[GZG] Thrusting in the Cherryverse

Greetings:

A participant on a C.J. Cherryh list I'm on has wondered if anybody is
aware of a Cherryh-Full
Thrust crossover. I figured I'd post the question here...

Anybody?

:)

FPK3

_______________________________________________
Gzg-l mailing list
Gzg-l@lists.csua.berkeley.edu
http://lists.csua.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lOn 3/27/07,
> Recursive Loop <recursive_loop@yahoo.com> wrote:

I don't know if anyone has or not. I'm not well-versed in Cherryh's
universe, though I have several books in my stack to eventually get down to
read.

Mk

> On 3/27/07, Recursive Loop <recursive_loop@yahoo.com> wrote:

Which one of her universes? And where does she drop enough technical about the
starships to give us something to work with?

Just asking, because I just don't remember her dealing with that sort of
crunchy goodness.

Greetings:

Answering the first...He was specifically looking at Company Wars +
Chanur.

Answering the second...No indication there. I would guess that between the
Mayfair Games box and Chris Weuve's "official unofficial" update plus notes on
Triplanetary and the like, plus a lot of work combing the books and waving the
hands will be needed.

FPK3

_______________________________________________
Gzg-l mailing list
Gzg-l@lists.csua.berkeley.edu
http://lists.csua.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lI have toyed with
the Idea and did try one ship

http://groups.msn.com/ConfusionCentral411/shoebox.msnw?action=ShowPhoto
<http://groups.msn.com/ConfusionCentral411/shoebox.msnw?action=ShowPhoto
&PhotoID=162> &PhotoID=162

[quoted original message omitted]

> John Atkinson wrote:

Nah, she's not like David Weber.

The universe in question would be the one shared by the
Merchanter stories (Alliance/Union/Mazianni) and the Compact
(Chanur). You can pick out bits and pieces, but you have to read just about
all the books to do so. Which can be good, because it gives you some creative
freedom to interpret it as you wish rather than being bound by what happened
on page 453 of book 7 or something.

Some notes I sent to Ed Carmien (the cherryhlister who made the original query
that Recursive Loop is following up on):

I find that straight conversions from tonnage or size, or by counting weapons,
don't work. It's better to start with the role of each ship for a rough idea
of mass.

The Compact species don't really have 'war' ships, just pirates and pirate
catchers, and Pyanfar seemed rather worried about the prospect of a human
warship getting into the Compact. So the Kif and Mahendosat ships are probably
just frigate/destroyers, all you need for either role.

Merchanters would come in all sizes, from tiny insystemers
to frigate/destroyer sized small traders/rimrunners to
giants like Dublin. None of them would have much hull integrity though, as
hull boxes really represent resisting power to damage rather than
accomodation. (I suppose the big merchanters might be pretty tough though.)

Each ridership being worth six fighters is a good idea. Very agile and
difficult to hit, and if nobody else uses fighters then they're pretty
dangerous too.

I'd thought of riders as destroyer sized ships with no FTL drive, pretty good
main drive, armoured, carrying beams, submunition packs or maybe a pulse
torpedo. FT has rules for ships being hauled around in FTL by others: the
'tug' ship, here a Mazianni carrier, has to spend an extra 1 mass on FTL drive
for every 5 mass of ship being taken along. So a carrier with 24 extra points
of mass spent on FTL could haul four mass 30 riderships along with it.

The later Alliance/Union books have Union (at least) armed
merchanters, which sound like scaled down carriers with weapons and protection
but no riderships. They sound about right for cruiser roles. Rimrunners don't
seem to get into combat if they can help it, so are probably frigate or
destroyer sized.

Carriers themselves are obviously big and impressive. The smaller ones like
Norway should be at least dreadnoughts, and monsters like Europe and Africa
would presumably be superdreadnoughts.

When deciding on drive ratings, it's not so much maximum speed, more turning
ability and acceleration. Insystem
ships are always incredibly clumsy, so I'd say drive-1.
Merchant ships are a bit faster because they can use the vanes to speed up or
slow down, but still don't dodge about
acrobatically so would be drive-2. Actual warships with
bigger engines would be drive-4 at most: nobody in Cherryh
books zips about like White Stars in B5.

For weapons, light beams or light gun equivalents seem to be carried by
everybody, only one or two for the small merchants. The nearest thing to a
railgun in FT is the pulse torpedo, fairly good range with a destructive
punch.
(Unless you're willing to mix technologies and use K-guns.)
Carriers fired missile swarms in The Sandman, The Tinman, and the BettyB,
which sound like FT salvo missiles. In
Rimrunners, the not-too-big Loki "throws missiles" at a
Mazianni ship, but again you could interpret that loosely.

Protection I'm not so sure about. Point defense systems are reasonable if
carriers are firing missiles, Kif ships have armour. The shields around FTL
ships seem intended to protect against debris hazards rather than weapons, but
you could argue that they could be used for that too, especially on carriers.

> From: ~ On Behalf Of Hugh Fisher

> The later Alliance/Union books ... <snip>

> Carriers fired missile swarms in The Sandman, The Tinman,

I thought I had read all the Merchanter / Company Wars
books. Which one do those ships appear in?

Nathan

> On 4/5/07, CS Renegade <njg@csrenegade.demon.co.uk> wrote:

You know, when you have your e-mail up in your office and someone
walks in and sees a thread titled "Thrusting in the Cherryverse" you sometimes
have some 'splainin' to do...

> At 8:09 PM +0100 5/4/07, CS Renegade wrote:

"The Sandman, the Tinman, and the BettyB" is a short story that I have in "The
Collected Short Fiction of CJ Cherryh" and is listed as first published in
"Daw 30th Anniversary Science Fiction".

Without (I hope) spoiling the story, it's set in Pell system many years after
the war. A few quotes:

'Cigar-shape head-on.  Cigar-shape with deflecting planes
all over it.'

'The inert, the bullet coming their way, was high-v and
high-mass, a solid chunk of metal that might have been
traveling for fifty years and more, an iron slug fired by
a long-lost warship in a decades-ago war. Didn't need a
warhead. Inerts tended to be far longer than wide because the fire mechanism
in the old carriers stored then in bundles and fired them in swarms, but no
matter how it was orientated when it hit, it was a killer.'

'Velocity and vector depended on the ship that, somewhere out there, fifty and
more years ago, had fired what might be one, or a dozen inerts.

'The big ships had guns. Guns could deal with an inert.'

David Weber would have provided the mark number, date of introduction,
acceleration and duration, etc.

cheers,

> David Weber would have provided the mark number, date of

And there'd have been nine *hundred* of them, traveling at exactly 8631kps,
ready to brutally tear open the ship in 13.45 minutes
(never thirteen or thirteen-and-a-half).

And none of his characters have grasped the concept of "terse".

> On 4/6/07, laserlight@verizon.net <laserlight@verizon.net> wrote:

You know, with the size and quantity of missiles going steadily skywards in
the Honor Harrington universe, you have to wonder if
there's not some deep-seated psychological issue being addressed
there.

But then, Weber's books have been sliding downwards in quality to the point
that I can't be bothered to read them anymore. It's sad.

(In a bogus Austrian accent) Sometimes Herr Atkinson, a missile is just a
missile...

But I have to agree about Weber's stuff. "War Of Honor" finished me off for
good.

Best regards, Robert Bryett

> On 06/04/2007, at 22:48 , John Atkinson wrote:

> You know, with the size and quantity of missiles going steadily

So Jerry, How long have you been his publicist?

Sorry I couldn't resist......just kidding...)

_______________________________________________
Gzg-l mailing list
Gzg-l@lists.csua.berkeley.edu
http://lists.csua.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lAll of Weber's
books or just his Honorverse stuff? I thought his Bolo novels were excellent.
Armageddon Reef is pretty good also.

Roger

> On 4/6/07, John Atkinson <johnmatkinson@gmail.com> wrote:

> All of Weber's books or just his Honorverse stuff? I thought his Bolo

I dunno about those, but the Saganami Island one where they're annexing the
Talbott Cluster would be 100% better if it had 30% less dialog. And if he
didn't have the fixation on precise numbers. "Are they Peeps or pirates? We'll
find out in 104 minutes". Sheesh.

Any conspiracy theories on the significance of the number he does use?

Michael Brown mwsaber6@msn.com

[quoted original message omitted]

_______________________________________________
Gzg-l mailing list
Gzg-l@lists.csua.berkeley.edu
http://lists.csua.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lOn 4/6/07, Michael
> Brown <mwsaber6@msn.com> wrote:

Yes. But I can't divulge them. Otherwise you'd only have 10.4 minutes to clear
out from where you are right now.

Mk

I think it's to show that he really did the math on how long it takes to
achieve a zero/zero intercept with Ship A starting at point X with
velocity N and accelerating at 178g's and ship B starting velocity P at point
Y with 531g acceleration.

> Any conspiracy theories on the significance of the number he does use?

Indy has even less time than that to clear out before the NBS arrives at his
location......

He's just one of those guys who likes numbers and detail. C'mon, you're
telling me nobody on this list has gone to a convention and encountered at
least one argument about something like the exact muzzle velocity of an 88mm
Flak? (Or, some of the conversations
we've had here on this list.  (8-) )

I don't think you could be a wargamer and NOT have a mind for detail
to a certain level, and Weber's a sci-fi wargamer.

Compare and contrast this to Weber's fantasy novels (Bahzell) --
he can write without being pedantic. It's obvious there's been a lot of
background work done, but, you don't get the same level of detail that you get
out of Honorverse stuff. (e.g. This group took exactly this many days to cross
Dwarvenhame, or that this legion has exactly this many men in this many units,
etc).

With Honor, Weber's caught in two traps -- he's written so many books,
he's having a hard time coming up with new stuff, and he's trapped in the
style set from the first book, so, he probably feels the need to continuing
writing in that style even though he's evolved as a writer in twenty years.
Especially in the Honorverse where technology plays a major role in the plot,
and he has to keep coming up with new gizmos to maintain tension in the naval
battles, which features prominently in the overall story. *shrug*

JGH

> laserlight@verizon.net wrote:

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Gzg-l mailing list
Gzg-l@lists.csua.berkeley.edu
http://lists.csua.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lOn 4/6/07, Jerry
> Han <jhan@warpfish.com> wrote:

As someone who has most of Honorverse in hardcover, I think my opinion may
have some weight on the topic of the decline in the series. It is not the
rapidly evolving technology needed to keep the RMN from collapsing under the
weight of the increasing mass of the RHN, it is that the
Manticoran-Havenite
War is two books past its end-by date.  The war did not end in War of
Honor, nor did it end in At All Costs, and I have the terrible fear that it
will not end in the next book. The war has gone stale and there are no longer
any interesting villains who are likely to be casualties, so any future deaths
of named characters are going to be characters that are well liked. The
technology is advancing, but the story seems to have stopped.
Personally, I found the Honor-Hamish resolution to be unsatisfying, but
I will accept that not everyone appreciates Tristan and Isolde.

Unfortunately, it seems that there is no end in sight for the war without a
miracle allowing either the RHN to dictate terms to a recalcitrant Queen
Elizabeth following a stupendous defeat of the RMN (sadly, this is becoming my
preferred ending), or the Queen being removed from the throne without any
involvement of the Republic of Haven. An idle daydream of mine involves a
plausible set of circumstances that end with Pritchard being adopted by a
treecat, which would force the Queen to acknowledge that peeps are people,
too.

> With Honor, Weber's caught in two traps -- he's written so many

It's not the lack of new tech, nor the continuing war. It's that the drafts
need to be edited for length. If he'd cut every paragraph by a line, that
would improve things a lot.

> Richard Bell wrote:
WARNING: SPOILER FROM "AT ALL COSTS" BELOW

Given that the assault on Manticore involved Mass Megadeath, not Millions of
casualties, but Millions of deaths, I think the psychological effects on the
two nations will be extreme. The RMN has been destroyed, all but a rump (which
fortunately for Manticore has the

UberWeapon du Jour so is unbeatable - just too tiny to do more than
defend). The RHN navy is having to build new factories to build the factories
to build the printing presses to print "The President of the Republic Deeply
Regrets...." notices for the mass slaughter.

Imagine the Battle of the Somme, times ten. Or an Invasion of Japan
without the A-Bomb - One that *is repelled*.

I know some people are allergic to long paragraphs, but I don't really think
anyone would even notice the length if the story was still any good.

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Gzg-l mailing list
Gzg-l@lists.csua.berkeley.edu
http://lists.csua.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lOn 4/7/07, Zoe
> Brain <aebrain@webone.com.au> wrote:

No. The Republic of Haven is a lot bigger than the Star Kingdom of Manticore,
they do not need to build factories to build the printing presses. There is
more than enough capacity. Assuming navy personnel are drawn uniformly from
each republican system, most people who have lost a loved one, but do not live
on post, will not know anyone else who has. No single planet will have print
runs exceeding several thousand. If they are not evenly distributed, you
accept a notification delay and distribute the notice printing.

The size of the RoH is such that if they absolutely had to do remount
Beatrice, they could do the second one in six or eight weeks, a third one in