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Welcome to recent new member Shannon Foraker!

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Re: Welcome to recent new member Shannon Foraker!
Post by tlb   » Fri May 06, 2022 10:42 pm

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cthia wrote:I agree, but, then, how did Tourville get the full impression of her, did he have prior knowledge of her before she was assigned to him?

In chapter 8 of In Enemy Hands Shannon Foraker is newly assigned to Citizen Rear Admiral Tourville's command and this is stated:
"I think so." There was an edge of caution in Honeker's reply. He'd been too quick to agree with Tourville a time or two, only to discover that the citizen rear admiral had sold him a bill of goods just so he could see a little action. The experience had taught him not to rush into anything, and he looked at Citizen Commander Shannon Foraker, Tourville's ops officer and the newest member of his staff. "What do we know about probable enemy forces in the area, Citizen Commander?"
"Not as much as I'd like, Sir," Foraker replied promptly. The golden-haired citizen commander had a formidable reputation as a tactical officer (indeed, she was widely regarded as something of a witch in that department), including the enthusiastic recommendation of her previous people's commissioner. Fortunately for Foraker, Citizen Commissioner Jourdain's report had also warned Honeker that when she became immersed in a problem, she often backslid into some rather prerevolutionary habits of speech. Viewed against her accomplishments, Honeker—like Jourdain before him—was prepared to cut her some slack, and one of the things he most liked about her was that it never seemed to occur to her to cover her own posterior by hedging. If someone asked her a question, she answered it to the best of her ability and without equivocating, and that, unfortunately, was increasingly rare in the People's Navy. In his more honest moments, Honeker knew why that was, though he preferred not to think about it too closely.
Then Shannon sketches out the operational plan that would catch Commodore Yeargin's ships with their wedges down:
"Oh, I think we can manage that, Sir," Tourville assured him with a smile, then nodded to Foraker once more. "All right, Shannon. Assume you've got your pods. Now sketch me out an ops plan to make the best use of them."
"Yes, Sir." Foraker punched up fresh data, her long, narrow face intent, and Honeker bit his lip against the automatic urge to correct her. He'd seen her at work often enough by now to realize that Jourdain had been right: her reversion to the older, forbidden military courtesies simply meant her brain was too thoroughly engaged on the problem before it to leave any room for other considerations.
"First of all," the ops officer began, "we have to bear in mind that Manty tech systems are still better than ours across the board. On the other hand, they haven't been in possession of Adler or Micah long enough to have deployed their usual sensor platform network. Even if they had been, their operational patterns around Trevor's Star indicate their Sixth Fleet is short of platforms just now. That, at least, is NavInt's interpretation of their increased use of destroyers and light cruisers as perimeter pickets, and it makes sense to me, too. If they don't have enough sensor platforms, they'd have to cover the gaps with ships. I also think it's a fairly safe bet that if they're short at someplace as critical as Trevor's Star, they're probably even shorter in the much lower priority systems in our operational area. If they do have a sensor bottleneck, it's probably temporary, but until they get it fixed, it offers us a window of opportunity."
The other members of the staff were leaning forward as they listened raptly to Foraker and punched notes and questions into their memo pads for later discussion. And, for all his feeling that control of the squadron's affairs somehow eluded him, Everard Honeker leaned forward with them, for this was the reason he was willing to put up with Tourville's posturing and defend him against the occasional charges of having created a "personality cult." Whatever faults the citizen rear admiral might have, he was a fighter. In a People's Navy which had far too much experience with desperate—and losing—defensive fights, Tourville looked constantly for opportunities to attack. No wonder he'd wanted Foraker for his staff! The two of them were exactly alike in at least one respect, for where all too many of their fellows viewed the Manticorans' superior technology as a fatal disadvantage, Foraker and Tourville saw it as a challenge. They were more concerned with finding ways to exploit any opening against the Manties than with seeking ways to protect themselves from the Manties, and Honeker would tolerate anything short of outright treason to protect people who actually wanted to fight.
"Now," Foraker continued, replacing the star map with a detailed schematic of a hypothetical star system, "let's assume that this is our objective and that the Manties only have about half the sensor platforms they'd really need to cover its perimeter. If I were them, I'd put the platforms I did have here, here, and here." Volumes of space within the star system blossomed with tiny red speckles to indicate the areas covered by her theoretical sensors. "This pattern would make optimum tactical use of their platforms, but it leaves the system periphery vulnerable, so what I'd suggest would be—"
She went on talking, sketching out her proposed attack plan with bold red arrows, and Everard Honeker smiled in approval as he listened.
From chapter 10:
Holden Singer snapped upright in his chair, eyes wide. It took eight seconds for his radar pulse to reach Count Tilly and her consorts, and another eight seconds for it to return. During that time, the Peeps' approach speed had cut the range by over a million kilometers . . . and brought them well into missile range. It took the lieutenant another two seconds to realize what he was seeing and shout a warning, and it took Commander Dillinger another second and a half to order the General Quarters alarm sounded. In all, twenty seconds elapsed between the time Tourville passed his order to fire and the moment the atonal, two-toned howl of the alarm actually began to sound.
HMS Enchanter's crew had barely begun to race to their battle stations when four battlecruisers, eight heavy cruisers, and six light cruisers, with a combined total of fifty-six missile pods on tow behind them, opened fire. Peep missiles were less efficient than those of the RMN, but in compensation, Peep warships mounted more tubes . . . and so did their missile pods.
By the time Singer's assistant tac officer flung herself into the chair beside his, over nine hundred missiles were in space and streaking for his ship.

"Yessss!"
Citizen Captain Bogdanovich's exultant, sibilant whisper said it all as Tourville and his staff watched their massive salvo stream towards the enemy. Even as the missiles went out, Tourville's engineers were bringing up his ships' impellers and sidewalls, for there was no longer any reason to hide. Unlike the Manties, Tourville's officers had known their drives and defensive systems would be needed, and they'd been at standby for over fifteen hours, but even with hot impeller nodes, they would need at least another thirteen minutes to bring their wedges up.
Yet that still put them far ahead of the Manties, for the Manties hadn't known this was coming. Their missile-defense fire control started to come on-line, blossoming on Shannon Foraker's display in bursts of light, but their passive defenses could never be brought up in time. And against the hurricane of fire coming at them, all their radar and lidar could really do was provide targeting beacons for her missiles' onboard seekers.

Commodore Frances Yeargin hurled herself onto her flag bridge almost before the lift doors opened. She hadn't waited to don her skinsuit; she came charging out of the lift in shirt sleeves, without even her tunic . . . just in time to see the first laser heads detonate in the depths of her visual display.

-- snip --

Sixteen seconds later, Shannon Foraker's second salvo streaked down on the stunned, mangled survivors, and when the last of them detonated, the Manticoran Alliance had lost six RMN heavy cruisers, three RMN and seven GSN light cruisers, and nine destroyers . . . without getting a single shot off at their attackers.
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Re: Welcome to recent new member Shannon Foraker!
Post by Shannon_Foraker   » Fri May 06, 2022 10:52 pm

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cthia wrote:
Jonathan_S wrote:I will agree that tactical knowledge is useful, I was simply trying to state that tactical wizardry by itself was insufficient.
And I agree with that.
Tactical knowledge was necessary but not sufficient.

And I argue that tactical wizardry is not necessary in the head of Bolthole (though very useful); but a base level of tactical knowledge probably really is necessary. If for no other reason that to judge whether the tacticians under you are trying to feed you a snow job - and so you can make informed decisions between tactics and design.

I agree, but, then, how did Tourville get the full impression of her, did he have prior knowledge of her before she was assigned to him?


If I remember, Theisman got Caslet, and maybe (beyond is just guessing), he mentioned his not-so-socially-skilled tech and tac nerd to Theisman, who gave her to the person who could use her the most?

Someone like Theisman or Tourville may have seen her file and seen that she needed help to protect herself from StateSec, but had good brains otherwise, unlike StateSec.
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Re: Welcome to recent new member Shannon Foraker!
Post by Jonathan_S   » Sat May 07, 2022 12:00 am

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cthia wrote:I agree, but, then, how did Tourville get the full impression of her, did he have prior knowledge of her before she was assigned to him?

I'm not sure if Tourville knew her before she was assigned to serve on his flagship, the battlecruiser Count Tilly. When she was on Caslet's cruiser Vaubon it was serving under Citizen Admiral Thurston for Operation Dagger (4th Yeltsin) and Giscard when scouting in Silesia. So I'm not even sure if her ship was ever assigned to Tourville. But once the Vaubon POWs were returned Caslet got assigned to Operations Officer, Barnett System Defense Command and Shannon was assigned as Tourville's Operations Officer.

However once serving with him she helped mastermind his seizure of the Adler system (where Honor was then captured). She was on the bridge of Count Tilly with him when she noticed the prisoner's escape from Ransom's personal BC transport (just before it's destruction); and Tourville was the one who noticed and reached over her shoulder and deleted that footage while she was still deciding what to do. She continued to serve with him during First Zanzibar. And she was still on his flagship's bridge when she was moved to "Oops," the Statesec ships. :D

So, whether or not he knew much about her when she joined his staff, by the time he recommended her to command Bolthole he'd been working closely with her for 4 or 5 years.
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Re: Welcome to recent new member Shannon Foraker!
Post by cthia   » Sat May 07, 2022 11:09 am

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Jonathan_S wrote:
cthia wrote:I agree, but, then, how did Tourville get the full impression of her, did he have prior knowledge of her before she was assigned to him?

I'm not sure if Tourville knew her before she was assigned to serve on his flagship, the battlecruiser Count Tilly. When she was on Caslet's cruiser Vaubon it was serving under Citizen Admiral Thurston for Operation Dagger (4th Yeltsin) and Giscard when scouting in Silesia. So I'm not even sure if her ship was ever assigned to Tourville. But once the Vaubon POWs were returned Caslet got assigned to Operations Officer, Barnett System Defense Command and Shannon was assigned as Tourville's Operations Officer.

However once serving with him she helped mastermind his seizure of the Adler system (where Honor was then captured). She was on the bridge of Count Tilly with him when she noticed the prisoner's escape from Ransom's personal BC transport (just before it's destruction); and Tourville was the one who noticed and reached over her shoulder and deleted that footage while she was still deciding what to do. She continued to serve with him during First Zanzibar. And she was still on his flagship's bridge when she was moved to "Oops," the Statesec ships. :D

So, whether or not he knew much about her when she joined his staff, by the time he recommended her to command Bolthole he'd been working closely with her for 4 or 5 years.

I also suppose that Tourville had lots of private discussions with Shannon, even if only in the form of debriefings after battles. And if she is anything of a nerd as much as we all think she is, her brain melting dialogue may have been enough to alert anyone to her genius status.

Where she came by that genius god only knows.

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: Welcome to recent new member Shannon Foraker!
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Sat May 07, 2022 11:27 am

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Jonathan_S wrote:So, whether or not he knew much about her when she joined his staff, by the time he recommended her to command Bolthole he'd been working closely with her for 4 or 5 years.


By this time, Theisman (who would be the one to approve the assignment) would have also served with Caslet for a short while, before he was sent to Hades, and as Giscard's boss, he'd also have got that admiral's impression of Shannon. Plus, as Jonathan's excerpts prove, even the StateSec commissioners who were responsible for her also highly recommended her. It looks like her record was a long streak of technical accomplishments. And as the excerpt also proves, she was interested in figuring out ways to use what they had, instead of whining about what they didn't.
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Re: Welcome to recent new member Shannon Foraker!
Post by Shannon_Foraker   » Sat May 07, 2022 6:38 pm

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cthia wrote:
Jonathan_S wrote:I agree, but, then, how did Tourville get the full impression of her, did he have prior knowledge of her before she was assigned to him?

I'm not sure if Tourville knew her before she was assigned to serve on his flagship, the battlecruiser Count Tilly. When she was on Caslet's cruiser Vaubon it was serving under Citizen Admiral Thurston for Operation Dagger (4th Yeltsin) and Giscard when scouting in Silesia. So I'm not even sure if her ship was ever assigned to Tourville. But once the Vaubon POWs were returned Caslet got assigned to Operations Officer, Barnett System Defense Command and Shannon was assigned as Tourville's Operations Officer.

However once serving with him she helped mastermind his seizure of the Adler system (where Honor was then captured). She was on the bridge of Count Tilly with him when she noticed the prisoner's escape from Ransom's personal BC transport (just before it's destruction); and Tourville was the one who noticed and reached over her shoulder and deleted that footage while she was still deciding what to do. She continued to serve with him during First Zanzibar. And she was still on his flagship's bridge when she was moved to "Oops," the Statesec ships. :D

So, whether or not he knew much about her when she joined his staff, by the time he recommended her to command Bolthole he'd been working closely with her for 4 or 5 years.

I also suppose that Tourville had lots of private discussions with Shannon, even if only in the form of debriefings after battles. And if she is anything of a nerd as much as we all think she is, her brain melting dialogue may have been enough to alert anyone to her genius status.

Where she came by that genius god only knows.

I really like and agree with the comments about the debriefings.
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Re: Welcome to recent new member Shannon Foraker!
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Sat May 07, 2022 7:37 pm

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cthia wrote:I also suppose that Tourville had lots of private discussions with Shannon, even if only in the form of debriefings after battles. And if she is anything of a nerd as much as we all think she is, her brain melting dialogue may have been enough to alert anyone to her genius status.

Where she came by that genius god only knows.


It might be a completely natural occurrence. We do have geniuses coming up every now and again. The truly great ones only once in a generation, and only in particular fields. I'm guessing Shannon was her generation's, at least for the planet Haven (it's hard to talk about "once in a generation" when the human population is over 2 trillion -- not even counting prolong!).

Of course, she'd need to be nurtured to develop those faculties. Einstein or Hawking couldn't have developed their theories if they'd been born in Ancient Greece. Equally, Honor couldn't have been the tactician she was if she'd been born in pre-recontact Grayson (or worse, Masada), where her gender as a woman would have precluded her from learning and even if she did join the military, the best she'd see would be a frigate.

So she must've had access to some things while in the PRH. I think we put too much emphasis on the PRH being backwards compared to Manticore and having lost the race, but they can't have been TOO far behind. They were still building superdreadnoughts by the droves and they had the second biggest navy of all in the Galaxy, behind only the Solarian League's. You don't build superdreadnoughts, impellers, fusion reactors, missiles, all manners of sensors, etc. if you don't have some education and capabilities. The Legislaturalists may have been short-sighted in long-term decisions, and probably even blind to being manipulated, but they weren't completely stupid. They had schools and they must have recognised some people, and given them some education.

BTW, we talk about how Shannon was a tac witch who became the restored Republic's most inventive innovator, but I now think that's actually backwards. It was the fact that she was good at using the things she had in innovative ways that allowed her to become tac witch. She simply applied the same skill she later used for engineering (and as the passage above shows, for tactics) to the sensors. She studied what she had, the capabilities thereof, what others could do with their toys, and extrapolated to uses the manuals didn't consider.

One of those being certain uses of reactors or weapons aboard StateSec superdreadnoughts.
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Re: Welcome to recent new member Shannon Foraker!
Post by tlb   » Sat May 07, 2022 8:13 pm

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:So she must've had access to some things while in the PRH. I think we put too much emphasis on the PRH being backwards compared to Manticore and having lost the race, but they can't have been TOO far behind. They were still building superdreadnoughts by the droves and they had the second biggest navy of all in the Galaxy, behind only the Solarian League's. You don't build superdreadnoughts, impellers, fusion reactors, missiles, all manners of sensors, etc. if you don't have some education and capabilities. The Legislaturalists may have been short-sighted in long-term decisions, and probably even blind to being manipulated, but they weren't completely stupid. They had schools and they must have recognised some people, and given them some education.

Two important dates:
1680 PD: Haven issues its Economic Bill of Rights, which began the Dole System, where the proletariat eventually traded their right to vote for a monthly subsistence check.

1778 PD: The Technical Conservation Act of 1778, revokes emigration visas for all research and production engineers by nationalizing their expertise "as a resource of the Republic" of Haven. Reaction to this closed off Haven from access to Beowulf and possibly other research and technical resources.

We know the officers had to be educated, because the lower ranks were people off the Dole. However the officers with the best chance to advance were those from Legislaturalist families.
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Re: Welcome to recent new member Shannon Foraker!
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Sat May 07, 2022 8:23 pm

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tlb wrote:We know the officers had to be educated, because the lower ranks were people off the Dole. However the officers with the best chance to advance were those from Legislaturalist families.


No doubt. But that doesn't mean that others from outside those families had no chance. Arrogance may have played a large part in not properly recognising the people that were their "inferiors" but some must have stood out. Shannon would have been one.

Also, who's to say she wasn't a distant relation of a Legislaturalist family? Close enough to get good education, but far enough that she'd have been allowed to continue her career as Citizen Lieutenant once the CPS took over and the StateSec purged the Legislaturalist officers off the PN.

Plus, even the StateSec would have recognised her capabilities. The passage above about two people's commissioners passing on reports about her make it clear it had happened at least once. And, of course, no one in StateSec underestimated her capabilities after her final message... those that lived, at least.
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Re: Welcome to recent new member Shannon Foraker!
Post by Shannon_Foraker   » Sat May 07, 2022 8:28 pm

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
cthia wrote:I also suppose that Tourville had lots of private discussions with Shannon, even if only in the form of debriefings after battles. And if she is anything of a nerd as much as we all think she is, her brain melting dialogue may have been enough to alert anyone to her genius status.

Where she came by that genius god only knows.


It might be a completely natural occurrence. We do have geniuses coming up every now and again. The truly great ones only once in a generation, and only in particular fields. I'm guessing Shannon was her generation's, at least for the planet Haven (it's hard to talk about "once in a generation" when the human population is over 2 trillion -- not even counting prolong!).

Of course, she'd need to be nurtured to develop those faculties. Einstein or Hawking couldn't have developed their theories if they'd been born in Ancient Greece. Equally, Honor couldn't have been the tactician she was if she'd been born in pre-recontact Grayson (or worse, Masada), where her gender as a woman would have precluded her from learning and even if she did join the military, the best she'd see would be a frigate.

So she must've had access to some things while in the PRH. I think we put too much emphasis on the PRH being backwards compared to Manticore and having lost the race, but they can't have been TOO far behind. They were still building superdreadnoughts by the droves and they had the second biggest navy of all in the Galaxy, behind only the Solarian League's. You don't build superdreadnoughts, impellers, fusion reactors, missiles, all manners of sensors, etc. if you don't have some education and capabilities. The Legislaturalists may have been short-sighted in long-term decisions, and probably even blind to being manipulated, but they weren't completely stupid. They had schools and they must have recognised some people, and given them some education.

BTW, we talk about how Shannon was a tac witch who became the restored Republic's most inventive innovator, but I now think that's actually backwards. It was the fact that she was good at using the things she had in innovative ways that allowed her to become tac witch. She simply applied the same skill she later used for engineering (and as the passage above shows, for tactics) to the sensors. She studied what she had, the capabilities thereof, what others could do with their toys, and extrapolated to uses the manuals didn't consider.

One of those being certain uses of reactors or weapons aboard StateSec superdreadnoughts.

An example of a true genius is your niece, cthia. I'm just smart.

The PRH really couldn't have been that far behind, I agree.

As for Oops, read this facebook page, including the images. I promise the images have amazing info, though I can't promise it's from Weber, as anyone can be anyone on the Web.

However, I suspect it's from the man himself (the message linked in images).
https://m.facebook.com/groups/442313124 ... 544197444/

Shannon doesn't have to have been born on Haven, she could have been born on another Havenite world.
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