Honor Harrington / Tropes A to F

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A

• Absent Aliens: Downplayed. A few sapient alien species are present, but since they collectively aren't very advanced or influential they fade into the background in the metaplot, and only the human nations collectively has the numbers, technology, and political power to shape the region in any meaningful way. The two most significant aliens are the treecats, who are essentially a client-state of Manticore, and the Alphanes, the only known multi-system alien civilization but who disappeared many millennia ago.
• Accidental Truth: In Shadow of Freedom, "Firebrand" is a Mesan agent posing as a Manticoran agent, setting up rebel groups on OFS-controlled planets for failure by promising them Manty support. He tells his latest marks that Admiral Gold Peak is about to attack the Solarians at Meyers and that she is prepared to offer naval assistance when their revolution begins, when he knows that she has no plans for offensive action at all. When Gold Peak does move on Meyers, she is perfectly positioned to receive the requests for help, and actually is prepared to offer support.
• Achievements in Ignorance:
  • The Graysons made some revolutionary R&D discoveries due to having to rebuild their tech base from scratch. One is their creatively designed inertial compensators, less advanced but more efficient than what the rest of the galaxy uses. Manticore incorporates the best ideas from Grayson's compensators into their own to make them even better than before.
  • Grayson's other major low-tech contribution to Manticore are their nuclear fission reactors, which are also far more efficient than anyone thought was possible. Though still inferior to fusion reactors on a per-ton basis, they are much more easily downscaled, thus filling the missing niche that made Manticore's advanced LAC designs practical.^note A major reason LACs in general were so cost-inefficient is because even the smallest designable fusion bottle is wastefully oversized for their tonnage, but the small, laser-initiated fusion plants used in small craft like pinnaces are not efficient enough to be scaled up to power a warship. Fission reactors fit snugly between them, slightly underpowered for a LAC but still in the "good enough" zone. Even better, fission power is considered so ancient that it takes Haven even longer than usual to discover Manticore's secret ingredient.
  • Allison Chou-Harrington manages to land the society coup of the century on Grayson when she quite innocently decides to invite Protector Benjamin Mayhew and his family for dinner. Nobody else even considered this possibility before^note the last time a Protector had been a guest rather than the host was a surprise birthday party several centuries earlier, and according to Katherine Mayhew, a number of Grayson socialites are "on the brink of death from pure envy" as a result.
• Acquainted with Emergency Services:
  • Alluded in "Ms. Midshipwoman Harrington", when some of the ship's officers learn that Honor has had regular full-contact training bouts with one of the ship's Marine sergeants. Their first reaction is to ask how well she's gotten to know the ship's medical officer.
  • In Honor Among Enemies, it is a running gag to explain that "this ship has a fine doctor" when discussing Aubrey Wanderman's training in hand to hand combat with SMAJ Hallowell (the senior enlisted marine aboard the Wayfarer) and Horace Harkness. It gets to the point where Aubrey begins saying it as well.
• Action Girlfriend: Honor to Hamish Alexander. He declines her offer to teach him martial arts, saying that in the (highly unlikely) event that some poor mugger makes it through her bodyguards, he will be content to hold her coat while she beats the hell out of him.
• Action Mom: Captain Helen Zilwicki commanded the escort ships which were shepherding a convoy of freighters that included her husband and daughter as passengers. When they came under attack by a Peep raiding squadron, she managed to hold them off long enough — and destroy enough of them — for the entire convoy to escape.
• Advanced Tech 2000: The Solarian League Navy has a program called "Fleet 2000"^note the HH date is coming up on the year 2000 Post Diaspora, or after the start of the exodus to the stars, which is supposed to be a significant upgrade of combat capability. While there are improvements in the hardware, much of it is merely window dressing, modifying the outwardly visible aspects of the hardware like displays and such to be more photogenic. Unfortunately, this makes it harder for a commanding officer to see the tactical and astrogation displays.
• Air-Vent Passageway: Used in Crown of Slaves, but used more realistically than many examples. Crawling around in them is murderously hard work, characters without detailed schematics get badly lost, and it proves almost impossible to remove a grille without the proper tools. Additionally, the ducts in question are on a space station and are deliberately designed to be large enough to crawl through since they double as maintenance access passages.
• Alas, Poor Villain:
  • Admiral Rayna Sherman in Honor Among Enemies. She deeply regrets signing up with Andre Warnecke and spends much of the single chapter she appears in plagued by her conscience before dying in the service of a madman. She is almost happy to die, since it is finally an escape from a situation she sees as inescapable.
  • Officers of the Solarian Navy are often frustrated by the incompetence of their superiors and view their oppressive missions with contempt. When they wind up facing off against the Manticorans, they almost to-a-man are saddened by how many of their subordinates are going to die as a result of the stupidity.
• The Alcatraz: The Havenite Penal Colony of Hades is a Zig-Zagged version of this trope. On the one hand, it's been around for decades and no one had ever escaped before Honor's arrival. Its design is quite simple: just toss prisoners out in the wilderness with whatever basic tools they need to build shelter. Since the Island Base controlled by the local State Sec garrison has all the food and technology on the planet, there is no need for walls or watchtowers, just a delivery of food once a month to keep the prisoners fed. On the other hand, this simple design also instills a profound sense of laziness among the guards, who don't bother with any other type of security measures. Why encrypt comms? The prisoners have no radios. Why patrol the wilderness? The prisoners have nowhere to go. Why challenge incoming craft? Even if the prisoners were to somehow hijack a supply shuttle, they have no weapons. This lack of alertness provides all the opportunities Honor and her escapees from Tepes need to recruit some prisoners and plan their assault on the island with their captured assault pinnaces. Of course, there's absolutely no reason why anyone would suspect there were any pinnaces in the entire system, let alone ones under the control of a concealed enemy force, but if the guards had been more attentive, they had any number of opportunities to realize something was wrong before the missiles started flying.
• All Amazons Want Hercules: Discussed in "From The Highlands". Kevin Usher argues that whoever kidnapped Helen Zilwicki made a crucial mistake because of her mother's Heroic Sacrifice. Victor is confused until Kevin asks outright "Do you really think a woman like that married a wimp?"
• All There in the Manual:
  • Weber posts a lot in forums providing additional details, mostly about the underlying architecture of the world building. Most of it is collected here
  • The Progressive Party's ideology^note Economically conservative, with an isolationist foreign policy has to be explained outside the books, because their one on-screen representative (Elaine Descroix) has no ideology whatsoever.
• Almighty Janitor:
  • Nobody ever takes Sir Horace Harkness for anything more than a battered old working-class noncom, but behind the unremarkable exterior lurks the mind of a hacking genius clever enough to hack his way into one of Manticore's most-protected military computer systems solely to make sure that he is always assigned to the same duty station as the young officer he has taken under his wing. This comes in extremely handy in In Enemy Hands.
  • The written constitution of the Solarian League affords very little authority to the central government, and what little power they used to have has been systematically chipped away over the centuries until the elected officials are little more than figureheads. The real rulers of the Solarian League are a quintet of Permanent Undersecretaries who manage the bureaucratic agencies which run the galaxy.
• Always Chaotic Evil: Averted with most "villain" factions, who will get at least one Token Good Team Mate or Defector from Decadence to acknowledge their basic humanity, but played absolutely straight with the Old Testament culture of Masada. The range of characterization for the (male) Masadan characters Honor fights against spans roughly from "genocidal lunatic" to "rapist genocidal lunatic" throughout the series.
• Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: When we meet Honor's mother, the first words out of her mouth are an observation of how nice a butt Honor's executive officer has, and telling Honor she needs to tap that — pronto. And she does that kind of thing all the time. Ironically, she is considered a bit of a prude on her home planet, due to her being decidedly monogamous.
• Amazon Chaser: Iris Babcock is quite clearly described as not being particularly attractive. In the middle of book four, however, her pure badassitude leaves Harkness gawking and the next time we hear of either of them they've married each other.
• Ambiguously Brown: Over the two thousand years since the present-day, the human race has interbred enough (not to mention played with genetic manipulation here and there) that it is actually fairly uncommon for the ethnicity, let alone skin color, of a character's name to match his features.
  • Planetary environments also have a hand in creating several unique strains of humanity, such as the Graysons, with their ancestors' need to "gengineer" a resistance to heavy metal toxicity, and the citizens of Ndebele, who are described as "Bantu paler than Vikings."
• Ancient Conspiracy: The Mesans, manipulating events in the human inhabited galaxy for at least several centuries. It may be more than a coincidence that "Mesan" can be pronounced like "Mason."...
• And I Must Scream: Anyone unlucky enough to be targeted by the nanotech assassination virus experiences this. It takes over motor control only, so the victim remains fully conscious and aware even though he can't stop his motions or make a sound in protest. Chillingly portrayed by one loose end for the Mesan Alignment, who finds himself desperately trying to call for help, as he watches his own arm pull a gun out of his desk drawer and put the barrel into his mouth. In a twist, the empathic/telepathic treecats can hear the mental screams and react accordingly.
• Another Dimension: A fourth spacial dimension exists in the form of hyperspace, whose multi-layered bands are denoted using Greek letters. Unlike many other fictional dimensions, hyperspace bands are quite mundane. All they contain, besides any visiting ships, are invisible, glacial gravity waves. If a ship has an impeller drive, the waves will either propel it at great speed (with a Warshawski sail) or destroy it instantaneously (with an impeller wedge).
• Anyone Can Die: Unexpected character deaths abound. Even the title character was originally intended to die at the conclusion of the Manticore/Haven conflict and be replaced by her son and daughter after a Time Skip to the confrontation with Mesa and the Solarians. She was saved only by a combination of fan outcry and a timeline change by co-writer Eric Flint. Only Honor's valet is invulnerable, because the author's wife likes him. Weber wrote:
  "Military fiction in which only bad people—the ones the readers want to die—die and the heroes don't suffer agonizing personal losses isn't military fiction: it's military pornography. Someone who write [sic] military fiction has a responsibility to show the human cost, particular [sic] because so few of his readers may have any personal experience with that cost.
• Anti-Hero: Mostly as secondary characters. Chief Harkness, Jeremy X, Klaus Hauptmann, etc. The Spook Duo (Victor Cachat and Anton Zilwicki) are more than willing to ignore some pesky little rules in their pursuits, too.
• Apocalypse How: Discussed in detail.
  • It would be much easier for a warfleet to bombard and destroy a planet (apocalypse Class 4) than to fight another warfleet. The "Eridani Edict," a declaration by the Solarian League, forbids them from doing so, unless they first take control of the orbitals and offer a surrender chance. Controlling the orbitals is the equivalent of holding a sword to the planet's throat, and no sane opponent would keep fighting under that threat.
  • A brief (by Weber's standards) discussion in one book also points out that even civilian spacecraft could become a relativistic kill vehicle. Later, Mission of Honor demonstrates how much devastation can be caused as collateral damage or even accidentally. Debris from an orbital strike (not a treaty violation, and not even aimed at the planet) kills 5 million people on the surface, including most of Honor's large extended clan. Many more people would have died had not an intervening ship been quick on the draw.
• Appropriated Appellation: The ruling members of the League bureaucrats are referred to as "Mandarins" by newsies critical of their actions, despite the best efforts of the League propoganda officials to stamp out the practice. The practice has gained so much traction that they have begun to accidentally refer to themselves as Mandarins, and are not happy when they realize it.
• A Protagonist Shall Lead Them: Judith Newland, playing Moses to the "Sisterhood of Barbara", a group of women dedicated to escaping Masada.
• Arbitrary Weapon Range: At one point, some Marines need to use an antitank launcher to blow open a blast door, but can't use the best munition for the job because the range is shorter than said munition's minimum safe distance.
• Arc Welding: Mesa and Manpower, Incorporated are first mentioned in War of Honor, ten books into the series and two books before their rise to the position of primary antagonists. Later books give them credit for not just a lot of the earlier events of the series, but even historical events stretching back centuries that had been mentioned and discussed by characters for years.
• Arc Words:
  • "This world is God's" for anything dealing with the Masadans.
  • Oyster Bay, and before that "The Onion", before The Reveal of The Mesan Alignment.
• Armor-Piercing Response: Delivered in Uncompromising Honor during an argument between the "Mandarins" and the head of their Navy, who has just shown an the ability to Know When to Fold 'Em. His response quickly crosses into Rage Breaking Point/ "The Reason You Suck" Speech territory and causes all of them to end up gaping in silence or livid with anger.
  Malachi Abruzzi: Then why the hell do we even have a Navy?
  Admiral Kingsford: Why, you have a Navy to do all those dirty little jobs you need done in the Protectorates. You have a Navy you and your colleagues sent into a war it can't win. You even have a Navy you can order to completely destroy the economies of completely neutral star nations. But you don't have a Navy so I can murder the men and women under my command because you don't have a frigging clue what else to do.... The Navy's done dying just because the lot of you have been too damned stupid and too damned arrogant to listen to the people who have been trying to stop this goddammned war you started — you, not them — since before it even began!

• Artificial Gravity: The effects of this technology are pervasive — impossibly tall skyscrapers, the replacement of all forms of ground transport, interstellar shipping cheap enough to ship perishables, FTL communication and travel, tractor beams, protective force fields, cheap and practical nuclear fusion, shaped nuclear explosions for laser warheads, cheap satellite launches, etc, etc. Just how exotic it is can seem to vary somewhat within the series; at least some stories imply that Honorverse gravity-tech propagates faster than light, but others seem to contradict this.
• Artistic License – Physics: Although Weber takes pains to get the physics right, he's primarily a naval historian by training, and a few creative changes to the laws of the universe do slip through.
  • At one point in Flag in Exile, the Peep missiles being used are said to be able to accelerate to a maximum velocity of about 60,000 kps relative to the ship that launched it, at which point their drives will burn out. That's a delta-v budget of 0.2c. Yet at another point in this same engagement, the claim is made that if the launching ships are incoming at 0.8c, their missiles will have a burnout speed of 0.99c. Unfortunately, that close to the speed of light, speeds don't add together in such a straightforward fashion — two velocities v1 and v2 add together as v = (v1 + v2) / (1 + (v1 * v2 / c²)). A missile launched at 0.8c would, if it accelerated by another 0.2c in its own reference frame, have a final speed of 0.862c, not 0.99c. (Time Dilation is a factor from one perspective; relativistic mass is a factor from another.) In order to accelerate from 0.8c to 0.99c, a missile would have to accelerate to 0.913c relative to the launching ship, which represents a delta-v of over 673,000 kps as viewed from its own reference frame.
  • Similarly, in chapter 35 of Ashes of Victory, Weber says that missiles accelerating at 48,000g (470 kps-squared) over a distance of 3.5 light-minutes will have a final velocity of 0.83c. But under special relativity, at high speeds an object accelerating at 470 km/s² will actually gain less than 470 km/s of velocity every second. For an object accelerating over a given distance, where the distance is measured in a fixed observer's reference frame, the formula for how much time it takes in the accelerating object's reference frame is T = (c/a) * ArcCosh (a * d/c² + 1), which for these missiles works out to T = 504 seconds. The formula for the final velocity you'll have when accelerating for a certain length of time, where the time is measured in the accelerating object's reference frame, is v = c * Tanh(a*T/c). Even if we generously assume that these missiles can actually accelerate for a full 9 minutes (T = 540 seconds) in their own reference frames, their final velocity will only be 0.69c, not 0.83c.
• As You Know: Lampshaded when the Big Bad lays out their evil plan to his henchmen.
  "I'm perfectly well aware that all of you already knew all of that." He smiled slightly. "Put it down to the executive producer's last-minute, pre-curtain anxiety. Or, more likely, envy."
• Assassin Outclassin': Honor has survived a half dozen attempted assassinations. Scores of bystanders and several of her bodyguards have been wounded or killed, one of her friends died Taking the Bullet, she herself has been injured more than once, but she has always made it out alive. Few of the assassins have gotten away. She has even foiled more than one assassination attempt against other people when she was nearby.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership:
  • In The Honor Of The Queen, the religiously conservative Graysons initially can't handle Honor's mere presence, due to their prejudice against women. They simply can't believe that a woman can in any way be capable of a military command. This changes after the planetary newsnet gets their hands on a security-camera recording of Honor decimating a small army of armed assassins who were trying to kill the planet's leader — with her bare hands.
  • Scrags follow this trope clearly and unquestionably.
• Attack Its Weak Point: The most vulnerable points on a military spaceship are the fore and aft aspects of its impeller wedge, since they are the only ones against which it is impossible to project a sidewall.^note Actually, it is possible — they're called bow/stern walls — but they also disable a ship's Reactionless Drive, giving them only a few niche applications. Getting a broadside firing angle against this vulnerable side of an enemy ship is called "crossing the T", and any captain who finds themselves on the receiving end is in a very bad situation.
• Attack Pattern Alpha: As goes almost without saying, almost every military engagement involves quite a few attack patterns being employed. The most significant such code from a plot perspective, however, is the Manticoran fleet signal "Case Zulu" — meaning "Invasion Imminent". It has so far been used twice in the series; the first by Honor at the climax of On Basilisk Station, the second by Admiral Stephania Grimm, head of the Junction's Astro Control, when Haven launches Operation Beatrice.
• Attempted Rape: Pavel Young tried to rape Honor when they were both midshipmen. She beat the snot out of him, but was too scared of the potential political ramifications to press charges. Her character growth and his distinct lack of character are a fair chunk of the plot of the first three novels and most of the plot of the fourth.
• Author Appeal: It's quite a bit more subtle than the polygamy thing or the eternal youth thing in his books (plus the giant penis-shaped starships), but David Weber's thing for petite frequently-pregnant women is worthy of comment. While most of the pregnancies occur offscreen, Katherine Mayhew and Allison Harrington in Honor Harrington have eight to eleven pregnancies and eight live births between the two of them. There's never any discussion of the difficulties this would have on a woman of small size, just comments about how beautiful/elegant they are and how impressive it is that they're into natural pregnancy (given that his wife appears to be significantly smaller than him, and they have three children, this may be a personal fondness)...
  • He also seems to have an odd need for Hold Your Hippogriffs expressions, replacing perfectly serviceable cliches with their IN SPACE equivalents for no good reason. This is exclusive to Weber's work on the series; on the novels written or co-written by others, no "hippogriffs" are usually in sight.
  • So far almost every star nation^note Erewhon is an exception in the Honorverse firmly supports and uses the death penalty where it comes up, while more specifically, the method of execution is hanging. No character or government, not even from the quarters you'd expect, is shown to question or oppose it.
  • His support of laissez-faire capitalism vs. socialism is also quite obvious.
  • Baseball has spread to the stars and pages of prose are dedicated to the sport.
• Author Tract: The series makes it abundantly clear what David Weber thinks about any number of issues. At the start of the series, Haven is the antagonist, and explicitly a welfare system taken to absurd extremes. The need to provide for masses on the dole makes them turn conquistador. One character later internally ponders at length how Haven's education system turns out poorly trained soldiers because it focuses on "validating" the students rather than really teaching them. The evils of socialism and flat taxes are also discussed. Nearly all star nations have capital punishment, the bad guys included, and it's always done by hanging. Abortion is also considered unethical, though it's obsolete now as babies can be "tubed" and birth control is all but foolproof. Both Conservatives and Liberals are initially not portrayed well (some good examples come about later), with the protagonists being centrist. This makes sense as the series also pushes what are usually more left-wing views, like sexual liberation and women's rights.
• Awakening the Sleeping Giant: For most of the series the Solarian League has been effectively ignoring the activities of the protagonists and antagonists. Both participants are worried about what will happen to them if the League comes in on the opposing side, since the total military forces of Haven and Manticore are insignificant compared to those of the League, which has more superdreadnoughts than Haven or Manticore has destroyers. Ultimately subverted, however: starting in Mission of Honor the perspective begins to change as characters recognize how severely Manticore and Haven's applied military technology has shifted the balance of power. The League is still infinitely bigger, but they realize that it is so far behind that it will likely collapse in on itself if it ever came to open warfare.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Although the grav lance, first seen by the reader in On Basilisk Station, has the ability to knock down even a superdreadnought's sidewalls in one shot, it can only function at ¼ (or less) the range of all other existing weaponry, and that assumes it does not malfunction all on its own. Subsequent increases in missile ranges have made it even more impractical than it was in the first book. Actually scoring a kill with the thing (first in a fleet exercise and then in a real battle) is what makes Honor's reputation in the first book, since everyone in the navy except for the loadout's sponsor realized how useless it was immediately. A later novel would have said sponsor openly admit that she knew it wasn't practical yet, and had had it installed on Fearless because she wanted the ship to use as a platform so a team could work on making it more practical, not for use in combat, whether simulated or real.
  • On paper, energy torpedoes have tons of advantages, being lightweight, fast-firing, extremely difficult to shoot down, and absolutely devastating to shipboard armor. The downside? They're completely useless against a military-grade sidewall. That's the problem the grav lance was meant to solve, giving Honor's first Fearless a one-two punch that could knock out even the largest capital ships, but the technology just wasn't there. In the age of missile ascendance, neither weapon shows any hope of finding a niche in the foreseeable future.
  • The Mesan spider drive. While the spider beams are virtually invisible compared to the impeller wedges all other ships use, they produce no gravitic sump for an inertial compensator to work with, meaning that spider-ships have to use much less effective grav plates and are therefore capped at about half the acceleration of even a superdreadnought. Even more importantly, the lack of impeller wedges and the fact that sidewalls block the spider beams mean that a spider-ship has no gravitic shielding. In short, a spider-ship can hide, but it can't run and it can't fight, making it useful for sneak attacks only, akin to early submarines.
• Awesome Moment of Crowning: Crown of Slaves ends with the coronation of "Her Incisorship," Berry I Zilwicki, first queen of the newly founded Kingdom of Torch, during which she introduces her newly-appointed commander-in-chief, Thandi Palane, and the approving roar of the crowd is a beautiful and terrible thing.
  "Death to Mesa!"

B

• Badass Adorable:
  • The entire treecat species. Cute, cuddly little critters who have six limbs, each tipped with razor-sharp claws, and who turn into berserk buzzsaws when the ones they love are in danger.
  • Abigail Hearns, cute as a treecat and just as deadly.
  • Helen Zilwicki, Jr. foils her own kidnapping, using karate skills learned from one of the premier martial arts masters on Earth, at age 14.
• Badass Boast:
  • From I Will Build My House of Steel
    Lieutenant (and future King) Roger Winton: I will build my house of steel.
  • A treecat gets one in A Rising Thunder.
    Sorrow Singer: The People know how to deal with those who would slay us.
• Badass Bureaucrat: Not all of the Honorverse's badasses are in the military.
  • Dame Estelle Matsuko, first introduced as the Special Commissioner for the Basilisk system in On Basilisk Station. She is brought back (name-checked only) to be the Home Secretary for the Grantville government, and properly reintroduced in The Shadow of Saganami as the Governor-General of the Talbott Quadrant. At several points the novels explicitly point out that when she is sitting at a table otherwise filled with Admirals, she is clearly the one in charge.
  • Queen Elizabeth III, whose political acumen is the envy of all who behold it and whom nobody dares to underestimate.
  • Eloise Pritchart, who got her start as a guerrilla fighter and assassin in the Aprilist movement before allowing herself to be co-opted by the Committee of Public Safety and proceeding to Feed the Mole in magnificent fashion. Ultimately she becomes President of the restored Republic of Haven.
• Badass Creed:
  • The motto of the Royal Manticoran Naval Academy (borrowed from Winston Churchill):
    In War: Resolution. In Defeat: Defiance. In Victory: Magnanimity. In Peace: Goodwill.
  • The Royal Manticoran Navy's motto is "fortitudo, fidelitas, decus" (Courage, Loyalty, Honor).
  • The Royal Manticoran Marines, meanwhile, use "Adapt and Overcome" as an unofficial slogan. It is often shortened to the simple-but-clear "Can do".
  • The Audubon Ballroom has "Shall we dance?" usually delivered as a challenge to Manpower slavers (who generally do not last long after this).
• Badass Family:
  • The Zilwicki clan. Posthumous war hero mom, Genius Bruiser super-spy dad, Cute Bruiser and Lady of War-in-training daughter, rabble-rousing anti-slavery step-mom, A Child Shall Lead Them adopted daughter, and that does not even count the super-spies, Super Soldiers, and various freedom-fighters who make up the family friends.
  • The Harringtons. Honor gets most of the attention, but her father was a ruthless killing machine in combat when he was a Marine, and her mother's twin brother used to be a hard-core special forces operator who had no problem organizing assassinations of enemies just to make a point.
  • House Winton, as I Will Build My House of Steel goes to show, a family of skilled and determined politicians, with a tradition of military service. Roger III was the one who turned the Royal Manticoran Navy from an anti-piracy force into a first-rate navy, in expectation that they would eventually go head-to-head with the expanding People's Republic of Haven.
• Bad Liar: Honor, Sir James Webster, and a few other Manticoran officers-cum-diplomats. That's part of the reason they're chosen as diplomats; their inability to lie well makes their honesty equally obvious. Apparently, Webster is such a terrible liar that people actually mistake his attempts to do so for sarcasm.
• Batman Gambit: Discussed in Echoes of Honor where Admiral Tourville explains to People's Commissioner Honeker exactly why it is a terrible idea for your plan to rely on the enemy doing exactly what you want them to do. War Secretary McQueen's deliberate aversion of such plans is brought up as a reason why Operation Icarus had better odds of success than an earlier, too-elegant-for-its-own-good plan did in Flag In Exile.
• Batter Up!: When Honor sees a baseball team for the first time she thinks she is witnessing the outbreak of mob violence armed with wooden clubs. Andrew LaFollet manages to stop laughing long enough to explain to her that baseball is a sport on Grayson and those clubs are sports equipment - and that the players do not use them on each other.
• Battle Butler: Cathy Montaigne's butler is an ex-combat slave and undercover freedom fighter.
• Battle Couple: Victor Cachat and Thandi Palane as of Cauldron of Ghosts. The two of them take out several criminal gangs and fight in a drawn-out siege against overwhelming odds together.
• Bavarian Fire Drill:
  • Starting at about halfway through the series, James MacGuiness is no longer actually in the Navy. However, he continues to serve as Honor's steward — which is technically illegal since he is a civilian gaining access to restricted locations and information — apparently by just showing up and continuing to do his job.
  • Master Steward Chris Billingsley, Michelle Henke's personal steward, got a pet cat aboard her flagship in spite of regulations preventing pets aboard ships.
• Beam Spam:
  • When an attacking spacecraft gets within energy range of its prey, it typically fires every single laser and graser mounted on its broadside in continuous-fire mode until the target dies. In Honor Among Enemies, Honor's Q-ship Wayfarer mounts eight superdreadnought-sized grasers on its broadside, capable of reducing to incandescent flinders any attacking ship dumb enough to get close.
  • Even modern missiles are also Beam Spam, delivered via Recursive Ammo and Manticore Missile Massacre. Each missile uses the energy of its detonation to power a cluster of x-ray lasers aimed at the target, and these are fired in increasingly large salvos as the series goes on. Each salvo detonating around a target results in hundreds of beams lancing toward the target from every direction possible.
• Beat Them at Their Own Game:
  • In At All Costs, the new Manticoran Eighth Fleet's job is to conduct deep raids in response to the Havenites repeatedly doing that, and (initially, at least) it does so a lot better than the RHN ever did.
    Thomas Theisman: To be blunt, Harrington just gave us an object lesson in how rear area raids ought to be conducted.
  • Also in At All Costs, Honor's raiding force is actually defeated (one of only two genuine defeats she's ever suffered) by a Havenite force using two of her own tactics against her: The hyperspace mousetrap from Sidemore and the concealed minelayers from Hancock. She sees through the first trick in time to avoid most of it, the second takes her by complete surprise.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Honor gets severely wounded multiple times and suffers disfiguring injuries, but (with one exception) gets patched up as good as new by the time the next book starts through the use of cybernetic replacements. Fittingly for an expy of Horatio Nelson, she loses an arm and an eye; the same arm and eye as Nelson lost (the left in both cases).
• Becoming the Mask: The State Sec remnant forces, who finally become a well-disciplined, focused fighting force as the People's Navy In Exile. Unfortunately, they realize the transformation has happened as their fleet is being torn to shreds by an enemy that has them badly outclassed.
• Believing Their Own Lies: One of the things that made Cordelia Ransom so dangerous, and foolish, is that she appears to genuinely believe all of her own propaganda.
• Beneath the Mask: In Mission Of Honor, after Oyster Bay, Hamish Alexander notes that after all these years knowing Honor, this was the first time he had met The Salamander.
• Benevolent Conspiracy: The original Mesan Alignment is one of these. It wants nothing more than to legalise genetic engineering across the galaxy, and has regrettably had to work from backstage until recently (at which point they change their name to the Mesan Engagement). The evil Mesan Alignment uses the original as misdirection and a handy recruiting tool.
  "The Mesan Alignment that was established here on Mesa during Detweiler’s lifetime, the one we’re now calling the Benign Alignment, rejected his radicalism—assuming he was ever serious about it in the first place. It was dedicated to supporting a gradualist improvement of the human race—one which deliberately conserved strengths, weeded out weaknesses, but without any defined final objective. What you might call the maximization of each individual’s natural potential as a part of moving the entire race forward. I can’t be sure yet, but I suspect we’ll discover that the Malign Alignment began as a splinter faction of the original Alignment that was impatient with the concept of gradualism. But that original Alignment definitely was a benign organization, and I’m pretty sure it was only because of the…intensity of feeling where genetic modification was concerned during Detweiler’s lifetime that it was organized in secret."
• Beware the Nice Ones:
  • Honor can be pushed too far. The results are bad for the ones who do it.
    It was a merciless something, her "monster"—something that went far beyond military talent, or skills, or even courage. Those things, he knew without conceit, he, too, possessed in plenty. But not that deeply personal something at the core of her, as unstoppable as Juggernaut, merciless and colder than space itself, that no sane human being would ever willingly rouse. In that instant her husband knew, with an icy shiver which somehow, perversely, only made him love her even more deeply, that as he gazed into those agate-hard eyes, he looked into the gates of Hell itself. And whatever anyone else might think, he knew now that there was no fire in Hell. There was only the handmaiden of death, and ice, and purpose, and a determination which would not—could not—relent or rest.
  • Even though treecats are "cute" to humans and love children, they turn into ruthless living implements of death (once described as furry berserking buzzsaws) when anyone their humans happen to like/want to protect are threatened.
  • Shannon Foraker, who simply remarks "Oops!" when two full squadrons of super-dreadnoughts (and roughly one hundred thousand crewmembers) get annihilated by a few keystrokes.
• Beware the Superman: Earth's devastating Final War was fought by super soldiers with drastic adjustments to their physiology for increased combat capability. They were also supposed to be modified for super-intelligence, which all too frequently had the side effect of increased aggression and sociopathy, and that has led to lasting prejudice against all genetic engineering. Honor herself, who inherited a set of adjustments for life on high-gravity worlds, fears that her modifications may be responsible for her temper and her lethal combat abilities.
• BFG: The tri-barrel, a portable weapon verging on light artillery, has frequently been described as shredding the environment around their target.
• Big Bad: Albrecht Detweiler and the Mesan Alignment, the mastermind behind events stretching back centuries.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • Zig-zagged so much you would expect it to blow an impeller node in Honor Of The Queen.
    Dear god. She doesn't know we're here.
  • From the short story The Service Of The Sword: HMS Gauntlet's return to Refuge after defeating three heavy cruisers in open battle and blowing the fourth and last out of orbit with one salvo.
  • Honor Harrington and Eighth Fleet make it home just in time to turn the tide at the First Battle of Manticore thanks to the Heroic Sacrifices of Admirals Sebastian D'Orville, Theodosia Kuzak, and Alistair McKeon, plus the bulk of their forces. Her arrival saves her home system from a brutal defeat... but the battle nevertheless leaves both navies in tatters.
  • At the end of Shadow of Freedom, Michelle Henke collected all of Tenth Fleet and set off for Mesa. In the next book, Cauldron of Ghosts, she arrives just in time to rescue Victor Cachat, Thandi Palane, and the seccies who are about to be overrun in the siege of one of the residential towers.
• Big Eater
  • Due to her genetically altered metabolism, Honor (like her father) can eat like a horse and never gain a pound. This becomes less than helpful when she is a prisoner of war, because standard prison rations are effectively starvation rations for her.
  • Thandi Palane, whose enhanced physique requires a minimum of four large meals a day to avoid starvation. Victor Cachat observes at one point that she appears to be inhaling bread rolls.
• Bizarre Alien Senses: The Sphinxian Treecats are telepathic and empathic, and are evidently unique in the universe in that trait. Some humans, such as Honor, appear to display an aptitude for it as well, though.
• Black-and-White Morality: Played completely straight in the second book, where the Manticore/Grayson characters (except a few evil turncoats) are noble and chivalrous while the antagonist Masadans are a culture of religious maniacs who impose the death penalty for teaching women to read. Oh, and they are also rapists. No Masadan character is given any sort of sympathetic motive, or even a Pet the Dog moment, not even in a For Your Own Good sense of wanting to save souls from damnation (or whatever): they are driven only by petty spite and pure hatred of heathens who allow women to exist in public.
• Blackmail: A prominent and frequently used tool by most sides. The most notable examples are the Earl of North Hollow, whose files have manipulated Manticoran politics for decades at least, and Mesa, who has seemingly every Solarian flag officer in its pocket, including the competent ones.
• Bleak Border Base: Basilisk Station, which oversees Manticore's only extrasolar possession at the start of the series, is where the Navy sends its unwanted officers when they can't simply beach them. The system is of little economic importance; Manticore only cares about securing its Junction terminus against a Havenite invasion.^note For political reasons, the Navy can only station a limited number of ships there; rather than use this as a reason to send their best, they instead decide to send their worst, under the presumption that if the system is invaded, the local picket won't be enough to do anything except call for help. But after Harrington arrives and foils Haven's False Flag Operation to take over the system (not to mention her crackdown on the flourishing smuggling trade), Manticore re-evaluates its priorities and stops treating Basilisk as a backwater.
• Bling of War: This is also a hallmark of the Mesa System Navy (the attention-getting false front of the Mesan Alignment's military might) and emphasizes their showiness and lack of competence compared to the much more subdued uniforms of the top-secret Mesan Alignment Navy.
• Blithe Spirit:
  • Allison Benton-Ramirez y Chou Harrington enjoys playing this trope immensely, being from a whole Planet of Hats populated by them. She often managed to scandalize even "libertine" Manticorans, not to mention members of her husband's much more straitlaced society on Sphinx. She did have to tone it down when Harringtons moved to Grayson, though.
  • Ginny Usher seems to be the personal Blithe Spirit of her adopted little brother Victor Cachat.
• Blown Across the Room: Pulsers tend to shred their victims, but occasionally the tattered remnants of their bodies will be propelled down a hallway.
• Blue Blood: The series provides an in-depth examination of the pros and cons of an established aristocracy, and the impacts it can have on the development of those born into the system.
  • Pavel Young, Michael Janvier (Baron High Ridge), Steadholders Mueller and Burdette, and the Countess of New Kiev might as well be the poster boys of Aristocrats Are Evil, but the series also features the honorable House of Winton, the Mayhew family of Grayson (excepting such black sheep as Maccabeus), the Alexanders of White Haven, and eventually Honor Harrington herself. At several points in the series the characters themselves will debate the merits of various political systems, with the eventual conclusion that they all have positive and negative aspects, but the Manticoran model at least does its best to curb the excesses of any power elite.
  • Also demonstrated is that people have to be seen as individuals: Michael Oversteegen is a relative of—and greatly resembles—Baron High Ridge, has the affected (annoying) drawl adopted by some members of the aristocracy and shares many of the Janvier family's political views... but is a resourceful, courageous, highly moral, and capable officer who cares for and treats his subordinates with respect, works well with others, and is in turn respected by his peers. He's basically what the more "traditional" members of the aristocracy claim to be. He also thinks High Ridge's side of the family are complete idiots.
• Bodyguard Crush:
  • Hugh Arai for Queen Berry in Torch of Freedom, initially against his will and fully expected by Jeremy X.
  • Andrew LaFollet spends most of his life quietly, deeply, and unrequitedly in love with his Steadholder, Honor Harrington, even refusing to marry or have children (all but unheard-of on Grayson) out of his devotion to her. She knows about his feelings and regrets hurting him by not requiting them, but he doesn't seem to consider it a loss.
• Bond Creatures: Treecats which "adopt" humans form an instant and indissoluble psychic bond with them. Early on, this was terribly tragic. Treecats tend to suicide from despair when their human partner dies. Treecats are also one of those species that are long-lived for their size, clocking 2 to 3 centuries on average. This meant that to bond with a human was to be Blessed with Suck. The first bonded treecat did so with a child, and still only lived half his allotted lifespan. Late-generation prolong treatments mostly un-sucked this.
• Book Ends: With an actual book, even. At All Costs begins and ends with Honor reading a story to some children.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Haven's main method of ensuring prisoners of war do not escape their prisons is to stick them on an island hundreds of miles from any mainland. Michelle Henke remarks in one book that she has to admit the "moat" is pretty effective even for keeping in hundreds of people who are known to both be martially competent and have a desire to be elsewhere. By doing this, Haven is able to spare the prison camp of pretty much all of their own personnel, aside from a liaison, and lets the prisoners run it almost autonomously.
  • The same method is later adopted by Torch: they put their prisoners on a very scenic island... that's surrounded by terrifying aquatic predators.
• Boxed Crook: Georgia Sakristos, the chief political and security advisor for Pavel Young (and later his brother), is found by Anton Zilwicki to be the former Mesan slave, known as Elaine Komandorski, who once sold a whole lot of escaped slaves back to their masters for her own personal freedom and a hefty load of cash. "Team Honor" offers her a significant handicap in relaying this info to the Audubon Ballroom in exchange for dismantling the North Hollow's political machine and the destruction of the massive supply of blackmail material that forms the backbone of North Hollow's political power. She takes the deal, simply because she knew that as a public figure she'd never be able to avoid the Ballroom for long, and for a traitor like Komandorski they'd kill her slowly.
• Braids of Action: Honor's default hairstyle since she started to wear her hair long. Often used by other characters, Honor alludes to it become a common hairstyle among female officers who wear their hair long, presumably for the usual pragmatic reasons (i.e. when they need to get a skinsuit helmet sealed on quickly during an engagement.)
• Bread and Circuses: How the old Republic of Haven became the People's Republic of Haven.
• Breaking the Glass Ceiling: Lieutenant Abigail Hearns is the first native-born Grayson female to ever hold military rank. Though she's more a case of sidestepping the ceiling — while she's officially part of the Grayson Space Navy, she went to Manticore's military academy and so far in the novels has been serving exclusively on Manticoran ships. Officially this is to let her gain experience before she eventually moves back to the GSN, but there's a certain amount of "make sure her eventual GSN superiors can't just shove her off into a more 'appropriate' female posting" going on as well.
• Break the Haughty: Frequently and routinely to the Solarian League (the star nation that refers to anyone not a citizen of the SL as 'neo-barbarians') by Manticore. Not only do they continuously snub diplomatic and military representatives of the League (who are shocked by such audacity) they chew up and spit out every Solarian fleet they fight, at absolutely pathetic odds (a dozen cruisers defeating about six dozen superdreadnoughts).
• Brick Joke:
  • In Uncompromising Honor, Honor jokes with Hamish about him taking the Duke of Cromarty (the Queen's yacht) to attend the Beowulf conference. After Hamish is found miraculously alive in the aftermath of the Beowulf Strike, the Queen sends him to Earth on the Duke of Cromarty so he can reach Honor as soon as possible.
  • In the first book when asked if he knows Pavel Young (as a build up to explain his sabotage of Honor) Hamish is described as confused by the apparent non sequitur. In Ms. Midshipwoman Harrington when the Captain of the ship a young Honor is serving on asks if his XO knows Young's father (also to give context for the family’s sabotage of Honor) the XO is described as confused by the apparent non sequitur.
  • In "Echoes Of Honor." Admiral Elvis Santino declares that he's not going to be another Frances Yeargin (another General Failure who suffered a Curb-Stomp Battle against a surprise attack in the previous book). Santino proceeds to get his entire command wiped out due to his poor tactical sense and refusal to retreat. Two books later, in "War of Honor," when Admiral Allen Higgins orders his forces not to engage a Haven invasion force, he declares that he's not going to be another Elvis Santino.
• Bright Lady And White Knight: Honor herself, with Andrew LaFollet and, to a lesser extent, the rest of her armsmen. See also Bodyguard Crush.
• Burning the Flag: In A Rising Thunder, the Manticoran ambassador to Earth observes a 'spontaneous' protest against his nation, noting how the crowd is setting fire to Manticoran flags as well as badly-made effigies in Manticoran naval uniforms. One of the protesters waiting a bit too long to let go of a burning flag adds a bit of humor to an otherwise bleak scene.
• Burning the Ships: The original colonists to Grayson wrecked their starship's cryonics equipment, ensuring that it would be impossible to return to the "sinful" Earth. They didn't wreck the whole thing, though, which is fortunate because it turned out that the planet was basically one huge Superfund site and there's no way they would have survived without the ship's resources.
• Burying a Substitute: Echoes of Honor opens with one of the two state funerals held for Honor Harrington, both of which used empty coffins because Haven didn't return her body for burial. Because the execution was all special effects and Haven didn't have a body to return.
• The Bus Came Back: Dame Estelle Matsuko, career diplomat and the Resident Commissioner for the system in On Basilisk Station, played an important role in the first novel, then completely vanished from the narrative aside from a few brief third-party mentions. When she showed up again in The Shadow of Saganami, she had become Lady Dame Estelle Matsuko, Baroness Medusa. She subsequently becomes a major character in the Saganami Island spinoff series as the Provisional (and later Imperial) Governor of the Talbott Quadrant.
• But I Can't Be Pregnant!: Honor in At All Costs, more or less directly quoting the trope name when she finds out. There was a birth control failure, when a paperwork error prevented her doctor from realizing her implant had expired during her "death" on Hades.
• Butlerspace: Honor's faithful valet, James MacGuiness, has been ascribed a broad selection of seemingly-supernatural abilities, including teleportation, invisibility, and precognition. He can serve an entire tableful of admirals without anyone actually seeing him, appear the moment he's needed whether he's been called for or not, and always has whatever snacks, drinks or other necessities any guest may require ready - piping hot or pleasantly chilled, as preferred, even if they appeared unannounced in the middle of the night. Even if they are the President of the Republic of Haven and most of her Cabinet.
• Butt-Monkey: Admiral Genevieve Chin, RHN, cannot catch a break. Every appearance has been a loss for her, and even when she won against Admiral Kuzak's Third Fleet, she promptly lost against Eighth Fleet's immediate counter attack.

C

• Cadre of Foreign Bodyguards:
  • The body guards for the Hereditary President of the People's Republic of Haven are all from Neo Geneva.
  • Honor's armsmen hail from Grayson, prompting some ruffled feathers when she has to take armed foreign nationals onto Her Majesty's warships. Captain Harrington is certainly not allowed any such thing, but Steadholder Harrington is legally prohibited from being without her armsmen, so the issue was quietly dropped when it became clear that the Protector of Grayson was quite prepared to raise trouble over it.
  • Matteo Guttierez, late of the Manticoran Marines, is the armsman for Abigail Hearns, daughter of Steadholder Owens of Grayson. Abigail disliked the idea of having her own personal bodyguard, to put it mildly, but puts up with Matteo because of that business on Refuge in "The Service of the Sword".
• Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit":
  • Sphinxian chipmunks. The only description given of one is that it has six legs (typical of creatures from Sphinx), and that it looks nothing like a Terran chipmunk.
  • Treecats. Their only part that looks like that of an Old Earth cat is the head. Otherwise they look much more like big six-legged weasels. That being said, they do behave like Old Earth cats, and have similar dietary requirements. In the short story A Beautiful Friendship, Stephanie Harrington laments the lack of imagination behind such names, shortly before discovering Treecats and giving them their name.
  • Almost all Manticoran system wildlife got tagged with a name of some Earth lifeform, but few actually resemble their namesakes. Even "mistletoe" is a tree that does not resemble its namesake at all.
  • A number of other planets seen throughout the series also have wildlife or plants named for Terran wildlife or plants, attaching prefixes like "near-" or "neo-" or "pseudo-" to the earth fauna or flora's name.
  • Lampshaded in Storm From the Shadows when Mike Henke describes the local seafood on Flax in a message to her mother: "They've got what they call 'lobsters,' even if they don't look anything like ours — or like Old Earth's, for that matter —..."
• Capital Offensive:
  • The First Battle of Manticore has Haven going all in and trying to end the war in one fell swoop. It's the single largest space battle in human history.
  • The Second Battle of Manticore has the Solarians try to force the upstart "neobarbs" to submit to the League. It's a Curb-Stomp Battle, with the Royal Manticoran Navy (and friends) doing the stomping.
  • The Battle of Sol has Honor take the Grand Fleet (comprised of ships from Manticore, Haven, and Grayson) to the Sol System to force an end to the war and to bring the Mandarins to justice. The battle ends with no casualties on the Grand Alliance side and the crews of two-three ships on the League side (by accident). On a larger scale, Honor forces the League to accept peace on the Alliance's terms and agree to allow her to destroy the system's entire space-based industry and all warships currently in Sol. She also demands the surrender of all Mandarins, the dissolution of the OFS and protectorates, and a rewrite of the League constitution.
• The Captain: Honor and many others, this being a navy focused series.
• Cassandra Truth: The few Sollies that recognize how far behind the times the League Navy is are often brushed off as alarmists and defeatists. Once the rest of the Sollies figure it out, they accuse the aforementioned Sollies of not being alarmist enough.
  • Oliver Diamoto, as the Sole Survivor of the bridge crews who witnessed the Manticoran "super-LACs" for the first time, found himself as the only person in a position to report on their capabilities. Unfortunately, with no actual data to back him up, Haven's political leadership chooses to write his reports off as exaggerated, and his warnings end up doing fairly little besides worsening the tension between McQueen and Saint-Just.
• Cast Herd: Rather than strictly follow Honor, the books often alternate chapters or sections covering characters from particular groups — the Manties, the Havenites, the Sollies, the Talbot Cluster/Quadrant residents, the Torches, the Mesan Alignment, etc. Later in the series, the Torch and Talbot herds got their own sub-series.
• Casual Interplanetary Travel: To the point of day trips to other planets by middle class people being possible (with favorable orbital positions). In Ashes of Victory Admiral Caparelli mentions the Navy's willingness to ferry Honor between her father's hospital on Sphinx and Saganami Island on Manticore — "it's only a few hours away".
• Casual Interstellar Travel: It helps that it is the year AD 4023, with interstellar travel having existed for almost 2,000 years. Historical asides note that travel only became casual in the last 600 years. Before the development of the Warshawski Sail, travel through hyperspace between even the nearest stars took weeks or months, and ran such high risks of running into a Negative Space Wedgie that most colony ships were actually slower-than-light vessels.
• Catchphrase: "Let's be about it." Honor's use of it as such has been picked up on in the books, with both Dame Estelle Matsuko and Lieutenant Abigail Hearns using it when Honor is nowhere nearby. Honor herself has been zinged a few times by having it quoted back to her by one of the other characters, and we learned in "Ms. Midshipwoman Harrington" that she picked it up from her first captain during her middie cruise.
• Cat Folk: The Treecats, although they have many significant differences from actual cats, including six limbs and telepathy.
• Caught in the Bad Part of Town: Cauldron of Ghosts: Early in their infiltration of Mesa, Victor Cachat and Thandi Palane are accidentally routed through the Lower Radomsko district, the poorest and most violent seccy district of Mendel, and promptly attacked. Since we're talking about Cachat and Palane, the trope is then promptly reversed onto the attackers instead.
• Cerebus Syndrome (or Growing the Beard): The series starts out as a fairly light space-navy adventure series, but gradually morphs into a galaxy-spanning political conspiracy epic. (Losing some readers along the way.)
• Characters Dropping Like Flies: The early books in the series had lots of named bit characters dying. When Eric Flint was to start writing in the universe, he tried to find some few characters appearing in only a single book or two that he could use — and found they had a 90% mortality rate. (He did manage to find three.)
• Chekhov's Gun: Appears several times throughout the series.
  • One of the most blatant uses is in the first book where a new weapons system is briefly demonstrated and then forgotten about until the height of the final engagement. This is explicitly because it's so short ranged as to be useless in a normal fight, but the enemy obligingly closed to point-blank.
  • After Honor loses her arm, her dad builds her a new one, and decides to include a built-in pulser just in case. Needless to say, she eventually has to use it.
  • Another literal Chekhov's Gun shows up in Honor Among Enemies in the form of Honor's .45 pistol.
  • Subverted in Honor Among Enemies. During a Virtual Training Simulation early on a Mauve Shirt technician comes up with a brilliant new way to restore a busted grav-sensor, prompting Honor to order the trick 'cleaned up and filed for later use'... but the situation where it would be useful never comes up again.
  • In Honor Among Enemies, the cousin of the Andermani Emperor mentions an Andermani marine tried to kill the Emperor's heir for no reason at all. Seven books later, it is revealed that the Mesan Alignment has a nanovirus that can take over a person's body and force them to do anything - and they cite that attack as one of its first uses.
• Chekhov's Gunman:
  • Kevin Usher first appears in The Short Victorious War, set a number of years before he becomes a main character in the "Wages of Sin" stories and books. He appears as the leader of the special-ops team that takes out Internal Security head Constance Palmer-Levy's car with a SAM as part of Rob Pierre's coup against the Legislaturalists. In the same book, fellow "Wages of Sin" main characters Anton and Helen Zilwicki also make their first brief appearance.
  • Thomas Theisman first appeared as a destroyer skipper in The Honor of the Queen as an honorable Havenite officer who told Honor the truth about what the Masadans had been doing to the captives on Blackbird. He appeared in two scenes in The Short Victorious War (the same two scenes as Anton Zilwicki, incidentally), and then again briefly in Flag in Exile. But it wasn't until Honor Among Enemies that the true purpose of his plotline began to unfold; from then on he took an increasingly important role in events, culminating in the efficient and brutal reorganization of Haven's government via a pulser dart to Saint-Just's head.
• Chessmaster: Half the cast are top notch military strategists, others are political strategists, and some are both.
• Chew Toy: Every time the name "Joe Buckley" appears it usually means his death. Especially the latest SLNS Joseph Buckley, most of her predecessors in the SLN, and the scientist after whom she is named. That's about half a dozen in one paragraph. Joe Buckley is a Baen-wide official Designated Victim.
• Cincinnatus: Thomas Theisman, who not only had the the opportunity to, but actually had successfully orchestrated a coup and taken control of the People's Republic of Haven. However, he immediately held general elections, resurrected the original constitution of the Republic of Haven and gladly accepted a cabinet position as Secretary of War. In the ensuing years and internal political struggles, several characters remark that the new government of Haven stands no chance of being internally toppled because Theisman stands behind it, and the navy stands behind him.
• Cliffhanger: Several of the books end abruptly with a galaxy-changing action or revelation, and no denouement to clear up the loose ends. For example, the last thing we see in Ashes of Victory is Citizen-Admiral Theisman shooting Oscar Saint-Just, and the last thing we see in Mission of Honor is President Pritchart proposing an alliance with Manticore against the Solarian League and Mesa. Often, there's a gap of time between the cliff hanger and the next book, with the fallout of the cliffhanger event generally summarized.
• Colony Drop: Operation Oyster Bay, though mostly accidentally, results in chunks of the Manticore system's orbital industry falling and killing millions, including 1% of all treecats and most of Honor's extended family. Because the biggest chunk fell on Yawata Crossing, Manticorans refer to the attack as "The Yawata Strike".
• Command Roster: A new one in every book, though characters that survive will often move into a more senior position in the next, often leaving for a time and then come back. A common pattern is Assistant Tactical Officer (Junior Security Officer) to Tactical Officer (Security Officer) to XO (Number Two), and then into The Captain.
• Common Nonsense Jury: The court-martial for Pavel Young reaches a verdict that cannot be supported by the evidence in any way: Guilty on three counts, deadlocked on the two capital counts of cowardice and desertion, and cashiering in place of execution. This happened because two of the panel judges were (one way or another) in Young's father's pocket, and a third placed the military needs of the Star Kingdom^note Young's execution would have made it impossible to get a declaration of war against Haven over justice for the men who Young's cowardice got killed. Only that last motive is portrayed at all sympathetically.
• The Conspiracy: The Mesans and their centuries-old plot to infiltrate everyone and bring about an age of forced genetic engineering and slavery for all.
• Continuity Nod: Many times, we will see passing references to ships or people that featured prominently in earlier books. Of particular note is HMS Warlock taking part in the Battle of Monica in Shadow of Saganami. It is stated by Warlock's captain that the ship has had a poor reputation ever since Pavel Young was the captain during A Short Victorious War.
• Continuity Snarl: Represented by some of the expanded-universe short stories written by other writers (and in some cases, Weber himself).
  • The "Let's Dance" story, written as backfill for the "Crown of Slaves" stories, in which Honor Harrington ends up causing a diplomatic incident by working with a gang of known terrorists to capture a slave-trading space station. Said incident is not mentioned in On Basilisk Station (written considerably earlier) which happens immediately afterward — nor does anyone throughout the book show the sort of reaction that might be expected to someone who caused an incident of that nature.
  • Regarding Jane Lindskold's "Promised Land", you would think the fact that a member of Manticore's royal family is married to a Grayson-born former Masadan captive wife would merit some mention in (the earlier-written) The Honor of the Queen, concerning as it did a possible alliance between Manticore and Grayson. Un-snarled, however, in "Ruthless", by the same author, which indicates that at the time the alliance was formed, Prince Michael and Judith had not yet fully realized their feelings for each other. Even though seemingly everybody else in the Manticoran aristocracy had figured it out.
• Cool Spaceship:
  • The converted merchant ship that Honor captained in Honor Among Enemies was cool. It had superdreadnought class lasers and large numbers of missile pods. Which were stealth to boot. However, being based on a civilian merchantman hull, it lacks many of elements which characterize military ships, such as outer armor, multiple hulls, redundant systems, and all the other things which lessen damage.
  • The "super LAC," CLAC, and SD(P) classes developed during In Enemy Hands, Echoes of Honor and Ashes of Victory also qualify.
• Corporate Conspiracy: Manpower, Incorporated, who are The Man Behind the Man for the Mesan Alignment, who themselves instigated the war between the Republic of Haven and the Star Kingdom of Manticore.
  • Zigzagged. The original Mesan Alignment was essentially a reformist secret society looking to make it easier to legally practice genetic engineering (this had been summarily forbidden by the planet Beowulf as a knee-jerk reaction in the wake of the Final War). From that sprung a revolutionary conspiracy of the same name looking to impose the legalisation of genetic engineering on the galaxy by force (think Bomb-Throwing Anarchists practicing hybrid warfare), who used the reformist society as a recruiting pool. And Manpower, Inc. (and other transstellar corporations) piggybacked on the revolutionary, "Malign" Alignment and (it's implied) helped to pervert the minds of its leaders in present day to the point that their intentions (galactic domination through fragmenting H. sapiens into a number of subspecies, one of which would be bred to lead) aren't even close to what either conspiracy was originally designed to accomplish in the first place (legalising genetic engineering).
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: played straight and subverted.
  • Played straight with the board of directors of Manpower Incorporated, and all of Mesa's rulers in general. It is becoming increasingly clear that the whole Corrupt Corporate Executive thing is just a cover for their real evil scheme.
  • Subverted with the Hauptmann Cartel and Honor's various enterprises, though Hauptman originally played it straight — the very first book has him getting into a conflict with Honor that involves threatening her parents' careers. He gets so nasty she issues a death threat to stop him cold. His Heel–Face Turn comes only five books and about ten in-universe years later after Harrington saves his daughter Stacey's life and Stacey called the old man out.
  • Played with by the Rembrandt Trade Union of Talbott. Their founder is definitely seen as one by his enemies (and some of his allies), but turns out to be a Well-Intentioned Extremist who adopted the persona simply as a means to accelerate and consolidate the economic power of the Talbott cluster to avoid being swallowed by the inexorable expansion of the Solarian League. When one of his fellow executives actually turns out to play this trope very straight, he wastes no time in completely destroying her career.
• Court-martialed: Field of Dishonor opens with the court-martial of Captain Lord Pavel Young for disobeying direct orders and cowardice in the face of the enemy, among several other counts incurred during the Battle of Hancock in The Short Victorious War. There's a level of Jury and Witness Tampering going on, as half the officers on the panel judging the trial are in thrall to Young's father, Earl North Hollow, whether due to personal politics or blackmail. This results in Young being found guilty on four of six counts but a hung jury on the other two; he's dishonorably discharged but not sentenced to death.
• Covers Always Lie: Some of the short story anthologies notably play this trope straight in various typical sci-fi book ways, most egregiously done by Service Of The Sword, which portrayed a group of Space Fighters, even though no such thing exists anywhere in the Honorverse. The David Mattingly covers for the main series in general tend to avert this trope, but even they will have the occasional scene absent from the book. Covers for international editions of the book vary in accuracy; the covers for the French editions, available at http://genkkis.deviantart.com/gallery/24898514 , are especially notable for their accuracy, to the extent that some American fans will print out those covers and put them on their hardcovers in place of the original David Mattingly covers.
  • Flag in Exile's cover is later lampshaded. In a later book, Honor sees a mural of her climactic duel in that book, which depicts her unhurt, with Protector Benjamin in the background with Nimitz (as the cover of Flag in Exile depicts), then points out in the actual scene, she had recently received a cut on the head, and Nimitz wasn't even there.
  • Shadow of Freedom has a cover which shows a conference which actually occurs in the previous novel, A Rising Thunder.
• Covert Group with Mundane Front: Beowulf's Biological Survey Corps. Commonly regarded as fairly tough, for an innocuous civilian agency. In reality, elite anti-Manpower commandos.
• Crash-Into Hello: Allison Chou engineered such a meeting with Alfred Harrington when they were in medical school, primarily to see if her ex boyfriend's low opinion of him was warranted or not. She failed to take into consideration Alfred's large size and long stride, and is almost sent crashing to the ground except for his quick reflexes.
• Credit Chip: Slavers commonly use physical credit chips instead of electronic transfers for their transactions. There's legal uses for those chips as well, but all we see them used for are slave purchases.
• Crime of Self-Defense: Honor catches some media flak from her political opponents for shooting a man whose gun was empty... because he had shot her in the back seconds before, in violation of dueling rules that would have mandated his death anyway by the hand of the duel supervisor.
• Critical Staffing Shortage: Manticore's biggest bottleneck in its war against Haven, and later the Solarian League, is manpower. Even with increasing concessions in automation to reduce crew sizes, and accelerated naval training programs, they only barely manage to keep up with their shipyards. This forces a Manticoran fleet to get a bit creative after forcing the surrender of a much larger Solarian fleet, since their compliment of marines is nowhere near enough to handle the huge number of prisoners they are now responsible for.
• Cult Colony:
  • Grayson and Masada were formed by a fundamentalist sect of Christianity. (The Masadan "Faithful" ended up rejecting Christian theology after the Grayson Civil War and their exile, basing their religion instead on an ultra-fundamentalist reading of the Old Testament which is particularly notorious for its loathing of women. The Graysons themselves have mellowed somewhat over the centuries, but continue to adhere to a conservative brand of orthodox (small "o") Christianity which looks like a cross of Anglicanism/Episcopalianism and various Fundamentalist/Evangelical denominations.)
  • Nuncio in the Talbott Cluster was founded as a more-or-less standard Cult Colony, but the original organizers screwed up so badly the few survivors became an atheist colony.
  • Refuge was another fundamentalist colony, this one established by settlers from Haven.
• Culture Clash: A major theme of stories taking place on Grayson. Honor's mother and Tomas Ramirez both also play the role of (mostly integrated) outsiders to Manticore's culture. One of the funnier moments in the books is Honor's first exposure to baseball. She radically misunderstands why a group of people would be heading to the park armed with "clubs."
• Culture Chop Suey: Humanity's push for the stars mashed the cultures into a chunky salsa even better than globalism does it now. You still can make out the basic ingredients, usually, but the overall results do not really look like anything in particular. The Manticoran and Andermani Empires are particularly notable examples. The former is comprised of various cultures and ethnicities that have over time taken on a British veneer, while the Andermani are predominantly ethnic Chinese posing as Germans, much like their ruling dynasty.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • The final offensive in the first Manticore-Haven War involved SD(P)s destroying Havenite ships from so far out that the Havenites can't fire back at all because the Multi-Drive Missiles provide such an obscene range advantage.
  • The Manties have even been on the receiving end of one of these when the Havenites restart the war in War of Honor and take back most of the gains Manticore had made before the cessation of hostilities.
  • The Mesan Alignment's sneak attack on the Manticore home system, Oyster Bay, resulted in millions dead, smashed orbital industries, and no losses for their side. To add insult to injury, Manticore's military forces are never engaged, being utterly insignificant to the outcome of the attack.
  • There are several utterly one sided naval battles over the course of the series. The one that stands out the most, if only for its sheer scale, is in A Rising Thunder, when a joint fleet commanded by Honor and Tom Theisman, combining Manticoran, Havenite, and Grayson ships, engages a Solarian fleet. Honor loses two thousand people. The other side loses over 1.2 million.
  • Deconstructed in Shadow of Freedom, when a Manticoran destroyer squadron annihilates a squadron of Solarian battlecruisers. The initial Manticoran attack was so brutal that the Solarians immediately realized they were outmatched and surrendered... but too late for the Manties to recall the next wave of missiles. Over half of the Solarian crewmen are killed when their ships are blown from the sky before they can abandon ship, while the Manticorans are helpless to do anything but watch the results of their handywork. The Manticoran commander spends a bit of time second-guessing himself on whether it was really necessary for him to open up with such a heavy attack after all.
  • Also in Shadow of Freedom, Lieutenant Abigail Hearns, in command of a small group of crewmen, goes up against a whole lot of Solarian Gendarmerie thugs in control of a space station in order to rescue captured personnel. Via the creative application of grenades, computer hacking, and I Shall Taunt You, she proceeds to wipe the floor with the alleged best ground combat forces in the universe.
  • The final book, 'Uncompromising Honor', contains a few:
    • The Battle of Hypatia, where five small, somewhat-outdated Manticoran ships manage to destroy dozens of Solarian battlecruisers in a desperate bid to prevent them from killing millions of third-party civilians. Four of the five Manty ships are lost from the sheer number of missiles fired at them, but they manage to convince what's left of the massive Solarian fleet to turn tail and run.
    • The Solarian League later tries a sneak attack on Beowulf. If not for Mesa deploying a countermeasure to Manticore's new system-defense network, the Sollies probably would have been all destroyed before ever getting their new stealth missiles off. As it is, the stealth missiles are almost completely neutralized by a new backup defense system, and the Manties' counterattack destroys all but a couple dozen of the four hundred-plus-ship Solly fleet.
    • At the very end, Honor decides to end the war once and for all by attacking the Sol system directly. She deliberately makes a huge missile salvo miss the main Solarian defense fleet at the last second, and blow up 90% of their mothballed reserve ships, just to show that Manticore could wipe out the Solarian League's forces without getting a scratch on their end. It ends up convincing the Solarian Navy to surrender unconditionally.

D

• Damage-Sponge Boss: The Solarian League's navy is obsolete in every meaningful way. Its hardware is 20 years or more out of date, it's got no sense of modern doctrine, its officers have never had real war experience, and it is so convinced of its own superiority that it is barely even paying attention to the huge war between Haven and Manticore, dismissing reports of their technological progress as exaggerations and fabrications. Ship to ship, any Havenite or Manticoran ship would beat a Solarian ship without the Solarians even getting in range to fire a shot. But, the League's navy is so incredibly large that, when discussing the possibility of all out war, the Manticorans' most pressing tactical concern is that they'll run out of ammo before running out of targets. Once Manticore allies with Haven, however, even that worry is wiped away, resulting in this beautiful and badass quote by Aivars Terekhov:
  Terekhov: Let’s do some math here, Brigadier. If two of our ships can kill seventy of yours, and we’ve got five hundred of them, that means we can kill every superdreadnought in Battle Fleet, including the Reserve, about three times each.
• Dating Catwoman: The People's Republic of Haven assigned People's Commissioners to keep an eye on navy officers in command positions, to make sure they toed the line. What the St. Just regime never learned, though, was that one admiral and people's commissioner wound up in bed and in love with each other. If they or their relationship had been discovered, the kindest fate that awaited them both would have been summary execution. Fortunately for the future Republic, future President Eloise Pritchart and future Fleet Admiral Javier Giscard were very good at hiding their relationship.
• David Versus Goliath:
  • Downplayed in the conflict between Manticore and Haven. Haven is the Goliath, at least on the surface, with a population and industrial base that completely dwarfs Manticore. However, they are also plagued by their dying economy, regressive educational institutions, and a new Full-Circle Revolution every other Tuesday. This, combined with Manticore's thriving trade industry and cutting-edge military R&D, makes them far more evenly matched than simple numbers would suggest.
  • In general, military ships of a given class are not expected to stand up to anything larger than themselves; they are expected to use their speed advantage to evade larger foes. However, there are exceptions. Sometimes it is because retreat is not an option (as in several of Honor's early commands). In the case of the Manticore-Solarian War, it is because the technology gap is so huge that not even Solarian superdreadnoughts have a reasonable chance against current-generation Manticoran missiles.
• Days of Future Past: The Napoleonic Wars set in the future, complete with laws of physics specifically designed to give starship-to-starship combat the flavor of Wooden Ships and Iron Men.
• Dead Drop: In Cauldron of Ghosts, Victor Cachat gets back in touch with a group from the previous novel by checking various dead drops and replying to one.
• Deadly Dust Storm: Grayson has some seriously fearsome dust-storms... not because it's particularly dry, or particularly windy, but because the local environment has lethal levels of several very nasty heavy metals, making it suicide to go outside on windy days without a filter-mask or better. People who grow up there but later left for other planets have been shown to reflexively reach for their (no-longer present) breather-mask whenever they see dust getting kicked up by the wind.
• Deadly Environment Prison:
  • The native life of Haven's secret Penal Colony of Hades is indigestible to humans, the prisoners were scattered in camps all across the planet with the only source of food being periodic supply shuttles.
  • From Torch of Freedom: after the Battle of Torch, a POW camp is set up on one of Torch's islands. There's no guards on the island itself, and only a few patrol boats in the ocean around it ... but the local sea life will eat just about anything short of rocks, and the surviving StateSec prisoners learn quickly not to try swimming/boating to the mainland.
• Deadly Euphemism: An enemy commander planetside rudely tells Sir Aivars Terekhov (in orbit over the planet with his ships) to depart or she'll kill (more) of the civilian population she is holding on the planet (having previously destroyed several entire cities). After saying, "Why do people like you always think they're more ruthless than people like me?", Terekhov informs her that his "response" to her terms will be arriving "any moment now." A few seconds later, a kinetic strike obliterates her entire headquarters from orbit.
• Dead Man's Switch: in Honor Among Enemies, there's a double version of this; a terrorist has taken over an entire planet, and when Honor tries to liberate it, he reveals that he has bombs planted under major population centres, which he can detonate himself, and will be detonated if she tries to take him out with an orbital strike; he uses this to bargain for safe passage out of the system. When he leaves the planet's orbit, he'll be out of range and can't set them off any more — so he insists on having Honor as a hostage until he can meet a waiting ship. Honor agrees, but brings her own dead man switch; a charge on the outside of their shuttle that will detonate if she doesn't enter a code at regular intervals. Unknown to the terrorist, she has another plan; her 'switch' is concealing her old fashioned gun, undetectable by common modern technology, and when they're out of range she uses it to kill the terrorist.
• Death by Irony:
  • Denver Summervale carefully plans out how he wants to goad Honor into challenging him to a duel, and then kill her slowly with several shots to give her time to realize what's happening. Unfortunately for him, he completely underestimates her, and she uses precisely the same plan to kill him.
  • Admiral Rajampet derides the idea of the Mesan suicide virus... until he falls victim to it. His last thoughts are (pretty much) "Oh, it did exist after all."
  • Brigadier Yucel, who caused the deaths of about half a million people by ordering Orbital Bombardment of major population centers in order to quell a planetary revolt, is killed when her headquarters is struck dead-center by an orbital strike compliments of the Royal Manticoran Navy.
• Death World: Several.
  • Grayson has such high concentration of heavy metals, just breathing the natural air will kill you via lead poisoning long before the lung cancer has time to develop. Inhabitants must live in sealed environments with carefully filtered air; food must be grown either in expensively detoxified soil or in even more expensive (but somewhat less laborious) orbital farms. It is later revealed that even with these measures, the original colonists would never have survived if not for the genetic modification performed on them without their knowledge.
  • The prison planet Hades ("nicknamed" Hell by its inmates, not that that is much different from its actual name) is covered with wildlife that is distinctly Red in Tooth and Claw and the biochemistry of the place is such that humans can not eat the native life. There is exactly one plant on the entire planet that humans can even digest. It contains trace elements that cause brain damage.
  • Guanyin (the original name of the Andermani Empire's capital planet) had undetected bacteria that ate chlorophyll, leading to mass crop failure and famine.
  • There aren't many details about Ndebele and Zulu, the two habitable planets of the Mfecane System. What is know is that they are often referred to as hell-planets, and the first generations of colonists had an 80% infant mortality rate.
  • Sphinx is a relatively minor example, due to the high gravity and its very robust ecosystem which includes a staggering variety of very capable and very dangerous predators. The unusually long year additionally means years of winter at a time, and equally long summers which can become dangerously dry, leading to massive wildfires. Even in Honor's time, much of the planet is still untamed wilderness.
• Decapitation Strike:
  • In The Short Victorious War, Rob S. Pierre's conspiracy hijacks a naval shuttle and carpet-bombs the Haven presidential palace while his entire family and the heads of all the major Legislaturist houses are there. He frames a "rogue element of the People's Navy" for it, which gives him an excuse to purge the Navy of old regime loyalists.
  • This trope is the reason that both Haven and Manticore keep so many of their ships at home during the war, despite how useful they would be fighting on the front. Either could, if they chose, launch a direct assault against their enemy's capital. Haven might survive the loss of their home system, but Manticore absolutely would not, and neither side is willing to launch or invite that sort of winner-take-all gambit. Until Manticore unveils the unstoppable power of their Apollo missiles, which forces Haven to invoke this trope in desperation.
• Declining Promotion:
  • By the current point Sir Horace Harkness is easily qualified to be at least a commander and possibly a junior-grade captain (and gets put in the appropriate slots), but his actual rank is only chief warrant officer.
  • The RMN's Bureau of Personnel is fairly conservative about when it chooses to offer a captaincy to its prospective officers, which means it is a Very Bad Idea for such officers to decline the offer. BuPers figures if you're not ready by the time they're ready, you never will be.
• Deep Cover Agent: Taken to ridiculous extremes by Mesa, whose Long-Range Planning Board plants its agents by first planting their grandparents long before they're ever born.
• Defector from Decadence:
  • As a result of the Deep Cover Agent extremes of Mesa, more than a few Alpha lines have defected when no suitable member of the family is a candidate. Richard Harrington did so when the Harrington relocated to Manticore.
  • Damien Harahap (AKA Firebrand) does this in book 19, especially after bonding with a treecat.
• Deflector Shields:
  • From above and below: Starships are protected by their utterly impenetrable impeller wedges (aka "belly bands"), which use extremely strong gravity to distort space so much that no physical or energy weapon can get through them.
  • From the sides: Starships have weaker (but still formidable) sidewalls. These don't so much block incoming lasers as redirect them, so that some shots that would otherwise be direct hits turn into misses. A starship can open small, temporary holes in its sidewalls through which its own missiles and energy weapons can be fired.
  • From the front and back: Ships have no protection other than their hull armor. In In Enemy Hands, a means was devised to project a "bow wall" or "stern wall" directly in front of or behind a ship — but only one or the other, never both at the same time, and then only if the ship shuts off all acceleration while such protection is present.
  • Space stations and other installations that lack impellers can be protected by an omnidirectional sidewall.
• Delaying Action: A few times, most notably with Rear Admiral Sarnow's battlecruisers against a Peep force of dreadnoughts in A Short Victorious War. Not only did they have to delay them until The Cavalry arrived, but they had to continue to delay them so they would not have time to escape before Admiral Danislav's fleet could pounce on them. Buying that time cost them greatly.
• Democracy Is Bad:
  • This is the view held by the Andermani Empire. From their point of view, any democratic system is far too unreliable and unpredictable in the long term to be trusted. It is noted that the one of the only reasons this works is because the Andermani have a strange trend of getting very competent yet odd rulers. In addition, there is mention that the Empire nearly tore itself apart a few times over the issue of succession.
  • The People's Republic of Haven is shown to be democratic in the worst possible sense, at first. It's controlled by a hereditary oligarchy, but the Legislaturalists maintain their mandate through an exchange of an ever-expanding welfare system for votes. Later, this is replaced by a fascist Committee of Public Safety, which is not democratic, but its power is still based in mob rule.
    That said, the narration notes that there were nations that copied the Haven's welfare system, but actually made it work, and the Haven's fall into the oligarchy is an exception rather than the rule. It's later revealed that Havenites were actually skillfully manipulated into breaking their own system by the Mesan Alignment, seeking to weaken them so they'd be less of an obstacle to their plans of galactic domination.
  • The narration is generally in favor of a restricted, elitist, or at least meritoctatic democracy. Manticore doesn't allow welfare recipients (those who get more in government benefits than they pay in taxes) to vote, and the idea of the government using tax money to give the voters what they want is called "vote-buying" and is repeatedly portrayed as the first step to a nonfunctional People's Republic of Tyranny.
• Depraved Bisexual: From the novella Let's Dance!, the commander of the Casimir slaver depot, Edytá Sokolowska, is said to be into both physical and psychological torture of her "toys" (men and women), including the threat of the prepubescent sons and daughters of said "toys" being given to the station's XO, Julian Watanabe, who is no less of a torturer, if given more to the physical kind.
• Determinator: Honor & Victor Cachat, to name just two.
• Designated Victim: Poor, poor Mr. Buckley. He is Baen's general designated victim.
• Designer Babies: Manpower, Incorporated's hat, both for their products and themselves.
• Didn't See That Coming:
  • In The Short Victorious War, four Peep battlecruisers expecting a lone Manty light cruiser stumble upon the dreadnought HMS Bellerophon, which is on routine rotation home, at close range. Despite the fact that the ship — which hadn't expected to encounter anyone — is currently under the temporary command of a communications officer and self-admitted tactical ignoramus, the disparity of firepower is so great that the result is a Curb-Stomp Battle for the Manties.
    Lt. Commander Avshari: Ms. Wolversham, you are authorized to return fire!
  • Oyster Bay. The Mesans were not using impellers, but their new spider drives. The Manties literally had no way of seeing the MAN coming, despite being always alert and ready.
  • The Spook Duo's survival on Mesa, Jack McBryde's Heel–Face Turn, and the subsequent formation of the Grand Alliance, for the Mesan Alignment.
  • The Spook Duo's return to Mesa, the subsequent trouble they stir up, and Mike Henke arriving in orbit with a fleet of warships once everything has come to a head.
  • Esther McQueen is killed off-camera this way by not realizing Oscar Saint-Just has a nuclear warhead placed in the Octagon's basement in case the military gets uppity and needs to be put down hard.
• Didn't Think This Through: As a routine security measure, Mesa outfits its most sensitive field agents with suicide nanotech to induce death within moments of being taken into custody so they can't be interrogated. As a security measure it's a resounding success. Unfortunately for Mesa, it also makes purging said agents a fairly simple exercise once their enemies catch on to their existence.
• Diplomatic Back Channel:
  • The creation of the Kingdom of Torch occurs during the ceasefire between the Republic of Haven and Manticore, though by this point the High Ridge government's idiotic policies are making a resumption of hostilities more and more likely. Torch, however, was created with people and resources from both star nations (and several others). This, and the fact that Torch's highest military officer is the girlfriend of Haven's best secret agent, and its new queen is the adoptive daughter of one of Manticore's best intelligence operatives, and is also good friends with a member of Manticore's royal family means it starts out with strong ties to both powers. These ties make Torch a natural back channel between the two powers, something that Queen Elizabeth III and President Pritchart both have in the backs of their minds.
  • Late in the series, we learn that Beowulf and Manticore have been maintaining a "black" communications link along with their open ones, for messages that really can't be sent between a Core World of the Solarian League and an independent star monarchy due to politics ... but need to be sent anyway. Beowulf uses the link to warn Manticore about "Operation Raging Justice" — the planned invasion of Manticore by the Solarian Navy.
• Diplomatic Cover Spy:
  • In Mission Of Honor, the new Havenite government is surprised when the Beowulf embassy's naval attaché turns out to be the station chief of their intelligence service only because they actually suspected the commercial attaché of holding that job.
  • Valery Ottweiler, introduced in the Shadows sub-series, is a Mesan diplomat who gets heavily involved in the plan to set up a shooting war between the Solarian League and Manticore.
• Dissimile: Ashes of Victory says that Sphinxian koi actually do look like Terran koi, "allowing for the absence of scales, the extra fins, and the horizontal flukes of the tail".
• Distress Call:
  • Honor Among Enemies has Harrington, in command of HMS Wayfarer, respond to a distress call from RMMS Artemis and HMS Hawkwing, a Manticoran passenger liner and the destroyer escorting her, which are being attacked by a pair of Havenite battlecruisers.
  • In Obligated Service, Commander Greentree is tipped off that something is very wrong when he encounters the Cessation of Communications variant... from the largest shipyard and orbital base in the Grayson home system.
• Divided for Publication:
  • ...but only for translation purposes. The Japanese versions of the Honor Harrington books are split in two starting with the third or fourth book, more with the later volumes.
  • Weber indicated that the 13th Honorverse book, A Rising Thunder, was divided for publication due to being too long for economical hardcover printing and binding. This would not be the first Weber book to which this had happened.
• Doctor, Doctor, Doctor: Most often Admiral Admiral Admiral, but also sometimes Steadholder Steadholder Steadholder or Duke Earl Countess.
• Domed Hometown: Many of the steadings on Grayson feature air-tight domes due to the high presence of heavy metals on the planet. The introduction of advanced new building materials after their alliance with the Manticorans means the Graysons can now build far bigger and stronger domes.
• Don't Make Me Destroy You:
  • The beginning of Mission of Honor, where for the first time Honor can personally express her desire for the war to end.
    "Speaking for myself, as an individual, and not for my Star Empire or my Queen, I implore you to accept Her Majesty's proposal. I've killed too many of your people over the last twenty T-years, and your people have killed too many of mine. Don't make me kill any more, Madame President. Please."
  • In Shadow of Freedom, the Manticoran task forces sent to various Solarian star systems ask the enemy time and again to stand down and avoid unneccessary bloodshed. Of course, most of their targets ignore them and get their asses kicked by the Manticorans' vastly superior weapons tech.
• Doomed by Canon: There are a great deal of historical parallels with the series being Horatio Hornblower IN SPACE!. However, over time the plot goes Off the Rails and several characters Doomed by Canon end up surviving and vice versa, with Napoleon's expy suffering a rather bad fate.
• Doomed Hometown: Blackbird Yard and GNS Ephraim are a classic example in Obligated Service.
• Doom Magnet: Honor repeatedly laments every death that she's caused in the course of her duties, even when they're all justified and may have prevented even more deaths down the line. Nevertheless, due to her tendency to be in the right place at the right time, her casualty count is higher than it is for officers who are even more ruthless than she. Lampshaded in Honor Among Enemies, when a couple of the wash-outs hastily assigned to her Q-ship are overheard complaining about their chances of surviving their mission.
• Dramatic Irony: Constantly, to varying degrees, since the narrative follows scores of characters on a dozen different sides, and none of them ever have perfect intelligence.
  • On Basilisk Station ends with Honor chasing a Havenite spy ship that is trying to call off a Havenite invasion. Honor thinks they are trying to summon an invasion. The captain of the opposing ship is a tad bitter about the irony.
  • In War of Honor, Honor reflects how Chakrabarti, № 2 at the Admirality, is likely to tell Sir Edward Janacek, № 1, whatever he wants to hear. The previous time we heard anything about him before that point, it's Janacek thinking about how Chakrabarti keeps bending his ear with increasingly dire predictions. The next time is his first "onscreen" appearance, and it's him begging Janacek to take his (perfectly sensible) advice or he resigns. He resigns. One of the first things Honor does in the next book is admit she was wrong about him.
  • In The Shadow of Saganami, the slow spread of news across the breadth of the Talbott Cluster makes for quite a few such moments.
    • At the end of Chapter 31, Captain Terekhov of HMS Hexapuma is "looking forward to discovering what new routine, boring, absolutely vital and essential tasks awaited them" upon their arrival in Celebrant ... not knowing that a dispatch boat is on its way to order them to the assistance of the population of Split, who are dealing with a series of terrorist bombings by an isolationist extremist group that began in the latter half of Chapter 14.
    • At one point, during a discussion of recent events, Dame Estelle Matsuko says, "Either way, I'm glad there's not going to be any more spectacular bloodshed and explosions coming out of the Cluster." Smash Cut to Captain Terekhov, who has just hijacked most of the southern patrol and is on his way to force the surrender of the system of Monica in a battle that would wind up getting him knighted (and the Parliamentary Medal of Valor) and end with the entire squadron on the List of Honour. Sorry, Dame Estelle!
  • Grayson Navy Letters Home is written from the POV of a Cecilie Rustin, a female Grayson ensign on her first posting. Obligated Service focuses on Claire LeCroix, her room mate during the same assignment. If you read the former, you know that the latter will involve The Oyster Bay attack on Blackbird Base, where Claire's cousins live and work, and where her previous ship is in drydock. Her cousins and former shipmates are killed in the attack.
• The Dreaded: By the closing stages of the of the war with the Haven during the Pierre government, Harrington became THE boogeyman to the navy and political leadership of the People's Republic. Pierre ruefully admits that half his analysts believe her being present at most of the critical confrontations between Haven and Manticore over the preceding decade, and winning them (even after apparently being killed in one of them, only to reappear later having engineered the greatest prison break in human history), is due to pure chance. The other half, working for a dictatorship that is ideologically atheist, believe she's in league with the Devil.
• The Dreaded Dreadnought: Averted. Even at the beginning of the series, the Lensman Arms Race means Dreadnoughts are only the second-biggest ship class, with the biggest being called superdreadnoughts. By the current book, nobody's building dreadnoughts because they can't survive against a wall of battle populated by SDs anymore, especially with the advent of the podnought.
• Drop Ship: Naval pinnaces are technically armed shuttlecraft, but they serve the role of getting military personnel between ship and planetside, including marines into combat when necessary. They are equipped with variable-geometry aerodynamic control surfaces to aid in this role, making them double as Space Planes. If a larger force needs to be landed in a higher danger situation, then the larger, more heavily armed-and-armored assault shuttles are used instead, though not every ship warrants carrying them in the limited berths of their shuttle bays.
  The difference is in that the pinnaces are basically something of an orbit-capable airliner, lightly armed and armored, and able to fit around a hundred (not battlesuited) people at most; while the assault shuttles are almost LAC-sized bona-fide flying APCs, capable of disembarking of around a company or two of battle-armored Marines with their armor and heavy weaponry, and able to fight a space battle almost on par with the LACs.^note Which are torpedo boats IN SPACE!.
• Drunk Driver: Arnold Giancola is killed by one in At All Costs. This provides innumerable headaches for the government, since "accidents" were a favorite method of the Legislaturalists when they wanted to remove a political opponent and nobody is going to believe that this time it really was an accident, unfortunately timed right as they got information that implicated him in restarting the war — with him dead, they couldn't investigate it, and they couldn't come forward with what information they did have because it would have looked for all the world like they had killed him and made up an excuse. Even the Mesan Alignment is bedeviled by this incident, even though they -- for once -- are completely innocent:
  Albrecht Detweiler: What? We didn't have anything to do with that!!
• Duel to the Death:
  • Duelling with pistols is legally allowed in the Star Kingdom, though frowned upon, with the rules and regulations codified in the Code Duello. This fact plays an important role in Field of Dishonor.
  • Grayson has no Code Duello or legally sanctioned duels, but its constitution does provide for Trial by Combat in the event of Protector's Justice. This resolves itself as duel to the death between the accused and the Protector's Champion, as seen in Flag in Exile.
• Dumb Muscle: The Scrags; how many times do you see Super Soldiers that could not pass a high school entrance exam? Later appearances demonstrate that their problem is less outright stupidity and more their arrogance; they are simply so utterly convinced of their own superiority that they don't bother to think much. Scrags who get over this (particularly the literal Amazon Brigade of Torch) are shown to be quick-thinking and often dangerously clever.
• Dwindling Party:
  • During the jailbreak in In Enemy Hands, a team of three Armsmen and two naval officers is sent to retrieve Honor from her cell. They get picked off (or make Heroic Sacrifices) one by one and only Honor (well, most of her) and Andrew LaFollet survive to join the rest of the escapees.
  • Honor's initial team of Armsmen. One Heroic Sacrifice after another reduces their numbers until only Colonel LaFollet remains from the original group. To keep him out of the line of fire Honor assigns him to guard her son instead of her...and he promptly makes a Heroic Sacrifice to save little Raoul and Honor's mother during the Yawata Strike.
• Dying Moment of Awesome:
  • A Grayson armsman will settle for nothing less than this or a Heroic Sacrifice.
  • The Battle of Manticore kills Admirals Sebastian D'Orville, Theodosia Kuzak, and Alistair McKeon — but not before they hold off the Havenite forces long enough for Eighth Fleet and Honor Harrington to make it home and turn the tide. They gave their lives to save their Queen and kingdom, and the Royal Manticoran Navy will never forget it.

E

• Earth That Used to Be Better: Several characters from other planets end up on Earth at some point during the series. None of them are impressed by what they see: Widespread corruption, a populace divided between deeply cynical elites and credulous masses guided by Bread and Circuses, and displays of spectacular arrogance and deep bigotry. It's not quite a Wretched Hive, but all visitors seen so far prefer their own homeworlds. Even the guy who grew up in a slum. What makes it worse is that at various points in the Back Story, Earth was much worse.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The much discussed grav lance, that was prominently featured in the first book, but is quietly swept under the carpet in subsequent volumes. Weber later admitted to unintentionally making it a sort of a magic bullet, a concept that he abhors personally, and hopes that the readers would forget about it. Of course it was a repeated point in that book that the thing is so ludicrously situational that you'd never get a shot off against anyone who knew about it while the space it takes up cripples standard firepower, and the ending strongly implies Honor got the project killed.
  • In Crown of Slaves it's implied that Governor Barregos is not part of Captain Rozsak's conspiracy while in later books he's Rozsak's co-conspirator.
  • On Basilisk Station has a bit of this. The extremely short-ranged Grav Lance that is one of the central plot elements of the book is gone from later installments, as weapon ranges extend from tens to hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of kilometers, and while Admiral Dame Sonja Hemphill remains quite enamored of her own genius in her later appearances, she is not (unlike in the first book) inclined to take out her frustrations over the failures of systems she developed on the officers trying to employ them in the field.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: To the Manticoran-Havenite wars, at least. The restored Republic of Haven has a duly elected President, fully realized Congress, and an all-over mostly-functional government which has signed a binding peace and mutual defense treaty with the Star Empire of Manticore... but it took two revolutions, a cruel and oppressive regime, millions of deaths (many of them unnecessary), and the most titanic space battle in history up to that point to get them there. Meanwhile, Manticore (and Grayson) has signed a peace and mutual defense treaty with its longtime enemy, has the most skilled, battle-hardened, and technologically-advanced military in all of human-settled space, and is finally on the way to taking down the perpetrators of Oyster Bay — but it took millions of lives, several assassinations, and a titanic battle in their home system that could have been prevented if they'd only known about the Onion sooner to bring them to that point. The Grand Alliance is probably the best thing that could have ever happened to any of the three star nations involved, but it was born in blood, fire, and decades of warfare — which makes its formation all the sweeter.
• Egopolis:
  • A rare involuntary example. Honor spent some time legally dead due to being trapped behind enemy lines without the enemy being aware of it. When she finally makes it back to friendly territory, she is mortified to learn a dozen different projects ended up named after her, including a brand new type of superdreadnought. She manages to get most of them un-named after her, but the Graysons cling to the ship's name — and take glee entirely unbecoming of Godly men such as themselves in passing her around the various military departments, all of whom piously explain why they couldn't possibly change the ship's name. Honor feels terribly sorry for herself. The Graysons can barely restrain themselves from all-out guffaws.
  • More mundane examples include the various steadings of Grayson, all of which are named for their founders, including Harrington Steading.
• Embarrassing Statue: After Honor returns to Alliance space following her stay on Hades, during which the entire galaxy thought she was dead, she is truly embarrassed to find that in her absence not only have they named an entire class of superdreadnoughts after her, they built a statue of her as well. And they refuse to tear it down explaining to her with infinite patience (and suppressed laughter) that they are perfectly willing to rebuild it in the event she orders her armsmen to destroy it. Eventually she just resigns herself to it.
• The Empire: Subverted; the new Star Empire of Manticore and the Andermani Empire may be expansionist monarchies, but they are the nice guys of the galactic political setting — the Manticorans more so than the Andermani, however. Lampshaded in Echoes of Honor by the Prime Minister:
  "Never mind that we've got a participating democracy, as well, and the Peeps don't. [...] They're a 'republic,' and we're a 'kingdom,' and any good oatmeal-brained Solly ideologue knows 'republics' are good guys and 'kingdoms' are bad guys!"
• Enemy Civil War: Haven, multiple times. It is also heavily hinted that the same fate awaits the Solarian League in the near future. The Mesan Alignment is, as of the later books, actively attempting to foster these wars in star nations opposing them.
• Enemy Mine: A couple of instances of this.
  • Alfredo Yu when he defects to Manticore after he realizes he will get blamed for the monumental Peep screw-up at Masada. He eventually ends up an officer in the Grayson Navy, as Yu's personal sense of honor and skill are more than enough for him to find forgiveness for his past actions among a navy so desperate for experienced officers.
  • Warner Caslet, another Peep officer, also defects to Manticore in an impossible situation.
  • Victor Cachat has managed to rope Manticoran secret agent Anton Zilwicki, in addition to a Manticoran warship or two, into doing the Republic's dirty work on more then one occasion. In Mission of Honor Zilwicki and Cachat get proof back to their respective governments of Mesan manipulation and sabotage of the peace talks in order to keep Manticore and Haven shooting at each other. The book ends with a formal decision to ally together against the Solarian League.
  • In Crown of Slaves, Audubon Ballroom and former Scrags, bitter enemies elsewhere, work together with Victor Cachat to handle a situation in Erewhon space involving Manpower, Inc, who are employing Masadan fanatics with Scrags providing muscle.
  • Manticore and Haven themselves manage to bury the hatchet this way. Despite decades of built-up enmity, the one thing they've always had in common is their mutual hatred for genetic slavery. So when it comes out that Manpower orchestrated the entire conflict between them, it becomes the perfect excuse for the two heads of state to not only call a truce, but sign a military alliance in the same breath.
• Energy Weapon:
  • Laser clusters are used for missile defense, having replaced the obsolete autocannon.
  • Larger broadside lasers, plus grasers (gamma-ray lasers), are used for close-range ship-to-ship combat, though the former have fallen out of favor since the Haven-Manticore Wars.^note Lasers were used antebellum because their lower mass allows for more mounts, to protect against attacks by large numbers of smaller ships, but advances in missile technology and doctrine have made such strategies too impractical to be worth designing against.
  • Even missiles are energy weapons on the inside. By the time of the first Haven-Manticore War, contact warheads have been completely supplanted (at least within modern navies) by laser heads, which use laser pumping to focus the energy of the missile's nuclear warhead into x-ray beams that can skewer an enemy vessel at ranges of up to 30,000 km. Although contact warheads have a higher destructive potential than laser warheads, they are disfavored because of how incredibly difficult it is to score effective hits with them. In the rare instances when they do (as Rafe Cardones managed against Saladin thanks to the ineptness of her Masadan crew), the damage they inflict is fearsome.
• Enlightened Self-Interest: Demonstrated by both Manticore and Haven in The Honor of the Queen when they provide technology and funding to several independent planets in the space between their territories (the directly relevant ones being Grayson and Masada, respectively) in order to build them up as allies and forward operating bases for the coming war. It's noted that Haven would've preferred to deal with the Graysons than with the Masadans, but Protector Benjamin didn't like Haven's track record. Manticore was more successful, occupying Masada and later incorporating Grayson Space Navy units into several major battles during the war.
• Entertainingly Wrong:
  • In A Rising Thunder, we learn that despite Manticore & Haven's own belief to the contrary, Mesa actually had nothing to do with Arnold Giancoloa's actions. However, as Benjamin Detweiler tells his father, there's enough circumstantial evidence alongside the use of their killer nanotech by their actual mole, that their theory isn't unsound.
  • In that same scene, Albrecht isn't as angry about the revelation Cachat & Zilwicki were alive to dispute their version of the Green Pines incident as he might be otherwise, because he acknowledges that the fact the evidence favored their initial belief that they had been killed.
  • In more general terms, it's a belief of many Manticore flag officers that in space combat you never get surprised, you just realize some piece of information you overlooked or were kept from seeing.
• Eternal English: English remains the universal language and is largely unchanged due to the use of recordings and standard education materials, but the trope itself is averted in that, when Honor reads a 20th century book to some children in At All Costs, she says that some of the word meanings have changed since it was written.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Basically what drove Jack McBryde's Heel–Face Turn in the Torch of Freedom.
  • Similarly, the People's Republic of Haven considers Space Pirates and Slavers to be a special kind of evil, one that deserves special treatment, which actually is one of the few things they have in common with the Manties.
  • Michael Janvier, Baron High Ridge, may be an aristocratic, self-serving, myopic, elitist, hypocritical, moronic, incompetent, overall not nice person, but even he knows not to look a gift horse in the mouth when a good portion of the Grayson Wall of Battle plows through the Manticoran Wormhole Junction on their way to reinforce Trevor's Star at a moment when the Manticoran Royal Navy literally has no ships to spare, just in time to help defend the system from a Havenite surprise attack. His willingness to let them get away with it is the only reason the Second Manticoran-Havenite War becomes a more prolonged conflict instead of the blitzkrieg everyone thought it would be.
  • And this trope plays a heavy role with the Mesan organized crime syndicates in Cauldron of Ghosts, leading them to throw in with the Kingdom of Torch.
  • Georgia Sakristos is not a nice person. In fact, she started her career by cheerfully selling out a shipload of innocents to slavers and has been responsible for a lot of equally callous actions since. And even after all that, she is still utterly disgusted by Pavel Young.
• Even the Rats Won't Touch It: Even in the future, the only thing worse than RMN emergency rations are Peep e-rats.
• Everybody Knew Already: By the end of The Short Victorious War, Honor learns to her discomfiture that her entire chain of command knows that she's going steady with Paul Tankersley — from the members of her crew on the Nike up to and including Admiral Parks, who chooses her ship to transport Tankersley back to Manticore because of it.
• Everyone Can See It: The relationship between Honor and Hamish by War of Honor.
  Sweet Tester [...] each of them thinks no one in the world — including each other — can tell what's going on. They actually believe that.
  Idiots.
• Everyone Has Standards: Even several Solarian commanders are unwilling to carry out orders to destroy a system's space infrastructure - particularly when it has tens of millions of people living there, and that they cannot be evacuated in time.
• Everything is Big in Texas: Montana. Comes with being a Planet Of Stetsons: huge ranches, huge cattle herds, huge natural features (including a massively oversized Grand Canyon expy)... and huge egos.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good:
  • We finally get to see inside Pavel Young's head in Field of Dishonor, and he is a completely horrible person, and believes that everyone else thinks like he does. He really does not understand the actions of his opponents.
  • The Solarian leaders assume Manticorans are as dishonest and scheming as they are, and consequently make ever-more disastrous foreign policy decisions.
    • Similarly, the oligarchs in charge of the majority of the worlds of the Talbott Cluster think Manticore, with its aristocracy, is just as corrupt as they are, as they simply cannot imagine any "true" constitutional monarchy that has integrity and honor. As such, they choose to interpret Manticore's diplomatic statements and military actions as bluffs and blunders, instead of legitimate. Only when Manticorans begin to live up to their word during the events of The Shadow of Saganami do many of them finally realize that they have been wasting most of their opportunities to negotiate in good faith, and quickly come together to ratify a proper constitution.
  • A variant in Shadow of Freedom. Major Pole of the Solarian Gendarmerie can't comprehend that "neobarbs" might actually be willing to stand up to the invincible Solarian League as a matter of honor with the support of their superiors. He instead comes to the conclusion that the Manticoran captain on the scene needs to succeed in the actions he's currently taken to have any chance of covering his ass with his superiors, since Solarians understand CYA very well.
• Evilutionary Biologist: The people of Beowulf, the premier genetic research and development planet in the galaxy, have strict guidelines in place to make sure they do not cross any moral or ethical lines when it comes to their work on the human genetic code. Because Mesans are, in a nutshell, the rogue Beowulfans who did not like the Beowulf Code, they are composed almost solely of Evilutionary Biologists who hate Beowulf with a passion. According to Weber, the Mesans have a point about undue demonisation of transhumanism that is in the Beowulf Code, but they are wrong in their attempts to prove that to everyone by force.
• Evil Versus Evil: Cauldron of Ghosts, with the Mesan organized crime syndicates taking up arms against their planet's oppressive government. Note that the degree of evil among the mafias varies quite a bit, and most of the well-established gangs practice Pragmatic Villainy (unlike their government, whose brand of evil has been highlighted multiple times as improbably impractical.)
• Exact Eavesdropping: From "Nightfall" in Changer of Worlds. Two characters are preparing evidence so that, if it becomes necessary to remove Esther McQueen, they'll have backup. They spend some considerable time talking about the necessity of hiding this action, since they need McQueen and will for some time yet. The final comment of the conversation (approximately, "We'll need this when we pull the trigger on McQueen") is overheard and passed to McQueen — where it triggers a full revolt. McQueen repeatedly complains that if she'd been given even six more weeks she would really have been ready. The revolt fails, McQueen dies, in the aftermath the government falls — and the entire premise of the first 8-9 books in the series (good monarchy against evil socialist republic) is fundamentally altered. The series is up to 12 books now.
• Exact Words: When confronted with a pirate who's holding a planet's population hostage, Honor negotiates a deal with him, agreeing to a detailed plan by which she and the pirates will leave the planet on a shuttle together, and how she will not give any chase once he's left the system. One of her subordinates notes that, in all the detailed explanation of this agreement, Honor never actually says she's going to let him leave the system.
• Exotic Extended Marriage: Polygamy is pretty much universal on Grayson, as a genetic quirk that allowed them to survive Grayson's harsh environment also skewed the birth rate to three girls for every boy. Allison Harrington notes that as a result, Grayson children have extremely secure childhoods.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: An internal version happens in At All Costs, when Admiral Chin wonders about the strange maneuvers of the Manticoran force that just hypered in behind her. Over the course of several paragraphs of narration, it dawns on her exactly which formation she is looking at...and what they're armed with.
  But if Third Fleet was what they'd just finished destroying, then these people had to be Eighth Fleet, which meant Honor Harrington. And Harrington didn't do things that didn't make sense. So what—?
  Her eyes opened wide in horror.
  "General signal all units!" she shouted, spinning towards her com section. "Hyper out immediately! Repeat, hyper out—"
  But it had taken Genevieve Chin two minutes too long to realize what was happening.
  • This is doubly more powerful if one remembers the First Battle of Hancock Station and the bottomless bag of nasty tricks opened up on poor Genevieve Chin in that fight. Practically, nothing Harrington did at that time made sense to Chin, or anybody else for that matter, given that it went against centuries of accepted combat practice and relied on military hardware so outdated, pretty much everybody forgot about it. And how badly Chin's superior force got battered by those tricks, even before the superdreadnoughts arrived in-system.
  • And triply more powerful when you remember how that battle redefined military thinking in the entire Haven quadrant, by bringing up missile pods back onto the scene.
• Expy: The Five Mandarins, the five Permanent Senior Undersecretaries who lead the Solarian League, have a lot in common with Safehold's Group of Four, also by Weber.
  • Both are groups of The Man Behind the Man, rendering the people who are supposed to be in charge effectively puppets.
  • Both are faced with a smaller enemy who is far more technologically advanced than they are.
  • Both are highly focused on their own survival in the short term, and are thus making decisions that will prove disastrous in the long term.
• Extradimensional Power Source: The "energy-siphon" effect of the impeller drive, which is said to draw power from adjacent hyperspace bands, offsets a good chunk of a ship's power consumption. How this works is not explained, nor is it mentioned very often, since it doesn't have any impact on how things work in the story. The one exception is when ships are traveling along grav waves via Warshawski sail, in which case the siphoning effect is much stronger, making them popular trade lanes for the additional free energy they provide.
• Extra-Dimensional Shortcut: Hyperspace is layered like an onion, with our normal spacetime being the outer layer. The distance between points becomes further compressed as you transit to higher bands, although until Mission of Honor nobody's transited higher than the theta bands and lived to tell the story. Most ships don't go higher than the zeta bands under normal circumstances.
• The Extremist Was Right: Despite the Reign of Terror imposed by the Committee for Public Safety and their Black Shirts in State Sec, Robert S. Pierre's economic reforms of the People's Republic of Haven actually worked, setting the ground work for the Republic of Haven to be reborn.
• Extremophile Lifeforms: The population of Grayson developped resistance to heavy metals poisoning, enabling them to survive on this planet, although with shortened lifespans.
• Eyes Never Lie: All over the place in a world full of stoic, navy poker faces and smooth, evil politicians. The sole exception is Eloise Pritchart, whose eyes tell everyone exactly what she wants everyone to be told. This saves not only her life but her lover's multiple times over. Fortunately for the future Grand Alliance, Honor Harrington doesn't need to rely on her eyes to know when she's telling the truth.
• Eyepatch of Power: Honor loses her left eye in The Honor of the Queen, but it is replaced by a prosthetic that has some superiority despite the imagery from it not seeming as 'real'. The prosthetic is deliberately burned out by a technician aboard Tepes in the book In Enemy Hands, and goes unreplaced for over two years.
  • Honor loses her eye about half way though The Honor of the Queen and so wears an eyepatch for the rest of the novel. She gets the prosthetic eye sometime before the next novel.

F

• Facepalm: In The Honor of the Queen, when Reginald Houseman is making a fool of himself by trying to talk the Graysons into economic cooperation with their mortal enemies, the Masadans, "Ambassador Langtry covered his eyes with one hand ... Langtry's other hand rose to join its fellow over his eyes".
• Failed State: The Silesian Confederacy is a conglomerate of around sixty star systems ostensibly under one banner. In reality, it's so rife with corruption and inept leadership that it is utterly unable to maintain order and security within its borders and its own member worlds are frequently fighting each other. The strongest military presence in the region is usually either the Royal Manticoran Navy or the Andermani Navy, both of which use the Confederacy as a place to send young officers to cut their teeth against the pirates and other troublemakers.
• Failsafe Failure: Averted, the failsafes on critical ship components do not fail unless part of them has just been blown up. This is because the engineers are fully aware of the fact that if the fusion reactors or intertial compensators fail catastrophically, they won't live long enough to try to fix them, so they do a lot of preventative maintenance to make sure this doesn't happen.
• Fake Defector: Horace Harkness, who is knighted because of it.
• False Flag Operation:
  • Haven's plot to take control of the Basilisk System was meant to start with one of these. Their agents provided Medusa's native alien species with primitive firearms and provoked them to attack the local human enclaves, so that Haven could "coincidentally" stumble across the crisis, take control of the planet, and use Manticore's "irresponsibility" to justify not giving it back to them. Unfortunately for Haven, Harrington deduces their plan in time to prevent it from succeeding, and while they deny involvement and claim all the evidence was forged, it's still a huge embarrassment for them on the political stage.
  • A particularly subtle and nasty one is the focus of Shadow of Freedom. the Mesan Alignment is funding various resistance movements in the Verge under the banner of Manticore as a Xanatos Gambit that will leave Manticore stretched too thin supporting people in need or abandoning them and looking like an unreliable and untrustworthy ally. It comes back to bite them, though, when Admiral Khumalo, Baroness Medusa, and Tenth Fleet manage to keep Mesa's promises in Manticore's name.
  • In Cauldron of Ghosts, The Mesan Alignment begins staging high-casualty terrorist attacks targeting citizens on Mesa, pretending to be the Audubon Ballroom acting in support of the Seccies (descendants of freed slaves) and the Slaves. The apex of this is a series of attacks targeting the families of planetary security and law enforcement agencies in order to bring about widespread violent crackdowns, all so that they can fake the deaths of the Alignment conspirators as part of their abandoning Mesa to the Manties and Havenites.
• False Reassurance: In Basilisk, Honor's response to having apparently asked her bosun to look for smugglers to man customs flights:
  "Of course not, Major. This is a Queen's ship. What would we be doing with smugglers on board?"
• Famed In-Story: Honor, to her constant chagrin. Many of the other high-ranking political and military figures are also famous, of course, but they are used to it.
• Fantastic Fighting Style: Several.
  • Honor is a master of coup de vitesse, a synchretic style which has mugged every "hard" martial art in existence for interesting ways to turn humans into bleeding heaps of failure on the floor. Coup de vitesse seems to be the preferred style in the Royal Manticoran Navy.
  • Some mention has been made of the Judo-derived Andermani style "Neue-Stil Handgemenge" (Dog-German for "New Style Hand-to-Hand Combat), the form known to the junior Helen Zilwicki and practiced by Master Tye from "From the Highlands".
  • The Grayson swordsmanship style is an offshoot of kenjutsu that filtered through The Seven Samurai and bounced off a swordsmith who didn't think the katana made much sense as a weapon. It shares several techniques with kendo, but has lost some and has others which are unique. Grayson swords are based on the katana, but have full two-hand hilts, basket-shaped guards and a prominent false edge.
• Fantastic Ship Prefix: Several of the space navies have their own prefixes. Manticore, however, does not; like the United Kingdom's Royal Navy, they use HMS (Her/His Majesty's Ship).
  • Grayson ships are designated as GNS (Grayson Navy Ship).
  • The People's Republic of Haven uses PNS (People's Navy Ship).
  • The Republic of Haven uses RHNS (Republic of Haven Navy Ship).
  • The Andermani Empire uses IANS (Imperial Andermani Navy Ship).
  • Solarian ships are designated SLNS (Solarian League Navy Ship).
  • Mesan warships (the real ones, not the Alignment's various dummy navies) use MANS (Mesan Alignment Navy Ship).
  • Hull classification numbers are similar to current navies with the exceptions of Dreadnoughts (DN) and Super-Dreadnoughts (SD). Later Dreadnoughts built to carry and deploy missile launching pods are designated SD(P). When LAC carriers come along they get the designation CLAC.
• Fantastic Slur: "Genie," for a genetically-engineered person, in A Beautiful Friendship. Honor calls herself one rather casually, so by her time it's possible the word has lost its sting (or become irrelevant given No Transhumanism Allowed). But then, Honor may just have G Word Privileges.
• Fantasy Conflict Counterpart:
  • The series draws a lot of inspiration for its setting and events from The Napoleonic Wars, but with the land battles ported to Space Navy battles. The comparison goes Off the Rails around book nine, at least partly due to the fact that their Napoleon analogue fails in her coup attempt.
  • Naval tactics and architecture, however, are heavily influenced by World War I. "Battleships" in the series are analogous to pre-Dreadnought models, outgunned by, well, dreadnought- and superdreadnought-class vessels, while being too slow to take on battlecruisers. In turn, Admiral Sonja "Horrible" Hemphill seems to be inspired by British Admiral Jackie Fisher, whose brainchild HMS Dreadnought largely was: both were motivated to use new weapons technology to break the stalemates that naval battles tended to devolve to because it was so difficult to force a decisive battle. Assuming competent leadership, either side usually retained the option to withdraw if they were losing, as the Germans did at Jutland, while at the Battle of the Chesapeake Bay the French avoided a direct engagement because they only needed to delay the British from reinforcing Cornwallis at Yorktown. Similar issues are in play at the start of the series, as described during the naval exercises in On Basilisk Station: until Manticore introduced the missile pod (roughly analogous to the introduction of effective naval airpower), it was difficult for either side to do enough damage to win decisively.
  • Honor's actions in The Short Victorious War, assuming command of the fleet after her admiral is incapacitated, rather than having an admiral aboard another ship assume command during a key moment in the pitched battle, is likely based on the actions of US Navy Lieutenant Commander Bruce McCandless aboard the heavy cruiser USS San Francisco (CA-38) during the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal. Like Honor, Commander McCandless was decorated for his actions rather than court martialled. With the death of Admiral Dan Callaghan, Captain Cassin Young, and San Francisco's XO (as well as Admiral Norman Scott aboard USS Atlanta, accidentally struck down by friendly fire from San Francisco, nobody was immediately aware of it in the confusion except a the men who found Scott's body), the US fleet was in disarray. He was not the seniormost surviving officer aboard San Francisco. The senior surviving officer aboard was Lieutenant Commander Herbert Schonland, the ship's Damage Control Officer. Schonland was far too busy keeping the crippled cruiser afloat, and told McCandless to "carry out the Admiral's orders," effectively giving command to McCandless (though necessary, this could have been interpreted as Dereliction of Duty and/or Deserting his Post In the Face of the Enemy for Schonland). When the fighting subsided, Captain Gil Hoover of the light cruiser USS Helena took command of the remaining ships as the senior surviving officer afloat. Though costly, the battle was a victory for the Americans, and McCandless and Schonland's actions saved San Francisco, with both men receiving the Medal of Honor.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Some blatantly obvious, some mixed-and-matched:
  • The Star Kingdom of Manticore is 18th century Britain: Manticore itself is England, Landing is London, and Sphinx and Gryphon are Wales and Scotland, respectively.
  • The People's Republic of Haven is mostly 18th century Revolutionary France — The coup's organizer was named Rob S. Pierre and he formed his new government in a Tennis Court, assisted by Oscar Saint-Just. The government is called the Committee for Public Safety, characters repeatedly refer to his governance as a Reign of Terror, and his capital is Nouveau Paris. In the later books, after yet another revolution, the PRH has returned to their original state structure, closely modeled on the USA. According to Weber, this all was supposed to be a cautionary parallel of the USA turned into a welfare state. He also admitted, much later on, that he exploited the Revolutionary France parallels to distract readers into thinking they did know where the story was going — and then he nuked Napoleon....
  • The Andermani Empire is explicitly modeled on the Kingdom of Prussia. They were founded by a guy who thought he was the reincarnation of Frederick the Great, to the point of running around in full Prussian military uniform. Just the first in a line of loony, yet competent, emperors. The vast majority of the population is ethnically Chinese, including the royal family whose members sport names like "Chien-Lu Anderman, Herzog von Rabenstrange".
  • Grayson admits that it's Meiji Japan, complete with kudzu, but Protector Benjamin explains that the analogy only goes so far. It turns out that they based large parts of their pre-industrial society on what little fiction they brought with them, including Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai. They still love baseball, though, which is reflective of their other influence being American. They are also one of the last planets to still use neckties, as well as US Air Force style uniforms for their space navy complete with clouds and thunderbolts for field officers. This is commented on as anachronistic, as obviously Space Is an Ocean and should have uniforms to match.
  • The Silesian Confederacy is a nice pastiche of the worst parts of the Third World in terms of corruption, ineffectual government, and generally being a very bad place to be, as well as the actual Silesia and its role in history between France, England, Prussia, and Austria.
  • The planet Montana which is, well, exactly what it sounds like as a counterpart culture, in an idealized version of the US "Old West".
  • The Solarian League has been explicitly said to be too vast for any historical comparison^note by comparison, Weber has said that if the Solarian League was the U.S., then Haven and Manticore might be individual counties in California, but the ruling group of bureaucrats has been nicknamed in universe "Mandarins", a clear allusion to the corruption and stagnation China has suffered in the past. There are also some similarities to the U.S. under the Articles of Confederation^note  the strong sovereignty of the member states, the need for unanimity by the delegates, the inability of the central government to directly raise tax revenue (forcing it to rely on trade tariffs), and its replacement by a new Constitution at the end of Uncompromising Honor.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: The Honorverse rests on three main technologies which, together, enable the extensive interstellar infrastructure that connects the galaxy during the period in which the books are set.
  • The first to be discovered was Hyperspace, of the "compressed space" variety, in which there are multiple "bands" of hyperspace where spacial distances are shorter relative to normal space. Higher bands have higher compression, and are thus faster, but also more dangerous to travel. This made deep space travel possible, though far from convenient, as ships still required massive amounts of fuel to reach even the lowest hyperspace band. The first wave of Sleeper Starships left Earth during this period.
  • The second technology was the impeller drive, which provides a far more powerful and efficient mode of acceleration over traditional reaction drives. The catch was that impeller ships in hyperspace had a bad habit of vanishing without a trace, which meant their use was limited to intrasystem travel and exploration by crews as crazy as they were well-paid.^note Small impeller ships of people willing to bear the risk would scout for systems worth colonizing and sell the information to interested parties for lots of money. The buyer would then send a colony ship the slow, but safe way. The disappearances remained a mystery until...
  • ...it was discovered that hyperspace contains invisible gravity waves that react violently with normal impeller wedges. The Warshawski sail, an impeller drive modification named for the scientist who invented it, turns these grav waves from deadly, impermeable obstacles into Hyperspace Lanes on which ships can travel faster than ever before, ushering in a golden age of (reasonably) safe and affordable travel throughout the known galaxy.
• The Federation: Deconstructed with the Solarian League. The Empire of Manticore is shaping up to be a real one, as is the Republic of Haven.
  • The federal structure of the new Star Empire of Manticore is described at some length in Storm from the Shadows, as well as in the new companion volume House of Steel.
• Feminist Fantasy: The more-or-less complete gender equality of Manticore, Haven and most other star nations is lampshaded by Grayson's still heavily-patriarchal, though getting less so, society. One of the most prominent demonstrations of this is the way characters, both male and female, automatically assign their own gender pronouns to unknown or hypothetical individuals (barring a few exceptions in the first book). Gender issues also play a major role in several plots, notably The Honor of the Queen (where Honor Harrington trashes ridiculously evil Straw Misogynist Hebrew Bible fundamentalists).
• Feudal Future:
  • Manticore has an official aristocracy, but many of its titles stem from intellectual property rights and corporate ownership. Only a fraction of the peerage have titles based on direct property ownership.
  • The Anderman Empire has a landed aristocracy based on Prussia and greater German territory from the eighteenth century.
  • Grayson aristocracy is descended from traditions of the Dutch Republic, with nobles enabled to act in the Protector's absence, despite its primary cultural influences of the American South and isolationist Japan.
  • Haven had a declared aristocracy, but its Legislaturalist clans were not bound by property or titles, but political influence.
• Fictional Accent: In the series, a number of accents are noted: The crisp accent of Sphinx, the soft slow accent of Grayson, the upper-class Legislaturist and lower-class Doleist accents of Haven, and the affected drawl of certain Manticorian aristocrats, among others.
• Fictional Geneva Conventions: There is a body of interstellar law that, like the real Geneva Conventions, most star nations prefer to adhere to to avoid political fallout, particularly from the Solarian League. A few are described specifically.
  • The Deneb Accords most closely resemble the Real Life Geneva Conventions, in that they outline the expected conduct of two nations at war, and especially the treatment of prisoners of war. Most star nations are signatories, exceptions being the Obviously Evil ones like Mesa and those too small or isolated to wage war in the first place.
  • The Eridani Edict forbids the indiscriminate bombing of defenseless planets without an invitation to surrender. Since it is so easy for a space fleet to bomb an entire population into oblivion, no sane government would refuse such an offer.^note Even if they do, the Edict doesn't permit wholesale slaughter, but it does permit the destruction of legitimate military and command targets as long as collateral damage is minimized. The idea is to ensure a planet's leadership cannot take advantage of an invader's goodwill by using civilians as human shields. It differs from the Deneb Accords in that it is not an interstellar agreement, but a unilateral declaration by the Solarian League that they will personally destroy any individual or government who violates it, intentionally or not. It doesn't say what should happen if they themselves violate the Edict, but surely the mighty Solarian League would never stoop so low... right?
  • The Cherwell Convention is a mostly universally accepted rule that legally equates slavery with piracy (which in most places is a capital crime). Of particular note is the Equipment Clause, which states that any ship equipped for transporting prisoners must be under the flag of a legitimate government/police agency with proper documentation, otherwise it is presumed to be a slaver. Though they don't agree on much, Manticore and Haven both enforce this clause religiously, much to the annoyance of the more corrupt galactic functionaries who profit from the slave trade.
• Fighting for a Homeland: The Peoples Navy in Exile, comprised of PRH warships that remain loyal to the Committee for Public Safety and plan to one day retake Haven from the current Republic government.
• Finger Firearms: A stealthy, emergency-only version. Honor's cybernetic arm packs a pulser (essentially a high-tech gauss pistol) concealed inside her index finger. Firing it blasts the fingertip off.
• Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon:
  • Chase weapons on ships of the wall are spinal mounts that larger than most of their broadside armaments.
  • Spine-mounted grasers on the later generations of LACs.
  • Roland-class destroyers mounted all 12 of their missile tubes in "chase" configuration, 6 of them each fore and aft, due to space restrictions imposed by the larger missiles.
• Flechette Storm: Pulser weapons function like this. Instead of using combustion-driven slugs like conventional firearms, they use grav-pulses to launch miniature darts at high velocity with an extreme rate of fire. The darts themselves come in multiple types, depending on the tactical situation: explosive darts are common for general combat, armor-piercing darts for dealing with hard targets like Powered Armor, and low-penetration "crumple" darts for situations where over-penetration is a problem such as during a space-born Boarding Party.
• Floating Head Syndrome: Most of the book covers (Storm from the Shadows being a particularly good example) would tend to suggest that the Royal Manticoran Navy is at war with the ghost of Honor Harrington's ginormous floating head. Even in the books where she has only a cameo appearance.
• Fluffy the Terrible: HMS Hexapuma, a heavy cruiser affectionately known by its crew as the Nasty Kitty.
• Flying Car: All over the place thanks to countergrav technology. Aircars are a common means of transport on any reasonably advanced planet, and even ground cars use countergrav to negate their weight and effectively float.
• For the Evulz: The Mesan Alignment's entire motive for their centuries-old conspiracy is to force slavery and involuntary genetic engineering on people... despite their own leaders acknowledging among themselves that their system is less efficient than democracy and free-market capitalism. So they actually run at a loss so they can have more tyranny and slavery.
  • Zigzagged. The real motive for the Mesan Alignment's conspiracy (the evil one as well as the Benevolent Conspiracy of the same name) is to make genetic engineering legal. The evil Alignment's other real motive, according to its titular leaders the Dettweilers, is to split humanity into a number of different species, one of which would be bred specifically to lead. The slavery is the third factor, but it's implied the Dettweilers did not come up with that; it was instead planted by Manpower, Inc., whose root motive is safeguarding corporate profits.
• Foregone Conclusion: I Will Build My House Of Steel focuses on Roger Winton through his military career as the Crown Prince of Manticore, and later his political career as he takes the throne after his mother's death. Much is made of the fact that he will have a long life to enact the changes Manticore needs to prepare for the oncoming war against Haven, as well as to spend time with his children. Anyone familiar at all with Queen Elizabeth's backstory will know that Roger is assassinated when his children are still in their teens, and before he can finish his preparations for war with Haven.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In Crown of Slaves: Ruth Winton's security detail discusses the difficulties of protecting her on her trip to Erewhon, and they mention receiving medals for their bravery in risking their lives to save hers. The officers discussing the medals receive them. Posthumously. Also, the discussion of how Berry would make a good Queen.
  • While LAC usage as parasite craft first properly came up in Honor Among Enemies and full CLACs only appeared afterwards, the idea of using them as riders adjunct to a hyper-capable carrier could be seen all the way back in Honor of the Queen, albeit being towed rather than internally stowed; it just took several books before the technology to make an LAC that could actually pose a threat to a big ship came about.
  • In The Short Victorious War, Admiral Mark Sarnow notes that if Honor had been given a Manticoran peerage that accurately reflected her Grayson title as Steadholder Harrington, she'd have been a duchess, not a mere countess. Some six books later, she does indeed become Duchess Harrington.
  • In Flag in Exile, Rear Admiral Thomas Theisman thinks, "The universe... was not precisely overrunning with fairness, but it did seem that what went around came around. A point the Committee of Public Safety might want to bear in mind." This is four and a half books before Admiral of the Fleet Thomas Theisman puts an end to the Committee of Public Safety with a pulser dart through Oscar Saint-Just's head.
  • At the end of Ashes, the Queen asks the Opposition to support the current gov't and interim Prime Minister at least until the war is over. They refuse, and the Queen promises revenge and says that they will "rue this day". They become the new Gov't.
    • One book and several in-universe years later, the truce with Haven falls apart, the Prime Minister goes to her to ask to form a new government. In part for the greater support, in part to spread the blame. The reigning monarch, for the first time in Manticoran history, refuses, leaving him to either continue and take the blame or resign in disgrace. (He resigns.)
  • When examining herself in a mirror in War of Honor, Georgia Young briefly sticks out her tongue. This comes across as a little strange given what readers know of her character by that point...but it makes perfect sense once you know that she's a former genetic slave. ^note  Genetic slaves typically have a marking number encoded on their tongues. Many escaped slaves display it as a point of pride
  • In War of Honor, an encounter between Honor and Andermani admiral Rabenstrange (cousin of the Andermani Emperor) has to take place without Honor's armsmen present, referring to an Andermani marine who had, with no warning, tried to kill the Emperor's younger brother and his family. Later in the timeline, it is revealed that the Mesan Alignment has a nanotech virus capable of taking over anyone's motor control and force them to do something.
  • In At All Costs, Admiral Truman's task force runs into a trap laid by a rather sneaky Havenite defense CO using a very limited number of system defense pods in a very effective way. Mike Henke, as one of Truman's squadron commanders, muses that she doesn't want to think about what somebody as sneaky as that enemy CO could do if she actually had enough pods. She finds out exactly what such a sneaky opponent can do a bit later in the book, at the Battle of Solon. It involves most of her squadron being destroyed and an extended stay in a Havenite military hospital as a POW.
  • In Mission of Honor, White Haven refers to the Solarian fleet led by Sandra Crandall as having been meant as a "Pearl Harbor attack." Just a couple of chapters later, when "Operation Oyster Bay" kicks off, Manticore learns what a "Pearl Harbor attack" really is.
  • In Mission of Honor, certain Solarian Frontier Fleet contingency plans are mentioned, such as "Case Fabius" (peacekeeping operations by the Fleet that "accidentally" destroy orbital infrastructure as a way of applying pressure to a recalcitrant protectorate system) or "Case Buccaneer" (false-flag commerce raiding by Fleet units as an excuse to invade a Verge system and reduce it to a protectorate). After the League Navy repeatedly demonstrates its utter inability to harm the Manticorian Alliance navy in straight-up combat, the Battle Fleet begins Operation Buccaneer (commerce and infrastructure raiding of neutral Verge systems suspected of trading with the Manticorian Alliance), followed by Operation Fabius (raid on Beowulf with the intention of destroying its orbital infrastructure).
• Forgotten Fallen Friend: Averted just as hard as Weber can possibly manage. Any prominent supporting character killed in the course of the plot will still be remembered, sometimes more than a dozen books later. It's yet another way Weber underscores that War Is Hell, and that losing friends, family, and comrades takes its toll on the survivors.
  • If Honor Harrington owns, governs or is otherwise connected with anything that she can rename after a fallen friend, she will.
• Forgotten Superweapon: The grav lance as seen in On Basilisk Station. It got a mention in a short story set right afterward and then vanished forever. When posters to the Baen's Bar discussion forums about Honorverse ship technology mentioned this, as well as coming up with various innovative ways in which such a device could be used, Weber admitted that he had not fully thought through all the game-breaking implications such a weapon would have to space naval combat in his universe when he came up with it, and now rather hoped people would just forget about it. Other posts of his note that Manty wallers do mount grav lances in their broadsides; what was radical about it in Basilisk was "the idea of trying such a mass intensive weapon in a CL hull when it can be used only under extremely unusual circumstances even by a capital ship". In addition, from a Watsonian perspective, Manticoran naval tactics have evolved to prioritize the fact that their missiles outrange everybody else's (even Haven's, who are doing a decent job of keeping up in the Lensman Arms Race), allowing them to destroy entire fleets without taking a single casualty themselves (see: Battle of Spindle). A whites-of-their-eyes energy weapon has even less use to them under such circumstances, turning something that was already Awesome, but Impractical even more so.
• Former Regime Personnel: A lot of former People's Navy and StateSec ships wound up as mercenaries or pirates, many thanks to having a pulser dart awaiting them for their actions under the previous Havenite government.
• For the Evulz: The Mesan Alignment's entire motive for their centuries-old conspiracy is to force slavery and genetic engineering on humanity... despite their own leaders acknowledging among themselves that their slavery system is less efficient than free-market capitalism. So they actually run at a loss so they can have more tyranny and slavery.
• Four Lines, All Waiting:
  • The first few books had Havenite viewpoint characters (including series anchor Thomas Theisman), but primarily as counterpoints to Honor's narrative. The fourth officially moved to Two Lines, giving Haven's side of the war on a regular basis. Then we basically skipped Three and went straight to Four with the addition of vewpoints from Solarian and Mesan characters. Not coincidentally, the story got more complicated.
  • The series has always been very patient about spinning out plot lines. Hamish Alexander, for instance, is introduced as a narrator in the first book but doesn't even meet Honor for the first time ("on-screen" at least) until the very last pages of the second.
• Frontline General: Admirals always lead battles from the flag bridge of one of the ships in their fleet, usually the largest. Justified because light delay would make commanding from a planet or base at best inefficient and at worst impossible.
• FTL Test Blunder: While hyperspace was already known for centuries at that point, Dr. Joseph Buckley believed that his newly invented gravitic impeller drive could make travel through it both a lot faster and safer. With the fortune earned from his numerous patents he built a test ship and took it on its first journey. That was how humanity first learned about what happens when an impeller wedge makes contact with a standing gravity wave. It took one of Buckley's surviving colleagues making significant modifications to his design to make impeller-powered hyper travel feasible and Buckley's fate has remained proverbial as an object lesson in "look before you leap" ever since.
• Fun with Acronyms: In Echoes of Honor, it is said that Commanding Officer, Light Attack Craft sounds too much like "colic", but no one wanted Commanding Officer, Wing either.
• Funetik Aksent: Michael Oversteegen's aristocratic Manticoran accent verges slightly into this territory, suggesting that for all the Star Kingdom's similarity to 18th Century Britain, an upper-class Manticoran accent sounds rather like a Southern drawl.
• Furnace Body Disposal: Anton Zilwicki in the short story From the Highlands in the titular anthology "Changer of Worlds" does this. First, he hacks into his apartment building's garbage disintegrator logs to make sure the the kidnappers who took his daughter didn't just... dispose of her. Then, he disables the logs (and attached alarms) because he knows he'll be needing to use the system for this very purpose shortly...
• Future Slang:
  • Or rather, future military terminology. "Ship of the Wall" instead of "Ship of the Line", etc. Space is 3-dimensional; on the ocean, a battle line is a line of ships (hence "ship of the line") turned to give maximum cannon cover, while in space, ships can not only line up horizontally, but also vertically, providing a complete wall of cannon cover.
  • A number of current-day expressions are seen in Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp" form: e.g. "paper hexapuma" instead of paper tiger, "loose warhead" instead of loose cannon.
  • Averted in some other instances. For example, non-coms that become commissioned officers through Officer Candidate School are still called mustangs.

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