Today, we’re talking about conflicts in fandom between people who like one romantic pairing over another, along with… Oh, not that kind of ship, huh? Never mind, this episode is about actual ships and the fights they get into. Mostly spaceships, but also some mention of the air and water variety. Plus, you get to hear Oren’s attempt at pronouncing “Jeune École.”
Show Notes
- The Aeronaut’s Windlass
- Honor Harrington
- Warhammer 40k
- Jeune École (The “Young School,” not “New School”)
- The Expanse
- Machine Spirit
- Adeptus Mechanicus
- Codex Alera
- War Drive
- Hyperspace
- HMS Rodney
- HMS Captain
- Sid Meier’s Pirates
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Victoria. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle. [opening song]
Oren: And welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. Once again with me is my brother Ari.
Ari: Hello again, everyone. I’m back.
Oren: Yes. Now, before we start this podcast, I need everyone to read this 500 page technical schematic for how rail guns work. This is gonna be on the test.
Ari: I definitely know that. So, I’m ready.
Oren: So, we’re talking about ship battles today. Possibly because Ari and I recently read The Aeronaut’s Windlass, which is sort of about ship battles.
Ari: There’s a couple of ships in there.
Oren: You know, there’s some airships in there, kind of. We get a little one at the beginning and then a big mystery plot, and then another little one at the end, or a bigger one.
Ari: They have a little tussle. I don’t know if this is where Jim Butcher’s greatest strengths lie, but it was okay.
Oren: And I know you’ve been binging the Honorverse books, again. Which are about two things: ship battles and how great monarchy is.
Ari: Yes, we love the monarchy here. Big fan. A benevolent dictator is really just our best option as far as a form of government.
Oren: Just such an interesting take to read in 2025.
Ari: Look, look, it’s complicated. Okay? These were made in like 19, like 89, so they had no idea. Now, there was no evidence that monarchies might not be the best form of government at that point.
Oren: How could they have known?
Ari: They just couldn’t have known. They were fresh children.
Oren: It’s so funny to me how they start off by being like, ‘And you know what bankrupts communist states? It’s welfare. They spend too much on welfare.’
Ari: Yeah.
Oren: And you look at what actually bankrupted communist states, and it was military spending.
Ari: Look, David Weber’s political views, or at least the ones expressed in this book, ’cause they’re not always the same- I read some of Orson Scott card’s books and boy, those are different.- but the, whatever they are, they mellow out a bit. But yes, you do have to accept some love of the monarchy. Couple of monarchies, actually.
Oren: Yeah. So, for ship battles, I think the first thing to think about is what is your inspiration? Like your historical inspiration, assuming you have one. That will sort of help you inform what you’re doing. Like in The Aeronaut’s Windlass, which is an airship story, there’s clearly like an inspiration to age of sail, ships of line type combat, although they can also fly and go in any direction they feel like.
Ari: They’re also airplanes, which were definitely around at about the same time, give or take.
Oren: Yeah. You could almost miss this, but they drop that one of the big ships they’re fighting is 500 years old.
Ari: Yeah. A little war hammer inspiration in there with like old ship, good ship.
Oren: Yeah, it’s like the ship gets better as it ages.
Ari: Yeah. It’s like wine, you know? It just gets better with age.
Oren: They mentioned that it has steam engines, and I got the impression those were kind of recent, so I’m like, did they refit it for steam engines?
Ari: Yeah. Being 500 years old doesn’t actually mean a lot. It’s like a Ship of Theseus issue here. They’ve just replaced every part of it at this point, but they like the name, and they’re like, ‘Well, we can’t just name a new ship that, so we just have to keep refitting this one.’
Oren: Yeah. The ship’s bell is 500 years old.
Ari: Yeah, exactly. Look, as long as one piece is still from the original, it’s legal, okay? No one can sue us over this.
Oren: Yeah. So, that’s one option. Star Wars is obviously World War II in space. The Honorverse books are kind of World War I in space, and then they get into this weird, like, missile development tech, which kind of mirrors torpedo development before World War I. And then we get into something that’s vaguely analogous to aircraft carriers, but also kind of like the Jeune Ecole mid-1800’s French naval strategy. So just some mix and matching going on there.
Ari: I think they even use that term in the Honorverse books.
Oren: Jeune Ecole? Do they?
Ari: yeah. I think they talk about that as like a school of ship design or something. It’s something similar. That’s how I read it in my head, anyway.
Oren: Yeah, it so it’s a French term, and if you will forgive me for being way too nerdy, it translates roughly as ‘the new school.’
Ari: Yes, that is in the Honorverse.
Oren: Yeah, and the idea was that you could use a bunch of small, heavily armed ships to blow up bigger ships, and the idea was that it would be more cost-effective. At first, they were like, ‘We can use these new explosive shells that we’re designing.’ And then that didn’t work because of Ironclads. So they were like, ‘Alright, we’ll switch that out, and we’ll use torpedoes instead.’ And that also didn’t work. And it’s a fun example ’cause everyone’s always wondering like, ‘Well, why didn’t they see aircraft carriers coming?’ Right? Why didn’t they realize aircraft carriers would out mode battleships? And it’s like, well, people had said exactly the same thing about torpedo boats.
Ari: You know, hindsight 20-20, and all that. It’s a lot easier to look at everything after the fact and be like, ‘Well, yeah, that just makes sense, obviously.’
Oren: People are always claiming that this is gonna be the next big thing that’s going to out-mode everything. And sometimes it is, but often it’s not.
Ari: And also, especially in like an existential wartime, you really don’t wanna be wrong about this and invest all in on a new weapons system for it just to not work. So, you know, I can see why there would be some resistance to upending naval doctrine in the middle of a world war or leading up to one, and the Honorverse does include some of that, actually.
Oren: And that is part of the reason why the French Navy was struggling towards the late 1800’s and start of the 1900’s, is that they had gone in on this Jeune Ecole idea or, I’m sure I’m butchering that, but you know, the new school, right? And it wasn’t like they stopped building larger ships, but the larger ships really took a backseat for a while, and so then they had to play catch up right around the time everyone else was revolutionizing how their battleships worked.
Ari: Yeah, the Wonder Weapon School of Thought, like, ‘We’ll build the magic bullet, and then we’ll be good to go.’ You see in the Honorverse, it’s important that you have the person who pushes that be tempered by the cool cool main characters who know that too much innovation all at once with unproven technology is a bad thing. So like, we need the cool main character. That’s what France needed.
Oren: Yeah. Why didn’t France have Captain Honor here helping us out? I mean, her name is Honor. How could she not be right?
Ari: She is very cool, and I say that jokingly, but I like her a lot as a character. But boy, the setting also likes her a lot as a character.
Oren: That’s very cool. Then there are some ship battles in fiction that don’t have an obvious parallel, like I don’t know what the Expanse is drawing on. I mean, the Expanse does have big guns and torpedoes, so I guess you could argue that that’s again, sort of World War one-ish, but they’re so different in the way they operate.
Ari: You do see, I think some of this in the details of how the Honorverse works as well, where it’s like someone actually giving at least some amount of thought to what warfare in distances imposed by being in space would mean and how the differences between momentum and acceleration and things like that and gravities and all that noise would affect how combat works and what ships are forced to think about, or captains are forced to think about. And I think I see some of that in the Expanse where they’re exploring the differences. It’s not just World War I but with some stars in the background, or World War II with some stars in the background. There would be a lot of changes if we actually tried to shoot at each other over Interstellar or even intersystem distances.
Oren: Do they use crossing the T in the Honorverse? It’s been a while.
Ari: Yes. They cross the T. Their form of propulsion is also their form of defense. There’s super, like, gravity walls that are formed above and below the ship with weaker ones on the side, but in the front and the back they are open, so you are always trying to cross your enemy’s T and either get it down the throat or up the kilt shot as they say.
Oren: You can definitely see how that makes a little more sense on the water than in a three-dimensional space environment.
Ari: Yeah, everything’s like real big in Honorverse. Like, the size of these things are measured in like hundreds of kilometers. So, it’s like approximately being in front and also their, when their attacks are done with like missiles, the missiles are supposed to be smart enough to try and maneuver in front and behind ships before they explode. That kind of thing.
Oren: So that’s an interesting question, actually, since we’re talking. You mentioned shields. How do you feel about shields in ship battles?
Ari: When all they do is represent additional hull that comes back between episodes, like how in Star Trek they’re just like, ‘Oh, okay, like we just have to get through the shields.’ then the consoles start exploding. I like when shields are-if they’re doing something more novel than just adding additional hit points to the ship. The Honorverse ones are mostly a damaged reduction mechanic rather than a complete ‘you have to punch through these before you can hurt me’ kind of deal, and I prefer that style.
Oren: Yeah, and I mean, with Star Trek you can really tell the writers kind of struggle with that sometimes ’cause it’s like if the shield is basically just a wall of hit points you need to get through, then what happens when we’re in kind of a rush, right? It’s like, we don’t have time to chew through the shield, so it’s just oh, suddenly the shields don’t work.
Ari: Yeah. Or, just stuff explodes anyway. Like the shields are there, but they’re like, oh, the shields are down to 50% and like three incidents have died already ’cause their consoles exploded in their faces. Like, I don’t, what is the shield doing?
Oren: Yeah. I mean, that is one of the advantages of a book over a TV show is that at least with the budget that Star Trek was working with in the nineties, you know, they need to make the space combat feel dangerous, right? But they can’t actually have like a phaser beam rip through the bridge. They don’t have the budget for that. So they had to go with consoles exploding. That’s how you make it feel dangerous.
Ari: We put explosives in everyone’s consoles to really spice things up a little bit when we’re fighting.
Oren: Right. Whereas, In the expanse or in the Honorverse or in Windlass, things just explode because people are shooting explosives at you.
Ari: Yeah, and the Honorverse spends a lot of time during its space battles really trying to hammer home both the physical damage to the vessel, because especially in the early books, the vessels are almost their own characters in the fights, but also the human costs as the Honorverse gets, not incredibly graphic, but graphic enough that it seems like a bad time.
Oren: Yeah. I reread the first one recently, and I thought it did a really good job of explaining what the different systems were and why they mattered. You understood like, okay, so we need these sensors because they allow us to see the missiles coming and that’s how we dodge them. And so when we lose these sensors, now we’re taking more damage, and you know, stuff like that, right?
Ari: Yeah. We’re gonna take more damage ’cause our net of defensive systems are now falling apart.
Oren: Yeah. And I thought that was very good. It really added a sense of desperation as these two ships are just tearing each other to pieces. It was confusing the way that it keeps switching between ship bridges like that with basically no indication of which ship we’re on.
Ari: So I, for the most part, didn’t have that issue reading it way back when. And it’s much better as an audiobook, obviously, because the voice changes.
Oren: Yeah.
Ari: I do honestly think that one of the reasons, in later books, all of the bad guys have to start calling themselves Citizen Captain and Citizen Admiral is so you have an easier time identifying which side you’re reading about.
Oren: Yeah.
Ari: Without having to remember the characters’ names.
Oren: In Windlass, I was sometimes a little confused what exactly they were doing. I sometimes got it. Like, okay, the netting is basically sort of like sails, except they aren’t dependent on wind direction. It’s like sails, but you always have wind going in the direction you want to go. So you can shoot that. Okay, I can see how that works, but I remember specifically in the big ending fight when the two battle cruisers are shooting at each other, I could not track why one of them was being more effective than the other one.
Ari: It’s ’cause it was real old. Yeah. I think was my takeaway is that the ancient machine spirit that dwelt within it and the powers of the Adeptus Mechanicus and holy terror really spoke through its guns. And I have no idea. I agree.
Oren: As far as I could tell, it was because the ship that was losing was captained by a loser who we hate, and so, his ship sucks.
Ari: Yeah, what a jerk. Yeah, the Honorverse falls to that sometimes too. This, the ship is captained by a big dumb jerk and that means their ship sucks. It’s weird ’cause Butcher has a high fantasy, the Codex Alera series where he writes large scale battles, and I think he does a really good job at some of my favorite fantasy battles that I’ve read. And so I was a little confused by some of the vagueness present in the ship battles in Windlass. That it was just like even sometimes, literally, they went into the clouds and then one ship came out and was winning. It’s like, oh, I might’ve liked to see that, but okay.
Oren: What happens in the clouds stays in the clouds.
Ari: Until it comes out, and it shoots at our main character, Captain Grim.
Oren: Oh gosh. Captain Grim. Okay. I don’t hate Captain Grim, but I definitely don’t like him as much as Butcher does.
Ari: Butcher really likes Captain Grim, which I get it. People like honors in the Honorverse, so I do get it, but also I don’t like him as much.
Oren: The fact that he’s so persnickety about people calling him Captain Grim and not by his first name, Francis. He’s such a try hard in that scene. It’s like, no, don’t call me Francis. I’m Captain Grim. Like, okay.
Ari: Yeah, if people call you that, cool. But it loses a lot of its impact when you’re running around demanding people call you by your cool alias name, you know, like I’m not Ari, I am like Death Slicer and call me that, damnit. You can’t call me by my actual name.
Oren: Y’all gotta call me Rathe McBlade from now on.
Ari: Exactly. It’s very cool.
Oren: Which like to be clear, if someone tells you what their name is, respect them. I’m not saying you should go check to see what their actual first name is. I’m saying, in this context, he just wants you to call him by his gamer tag. This is not like a name change situation.
Ari: Yeah, I completely agree. If someone tells you what their name is, respect that. But this seems like a guy who is very attached to his Xbox Live gamer tag and really wants you to respect how cool he is.
Oren: This is a little bit beyond ship battles, but one of the reasons I think Honor is a better character than Grim is that Honor has to start with a goddamn loser ship that’s been like half gutted to fit this like newfangled weapon that barely works. Whereas, Grim starts with a ship that’s already like the best ship of its size, and then he gets a special power crystal that makes it even betterer.
Ari: Yeah, it’s called the Predator. It’s a very cool ship for cool people. And it has all the coolest people. Like, they’re gruff, and they pretend they don’t care, but they care. They really do care.
Oren: I was so much more attached to Honor’s, like tiny little cruiser in the first book. It was like getting blown up and I was like, no, no special ship. No.
Ari: Yeah. And that’s why at the end when it’s like, oh no, like my ship sustained too much damage, it will never, like, it’s gotta go to the scrappers. It’s like, oh, you fought so hard. And now, now our, the poor ship is just. What did they say? She was too old and she gave too much.
Oren: That’s a pretty good line, honestly.
Ari: And it’s like, oh, now I feel bad.
Oren: As opposed to Predator, which is very cool.
Ari: We love predator here and we know nothing. Predator’s gonna be fine. Predator isn’t going anywhere. I don’t believe for a second the predator will suffer. Any permanent damage except for maybe like the final climax, and then we cut to having a cooler, bigger ship, also named the Predator.
Oren: Predator two Electric boogaloo.
Ari: Exactly. That’s the only instance I can imagine that ship is going anywhere in the Windlass series.
Oren: Moving back to the actual ship battles, one thing to think about is how do your ships get into and out of fights? Because in the real world it’s on the water, right? And they gotta move around on it. But in fantasy settings, they’re often in space or in the air, and those tend to be a little different. Especially once you get FTL involved. Like, if your ships can jump to Lightspeed, it’s very easy to end up in a situation where anytime they’re losing, they can just smash the go to Lightspeed button and escape. And you probably don’t want that. That’s gonna hurt tension in a lot of your fights.
Ari: The Honorverse dedicates a lot of pages to explaining why, in all of these fights, you can’t just do that.
Oren: Yeah.
Ari: They have like hyper limits around the stars. So like once you’re inside a certain space within, depending on the star type, you can’t hyper out. So we’d have to like break away and get outside again. The Weber goes to a lot of trouble to talk about how space is huge, and even the biggest ships are tiny moats. So this is all down to very precise math generating intercept vectors and then tricking people who might have higher acceleration than you into an angle where they just can’t get away from you. It’s just impossible with the technology in the setting. Even if they max excelled away from you, they have built up too much speed coming towards you, that kind of thing. And it’s obviously like that is an important detail for him, and I think it serves the series generally quite well in making the battles feel both different from being just on the water, but also possible and not just pretending that space is really tiny. Because that’s kinda what Star Trek does, right? Star Trek just pretends everyone’s kind of right next to each other all the time.
Oren: Yeah, they’re always flying up there. Star Trek has also kind of changed the way Warp Drive has worked over time. Like sure, the distances in Star Trek don’t make any sense, but it at least used to be that if a ship went to Warp, the other ship could just chase at Warp, right? And again, the distances are weird, but at least in like relative speed that sort of works. But more recently, star Trek has increasingly treated warp speed more like hyperspace, which I suspect is JJ Abrams fault.
Ari: JJ, why would you do this?
Oren: Like, he started doing that in the 2009 movie, and I think it’s just sort of stuck. Even the shows are doing it now. Now, granted, we don’t know for sure, right? I think in, in Discovery, they still do like a warp speed chase where they’re shooting at each other. So, it’s not like it’s guaranteed, but the writers are treating it more that way. Which Star Wars has this as a huge problem. Like in Star Wars, every new edition of Star Wars pushes the envelope of where you can go into hyperspace and how easily.
Ari: Well, let me tell you about, uh, hyperspace branding this new idea I’ve thought of. I think it’ll really do well for this series. You know, imagine you’re going like really fast.
Oren: Are you? Is that how hyperspace works?
Ari: It might be, but it’ll look really cool. Like. The coolest looking scene in a movie, you might say.
Oren: yeah, is it worth what happens after? I don’t know.
Ari: But it did look really good.
Oren: But like even beyond the hyperspace ram, like we’re at the point now where you can hyperspace from the atmosphere of one planet to the atmosphere of another planet.
Ari: Yeah. It’s kinda like teleportation. I think this is when writers, I don’t know if lazy is the right word, but their focus is elsewhere. And so this is the button you press to get from one locale to the next and the rest of it, it’s fine.
Oren: Yeah, don’t worry about it. It’s funny to me because The Aeronaut’s Windlass shouldn’t have had this problem because it doesn’t have FTL, but for some reason Butcher added like a permanent cloud layer that any ship can just dive into to escape anytime it wants to.
Ari: See. I initially assumed when I was reading, ’cause the way they talked about it was like, ‘oh, you can’t just do that.’ And so I’m like, oh, is the cloud layer like corrosive? Is there something in it that like eats you, like a big monster? And there are monsters in it, but they’re apparently not super common, and you could just run away from them or not attract their attention by being quiet.
Oren: Right.
Ari: So, you can just leave. I don’t wanna be here anymore. I’m gonna go live in the fog now.
Oren: One of the things about Windlass that also kind of confused me was how advanced their technology is in some ways, and yet they don’t have turrets.
Ari: Butcher really likes Broadsides.
Oren: You can still have broadsides with turrets.
Ari: No, those two things cannot exist at the same time in what I imagine of naval warfare. Once one is invented, broad sides are over.
Oren: Unless your ship only has one turret.
Ari: Yeah. Points-Look, it just wouldn’t be the same.
Oren: Or like, I guess it could be one of those weird experimental battleships that have like all the turrets in the front.
Ari: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oren: That’s-which, those look kind of funny, but-
Ari: They’re over the-some weighting issues that maybe-
Oren: Yeah. Most of the time, even with turrets, you still have broad sides. It’s just, historically speaking, we basically started putting turrets on ships almost as soon as ships were like structurally sound enough to have them.
Ari: Mm-hmm. And they weren’t just cannons sitting like inside the ship that could technically roll around sometimes, maybe.
Oren: Yeah. No, they were like fully rotating platforms, although they were like, it was not an easy process.
Ari: Sure.
Oren: Like, there were several experiments that did not go well. There’s an infamous HMS captain, which was one of the experiments with early turrets that was extremely unstable and just rolled over and sank one day, and it’s like, yep.
Ari: Yeah, I can imagine that. You have all this weight in one spot, and then also once the guns start firing and if you’re trying to like, put the biggest gun you can in the turret. And all of a sudden your ship is on its side.
Oren: And it had to do with the fact that these ships still had mast, which made it really awkward. Like, where do we put the turret if they have masts? That was a whole problem. That’s another reason why for a while, naval planners in the UK were very cautious about new technology is that there had been a lot of warnings that the ship was dangerous and the disaster waiting to happen. And they had been, at least according to the narratives that I have read, ignored because there was a fear that we were gonna miss out on this new technology. So, you know, I’m not saying that directly applies to any of our modern situations, but I’m not, not saying that either.
Ari: Oh, it’s, don’t even worry about it. Jim Butcher just, he just kind of picks and chooses what he wanted. Like some things are obviously very advanced compared to the age of sail broadside canon blasts he wanted. So it can feel a little, I don’t know, anachronistic maybe to read that and see like, wait a minute, these technologies, one of these should be advanced a bit more if we also have this other one.
Oren: Yeah. One thing that I was a little annoyed by was the fact that apparently the ship’s webbing is outside the shields. And I guess that’s not a huge problem for big ships ’cause they have like spools of the stuff so they can just let out some more if you shoot it. But I mean, part of this was just a dramatic issue because later in the book there’s the big rival ship right captained by his ex-wife, which is built up like it’s gonna be the bad guy. And then when they actually fight it-
Ari: They just surrender. It’s fine.
Oren: Yeah. Like, they fight it and it takes like two pages. They like fly up to it and shoot off its webbing real quick ’cause that’s outside the shield, and then it can’t do anything. And it’s like, all right, this is dramatically unsatisfying, but also feels like this is way too easy a tactic. It’s like, why would you ever shoot at anything else if you could do this?
Ari: Yeah. The common issue where a lot of fiction will make shields and then put the most important things outside the shield.
Oren: Like the shield generator.
Ari: Yeah, especially the shield generator. It’s like, what? Like, why did you put that out there? You should tell me if there’s a reason. ’cause I would like to know,
Oren: And I’m pretty sure Butcher is getting inspiration from the fact that during the age of sail there was a lot of discourse about whether or not you should shoot at the enemy ship’s rigging or at its hull, right? And you could argue that it came down to what was your priority? Was your priority destroying the enemy or was your priority getting where you were going to like drop off troops and stuff?
Ari: Yeah
Oren: But at the same time, it’s not really the same because in the age of sail, if you shoot at the rigging, it’s not like one broad side, and now your enemy has no more rigging left right? Which is how it seems to work in windless, at least in that particular battle.
Ari: Yeah. I mean, I played a lot of Sid Meyers pirates, so I’m pretty much an expert on this. You use the chain shot to take down their sails so that you can board them and have a fencing mini-game.
Oren: Yeah, a little fencing, mini-game. Plus, then you get a free ship. So, why would you ever sink them?
Ari: Yeah, exactly. That’s how you gotta trade up. You gotta like, hermit crab your way into a bigger ship every time. For Butcher’s story specifically, uh, it really does suffer from how effective blasting the webbing is. Very wildly because he had introduced two ships that were being set up as the big final boss. And then like, what do you do with that? Like, the predator can’t fight two ships that outgun and out everything except being the coolest. So you have to get rid of one real quick. And so that’s how they, they’re like homing their homing pile that they had in there, and then they just take out sales and now it’s over. But they can’t end the fight like that with another one. So it just stops working like that. Like, why wouldn’t you have spools in your smaller ship? Like, how big are they? Are they so large that you couldn’t afford to put some space to not getting completely knocked out of a fight ’cause someone got a good hit?
Oren: I mean, and especially with how vulnerable that makes you, right? It just seems like something you would prioritize. That’s partly just a plot problem that Windlass has, right? Because Windlass has this big like mystery where they’re like trying to stop the bad guys from doing something and the bad guys are really mysterious, and we never really find out what they’re trying to do. And at the end, they basically get away with it, and it’s like, all right, they got away with this magic book. What does that mean? It’s like, I don’t know, come back for book two to find out.
Ari: Read the next one, I guess. It would’ve been nice to know something about the book.
Oren: Right? And it feels like butcher. Couldn’t figure out how to make a climax that was actually part of that mystery. So instead he was like, oh, hey, remember that big Battle cruiser from the very beginning of the book? That’s the climax. You’re gonna fight that guy instead
Ari: From the dark age of technology. I’m sorry, to anyone listening who doesn’t recognize all these war hammer references, but that’s all I could think of whenever they talked about how old and cool the ship was.
Oren: Glory to the Omnissiah!
Ari: Exactly. Is that’s, that’s that was me reading that. Yeah. It’s like, shoot the air ship’s on the cover, and it’s all very important, and it has nothing to do with the mystery that’s happening.
Oren: Yeah. Oh, that is another thing that’s funny is what do these airships look like?
Ari: I have no idea. I have literally no clue.
Oren: The book cover doesn’t really show one. Instead, it shows someone who I assumed to be Captain Grim, although he looks too young.
Ari: Yeah, he looks really young. Like I imagine Grim is like a weathered, but handsome, like 40 something.
Oren: Yeah, I kind of imagine him looking a bit like Gortash from Baldur’s Gate 3.
Ari: No, a handsome young man with an easy smile.
Oren: But on the cover, I guess that’s supposed to be Captain Grim, but it doesn’t really show the ship at all. And all the art that I’ve seen of it sort of depicts them as flying tall ships, but I know that’s not what they look like. The description is of like a cylinder, but also they have an open deck somewhere. Like, where is the open deck?
Ari: Yeah. The image in my mind is kind of like a half cylinder with like the front top part open, and then you have like the webbing put out behind it like fins almost. That was the best I got, but I think I took that from like a magic card or something. So no idea how close that is.
Oren: My question is, why does it have an open deck?
Ari: Because people need to fall off. Obviously.
Oren: You have to seal the rest of the ship. What’s the point of making the top part open just so that your sailors can tumble off the side sometimes?
Ari: It’s very dramatic is why, I have no idea. I assume that this is just more of butcher really wanting to pull from Those age of sail ships, where they had open decks. So this one has an open deck too, so you can like basically build on that imagery. A lot of readers, I’m sure, have at least some idea of like a captain trumping around on the deck of their wooden sailing ship. He’s shouting cool orders as their ship explodes around them. Like, you know, that’s a very evocative image, but it doesn’t make a ton of sense in the setting we have.
Oren: I mean, pretty cool moment from the end of the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie where it’s like walking down the stairs as they’re exploding. I mean, that battle, it makes no sense at all.
Ari: No, no.
Oren: but it’s a cool scene.
Ari: Yeah. That ship would’ve just ruined two ships because they had all their guns available, but, you know.
Oren: Yeah. It’s like, are you guys gonna shoot? Nah, nah, don’t worry about it.
Ari: No, they, it is very cool what they did to us. Like we have to give it to ’em. One of the things that’s an interesting alternative to that though, is in the Honorverse, what they do is they specifically call out the juxtaposition between what is happening compared to like the immediate environment the characters are in. Like, the characters are in this like quiet, small room in like the center of their ship. So like the most armored spot they could possibly be as like these waves of missiles and lasers are going out and killing thousands and thousands of people that until their shift is hit directly, they don’t hear a single thing. And even if the ship is big enough, even when the ship is hit, then they just get like, you know, their screen shakes a little bit in the old, the Star Trek manner. The camera shakes, and how that is like, you know, it feels kind of unreal until all of a sudden like, explosion breaks through into the bridge and then all of a sudden, like all the horrors of war are on upon them. And I think that’s really cool too. So you don’t have to evoke always like pirate to the Caribbean or, you know, whatever. Take your favorite age of sale. That kind of imagery, I think you can do a lot with specifically not using that imagery in your fantasy or sci-fi.
Oren: All right. Well, we are about out of time, so thank you for talking to me about ship battles.
Ari: I love ship battles. I am, I’m here for it.
Oren: And, if those of you at home want to help us continue our battle against the Pirates of AI bots that are-Yeah, we’ll go with that. That’s a metaphor. You can support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson. He’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. Bye everyone.
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