Eric wasn’t perfect, and he would have been the first one to say so. Below is his comment on the bar regarding why there are 8 stars on the USE flag. But after that is what Mike Nagle wrote in the Grantville Gazette. The reason was given in the original novel 1632, something Eric wrote more than 20 years before his Bar post. It’s easy to think that an author will remember everything they’ve written, but that simply isn’t the case. It especially isn’t the case when it’s been decades with many books in that series and multiple totally unrelated series having been written in the interrim. Personally, I think it’s pretty amazing that we have so many writers and fans who can help us keep track of all these details even when we forget them. – Bethanne Kim (Publisher, Eric Flint’s 1632 & Beyond magazine) Baens Bar 20 February 2020 00:59 I’m guessing, because BALTIC WAR was written so long ago that my memory is fuzzy, but I suspect the reason there are eight stars on the cross of the USE flag is simply because that’s how many our artist Tom Kidd put on it and it didn’t occur to me at the time to think about the logic behind it. There’s no logic at all to having it based on the original cities in the New United States. What would make sense would be to do it the way the USA’s flag works, which is to add a star every time a new province is formed. Then — oh, joy! — we can have endless wrangles because the imperial cities start clamoring that they damn well ought to be represented on the flag as well as the provinces, and grouchier members of the CoCs would insist that provinces under imperial administration shouldn’t be given the same august status as self-governing provinces. Mike Nagle (excerpted from 1632 and Flags of…