Honorverse ramblings and musings

cthia wrote:This is probably inconsequential and/or I may have missed its significance. At any rate, this enquiring mind wants to know.

Why did the MAlign wire Rajampet $3.6B if they knew they were going to kill him?

It isn't like he would need the money to buy the farm. LOL

Drunken_Wiki wrote:He was a corrupt man, taking bribes from the Mesan Alignment to help them orchestrate the conflict between the League and the Star Empire of Manticore. In addition, his personality was characterized by belligerence and a fierce resentment of Manticore (for its wealth and disinclination to kowtow to the League's whims). However, shortly after he had received his pay of 3.6 billion credits, a phone call at his home triggered Mesan mind control nanites to force him into killing himself with his own pulser. (HH13)

They knew they would kill him, yes - but they knew also that he was greedy. It was expected to be, if you want to rise into in the upper echelons of the SLN. And, by the way - 1st) I doubt that all the money were from the Alignment. He surely had other patrons, too. 2nd) He was a flag officer for 40+ years, if I remember correctly - for such a long time 3.6 Billion as bribe are actually peanuts. Just the price of one Superdreadnought ... for a Fleet Admiral! I'd say the bribes Kolokoltsov and his cutthroats take for granted in this timeframe are higher - by a considerable margin.

cthia wrote:This is probably inconsequential and/or I may have missed its significance. At any rate, this enquiring mind wants to know.

Why did the MAlign wire Rajampet $3.6B if they knew they were going to kill him?

It isn't like he would need the money to buy the farm. LOL

Drunken_Wiki wrote:He was a corrupt man, taking bribes from the Mesan Alignment to help them orchestrate the conflict between the League and the Star Empire of Manticore. In addition, his personality was characterized by belligerence and a fierce resentment of Manticore (for its wealth and disinclination to kowtow to the League's whims). However, shortly after he had received his pay of 3.6 billion credits, a phone call at his home triggered Mesan mind control nanites to force him into killing himself with his own pulser. (HH13)

Eagleeye wrote:They knew they would kill him, yes - but they knew also that he was greedy. It was expected to be, if you want to rise into in the upper echelons of the SLN. And, by the way - 1st) I doubt that all the money were from the Alignment. He surely had other patrons, too. 2nd) He was a flag officer for 40+ years, if I remember correctly - for such a long time 3.6 Billion as bribe are actually peanuts. Just the price of one Superdreadnought ... for a Fleet Admiral! I'd say the bribes Kolokoltsov and his cutthroats take for granted in this timeframe are higher - by a considerable margin.

But it wasn't just the money. It was also the implications of said money, if found, when found, after an investigation. A transfer into his account just prior to his apparent "suicide" would possibly suggest foul play to an astute investigator and it seems that the MA would want to avoid any and all strings and complications.

It may also beg to question why someone who had just received such a large amount of cash would kill himself. I think I missed something.

Been meaning to ask...

Why don't Sphinx and Gryphon have at least a small SDF of its own?

Hi Eagleeye,

While a RMN SD dropped down to ~30 B M$ in the first war because they were building so many so quickly; OTOH, SLN/BF SD's are or were costing around 40-50 billion each, because of all that graft, you know.

Cthia, it obviously wasn't all at once, NTM obviously secret; rather the skimming over 50+ years, and for the Malign, 3.6 billion is chicken feed given the tens if not hundreds or thousands of trillions they've spent over the centuries, assuming they didn't find his accounts to loot them, but recovering the money would be the more dangerous part, given the potential to raise questions, especially now.

Killing him before he got to spend any of it would probably seem like poetic justice to the MAlign.

L

Eagleeye wrote:

cthia wrote:This is probably inconsequential and/or I may have missed its significance. At any rate, this enquiring mind wants to know.

Why did the MAlign wire Rajampet $3.6B if they knew they were going to kill him?

It isn't like he would need the money to buy the farm. LOL

quote="Drunken_Wiki"He was a corrupt man, taking bribes from the Mesan Alignment to help them orchestrate the conflict between the League and the Star Empire of Manticore. In addition, his personality was characterized by belligerence and a fierce resentment of Manticore (for its wealth and disinclination to kowtow to the League's whims). However, shortly after he had received his pay of 3.6 billion credits, a phone call at his home triggered Mesan mind control nanites to force him into killing himself with his own pulser. (HH13)

quote

They knew they would kill him, yes - but they knew also that he was greedy. It was expected to be, if you want to rise into in the upper echelons of the SLN. And, by the way - 1st) I doubt that all the money were from the Alignment. He surely had other patrons, too. 2nd) He was a flag officer for 40+ years, if I remember correctly - for such a long time 3.6 Billion as bribe are actually peanuts. Just the price of one Superdreadnought ... for a Fleet Admiral! I'd say the bribes Kolokoltsov and his cutthroats take for granted in this timeframe are higher - by a considerable margin.

Drunken_Wiki wrote:He was a corrupt man, taking bribes from the Mesan Alignment to help them orchestrate the conflict between the League and the Star Empire of Manticore. In addition, his personality was characterized by belligerence and a fierce resentment of Manticore (for its wealth and disinclination to kowtow to the League's whims). However, shortly after he had received his pay of 3.6 billion credits, a phone call at his home triggered Mesan mind control nanites to force him into killing himself with his own pulser. (HH13)

quote

They knew they would kill him, yes - but they knew also that he was greedy. It was expected to be, if you want to rise into in the upper echelons of the SLN. And, by the way - 1st) I doubt that all the money were from the Alignment. He surely had other patrons, too. 2nd) He was a flag officer for 40+ years, if I remember correctly - for such a long time 3.6 Billion as bribe are actually peanuts. Just the price of one Superdreadnought ... for a Fleet Admiral! I'd say the bribes Kolokoltsov and his cutthroats take for granted in this timeframe are higher - by a considerable margin.[/quote][/quote]

The money probably came in carefully over the years. Perhaps at the start it was some politician telling him that they were concerned that the navy would use some sort of ruse that some neobarb had advantages. That way they would force the navy to do "bad" things.

So he took the money and made certain that the key leaders involved in checking the Haven quadrant toed the line. People were in positions for a long time.

The admiral got very rich which he probably used to help his family and the Mesalliance made certain that the League was unprepared.

A good deal that was really a bad one. Finally, the admiral was a liability. Had his game playing been caught he might have been forced to testify and that would have been very BAD.

cthia wrote:Been meaning to ask...

Why don't Sphinx and Gryphon have at least a small SDF of its own?

Sphinx and Gryphon are planets in the Manticore Binary System, sort of at the heart of the Star Empire of Manticore. Why the heck would they want to have system defense forces? Those are basically the "navy national guards" of member systems of the SLN, although the term is also used to describe the forces of independent (or nominally so) star systems who have no intent/ability to project power over interstellar distances. (In other words, they have coast-defense fleets, not blue-water fleets.)

badly phrased but i think Citha meant why are no navy ships permanently assigned to guard Sphinx or Grphon.

to which the answer would there are guard ships. they are just so incredibly slow and non hyper capable to they are called forts.

runsforcelery wrote:

cthia wrote:Been meaning to ask...

Why don't Sphinx and Gryphon have at least a small SDF of its own?

Sphinx and Gryphon are planets in the Manticore Binary System, sort of at the heart of the Star Empire of Manticore. Why the heck would they want to have system defense forces? Those are basically the "navy national guards" of member systems of the SLN, although the term is also used to describe the forces of independent (or nominally so) star systems who have no intent/ability to project power over interstellar distances. (In other words, they have coast-defense fleets, not blue-water fleets.)

Sorry, didn't actually know what the defense forces translated to, or even that Sphinx had any worth writing home about.

Basically, in BoM, the RMN was concerned with Tourville making a beeline directly for Sphinx because they would be out of position. Since the SEM is such an affluent system, and Sphinx and Gryphon share in that affluence, I couldn't imagine why they don't enjoy a suitable force of their own? In cases where an opponent might come loaded for bear and headed directly there.

In fact, I got the impression that Sphinxian orbital infrastructure would have been reduced to orbital debris, catty litter, cultivator catnip, space dust, rubble. With the richness of the system, why is Sphinx sometimes naked? As their coastal defense fleets (or whatever is there) don't seem sufficient to hold down the fort until the cavalry comes.

Granted, their was an unprecedented weight of metal bearing down, but still. I do think I recall Tourville's concern of taking losses there, which indicates there was something in orbit. In a nutshell, I didn't imagine Sphinx being as heavily defended as I imagine she should, or would, be. I also felt Honor's obvious pain, knowing she couldn't deploy her forces there in the second BoM -- her home world which holds most of what she holds dear. I always wondered whether that fact was indeed a distraction.

Apparently I was in error. My apology.

shrug

.

Dauntless wrote:badly phrased but i think Cthia meant why are no navy ships permanently assigned to guard Sphinx or Grphon.

to which the answer would there are guard ships. they are just so incredibly slow and non hyper capable to they are called forts.

Yes! Thanks for translating. It also seems it would be distracting to Honor. Her family is there.

I think partly it comes down to why would an attacker go after anything but manticore.

war as per always is politics using violence and unless you are someone like the malign who want to replace humanity then the political centre of the binary system is manticore.

after all if you take manticore's orbitals and demand surrender then you have the surrender of the entire kingdom/empire.

take sphinx or gryphon and all you have are hostages, so generally speaking taking anything but manticore is only worth doing to draw forces away from manticore making it easier to take it and thus the kingdom/empire.

now RFC has mentioned before that although not mentioned often (he does have so many other things to wants to tell us about) each planet of the original kingdom has forts in orbit, i think there is a passage in at all costs about how the sphinx forts could have fired on the havenites but that would have invited retaliation and anything that they didn't shoot down could miss them and hit Sphinx.

so why are there no guard ships? because they are not needed. Home fleet responds to any major threat that threatens the binary system, it has happened twice in 500 years.

oyster bay was closer to a terrorist attack then anything the forts or home fleet are made to stop. even them it is the sort of attack you can only do once.