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    G 
  • Galactic Superpower: The Solarian League, at least until Uncompromising Honor.
  • Gambit Pileup:
    • Torch of Freedom, although by April 1922 p.d. there are still too few people to understand all the implication of what has just happened.
    • Shadow of Victory, ending in November 1922, is even more of this, as it concludes on Mesa, amidst the nuclear holocaust triggered by Albrecht Detweiler as a final note of the Houdini plan, and all the gambits in the extended Rashomon-sequence of the recent books coming to a head.
  • Game Changer: The new technologies and tactics developed in the Haven/Manticore wars utterly destroy the naval status quo, rendering tactical and strategic doctrines that had remained largely unchanged for over a century obsolete practically overnight. Certain developments by Mesa note  are likely to have a similar effect once their ramifications are fully understood.
  • Gender-Blender Name:
    • Many female officers go by male versions of their given names. Michelle "Mike" Henke. Harriet "Harry" Benson. There is also a male officer, Gervais Winton Erwin Neville Archer, who goes by Gwen. This, of course, only adds to the Viewer Gender Confusion.
    • Emperor Gustav VII averted a potential succession crisis and possible civil war in the Andermani Empire by having herself legally declared a man to get around the Empire's males-only line of succession. She went on to rule for 38 years and is generally regarded as one of the Empire's best rulers.
  • Gender Rarity Value: Unintended consequences of genetic engineering undertaken shortly after landing on the planet Grayson means that the Graysons have a birth-rate skewed 3:1 in favor of female births. Women have few rights on Grayson, and none on Masada, with their primary duties the "traditional" role of wife and mother.
  • General Failure:
    • On Hades, Honor is convinced by her subordinates to present herself as a Grayson officer rather than a Manticoran one, since she has a much higher rank in the GSN (Fleet Admiral) than in the RMN (Commodore) and won't have to yield her command to any other Allied flag officers they liberate from the prison camps. (Not because she wants to subvert the chain of command, but because the delicate trust she has built with her Ragtag Bunch of Misfits would collapse were she replaced by a total stranger.) She feels awkward about this at first, even though it's perfectly legal... until she meets Rear Admiral Styles, a contemptible coward of an officer who was captured early in the war from being unprepared for Haven's invasion and is more concerned with saving himself than anyone else on Hades. He spends all of his time trying to undermine Honor's authority because, as a petty-minded person, he assumes she is flaunting her Grayson rank for the same petty reasons. No one sheds a tear when Honor finally snaps and places him under arrest for insubordination.
    • If one had to describe the second Janacek Admiralty in War of Honor in a single trope, this would be it. Incompetents promoted to critical posts based on their political reliability, competent officers beached for having doubts about the admiralty's disastrous policies, a First Lord who is all too willing to let his personal antipathy for said competent officers overrule any bit of actual sense he might have and a naval intelligence apparatus more concerned with looking good than with generating actual intelligence. They lasted exactly one book (roughly four years) and effectively did more damage to the Star Kingdom of Manticore than any external enemy.
    • Solarian military is this squared. With its stupenduous corruption, rampant nepotism, political appointees galore, incompetent lickspittie subordinates, rare competent officers marginalized and ignored, snail-pace development and obsolete hardware, its sheer size and institutional inertia are the only reasons the League lasted as long as it did.
  • General Ripper:
    • Solarian Admiral Josef Byng from Storm from the Shadows, who takes the traditional Solly scorn for "neobarbs" to new heights, such as having an itchy trigger finger where Manticore is concerned. He becomes an Unwitting Pawn for the Mesan Alignment.
    • Solarian Fleet Admiral Sandra Crandall who, like Admiral Byng, has a disgust and contempt for the Manticoran Navy. Whereas Byng was only able to bring three squadrons of battlecruisers along on his personal vendetta, Admiral Crandall brought nine squadrons of superdreadnoughts with her, and wound up following right in Byng's path.
    • Solarian Gendarmerie Brigadiernote  Francisca Yucel is an enforcer given to breaking heads first, and asking the questions later. She orders an orbital kinetic bombardment of rebel towns and locks thousands of hostages in a stadium only to "make an example".
    • Kapitän der Sterne Guangfu Gortz of the IAN is an anti-Manticoran hardliner. When he discovers HMS Jessica Epps stopping what appears to be an Andermani merchantman, he moves to intervene. Reasonable enough, except he is clearly only looking for an excuse to start a fight. He is deaf to Captain Ferrero's evidence that the merchantman is a slaver running with a false transponder code and misinterprets (perhaps deliberately) her warning shot as an attack on the merchie and destroys her ship (getting his own wrecked in the process).
    • Gortz's station commander, Admiral Graf von Sternhafen, was also complicit in provoking Manticore. When the more level-headed Großadmiral Herzog von Rabenstrange arrives to replace him, Sternhafen finds himself on the business end of a "The Reason You Suck" Speech for his inept handling of the situation. By choosing to assume the Manties were in the wrong instead of doing his due diligence, he makes a fool of the Empire when it becomes obvious that Jessica Epps was right about the slaver, which either Gortz or Sternhafen could have easily ascertained if they hadn't let themselves be blinded by their hate for the Manties.
  • Generation Ship: Before the invention of cryonic sleeper ships, hyperspace travel and Warshawski sails, humanity used slower-than-light generation ships to colonize other star systems. The first ship Prometheus left the Solar System in AD 2103, marking the begin of the Diaspora of Man and new dating system.
  • Genius Bruiser:
    • Kevin Usher acts like a drunken thug of a Space Marine, but in addition to his strength he has a keen mind that ultimately gets him a job as the head of the reformed Republic of Haven's internal security agency.
    • Honor to a certain degree (six-feet-two, very physically fit, and a eighth-degree (out of 9) black belt in a form of unarmed combat).
    • Anton Zilwicki is perhaps the single most extreme example, being both a (three-times) gold medalist in the Manticoran equivalent of the Olympics for Greco-Roman wrestling, a Heavy Worlder with such a massive build that he can literally tear a Scrag limb from limb with only moderate effort, and one of the greatest computer hackers and intelligence agents in known space.
    • Sir Horace Harkness is known for getting in brawls with entire bars full of marines, but when so inclined, can hack through almost any computer system with relative ease.
  • Genius Cripple: Emily Alexander. A triplegic for decades, and easily THE one most shrewd mind in the whole kingdom. Sometimes she looks just like Stephen Hawking's expy of sorts, only with politics and drama instead of physics.
  • "Get Out of Jail Free" Card: Kevin Usher, head of Haven's FIA, asks for and receives a presidential pardon for any crimes one of his agents commits in running a "black" investigation of possible treason by Secretary of State Giancola.
  • Glass Cannon:
    • Honor's first cruiser, HMS Fearless was refitted with weapons that would allow it to kill far bigger ships. But the weapon's short range and the lack of any decent defenses resulted in a single resounding success during the first fleet exercise, and getting 'destroyed' in every exercise thereafter once the opponents had realized the threat and decided to give some payback for the first success.
    • The new Manticoran LACs introduced in In Enemy Hands are armed with battlecruiser grade grasers, but they are not very survivable should an opponent decide to focus on them; it is said that any LAC which is hit by a bigger craft will be destroyed. In universe, LACs in general are described as "eggshells armed with sledgehammers".
    • Pod-layer ships in general are this compared to their traditional equivalents due to having to be built with a hollow core, particularly the BC(P). This eventually leads to the development of the Nike-class battlecruiser which was designed as a deliberate aversion of the trope and does very well indeed in situations where endurance is called for.
    • The Roland-class ships can take out battlecruisers with their 45-megaton tipped missiles but they have no more ability to withstand punishment than any class of destroyer.
  • The Good Chancellor: Chancellor Prestwick of Grayson.
  • Good Girls Avoid Abortion: This is part of the Beowulf Code, which is the defining code of biomedical ethics throughout most of the galaxy.note 
  • The Good Kingdom: Subverted; far from being the political Butt-Monkey, anyone who attacks the Star Kingdom of Manticore is in for a world of hurt. It is now the Star Empire of Manticore, upon the formal incorporation of San Martin, the Talbott Quadrant, and half of Silesia.
  • Good Republic, Evil Empire: Not so much subverted as demolished with comparisons of the democratic monarchy of the Star Empire of Manticore to the totalitarian oligarchy style government of the People's Republic of Haven and the Solarian League. The trope is also referenced in-universe as one of the problems Manticore has in its war against Haven: Solarians tend to automatically think in this trope, and though the League is neutral, public opinion skews against Manticore.
  • Good Versus Good: The restored Republic of Haven vs. the Star Kingdom of Manticore, to the point where it is actually heartbreaking as readers grieve for both sides and can't find it in them to cheer — what's good for one invariably hurts the other. Until the Grand Alliance, that is...
  • Go Out with a Smile: Emily Alexander-Harrington dies this way, while telling Honor she loves her.
  • Got Me Doing It: In A Rising Thunder, one of the civilian bureaucrats in charge of the Solarian League's inner monologue laments a local reporter dubbing him and the other bureaucrats the "Five Mandarins," and how it's caught on. A handful of chapters later, his narration refers to them as Mandarins, then stops to add, "Dammit, now I'm using it."
  • Government Drug Enforcement: Manpower, Inc. uses a combination of genetic engineering and powerful medication to control a population of "genetic slaves" to do manual labor, serve as super soldiers, and act as sex slaves. Also, it is heavily hinted that the People's Republic of Haven used drugs in the drinking water and food supply to keep a lid on rebellious proles in their welfare state gone wild.
  • Grand Theft Me: The Mesan Alignment assassin nanobots are a limited form of this, combined with And I Must Scream. An altered subject is given a specific trigger for a limited set of actions that their body will compulsively obey regardless of that person's wishes; most frequently this is done to force someone to commit suicide or to assassinate a high-level target. Honor is nearly made a victim when her flag lieutenant, so altered, opens fire on the bridge.
  • Great Escape: Honor Harrington is responsible for one of the grandest examples on record; she managed to take over a whole prison planet and made it back to friendly space with half a million freed inmates.
  • The Great Exterminator: The planet formerly known as Kuan Yin—after the Chinese goddess of mercy—turned out to be infested with a native bacterium that ruthlessly devoured Terran chlorophyll. The settlers were saved from starvation by the mercenary Gustav Anderman, who brought in offworld scientists to develop crops that were resistant to the disease in exchange for being named their monarch. The Anderman dynasty has ruled an empire from what is now known as New Berlin ever since.
  • Great Offscreen War: Earth's "Final War" many centuries before the current timeline, where the planet was nearly rendered completely uninhabitable until several colonies sent aid to repair the damage. Prejudice against Genetic Engineering is due to the rampant use of it during the war. Skrags are merely the only surviving human mods that bred true.
  • Grew a Spine: In On Basilisk Station, Alistair McKeon has a strange variety. He proposes a moral course which is promptly discarded as wrong, but the very act of making an independent proposal against Honor and arguing for it was a key in developing the dynamic between the characters.
  • Grey-and-Gray Morality: Although it is not evident in the first book, by the second book we get the first sympathetic Havenite characters, and the series has been trending this way since then, with Manticore as A Lighter Shade of Grey. By the beginning of War of Honor, the two sides are both in about the same place in terms of morality, and in Mission of Honor the two nations sign a peace treaty and military alliance, forming the Grand Alliance against the Solarian League and Mesa.
  • Group-Identifying Feature: In this series, genetic slaves have ID codes gene-engineered to grow on their tongues. Freed former slaves will sometimes stick out their tongues, either as The Reveal or to make a point.
  • Guns Akimbo: Jeremy X dual-wields pistols when engaging Scrags in the novella From the Highlands.

    H 
  • Hand Cannon: In a world of sleek 'Pulsers', Honor's antiquated M1911A1 .45 Pistol definitely counts, and is even referred to verbatim as such in Honor Amongst Enemies. It's also mentioned to be an effective tool of psychological warfare, since the literally deafening roar when it fires can come as quite a shock for anyone accustomed to the pew-pew-pew of Pulse-weapons.
  • Happily Married: Despite all the horrors Weber throws at his characters, this is actually par for the course. Examples include Hamish and Emily Alexander (and later Honor happily married to both Hamish and Emily Alexander-Harrington), Alfred and Allison Harrington, Aivars and Sinead Terekhov, Elizabeth and Justin Winton, and many, many others, including Javier Giscard and Eloise Pritchart, in fact if not in name.
  • Hard-Work Montage:
    • Used in On Basilisk Station, when the junior officers of Fearless are shown enforcing trade regulations, catching smugglers, regulating the planetary orbitals, and generally making their presence known.
    • In Honor Among Enemies we see repair crews working frantically to fix battle damage before the next enemy ship arrives. Tragically, after a heroic effort, they fix it just in time for them all to be killed when a rogue missile hits them.
  • Hate Sink: Between the Sleazy Politicians Manticore has to deal with, the Straw Misogynist Masadans (and a few Grayson fanatics), Peep zealots, A significant number of Mesan planetary authorities, arguably the Detweiler brothers by the latest book, and some Solarian League politicians, businessmen and soldiers, there’s quite a few out there but the two biggest (taking that title away from the previously reigning High Ridge government officials) are probably Malachi Aburzzi and Nathan MacArtney of the Mandarins, both of whom lack the barest moments of decency (unlike their three fellows) and never seem to do anything but insult Manticore, talk about their willingness to sacrifice their own men with no remorse and kowtow to corporate interests without a shred of introspection or empathy about the millions who’ve died because of their arrogance. Their comeuppance at the end of Uncompromising Honor is richly satisfying, even if it’s possible to feel some pity for the more hesitant or pragmatic colleagues dragged down with them.
  • Heavy Worlder: Honor Harrington and others from Sphinx (1.35 g). Ramirez and others from San Martin (2.7 g). The series falls under the "heavy worlders are larger" version of this trope, except for the Meyerdahl First Wavers, which were genetically modified not to need additional bulk for additional strain.
  • Heel–Face Revolving Door: Pat Givens is of the opinion that agent provcateur Firebrand must have vertigo from all the times he's been turned.
  • Heel–Face Turn: As a consequence of a large amount of Character Development (and characters, of course), there is lot of it in the series.
    • Klaus Hauptman went from the typical arrogant jerkass in the first book, through just some jerkass who learned to tread lightly where Honor is concerned later, through Jerk with a Heart of Gold in the Honor Among Enemies, to the outright hero (although sadly sidelined) in the latest books. It had required a lot of Character Development and Calling the Old Man Out on his daughter part, though.
    • Havenites are probably the most well known example in the series, given that they have had not one, but two major revolutions in just 20 years, with several smaller coups in between, and the latest bunch of revolutionaries is significantly better than others.
    • Played with regarding Samiha Lababibi in The Shadow of Saganami, then-President of the planet Spindle in the Talbott Quadrant. She's among the representatives to the Talbott Constitutional Convention that believe that delaying in the annexation effort will allow for the oligarchies of their star nations to be in a better position to negotiate terms so, instead of getting full integration into the Star Empire, they would be Manticoran citizens in name only, reaping the benefits without any of the downsides for the aforementioned oligarchies. She actually hates the people she has to work alongside, because, while her star system may be oligarchical, her "allies" are even worse places to live. The moment the situation changes, she breaks away from them, and steers Spindle into being the capitol system of the Talbott Quadrant, and even manages to become the first Minister of the Treasury for the Quadrant.
    • Jack McBryde in Torch of Freedom, combined with Even Evil Has Standards and Too Dumb to Live on the LRPB's side.
    • Alfredo Yu was the top Haven officer working alongside the Masadans in The Honor of the Queen. By Flag in Exile, he not only defected from Haven and requested asylum in Manticore, but became a naturalized citizen and senior naval officer of Masada's arch-enemy Grayson.
  • Heel Realization: Jack McBryde, in Torch Of Freedom.
  • Hegemonic Empire: The Star Empire of Manticore has some relatively minor flaws, but between its high standard of living and fairly democratic government it stands head and shoulders above many other polities, especially when the alternative is becoming a satrap of one of the less savory powers of the region.
  • Hereditary Republic: The Legislaturist families and the Hereditary President for life of the People's Republic of Haven.
  • Hero Antagonist: The Republic of Haven, particularly once they stop being the People's Republic of Haven. There's plenty of mutual respect on both sides among the various military commanders, and most of the decent Havenite officers are simply My Country, Right or Wrong types who are fighting Manticore only because they have no choice. When Haven and Manticore wise up to the fact that outside forces have been manipulating them into war with each other, they decide they've had quite enough of that, thank you very much, and proceed to join up in a military alliance so badass that the only reaction from readers is, "holy hell, Mesa is fucked." This team-up is made a great deal easier by the aforementioned mutual respect.
  • Hero of Another Story: In Echoes of Honor several prisoners have spent years hiding in the bush after faking their deaths while receiving assistance from some of the prisoners who remained behind. After the prison revolt, they spend a lot of time capturing (or lynching) fugitive members of the State Sec garrison, relying on the years they spent learning the island's hiding places. They feel like they could have had their own book, but only get mentioned over about two pages.
  • Heroic Sacrifice:
    • Andreas Venizelos stayed behind covering Honor and others' getaway from the Tepes in the book In Enemy Hands, as did all but one of her armsmen. Special mention goes to Armsman Robert Whitman for deliberately throwing himself directly into the gun muzzles of the guards of Honor's cell to prevent the rest of his squad from being pinned down and trapped.
      [Timmons] thoughts broke off as someone rolled out into the middle of the passage. His sudden appearance took Timmons totally by surprise, and he gaped at the apparition in shock, unable to believe anyone would deliberately throw himself into what he knew had to be a deathtrap. But that was because he'd never encountered a Grayson armsman whose Steadholder was in danger. Robert Whitman had only one purpose in life, and his very first shot tore Citizen Lieutenant Timmons to bloody rags.
    • Jack McBryde, a Mesan security official in Torch of Freedom, who opted to stay behind to cover the heroes' escape.
    • Captain Helen Zilwicki, sacrificing her ship to let civilian ships (with her husband and daughter on board) escape an attack from the enemy navy.
    • Honor Harrington herself. She sends her ship(s) into the teeth of impossible odds almost once a book to save other people. The most starkly sacrificial instances would be in Honor Among Enemies and In Enemy Hands, both cases in which she sacrifices her ship to save merchant ships. And in Ashes of Victory, she interposes her off-duty civilian private pinnace between a missile and the royal transport in order to save her Queen.
    • Lara, one of Queen Berry Zilwicki's bodyguards physically throws the queen out of the room to save her from an assassin's airborne toxin. She tells another one of the queen's bodyguards, her boyfriend, to close the doors because she won't be able to outrun the cloud of toxic gas herself.
    • Admiral Sebastian D'Orville and the rest of Home Fleet know that they have no chance to stop Lester Tourville's Second Fleet in the Battle of Manticore, and that all they can do is blunt the attack enough that, hopefully, the rest of the RMN can pull out a victory. They're right, and they don't survive the first salvo... but Manticore wins.
    • The Royal Manticoran Navy comes by this honestly; the "Father of the RMN", Commodore Edward Saganami, went down this way, sacrificing himself and his ship to allow the merchantmen he was escorting time to get away. His career and sacrifice marked the turning point of the Navy itself, turning it from a small planetary navy into one of the best-disciplined navies in the universe and founding what is still called "the Saganami tradition," which remains the hallmark of the RMN.
    • The RMN's other great hero, Ellen D'Orville, sacrificed herself to save over a million people when an assassination attempt against her went awry.
    • It is the sworn duty of all Grayson armsmen to do this when necessary to protect their Steadholders and their Steadholder's families, and those of Honor Harrington are no exception; besides the aforementioned feats on the Tepes, Andrew LaFollet died ensuring that Honor's mother and son would survive in Mission of Honor.
      • LaFollet's death means that all of Honor's original armsmen have gone out in the line of duty, most if not all of them embodying this trope. Yet still volunteers come forward to serve, knowing exactly what will likely be expected of them.
      • The armsen are fully prepared to embrace this trope when they need to. Later on during the escape from the Tepes, the senior armsman present only has to ask "Who will take it?" when it becomes clear that they need someone to hold the pursuers off long enough to escape. One of them immediately volunteers.
    • A Manticoran picket of five ships led by Admiral Kotouč attacks a Solarian fleet that outnumbers them 20-to-1 in order to Hold the Line and give the Hypatians more time to evacuate their space habitats.
  • Heterosexual Life-Partners:
    • Horace Harkness (later knighted), and Scotty Tremaine. It's mentioned in Mission of Honor that Scotty's personnel jacketnote  has a note that says never to break him up with Harkness. The Bureau of Personnel Officer which tells him this notes dryly that if anyone tried, she knows Harkness would just hack his way to Tremaine's side anyway. It's strongly implied that Harkness used to do that, until BuPers gave in and added the notation in hopes that would save their computer systems from Harkness's meddling.
    • In later books, Anton Zilwicki and Victor Cachat, the "Spook Duo", turn into this. The Ho Yay is eventually lampshaded by a particularly snarky comrade of theirs.
    • Though we only see the beginnings of their relationship in Uncompromising Honor, it is heavily implied that Shannon Foraker and Sonja Hemphill are well on their way to this, with Honor even nicknaming them "the Demonic Duo".
  • He Who Fights Monsters:
    • The Citizens Rights Union (And their official political branch, the Citizens Rights Party) of the People's Republic of Haven. Though they fight for the continued improvement of the standard of living of the PRH's citizens, the (enemy) Legislaturalists recognize them as an integral part of the system they theoretically oppose.
    • Robert Stanton Pierre and Oscar Saint-Just originally staged their coup with legitimate goals. They were always planning to push their plans through with blood, but at least they were going to make changes, and some of their changes actually pay off, especially for the economy. However, as the series progresses they progressively become more and more like the Legislaturalists, falling into the same pitfalls and traps that spelt doom for their predecessors. As Saint-Just himself said, what mattered to him was not who held power or why, as long as it was used effectively. However, by the time of Echoes of Honor he himself is promoting incompetent officers to positions of authority, whitewashing military reports that do not agree with the Committee line, and absolving those same officers of blame based on their political connections. Those specific acts were some of the final straws that originally pushed him and Pierre into revolt. There seem to be moments when Pierre realizes this to some extent, but he feels trapped and unable to stop it.
  • Historical Domain Character: Rob S. Pierre and Oscar Saint-Just are re-imaginings political figures of the French Revolution, part and parcel of the Days of Future Past.
  • Hit So Hard, the Calendar Felt It:
    • Almost every nation in the Honorverse uses two distinct calendars, one which is universal throughout almost all humanity, and one which is specific to each nation. Grayson, alone in the Honorverse, still uses the Gregorian calendar, even though it is grossly unsuited to the orbital mechanics of their homeworld.
    • The calendar used by humanity as a whole is derived from the launching of the first human colony ship, the Prometheus, in 2103CE, splitting history into Ante Diaspora and Post Diaspora eras measured in the traditional 365 day "T-year."
    • Each nation has its own local calendar, which measures time with the length of the local year and counts from the date of the founding of that nation. Manticoran dates are reckoned in Manticoran years "After Landing", which occurred in 1416 Post Diaspora.
  • Hoist by His Own Petard: The Mesan Alignment implants many of their field agents with suicide nanotech so that, if arrested, the agent will quickly drop dead of apparently-natural causes. Once this is discovered, the Solarian League Navy quickly (if messily) identifies and removes the agents in their top ranks by staging a series of mock arrests.
  • Holding Hands: Thomas Theisman holds Eloise Pritchart's hand when she's faced with the awful decision to launch Operation Beatrice, which resulted in the First Battle of Manticore. In this case — particularly since neither of them are shown to touch others casually — it's used to underscore just how close the two characters have become.note 
  • Hold Your Hippogriffs: Nearly every expression gets this treatment. Proverbs use metric units instead of their original imperial measurements, 'bullet' has been largely replaced with 'pulser dart' in certain other proverbs (both silver and magic pulser darts have been mentioned), any saying that referenced a terrestrial animal is similarly updated (a "paper hexapuma" instead of "paper tiger" for instance), ideas go out the airlock instead of out the window, and hold atmosphere instead of hold water.
  • Homage:
    • The entire series started as one big homage to Horatio Hornblower, though as of late it has moved away from that.
    • John Ringo's "A Ship Named Francis" pays homage to Irresponsible Captain Tylor, involving a starship where dubiously-competent space navy misfits end up, an alcoholic doctor, a martinet first officer, and a protagonist named Tyler.
  • Honor Before Reason: Subverted; characters express a very low opinion of commanders who futilely get their commands destroyed just to not be seen as running away. It is mentioned, however, that the "honor of the Star Kingdom" is one of the few acceptable reasons to stand and fight a suicidal battle. That is because such fights tend to build quite a reputation, and reputation is a fuel that merchant empires (which Manticore effectively is) run on. Michael Oversteegen in Crown Of Slaves sums this up:
    "Well," Oversteegen said with a cold, hungry smile, "defendin' other people's planets against unprovoked attack by murderous scum seems t' have become something of a tradition for my Queen's Navy over the past few decades. Under the circumstances, I'm sure she'll forgive me for followin' that tradition."
  • Hope Spot: In Honor Among Enemies, Honor's Q-Ship is stuck in a hopeless fight against a peep battlecruiser. The one weapon on her slow, clumsy, flying deathtrap that could actually turn the tide is out of order and her engineers seem unable to get it working again in time. Then, when it looks like the situation can't possibly get any worse, the chief engineer manages to get the cargo bay doors that kept the weapon from being deployed unstuck. Only for a chance hit to go straight through those open doors, gutting the ship, killing the treecat-bonded engineer (along with a lot of red- and mauve-shirts) and nearly knocking Honor out from the psychic backlash.
  • Hover Tank: Downplayed. Modern tanks in the setting do include the ubiquitous counter-grav technology, but the practical problems with a firing platform that hovers and takes hits keep them from using it during combat where ground locomotion is still preferable. However, they do use counter-grav to reduce the tank's effective weight while "cruising" from one location to another.
  • Hufflepuff House: Matapan, the Midgard Federation, and the Asgard Association. They appear on maps in the first few books (with Matapan called Mazapan), but we know nothing about them beyond a minor blurb in The Short Victorious War and a handful of infodumps that mention the Matapan terminus by Weber.
  • Huge Guy, Tiny Girl:
    • Alfred and Allison Harrington. Alfred is 4 cm taller than his daughter, which gives him 192 cm, while Allison is not even a two-thirds of that.
    • On the Havenite side is Kevin and Virginia Usher.
    • Berry Zilwicki (not extremely tiny, but fairly petite, possibly due to poor nutrition when she was growing up homeless in the slums of Old Chicago) and Hugh Arai — having been engineered as a Manpower heavy-labor slave, Arai is gigantic, with the musculature of an Olympic weight-lifter.
    • Anton Zilwicki and Catherine Montainge, he's built like a linebacker and she stands six feet tall.
    • A platonic example is the Talbott Quadrant's Governor-General, Dame Estelle Matsuko, and station commander, Admiral Augustus Khumalo. Matsuko is all of five-foot-two and delicately built, whereas Khumalo easily tops six feet and is massively built.
    • Another such is Lt. Abigail Hearns and her bodyguard, Lt. Mateo Gutierrez, a "massively built fellow who would have made at least two and probably three of her".
  • Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: Or was. Pretty much most of the early survey ships didn't come back. The reason why wasn't discovered until a few ships got lucky and reported the below mentioned Hyperspace Lanes. If you don't have the right equipment you get instantly destroyed if you touch one. Also you can't enter into Hyperspace while going any faster then 30 percent light speed. Doing so will destroy the ship. And the deeper (and faster) hyper bands are also more dangerous - almost nobody with a normal hyperdrive has ever crossed into the theta bands and come back to tell the tale , although Alice Truman did have the interlocks removed by her upset engineer and "bounced off the iota wall a day out of [Grayson].", when she needed to inform Admiral White Haven on Manticore that Grayson was being attacked. Also, the Mesan Alignment's streak drives can break the kappa wall.
  • Hyperspace Lanes:
    • Gravity waves. They used to be a Negative Space Wedgie before Warshawski sails were invented, but now they serve as high speed highways that allow roughly 10 times the acceleration of pure impeller travel and a way of powering your ship without using any of your reactor fuel, shaving massive amounts of time and cost off of trips. Their role as choke points for interstellar traffic plays a major role in The Short Victorious War and Honor Among Enemies.
    • Wormholes sit on the border between this trope and Portal Network. They aren't necessary for economical interstellar travel, but they make travel over immense distances instant. They're important enough that Manticore is a notable power even when it has only two systems because it has six (later seven) wormhole termini. Control of the junction's termini is a huge focus of both sides' war efforts.
    • Hyperspace rifts serve as an inversion of this trope. They provide choke points too, but by making travel slower instead of faster. This is especially true in the Selker Rift, home to one of the few grav waves in the known galaxy that moves quickly and unpredictably, the Selker Shear. Ships must cross the rift slowly enough to circumnavigate the shear, should it cross their path, otherwise they risk a fatal collision.
  • Hyperspeed Ambush: Comes up from time to time, but usually only outside of a star's hyper limit. It does come up from time to time inside the hyper limit when dealing with wormhole junctions, most notably at the Battle of Trevor's Star and the Battle of Manticore (notably, in the Battle of Manticore, the Havenites and Manticorans both managed to pull this on each other in rapid succession).
  • Hyperspeed Escape: If a ship is outside the hyperlimit of the nearby star, they can usually escape just by transitioning into hyperspace. At least a few battles have featured a defeated force attempting to run for the hyper limit while the victorious force attempts to run them down before they can escape. Alternately, a force pretending to be weaker than it is (or stalling for time) might attempt to bait a superior force into chasing them too far inside the hyper limit to escape when The Cavalry arrives, or simply to draw them away from weaker ships that they are escorting.

    I 
  • I Am Not Left-Handed:
    • In the run-up to Operation Buttercup, Manticoran and Grayson Pod-laying Superdreadnoughts had concealed their full capabilities by pretending the Manticoran Missile Massacre was coming from their consorts. What they were able to do when they finally cut loose was impressive.
    • This was also policy against the Solarian League, to run the ship impeller drives at lower acceleration and fire from ranges that would only need two drives of their Multi-Drive Missiles rather than the range offered by the full three.
    • Inverted against the Solarians later on, once the situation had begun to develop into full-fledged war. Manticoran attempts to defuse potential standoffs by warning Solarian forces of the severe mismatch in combat capability between their forces often fell on deaf ears, resulting in engagements that were usually very lethal for the Solarians.
  • I Believe That You Believe It: Crops up a lot where Mesa is concerned. An example would be when Zilwicki and Cachat spoke to Honor to explain Haven was not responsible for various assassinations. Their arguments were compelling and Honor knew they weren't lying to her, but they didn't have any evidence, so all Honor could be certain of was they were sure Haven didn't do it. It also comes up with Herlander Simões. His genuine outrage and knowledge of Mesan tech helped back him up, but all they could be sure of was that Simões genuinely believed everything he said was the truth.
  • Iconic Sequel Character: The series is prone to this, given how long it's been running. Some of its most iconic and beloved characters don't appear until much later than an incoming fan might expect.note 
    • Michelle Henke, Honor Harrington's best friend, isn't introduced until The Short Victorious War, which is book three — yes, two whole books go by in which Honor's best friend isn't even mentioned.
    • Fan favourite Havenite tac-witch Shannon Foraker isn't introduced until Flag in Exile, which is book five, and really starts starring in Honor Among Enemies, the next book.
    • Eloise Pritchart, series anchor and beloved Havenite heroine, doesn't debut until book six, Honor Among Enemies, and doesn't become a major player until Echoes of Honor, which is book eight.
    • Lester Tourville, Havenite admiral who is capable of beating the title character herself in head-to-head combat, isn't introduced until In Enemy Hands, which is book seven.
    • Victor Cachat, superspy extraordinaire, isn't introduced until the third short-story anthology, Changer of Worlds (published between Ashes of Victory and War of Honor, books nine and ten). He's also something of a Canon Foreigner/Canon Immigrant, being a brainchild of the Weber's coauthor Eric Flint, who's just joined the series at that point.
  • I Did What I Had to Do: Honor insists on dueling with Pavel Young, irrespective of the political or professional consequences, because It's Personal.
  • Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: All even-numbered books are titled with some pun involving the title character's first name. Similarly, all books in the Saganami Island spinoff series have a word "shadow" in their title.
  • Idiot Ball:
    • The Manticoran Opposition's official policy for the years leading up to the series, and for quite a while into the series, is opposition to the buildup of the Navy and an aversion to "provoking" Haven. Characters, both within the Manticoran government and even the PRH, point out that they are essentially trading their own survival for short-term political gain. From the Opposition's perspective, they feared that the threat of Haven was an excuse by King Roger to strengthen the Crown at the expense of the Parliament. But as time eventually demonstrated, Roger was right.
    • Pavel Young blackmails his chief of security, Elaine Sakristos, into having sex with him (And it is a violent and painful night in and of itself). Elaine is amazed that he really never seems to understand that she is the one person he should not push into rebellion.
    • In Torch of Freedom it is largely Isabel Bardasano carrying the Idiot Ball for the Alignment. The LRPB did act callously, but they had no reason to expect anything worse than Simões' tragic burn-out. The real problems began when Bardasano specifically assigned Jack McBryde, one of her senior intel/security commanders, to become Simões' confidante and therapist. Not only was this a serious violation of normal procedure by itself, but it was exceptionally stupid to assign McBryde, who had already been pulled from field work for being too "soft" and "sentimental". In other words, Bardasano assigned the guy most likely to lose faith in the Alignment, and that same guy also had access to most of the Alignment's most damaging secrets.
    • Ever since his first appearance in Flag in Exile, Steadholder Mueller was consistently portrayed as the most competent and dangerous of Grayson's reactionary conspirators. Then came Ashes of Victory where he picks up the Idiot Ball in chapter twelve and doesn't let go of it until he's finally executed for treason. He ends up blindly trusting not only a man with suspiciously useful skills who turns out to be an undercover cop but also a group of very thinly disguised Masadans funded by Haven. And his idiocy has long-ranging consequences, since it pretty much paves the way for the High Ridge government...
    • Working in concert with Mueller's Idiot Ball, the prime minister and queen of Manticore each accept a gift from him; "a memory stone", which each contain a beacon for the assassins' missiles to home in on. No one questions this, not the people who are investigating Mueller on suspicion of murder and treason, and not the people whose job it is to guard the two most important people in the entire kingdom. For context, if you live in the US, imagine how the Secret Service would react if you tried giving a gift of unknown provenance to the president.
    • In-universe, various characters speculate that possession of one is a prerequisite for attaining flag rank in the Solarian League Navy. After all, if the SLN had selected their admirals by some other means, such as pulling names out of a hat, they would have found at least one person with a functional brain.
    • During In Enemy Hands, Cordelia Ransom invites the captured non-coms of HMS Prince Adrian to turn against their plutocratic masters. Horace Harkness accepts. Although his homeworld Gryphon does have a cultural mistrust of its nation's hereditary aristocracy, it doesn't reach the level of class warfare, and even someone fed up with the war would have to be insane to think that State Sec, who only minutes ago were having fun Pistol-Whipping their captives and bragging about Harrington's impending execution, would be a step up. Despite this, all of the other Manticoran prisoners, even Harkness's best friend Scotty Tremaine, collectively grab hold of the ball in completely believing his defection is genuine, without considering the far more obvious (and true) explanation that he's playing into the role of the "poor, oppressed proletarian" to gain their captors' trust. (Tremaine himself lampshades his idiot ball after the truth comes out.) State Sec also isn't particularly smart for trusting him as much as they do, but they at least have the excuse of not knowing Harkness personally and having a propagandized perception of Manticore's sociopolitical climate.
  • I Dub Thee Sir Knight: Aivars Terekhov gets knighted for the Battle of Monica, courtesy of the Talbott Quadrant's Governor-General Dame Estelle Matsuko, in Storm from the Shadows. And this is after he's just gotten the Parliamentary Medal of Valor.
  • If I Wanted You Dead...:
    • The Manticorans will occasionally fire an overwhelming volley of missiles and let them detonate harmlessly, to let the enemy know that they could be wiped out effortlessly, but that the Manties are open to alternate suggestions.
    • Another method is "Mapping their hull". If another ship crowds too close to a warship without permission, or fails to respond to a friendly/neutral ship approaching them (implying that they're pointedly ignoring them or just aren't paying attention), a ship might crank their active radar to the max setting and blast the other ship with a close-range, high-intensity burst of radio waves likely to white out their sensor screens. It's described as the inter-ship equivalent of going "Hey, heads up, stupid!"
    • In Shadow of Freedom the Manticorans flaunt their technical superiority several different ways in a single engagement, in an attempt to persuade a hostile fleet to stand down. (Unfortunately, it didn't work):
      • Firstly, by short-circuiting the expected lag in communications with their FTL grav-pulse comms.
      • Next by calling the enemy ship by its name, information they got by reading the name off the hull with a stealth recon drone (the drone is also key in the first trick).
      • Finally, during all of this interaction the Manties haven't even gone to Action Stations and are still sitting around in their standard service uniforms rather than skinsuits, demonstrating their utter lack of concern for their opponent's offensive capability.
    • This is how Honor ends the Solarian/Grand Alliance war. She takes the Grand Fleet directly to the Sol system, when no one had dared attack the system in centuries; launches a large-but-not-ludicrous missile barrage at the main Solarian defense fleet from a distance that the Solarians can't hope to counterattack from with any sort of accuracy; uses the Alliance FTL missile-control systems to run rings around the Solly anti-missile defenses; and finally redirects the missiles at the last second to instead destroy most of the Sollies' unarmed, mothballed ships sitting in drydock, to show that the Alliance really doesn't want to kill any more people than they already have. Given how all news of the war until now had come from out-of-system and been heavily filtered through Solarian-controlled media, this proves definitively to both Solarian naval command and the Solarian citizenry that the Grand Alliance could easily wipe them off the map without suffering any casualties of their own. The Solarians surrender shortly thereafter and acquiesce to every one of the Alliance's demands.
  • I Just Write the Thing: Weber has occasionally expressed surprise with how his own stories turn out, most frequently with regards to the progression of military technology under the rules he has committed himself to abide by.
  • Implausible Deniability: Haven denies up and down that they had anything to do with the False Flag Operation to take Basilisk from Manticore, despite overwhelming evidence of their involvement. Although there was no smoking gun on the ground that ties them to the Medusan insurrection, the Havenite "merchantman" Sirius, which turned out to be an armed Q-ship that half wrecked HMS Fearless, is rather impossible to explain away. But Haven tries anyway, claiming that the sensor data of the battle was all forged and that Harrington destroyed a defenseless civilian ship in cold blood, going so far as to try and convict her in absentia for murder. Of course, Haven knows they're not fooling Manticore, but appearances must be maintained for the rest of the galaxy or else they're tacitly admitting that they were caught committing an act of war.
  • Improbable Aiming Skills: Honor is extremely skilled with handguns. In a variation of this trope, at no point does she actually shoot beyond the range that a trained human ought to be capable of, but rather, she is able to aim accurately even from the hip. This is what allows her to defeat Denver Summerdale in a duel, because no matter how fast he is at aiming, he is still needs to raise his arm to do it. Andrew LaFollet attributes this ability to Honor's exceptionally strong kinesthestic sense. (And, of course, many, many hours on the shooting range.)
  • Improvised Weapon: In Honor of the Queen, Honor uses a metal tray as a throwing weapon against Protector Benjamin's would-be assassins.
  • Inappropriately Close Comrades:
    • The Manticoran navy has rules against fraternization in the same chain of command, which is one of several reasons that Honor's relationship with Hamish Alexander (her superior officer) is kept secret. This problem is resolved when the latter is made First Lord of the Admiralty, which is a civilian role despite its military focus.
    • Though there aren't explicitly said to be official rules against it, the last person in the galaxy any good People's Commissioner should get romantically involved with is the Admiral she's supposed to be reporting on... which doesn't stop Eloise Pritchart and Javier Giscard from embarking on a love affair so insanely dangerous that they both know every minute they have is borrowed time.
  • Indy Ploy: The area where Victor Cachat shines. The guy can take any situation, no matter how craptastic, and turn it on its head with a bit of creativity and a whole lot of sheer guts. He eventually takes it to the point where his colleagues wonder why they even bother coming up with plans for missions he's involved in, since he's invariably going to throw them out the window and start improvising.
    Anton Zilwicki: What Victor would tell you is that plans aren’t blueprints, they’re simply guides that lead you to the next plan.
  • I Need a Freaking Drink: Elizabeth's first thought upon entering a meeting with President Pritchart and her cabinet in Mission of Honor is that she needs a whiskey. She does not, however, mention this to anyone else.
  • Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: By A Rising Thunder at the latest, the Solarian League has lost its mystique and comes across as a powerless wreck of a state ruled by people who are inept fools at best, and Mesan wreckers more often than not if not that. Manticore effortlessly destroys their fleets, crashes their economy and starts occupying their planets, with leaders like Admiral Filareta and Under Secretary Kolokoltsov desperately flailing about for any sort of effective counter-strategy, overall appearing more overawed and pitiable than threatening.
  • Inertial Dampening: The ubiquitous impeller drive creates what's referred to as an "inertial sump", which is in fact the primary limiting factor in ship acceleration. In theory, an impeller wedge can accelerate even the largest ship at an arbitrarily high rate, but not without overflowing the sump and killing the crew. Inertial compensators are infamous for giving absolutely no warning before they fail; in the rare instances when they do, the result is, without exception, instantaneous death for everyone aboard. Unsurprisingly, captains always leave a generous safety margin except in life-or-death emergencies. However, Manticore's Grayson-inspired tech advances teach them that the galaxy-accepted standard acceleration rate (80% of theoretical maximum) is overly conservative, and that they can push their improved compensators into the 90-95% range with no significant loss in reliability.
  • Infodumps: David Weber's specialty; the series is flooded with these. Arguably the worst and most egregious use was in the climax of the first book. Honor's vastly outsized and outgunned starship is chasing a Havenite ship, trying to get to it and take it down before it can make good its escape. It is a tense chase as the range closes, with both sides readying their weapons and defenses, steeling their resolve...and then Weber dumps a full ten pages of the history of hyperspace travel in the middle of it. It really could have gone most anywhere else in the book and would have fit better. Though it did help hammer home the point that that tense chase scene lasted several hours. Space is big.
  • Insane Admiral: Given the series' preponderance of space navy protagonists, many of whom eventually rise to flag rank, this trope is for the most part averted.
    • Between Josef Byng and Sandra Crandall (among others) it sometimes seems to be the Solarian League's hat, making decisions based primarily on bigotry towards "neo-barbs" and ignorance of the advance of technology outside of Solarian research thanks to the war's Lensman Arms Race.
    • The Manticorian Rear Admiral Elvis Santino, introduced in the short story "Ms. Midshipwoman Harrington", is an incompetent buffoon whose family greased the way for advancement far beyond his actual skill. He would rather die along with his whole command than be thought of as a coward by doing the sensible thing and retreating in the face of a force which vastly outnumbers his, as an extreme reaction to another Manticoran flag officer rightly being accused of being insufficiently offensive-minded.
    • Andermani Admiral Xiaohu Pausch, Graf von Sternhafen, the station commander of Andermani forces in the Silesian Confederacy, attempts to engineer a war between his nation and Manticore due to an irrational hatred of the Star Kingdom, and views the weak High Ridge government as the perfect target for his plans in Mission of Honor. He recruits like-minded Andermani captains to intentionally provoke Manticoran ships in Silesia, and when an Andermani warship blows up a Manticoran one, war seems inevitable. Then the Republic of Haven kicks off Operation Thunderbolt, and the new Grantville government of the Star Kingdom of Manticore decides to just split Silesia, which can't really be called a sovereign star nation at this point anymore, with the Andermani. This satisfies Emperor Gustav's hunger for new territory and brings him in as a Manticoran ally, resolving the entire situation, while Admiral Sternhafen is dragged back home in disgrace.
    • Solarian Gendarmerie brigadier Francisca Yucel, while sticking more to the ground side of the things, could've given any of them Navy boys and girls a run for their money in the sheer General Ripper department,note  and her general disposition was described to be quite similar to Sandra Crandall's, with whom she could easily compete for the post of the most irascible, dour bitch in the Solarian Military.
    • Lampshaded in Shadow of Freedom:
      Admiral Henke: You know, I’m beginning to wonder exactly what qualifications the Sollies look for in candidates for their naval academy. I mean there has to be a filtering process. You couldn’t just go out and pick middies at random and get such an invariably stupid crop of flag officers. There has to be some kind of system. If you just picked names out of a hat, for example, somebody would have to have a functional brain.
  • Insane Troll Logic: In one book, several characters discuss how certain media personalities were lambasting Honor for shooting and killing Pavel Young in a duel, despite the fact that he had no ammo left and thus could not defend himself. He had no ammo left because moments before, he had spent it all shooting Honor in the back before the duel formally began.
  • In-Series Nickname:
    • All of the star nations are given nicknames for their peoples. Star Kingdom of Manticore = Manties, People's Republic of Haven = Peeps, Andermani Empire = Andies, Solarian League = Sollies, and the poor members of the Silesian Confederacy get called Sillies (or, more respectfully, Confeds).
    • Every RMN ship tends to get one of these. Most prominent so far is the Nasty Kitty, official nickname of HMS Hexapuma.
    • The Adrienne Cross is the highest award that can be given to members of the Queen's Own Regiment. Thanks to the medal including the image of a snarling treecat, the Queen's Own normally refers to it as the "Spitting Kitty".
  • Insignia Rip-Off Ritual: Royal Manticoran Navy officers who are dishonorably discharged are forced to endure a public shaming ritual in which, among other things, their insignia and honors are torn from their uniform. Pavel Young endures one in Field of Dishonor, as did Denver Summervale for becoming a mercenary duelist.
  • "Instant Death" Radius: Energy weapons are very deadly within the range where sidewall cannot negate them. So are treecats to anyone foolish enough to try fighting one in melee.
  • Insult to Rocks:
    • Solarian Admiral Byng was described by Capt. Teague as not having "the brains God gave a cockroach." Capt. al-Fanudahi responds, "I think you were doing cockroaches a disservice there a minute ago".
    • Solarian Admiral Crandall was described as having the disposition of a grizzly bear trying to pass a pinecone, but it was later decided that this was a gross slander against grizzly bears.
    • The Beowulf Board of Directors would consider the ruling members of the Solarian League to be imbeciles, if they did not think they were being unfair to imbeciles.
  • Internal Reveal: Frequent, due to all of the Dramatic Irony. Most significantly with the forged diplomatic correspondence, and everything Mesa has been up to.
  • Interquel:
    • The first ten chapters of A Rising Thunder describe events concurrent to the previous book, Mission of Honor.
    • Similarly, the action on Shadow of Freedom starts before the end of Mission of Honor, and long before the events described in the middle of A Rising Thunder.
    • Part of Cauldron of Ghosts overlaps the latter half of A Rising Thunder and Shadow of Freedom.
  • Interservice Rivalry:
    • The reason PO Harkness has been passed over for CPO twenty times. He considers it his personal duty to dismantle the contents of any Marine Corps uniform when on liberty. After his marriage to Sergeant Major Iris Babcock, RMMC, He gets better, because he knows his wife would kick his ass if he tried any of his old tricks. It is explicitly noted that most marines consider Harkness' attentions to be a compliment, part of the friendly competition between any branch of any service.
      • One Marine explains this to a young Navy tech by pointing out that somehow, nobody ever gets killed or crippled in those bar fights, despite both sides having decades of training in martial arts and plenty of combat experience.
    • The Solarian League Navy's Frontier Fleet and Battle Fleet do not like each other. Unlike the Harkness/Marine Corps rivalry, this is a rather unfriendly one.
    • The training exercise that was a cover story for finding and interrogating Paul Tankersley's killer was justified with the argument that "Royal Manticoran Marines shouldn't have to stand around and lose their edge just because the sissies who run the navy broke one of their ships." The plan to use whatever transport became available thus obtained a paper trail all the way up to a General who approved of the sentiment.
  • Intrepid Reporter: Audrey O'Hanrahan is known as the single most honest reporter in all the Solarian League. However, this is subverted by O'Hanrahan herself who is actually a spy taking advantage of a well-earned reputation for hard-hitting journalism to agitate a war between Manticore and the Solarian League.
  • I Shall Taunt You: This has pretty much become Standard Operating Procedure for Michelle Henke's Talbott forces in its encounters with the Solarian League Navy:
    • Mike explicitly spells out that she wants this done to Sandra Crandall in Mission of Honor. She even notes that it conflicts with their other goal of stalling Crandall for time, pointing out regardless of what happens she wants the Solly admiral making angry decisions instead of rational ones.
    • In Shadow of Freedom, Captain Zavala and Lieutenant Hearns mercilessly dig into the Saltash governor and the leaders of the Solarian gendarmes respectively. Zavala even changes communication lines in mid-conversation with the governor to speak with the CO of one of the naval forces they're facing. Effectively interrupting the governor of the planet and putting him on hold.
    • From the same book, Sir Aivars Terekhov is more subtle. He opens communications with Solarian forces at Mobius with his crew wearing their normal uniforms instead of the protective skinsuits one normally wears into battle. This sends a clear message to the Solly CO that the Solarian ships are no threat to them whatsoever.
    • Manticorans all around are also very fond of using their FTL communication abilities to spark Oh Craps of varying degrees in their Solarian opponents. Their use of FTL tends to emphasize just how far ahead they are technologically, since until Honor of the Queen even limited FTL communication was something of a scientific holy grail.
  • I Surrender, Suckers:
    • At Blackbird Base in The Honor of the Queen, the Royal Manticoran Marines lose several troopers to Masadan soldiers who concealed grenades. Some even do it to the RMMC field medics attempting to treat their wounds.
    • ZigZagged in Storm From the Shadows. When, at the end of the Battle of Solon, Henke's HMS Ajax has no Alpha nodes (meaning she can't flee into hyperspace) and no operable boat bays left (meaning she can't abandon ship), she sets up a sneak attack hoping to take out some of the pursuing ships before she is destroyed. Then, unexpectedly, one of the boat bays is cleared and the remaining crew starts evacuating using its small craft ... just minutes before the trap is sprung. Sadly, Henke realizes the problem too late, and loses two-thirds of her crew to their pursuers' counterattack.
  • I Take Offense to That Last One: The idea that Mercedes Brigham's sense of humor is 'low' is "base libel". Evil, on the other hand...
  • It Only Works Once:
    • Honor's "sucker punch" tactic in the first wargame of On Basilisk Station works flawlessly, taking out the "enemy" flagship. Unfortunately the strange weapons loadout of HMS Fearless is only good for surprise attacks, and on all subsequent wargames, the opposing force knows it is out there and prepares accordingly. In the book's climax, Fearless once again comes up against an enemy who doesn't know about the Grav Lance. The results are rather spectacular. However, as Honor is the first to point out, the only reason the situation (an outdated light cruiser with experimental weapons vs a Q-ship with battlecruiser armament) occurred in the first place was that most of their conventional firepower had been stripped to make room.
    • Subverted in that the Mesan plot in Storm From the Shadows is, and is frequently Lampshaded as, a repeat of the plot used in Monica in Shadow of Saganami. But this one succeeds in its intended goal of starting a shooting war between Manticore and the Solarian League.
    • The Havenites reuse some of Honor's tactics against her at Solon, resulting in the capture of Honor's friend Michelle Henke
  • It's Personal: Several times, but notably:
    • Honor's duel with Pavel Young, a personal vendetta starting when they were both Midshipman students at Saganami Island.
    • Beowulf and Mesa, and everything between them.
    • Elizabeth's issues with Haven.
    • In Mission of Honor, Mesa orchestrates an attack that kills about 8 million people in the Manticore home system alone, including the majority of Honor's extended family. When she meets with her husband again after the attack, she has this to say:
      "I'll miss them...but I won't forget. I'll never forget and one day—one day—we're going to find the people who did this, you and I. And when we do, the only thing I'll ask of God is that He let them live long enough to know who's killing them."
    • In Shadow of Freedom, the ships led by Commodore Zavala is part of the same squadron whose ships were killed by Josef Byng in Storm From the Shadows. Especially Tristram, who was the survivor of that attack and the one who brought word to Manticore. They're almost itching to fight the Solarians in Saltash as payback. Zavala even contemplates whether his plan to attack outright instead of use the Missile Massacre fake out and detonating the missiles just before they would hit was a result of pragmatism (not wanting to waste a now precious limited number of missiles) or this trope. He decides he's fine either way until the Solarians surrender and his ships have locked the salvos too closely together, making them unable to stop the attack in time to let the Sollies abandon ship.
  • It's Quiet… Too Quiet: Commander Greentree orders GNS Manasseh to sound General Quarters when he picks up no signal traffic at all while on approach to the Grayson system's primary shipyard and naval facility.
  • I Will Only Slow You Down:
    • Commander Alvarez and the Madrigal in Honor of the Queen.
    • Admiral Michelle Henke does the same in At All Costs though she survives.

    J-K 
  • Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique:
    • Howard Clinkscales doesn't tell Protector Benjamin how he got the Maccabeans to talk. And the Protector doesn't ask.
    • How some of Honor's friends get Denver Summervale to confess that Pavel Young hired him.
    • It is a favorite pastime of State Sec, but it is often just for fun. For business, they just threaten to shoot you and your family.
    • Subverted twice by Victor Cachat:
      • In Fanatic, he has a group of StateSec officers arrested and beaten half to death, pronouncing them innocent and sending them to the medics, or pronouncing them guilty and shooting them. The whole thing is a sham: He's framing the "guilty" ones for one of the few crimes they didn't commit, and covering up the treasonous decency of the "innocent" ones.
      • In Crown of Slaves, he puts on his best Sociopathic Hero demeanor, and explains to a group of captured Mesan agents that the information they may know would be helpful, but hardly necessary, and that he does not value their lives at all. Then he shoots one to demonstrate (and because he knew too much). The others can't talk fast enough.
  • The Jeeves: James MacGuiness, Honor's steward, is almost this. He's often a step or two ahead and mostly makes it look effortless.
  • Jurisdiction Friction: Headed off in Flag in Exile when riots break out in Harrington City over a preacher insulting Honor. Honor makes sure that only the Harrington City Police are involved in quelling them and not her personal armsmen, because using her personal forces would send precisely the wrong message.
  • Jury and Witness Tampering: In Field of Dishonor, two of the six officers serving as panel judges (the military equivalent of a jury) during Pavel Young's court-martial are either invested in his father's political faction or present in said father's voluminous blackmail files.
  • Just Following Orders: Grayson armsmen (personal armsmen, not the municipal guard) are sworn to obey their Steadholder above any other authority, including planetary law. They are indemnified against prosecution for any crimes they commit under orders; culpability instead falls to their Steadholder for giving the order.
  • Just the First Citizen: After the Committee of Public Safety takes over the People's Republic of Haven, this trope starts cropping up all over the place. The head of the Committee is the Citizen Chairman, cabinet-level positions are Citizen Secretaries. It even extends into the military, from Citizen Petty Officers on up to Citizen Admirals. Characters that aren't so good at the Citizen Rank titles, like Shannon Foraker, are at risk of being killing by State Sec.
  • Justice by Other Legal Means: Since duels are legal under Manticoran law, a person who is (or believes they were) a victim of an offense can challenge the offender to a duel rather than press charges. If the accused accepts and goes through with the duel, regardless of the outcome, they are immune from further prosecution. (By the same token, someone who does press charges waives their right to issue a challenge.) This is how Denver Summervale abuses the law to assassinate Paul Tankersley: by provoking Tankersley to attack him (which is legally considered an assault with a deadly weapon by virtue of his coup de vitesse black belt), Summervale places him in the position of either facing a severe legal penalty or facing him on the field of honor. Being a competent military officer, Tankersley decides to take his chances, which is exactly what Summervale wanted, because he never misses his shot.
  • Kangaroo Court:
    • The title character herself is subjected to a sham trial in absentia at the end of her first book, where the People's Republic of Haven convicted her in absentia of war crimes for the murder of the "civilian" crew of the "unarmed merchant freighter" Sirius to cover up the fact that Sirius was Q-ship and part of a failed Havenite plot. No one in the know viewed the trial and verdict as anything other than a joke, until Honor was later captured as a prisoner of war and the new bloodthirsty regime of Haven used the verdict as a rationale for her execution and exemption from treaties covering the care of POWs.
    • Subverted when Thomas Theisman stages his coup and overthrows Oscar Saint-Just and the State Sec regime. Saint-Just asks cynically if he will get a show trial just like all the ones he has been responsible for, but Theisman informs him there have been enough of those and promptly shoots him in the face.
  • Karma Houdini: Played with, with several villains (like Steadholder Mueler and Denver Summervale managing to get away clean at the end of the book. Ultimately averted, because the Houdinis can't leave well enough alone and have another go at the good guys in later books, resulting in their demise.
    • Uncompromising Honor wraps up the main plot of the series and sends Honor off into at least temporary retirement, but the inner layers of the onion are still at large and directly responsible for tens of millions of civilian deaths at Beowulf, to say nothing of the millions of other lives lost as part of their massive scheming. The afterword strongly suggests that they'll be dealt with in future works, though.
  • Karmic Death: In the Service of the Sword story "Fanatic", a useless Jerkass gravitics tech dies fleeing arrest when the spacesuit he had avoided training with slams him into the gravitics array he had avoided servicing.
  • Kansas City Shuffle: Manpower, Inc. is an openly corrupt, shady genetic slave trading company. It is a well-known fact that they collude with all the other Mesan transtellar companies and that they have their fingers in all kinds of political corruption and crime. They are a front for a centuries old conspiracy intending to create a society ruled by genetic elites.
    • Zigzagged. The original such conspiracy 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 to a eugenically-motivated war on Earth). From that sprung a revolutionary conspiracy of the same name looking to impose the legalisation of genetic engineering on the galaxy by force (think Marxist-Leninists), who used the reformist society as a recruiting pool. And Manpower, Inc. (and other transstellar corporations) piggybacked on the revolutionary society and (it's implied) helped to pervert the minds of the conspiracy's leaders in present day to the point that their intentions (galactic domination) aren't even close to what either conspiracy was originally designed to accomplish in the first place. Who's the front organisation? Who can tell?
  • Katanas Are Just Better: The swords of Grayson are katanas with a western hilt put on them, as Grayson based most of its martial arts off of Seven Samurai. However, Grayson swords, unlike katanas, have sharpened spines a third of their length.
  • Kicked Upstairs: What eventually happened to Allen Higgins. After he was forced to destroy Grendelsbane and then watched helplessly as Mesa blew up all of Manticore's space industry, he was removed from command and made the Vice Chief of Staff for the Grand Alliance. (Even though nobody blamed him for either disaster, the Grand Alliance officers reluctantly concluded that the traumatized Higgins was in no shape to command anything for the foreseeable future.)
  • Killed Mid-Sentence: Javier Giscard, at Lovat in At All Costs. His last word is Eloise's name. He never finishes it.
  • Killer Rabbit: Treecats usually appear quite fluffy and harmless, but when their anger is aroused they have sharp claws several centimeters long each, and in the narrative have been described as "furry buzzsaws" when they go into action.
  • Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: While generally averted — most starship-killer weapons employ Frickin' Laser Beams in some manner, with explicit mention of kinetic-based starship weaponry being obsolete in the face of 20th century Post Diaspora anti-ship missiles — there have been instances:
    • Pulsers fire hypervelocity flechette rounds at a target. Their speed is such that they generally tear right through anything lighter than full Powered Armor suits.
    • "Antique" chemical-based hand weapons can sometimes be a better bet than the hypervelocity flechette rounds used by pulsers. Because they have no detectable power source they can be smuggled into areas a pulser would never be allowed, and since their projectiles carry far less force they are considerably less lethal and damaging to the surrounding environment. They are the only weapons permitted in duels under Manticoran law, partly for reasons of tradition, but mostly because they are far less lethal than pulsers and the hope is that honor will be satisfied before either participant is killed.
    • Countermissiles destroy incoming missiles by ramming their impeller wedges into them. No explosives necessary.
    • The way works is that humanity at this point have developed energy weapons that scale better in damage than their kinetic equivalents, once you get beyond a certain point. Man-portable energy weapons like the plasma-rifle are very heavy, while devastating flechettes even come in pistol size.
  • The Klutz: Carson Clinkscales, in In Enemy Hands. At one conference, he tripped over his own feet, which knocked an officer's cap off, which went sailing across the conference table and hit a water decanter hard enough to knock it over, and because the decanter's lid hadn't been secured it dumped its entire contents in the Flag Captain's lap.
  • The Knights Who Say "Squee!": Lieutenant Abigail Hearns, Miss Owens, the first Grayson woman to go through Saganami Island, was nine years old when she watched then-Captain Honor Harrington make a heroic last stand against a far more powerful enemy force to save the planet and its people (in The Honor of the Queen). She promptly caught an enormous case of hero worship for that same captain, became Navy-mad, and spent the next decade or so taking as many hard science courses as she could and begging her father to let her go into the service like her heroine. When she managed it, she caught now-Admiral Harrington's eye as one of the best tactical minds in her class, became a mentee of said Admiral, and wound up a major character in the Saganami Island spinoff series.
  • Knight Templar: The entire Committee of Public Safety. The old government was indeed corrupt and needed to go, and they did make a ton of positive reforms to the economy. But they drowned Haven in a sea of blood doing so. Specifically referencing Napoleon and his "Whiff of Grapeshot" when a riot is put down using orbital bombardment.
  • Know When to Fold 'Em: A defining trait of pretty much any character portrayed in at least a somewhat sympathetic light. Not knowing when to fold is frequently coupled with Too Dumb to Live.
    • Commodore Thurgood in Shadow of Freedom tries to save his ships rather than make a pointless stand when Manticoran ships take over the Meyers system.
    • A number of Frontier Fleet officers finally start getting the hint in Shadow of Freedom and surrender rather than die stupidly, although in one case it takes the destruction of an entire squadron to make the point.
    • The only male Masadan ever shown in anything even remotely like a positive light in The Honor of the Queen is Colonel Harris, a professional soldier on Blackbird Base. He surrenders when the situation gets hopeless and tries to save as many of his soldiers' lives as possible. Meanwhile, the more typical Masadans on the base start resorting to suicide bombings.
    • Being able to take this route is also one of the signals that the Republic of Haven has changed significantly from the People's Republic of Haven. On one occasion, a Havenite commander—faced with what appears to be an overwhelming disadvantage—elects to withdraw instead of fight, and muses that under the new leadership, he actually can without worrying about being branded a coward and failure by the regime and getting shot.
    • A Solarian Battle Fleet armada tries to fold them, but unfortunately another party causes the the launch of a last ditch missile flush and the destruction of the flag bridge.
    • In Ashes of Victory, Honor talks about this trope with Andrea Jaruwalski, who had her career sabotaged by a petty rear admiral when she advised folding. She draws a clear line between knowing when to fold 'em; knowing when you can't fold and must fight to the end, even if it may require a Heroic Sacrifice from you and yours; and doing what the petty rear admiral did, which was get his command pointlessly destroyed by sailing into battle against a vastly superior force rather than retreat and be seen as a coward.

    L 
  • Lady of War: Honor holds high positions in the governments of two star nations, and is experienced in dealing death both wholesale (starship combat) and retail (in-person violence).
  • Landslide Election:
    • When the newly liberated people of San Martin learn that the last commander of their fleet before they were conquered by Haven is among the people Honor rescued from Hades, he pretty much gets drafted into running for President in their next election, at which point virtually all of the other candidates withdrew. The only candidate to stay in pretty much did so to keep Ramirez from running unopposed as a matter of principle, and conceded the election after receiving less than ten percent of the vote.
    • In the first set of presidential elections held under Haven's restored Constitution, then-interim head of state Eloise Pritchart was (quite understandably) officially elected President by a thirty-point margin.
    • When Beowulf finally votes on leaving the Solarian League, the measure passes with 92% in favor.
  • Laser-Guided Karma:
    • In Honor Among Enemies:
      • Andrew Warnecke and his close followers are killed by Honor and her crew, having followed the terms of the agreement that Warnecke "forced" on them nearly to the letter. His mistake was in not searching for chemical-propelled weaponry, like Honor's Colt M1911 pistol.
      • Steilman's gang of thugs ultimately wind up killed by a grazer fired by a warship from the same people to whom he had planned to defect, with copies of the manuals for advanced Manticoran military technology.
    • In Storm From the Shadows, Solarian admiral Josef Byng slaughtered three Manticoran destroyers out of hand while their wedges were down and the ships were entirely unprotected in the star system of New Tuscany; the fourth and last member of the division survived only because it was hiding out-system. Later in the novel, Admiral Michelle Henke, a bit irritated at the unprovoked destruction of a part of her fleet, guides karma comprised of lasers — the kind that make up the RMN's ridiculously powerful, precisely targeted, and very lethal missile heads — right into Byng's flagship. Neither flagship nor Byng survive the encounter.
  • Last Stand: The defense of Neue Rostock in Cauldron of Ghosts is a deliberate (discussed and invoked) Last Stand. The defenders could have withdrawn, but they chose to fight to the end to bleed the mesan security forces dry, make a powerful statement (referred to as the seccies' own Alamo) and buy the other seccy districts some time to get armed and organized. The Cavalry arrives, as it often does, just barely in time to save the (few) survivors.
  • Late-Arrival Spoiler: If you are this far down the page, it is already too late.
  • Late to the Punchline: Brigadier Yucel is still trying to figure out what Aivars Terekhov's Pre-Mortem One-Liner means when the punchline annihilates her headquarters from orbit.
  • Latex Perfection: The disguise used by Agent Covilla, aka Rachael, in "Let's Go to Prague" is so effective that when the protagonists see the agent again upon returning from their "vacation", they didn't realize it.
  • Latex Space Suit: Skinsuits, worn by personnel in space in conditions under which depressurization is probable (such as during battle.) Each skinsuit is custom fit for the wearer, and incorporates some elements found in lighter forms of Powered Armor (ballistic materials designed to resist impact and puncture, some electric "muscle" around the joints to offset the weight, etc.) Navy versions are designed to be comfortable and easy to move and operate in, as sitting at duty stations and effecting emergency repairs are a priority for them, while marine versions are bulked up by incorporating additional fixed armor plates, Heads-Up Display, and weapon integration to give them greater combat survivability.
  • The Law of Conservation of Detail: Weber is particularly good with this, frequently giving one-off characters personalities within a page or so, often just before killing them off.
  • Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The technology, capabilities, and overall doctrine of interstellar warfare and starship combat have changed considerably over the course of the books. In Shadow of Freedom, rather than repeatedly mention that the Solarian League Navy is hopelessly obsolescent (as had been done in previous books), they simply put the POV on a Solarian admiral trying to figure out what the Manticorans intend to do with a handful of destroyers by predicting the strategies they'd need to use to successfully lay in an attack. Even with the longer-ranged missiles, she still assumes they will be limited by useful payload, fire control lag, weight of fire, and the need for several of the missiles to be penetration aids to divert enemy point defense to allow the missiles to strike their targets — all tactics highlighted in the first few books before the development of FTL communications and the Manticoran Missile Massacre rendered all that moot over a half dozen books earlier.
  • Leave No Survivors:
    • In the short story "A Grand Tour", by David Drake, during the brittle pre-war peace between Manticore and the People's Republic of Haven, a Havenite cruiser manned by the figurative scrapings of the Dolist masses engages and destroys a Manticoran destroyer in a back-world sector of the Solarian League. In order to keep word from getting out of their action they attempt to slaughter the crew that escaped the destroyer's destruction, missing a shuttle of survivors in the debris from the destroyed ship.
    • In Echoes of Honor, when the combined Grayson-Manticore fleet with the new podnoughts rides to the rescue in the defence of Basilisk, Earl White Haven nearly has a heart attack when he thinks Admiral Yanakov ordered no quarter. Fortunately, the latter only called for no mercy, which is a powerful emotional statement but is thankfully not a massive war crime.note 
  • Legacy of Service: Although it's only in the first/second generation it seems likely that the Clinkscales and LaFollet's will become this for the Harrington clan. In the case of the Clinkscales two generations have served her as Regent and Honor has actually formally adopted the clan as an extended part of the Harrington clan. In the case of the LaFollets at least four members of the clan have served her in various positions (two male members as bodyguards and two female members as maids/advisors).
  • Lensman Arms Race: Superior technology is often treated as a powerful tactical edge, but one that can be and is overcome if not used properly or simply overwhelmed. As the series goes on, several new technologies are introduced that revolutionize space combat, only to have the advantage negated within a few months as counter-technologies are developed. After twenty years of war between Haven and Manticore, both sides have developed war technology far in advance of any other nation in the galaxy. They are so far ahead of the Solarian League, in fact, that when the threat of war with the "Sollies" looms on the horizon, their only real tactical concern is running out of missiles.
  • Let Me at Him!: In The Honor of the Queen, Honor learns that a P.O.W. prison guard has been ordering prisoners raped and beaten, and goes after him with murderous intent. Only the intervention of one of her subordinates, who shoves her arm aside just as she is pulling the trigger, keeps her from committing career suicide by killing him without a trial.
  • Let Me Get This Straight...:
    • Multiple characters have a habit of repeating back what was just said to them, and the accompanying text specifies that they are summing up the conversation in order to make sure that there are no misunderstandings when they decide what future action to take.
    • In a case of Truth in Television, it's mentioned — and demonstrated — on several occasions that naval practice requires orders to be repeated back to ensure that they've been correctly heard and received.
  • Let's Dance: The Audubon Ballroom uses "Shall we dance?" as a Battle Cry, just before proceeding to kick slaver ass.
  • The Little Detecto:
    • All hyper-capable ships are equipped with Warshawskis, sensors that detect the invisible gravity waves in hyperspace that give a nice speed boost to a properly configured impeller drive (and will instantly destroy one that is not).
    • Ships transitioning out of hyperspace also leave behind an energy footprint that the right kind of sensors can detect. Advanced inhabited worlds like Manticore have extremely large and sensitive arrays of these sensors that can detect hyper transits from billions of miles away, as an early warning against sneak attacks. The Oyster Bay attack was only possible because Mesa invented an entirely new type of stealth drive specifically to defeat these sensors.
  • Living Lie Detector: Treecats are empaths, who can sense people's emotions and thusly can easily tell if a person is lying. Beginning in Honor of the Queen, Honor herself can sense the emotions of others through her treecat, and can likewise tell when they are lying.
    • Two short stories in the sixth Worlds of Honor anthology mention that Honor's dad is capable of doing this without a treecat due to being a telepath. Even a mischievous young Honor never bothered to lie to her father, knowing it would do no good.
  • Longevity Treatment: The prolong treatments. It's most blatant example is Honor's mother, Allison, who at 90 is still very attractive and capable of bearing children. And since Honor is a third generation recipient, she's likely to live even longer.
  • Long-Running Book Series: The first edition of On Basilisk Station came out in 1992, and has many volumes (counting spin-offs and anthologies), with even more planned in the future.
  • Loophole Abuse:
    • This is how the Solarian League came to be effectively ruled by its bureaucrats. The League's constitution note  makes the resulting body near impossible to actually govern, so when problems arose that required actual governance to fix, the League was stuck...until some bureaucrats realized that while the League couldn't actually enact any truly effective laws, it could issue bureaucratic regulations. And while it couldn't raise taxes, it could collect "service fees". Eventually, all power shifted to the bureaucrats, with the elected officials being entirely cosmetic figureheads.
    • Under Burdette Steading law, the eldest male member of the household is considered the legal head of the household, and is held responsible for the family finances. Claire's seventeen year old cousin uses this as justification to regularly drain her bank account of the money she earned in the Navy. Meanwhile, Burdette Steading law also stipulates that an officer in the Grayson armed forces is considered a Gentleman, and thus not dependent to anyone else in their family (the law being written when only men could serve in the Grayson armed forces). Michael Mayhew thus considers having Claire legally declared a gentleman in order to free her of her cousin's control. Claire rejects the idea, preferring to contact Steadholder Burdette directly to resolve the issue rather than end running him.
  • Lost Colony: Several worlds that became Neobarbs became cut off from the wider galaxy. Especially early ships from the Cryo era or pre-cryo generational era. The most extreme case was Calvin's Hope which left Earth in PD 45, the world they planned on settling was hit by a Dinosaur killer asteroid just before they were to land 600 years later. They were forced to move on, and had the bad luck to settle on a inhabitable word around a orange dwarf which rarely have planets, and have their primary technology base placed in a valley surrounded by a dormant super-volcano, which awakens before their tech base can support a move. They are then reduced to a hunter gather stage, slowly regaining civilization until rediscovered 1900 years after leaving earth. By the People's Republic of Haven, who uplift them to create Bolthole.
  • The Lost Lenore:
    • Paul Tankersley to Honor; Javier Giscard to Eloise Pritchart.
    • In a non-romantic sense, Honor has a number of these: Armsmen who have sacrificed themselves for her, friends who died in battle (especially Alistair McKeon, who was killed in the Battle of Manticore). Much of her extended family was lost in the Yawata Strike as well.
  • Lower-Deck Episode:
    • Honor Among Enemies spent a great deal of time with new ratings on their first deployment.
    • Shadow of Saganami focused largely on four midshipmen fresh out of the academy.
    • Grayson Navy Letters Home (found here) are the letters of a female Grayson Ensign on her first post-commission deployment. A later short story, Obligated Service, by the same author, focused on that ensign's room mate during the same time period.
  • Lowered Recruiting Standards: Done quietly as the Manticoran navy needs the manpower, which is how folks like Steilman from Honor Among Enemies are still in service.
  • Ludicrous Precision: David Weber often gives ship velocities to 6 significant digits, when those ships are accelerating at rates that make the last three digits change in the time it takes to read the number. On one occasion he had a character verbally give a "time to grav lance range" in hundredths of a second, and almost nobody in the series will say something like "about five minutes" when "two-hundred-ninety-three-point-two seconds" is more accurate.
    "Since .3 c (approx. 89,907.6 km./sec.) was the maximum velocity ..."

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