Honorverse ramblings and musings

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?

OrlandoNative wrote: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.

...

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.

Relax wrote: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?

SWM wrote:

Relax wrote: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?

There does seem to be a grav wave between Manticore and Grayson, but it is mentioned only once. We never get a description of a grav wave, we never have a scene while a ship is in a grav wave, and the grav wave does not affect the plot in any way.

The only mention of a grav wave is in Chapter 22, when Admiral Garret says that Grayson warships cannot get as much acceleration from a grav wave as Manticoran ships, and therefore could not get to Manticore any faster than the freighters which had already been sent off.

The Honor of the Queen, Chapter 2 wrote:She snorted tiredly at herself and finished the cocoa. MacGuiness knew exactly how to make it, and its rich, smooth calories were another reason to put in more gym time, she thought with a grin. Then she rose and crossed to the view port to stare out into the weird, shifting splendor of hyper space.
That view port was one of the things Honor most treasured about her ship. Her quarters aboard her last ship, the elderly light cruiser which had bequeathed her name and battle honors to the present Fearless, hadn’t had one, and it gave Honor an ever-renewed sense of the vastness of the universe. It offered both relaxing contemplation and a sense of perspective—an awareness of how small any human being truly was against the enormity of creation—that was almost a challenge, and she stretched her long body out on the padded couch beneath it with a sigh.
Fearless and the ships of her convoy rode the twisted currents of a grav wave which had never attained the dignity of a name, only a catalog number. Honor’s cabin was barely a hundred meters forward of Fearless’s after impeller nodes, and the immaterial, three-hundred-kilometer disk of the cruiser’s after Warshawski sail flickered and flashed like frozen heat lightning, dominating the view port with its soft glory as it harnessed the grav wave’s power. Its grab factor was adjusted to a tiny, almost immeasurable fraction of its full efficiency, providing a minuscule acceleration which was exactly offset by the forward sail’s deceleration to hold Fearless at fifty percent of light-speed. The cruiser could have sustained a velocity twenty percent higher, but the hyper bands’ heavier particle densities would have overcome the freighters’ weaker radiation shielding long before that.
Honor’s brown eyes were rapt as she watched the sail, fascinated as always by its flowing-ice beauty. She could have shut down her ship’s sails and let momentum take its course, but those sails balanced Fearless delicately between them like exquisitely counterpoised fulcrums that lent the cruiser an instant responsiveness. Their current grav wave was barely a half light-month deep and a light-month wide, a mere rivulet beside titans like the Roaring Deeps, yet its power was enough to send her ship leaping to an effective five thousand gravities’ acceleration in less than two seconds. And should Fearless’s gravity detectors pick up unexpected wave turbulence ahead of her, she might have to do just that.
Honor shook herself and let her eyes rove further out. The sail cut off all view of anything astern of Fearless, but the bottomless sweep of hyper space stretched out ahead and abeam. The nearest freighter was a thousand kilometers away, giving both vessels’ sails ample clearance from one another, and even a five-megaton freighter was an invisible mote to unaided vision at that distance. But Honor’s trained eye picked out the glittering disks of the ship’s Warshawski sails, like flaws of strange, focused permanence against the gorgeous chaos of hyper space, and astern of her was the gleam of yet another stupendous merchantman.
Her merchantmen, she told herself. Her charges—slow, fat, clumsy, the smallest of them six times more massive than Fearless’s three hundred thousand tons but totally defenseless, and stuffed with cargoes whose combined value was literally beyond comprehension. Over a hundred and fifty billion Manticoran dollars’ worth of it headed for Yeltsin’s Star alone. Medical equipment, teaching materials, heavy machinery, precision tools, and molycirc computers and software to update and modernize the Graysons’ out-of-date industrial base—every penny of it paid for by Crown “loans” which amounted to outright gifts. It was a sobering indication of how high Queen Elizabeth’s government was willing to bid for the alliance Admiral Courvosier sought, and it was Honor’s responsibility to see it safely delivered.
She leaned further back into the cushioned couch, reclining to savor the melting muscular relaxation in the wake of her exercise, and her brown eyes were heavy. No Navy skipper enjoyed convoy duty. Freighters lacked warships’ powerful Warshawski sails and inertial compensators, and without them they dared not venture much above the delta bands of hyper space, whereas warships ranged as high as the eta or even theta bands. At the moment, for example, Honor’s convoy was cruising along in the mid-delta bands, which translated their .5 C true velocity into an effective velocity of just over a thousand times light-speed. At that rate, the thirty-one light-year voyage to Yeltsin’s Star would require ten days—just under nine, by their shipboard clocks. Left to herself, Fearless could have made the same crossing in less than four.
But that was all right, Honor thought drowsily as Nimitz hopped up onto her chest with his soft, buzzing purr. He curled down and rested his chin between her breasts, and she stroked his ears gently. Four days or ten, it didn’t matter. She didn’t need to set any records. She did need to deliver her charges safely, and commerce protection was one of the purposes for which cruisers were specifically designed and built.
She yawned, sliding still further down on the couch, and considered getting up and taking herself off to bed, but her sleepy gaze clung to the wavering gray and black and pulsing purple and green of hyper space. It glowed and throbbed, beckoning to her, starless and shifting and infinitely, beautifully variable, and her eyes slipped shut and Nimitz’s purr was a soft, affectionate lullaby in the background of her brain.
Captain Honor Harrington didn’t even twitch when Chief Steward MacGuiness tiptoed into her cabin and tucked a blanket over her. He stood a moment, smiling down at her, then left as quietly as he had come, and the cabin lights dimmed into darkness behind him.

SWM wrote:Vince caught my post before I managed to edit and correct it.

He also somehow found yet another mention of a grav wave in HoTQ. I'm very confused and uncertain how my search of the text didn't find that one. Ah well.

In any case, yes, there is a grav wave, and in fact Grayson appears to be in a grav wave. So perhaps the movie will show a grav wave transit after all.

The Honor of the Queen, Chapter 15 wrote:HMS Troubadour had no warning at all. Lasers are light-speed weapons; by the time your sensors realize someone has fired them at you, they’ve already hit you.
Each of the Masadan LACs mounted a single laser, and if Troubadour’s sidewalls had been up, the crude, relatively low-powered weapons would have been harmless. But her sidewalls weren’t up, and Commander McKeon’s face went whiter than bone as energy fire smashed into his ship’s starboard bow. Plating shattered, damage and collision alarms shrieked, and Troubadour lurched as the kinetic energy bled into her hull.

The Honor of the Queen, Chapter 16 wrote:“How bad is it, Alistair?”
“Bad enough, Ma’am.” Alistair McKeon’s face was grim. “We’ve lost Missile Two and Radar Three. That leaves point defense wide open on the starboard beam. The same hit carried through into the forward impellers—Alpha Four’s gone, and so is Beta Eight. The second hit came in right on Frame Twenty and carried clear back through sickbay. It took out the master control runs to Laser Three and Missile Four and breached Magazine Two. The magazine’s a total write-off; Laser Three and Missile Four are on line in local control, and we’re repressurizing and rigging new runs to them now, but we lost thirty-one people, including Dr. McFee and two sick berth attendants, and we’ve got wounded.”
His voice was harsh with pain, and Honor’s eyes were dark as she nodded, but for all that, they both knew Troubadour had been incredibly lucky. The loss of one of her forward missile tubes and an entire magazine had hurt her offensive capability, and Radar Three’s destruction left a dangerous chink in her anti-missile defenses. But her combat power was far less impaired than it might have been, and the casualties could have been much, much worse. She’d been lamed, and until the alpha node was replaced she couldn’t generate a forward Warshawski sail, but she could still maneuver and fight.

The Honor of the Queen, Chapter 22 wrote:“Well, Sir, as you know, we’ve evacuated our own noncombatants aboard our freighters.” Garret nodded, and Honor shrugged. “Commander Truman’s report included an urgent request for reinforcements. I’m certain that request will be granted, but those are slow ships, Sir. I’d have preferred to send one of my warships, but I can’t spare Apollo if we may be facing two modern cruisers, and Troubadour’s node damage would restrict her to impeller drive. More, she couldn’t get much above the gamma band without reliable Warshawski sails. If one of your hyper-capable ships could be sent—?”

The Honor of the Queen, Chapter 21 wrote:“So we’re all there is for now,” Honor said even more slowly than her damaged mouth required. “What’s the status on Troubadour’s alpha node?”
“The Grayson yard people confirm Alistair’s original estimate,” Truman replied. “It’s completely gone, and they can’t repair it. Their Warshawski technology’s even cruder than I thought, and their components simply won’t mate with ours, but their standard impellers are a lot closer to our levels, and Lieutenant Anthony got with their chief shipwright before I sent Troubadour off with the freighters. By the time she gets back, the Graysons should have run up jury-rigged beta nodes to replace the damaged beta and alpha nodes. She still won’t have Warshawski capability, but she’ll be back up to five-twenty gees for max acceleration.”

At All Costs, Chapter 35 wrote:"I suppose part of it could just be the fact that Solon lies right in the middle of a gravity wave," she continued aloud. "I always get a sort of uncomfortable feeling between my shoulder blades in a case like this."
Jaruwalski nodded. No flag officer really liked attacking a star system which lay in the middle of a hyper-space gravity wave—not unless she was totally confident she'd brought along enough firepower to take the system outright—for a very simple reason. A starship could not enter a gravity wave and survive without functioning Warshawski sails, and no ship could produce a Warshawski sail if it had lost an alpha node out of one of its impeller rings. Which meant a single unlucky hit could leave a warship with otherwise trifling damage unable to withdraw into hyper if the rest of its task force or fleet had to run for it.

Vince wrote:

SWM wrote:Vince caught my post before I managed to edit and correct it.

He also somehow found yet another mention of a grav wave in HoTQ. I'm very confused and uncertain how my search of the text didn't find that one. Ah well.

In any case, yes, there is a grav wave, and in fact Grayson appears to be in a grav wave. So perhaps the movie will show a grav wave transit after all.

A grav wave apparently extends from near Manticore to near Yeltsin's Star. Similar to the Tellerman Wave being near the Basilisk system in On Basilisk Station.

When Honor is discussing sending for help from Manticore, the argument against sending Troubadour is that the ship will take too long to get back to Manticore, due to the loss of the forward Warshawski sail:

The Honor of the Queen, Chapter 22 wrote:Troubadour’s node damage would restrict her to impeller drive. More, she couldn’t get much above the gamma band without reliable Warshawski sails. If one of your hyper-capable ships could be sent—?”

The fact that Troubadour could be considered to be sent off in hyper with the message to Manticore, without Warshawski sail capability, albeit at a cost of reduced effective speed (gamma band or thereabouts), indicates that Yeltsin's Star does not lie directly in a grav wave.

Jonathan_S wrote:Although it's also possible that RFC's thoughts on on his hyper tech worked were still a little amorphous. After all another that book claimed that merchant ships couldn't got above the Delta bands because "Freighters lacked warships’ powerful Warshawski sails and inertial compensators" -- rather than the current reason; that they lacked warships' mil-spec hyper generator.