To extend my remarks in my "That'd be me post" above...
Yes, I am Fred Burton (hence my handle of Crucis), formerly a loyal minion of Dave Weber when he was producing Starfire products. I haven't stayed in contact with him for a long time, so don't be looking for any scoops on his latest projects. I'm as much in the dark as any of you.
However, I was/am the creator of The Star Union, the Zarkolyan Empire, The Pitariad (betcha'd LOVE to know who they are), the Laser Torpedo, the Anti-Shield Warhead, the Box Launcher, co-creator of the Gunboat, and nearly every Star Union and Zarkolyan character in The Shiva Option, as well as the "scenarios" in Crucian space shown by Dave and Steve in TSO, and that Starfire map of a part of Crucian space at the front of TSO. And the ship designer for the Arachnid, Star Union, and Zarkolyan fleets, as shown in ISW4.
The first scenario/scene between SF19 and Wingmaster Furra's 6th Strike Wing was scripted by me right down to the exact tactics used by the technically inferior Crucian ships defeat the Bug BCs. I actually gamed out that specific scenario in the tried and true map, counters, and d10's. The fact that Furra's SDR's managed to take out all but one of the Bug command datalink command ships was COMPLETELY random dumb luck. I was as astounded as I'm sure any reader was at their incredible good luck.
The Battle of Reymiirnagar (also called Hell's Gate, in Crucian) was also as I scripted it, although not in as much detail. The massive Asteroid Fortresses were my idea, and had been initially placed at another WP in the system which led to the Telik system, which is where the Crucians actually feared that a Demon attack might come for about 100 years.
The seemingly suicidal corvettes with ECM2 (datalink jamming ECM) was also my idea. I saw it as a very "crucian" thing to do. The Crucians aren't the religous fanatics that the Rigelians or the Thebans were, but they are very committed to defeating the Demons.
Along that line, a scripted battle of mine that wasn't included in The Shiva Option was the First Battle of Rabahl, where a reserve formation, the 10th Grand Wing (IIRC) fought a battle to the very last ship to buy time for the Br'stoll'ee to evacuate their very recently emplaced colony. In my history of the Star Union, 10th Grand Wing was called the "Gray Wing" because its ships and its crews were so old, and every member of 10th GW was posthumously awarded the Star Union's highest honor (whatever that is), since their sacrifice not only allowed the Br'stoll'ee the time to evacuate every single colonist, but it also delayed the Demon advance into that sector of Star Union space for many months, and bought the USN time to prepare itself for some larger battles to come in the area between Menkasahr and and the immense USN Fleet Base at Beylaktuur.
OTOH, I'm also the person who created the apparantly flawed Arachnid ships that, according to some people on the List, had some Magazines to far forward on their control sheets. That was both intentional and a mistake. Intentional in that the Bugs, IIRC, didn't start the war with anti-matter warheads, thus more forward mags wasn't an issue. And a mistake in that after they encountered AM whds early in the war and developed their own, the Bugs should have moved their magazines deeper into the ships at the first refits. (In my defense, if this was such an issue, I'd like to know why SDS didn't catch it before publishing ISW4. Moving a few mags back in some designs would have been a near zero effort amount of work, since it wouldn't have required any recalculations of costs, etc. But I disgress.) In the words of a well known Honorverse character, "Oooops".