Hutch wrote:cthia wrote:My sister asked me a puzzling question. I have no answer and thought I'd pose it here.
As myself, she likes the Mars Trilogy. (More because of its soap opera like feel) There she was exposed to the idea of colony ships. She asked me how every system settled in the Honorverse managed to produce the same type of ship propulsion and weapons systems in the end. "If every system was so remote and cut off from each other, how did their technology travel(npi) down the same paths. Why aren't some ships powered by this and some by this and some by that," she asks.
Is there a book that describes it all. Perhaps a detailed account of the diaspora of man?
Probably "The Universe of Honor Harrington" in one of the short story collections does as good a job as any. Also House of Steel describes the settlement and development of Grayson and Manticore in some detail.
The initial colony efforts (like Grayson and later, Manticore), were by 'slow ship', fusion-powered but with the passengers in cyronic storage and moving at well below the speed of light. So colonization would often take centuries to get to a location.
Once a reliable hyperspace ship was developed (and it took quite some time), then ships could be sent out to the new colonies to'spread the word'. Indeed, when the original Manticore colonists arrived, they found a team already there awaiting them, having arrived via Hyperspace.
As for Grayson, they depended upon the 'fusion-powered ramscoop' sub-light ships to first exile the Faithful and then defend Grayosn from their attacks. House of Steel then picks up the story:In 1793 PD, the Havenite merchant ship Goliath contacted both Yeltsin’s Star and the Endicott System, reestablishing contact between the descendants of Austin Grayson’s colonists and the rest of humanity.
Although additional contacts with the galactic mainstream were sporadic and infrequent, to say the least, the effects of rediscovery were profound. New technologies, whose possibility had never occurred to any Grayson or Masadan, were revealed, and a period of frenetic R&D ensued, driven by the longstanding hostility between the two star systems. Although neither Grayson nor Masada could obtain more than bits and pieces from their occasional visitors, both were aware of the dire consequences of falling behind their enemies, and both introduced domestically engineered versions of the hyperdrive, impeller drive, and Warshawski sail in remarkably short order.
The locally produced iterations of those systems were both crude and outmoded compared to more modern systems, yet in the process of essentially reinventing technologies the rest of the galaxy had enjoyed for centuries, Grayson researchers opened several promising lines of development which had not occurred to anyone else.
So the answer was diffusion, either direct or indirect, to systems because the hyperdrive allowed people to go most anywhere we were.
Are there still human systems out there that have never been contacted and still don't know about the hyperdrive? Possibly, but that is not the story the MWW has discussed.
IMHO as always. YMMV.
Thanks again, Hutch. Not sure if it'll satisfy sis, but I'll pass it along. Thanks even more for the read recommendations, as I'm trying to push sis close enough to the spinning vortex that is the 'Verse to get her pulled in. She just may elect to read those. So too shall I.
