity with World Power spaceships and tech, that not only sympathize with but also spirit their cause.