Honor Harrington/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions

* 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.

 

** 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).

*** 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.

*** 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.

** 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).

 

* 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?

 

* 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?

* 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.

** 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.

 

* 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?