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>From: Lesley Grant <lgrant@maths.tcd.ie>
>Subject: cherryhlist
>Date: Tue, 18 May 93 9:25:52 BST

> >From: "Phil G. Fraering" <pgf@srl.cacs.usl.edu>
 
> 1. It seems to me that other than the azi, Union isn't that far
> ahead, if it's ahead at all.

	Tape -- new skills, almost instantly. Rejuv -- live to 150. This is
being improved in _Cyteen_ (Justin and Grant get a new type which doesn't
grey the hair or cause brittle bones). Terraforming -- Cyteen becoming a
niceish place. 

> 2. It seems to take a lot more training to operate an ECS carrier
> smoothly than you could probably get from Azi (except for the really
> specialized ones, which you don't have that many of).

	From _Cyteen_ (and _DS_, _Serpent's Reach_, etc) it seems that azi
make the *best* soldiers, agents, pilots, techs, etc. They can be trained
pretty quickly on the theoretical side of things, and don't seem to have
problems putting theory into practice instantly (tape-teaching seems to make
one 'practised' at something, even if it's a new discipline). The military
in Union also consistently bought the 'best' azi, the ones with most initiative
and so forth.

 
> 3. All sides seem to understand the physics of Jump drive equally
> well; remember that Union had tried cloning the inventor, but she
> never produced anything.

	But _Cyteen_ offers the possibility that they could succeed with
Bok if they tried again. After all, it seems to have worked with Ari2.

 
> 4. Noone mentions riderships on Union vessels. Multi-ship operations
> seem to be inherently harder than large single vessels. A comparison would
> be between the Enterprise (i.e. the aircraft carrier) and a modern
> destroyer. Sure the destroyer's newer, but from an operations standpoint
> the Enterprise represents something much harder to operate, and ultimately
> much more powerful.

	Aren't the Union ships called carriers? That would imply riderships.
They also have fairly nifty spy ships, which the EC doesn't appear to have,
using semi-independent 'spooks' instead.

> >From: Onno Meyer <Onno.Meyer@arbi.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de>
 
> Didn't Dekker go to the belt to escape the draft? In my translation of
> _Rimrunner_, Bet was not about to be pressganged but drafted (no difference,
> but the draft was probably a little more formal). What term is used in
> the english text?

	"Taken": a paraphrase of the sentence is 'the Fleet would take what
it wanted, which was always the young ones and supplies'. There didn't
seem to be anything formal about it, but rather more in the line of boarding
a merchanter and dragging away the teenagers and 20-ish year olds. The Fleet
might have called it a draft, if it ever cared much about its image, but
merchanters and stationers seem to have regarded it as terrorism.

	
> One book (_DS_?) said that _Africa_ and _Norway_ were especially
> infamous among the civilians, and they wouldn't have such a reputation if
> they had spend the war attacking union carriers.

	Wasn't this from their actions in boarding merchanters? Norway had
a reputation for mainly taking supplies (although it also took people),
while Africa took what/whoever it wanted, and shot anyone who complained.


			Lesley