Genies!

TheGlyphstone wrote:

waddles for desert wrote:Actually, Honor could defeat Thandi with just one finger; and that is because Honor has a "flaw" as a genie.

Pretty sure shooting your opponent in what is supposed to be a martial arts match is a poor-sport maneuver...

So far as we know, Thandi regenerates.

So, it seems fair enough to me so long as Honor only shoots off arms and legs.

But, if you insist, in Honor's position, I suppose I could settle for setting the gain on the artificial arm to maximum and just pinching Thandi's hand off at the wrist. Or, maybe jabbing a thumb from the front into the spot between the head of the humorous and the clavicle, wrapping the other fingers behind the scapula and just crushing the shoulder joint.

But, I would allow that ripping the arm off completely would be unsporting.

waddles for desert wrote:So far as we know, Thandi regenerates.

So, it seems fair enough to me so long as Honor only shoots off arms and legs.

But, if you insist, in Honor's position, I suppose I could settle for setting the gain on the artificial arm to maximum and just pinching Thandi's hand off at the wrist. Or, maybe jabbing a thumb from the front into the spot between the head of the humorous and the clavicle, wrapping the other fingers behind the scapula and just crushing the shoulder joint.

But, I would allow that ripping the arm off completely would be unsporting.

When did Honor start dismembering her opponents in sparring matches? If this was a 'kill the other person' fight, sure, and the pulser-finger would also be fair game, but she managed to fight (and beat) Iris Babcock and Gunney Halleck without mutilating them.

Funny, I was thinking Thandi could do exactly that though. Brute ogre strength + joint lock + artifical arm = artificial arm ending abruptly at elbow or shoulder. Pretty sure Honor would still win one-handed, but it'd be a funny way to start the match off.

Pokermind might even call it a...hand-icap.

When the Honor-vs.-Thandi idea was proposed further up this thread, it was not specified that it would be a sparring match.

SWM wrote:When the Honor-vs.-Thandi idea was proposed further up this thread, it was not specified that it would be a sparring match.

I was the OP who suggested it, and I described it as a 'full-contact bout'. Calling something a 'bout' usually implies a sporting-match/exhibition type event, doesn't it?

No such qualifiers would apply if Honor was whaling on Tyrillos, though. On the other hand, he probably has anti-pulser armor plates under his skin or something similarly hax.

TheGlyphstone wrote:

waddles for desert wrote:So far as we know, Thandi regenerates.

So, it seems fair enough to me so long as Honor only shoots off arms and legs.

But, if you insist, in Honor's position, I suppose I could settle for setting the gain on the artificial arm to maximum and just pinching Thandi's hand off at the wrist. Or, maybe jabbing a thumb from the front into the spot between the head of the humorous and the clavicle, wrapping the other fingers behind the scapula and just crushing the shoulder joint.

But, I would allow that ripping the arm off completely would be unsporting.

When did Honor start dismembering her opponents in sparring matches? If this was a 'kill the other person' fight, sure, and the pulser-finger would also be fair game, but she managed to fight (and beat) Iris Babcock and Gunney Halleck without mutilating them.

Funny, I was thinking Thandi could do exactly that though. Brute ogre strength + joint lock + artifical arm = artificial arm ending abruptly at elbow or shoulder. Pretty sure Honor would still win one-handed, but it'd be a funny way to start the match off.

Pokermind might even call it a...hand-icap.

Followed at the end of the match by the sound of one hand clapping?

RFC raises a really interesting point. The Mesan alignments goals, in an abstract sense, the improvement of the human race aren't necessarily wrong. Beowulf believes in genetic modification to the point of survival and not a millimeter further. They are almost terrified of pushing the envelope of human development.

The MA says why can't everyone be super smart/super athletic/etc. One of their biggest goals that they made no progress in is telepathy, one of the reasons the great treecat reveal annoys them so much. They wan't to force evolution's hand, and push it even harder, condensing several millennium of change down into a single generation or two. Even today we routinely genetically modify crops to push yields and disease resistance to unprecedented levels.

If there wasn't the whole genetic slavery thing, and the conquering the known universe thing, I would probably be a lot more sympathetic to the MA then I would Beowulf.

Direwolf18 wrote:RFC raises a really interesting point. The Mesan alignments goals, in an abstract sense, the improvement of the human race aren't necessarily wrong. Beowulf believes in genetic modification to the point of survival and not a millimeter further. They are almost terrified of pushing the envelope of human development.

The MA says why can't everyone be super smart/super athletic/etc. One of their biggest goals that they made no progress in is telepathy, one of the reasons the great treecat reveal annoys them so much. They wan't to force evolution's hand, and push it even harder, condensing several millennium of change down into a single generation or two. Even today we routinely genetically modify crops to push yields and disease resistance to unprecedented levels.

If there wasn't the whole genetic slavery thing, and the conquering the known universe thing, I would probably be a lot more sympathetic to the MA then I would Beowulf.

This is one of the reasons I've always been a lot more sympathetic to Leonard Detweiler himself than to his descendants. We don't know a whole lot about him, but based on that, he seemed to be a lot less 'evil' than the current MA and its leaders, since his motives were exactly that sort of 'uplift everybody' rather than the 'uplift the most worthy, who are most worthy because they have been uplifted' attitude the Alignment has.

Unless a big infodump about LD is forthcoming in Cauldron, maybe RFC can help us out here? How far away from Leonard's original intentions/vision has the Alignment drifted over the centuries? Was he just as much a genetic supremacist as Albrect+Co., and I'm just buying too much into Jack McBryde's rose-tinted glasses?

biochem wrote:

If everyone could have genetically superior musculature, cardie-vascular systems, enhanced intelligence and improved reflexes, wouldn't that be better? If this was both the goal of the MAlign, and without their desire to rule, I feel they would be in the right.

The problem with that is during Earth's final war attempts to create individuals with superior musculature, cardio-vascular systems, enhanced intelligence and improved reflexes wound up suffering from the law of unintended consequences and creating monsters instead. So I can well understand the feeling in Honorverse that they don't want to chance that again.

However, the heavy grav modifications such as Honor's have been around forever and have proven to be very useful in settling the galaxy with the sole negative consequence being increased caloric requirements. And even that is situational, being a negative only when food is in short supply. So since these mods are widespread throughout the galaxy and proven safe, there should be much less prejudice towards them.

So I can see a logical progression being that if necessary it is OK to modify people with proven safe modifications but not OK to create any new modifications.

There is another negative alluded to in the books for Honor. She, Queen Elizabeth and her dad all have tempers they have to keep control of. It is mentioned that there was tinkering with intelligence done in a lot of the old strains and that one of the side effects was anger and aggression. I can't remember the book but I remember coming across it.

Direwolf18 wrote:RFC raises a really interesting point. The Mesan alignments goals, in an abstract sense, the improvement of the human race aren't necessarily wrong. Beowulf believes in genetic modification to the point of survival and not a millimeter further. They are almost terrified of pushing the envelope of human development.

The MA says why can't everyone be super smart/super athletic/etc. One of their biggest goals that they made no progress in is telepathy, one of the reasons the great treecat reveal annoys them so much. They wan't to force evolution's hand, and push it even harder, condensing several millennium of change down into a single generation or two. Even today we routinely genetically modify crops to push yields and disease resistance to unprecedented levels.

If there wasn't the whole genetic slavery thing, and the conquering the known universe thing, I would probably be a lot more sympathetic to the MA then I would Beowulf.

Actually, not.

Torch of Freedome, Chapter 61 prologue wrote:Since all that was true, Detweiler further argued, it only made sense to genetically modify colonists for the environments which were going to cause their descendants to mutate anyway. And it was only a small step further to argue that if it made sense to genetically modify human beings for environments in which they would have to live, it also made sense to genetically modify them to better suit them to the environments in which they would have to work.

Italics in the original, underline mine.

This is the fundamental basis behind Mesa's stratified society and the entire "genetic slave" thing. One of Beowulf's goals is to prevent the fragmentation of humanity into separate species, as well as to avoid the "superman" syndrome that, they believe, led to Earth's Final War.

JohnRoth wrote:
This is the fundamental basis behind Mesa's stratified society and the entire "genetic slave" thing. One of Beowulf's goals is to prevent the fragmentation of humanity into separate species, as well as to avoid the "superman" syndrome that, they believe, led to Earth's Final War.

'Fragmentation of humanity into separate species'.
That's an intriguing idea. Why should that be wrong? Why shouldn't we follow evolution and speciate?

I'm not really thinking about Beowulf and their code, more as a philosophical question. Homo Sapiens as the ultimate evolution doesn't seem right.