Operation Begonia

I was stopped for a day in editing The Early Fox, and went so far as to read a pdf from NASA on economical testing of small-scale NTRs (Nuclear Thermal Rocket engines).

My beta reader complained about "Site Theta" and wanted something that sounded more military and foreboding. I agreed in that I wanted a more official-sounding name for the test pad out in the desert that could be used consistently in dialog and narration.

(That reader also complained about Major Robert Flowers, but I just haven't been able to come up with something that is either boring, or too on-the-nose. I'm settling for reducing the number of times he gets reduced in the narrative as "Major Bob" -- instead of undercutting his power and menace, the narrative will more often call him "The Major.")

Anyhow, after all of that; VICTOR-7 is what I came up with. It ain't wonderful. It will have to do.

(VICTOR-7 is the codename for the test pad and associated. The actual non-code project name for the rocket was KITFOX.)

***

The other progress of the past few days is I've put Blue in uniform. There really is a mode in Military SF of the career progression story. Space Hornblower stuff -- not necessarily with ships that behave remarkably like something Wellington had used. Crossing the T...In Space!

Engineer path, which should change things up a bit. She's not aiming for command and I don't intend for her to spend a lot of her time in the big chair. Plus the setting is more corporate security than front-line Navy -- her first adventure is an SAR mission tasked to a nearby Survey ship.

A thing I hate when Mil-SF goes space opera, is that the protagonists inevitably have to break the rules. That's fine, but then the repercussions are unsatisfying. Either like Captain Kirk they get conveniently tossed into the briar-patch of being forced to command a starship again (instead of flying a desk as an Admiral), or they manage some crazy rules-lawyering by which everything they did was actually legal if you consider this sub-clause of a seldom-read paragraph that only applies when giant mole-rats are eating the sun...

Okay, sometimes they do get put on the beach, or on half-pay. Honor Harrington herself suffered from being taken off active duty (she wasn't cashiered because she has friends in high places. Which is another typical get-out-of-Leavenworth free card). So did Alexis Carew, but that was less for what she did and more because peace broke out.

That both makes a bit of a mockery out of all that insistence on honor and chain of command and respecting the regulations, and also is stuff I just don't feel like trying to figure out (aka, why exactly IS there a rule about giant mole rats?)

But besides genre suitability, there are good story beats I can get out of Blue having to work within a military-like structure.

Better than that; it provides familiar foundation for the story arc. Her having to survive on a frontier world is one thing. Her having to save herself, rejoin her crew, get their ship back, and finish their mission...that's a lot more structure to work with. Even if the story was headed that way originally, making that her duty makes it a lot more direct.