Mesan Alignment and Beowulf's Secession

For my first ever Forum post I would like to pose this question:

What will the Mesan Alignment try to do about Beowulf's secession from the Solarian League?

The situation the Alignment faces is that they now have a once in a lifetime opportunity to strike at the one system that they hate more than anyone else. If they could manipulate a few more Sollie officers (not hard), provide better weapons, or even secret Spider-drive ship support, they could deal a massive blow to Beowulf. Said system is now in a very vulnerable position as the first system to leave the League and is not yet fully protected with Manticoran grade weapons (or covered by Trumans fleet since they are protecting the Terminus and trying not to look like they are interfering with the plebicite vote). Not to mention the GA is investing a lot of rebuilding and econimic/political support on Beowulf, if they formally join the GA then the Alignments enemies only grow stronger.

Alternatively if they allow Beowulf to secced successfully then they send the message to the rest of League that breaking away is a possible course of action, one very nessessary if they want others to follow. If Beowulf tries to leave and gets squashed and the Mandarins successfully bring in the motion that the "rite of seccession" is no longer valid, then the breakup they want might be stalled, since the Mandarins want to keep the League together and the GA provides the best motivation for the systems to go along with their plans.

So what is the Alignment more likely to do? Let their most hated planet help further their plans? Or help the Mandarins stop the Beowulfers to increase fear in the League and stall the growth of the GA?

Personally, my feeling is they will go for the best of both worlds. They will supply the attacking SLN fleet with some Catafract pods. Some of these pods will be programmed to attack the planet instead of where ever they were targeted at.

Even if only a couple of missiles get through the MAlign will have a huge victory. First, as soon as a missile hits Beowulf, I doubt that the BSDF will be accepting prisoners, so nobody will be able to say "It wasn't us!" Second, the damage to Beowulf would soak up a lot of funds and work from the GA. Third, the fact that the SLN is guilty of an Edict violation would cause the League to fracture in to a thousand tiny pieces, and would allow the Renascence Factor to grab the moral high ground quickly.

RFC has said that the MAlign's reason for not doing an Edict violation is fear of getting caught, and letting it derail their plans. If they do this correctly, there is almost no chance of somebody figuring out it was them, and it allows them to accelerate their plans in a huge way.

Valen123456 wrote:For my first ever Forum post I would like to pose this question:

What will the Mesan Alignment try to do about Beowulf's secession from the Solarian League?

The situation the Alignment faces is that they now have a once in a lifetime opportunity to strike at the one system that they hate more than anyone else. If they could manipulate a few more Sollie officers (not hard), provide better weapons, or even secret Spider-drive ship support, they could deal a massive blow to Beowulf. Said system is now in a very vulnerable position as the first system to leave the League and is not yet fully protected with Manticoran grade weapons (or covered by Trumans fleet since they are protecting the Terminus and trying not to look like they are interfering with the plebicite vote). Not to mention the GA is investing a lot of rebuilding and econimic/political support on Beowulf, if they formally join the GA then the Alignments enemies only grow stronger.

Alternatively if they allow Beowulf to secced successfully then they send the message to the rest of League that breaking away is a possible course of action, one very nessessary if they want others to follow. If Beowulf tries to leave and gets squashed and the Mandarins successfully bring in the motion that the "rite of seccession" is no longer valid, then the breakup they want might be stalled, since the Mandarins want to keep the League together and the GA provides the best motivation for the systems to go along with their plans.

So what is the Alignment more likely to do? Let their most hated planet help further their plans? Or help the Mandarins stop the Beowulfers to increase fear in the League and stall the growth of the GA?

crewdude48 wrote:RFC has said that the MAlign's reason for not doing an Edict violation is fear of getting caught, and letting it derail their plans. If they do this correctly, there is almost no chance of somebody figuring out it was them, and it allows them to accelerate their plans in a huge way.

Oy, we just went over this...

Valen123456 wrote:What will the Mesan Alignment try to do about Beowulf's secession from the Solarian League?

Stand back and cheer.

The MAlign doesn't care whether Beowulf's attempt to secede is successful or not. The Renaissance Factor can use the attempt to assert a Constitutional Right as grounds for their own secession when the time comes.

There objective is to break up the SL. Beowulf bailing from SL for the reasons given is a good thing. So they don't want to stop them. It's exactly what they want to have happen, though not exactly how they palnned it.

However getting the SL to follow the plan THE SL LEADERSHIP, without input from the MA, came up with to destroy the industrial infrastructure of Beowulf would be a major win for the MA too. Beowulf is where a huge chunk of the GA tech is supposed to be built, so crushing this after months/years of work would be a huge hit to Manticore. It might very well also set back by years the work on the Manticore orbital facilities. So the MA wouldn't shed any tears over that.

No to mention that getting the SLN to carry out an edict violation as part of this would likely result in horror in all the core worlds at the SLN and SL leadership. But that would have to be not just deniable by the MA but actually not caused by them or their agents in a way that can be traced to them ever. The MA is playing a very long term game, and things will happen and be discovered over time. See their reasoning for why they didn't just kill everyone on Manticore.

So while I can imagine them putting wheels in motion via various means I can't see them doing anything like what they did at BoM2. But MDMs are "notoriously inaccurate" at long range and if someone following the orders of the SL leadership was to decide to use them to target orbital facilities from 15-20LM out bad things could happen.

Duckk wrote:

crewdude48 wrote:RFC has said that the MAlign's reason for not doing an Edict violation is fear of getting caught, and letting it derail their plans. If they do this correctly, there is almost no chance of somebody figuring out it was them, and it allows them to accelerate their plans in a huge way.

Oy, we just went over this...

I thought what we just went over was why most people don't do Edict violations and that the MAlign hasn't done one yet. Did I miss something? In fact I remember RFC saying quite spicificly that the MAlign does not really care about the Edict for the Edict, but for what violating it can do TO them. They have absolutely no compunctions about the result of the violation itself. If they can pin it on someone else, by actually having it be done by that someone else, they would have no problem about doing it.