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Information I'd love to know

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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by kzt   » Mon Feb 17, 2014 11:05 pm

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Well, they are in fact right, as David has outright told us that they don't know where bolthole is.

It's not an unreasonable assumption, as I would have expected an attack on bolthole and the Haven system not too much after the attack on Manticore if they did know where it was.
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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by drothgery   » Mon Feb 17, 2014 11:11 pm

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Graydon wrote:That tells me the Grand Alliance thinks the MAN doesn't know where Bolthole is. The MAN had the Legislaturists -- who probably started the place -- pretty thoroughly penetrated in an intelligence sense.
Just because Pat Givens believes something does not make it true. RFC has said straight out that Bolthole was set up by the Committee.

http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... ngton/65/1
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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by Graydon   » Mon Feb 17, 2014 11:29 pm

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drothgery wrote:
Graydon wrote:That tells me the Grand Alliance thinks the MAN doesn't know where Bolthole is. The MAN had the Legislaturists -- who probably started the place -- pretty thoroughly penetrated in an intelligence sense.
Just because Pat Givens believes something does not make it true. RFC has said straight out that Bolthole was set up by the Committee.

http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... ngton/65/1


Point. And definitely a point about Pat Givens not being omniscient.

I do note that infodump's twelve years old, and a lot of better ideas have been had since.
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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by jchilds   » Mon Feb 17, 2014 11:32 pm

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I wonder if cousin Nesbitt the evil spy has managed to figure it out yet?
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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by roseandheather   » Mon Feb 17, 2014 11:43 pm

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I honestly think the best argument for the MAN not knowing where Bolthole is is the fact that Bolthole is still intact.
~*~


I serve at the pleasure of President Pritchart.

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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by kzt   » Mon Feb 17, 2014 11:46 pm

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roseandheather wrote:I honestly think the best argument for the MAN not knowing where Bolthole is is the fact that Bolthole is still intact.

From the PoV of the characters, yes. We've been told by the guys running the MAN that they don't know where it is, but they are still looking.
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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by saber964   » Tue Feb 18, 2014 12:38 am

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Graydon" [quote="kzt wrote: quote="roseandheather"]
Yes, but in AoV she noted that Honor wasn't going to give her the chance to go through it herself, implying that she hadn't done it before Honor took her on. That doesn't mean she hasn't gone through it since - it's only a six-month course, after all, and it's entirely possible she did it off-screen between AoV and WoH, but I would still love to know for sure.

It's career death to not pass it. So she had either passed it previously or would have taken it off-screen.[/quote]

It's career death to flunk it if you want ship command, but not everybody attends.

Andrea might not be able to take it, she's been an instructor there, and knows things that would make it unfair.

There's also the question about whether or not it's possible to go off to ship command -- which is the thing the Crusher is pass/fail for -- after a long stint as a fleet tactical officer on the commanding admiral's staff. The normal progression probably has you doing fleet tactics after your hyper-capable command stint, or at least the first, relatively-small-ship one. Plus the fleet command teams tend to be very stable in the RMN.

So while it's possible for a combination of "taught it, has an equivalence", "Honor says good things", "we're really short of captains", and "here's your SD" to happen, I don't think it will, I think Andrea's not going to get a ship command of her own because she's much too useful to Eighth Fleet.[/quote]
ATC is a requirement for command of any ship bigger than a destroyer. Andrea probably already attended. When Honor attended she was one of very few who had held a command before attending, but if she had not passed or not went she would have never commanded anything bigger than a destroyer.
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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by Dafmeister   » Tue Feb 18, 2014 5:58 am

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This leads into another question, regarding the career paths in the RMN. Is it possible to advance to flag rank purely in staff/admin roles? Is it possible to be a professional staff officer?

I don't think it's been explicitly stated, but I don't think it is, because we've never seen (to my recollection) a staff officer above the rank of Captain in the RMN (unlike the SLN, where the average fleet staff has more gold braid than an RMN task force). My instinct is that you need to hold at least one hyper-capable command to make Captain of the List, which is the gateway to flag positions.

While on the subject, do we know if Honor has ever been a staff officer? I can't see any reference to her holding such a position in her bio on the wiki - the nearest she gets is her time teaching at the Academy/running the Crusher and her stint on the WDB between the Wayfarer cruise in Silesia and her posting to command a cruiser squadron in IEH, unless being Sarnow's flag captain counts (she wasn't on the staff, but worked very closely with it).

I'm a little surprised by this - if she was being looked at as a future flag officer early on then I would have expected her to have at least one staff posting in her career. Still, accidents happen, and it could be that Honor getting bumped up two grades after Basilisk Station may have thrown a spanner in Admiral Cortez's plans.
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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by jchilds   » Tue Feb 18, 2014 7:19 am

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Honor never really had time for a staff posting. In addition to the accelerated promotions she had, there was also the long periods of time she wasn't actually assigned to much of anything. The year her recovery took after HoTQ and the time she spent on half-pay in Grayson from FoD to the beginning of HAE both took up large chunks of time where she might have taken a senior staff position.

Also, the irregularity of her career path didn't help. OBS had her in a station command (of sorts), HoTQ had her in command of an ad hoc squadron and SVW saw her a flag captain. In FIE she became a senior flag officer in an allied navy.

Politics/influence may have had something to do with it, too. Pre-OBS postings show a lot of XO, TO or ATO positions, which may have been the result of the Youngs working to keep her out of a staff position, to frustrate her advancement.

As to advancing to flag rank without holding a ship command, Mercedes Brigham comes to mind, maybe. Unless she held a command during her time at Endicott or possibly a Grayson command, she was never more than a DD XO or a staff officer before flag rank that I can think of, although I may be wrong.
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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by Dale B   » Tue Feb 18, 2014 8:20 am

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roseandheather wrote:I honestly think the best argument for the MAN not knowing where Bolthole is is the fact that Bolthole is still intact.


Not really. The initial plan was for Haven to destroy Manticore as a military and political force, then probably have Haven taken apart by the Sollies before they went down. By that plan, leaving Bolthole intact was intentional. Haven had to have the building capacity to fight Manticore. Oyster Bay was an off the cuff, abbreviated version of what they actually intended, as they only had the Sharks (ships that were never intended to be deployed in active service) available. Mesa didn't have, and still doesn't have, the resources to hit Bolthole successfully. And tactically, it would be stupid. -If- they managed to pull Houdini off successfully, then the return of the invisible starships and the graser drones would only highlight that the rats got away, and =prove= that they have basing somewhere else. Which would negate much of the effects of Houdini.
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