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antishurtugal_reborn
So this part starts with a big caption of “Transcribed from Professor Chung’s Lecture at the UMC Naval Academy, Earth (2242)”. The first thing I notice is the hard date. I have nothing wrong with that, because sure, we could conceivably have a specific academy by that point for space marines. I mean, West Point (USMA, United States Military Academy) opened on March 16, 1802, which was 219 years ago, and the United States Naval Academy (USNA, Annapolis) was established on October 10 1845, which was 175 years ago. So, yeah, that I’ll let pass without much of an argument.
The second part I notice is that Professor Chung has no rank or PhD, either or both of which would indicate if he’s a civilian professor or a military instructor. The faculty of the real world Naval Academy is roughly evenly divided between civilian professors and military instructors, but the civilian professors nearly all have a PhD, and I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m pretty sure those who have those fancy letters at the end of their name typically want them known on legal documents, which is what this “lecture” would be. Maybe I’m wrong about that, I dunno. But I’d be damn proud of that achievement if I were to have a PhD.
These are small nitpicks, I know, but still. Professor Chung didn’t transcribe this lecture himself. Someone else did. So that someone is, in my opinion, showing disrespect for Professor Chung by not adding “Professor Chung, PhD” at the end of his name. Because not all professors have PhDs, especially at the Naval Academy. If they’re a military instructor, they don’t necessarily have a PhD but they do have a master’s degree. Now, to caveat that, this story is set supposedly 200+ years into the future - and there’s already argument on that so I’m not going to get into it since it really has nothing to do with the topic at hand - so maybe being that this is Fantasy Naval Academy, the rules are different.
But I somehow seriously doubt that in 200+ years we would throw out all traditional military honor, regimen, and rules just because.
Anyway. Let’s get into the meat of things.
This part is written as an actual lecture, complete with the typical “you thought this was going to be easy, but it’s going to be so so much worse than that” that professors usually give. The professor calls all of these students “cadets”.
Which is wrong.
All students in the Naval Academy are called “midshipmen”. They are always officers-in-training and that is always their rank. Upon graduation, they’re either commissioned as ensigns in the Navy or as second lieutenants in the Marine Corps. The only military academies that use “cadets” as a rank (which is only for full-time college students who are also training to become a commissioned officer, let’s be clear, not just anyone is a “cadet”) are Army, Coast Guard, and Air Force. The only other places that use “cadet” are the United States Merchant Marine Academy, the Maine Maritime Academy, the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, the California Maritime Academy, and the State University of New York Maritime College, along with a spattering of state-sponsored military colleges, but technically the “cadets” hold the rank of “midshipmen” and therefore, they are midshipmen.
I learned all this by a five-minute Google search. It really makes me wonder if Paolini did any research at all, because if he had, he wouldn’t have used “cadet” in reference to Naval Academy students.
Of course, if they’re Air Force students, then by all means, call them cadets. But they’re NOT AIR FORCE STUDENTS. THEY ARE AT THE UMC NAVAL ACADEMY. Which means they are MIDSHIPMEN and would not be referred to as “cadets”.
takes breath
Okay. Moving on.
The professor says that they’re going to get the “finest education the UMC can muster on the means and methods of ship-based combat” over the next six weeks. Um... that... that is great if you’re doing book-work or theoretical exercises in the classroom, but six weeks is not going to prepare these kids (because they are kids, mostly) for what they’re going to be involved in and witness while in actual combat. And actual combat rarely if ever goes the way it does in simulations and in carefully controlled exercises. Actual combat is terrifying and messy and you typically forget everything you learned in the training exercises and classroom because you’re just trying to stay alive. If you don’t want these kids to shit their pants and get screamed at by their fellow crew members to get their shit together and do something, you need to give them hands-on practical training.
Chung then goes on to say that fighting in space isn’t “twice as hard” as fighting in air or water, or even three or four times as hard. Fighting in space is so much harder than all of that. Which is potentially true. I wouldn’t know. Nobody alive right now would know. We haven’t actually done any space combat in this current era. There’s a lot of theories and such floating around, but that’s all they are: theories. So I’ll let that slide without any argument.
Chung then talks about how zero gravity is a “non-intuitive” environment for the human brain, even for those who’ve grown up on a ship or station. Which is likely true, because there’s artificial gravity in use on ships and stations, otherwise our bones would begin to lose density and our organs would begin to suffer. There’s science behind that. Look at the studies done on the astronauts that live for a year on the International Space Station. They lose bone density and muscle mass, no matter how much they exercise. Their organs are also functioning differently and their digestive tracts will behave differently. He goes on to say that there’s going to be stuff about inertial maneuvering that “you will not understand” (emphasis NOT mine) if they don’t have the proper instruction.
Which is true. About nearly anything you learn in school and in life.
And apparently no matter how good somebody is at it when they’re in normal space (or slower than light, as the professor calls it) you’re going to get your ass handed to you when you try to fight in a faster-than-light situation.
Um. I didn’t think you could fight in FTL specifically because of the way FTL works and the fact that ALL YOUR CREW ARE IN CRYO STASIS. Who the hell is going to be awake to run the ship? The AI? The ship-brain? And didn’t we just go over how there’s a reflective bubble that forms around the ship in FTL that drives the temperatures UP, thus necessitating the cryo stasis, and thus necessitating the need for a heat dump somewhere? If you were to introduce extra heat to the heat already being created by the FTL bubble, wouldn’t you just, you know, melt your ship? Wouldn’t you die? This makes absolutely no sense if you’ve read the story. I don’t know about anyone else, but at least in the chapters where I had FTL travel, no combat whatsoever happened. So we never actually saw this happen.
There’s also a pretty interesting thing the professor says here, too, about how the rules of normal-space combat are thrown “out the airlock and stomp[ed] on” and turned into a bloody mess, which I find fucking hilarious because once something is thrown out the airlock, they’re generally IN SPACE and therefore they cannot be stomped on, and therefore they cannot be made into a bloody mess.
Anyway, the professor then blah blahs on about how the make and model of their vessel, plus the makeup of their allies, will determine where they can fight, who they can fight, and if they need to retreat. He makes a very accurate statement about how if you can’t close the distance between you and your target, your target is going to be invulnerable to whatever you can dish out. He says it’s “advantageous to drop out of FTL with a high degree of relative motion”, ostensibly to get the drop on your enemy and close the distance quickly, but this one line also negates what he previously said about battle happening in FTL. Either you have to drop out of FTL to fight, or you can fight in FTL, you can’t have both. The professor also mentions that these “cadets” are officers, which is somewhat false, because they’re in training to be officers; they aren’t officers yet. Beyond that, he says that they’ll have to make judgment calls, such as whether they drop out of FTL to ambush the enemy or not, which is actually something officers don’t do. The captain does that. Not officers.
The professor then says that there are limitations to the fusion drives they have, and they have certain capabilities that ultimately prevent the use of personal combat space vessels. He says they’re outdated and really weren’t ever a thing. Which basically is a piss on all the X-wings and TIE-fighters and other science fiction shows or games where personal crafts were used in space combat. The fact that these personal craft exist in science fiction is actually a testament to the personal craft we have today, like fighter jets. You’d think if we had the technology to create one-seater fighter jets, we’d have the technology to create one-seater space battle craft, too. Humans have always been trying to find more refined ways of killing each other from the first dagger to the sword to the Winchester rifle to the gatling gun. Humans have also always been inventing to find that one thing that nobody knows they need yet. Like the first helicopter to rescue stranded and wounded soldiers in areas a plane just couldn’t reach.
He then goes on to say that machines are much cheaper and much more effective because they can withstand more g-forces than humans, which is true. He tosses out an example of a “radicalized miner” - which suggests people are able to be radicalized in the first place, and I have never seen such evidence in the actual story about there being a militant group that opposes the UMC like in the real world militant groups oppose just about anyone who doesn’t agree with their way of doing things - and a “local cartel member” - which also suggests there are cartels, evidence please, because I saw none of this (not even a mention) in the actual story - who gets their hands on a smaller ship for piracy and whatever, but when they come up against the Big Ship the UMC have, they always (emphasis NOT mine) lose.
Which is potentially true but only because the bigger ship can carry more ordinance than the smaller ship. The smaller ship has the speed and capability of reaching that speed faster than the bigger ship due to the size of the engine. It takes a lot less to power a lot less. It’s like having a street race between a dump truck and a Corvette, if you ignore the fact both have different engines and different types of fuel and the fact a Corvette is designed to go fast. The Corvette is smaller and therefore requires less to make it go. The Corvette could flee before the dump truck could even get a few feet. And I’m pretty sure, aside from the “radicalized miner”, the “local cartel member” would probably run away, considering they don’t like to be caught and pirates are more of a “hit and run” type than they are to stay and fight someone who has the obviously bigger guns.
The professor points out the rule of combat - get them before they get you - and goes on to talk about the weapons’ systems on the ships. Blah blah blah the bigger the gun the less you can carry, some weapons can be used at any distance but they’re only practical in close-quarters combat, or at such large distances that they enemy doesn’t have a clue you’re shooting at them yet. He talks about how they have to figure out how to balance their weapons’ fire with the ship’s “maximum thermal load”, which basically means how many times can you shoot before you have to have a cool down.
Which is yet another reason why combat in FTL won’t work. Because in FTL you’re generating too much heat, which your ship has to compensate for already. If you try to fire your weapons with that much heat already, you’re fucked.
Then Chung gets into ship-to-surface combat and says there are different rules there, too. Well, no shit, Sherlock. You aren’t going to attack a stationary installation the same way you’d attack a moving ship. This part is very brief, actually, and only ends with a question about how best protecting your troops and ship as you board the enemy’s vessel. He talks about “electronic warfare”, that is, hacking. Because that’s a thing in this, apparently. He says jamming may not protect you and that’s... it for the hacking section of this lecture. Wow. I knew professors whose syllabuses were longer than this section.
Chung then talks about how everything in space wants to kill you, which is true, including space itself, and so you need to know shit or you’re going to get everyone killed, and then mentions people might be thinking the ship-mind or pseudo-intelligence will handle everything, and the answer is generally yes, but there may be times these things are knocked offline or there’s something they can’t do, and therefore the human element has to be added in. Therefore when the AI can’t do it, these people have to, which is also true.
Then comes the part I had to read twice to understand that Chung went immediately into talking about the six weeks again and I was like, wait, wouldn’t this be better to have at the opening of the lecture than at the end? But then that just is Paolini’s typical writing style. He does this in the Inheritance Cycle a lot. He’ll start a chapter with the characters talking about one thing, suddenly skip to another subject, and then just as suddenly come back to the original subject, and it’s very jarring.
So continuing on, Chung ends his lecture by telling the students that these next six weeks are going to be the hardest of their lives and that it’s designed that way because the UMC doesn’t want anyone who’s unqualified to step onto a spaceship where they could potentially kill everyone. He says that it’s better they wash out now and “go back to being swabbies who only have to worry about keeping their boots polished and their jaws off the deck” which is incredibly insulting. Nobody uses “swabbies” anymore, if they ever used it at all, and if someone is in training to be an officer, they went through an awful lot of hard work to get there. He also offers them the opportunity to leave without anyone laughing at their backs or thinking less of them. Predictably, nobody moves, as Chung says “No? Alright then.” and continues talking about how the next month and half he and his staff are going to put everyone in this room “through the wringer” and that the students will wish they had given up in this moment. He also says that if they work hard and do things properly, then they’ll have a good chance of wearing their “officers’ pips”.
Which is the colloquial name for the stars worn on the military uniform as part of rank badge in the British Army and many Commonwealth police agencies. If the UMC is supposed to be based in Science Fiction/Fantasy America, then the officers would wear “insignias”. Please. Do some research and don’t just appropriate without ensuring the word is used across the board...
Then the professor dismisses everyone... which makes this more an introductory speech than a lecture. This is the kind of speech your professor gives when they’re going over what you’re going to do in that class and the syllabus and then starts some ice-breaker game to get everyone familiar with each other. This isn’t a lecture. You don’t dismiss class after a three page-long lecture. This really makes me wonder if Professor Chung knows what the hell he’s doing and if he’s qualified to teach people. Of course, considering the characters we actually meet in this story, I wouldn’t be surprised if all their teachers were completely unqualified.
no subject
Date: 2021-08-17 02:51 am (UTC)first: in Canada officers who have not yet been commissioned are Cadets. So this is clearly about a Commonwealth conquered future.
Second, what he is doing here is badly describing a common theme in hard sci-fi and futurism. Which is that space strongly encourages building as big as possible. In reality the larger a starship is the more advantages it has in combat. The use of small strike craft like the x-wing is largely regarded as less realistic than the use of straight up space wizards in Star Wars.
Which connects back to a major flaw of this book. It cherry picks at realism in the worst possible ways. Then explains itself very poorly while being pretentious about it.
Thanks for covering this chapter, it was painful to read and I didn't want to touch it.
no subject
Date: 2021-08-17 03:31 am (UTC)It really should have been the other way around. Stooooopid.
And speaking of bloody messes, this whole thing sounds slap-dash and lazy and barely researched. He gets even the most basic shit wrong. The sad part is that I'm not even the slightest bit surprised.