profit motive and already physically shielded, also carry better particle shield generators and can attain much faster interstellar voyage times both within a band, and because their better protections enables them to enter higher hyperbands with higher local particle counts, but higher speed multipliers. The interaction of gravity effects also manifest in much rarer, generally widely scattered wormholes, through which hyperdrive equipped ships can travel virtually instantaneously between the wormhole's end points. In some systems, several of these wormholes are found to be co-located forming an irresistible trading nexus, perhaps because their ends have some mathematical affinity: they occur with entrances relatively close together in very small spatial volumes. The greatest known aggregation of these co-located "Junctions" or Terminus Loci occurs in the Manticore binary star system, whose wormholes connect the wormhole junction to six (later seven) other star systems, giving the Manticore system an astrographic position to be coveted, and an immense revenue stream from transit tolls, manufacturing and trade, and a large carrying trade. In the stories, no means of faster-than-light interstellar communications exists. Messages between star systems must be physically carried by starships. Even using the fastest ships available as couriers, this communications "lag" between worlds has many consequences, greatly increasing the responsibility placed upon starship captains and senior military commanders far from home, complicating the coordination of military campaigns, and allowing a single accident or attack to render a planet incommunicado. The stories include numerous dependent and independent polities and several major star nations including two giant aggregations of many planets, Haven and the Solarian League. Protagonist Honor Harrington is a citizen of the Star Kingdom of Manticore which is, during the first 20 or so works of the series, the key rival and the main stellar protagonist against the star-conquering (People's) Republic of Haven; these two nations are consciously based on Imperial Britain and Napoleonic France, although Haven also seems to be influenced by the former Soviet Union. The first books deal with a universe of escalating tensions and military incidents until war breaks out in the third novel and lasts until the formal peace in A Rising Thunder, the thirteenth mainline novel. Each star nation suffers horrendous losses at the end of the eleventh novel, At All Costs, during the Battle of Manticore, when Haven makes an all-out bid to conquer the Star Kingdom before general deployment of a feared 'super weapon'. In the