Honor Harrington/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions
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** My understanding is that the missiles don't have live warheads so much as live drives- that is, the missile fire and PD isn't simulated by computers, but you actually fire the missiles, shoot real PD at them, and then simulate any damage. As to the sudden shift from live fire to real, there's two possibilities that come to mind: 1) The missile warheads are deactivated in an exercise but still there, or 2) the magazines have both exercise and live warheads. Tac officers swap between contact nukes and laser heads as the situation requires, as I recall.
** IIRC ''Storm from the Shadows'' states that warheads are attached when loaded into the tubes.
** It's
* Is there any distinction whatsoever between Liberals and Progressives, or between Centrists and Crown Loyalists?
** There are lots. Liberals in Manticore are, in fact, radical socialists, who believe that isolationism and welfare state are the things to go for. True, they are indeed quite liberal ''socially'', but not in the economics or matters of state. After Montaigne takeover of the party, they shifted towards the etatism and expansionism in their foreign policy (a move that was brewing inside the party for a long time, but was checked by New Kiev and her cronies), but still remained pretty much socialist. Progressives, on the other hand, are essentially opportunists (though not to the New Men extent). They don't really have any strong political conviction except some vague left-leaning sympathies, and thus usually side with Liberals, but mostly they care about power and influence. Centrists are [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin]], and Crown Loyalists hold dear the belief that whatever is good for the Crown is good for Manticore. Given that Elizabeth and her inner circle are, in fact, Centrist to the last man (and woman), this makes then Centrist too.
** The Centrist and Crown Loyalists have not always gotten along, but much of the current set of politics is the result of the Lord's coliaition's to keep power being opposed by the Crown. Gryphon, for instance, is a hotbed of Crown Loyalists rather than centralist interests because they traditionally oppose the power of the Lords, leading to the one internal armed conflict within Manticore's history, and the Crown Loyalists had the support of the Army and the crown against the Lords.
** There are also hints of change now as the Lords lose power to the Commons where the static influences keeping the same power blocs in control for years are now dying out.
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** Honorverse ships are ''big''. So they just have really big cellars. It's also entirely possible that enviro dept keeps hydroponic gardens on a bigger ones.
** The HMAMC ''Wayfarer'' in ''Honor Among Enemies'' has a hydroponics garden where Nimitz and Samantha rendezvous that grows tomatoes. Honor also complains (as a narrator) about the tedium of having to sign off on hydroponics inventories. However, it's pretty clear from some of the things eaten on ships (including meats, cheeses, and wines) that they ships probably carry some food in storage.
** Even then most ships have crews in the range of what Aircraft carriers have today, and similar logistic arrangements.
* One of the constantly recurring themes is that Silesia is so messed up because nobody has the small ships required to police it. Then, after that situation is resolved finally, the authors ''finally'' mention that there is are hyper capable combatants that are smaller than destroyers, just nobody has built them in 50+ years.
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* Why doesn't Paul just say 'oops, no thanks' when Summervale challenges him? Or at least, when he finds out he's a paid duelist, cancel the duel? Does Manticore really force people to go through with their duels even if it's likely one side was paid?
** [[Honor Before Reason]] (pun intended). If he found out after accepting what kind of man Allen Summervale was, it most likely wouldn't serve as an excuse to bow of the current duel without solid proof that he'd been hired for ''that'' duel. At which point, it would be tantamount to admitting publicly that Summervale's accusations that Honor sacrificed her command for him and that she was just desperate for ''any'' man to love her were right. It would probably destroy his career (since accepting and then backing down from duels is considered an act of cowardice) and send her reputation down in flames.
*** ''Allen'' Summervale was a totally swell guy, please-and-thank-you. It's not good to put libel on one of the highest [[The Kingdom|Kingdom]] nobles and Her Majesty's PM (and unofficial uncle) at that. ;) His distant cousin ''[[Complete Monster|Denver]]'' [[Psycho for Hire|Summervale]], on the other hand....
** Also, if he hadn't accepted the duel in the first place, he might have been subject to discipline and charges for striking Summervale in anger, which might have been true if he broke off the duel as well. "Fighting words" is rarely a defense when Paul could have challenged him to a duel ''himself'' for his insults to Honor. Duels are meant to be a more "civil" alternative to just waling on someone who insults you. Given the ''results'', it looks like just saying, "Fuck you," and continuing the beat down might've been smarter, but hindsight's 20/20.
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* There's a Thomas Theisman mentioned all the way back in ''Honor of the Queen''. Remind me, is that the very same Thomas Theisman who {{spoiler|shot Saint-Just}} and is Peep Secretary of War now? Going back over the old books feels odd in light of how Haven and warfare has changed.
** That Thomas Theisman who commanded the second cruiser that Peeps "lent" to Masadans, the Alfredo Yu's second-in-command? Yep, that's the very same guy. Twenty years is quite a long time, doncha think?
***
** He also made an appearance in ''A Short Victorious War'' commanding PNS Sword during their attack on Helen Zilwiki Sr.'s convoy.
** Thomas Theisman was just an ordinary naval officer who was put in a position, quite by chance, where he could fix his country. It's expressly stated many times that he never wanted to be involved with the dirty politics of Haven, which was mistaken as not caring about the state of Haven's politics.
* The prevalence of [[Stealth in Space]], particularly in the first two books, is bothersome. Yes, a ship that shuts down its impellers will not show up on your grav detectors. Yes, the radar blip from a ship looks the same as the radar blip from an asteroid. But a ship would also have to produce [https://web.archive.org/web/20120504132923/http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacewardetect.php heat], and lots of it. It would shine like a beacon in the thermal infrared. Why don't any of the ultra-sophisticated sensor suites on Honorverse ships include plain old thermal detectors?
** If you've turned your engines off and and reduced all electronics emissions to minimal levels, it would be logical to turn any heat-sinks off as well. Since the engines are specifically stated to be in the middle of the ship, lost heat should be relatively low. The sunny side of an asteroid wouldn't be any hotter. Sure, the interior of the ship will warm somewhat, but it's a favourable trade-off in exchange for not getting killed.
*** The ship will still be at considerably more that the ambient temperature of the space around it and will show up. Also, turning off/disabling the heat-sinks would be a quick way to cook everybody aboard (the problem with modern spacecraft is dissipating heat, not keeping warm and they don't have mucking great fusion reactors).
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*** Not ''exactly'' because of that, though this has played its role. Remember, Oyster Bay had its own equivalent of Ford island radar station -- they ''did'' notice the "sensor ghost" that was one of the Mesan ships, but found nothing when they'd tried to investigate it. It's true that the impeller signatures are somewhat overfocused on even by the best of the best, but with their tech the EM emissions are much more difficult to track, and thus on the distances involved hardly anyone try, unless they have the compelling evidence that they ''should'', like hyper footprints or something. And because spider drive doesn't use Warshawski sails or impellers, the hyper footprint of such equipped ship is much weaker than usually, even if the active stealth isn't counted in.
** It is stated in Mission Of Honor that stealthed ships can emit their waste heat in a direction of their choice. If you are stealthing around the edge of the system then emitting your heat toward deep space would be a good idea for example.
*** That would probably work, if you knew where all of the enemy lookouts were. There's also the issue of radiator area, though, and the sad fact is that the narrower a cone you want to radiate your waste heat into, the [https://web.archive.org/web/20120504132923/http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacewardetect.php#id--Why_Not?--Directional_Radiation bigger] the radiator needs to be.
*** Modern (2011) era telescopes will take about 4 hours to find something the size of an asteroid radiating the heat of over 200 Kelvins greater than background energy. If one was willing to double check with light speed sensors or say, use a FTL sensor net to take light speed readings, spotting anything where the crew wasn't submerged in liquid helium should be relatively straight forward 2000 years from now. Chalk it up to [[Hand Wave|Handwavium]] and [[MST3K Mantra|move on]].
*** If an active sidewall can stop a ''multi-gigawatt gamma-ray laser pulse'', then it obviously blocks waste heat emitted from the inside as well. Shazam, you are now emitting waste heat only at whereever you choose to open a sidewall port -- especially now that RMN ships have bow and stern sidewalls.
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** Possible explanation, it's mentioned that the ability to eject the hydrogen tanks is something built into military small craft but not civilian shuttles. If Harrington spaceport is a primarily civilian installation it might not really be designed to accommodate shuttles that eject bombs while crashing (a not unreasonable assumption, Honor lands there since it's her steading but Harrington steading as a whole does not seem to feature naval infrastructure so in all probability military small craft are very rare there). A modern analogy would be a damaged bomber making an emergency landing at a civilian international airport, they could presumably provide basic servicing (i.e. get the pilot out, refuel and tow it) but would lack the facilities to safely remove any bombs onboard.
** As a military vessel, an emergency procedure is probably designed to save the ''ship'' (and its crew) and probably not too worried about ancillary damage. Compare with the emergency procedure (that sometimes works) of ejecting of an overloading ship's reactor - in an emergency you'll do it but it's equivilent to detonating a nuclear bomb, so you really hope you don't do that near any civilian areas (or anything at all, for that matter).
** Real-world combat aircraft carry a feature that allows the pilots to automatically eject anything hanging from the under-wing hardpoints -- such as bombs, missiles, or spare fuel tanks -- in case of an emergency. This feature is obviously pretty damn harsh on anyone who happens to be directly underneath the aircraft at the time, but the designer put it in anyway because its not intended for use directly over friendly airfields. The basic design assumption was that the most likely place a military aircraft is going to suffer combat damage is when it's, y'know, ''actually in combat''. So, both of the above tropers are entirely correct.
* Any number of things can go wrong during a construction project, even if ''nothing'' has been sabotaged. This is why 20th century construction workers wear hard hats. So why, when Skydomes was assembling a new crystoplast dome over a school, were people allowed to stand ''[[Too Dumb to Live|right under]]'' the giant crystoplast panel as it was being installed?
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* In one of the books (I believe it was Flag in Exile) it's mentioned that upon Manticore's founding, the colonists 'borrowed' the concept of Seperation of Church and State from the North Americans. But if Manticore was settled mostly by people from the 'Western Hemisphere' (and specifically Europe), then it would have people from countries like France (which invented the concept). And every other European country that ratified the Declaration of Human Rights for that matter. Why would Manticore have to borrow the concept if it should basically already have it several times over?
** Because the primary cultural ancestor of the Star Kingdom of Manticore is Great Britain, which ''does'' have a state religion - the Anglican church.
* In ''On Basilisk Station'', we're told that cutters use reaction thrusters because they're too small to have impellers and inertial compensators. If so, then how do they make the impeller-driven, man-portable surface-to-air missile that's used in ''The Short Victorious War'' to assassinate Constance Palmer-Levy?
** It's not the impellers that Cutters are too small for, it's mostly the compensators which have to be a certain size. Even ship-to-ship missiles are smaller than Cutters and they have impellers too. But that's because missiles don't have crews and thus don't have people getting pulped by insane G forces.
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** Presumably they are inserted as extended family groups and not just mom, pop, and the 2.4 kids. So even if several adults die off in a generation, custody of the children simply goes to more adults 'in the know'. Also, Mesa ''knows'' who its sleepers are; if any of them die, "relatives from off-planet" can be sent in.
** The real trick would be to raise the kids with the right mindset so that when they do have it explained to them it seems to them like a good idea. For example raising them with attitudes such as mild racism/classism would help foster a feeling of superiority compared to the rest of society (as the other poster mentioned, having multiple families involved would provide more coverage for this). This could then be reinforced by sending them off-planet for their college education (providing the Alignment with the ability to gather scions of multiple lines together for careful covert indoctrination). Additionally the sleeper lines are not going to be deep inside the onion so they probably don't even realize that Alignment is involved with Mesa. If we assume that then the deep cover agents could easily believe that they are part of a long term plan to improve their own societies so the stuff they do isn't about betraying their society but helping it.
** And on top of all that, Mesa is the king of breaking eggs to make omelets. Its entirely in-character for them to enact a policy with a built-in 'breakage' rate for people -- so long as they're not 'losing' more sleepers each generation than they can afford to pay for, they won't care. Unless its a Detweiler, ''no'' individual person in Mesa is more important than keeping the Mesan machine as a whole in good working order; that is ultimately the root of every evil thing Mesa does, the belief that human beings are commodities rather than people.
*** Confirmed in the latest novel, ''Uncompromising Honor'' -- more than one Mesan family of long-term sleepers has been 'lost' when a suitable candidate could not be selected and successfully indoctrinated in a given generation, and what Mesa does then is simply write off the entire family line and never contact them again. {{Spoiler|Although entirely unknown to anyone outside the Alignment's inner circle, one of the 'orphaned' Mesan-descended family lines is the Harrington family. And so Honor's ridiculous genetics is finally given a canon explanation.}}
* While I disagreed with the frequent complaint that the later books are slowing down compared to the earlier books - I like the talky parts! - I can't help but wonder if Weber might be starting to take the piss a bit with it. I mean, they've almost started moving backwards - it takes a quarter of ''Rising Thunder'' to get to the point where ''Mission of Honor'' ended. Why?
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