Questions on Ringo's Human-Posleen War series.

[xammer99]

According to Amazon there are 4 (now 5 I guess) books in this series so...

a. Where does Watch on the Rhine figure into the series?

b. Is the series worth reading?

[xammer99]

Oh, and...

c. What are the books in the series? The Amazon comment said there are 4, but I can only find 2 (3 counting Watch) listed there.

[SylasGaunt]

A Hymn Before Battle
Gust Front
When the Devil Dances
Hell's Faire

Watch on the Rhine is sort of a side story to tha main novels, giving us a glimpse at what someone other than the USA has been doing in the war against the posties.

[acesand8s]

You can actually read the first two books in the series, A Hymn before Battle and Gust Front, for free at the Baen Free Library. If you want to read Watch on the Rhine you should at least read up to Gust Front.

The four book series is good and I would recommend reading it, especially since you'll only have to pay for two of the books. I couldn't stand the first two spin-off books, Hero and Cally's War and stopped reading a couple of chapters into the books. Watch on the Rhine was well written, but I absolutely hated the whole "well the Waffen SS weren't that bad, after all, the US Army shot prisoners too, and they're certainly better than socialists and environmentalists" angle. I liked the moral dilemma that the book initially proposed, but then it started being far too friendly towards the SS.

[Jalinth]

The four book series is good and I would recommend reading it, especially since you'll only have to pay for two of the books. I couldn't stand the first two spin-off books, Hero and Cally's War and stopped reading a couple of chapters into the books. Watch on the Rhine was well written, but I absolutely hated the whole "well the Waffen SS weren't that bad, after all, the US Army shot prisoners too, and they're certainly better than socialists and environmentalists" angle. I liked the moral dilemma that the book initially proposed, but then it started being far too friendly towards the SS.

I'd agree the first two books are solid, but after that they became too hard to absorb for me. Too much combat

I couldn't get through the first couple of chapters (one reason to skim through things at Chapters) in the Watch due to the whole "anyone who isn't SS is a girlyman" type theme. If they wanted to do the "modern men are wimps" theme, they could have just as easily used retired Wehrmacht troopers who fought on the Eastern Front rather than the SS. It wouldn't have given me such a visceral loathing.

Hero and Cally are terrible. Not sure about Hero, but Cally has a "co-author" who I suspect did 95% of the writing given the lack of quality.

I'd actually suggest reading the March series with Ringo and Weber. It combines heavy combat with solid plot and character development. The first 3 books are very good. A bit undecided on the 4th one.

[Zornhau]

But only if you like (well written and plotted) combat sequences. The March series is also good. Not quite as engaging, since it doesn't have the near future setting, but possibly a tad deeper.

[Prozac the Robert]

You can read the last two books legally if you can find them. They have been published on a cd which can be legaly copied and shared, so if you can find a copy online you are sorted. Of course paper is much nicer. The series is well worth reading.

I'm with acesand8s on the spin-offs. Cally's war simply isn't that great, and I don't really like what they've done to her character. I read a few of the sample chapters for Hero. It just seemed poorly writen. It could have been fanfiction of middling quality. (Actually, it seems to be a problem with a fair few baen books that they are a little unprofessional. Some go overboard with referencing things for example. Hells Faire is guilty of that with Sluggy Freelance of all things, but it's still a good book. Hero just seemed poor.)

[xammer99]

Thanks very much, think I'll pick'em up and give'em a shot.

What is the "March" series?

[The Dark]

The four book series is good and I would recommend reading it, especially since you'll only have to pay for two of the books.

I would say the first two are the best. Ringo's overall quality is starting to decline slightly due to excessive output, IMO.

I couldn't stand the first two spin-off books, Hero and Cally's War and stopped reading a couple of chapters into the books.

I liked CW, but I agree that Hero was mediocre at best.

Watch on the Rhine was well written, but I absolutely hated the whole "well the Waffen SS weren't that bad, after all, the US Army shot prisoners too, and they're certainly better than socialists and environmentalists" angle. I liked the moral dilemma that the book initially proposed, but then it started being far too friendly towards the SS.

That's Kratman's influence, from what I've heard. If the guy had a political column, he'd be blasting GW for being too liberal.

Not sure about Hero, but Cally has a "co-author" who I suspect did 95% of the writing given the lack of quality.

Pretty much 100%, from what I've heard. Ringo basically just said yes or no to the overall book. I think Julie would do better writing in her own universe, rather than trying to play in John's playground.

What is the "March" series?

March Upcountry, March to the Sea, March to the Stars, and We Few. A collaborative series by Weber and Ringo.

[White Haven]

I agree on the March series. I just finished reading Gust Front, and...eh...it's good, but bits and pieces here and there feel like fanfic. Just...hokey now and again. Course whatever retarded monkey Baen gets to write their back-of-the-book blurbs needs to be shot at down. Repeatedly. Starting from the feet and moving up, with blood transfusions at neck-level.

[acesand8s]

What is the "March" series?

The names of the books have been mentioned by The Dark. The series is about a large human interstellar empire that is beginning to show some strains. In the first book, a young, bratty prince, third in line to the throne of the human empire, is stranded with his bodyguard on a low tech planet. The series follows them sneaking across the planet to the only spaceport and what happens when the prince come home. Again, the first couple of books are available for free on the Baen Library.

[Netko]

I'd recommend the March series over the Posleen as well. Personally, I couldn't even get thru A Hymn Before Battle. Ringo unfortunatly has a very US rightwing bent, almost comical in some cases, and unless he has another author to curb his enthusiasm of putting down liberals as stupid, corrupt, tresoneous and incompetent while at the same time glorifing the rednecks to an insane level (most disgustingly seen in In the Looking Glass) what he produces tends to be unreadable by me. While Webber very obviusly by his writing has the same tendencies, he at least knows when to put them aside and out of focus, and in his more recent books, responding to criticism I guess, he has at least attempted to introduce positive leftist characters and has strayed from making ideological potshots either way. That trait (putting ideological potshots mostly aside) is tankfuly present in the March series.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm only complaining because those authors have or had a tendency to really pontificate their views in the books. I would be equaly annoyed by books doing the same from the opposite ideological perspective.

Anyway, that said, the March books I would recommend. They are well written, and manage to keep up the suspense thruout, altough they do start to feel a bit formulaic by the 3rd book. The fourth is a bit of a wild card. On the one hand, it mostly brakes the formula (trying to avoid spoilers here), however the suspense feels more forced, and overall the book feels weaker then the previous ones.

[The Dark]

Ringo unfortunatly has a very US rightwing bent, almost comical in some cases, and unless he has another author to curb his enthusiasm of putting down liberals as stupid, corrupt, tresoneous and incompetent while at the same time glorifing the rednecks to an insane level (most disgustingly seen in In the Looking Glass) what he produces tends to be unreadable by me.

ItLG was one I particularly had to laugh at, seeing as how I live within the instant agonizing death radius of the nuke that starts the book. Most of the guys I knew that joined the military did so to get out of the redneck area of town. As far as I know, the nearest unit to UCF is the 146th Transportation Detachment, which currently has more vehicles than soldiers. And the kicker for me detail-wise was that he got the names of two roads wrong. The premise behind the story was interesting, but the execution was lacking.

As an aside, though, don't take the cover of Von Neumann's War too literally when it comes out in August. Doc Taylor was unhappy about it because it doesn't represent the story well (although I haven't read the story, so I can't say whether it's worthwhile or not). Actually, I take it back. They changed the cover. Doc'll be pleased.

[Jalinth]

I'd recommend the March series over the Posleen as well. Personally, I couldn't even get thru A Hymn Before Battle. Ringo unfortunatly has a very US rightwing bent, almost comical in some cases, and unless he has another author to curb his enthusiasm of putting down liberals as stupid, corrupt, tresoneous and incompetent while at the same time glorifing the rednecks to an insane level (most disgustingly seen in In the Looking Glass) what he produces tends to be unreadable by me. While Webber very obviusly by his writing has the same tendencies, he at least knows when to put them aside and out of focus, and in his more recent books, responding to criticism I guess, he has at least attempted to introduce positive leftist characters and has strayed from making ideological potshots either way. That trait (putting ideological potshots mostly aside) is tankfuly present in the March series.

I'd actually agree about the anti-liberal (hell, anti-centrist) viewpoint in Ringo's books. Think of Heinlein's Starship Troopers ethic coupled with caricatures of civvies. I think Ringo needs to read (or re-read) Jerry Pournelle's early Co-Do books where the top military figure commented that while the civilians are screwing things up by the numbers, Earth had a number of military governments screwing things up even worse. So martial rule is only a temporary solution and not a permanent one.

As far as Weber goes, I don't get the same vibe from him in the Honorverse books. The "main" party is centrist-right with both the left and the right getting slammed. The first as being unbelievably naive and the later by being venal in the extreme. The Havenites are harder to place since you go from essentially pre-revolutionary France to post-Revolutionary France - extreme autocrats, just have different goals.

The Dahakverse is a bit more authoritarian, but not extreme (the government is a parliamentary constitutional monarchy where the monarch has significant powers but isn't untouchable and can be impeached).

[Xon]

This is actually a major problem I have with several US sci-fi authors, the glorification of hard-line classical right wing ideals and/or Libertarianism to the exclusion of all else.

Vernor Vinge (often regarded as a sci-fi classic) is horrifying bad in regards to this.

[MKSheppard]

John Ringo quite simply put cannot design military equipment to save
his ass, which is sad, since he's a former paratrooper in the US Army.

*********************************
Why his Military Designs Make No Sense
*********************************

Let us look at what he designed the "A4" Abrams to be:

The M-1A4's turret and primary frontal armor was a layer of battle-steel, room-temperature superconductor, nano-tube composite and synthetic sapphire threading. The combination meant that frontally it could shed off the fire of anything but a direct and unlucky HVM hit.

Y'know, this should have been done by 2004, instead of waiting until 2009
to appear, instead of building fantastically expensive ACS suits, the Indowy
should have been building huge slabs of armor capable of defeating railgun
rounds instead of complicated suits.

To reduce the possibility of being flanked, and to deal with the main problem of the Posleen, the fact that there were just way too many of them, the gunnery of the tanks was modified. On either side of the turret "add-on" weapons were installed. These were 25mm cannons like the main gun of a Bradley, but where a Bradley had one gun the Abrams were mounted with first two, one on either side, then four and finally eight. The .50 caliber TC gun was replaced with a 7.62 Gatling gun capable of hurling 8000 rounds a minute and the "coaxial" 7.62 machine gun mounted alongside the main gun was switched out for another. Even excepting their main gun, the "A4" Abrams could hurl an amazing mass of lead.

The main gun, however, remained a problem. It seemed a shame to pull the weapon, since it was about as good as it got from a cannon perspective. Finally, it was decided to leave the cannon in place and simply change the ammo mix. The ammo bin still carried a few "silver bullets" for old time's sake, but the majority of the rounds stored in an A4 were canister.

Let's not get to the Bradley:

The Bradley was one of the scout systems equipped with double 7.62 Gatling guns; and it was getting ready to do some harvesting.

What a bunch of bloody stupid designs. Did Mr. Ringo even stop to think
in his wanking to consider:

1.) Where the hell is the ammo coming to come from?
2.) It's not firehoses of firepower which kills posleen, it's sustained deep firepower.
3.) Where the hell is the ammo coming from?

To elaborate on the firehoses of firepower vs deep firepower, let us consider
the following:

1.) Posleen are big centauroid horse sized aliens.
2.) Posleen like to attack in waves which make the chinese blush
3.) Posleen really like to attack in human wave attacks.

The ideal weapons system for dealing with such attacks is the 25mm Bushmaster
or 40mm Bofors firing HE Frag rounds fuzed so that they will penetrate through
three or four Posleen ranks, killing four posleen through massive trauma from
25mm-40mm holes, before detonating and cutting down the Posleen mass behind
the first few ranks.

7.62mm Miniguns, or Metalstorm units firing 40mm Grenade rounds, or even 25mm
Bushmasters firing HE shells fuzed to superquick will simply just vaporize,
shred, puree, mistify the first rank of the Posleen, leaving the mass of posleen
behind the unfortunate first ranks alive and unharmed.

***********************
SheVas and why they make no sense
***********************

In Book 2, when a salvo of 16" shells from a battleship accidentally hits a Posleen
lander over Virginia and annihilates it, what does the USA do? They build 16" smoothbore
guns using fixed cases with electro-thermal propellant, and a depleted uranium sabot
with a 10 pound antimatter breaching charge....instead of producing 1 billion LOSAT
armed Bradleys.

Let's do the math:

A 16"/50 HE Shell has a muzzle velocity of 820 m/s, and a weight of 862 kilograms;
that equates out to 289.8 megajoules if my math is correct.

(NOTE: the rounds fired at Fredericksburg, VA were HE, not AP, they were firing
for effect on massed formations of Posleen)

The 16" Smoothbore of a SheVa is stated to have the power of six 16" shells; so
that's 1,738.8 megajoules. LOSAT is stated to have 40 megajoules of KE; so that
means a 43.5 LOSAT missiles equal the firepower of a SheVa.

Now, seeing as the original LOSAT was a stretched Bradley, carrying four LOSATs
ready to fire, and 16 more in an autoloader, with average reload time for all four
missiles 15 to 20 seconds.

What this means is that three platoons of LOSAT-Bradleys (12 in all) will be able to put
48 LOSATs onto target at best, or about 1,920 megajoules of energy; enough to cripple
or knock about a Posleen Lander. And they will be vastly cheaper, easier to maintain,
easier to replace than SheVas.

***********************
Why the US Military's Artillery Doctrine Makes No Sense:
***********************

Posleen do not have the following:

1.) Artillery
2.) Counterbattery Fire
3.) Firefinder radars

So why does the US Army spend so much time mass producing 155mm wheeled opentopped guns
based on South African Chassis, when they should have been producing M270 MRLS. A Posleen
attack meeting a MRLS Division would cease to exist under steel rain.

What's the reason for producing guns anyway?

Guns are good for:

1.) Sustained fire (useful, but we can just get 8" Howitzers to do that for us instead
of 6.1" (155mm))

2.) Counterbattery fire (Uhm, since the posleen have no artillery, why do we need this
capability?

The US Military KNOWS the way the Posleen attack; they've had five years to prepare, analyze
and they build the WRONG DAMN THINGS! If you gave me a few MRLS Divisions, I could
annihilate entire military map sheets of anything that lives in minutes, inflicting
millions of Posleen casualties for zero Human. Yet Ringo's Humans all do it the
stupidest possible way, muddling along the fighting for five years, allowing the Posleen
to slowly learn basic military tactics, making their jobs much harder in the end.

Wait? What about the Posleen's uber anti rocket device which does nothing against
shot and shell?

Firstly, it's nothing of the sort. It only tracks and destroys POWERED projectiles;
or projectiles that are TRANSMITTING. In the books, artillery shells with cameras in
them that transmit pictures back are shot out of the sky easily, but dumb shells aren't.

And in book 4, hundreds of ICBMS are launched from the Northwest against Posleen positions
in Tennesee; most of the ICBMs are shot down by the posleen in the BOOST phase, but once
the warheads debuss and are on pure ballistic trajectories, the posleen can't do anything
to stop 'em.

**************************
What would I have done if I was in charge instead of Mighty Mite?
**************************

I would have simply done the following for my anti Posleen force:

1.) Obtain M-1 and M-2/M-3 armor upgrade packages from the Indowy before Posleenfall.

2.) M-1 Abrams gets cannister, and the capability to airburst 120mm HE rounds like some
Russian tanks do, and a 25mm coaxial chaingun firing HE fuzed rounds.

(The Abrams actually was considered for a 25mm Bushmaster in the design process, so this isn't
insane.)

3.) The M-2/M-3 Bradleys obtain said 25mm HE rounds fuzed for detonation shortly after impact.

4.) Hordes of LOSAT armed Bradleys are procured to deal with Posleen landers.

5.) Hordes of M270 MRLS systems are built and scores of MRLS rounds are stockpiled,
along with 8" tracked howitzers.

6.) Hordes of 120mm Mortar Armed M113A3s are built and assigned to the Abrams/Bradley/LOSAT
task forces.

7.) Mass production of Watercooled Browning .50 Caliber HMGs; are distributed all over the
United States to anyone who has the space to store 1 billion rounds of .50 BMG.

8.) I mass produce the M-14 once again, and re-equip my infantry forces with it. Horse sized
aliens won't be dropped by 5.56mm

9.) M249 SAWs are replaced on a one-on-one basis with M-240Gs.

When the Posleen land; I move up my armies; and then begin the process of reducing the Posleen
pockets. A hour or two of MRLS salvos from my MRLS Divisions to clear the landing areas of anything
ALIVE (hey, if people are caught in there, they're dead anyway), then I move in my M-1s, M-2s, M-3s,
under a constant hail of 8" gunfire and 120mm Mortars, with LOSAT armed bradleys picking off Posleen
Landers.

Mechanized task forces of M1s and M2s proceed in, eliminating scattered bands of Posleen who survived
the MRLS barriages. Once the majority of Posleen have been eliminated, the infantry dismounts and
proceeds to mop up the few scattered Posleen who survived all this with their infantry weapons.

I estimate total eradication of all organized Posleen resistance in the Landing Pocket in a day
or two, with mop up of scattered bands of Posleen in out of the way places for several months
after the main pocket has been eliminated.

**************************************
Why are the Humans as stupid as Star Trek Ground Forces?
************************************

I realize that Mr. Ringo must make the book exciting
and he obviously wants to write more than just one
book; but did he have to make humanity, in particular,
it's militaries so terminally brain dead? Having the
conflict drag on for years and years on Earth wasn't
necessary to keep the story going; there are 70~ planets
that the GalFed has lost to the Posleen in the last couple
of years; they all have to be retaken...which is room for
several more books...

*********************************
Contradictions in the damn books themselves.
*********************************

From When the Devil Dances:

October 12, 2008 Last Transmission: Red Army, Nizhny Novgorod.
October 21, 2008 Official Determination: No coherent field forces outside of North America.

But we have him saying in the same book:

On the other hand, Canada's supplies of pitchblende were plentiful and above the weather-line that the Posleen preferred.

Wait, how can the Russians somehow magically lose their infamous harsh climate? They just need to keep walking east,
cross the Urals, and the Posleen simply cannot touch them there, because Siberia is that cold; the Russians
have done this before; in WW2, and they still have a rather big industrial base in Siberia, albeit with most of it
idle since the end of the Soviet Union; an Alien threat would revive the Siberian factories quickly.

[MKSheppard]

One of the big problems that Mighty Mite faces in Book 4 is he's running
out of power for his suits due to the way the M-300 Rifles are designed.

Human-manufactured 3mm by 4mm DU bullets for the M300 don't have their own
antimatter power source, meaning that when the railguns are firing that
kind of ammo, the power to accelerate the bullet to 0.3c comes from the
suit's own power supply,which means they're slowly running out of power
against a huge posleen horde.

First, a little system analysis. If each railgun round when it impacts a
posleen, has the power of 100 kilos of TNT, killing the Posleen it impacts
as well as inflicting splash damage on the nearby posleen, what reason is
there for a rate of fire so high that it's described as "streams of silver
lightning"?

Cutting the rate of fire down to 8 rounds per second, or about 500 rounds,
or about the rate of fire of a Maxim machine gun of WWI infamy, will signifcantly
extend the ACS' suit's battery supply, as well as ammunition supply while
retaining a significant proportion of lethality against the Posleen. Hell you
could probably lower it to about 200 rounds a minute, especially if each
individual 3x4mm DU round has the lethality of 100 kilos of TNT.

High rates of fire simply expend the majority of the 3x4mm DU rounds in converting
the front ranks of Posleen into red mist, when blowing them into bloody chunks will
do the job more efficiently.

This systems analysis of how fast you really need to fire to kill posleen
can also carry into other aspects of the ACS suit. Without the need for obscene
ammunition stowage for the railgun, you can free up a lot of space on the ACS suit
for more armor or additional support weapons, like 60mm micro mortars, which will
allow you to kill Posleen in the mass behind the front ranks while you mow down
the front ranks with railgunfire.

[Netko]

As far as Weber goes, I don't get the same vibe from him in the Honorverse books. The "main" party is centrist-right with both the left and the right getting slammed. The first as being unbelievably naive and the later by being venal in the extreme. The Havenites are harder to place since you go from essentially pre-revolutionary France to post-Revolutionary France - extreme autocrats, just have different goals.

The Dahakverse is a bit more authoritarian, but not extreme (the government is a parliamentary constitutional monarchy where the monarch has significant powers but isn't untouchable and can be impeached).

Read his Starfire series (his first books). In it he has gems like having a hippy reporter (like there isn't any other type) trying go get a scoop (with some antiwar goal while the whatever human goverment in that series is in a fight for its life) in a fighter hangar and getting his legs melted off by jet exaust. The narrator then goes on to mock and berate the reporter and all of his kind and is sad and angry that the military has to pay for the reporters artificial replacement legs. This is after introducing the character some half a page before the incident and never hearing from the character after - it is in there just so that he can have a "liberal" (in the US rightwing bad word sense) punching bag.

There are also little nuggets in Honorverse books, altough by that time he started moderating himself. In one of the earlier books, for example, there is a whole discussion on progressive income tax, and the narrator and several characters express dismay and sadness that the war forced them to institute it. That ties neatly into later when the opposition parties take over and form their incompetent goverment. There are several passages about how the Liberals specificly are loving their tax windfall and how evil and corrupt they are for not reducing taxes once peace has been established.

Thankfully, that aspect is missing from the newer books (starting roughly when he introduced Cathy Montaigne as a charcter).

(While we're on the topic of Honorverse I had this look on my face for most of the Shadow of Saganami - the Split system, its planets, cities and characters are all named after Croatian cities and island groups with the characters having Croatian and a few Serbian names)

[MKSheppard]

In it he has gems like having a hippy reporter (like there isn't any other type) trying go get a scoop (with some antiwar goal while the whatever human goverment in that series is in a fight for its life) in a fighter hangar and getting his legs melted off by jet exaust. The narrator then goes on to mock and berate the reporter and all of his kind and is sad and angry that the military has to pay for the reporters artificial replacement legs.

Suck that, hippy reporter! If I ever become a published author, I'll have the token hippy die in each book in some easily preventable way. The problem is when the author goes overboard in it.

[Netko]

You'll get no argument from me on that. The problem is that was just an example, he did go overboard in those books - there were 10 or so such cases per each book. Thankfuly later he muted those tendencies.

[Jalinth]

There are also little nuggets in Honorverse books, altough by that time he started moderating himself. In one of the earlier books, for example, there is a whole discussion on progressive income tax, and the narrator and several characters express dismay and sadness that the war forced them to institute it. That ties neatly into later when the opposition parties take over and form their incompetent goverment. There are several passages about how the Liberals specificly are loving their tax windfall and how evil and corrupt they are for not reducing taxes once peace has been established.

Thankfully, that aspect is missing from the newer books (starting roughly when he introduced Cathy Montaigne as a charcter).

I generally don't read books based on gaming systems, so never read the Starfire verse at all.

I do remember the whole bit about income taxes, but threw that into the naive/venal category since the book specifically mentioned that the only reason the higher tax rates were still in place is because the government never officially called off the war (which of course lead to the eventually resumption of fighting with the post-Pierre Havenite government). I also attributed it more to the whole "we need to portray the enemy as being as virtueless as possible" tendencies that many authors have (including Weber). I don't recall anything even decent about either the Conservatives or the Liberal parties in the book before Montaigne took over. The Havenites were actually given a better potrayal - Pierre and St. Just were both understandable characters and their goals were laudable (the means were a different story)

[Prozac the Robert]

Of course, if you want to see insane levels of right wing cheerleading you ought to look at the sample chapters of Ringo's Ghost. Its about a guy fighting THE EEEVIL TERRORISTS, and liberals are all pussys. Or something. Don't buy the book unless you've looked at those sample chapters, they put me right off buying it.

The taxes in Manticore make a bit of sense perhaps. An awful lot of Manticore's income comes from the wormhole junction, and compared to most other powers they are quite small. Compares to the Solarian League they are tiny. I think Manticore might be comparable to modern nations who relly on oil for their income, and hence can get away with lower taxes. That also helps by giving more incentive for businesses to bother with them rather than just sitting around on Sol or Beowolf.

[Tasoth]

I think in one of the later posleen books, the main character actually states that the gravguns were not his idea and a simple high RoF, heavy assault rifle/lmg would have been more effective to give to the suits but someone had decided they needed a nifty space ray gun.

[Prozac the Robert]

I think in one of the later posleen books, the main character actually states that the gravguns were not his idea and a simple high RoF, heavy assault rifle/lmg would have been more effective to give to the suits but someone had decided they needed a nifty space ray gun.

I remember something about that. Apparently someone on the design comitee wanted a ray gun and that was the closest they could come up with.

I did wonder though, why they couldn't replace the guns once ammo started running down. I assume that an earth made weapon wouldn't have enough firepower but who knows. The gravguns have the fringe benefit of being able to do slight damage to a lander, but I'm not sure how important they consider that.

[SylasGaunt]

Read his Starfire series (his first books). In it he has gems like having a hippy reporter (like there isn't any other type) trying go get a scoop (with some antiwar goal while the whatever human goverment in that series is in a fight for its life) in a fighter hangar and getting his legs melted off by jet exaust.

Which one was that, because I don't remember this incident.