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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hypersmurf" data-source="post: 1317266" data-attributes="member: 1656">A lot of the setting revolves around the impeller drive.  Basically space travel works in four ways: impeller drive, which is sublight; impeller drive in hyperspace, which is effectively faster, since everywhere in hyper is "closer" to everywhere in normal space; Warshawski sail in a grav wave, which is really really zippy, but only travels along the lines of grav waves; and wormholes, which instantaneously travel between two fixed points an arbitrary distance apart.So trade routes and military strategies involve grav waves and wormholes heavily.The books cover four major powers and assorted minor ones.  The Solarian League is really big, really old, and complacent in their technological superiority.  Basically, the Solarian League is bigger than the rest of humanity put together.The Republic of Haven is the second-largest empire around.  They've been staving off complete financial collapse via wars of conquest, gobbling up smaller star systems.The Star Kingdom of Manticore and the Manticoran Alliance is where the main character is from.  Manticore is an incredibly wealthy system due to an abundance of wormholes and hence a particularly vigorous trading economy.  Most of the series is about the war that takes place when the Republic of Haven thinks they should be able to quickly snap up Manticore with their vast numerical superiority... but it turns out that Manticore's R&D is far in advance of Haven's, and for much of the series, their tech (military, at least) has actually advanced beyond that of the League.The fourth major power is the Andermani Empire, who we haven't seen much of, but who look to become more prominent in the next few books.  They've butted heads with Manticore for decades over the trade in the Silesian Confederacy, a loose-knit region of systems with virtually no serious government and riddled with corruption and pirates.At the start of the series, warships come in a variety of classes - the smallest 'serious' warship is the destroyer, used for escorting merchants, antipiracy, and scouting/picketing/screening; cruisers are used for just about everything; and real battles are decided by the 'ships of the wall', the quivalent of wet-navy 'ships of the line'; dreadnaughts and superdreadnaughts.  Combat involves missiles for long range and beam weapons for short range, and in most of the engagements that we see throughout the series, salvo-volume for missiles is a major factor in deciding outcomes.  The more missiles you can launch in a single go, the better chance you have of getting significant damage past a ship's defences.-Hyp.</blockquote>

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