I think the legacy of Star Trek has a lot to do with it, too, with Kirk's Enterprise having a lot of naval organization to it (pish on Roddenberry's 'starfleet isn't military'). And since Trek was basically "Horatio Hornblower meets Wagon Train... IN SPACE!"...
Weber started off wanting to have his battles look like age of sail battles, so he invented a tech tree that would drive things to that point. Then he took the logical consequences of that tech and ran with them, and things are now (in-book time about 20 years later by the latest books) very very different.
Weber got his start from writing novels based on the Starfire game, which itself was inspired by Starfleet Battles, which goes back to the original Franz Joseph Trek fandom.
Right now, in the US, and for the last 40 years or so, there has been arguments in the halls of power over who should control America's space presence. I've alluded to this over in the Fenspace threads - NASA on the civilian side, the Air Force thinks they should have control of anything that flies, and the Navy insists that it's going to be "ships", so they should control it - and they do have the institutional infrastructure, tradition, and training to handle large crewed vehicles in a hostile environment, whereas the AF deals almost universally with much smaller craft (I think the largest crew for an AF plane is under 30, and that's for a radar bird with 2/3 of that as sensor crew.)
The naval tradition is also a highly romanticized one, which has a tendency to inspire writers all over the place.--
"I give you the beautiful... the talented... the tirelessly atomic-powered...
R!
DOROTHY!
WAYNERIGHT!
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.
Weber started off wanting to have his battles look like age of sail battles, so he invented a tech tree that would drive things to that point. Then he took the logical consequences of that tech and ran with them, and things are now (in-book time about 20 years later by the latest books) very very different.
Weber got his start from writing novels based on the Starfire game, which itself was inspired by Starfleet Battles, which goes back to the original Franz Joseph Trek fandom.
Right now, in the US, and for the last 40 years or so, there has been arguments in the halls of power over who should control America's space presence. I've alluded to this over in the Fenspace threads - NASA on the civilian side, the Air Force thinks they should have control of anything that flies, and the Navy insists that it's going to be "ships", so they should control it - and they do have the institutional infrastructure, tradition, and training to handle large crewed vehicles in a hostile environment, whereas the AF deals almost universally with much smaller craft (I think the largest crew for an AF plane is under 30, and that's for a radar bird with 2/3 of that as sensor crew.)
The naval tradition is also a highly romanticized one, which has a tendency to inspire writers all over the place.--
"I give you the beautiful... the talented... the tirelessly atomic-powered...
R!
DOROTHY!
WAYNERIGHT!
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.