are you kidding me? that's like the most cliff-hanger-y cliff hanger ever!
What will happen next? What did Doc Chen do? How will the Jung react? AAah! Not wanting to place any spoilers here I will stop, but...
I hate you Ryk Brown! (read: I love it!)
I just finished my second read-through of it, and as such was even more satisfied then the first time, I was not disappointed at all. Like Ryk says in another post, Nathan accomplished the main goal set in the first book.
Yes there are things left unresolved, and yes, a cliffhanger, which I really look forward to seeing addressed, but in the grand scheme of things, I do not think Nathan could have done anything else but what he did in the existing situation. I also trust Admiral Dumar to take proper steps to ensure everyone's safety.
Besides, we have 60 more books to read through, and I would pay for them in advance if I could, just because I really am enjoying the story, and the way it is progressing. I don't mind little things hanging as Ryk shows a good ability to come back to them.
Like I said, not at all surprised by Nathan's decision, it was the only one left to him. I knew as soon as the whole vengeance thing was brought up, I swore out loud to an empty room. All I'm saying is, in my opinion, he has to die now. Making him walk out of that would make absolutely no sense to me. Ryk would have to have something so major occur with the Jung (like them be lying about their citizen's feelings on the issue or something) to allow him to walk away. There is no conceivable way to talk his way out. Goring has no chance of walking away from Nuremberg and, at least in the eyes of the Jung, I doubt Nathan is much different.
Now, speaking of the Dr. Chen, personally I hope it is some sort of aggressive nanite to slowly replace all the Jung nanites with Alliance ones (Terran nanites). This would allow the alliance to control the Jung (theoretically) or at the very least remove the Jung ability to command their nanites. This could conceivably liberate many worlds, even the Jung home-world (assuming it requires such a thing, ideologically we just don't know). This would not occur within Nathan's "trial" I presume. Not unless the Jung leave him to rot in a jail cell for some time, or torture him, or something similar.
All I'm saying is that if Ryk intends to keep Nathan alive, it had better be damn good or I may have to walk away.
Nathan is like a Will Weaton from Star Trek type character to me and detracts from the story. As I said in a different thread, I’d like it better if Nathan was actually killed off soon. Kind of sick of his character. I like the series In Spite of Nathan, not because of Nathan. I’m more than ready for new or current characters to get more developed and take center stage myself.
I also think the story needs to start spending a lot more time developing the antagonist characters and their cultures and their history and start to show us what the universe looks like through their eyes otherwise it becomes too shallow.
But unfortunately with the escape of the old earth captain what's-his-name in the jump shuttle, we are going to have to put up with more blah blah blah as they cross paths again the future of man kind morality dialogue stump speeches between him and Nathan down the road, picking back up where they left off as the the name of this book implies... I'd like to see a Takaran nobleman push them both out of an airlock and space them at the same time. That would be a fitting example of humanity! ????
Plus, really, where is man's best friend the dog ever mentioned? Come on, there's no humanity if humans don't have dogs and pets down the road. We're not really going to settle Mars and such until someone finds a way to bring their pets. It's not human like... 🙂
Oddly enough my dogs name is Lucky.
Irregardless of Nathan's action of turning himself over to the Jung, I still have a problem with the whole scenario. The Jung did nuke the Earth twice. We are not looking at a mutually assured destruction cold war, but rather a Pearl Harbor-9/11 event. And what about Tanna? Would they not want revenge for another wanton act of war?
Sure there are now 10 JKKVs floating around, but who says the Alliance has to stop there. Why not thousands or hundreds of thousands. The United States had no problem using nuclear weapons on Japan during World War II because any surrender, unless it is total surrender, is no surrender at all.
The analogy of Japan doesn't really work, as Japan did not have the capability to easily destroy the US. They might have been able to win the war, but not capture the continental US.
If your goal is to survive, why would you choose to destroy your enemy's homeworld and likely send every one of their ships headed your way, hell bent for revenge? All it would take is a single battleship at FTL speed colliding with Earth to put them out of business for good. And there would be no defense against such an attack. Same is true of the KKVs that Dumar put on patrol. You don't need thousands of the them. One is enough. Eight of them is just redundancy.
MAD was the only logical conclusion. A long protracted war would not have made any sense, as why would you kill hundreds of thousands more people, (your and theirs) when you could end it with a MAD stalemate?
When you're headed for an unsurvivable waterfall, the only choices are go over it and die, or get off the river.
We have seen the Alliance attack FTL ships by bringing them out of FTL with Antimatter mines. I would assume that the Jung do not yet know of this strategy. So I'm not overly worried about this strategy initially. The problem comes when the Jung realize the first attack hasn't worked and send in multiple ships that are constantly adjusting trajectories.
The Alliance would contact the Jung and tell them they stopped the initial attack / the Jung will deign sending it. The Alliance will be forced to threaten them again with JKKV's. The pressure on the Jung could force them into sending a wave of ships as described above. All because of one Ship's actions, one captain orders.
Why would they do this? Imagine you live on a planet with 100 billion other people, at Heart of an Empire and all of a sudden, all of the food that was being shipped in from your captured colony worlds stops because they are liberated. Your world cannot sustain you.
The Alliance needs some way to supply the Jung with food without threatening to bankrupting the Jung society. Look at the Ta'Akar for a reason why you cannot hike the prices for food.
The Jung have not demonstrated the capability to stop Jump devices (well they have, but not successfully)
I would like to point out that at some point the Jump drive seems to have gone from not able to function in a gravity field to working quite well even at a planets surface. My point being that JKKV's should be able to jump directly to the surface of a planet and avoid any ordinance that would otherwise be available to attack near Jung planet objects / even FTL weapons.
The only defense I can see standing up to a JKKV is the placement of large fields of rocks/explosives in orbit above the planet. meaning that anything that tries to pass through the field will impact prematurely and as such not hit the planet with its full force. of course if the 8 JKKV's arrive into the same area, some might make it though... (as the Alliance I would scout the Jung Home world daily for signs of this, and either order that it is not done, or launch the JKKV's before the field is finished. Any attempt to negate the JKKV Threat would likely coincide with a Jung strike on Sol.
Maybe someone else has already posted this, but I haven't seen it yet...
In the stress of the Patoray Battle, Roselle (?) sends out word to attack the Laser turret in the North Pole of the asteroid facility. If the asteroid had less or no way of a fast free rotation, then aiming at the shields directly in the South Pole would have been the best to try to weaken the shield array and create a hole where they could penetrate as with other vessels. I can't recall or find if the asteroid had a Laser turret in the South Pole, but since the Celestia went towards the Southern hemisphere, my guess is that there wasn't. Normally all ships try to weaken the shields of the enemy vessel where they are not as strong and/or away from the enemy's fireline.
If no one of the other Captains noticed that, they all did a big mistake that led to the useless Celestia's destruction...
The jump was never NOT able to work in the presence of a gravity field. It was just that the presence of that field had to be accounted for in the jump calculations. As they got more experience, and upgraded their computers to Takaran systems, such accomodations in the jump calculations became a non-issue.
I don't see littering orbit with rocks as a viable defense. First, you'd need a hell of a lot of rocks. Literally millions of them, and they'd have to be in every conceivable orbit, which means collisions. Collisions that would send rocks raining down on the very world they were supposed to protect.
I've always found it curious that in Sci Fi, there always seems to be an easily exploitable "weak spot" in the enemy's shields. Why the hell would anyone design a defensive shield with a weak spot? Too much of a Star Trek style get out of jail free card for my tastes. At least the layered shield segment concept made sense, instead of just being a convenient weak spot.
Well, yes, Ryk, you're right. Why there is always a weak spot in the first, second and third Death Star? 🙂
However, forgive me if I am stubborn... If the asteriod did not have a laser turret in its South pole, wouldn't it have been a tactical mistake to try to destroy the shield array in the North pole in line of sight for the laser? Anyway, I am not criticizing, I am a superfan of the whole Saga.
And, in real life -as history tells us-, battles do have tactical mistakes that lead to either a victory or the less desired outcome... Your books, being SciFi, to my taste, have the right balance between real scenarios (not every time the good guys win, some main characters even die) and futuristic technology. That is why I like them all.
The Alliance avoids Civilian Targets & The Moon was a Civilian Target. The plan was to destroy the Ring Station around the Moon only. When they discovered the Shields arround the entire moon, They fired again on the shielded area around the Ring Base. When the Laser was spotted the decision was made to attack the part of the Moon that was an obvious Military Target.
It did seem stupid to me that they wanted to attack the side of the moon that had the biggest guns but think about it:
1) If you want to beat an enemy you take out its biggest guns first - The Laser
2) If you are avoiding civilian targets you are restricting where you can target so Attacking from the south may not have been viable from a target environment.
3) The time needed to bring down the shields over the entire Moon would have likely taken long enough to bring in the other Jung Ships in the system.
Another point I would make is that the Attack plan for the Laser was rushed & not coordinated the attack like they would have if they were in communications range, this might have had an impact along with the Blocking tactics that the Jung with the larger fleet size were able to pull off.
The Alliance has been Jumping from in front of imminent death for a while now so it was nothing new for them. Correction! It was nothing new to the Aurora, and the Celestia, and a lesser extent the Battleship but That kind of combat would have been very new to the Two Frigates which is why I do not complain about loosing one (those ships were stand off fighters with they're primary weapons being Jump Missiles.) The Celestia was just unlucky. (but i would have tried Micro jumps of 1 Km to skip out of the way of the laser)
Well, I like to think, as in my first comment about this topic, that the stress of the battle and facing a new challenge (first the supershields and then the laser) that was not in the attack plan were the reasons that made them incur in a rushed tactics... As you also mention.
You will note that Rossele the Battleship Captain made the decision to attack the laser and also was the first to Jump away when it went to fire. That's his style of fighting. Pound on the biggest target until its dead.
Committing the Frigates to a close in fight with a Supershield as you called in especially when there is a super laser there was the wrong call. Frigates like Gunships are not designed to deal with targets that much bigger then them.
Clone Planet??!! Where's the novella or stand alone novel on that place?
Can you say, "Ghatazak Clone Army"?
