Honorverse ramblings and musings

stewart wrote:

cthia wrote:I'm trying to determine the baddest of the baddest of the anal orifices that side of the Pecos.

My memory only serves up ...

-Beowulf's Biological Survey Crew (BSC)
-Solarian Gendermerie.
-The Royal Manticoran Marine Corp (RMMC)
-The Grayson Space Marine Corp (GSMC). I simply had to include a Corps with an elite special battalion called the Orbit Dogs.

Did I miss any? And who is the baddest of the lot?

---------------

I would not mention the Solarian Gendermerie in the same breath as BSC / RMMC Grayson Marines.

Solarian Gendermerie might personally be a$$h*le$ but militarily they are incompetent thugs.

The real Solaran Marines (example Thandi prior to Torch) would fit the list.

-- Stewart

I respect your attitude towards the Gendermerie, but all the textev I've consumed supports that they are real badasses ...

Cauldron of Ghosts

The training, methods and tactics of Torch’s army units had been shaped by Thandi Palane and were based on those of the Solarian Marines, which were in many respects quite different from those of Beowulf’s military, especially the BSC. Not only that, but the Royal Torch Army was still very much a work in progress, feeling its way towards its own sense of identity and organic traditions.

If Colonel Anderson chose to employ Plan C, it would be Lt. Colonel Kabweza and her soldiers who would carry it out. Plan C had the nickname among her BSC agents of Plan Biggest Hammer Around. If the Torch battalion she commanded shared any of the traditions and attitudes of Solarian Marines—which they were bound to, since both Palane and Kabweza came out of that military force—they would apply ferocious shock tactics in a boarding operation. The Beowulfan military, like that of Manticore, was highly skeptical of the Solarian Navy’s reputation, especially that of Battle Fleet. Not so, however, of the Solarian Marines. Unlike Battle Fleet officers and crews, who could easily go through an entire career without seeing any combat at all, the Marines were a real fighting force.

It was tempting. Slaver crews, no matter how vigilant and well-armed, had no more chance of resisting a full-bore close assault by Torch units trained to Solarian Marine standards than vigilant and toothy mice had of resisting bobcats. There wasn’t even much chance that the cargo would get harmed, so swiftly and savagely would the attack be driven through.

But even if no harm came to the cargo, there was no chance that Torch assault troops would leave any of the crew alive. Their tactics, like those of Solarian Marines, would lean entirely toward eliminate the threat, not taking prisoners.

Of course, much respect should also be given to Torch's fighting force as well who have been trained by Thandi, and ...

Not to mention that the majority of Torch’s assault troops had once been slaves themselves, and somewhere around one-third were former members of the Audubon Ballroom. Their hatred for slavers would be personal and deep. No matter how well disciplined they were, their tendency would always be to give no quarter.

My entire point is to catalogue the baddess of the baddess of the best. Not to champion certain morals, scruples or values. Lacking these may emphasize the point of the discussion. Baddess of the anal orifices. Someone to be feared. Not to be called on to help grandma across the street or to retrieve Dicey out of a tree.

Fox2! wrote:Among the Baddest of the Bad:

Andermanni Totenkopf

Do forgive my manners Fox2!

Thanks for adding that oversight.

Anywho, WELCOME to the biggest and bestess of the honorable, honorary honoring of Honor and the Honorverse. Pull up a chair and relax. Have a traditional first Old Tilman on us. And remember ...

Don't drink and drive! Don't drive and post!

Enjoy your stay!

From Wiki:

Parmley Station was a space amusement park orbiting the planet Ameta in the Hainuwele System.

Modeled after ancient Earth amusement parks like Disneyland and Coney Island, it was originally built by Michael Parmley, but had little financial success, and his descendants ended up stranded there in poverty for several generations.[1] The only entertainment seeking visitors were a few gas miners. The empty station was partially seized by freelance slavers for transshipment purposes. The slavers also established some kind of truce with the Butre Clan, the remaining descendants of Parmley led by Elfride Margarete Butre, Parmley's wife.

In 1921 PD, the Beowulfan Biological Survey Corps seized the station by force and turned it into a secret fortress for their anti-slavery effort.[2] In return for Elfride Butre's covert mission to Mesa, all members of the Butre clan still young enough received Prolong Treatment. (CS2)

My niece inquired as to whose weaponry tech is used for Parmley Station? And to what extent? Would it be Beowulf's? How much of Manticore derived tech would be deployed? How much Manty tech does Beowulf enjoy? Certainly nothing that the Solarians could aquire and gain certain insights?

Although, IIRC, Solarian beam weapons are on a par with the GAs.

Cauldron of Ghosts

Still, there was some chance. All it would take would be for one of the slaver ship’s officers on the bridge to trigger the slave evacuation procedures. The cargo would be forced out of their compartments by poison gas and expelled into vacuum. There would be no logic to doing so, since under the circumstances there was no way the slaver crew could pretend they hadn’t been carrying slaves. Some of the corpses would even be drifting in sight of the Station. But the slavers might figure that they were doomed anyway—not without some reason, being honest—and choose to commit an act of mass murder as a twisted form of reprisal. God knew the slave trade attracted enough sadists and sociopaths! Indeed, one might say that those were two of the trade’s more essential qualities.

We've gone through this before, for that I apologize. And I've been admonished by the great MWW himself. But either I'm a glutton for punishment, or the very thought of this is worse than treecat claws run up my bum. Every single time I come across it! It is all too easy for me to project myself in amongst the slaves - hungry, starved, questionable health, frightened, half-to-naked and ever fearing of being AIRLOCKED!

It forever brings me to tears!!!

I still maintain, that the universe's policy, signed and adopted by all decent, humanitarian and civilized systems, should be to execute BY AN AMUSEMENT RIDE OUT THE AIRLOCK, ANY and ALL slavers IMMEDIATELY!!!!!!!!!!!!!...

DO NOT PASS GO. DO NOT WASTE 200M CREDITS TRANSPORTING THEM TO THEIR RESPECTIVE CORRUPT GOVERNMENTS.

An effective deterrent has to be a motivating deterrent. DEATH ON FIRST CAPTURE. IS VERY MOTIVATING!

end rant. still fuming.

stewart wrote: I would not mention the Solarian Gendermerie in the same breath as BSC / RMMC Grayson Marines.

Solarian Gendermerie might personally be a$$h*le$ but militarily they are incompetent thugs.

The real Solaran Marines (example Thandi prior to Torch) would fit the list.

-- Stewart

cthia wrote:I respect your attitude towards the Gendermerie, but all the textev I've consumed supports that they are real badasses ...

Cauldron of Ghosts

The training, methods and tactics of Torch’s army units had been shaped by Thandi Palane and were based on those of the Solarian Marines, which were in many respects quite different from those of Beowulf’s military, especially the BSC. Not only that, but the Royal Torch Army was still very much a work in progress, feeling its way towards its own sense of identity and organic traditions.

If Colonel Anderson chose to employ Plan C, it would be Lt. Colonel Kabweza and her soldiers who would carry it out. Plan C had the nickname among her BSC agents of Plan Biggest Hammer Around. If the Torch battalion she commanded shared any of the traditions and attitudes of Solarian Marines—which they were bound to, since both Palane and Kabweza came out of that military force—they would apply ferocious shock tactics in a boarding operation. The Beowulfan military, like that of Manticore, was highly skeptical of the Solarian Navy’s reputation, especially that of Battle Fleet. Not so, however, of the Solarian Marines. Unlike Battle Fleet officers and crews, who could easily go through an entire career without seeing any combat at all, the Marines were a real fighting force.

What we have is...failure to communicate.

cthia, the Solarian Gendaramime are not
Solarian Marines. The Gendaramine are the local 'enforcers' for the Office of Frontier Security and do the 'policing' of the Protectorates and Verge planets on behalf of the OFS. They are 'the muscle', but not professional troops.

The Solarian Marine Corps is part and parcel of the SLN and is a professional force, which is often called upon to 'bail out' the Gendaramine when their bully-boy tactics backfire on them. The Marines have little if any respect for the qualities of the Gendaramine, as echoed in this passage from "Crown of Slaves".

Victor was a bit surprised to hear an SLN officer express her hostility to the OFS so openly, but not much. He knew the Solarian Marines had a particularly high recruitment rate in the protectorate worlds, which explained why the OFS used them only as a last resort. He knew of at least one incident where an OFS Security Battalion had been mangled during a pacification campaign by Solarian Marines supposedly backing them up. An unfortunate "friendly fire" mishap had been the official explanation, never mind explaining how a "friendly fire mishap" could produce sixty percent casualty rates for an entire battalion.

Baddest of the bad?
I think I'll go with Torch marines trained by or with Thandi that survived the experience, or RMMC marines from San Martin.

Chia, like you I have a teenage whiz kid, though mine is a daughter vs. a niece. I've been trying to figure out how to get her more interested in the HonorVerse and nearly accomplished it with the question about battle armor.

She said "oh, sort of like Iron Man except they can't fly (me: as far, and they carry "real guns"). No sale. Until I added the caveat "and the men look like Channing Tatum in their down time".

That might have worked. Now she wants to see the film.

*sigh*

cthia wrote:

From Wiki:

Parmley Station was a space amusement park orbiting the planet Ameta in the Hainuwele System.

Modeled after ancient Earth amusement parks like Disneyland and Coney Island, it was originally built by Michael Parmley, but had little financial success, and his descendants ended up stranded there in poverty for several generations.[1] The only entertainment seeking visitors were a few gas miners. The empty station was partially seized by freelance slavers for transshipment purposes. The slavers also established some kind of truce with the Butre Clan, the remaining descendants of Parmley led by Elfride Margarete Butre, Parmley's wife.

In 1921 PD, the Beowulfan Biological Survey Corps seized the station by force and turned it into a secret fortress for their anti-slavery effort.[2] In return for Elfride Butre's covert mission to Mesa, all members of the Butre clan still young enough received Prolong Treatment. (CS2)

My niece inquired as to whose weaponry tech is used for Parmley Station? And to what extent? Would it be Beowulf's? How much of Manticore derived tech would be deployed? How much Manty tech does Beowulf enjoy? Certainly nothing that the Solarians could aquire and gain certain insights?

Although, IIRC, Solarian beam weapons are on a par with the GAs.

There are no weapons mounted on Parmley Station. The only weapons are the hand weapons of the boarding forces based there (combination of Torch and BSC troops) and the weapons on any BSC or Torch ships which happen to be there.

SWM wrote:There are no weapons mounted on Parmley Station. The only weapons are the hand weapons of the boarding forces based there (combination of Torch and BSC troops) and the weapons on any BSC or Torch ships which happen to be there.

Au contraire, mon frere. From Chapter 2 of Cauldron of Ghosts (italics are mine):

“They’ve got a cargo on board, then.”
Damewood nodded. “And that’s a two million ton ship, according to the sensors, so it’s probably a pretty big one.”

That precluded the simple and straightforward measure of disintegrating the oncoming slaver ship with Parmley Station’s disguised but very powerful grasers once it got close enough. “Cargo” was a euphemism, dealing with slavers. The term meant human beings, alive and…certainly not well, given the realities of their situation, but still very far from dead.

As for cthia's query, since Beowulf via the BSC did most of the development and refurbishment of Parmley, I would presume that the grasers are SL manufacture. As you note, they are pretty much on a par with SEM/RH's energy weapons, and almost anybody's grazers are going to do a Hulk Smash on any unarmed and unarmored freighter.

stewart wrote:
I would not mention the Solarian Gendermerie in the same breath as BSC / RMMC Grayson Marines.

Solarian Gendermerie might personally be a$$h*le$ but militarily they are incompetent thugs.

The real Solaran Marines (example Thandi prior to Torch) would fit the list.

-- Stewart

cthia wrote:I respect your attitude towards the Gendermerie, but all the textev I've consumed supports that they are real badasses ...

Cauldron of Ghosts

The training, methods and tactics of Torch’s army units had been shaped by Thandi Palane and were based on those of the Solarian Marines, which were in many respects quite different from those of Beowulf’s military, especially the BSC. Not only that, but the Royal Torch Army was still very much a work in progress, feeling its way towards its own sense of identity and organic traditions.

If Colonel Anderson chose to employ Plan C, it would be Lt. Colonel Kabweza and her soldiers who would carry it out. Plan C had the nickname among her BSC agents of Plan Biggest Hammer Around. If the Torch battalion she commanded shared any of the traditions and attitudes of Solarian Marines—which they were bound to, since both Palane and Kabweza came out of that military force—they would apply ferocious shock tactics in a boarding operation. The Beowulfan military, like that of Manticore, was highly skeptical of the Solarian Navy’s reputation, especially that of Battle Fleet. Not so, however, of the Solarian Marines. Unlike Battle Fleet officers and crews, who could easily go through an entire career without seeing any combat at all, the Marines were a real fighting force.

Hutch wrote:What we have is...failure to communicate.

cthia, the Solarian Gendaramime are not
Solarian Marines. The Gendaramine are the local 'enforcers' for the Office of Frontier Security and do the 'policing' of the Protectorates and Verge planets on behalf of the OFS. They are 'the muscle', but not professional troops.

The Solarian Marine Corps is part and parcel of the SLN and is a professional force, which is often called upon to 'bail out' the Gendaramine when their bully-boy tactics backfire on them. The Marines have little if any respect for the qualities of the Gendaramine, as echoed in this passage from "Crown of Slaves".

Victor was a bit surprised to hear an SLN officer express her hostility to the OFS so openly, but not much. He knew the Solarian Marines had a particularly high recruitment rate in the protectorate worlds, which explained why the OFS used them only as a last resort. He knew of at least one incident where an OFS Security Battalion had been mangled during a pacification campaign by Solarian Marines supposedly backing them up. An unfortunate "friendly fire" mishap had been the official explanation, never mind explaining how a "friendly fire mishap" could produce sixty percent casualty rates for an entire battalion.

Thanks for clueing me in. I certainly mistook them to be one and the same. Like my niece is fond of saying of certain people, "some of my synapses are stuck in the open position."

Albeit indirectly, you've supplied an entity that I've technically missed.

The Gendamerie was widely feared throughout the Verge systems for its maintenance of literal intervention battalions. These units had a long standing reputation for brutality against any Verge world population which supported or even tolerated forces, which opposed de facto OFS imperial rule in the "protectorate" star nations. The reasons for this reputation manifested in the extreme, when the Gendarmerie's Brigadier Francisca Yucel took an Intervention battalion to the Mobius system and moved to violently suppress the Mobius Liberation Front (MLF).

By the time of Yucel's arrival, the MLF had overthrown Svein Lombroso's rule in most of the capital, Landing, as well as in five major cities and in most of the regional countryside. The Solarian League Navy Frontier Fleet ships in Mobius orbit, by Yucel's command, launched a series of indiscriminate, WMD-scale orbital kinetic strikes on population centers the MLF controlled. These actions would have constituted Eridani Edict violations if they had been committed against ordinary civilians; the targeted areas' support for the MLF created a grayer legal question.

The difference turned out to be irrelevant, as Yucel and most of her soldiers were killed when a detachment of Manticoran ships arrived and engaged the Gendarmerie forces, after Yucel defied Sir Aivars Terekhov's terms of surrender and threatened to begin killing MLF prisoners in her custody. (HH14)

SharkHunter wrote:Baddest of the bad?
I think I'll go with Torch marines trained by or with Thandi that survived the experience, or RMMC marines from San Martin.

Chia, like you I have a teenage whiz kid, though mine is a daughter vs. a niece. I've been trying to figure out how to get her more interested in the HonorVerse and nearly accomplished it with the question about battle armor.

She said "oh, sort of like Iron Man except they can't fly (me: as far, and they carry "real guns"). No sale. Until I added the caveat "and the men look like Channing Tatum in their down time".

That might have worked. Now she wants to see the film.

*sigh*

My niece became interested in the Honorverse because I am. My sister says I've created an intellectual monster. I bought her a baby grand for her first birthday, and a super computer when she was eight, which she has rebuilt herself several times already. She'll be studying theoretical physics, and would have graduated last year at the tender age of 12. However, "There's no way I'm going to allow my twelve year old daughter to enter college," says my sister. She just turned 13 a few months ago and her teachers claim that they are wasting her time. I am proud of my own high IQ. But my niece's results were 23 points above mine at 12-years-old! W-T-F?! Sometimes, the universe laughs!

She was a very long baby, and is rather tall for her age, even as a High Schooler she is above average. Which poses another problem for my sister. She looks every bit a High Schooler in age. More so in intellect. Tall, graceful, incredibly beautiful, long Indian inherited luxurious hair and boys falling over her like flies. A brother posited that mother nature felt that she needed a high IQ that merits her height.

I'm her favorite Uncle because I cut her umbilical cord, and she has the most beautiful belly button which she is fond of sharing. (She doesn't know that I closed my eyes to snip. (No not really) (Yea I did, just don't tell her.) So I suppose she feels she owes me. It's what my jealous brothers all say anyways.

So, I share your joy, merriment, wonder and dismay!

And, I congratulate the fittingly proud papa!