Hi NamelessFly,
From what little textev we have, your worst predictions apparently didn't happen, rather than massacres of women "there was lots of payback" -by women, and much of the leadership elders were killed with the few left fleeing into hiding according to Mercedes Brigham in FIE, IIRC.
Masada had something near 4.5 billion population at the time of THotQ, was generally quite technophobic unlike our current legion of terrorists, NTM quite poor; the BC and DD the peeps 'sold' them being 80% of the GDP, yet that's only about $1.33 per person which is certainly pitiful.
Granted that partly because women were barred from doing anything productive, but that again is the men's stupid fault isn't it.
But the textev from 'Promised Land' and THotQ was quite explicit that the navy got a third of the GDP, which is ridiculous, NTM was extremely oriented to offense not defense, though there were some defensive forts in the Endicott system and 20 LAC's, by the time Hamish showed up there was only a DD and 2 LAC's left against his 8 very modern BC's, so it was no contest.
Against that effectively helpless planet, Hamish had nearly 6000 marines [400+ squads] aboard his 8 BC's [~17,600 combined crew], a third in powered armor, which made them almost impervious to anything the faithful had on the surface, while the skin-suits were close, plus 2-3,000 sailors in support roles also in skinsuits.
While some of the elders may have had a few hours to hide or flee, I suspect most were captured quickly thanks to the unexpected nature of the RMN's visit, and the celerity with which HA-H [we obviously need to distinguish between Hamish and Honor; does HoA-H vs HaA-H work, or is HnA-H and HmA-H better?
] seized the orbitals while the other BC's took out the rest of the faithful's military capability in the system.
Given a transit time of less than 5 minutes, announcing emergency help that is an easy 3-4 digit number [#4357?] might be what needs to be broadcast for the women to call would reduce most attempted murder sprees by the remaining men.
We don't know the proportion of arable land under cultivation on Masada, or how big the 'individual' or patriarchal estates were, but if 60-75 million square miles for ~4.5 B would then mean some 60-75 persons per square mile, the majority female, probably leaving only around 6-7.5 adult men if 10% were armed at best that might fight, however pointless that might be, given how uncoordinated they'd be, since the many estates appear to be about as independent and inter-hostile as the Kzin.
Given how even a fire team could protect an estate's women if they weren't evacuated, a lot of harems could be assembled into larger more easily protected groups rather quickly without most of the estates realizing what was going on, given the RMN's ability to disrupt their primitive communications, and the RMN and RMMC's superior stealth etc.
Letting the older generation and men especially die is certainly happening, and many of the younger rising generation have apparently eagerly accepted the modern technological society that Manticore has offered, so I think Allison's discovery has been shared as well.
L
namelessfly wrote:There are all kinds of feminists dreams being discussed to deal with Masada. They are all predicated on the assumption that Manticore is able to put enough boots on the ground to impose these ideas. Iraq and Afghanistan offer two very good examples of how difficult it is to transform a culture. Remember how Bush was castigated for not deploying a large enough invasion force to properely occupy Iraq? IIRC, the ratio was something like 50,000 troops deployed to a country of 50 million people or 1000:1 ratio. The surge brought the ratio to 200:1 which seemed to work until the troops were withdrawn.
Even if a 1,000:1 ratio is adequate, Manticore would have to deploy an occupation army of about 5 million troops to impose any type of societal change on Masada. Any bright ideas about inviting women to emigrate would just provoke the Masadan males to kill a lot of women.
The best that Manticore can hope for is to interdict Masada and prevent the construction of serious weaponry including planet based missiles similar to those at Blackbird.
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