The Manpower Files

JohnRoth wrote:

kenl511 wrote:How many of the governing class in the Renaissance Factor are M'Align Star Lines? In ToF the comment is made that there is a lot of commonality in the genetics of Mesan slaves and Mesan Citizens, the slaves were the test bed for gating in DNA to the Star lines, there is a lot of overlap.

I think there may be a bit of confusion about what "star line" means. As far as I can tell, it's simply the term they use for the best Mesan Alpha lines, and is not a separate group of genetic lines. In other words, top performing lines. There may even be "star lines" among the beta, gamma and specialty groups.

How they manage the genetic manipulation outside of Mesa is a bit of a mystery, but I wouldn't think there would be "star lines" out there. It would be too hard to keep track.

kenl511 wrote:Mannerheim hosted a meeting, a summit meeting with many high powered people, is there traffic control records of their ships in orbit? Were the traffic control workers "Houdini"-ed?

Just suggested places to look.....

Maybe someone could send two marine intelligence infiltration specialists to check it out....

This is a chicken and egg problem - you'd have to suspect Mannerheim first to warrant digging through their traffic control records - there are simply too many planets to dig through everything.

One place that does warrant checking is the traffic control records of major nodes to see if they can spot ships that are going from here to there too rapidly. That is, a search for streak drive couriers.

The interpretation I took from the same references of Star Lines is as a generic term for the Alpha, Beta and Gamma Lines collectively. RFC has said the MAlign has lost lines of infiltration agents including Alpha Lines.

Beowulf does have a great deal of information on genetic slaves and should be able to identify people with a large amount of DNA in common with Mesa's slaves.

While I have trouble envisaging how the mechanics of genetic advancement and uplift of families off Mesa would work, I would imagine RFC has ideas and it would be easy to do if you were able to set up your own OB/GYN and Gene cleaning practices on many worlds.

kenl511 wrote:While I have trouble envisaging how the mechanics of genetic advancement and uplift of families off Mesa would work, I would imagine RFC has ideas and it would be easy to do if you were able to set up your own OB/GYN and Gene cleaning practices on many worlds.

Travelling fertility specialists (no need to advertise them as such) could introduce appropriate sperm at home very easily. Introducing fertilized ova at home with Honorverse tech would be doable, if not so trivial.

This is what we here at ONI have currently assembled on the entity known as the Mesan Alignment or MAlign.

Included is a hot link to what we call the MALIGN FILE.
http://honorverse.wikia.com/wiki/Mesan_Alignment

What is currently assembled on what we believe to be the MAlign home planet.

The Darius System was a star system under Mesan control in the Verge of the Solarian League. Its existence and purpose were kept from the rest of the Galaxy, including nearly every Mesan, since it was the site of the shipyards and training facilities of the covert Mesan Alignment Navy.

Star Geography
Darius was an F6 class star with one habitable planet called Gamma. (HH12)

History
The Mesan Alignment first settled Gamma in the first half of the 18th Century PD. By 1922 PD, the system's total population was close to 3.9 billion, of which two billion were members of the Mesan alpha, beta, or gamma genetic lines. The remainder of the population were genetic slaves. However, they were treated far better than genetic slaves elsewhere, as Darius was one of the very few places where the Mesan Constitution's legal prohibition against gross mistreatment of genetic slaves was actually enforced. Nevertheless, only a few of the system population ever left the system, and those who didn't understood the main activity of ship design and construction to be a defensive effort.

The travel and informational limits were effective. No one in the Galaxy, save for some of the officers and men of the MAN, and the Mesan Alignment leadership, knew anything about the Darius System or its purpose. (HH12)

Facilities
The space station Darius Prime orbited the planet Gamma along with four other stations, producing ships and training crews for the MAN. (HH12)

Darius Prime was a space station of the Mesan Alignment. It was located in orbit of the planet Gamma in the Darius System.
Albrecht Detweiler held his congratulatory speech to the Mesan Alignment Navy officers who carried out Operation Oyster Bay aboard the station. (HH12)

I was not aware until the availability of these files that the residence of Darius is believed to be in the Verge. However, this information came to my attention via our wiki informant. Can anyone textev vouche for its veracity?

cthia wrote:I was not aware until the availability of these files that the residence of Darius is believed to be in the Verge. However, this information came to my attention via our wiki informant. Can anyone textev vouche for its veracity?

I'm afraid that this is one of the cases where the wiki is not accurate. I have just gone through every reference to Darius in the text. Essentially all of the information we have about Darius (other than the fact that it is linked to the Felix Junction) comes from Mission of Honor. Nowhere in the text is there any clue as to where Darius is. Nor do I recall any infodump from David with any evidence. Darius could be in the Verge, but it could also be beyond the Verge. It could even be inside the boundaries of the Solarian League. We have no clues.

Security Clearance: High
Threat Level: High
Urgency: High

Streak drive and movement of the MAlign personnel.

Of course, ONI is highly concerned about this streak drive. A regularly dressed dispatch boat can enjoy this capability without looking suspicious.

We'd like to know just how much of an advantage the streak drive delivers compared to normal hyper travel vs wormhole junctions. The Solarian League has to travel the long way around to destinations now because of the final stage of Lacoon. Travel time for the League is now considerably longer than when they enjoyed the benefit of a junction.

What about the Mesan Alignment? Is the streak drive fast enough that it nullifies the need of wormholes? What we here at ONI are getting at is this. We have closed down Junctions to Solarian registry ships. However, in this state of war with the League, we reserve the right and the responsibility to our citizens to more closely inspect every ship. Because of the possibility of Solarian shipping carried out under subterfuge. *Moreover, in this de facto state of war with the MAlignment, we reserve the right to search and closely inspect every ship, including dispatch boats, for possible streak drive technology.

Our question submitted to the tech department is whether the data shared by Dr. Herlander Simões is enough to identify a streak drive enabled ship upon close inspection?

*And whether the diplomatic status of dispatch boats withstands de facto states of war? Something being kicked around in our legal department.

The Mesan Alignment. Is the Darius System completely self surficient? Is there a need of the MAlign to venture outside of the system for supplies? Even so, if the system is self sufficient, probably does not precude their continued need to travel throughout the galaxy... or to allow some contact outside of the galaxy to have contact with Darius. The need to keep abreast of what is going on in the Solarian League, the Haven system and the galaxy at large remains a must for the MAlign lest any of their intelligence operations suffer.

How are they traveling? Can they risk geing spotted taking their sports car out for routine travel at risk of being spotted and scanned emissions recorded? Yet if they are traveling commercially, how? And what of the risk of passenger manifestos? And surely they wouldn't run the risk of yielding to a road block and traffic stop in Lacoon.

The streak drive was a revolutionary hyper drive for starships that was invented by the Mesan Alignment in the early 20th Century PD.
For centuries, the theta band had represented an inviolable maximum for hyperspace travel. By using Hyper generators almost twice the size of conventional ones used by most other star nations, the Mesans broke the iota wall and the kappa wall, reducing, for example, the transit time from the New Tuscany System to Mesa from forty-five to less than thirty-one standard days. This made possible a conventional looking, but faster than any existing, dispatch boat design which allowed the Alignment to get news faster than it should have been able to, and to issue and distribute orders equally quickly.

cthia wrote:
snip...
The Mesan Alignment. Is the Darius System completely self surficient?

snip...

I think the only people who know about the Darius system are all part of the MAlign or resident on Darius, ONI and others can only speculate that the MAlign has a base somewhere where the weapons used in Oyster Bay were manufactured.

ONI will be concentrating on how much information they may be able to get from Mesa to further their knowledge of where the MAlign base may be.

Right. The Alliance strongly suspects -- we have textev -- that the Alignment has a shipyard, or maybe yards, somewhere, and within a few months when Mike Henke's dispatches get back from Mesa they'll know that it isn't in the Mesa system. So ... Where is it? They don't know if its one world or many, maybe some yards "hiding in plain sight", etc. They've never heard the name "Darius" in this context.

Searching will definitely commence, but they've gor a much larger area to search than when they were tyting to find Bolthole and couldn't. There are more eyes looking now, of course, but the galaxy's a big place. Then again, there's a lot of accumulated data in e files.... There may be a lead somewhere.

George J. Smith wrote:

cthia wrote:
snip...
The Mesan Alignment. Is the Darius System completely self surficient?

snip...

I think the only people who know about the Darius system are all part of the MAlign or resident on Darius, ONI and others can only speculate that the MAlign has a base somewhere where the weapons used in Oyster Bay were manufactured.

ONI will be concentrating on how much information they may be able to get from Mesa to further their knowledge of where the MAlign base may be.

Cthia is writing as "ONI", but he really means us, the readers of this forum, and he wants to include information we know but the main characters do not. I'm not sure why Cthia chose to write as "ONI" but it is pretty clearly not intended to limit the data we can use. Cthia apparently wants to gather all the information available from the text and infodumps.

cthia wrote:*And whether the diplomatic status of dispatch boats withstands de facto states of war? Something being kicked around in our legal department.

The state of war definitely does not supercede interstellar conventions on diplomatic status. In fact, even during the war, Havenite diplomatic couriers were never searched. If an Alignment streak ship is registered as a diplomatic courier of a neutral country (or even of the Solarian League or one of its members), Manticore cannot search it and will not be able to tell whether it has a streak drive. Manticore could prevent it from passing through the Wormhole Junction, but they cannot search it.

SWM wrote:

cthia wrote:*And whether the diplomatic status of dispatch boats withstands de facto states of war? Something being kicked around in our legal department.

The state of war definitely does not supercede interstellar conventions on diplomatic status. In fact, even during the war, Havenite diplomatic couriers were never searched. If an Alignment streak ship is registered as a diplomatic courier of a neutral country (or even of the Solarian League or one of its members), Manticore cannot search it and will not be able to tell whether it has a streak drive. Manticore could prevent it from passing through the Wormhole Junction, but they cannot search it.

Well, they could, but only if they wanted to be pariahs in the international community, and have the possibility of being tried for war crimes if the wheels fall off the wagon.

Fortunately, they are sane and are pro-international conventions, despite how inconvenient they may be.