There is the general spoiler page for general questions.
I’m making this set of pages for more specific questions.
The rule is: do not ask or comment about a book until it has been at least a month in issue. I think that will make everybody happy re spoilers.
I am guessing we’ll discuss Compact space here too?
Hi Spence!
Same universe, so I suppose so.
I’ll kick off – if Pyanfar is the glue that holds the Compact together, what happens when she dies? Power struggle? Leading to all-out war? Or am I just a pessimist?
[hey spider!]
I am hoping that a ship of hani will make it to Union space. Since it would take place in Union, [and not in the compact] then one of your other publishing companies could publish it. Have the Hani take on the Military or Mazianni. That would make for an interesting read.
Yabbut… Tully says he’s from the homeworld, Spence. But I like the way you think. I wonder what Porey’d do if Africa came up against a shipload of Knnn? What’s Pyanfar say–never shoot at someone you can’t talk with?
But even if Tully is from Sol the Mazianni certainly could happen upon Compact space, unintentionally.
I bet Py could handle them, though. Anyone who can handle the kif can handle Conrad, donchathink? 😀
Honestly, Busifer, I don’t think the Hani (or anyone else in Compact space save the knnn) could handle Mazianni or any other human military fleet units, even with the incomparable Pyanfar in command. The Compact species really don’t practice war in an institutionalized way. The closest they seem to come to purpose-built warships are “suspiciously lean” ships that are still ostensibly freighters. Humans, on the other hand, have purpose-built warships…carriers, ferchrissakes (bless our destructive little hearts). It’s one thing for the kif to attack and capture an exploration vessel like Tully’s, another entirely to engage real warships. And I don’t even want to think about what an azi-crewed Union battle group might do to Compact ships.
Now the knnn? That might be another matter entirely! I get the impression that the general tech level of the Compact is roughly equivalent to that of Sol/Alliance/Union space, with any advantage in a tussle the humans would have being based on having a specialized military (and numbers). But the knnn are clearly in a whole ‘nother technological league from the rest of the Compact…and very possibly humans, as well. Who knows what they might pull out of their sleeves.
Er…not that they have sleeves.
I’m not so sure. The Mazianni are not a war fleet anymore, just well equipped but patched raiders. Also, we don’t know that the ship Tully was on was strictly exploration, do we? As I remember it they happened upon one of the methane species before coming to oxy-space?
When I meant Py could handle it I meant she is ruthless and witty and have experience in how to out-manoeuvre someone with superior fire power.
An azi-crewed battle group, now, would be something else. But that was not what I was talking about 🙂
Hmm. Not so sure. Don’t forget that deep down the Kif don’t understand non-kifish behaviour, which was why Py could manipulate them. I don’t think Mazian would be such an easy mark. And can you imagine Edger or Porey’s response to a stroppy alien merchanter? Brief bright flash and a cloud of debris.
But Spider, that’d be followed by a group of several Knnn syncing up with the offending ECS ship and winking off to nowhere in particular. Sorta self-limiting behavior! 😉 Edger’s or Porey’s typical response only makes sense if you can intimidate the other guy. The only rule extant with Knnn, T’ca, etc., is that they don’t follow no rules.
Point!
CJ – someone over on Shejidan has asked why the Compact species (particularly the Mahen) haven’t appeared in A/U. Yeah, they’ve got a treaty with humanity, but like Tully says, there be three humanities. I could easily imagine the Mahen doing an end run around Sol space to see if the other governments are more receptive (and, knowing the Mahen, playing one against the other). Is there any possibility of an A/U-compact crossover?
This isn’t truly a question about the Merovingen series (plot and all that) as much as it is about how that series was published. It was doing pretty good for a shared world series… no huge increases in character abilities, the plots seemed mostly coherent, etc. And then we got Flood Tides, which raised a lot of interesting questions about Meroven, and then Endgame, which took all those very interesting questions and stomped all over them while rushing to an apocalyptic ending. So I got the impression that the series was meant to go longer, and for some reason it needed to be ended early, thus the stomping all over the threads started in Tides and the mad dash to tie up loose ends. Would this be a correct assessment, or just a figment of my imagination?
We had, unfortunately, a curtain imminent by the publisher, and, well, the truth is, writers are a fractious lot. Certain writers began to pull in various directions, and there we were: we did what we could do. Most of us are still friends.
I too noticed the scramble to achieve an ending, and I always thought Jones’ departure was something of a cop-out. Is there any possibility of a return to Merovingen via e-book, or is the series too tied up in various authors rights to be worth untangling?
I’ve also wondered how Jones and Mondragon’s relationship was affected by leaving Merovin. I mean, Jones is a fiercely independent young woman, with a highly specialized skill set. Take her out of Merovin, and she will survive, but she is going to have to rely a lot more on other people in order to do so. She won’t know who the players are, who can be trusted, where the safe spots are, etc. And being a pole-boat captain isn’t exactly a skill that is called for in many places. So I can see that Mondragon (who’s skill set is a little more universal) is going to be taking the lead more in areas outside of Merovin, and that is going to cause some strife between him and Jones. So I have always wondered if that was as happy of an ending as it seemed at first blush.
Good question. But Jones considers Mondragon a fragile flower who has to be saved from himself…and she is loyal—just a little crazy in her own way. It’s my opinion that boat they borrowed is going to raise Jones’ sights a bit, and she’ll take to it, once she figures out navigation.
Re: Why haven’t the Mahendo’sat shown up in Union/Alliance space?
You can’t just strike off at random into the unknown; you have to know where the jump points are. Plus there’s knnn and kiffish space between mahen space and the humanities, and the mahendo’sat don’t have right of passage.
A better question might be, why haven’t the kif discovered the humanities yet? But it’s possible they’ve known for a while and simply didn’t want to bring an extra oxy species into the Compact- the addition of the mahendo’sat and hani has not been to their benefit.
Re: Alliance and Union vs. Compact- I think we have to assume from Scapegoat and the Mri Wars that it would be all the humanities vs. the Compact- they seem to react collectively to alien threats. That said, the Alliance Fleet at this point consists of… the Norway. And Finity’s End et al., who kiffish or mahen hunter-ships could probably take out without difficulty. Union has a proper battlefleet but seem reluctant to commit it to doing anything useful if they can sit back and make Alliance do the heavy lifting.
The riders are a serious problem, but they could be reverse engineered pretty quickly. The difficulty lies in training the crews, but I think Compact may actually have the advantage there because the kif seem to react extremely quickly, and they all sleepwalk. They may not need tape.
So I think in the end it would come down to whether or not Pyanfar could keep the kif from defecting to Mallory. If so, Compact trounces us due to innate kiffish superiority and willingness to chuck C-speed rocks around with abandon; if not, humanity wins and we have allies to use against the mri seven hundred years hence.
Great points Spearmint (And Busifer)!
A war between Humanity and the Compact would certainly hinge on Union involvement. Without it, Humanity, despite having “proper” warships, would seem to be at a pretty severe numerical disadvantage (assuming, of course, a Pyanfar-unified Compact…at least the oxy-breathers), even if the Mazianni were brought back in. With the Union fleet committed (which I could see happening under Ari 2), the balance of power shifts significantly. A professional military, with its advantages of purpose-built ships, refined tactical doctrine, etc., is going to crush even a pretty big swarm, of converted freighters and Q-ships.
The kif are indeed willing to trash biospheres, but I don’t think Pyanfar is, if only because she’d realize there would be no way to stop a determined human retaliation, short of somehow persuading the knnn to get involved. Kif “going cowboy” and trying something like that on their own would signify a huge shift in the power balance in the Compact (that is, no more Pyanfar hegemony), which would in turn signify the end of a unified Compact. Disunited, the Compact would be hard pressed to deal with the Union military.
Great point about the kif defecting to Signe! I could so see that happening!
I’d like to think that a more in-depth contact wouldn’t lead to war. I have my moments of cockeyed optimism like that…
Interesting! Yes, in a human/Compact war Union resources would be vital. Earth’s “second Fleet” lacks any combat experience and the kif would take them apart.
Ref the Kif discovering humanity, weren’t they torturing Tully for intelligence? I think they’ve been aware of non-Compact sapients for a while (as have the mahen) but don’t know enough to risk an attack.
That was my impression, as well: the kif were after details about human space. Several scenarios that suggest themselves were they to succeed are less than pleasant. Given that they’d be approaching from “Sol side” (that is from a direction closest to Sol, furthest from Union space), it might occur to them that a very aggressive approach was workable – humanity might seem weak. Sol has been isolated from the push of human expansion, and I get the impression that the Home System is not economically strong at this juncture. It may lack the ability to field an effective military (not, mind you, that I’m yet convinced that any Compact species is, either…knnn excepted; some are excellent pirates, but not necessarily soldiers). But let’s assume kifish military superiority over Sol and perhaps even Alliance.
The kif could get very confident and full of themselves…then finally encounter Union. By then, there might be too much water under the bridge between species to avoid all out war. One shudders to think of what an Ari 2, convinced she was fighting for species survival, would be capable of…
The kif don’t- or pre-Pyanfar didn’t- have unified intelligence or a unified foreign policy. Akukkakk wanted intelligence, but Skkukuk seemed to immediately latch onto a platform of getting the humans out of kiffish space- I got the impression it was the kif pushing Pyanfar more than the other way round. Tully is non-threatening, so I can’t help but wonder if some of the kif knew more than they were saying about the humanities.
I agree Pyanfar would never endorse the C-speed rock option, but I worry it might not be possible to restrain the kif from escalating a conflict to mutually-assured-destructionville, because the sfik payoff for a victory in a inter-system war is so high. The motivation for some random captain to go rogue would be huge. (Heck, no one could even restrain Mazian, and he’s human).
Union happily blows stations and would probably cheerfully escalate to C-speed rocks, especially considering this is all pre-Gehenna Doctrine when they started pretending to have a conscience. This would be a terrible mistake, however, because once you go there warships don’t matter. You just need anything with a jump drive that can pick up a rock. Then it comes down to who has more ships and more systems to burn through, and the humanities lose. (Also a lot of the Compact jump points are dark or seem horrible to navigate, whereas human space is all linked together by the visible Hinder stars. We’re much easier to invade).
I’m also inclined to wonder about tc’a involvement. The kif are scared to death of them and the kif don’t scare easily, and the tc’a wanted the Compact to exist and wanted the humans out of it.
You know, I have a basic problem with the “c-charged rock” theory of world-ending. I have no argument with the physics of any significant mass hitting a populated world at near-c. I have a major argument with AIMING the damn thing. As I understand it (there’s the weak point! 🙂 ), a ship re-enters normal space vectored toward the sun (or gravity well, if that pleases you, but since we’re talking populated systems, I’ll stick with ‘sun’). All well and good, but it does no good to drop a rock into a sun–happens all the time, I suspect. You have to hit the ***planet***, which is NOT your vector at system entry. Unless you posit sticking your tender beak up against the rock and boosting laterally to steer it (after you stop its tumbling), it’s a billions-to-one shot to hit any planet, let alone the right one.
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I seek enlightenment–or at least a good argument, er, “spirited discussion.”
Easy enough to calculate though, surely? The incoming jump range is a matter of convention rather than physics. It shouldn’t be too difficult to engineer an entry on the ecliptic, deep inside the system. If you can be 100% sure of your arrival time, then you know exactly where the planet will be. Of course, the target may not be available for large segments of it’s orbit, but hey, reprisals can wait a few months….
As it happens, I agree with you – I feel there are too many variables for a reliable shot, but presumably Py knows better.
I agree, if you just pick something up in your… jump bubble thing… as you’re exiting the last system, it seems like the shot on reentry would be very hard to calc (especially given you wouldn’t know the precise mass of the rock)- plus it seems like you would dump the speed off your missile along with your own when you cycled the vanes, or in trying to extricate yourself from it you could badly throw off your own trajectory.
And you dock with your nose, so you can’t be bumping rocks around. Maybe you clamp the rock so you can maneuver with it? That would let you get the mass so you could calc it properly, and then you could do a Sandor-style pass through the system: make first dump so you’re slow enough to steer but still too fast to stop, unclamp once you’re aimed planetward, use your maneuvering thrusters to back away from the rock and then angle yourself for the next jump. I’d hate to calc the exit afterward, but species that sleepwalk can probably afford to play a bit faster and looser with their jump calculations.
What puzzles me is this: for a meteorite not to burn up in atmosphere into something trivially small it has to start out pretty huge- the moreso, I should think, if it’s C-charged. How can a normal sized ship jump dragging that much mass? The elves did it so it’s doable, but we may need Ms. Cherryh to tell us how.
This seems about the only way it could be done–grapple the rock (as you say, knowing the mass is key to a precise jump anyway), then, upon system entry, a light dump to get your velocity within manageable limits, boost laterally as needed to fine-tune the shot, ungrapple, then a tap on the directionals to get sufficient clearance for what CJ calls an “axis roll” (turnover), a solid bump on the mains to let the rock get far enough ahead to not be picked up in the hyperspace bubble (a calculable datum), and jump from the inbound range.
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Busifer, this has been nothing like a challenge to the tale. It is a quasi-compulsive nerd’s need to figure out how it could be done using the data given! That’s why I love CJ’s work so much; one of her characters would never save the day by reconfiguring the deflector array! Her worlds are internally consistent, that’s what makes it so easy to suspend disbelief.
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Niven and Pournelle made a pretty convincing case for catastrophe physics with Lucifer’s Hammer, IMO. As I said at the outset, I’ve no grief with the concept of clobbering a world with a rock in terms of what a big-game hunter would call ‘terminal ballistics’ (what happens after the bullet hits the target) At, say, .8c you could probably penetrate to the outer core of the planet with a chunk the size of a car. In which case, all you need is an inert such as those fired by the ship’s guns anyway. It’s more or less a big iron cannonball. Who needs a rock? Hurray for the cockroaches and bacteria….
My personal opinion on this is it’s FICTION so it doesn’t have to compute, or be founded in present day physics! 😉
The engineers that built the locomotives in the 1800’s would probably make disparaging comments after reading a novel written about aircraft warfare during the Vietnam war. They would not believe the stresses on the engines or on the pilot or that the aircraft could even get off the ground.
One hundred years makes a big difference if the technology is still expanding. I won’t be around when the time frame of the chanur books comes, so I can suspend my disbelief
Oh, agreed. We wouldn’t be reading sci-fi if we couldn’t handle impossible tech. But it’s still fun to analyse it. On the burning-up-in-atmosphere thing, it wouldn’t be in atmosphere for very long at those speeds.
oops – the html didn’t do as expected. The “in” was supposed to be italicised
Got it. 😉
Some fast lookups: I don’t remember these numbers off the top of my head.
Earth’s speed through the solar system: 9.8 kps. I don’t think they’ve factored in our system speed through the galaxy or the galactic speed through wherever. I think this is relative to the Sun.
Comet speed on approaching sun: 1,600,000 kph, which works out to 266666 kps, ranging down to 1200 kph, or 18.5 kps when trundling along in the outer solar system: not sure about the general state of affairs in the Oort Cloud. Still a pretty good smack.
I think it’s pretty difficult to conceptualize a hit coming in at 300,000 kps. The shock as it hit the atmosphere would be a challenge to the special effects guys, for sure, unless you just want to show a white flash.
Max speed for an asteroid, 67,000 kph, or 1116 kps, also variable, and slower if not inbound to the sun. Pretty impressive, but quite a bit less than getting whacked by a sunbound comet if you’re on Mercury.
The way I conceptualize it is that it’s not the rock, it’s the energy packet in which it exists, ie, the energy that gets delivered as it meets something not in the same packet.
I’ve never wondered before what the difference is between getting whacked by a comet or an asteroid, but I think now I do appreciate there could be a bit of a difference: even if the ice melts in the first instant, the energy delivered could be nasty.