The Maya Crisis...

munroburton wrote:

Annachie wrote:I think that the will activate it but not actually say anything. Just stop reporting to the league or sending them money.

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I concur. They'll stay under the covers as long as possible, carefully shaping their reports as to avoid extra forces being transferred in or current forces being recalled to deal with some crisis elsewhere in the League.

We readers know the Mandarins are prepared to go after any secessionists other than the Beowulfans with full force. Right now, the Maya Sector Detachment probably doesn't have enough firepower to stop something like the 600 SDs at Tasmania.

Therefore Governor Barregos should be waiting until he(and Erewhon) has at least 60 podlayers in commission and Battle Fleet has been whittled down below a thousand active wallers. And he will be if he doesn't want to end up owing the GA more favours than he has to(e.g. if he needs 100 or 200 GA SD(P)s to show up and save Maya from a SLN fleet).

Indeed, Barregos strikes me as being the sort of person who prefers being owed favours. Maya can collect a few of those by contributing to Manticoran rebuilding and offering a flag for "neutral" merchants to trade under(as well as 100% valid citizenship papers) and possibly as an intermediary between the GA and other potential breakaway sectors.

In return? Well, a discount on MWJ transit fees for several centuries would do nicely.

Erls wrote:I think a competent intelligence analyst (and there are certainly a few of them between Torch, the SEM, and Haven) would view the wormhole as:

1- Only 1 known wormhole is impassable. The odds of this being the second is very unlikely. Beyond that, if it is impassable there is not further reason for us to examine it. Thus, we will conclude this view as incorrect and ignore it.

2- Assuming then that the wormhole is possible, there are 3 possible outcomes:[snip]

Hutch wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Even 4 SDs is probably overkill to secure the wormhole. You could make the cost of an opposed transit unacceptable high with just a 60-odd pods and something to provide fire control for them. In the vulnerable terminus lane that's enough to at least mission kill 30+ SDs; way more that it's worth paying to take Torch.

There is no "overkill". There is only "open fire" and "I need to reload.

I see the wormhole, or any unknown wormhole, as a risk analysis situation.

Yes, it's unlikely that there's an unknown hostile presence behind that wormhole. OTOH the probable damage if there is a hostile presence is quite high.
Matched against that the cost (upfront and ongoing) of defending against a hostile transit is fairly low - relative to the cost to secure the system.

So even before there was specific knowledge of the MAlign conspiracy it would have made sense to have dropped off some firepower to keep an eye on the terminus.

This cheap defense would really be effective only against a wormhole transit; you'd need a more expensive and robust defense to protect the wormhole from getting pounced through hyper. I'd say that a reasonable defensive level is enough firepower that it's "cheaper" for an attacker to come at you through hyper. Going much beyond that seems largely a waste.

In this case, it's not costing Torch a dime; everybody else is providing the ships (oh, I image a division of their frigates will be out there).

We shall see, eventually. I suspect that the MWW didn't set that up and get the Harvest Joy blown up (and more importantly, spared Drs. Kare and Wix) for nothing.

Erls wrote:I think a competent intelligence analyst (and there are certainly a few of them between Torch, the SEM, and Haven) would view the wormhole as:

1- Only 1 known wormhole is impassable. The odds of this being the second is very unlikely. Beyond that, if it is impassable there is not further reason for us to examine it. Thus, we will conclude this view as incorrect and ignore it.

n7axw wrote:I guess I'm finding it a bit amusing that after I argued for this position and got hammered for it about a year plus ago, the consensus on the forum seems to be coming around to my point of view.

Jonathan_S wrote:Sure, if Torch can get others to provide the defense gratis then got as (non)-overkill as they're willing to.

But if Torch did have to provide defense out of it's own military resources then they have to balance wormhole defense against system defense.
(And in that scenario it's nice that you can get quite a lot of wormhole defense for only a modest allocation of your overall system defense assets)

Fox2! wrote:

Hutch wrote:There is no "overkill". There is only "open fire" and "I need to reload.

As we said in SAC, "Overkill is just right."

SWM wrote:

n7axw wrote:I guess I'm finding it a bit amusing that after I argued for this position and got hammered for it about a year plus ago, the consensus on the forum seems to be coming around to my point of view.

I think you are misremembering the response to your argument before. Your point of view back then is that people should have already suspected nefarious deeds in the disappearance of the Harvest Joy. Most people did not say that suspicion was impossible; what people said was that it was perfectly plausible for people to not suspect.

What several people are saying here is that, now that people know about the existence of the Mesan Alignment and have more evidence of their methods and intentions, it is plausible for a paranoid person (of which we can name three or four) to rethink the Wormhole again. This is not really a change of opinion.