You're doing Weber something of an injustice here, I think. On the first hand, as the series goes on, battles tend to occur between combatants who are no longe

You're doing Weber something of an injustice here, I think. On the first hand, as the series goes on, battles tend to occur between combatants who are no longer at or near parity with one another, as Manticore and Haven are at the start of the series. Across several books, Weber details how first the SD(P) project, and then Project Apollo, result in a massive qualitative improvement of Manticoran weapons, such that their navy becomes the most powerful in known space despite its relatively small size. On the second hand, if the attack you mean is "Oyster Bay", then Weber's at some pains to make clear that, while the current stock of missiles is sufficient to defeat one major attack on the scale of Filareta's, the wholesale devastation of Manticore's military manufacturing capabilities will result in a severe force imbalance against any further such attacks, and the sheer size of the Solarian League's navy will come to count for much more than their units' individual weakness against Manticoran ships -- a weakness largely predicated on qualitative differences in missile capabilities, which ceases to be an advantage when Manticoran ships' magazines can't be reloaded. Granted, the end of Mission of Honor and the events of A Rising Thunder make clear that the manufacturing deficit isn't going to end up being the fatal blow to Manticore that it initially appears to be. But you really can't claim with accuracy that Weber just breezes past it as such, not when he spends such effort (and page count) making clear to the reader that, all else equal, Oyster Bay would necessitate Manticore's surrender in relatively short order. And on the third hand, Weber's been getting a lot of trouble from his fanbase and others, since the start of the series, for his infamous habit of "infodumps". He's done a better job of taking to heart that criticism since he accepted that the series is no longer one which can be picked up and started from any book. For I think the same reason, he's also started allowing the reader to infer the actual events of a given battle, choosing to spend words on its prelude and ramifications rather than spewing monotonous chapters on battles whose details are a foregone conclusion. Not to say, of course, that Weber as an author is beyond reproach -- nothing of the sort. And his work is certainly a niche taste. But if you're going to criticize him, you'll do a better job of it if you concentrate on problems he actually has.