To promote the game, multiple Starfire books have been published that portray various campaigns and battles in the setting, many of which were written by David Weber.
I think the motivation of the Starfire books was to promote the writing careers of David Weber and Steve White (the authors)
My understanding is that the first (in real world time) book Insurrection was Weber's (and White's) first novel to be published. It's publication date, however, was 1990; two years after Task Force Games was sold (according to Wikipedia). In Death Ground (3rd book in real world time) and later were after Weber was a well-established author and Starfire had been sold to a private individual; it is almost certainly not the case that they were written to promote the game.
The Starfire books are actually free to read, legally available on the Internet nowadays.
Could you give a reference for this please? I just checked the Baen Free Library and don't see any of them there. You'd think at least Crusade (the first in the Starfire Universe's chronology) or Insurrection would be up, but I didn't see them.
And while we're on this (missile-dominance in combat) topic, there's a point of history that the OP might not be aware of. Aurora originally had MUCH shorter missile ranges (albeit still longer compared to energy range than in Starfire IIRC). The transition to long ranges was due to Steve's drive for internally consistent mechanics in the game. IIRC (and my recollection is a little cloudy here) the introduction of gunboats got him thinking about engine power, and he came up with the idea of types of engine power with differing power/size, with higher levels costing more fuel/power. This allowed him to make military and gunboat engines fit into the same theoretical framework, and he extended the idea to include commercial, fighter and missile engines (again, I'm a little fuzzy on the detailed order of events). When he ran the numbers for missiles (which IIRC were two steps up from fighters), he got HUGE ranges compared to what he'd been using (motivated by Starfire). [EDIT] Rereading this jogged my memory: I think what happened was that missile engines had to be two steps up from
gunboats in order to get the needed power levels. This "hole" in the physics offended his sense of consistency
so he introduced fighters (actually fighter engines) to occupy that slot in the power spectrum.[/EDIT] At that point people started analyzing the tactics/IRW analogues and discovered that Starfire had morphed from "Wooden Ships & Iron Men (or maybe Jutland) in Space" to "Harpoon in Space", i.e. from relatively short-range combat to the equivalent of over-the-horizon missile strikes. It was actually REALLY cool (and I believe unexpected by all) - that setting up a set of rules for Steve's game universe resulted in a tactical situation analogous to Modern Naval Warfare.
About fighters and gunboats: Yes they exist in Starfire, but a similar (and related) story holds for them. My recollection is that many people had been clamoring for fighters for a long time (because hey, space fighters are cool, right?) but that Steve was resisting putting them in because they would be inconsistently over-powered (in terms of mounting small weapons with a big punch - why not put those weapons on regular ships as well?) The way I remember it is that I made a suggestion to cut the size of weapons systems by having support personnel and maintenance be house (and left on) a mother ship - that would give a tradeoff of more powerful systems but lack of independent deployment ability. This suggestion didn't fly, but it got Steve thinking and he came up with the idea for "gunboat engines" mentioned above, which led to power levels and the natural creation of a "fighter engine" [EDIT] (which I now remember was due to the unoccupied "hole" in the power levels")[/EDIT] as well. My recollection is that my initial suggestion was a response to the "how do we get a small craft combatant" problem; if I was thinking about replicating anything specific it was the gunboats from Starfire.
So I would say that in both cases the analogies with the Honorverse are more a case of convergent evolution in game mechanics than direct motivation. Both Weber and Steve strive extremely hard for internally consistent "physics" in their fictional universe, which led to similar solutions to similar problems. Both had "excitement" pressure to introduce something like a fighter; both ended up with something analogous to a FAC (although both were probable also drawing from Starfire). It's pretty obvious from the first Honorverse books that Weber is consciously drawing parallels with Napoleonic naval warfare; it's only in the later books as technology advances that missiles become the big killers. I just realized that there's also convergent evolution at the meta-level here too; Aurora started out with short-range missiles; as "technology" (meaning Steve's understanding of what works for consistent game mechanics) improved the system evolved to long range (modern) missile combat.
[EDIT2]Whaddaya know - I thought it was lost in a board crash, but I just went to the oldest posts in Suggestions found this thread:
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=795.0 that was launched by my original gunboat post. From the comments, it's pretty obvious that the game mechanic came first and the analogies came later. I'm not sure what I meant by "fighters are already taken" with respect to naming; I don't think fighters were in Aurora at the time, so it's probably just a language thing. It's also surprising just how early in Aurora development this was - it was only about a year after Erik moved the board to pentarch, so maybe two years into Aurora. Haven't read it far enough to see if the missile changes are in the same thread or not - if I find that thread I'll further edit this post[/EDIT2]
[EDIT3]
Ok, just spent some fun and nostalgic time reading through old posts and found the rest of the history:
1) I was misremembering about fighters. Apparently, they were in the game from the start, but (it sounds like) with squadrons as the unit (like in Starfire); individual fighters were abstracted away as a count attribute of the squadron. Funny thing is I have essentially NO recollection of this. The change-over happened soon after the introduction of gunboats:
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=998.02) I was wrong about the extra slot in the power levels. The multipliers were 1x for ships, 2x for FAC/gunboat, 3x for fighters and 5x for missiles. I think Steve filled the 4x slot later with "drones", which were low-powered, long range missiles.
3) This thread is the big one:
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=1012.msg8328#msg8328 Brian launched Steve with a suggestion about magazine sizes, which got Steve thinking about an inconsistency in missile and magazine sizes. Somewhere in there the 5x power level missile stuff entered, and the end result was the current huge ranges. This shows up in the 11th post on the 1st page "The can of worms just got a LOT bigger..." Note that here Steve says "what if I changed Aurora to that type of model. It is now Harpoon instead of Honor Harrington". I don't think the context here is HH as a motivation for Aurora, however, I think it's an observation of analogy. In particular, he says that the original missile ranges were what they were because that's how Starfire worked.
Another interesting post in the thread is the 2nd post on the 2nd page. Steve's replying to Shinanygnz and says "The funny thing is that the more internally consistent and 'realistic' I try to make the game, the more it resembles modern naval warfare." This is what I was basing my original comment on - the current mechanics are much more driven by playability and consistency considerations rather than being based off some other game.
[/'EDIT3]
John