MAlign Tradecraft

The thing is part of their cover was the idea that worked for crooked companies, so why they can be good corporate spies, they can't be governmental spies.

SYED wrote:The thing is part of their cover was the idea that worked for crooked companies, so why they can be good corporate spies, they can't be governmental spies.

I'm not quite sure what you are trying to say here. I think it has been mangled a bit in the translation.

I think you are asking how could Alignment spies be as good as government spies, because they are effectively corporate spies. Is that what you mean?

Assuming I have interpreted you correctly:

There is no reason to think that corporate spies cannot be as good as government spies. It is just a matter of training, funding, mission, and experience. The Mesan Alignment is not just a corporate body. They actually govern one system (Darius), effectively governed another (Mesa), and have agents in numerous governments. It is likely that some of their agents and trainers, past and present, have actually been trained by one government or another. The Alignment is better funded than most governments. Their mission is more like the mission of government spies than corporate spies. And it's not like this is a new thing for the Alignment. They have four hundred and fifty years of experience. You can learn a lot of tradecraft in 450 years, especially if you have access to government agencies.

Garth 2 wrote:Given the MAlign has been able to operate for several hundred years (if not longer) without detection it's impossible to believe it's trade craft is that bad, after all they are successfully manipulating the SL, managed to penetrate the SKM/SEM, the RH/PRH/RH, the AE and Beowulf.

Don't forget, you only hear about intelligence operations when things go wrong (or, in the Honorverse the author needs us to see/hear about something.)

Prior to Firebrand joining MALign he was a SL operative, which meant he 'knew' he had the backing of the SL if anything went wrong. Remember when he went back to Norbrant (Spelling) after everyone thought she was dead and he got picked up by her people, his thoughts on the situation were very clear about 'how things were done'.

As for shipping the weapons and the tech teams via the same ship, in this instance this was more due to timing (after all the MAlign didn't find out the schedule had slipped until late in the day) as they had to utilise an expedited response, which was then followed up by a lucky break by the Nasty Kitty.

I personally would chalk it up to cockiness and hastiness. When you have gotten away with something for a long time, there is a tendency to become sloppy and single-focused. That seems to fit the MAlign to a T. The leadership panicked when they saw all their plans for the Haven Quadrant were being upset by Manticore's success against Haven and Manticore's move into the Talbot cluster. Instead of sitting put, waiting to see what would happen, and adapting accordingly, they tried to jury-rig the plan back into place by substituting Manticore for Haven and forcing the master plan to work. They tried to rely on spycraft that was rusty or hastily planned, leading to a lot of slip-ups. The MAlign embodies the old saw "haste makes waste" and it is apropos of their tradecraft as well.

Firebrand also spent years working for the Gendarmerie, so using the same codename, even if it was bad tradecraft was helpful to him.

Recall from Kornati, when everyone (including him) thought Norbrandt was dead, and the one guy managed to sneak up and put a gun to his back. Damien was a hair from squealing he was a Solarian Gendarme, because most Verge systems wouldn't want to kill him... just in case, it brought OFS down on their heads.

That he was so quick to be ready to squeal who he represented, was a security measure that favoured him, regardless of how good the rest of his tradecraft was, like meetings and code-words, etc.

The Alignement is very good at spy work so I wonder about the Yawata Hit! Remember New Tuscany! The Blow up a whole Spacestation with a good placed bomb! The space stations at Manticore had access for civilians (exception Weyland) so it would be much easier to destroy them with a covert Operation than with new secret Military Technology! They don´t have to show everyone what arrows they have in their hands.

A covert Operation with agents, and you would have nearby the same success with much lower need of resurces!

Maldorian wrote:The Alignement is very good at spy work so I wonder about the Yawata Hit! Remember New Tuscany! The Blow up a whole Spacestation with a good placed bomb! The space stations at Manticore had access for civilians (exception Weyland) so it would be much easier to destroy them with a covert Operation than with new secret Military Technology! They don´t have to show everyone what arrows they have in their hands.

A covert Operation with agents, and you would have nearby the same success with much lower need of resurces!

Naw, that's how they will do it in a year or two. You have a package from a Doctor Gigaton...

Maldorian wrote:The Alignement is very good at spy work so I wonder about the Yawata Hit! Remember New Tuscany! The Blow up a whole Spacestation with a good placed bomb! The space stations at Manticore had access for civilians (exception Weyland) so it would be much easier to destroy them with a covert Operation than with new secret Military Technology! They don´t have to show everyone what arrows they have in their hands.

A covert Operation with agents, and you would have nearby the same success with much lower need of resurces!

They probably could have. But the Stations at Manticore and Sphinx were a lot bigger than at New Tuscany. They were kilometers long. I don't think they could have destroyed all of it--in particular, the military part of it--with bombs only in the civilian zones. Also, the Alignment needed to target a lot more than just those two stations. They also targeted all the distributed construction facilities. Since they already needed the graser torpedoes for all the other facilities, it only required a little bit more to hit the stations with the same devices. That also reduced the possibility of detection. There was no danger of bombs being detected and defused, or early warning of the impending attack, or saboteurs caught and interrogated. That would have been disastrous for the larger plan. A completely unexpected mysterious attack by missiles leaves Manticore with a lot less information.

If I remember correctly a Honorverse interstellar shipping container is 50 meters long by 10 meters by 10 meters. Assume it is full of lithium hydroxide, so 4500 cubic meters of it, with a grav implosion bomb in 1 cubic meter and 499 cubic meters of reflectors. I suspect it will make a spectacularly powerful boom. Along with lots of X-rays and a shockwave running through the rest of the structure at much more than the speed of sound.

kzt wrote:If I remember correctly a Honorverse interstellar shipping container is 50 meters long by 10 meters by 10 meters. Assume it is full of lithium hydroxide, so 4500 cubic meters of it, with a grav implosion bomb in 1 cubic meter and 499 cubic meters of reflectors. I suspect it will make a spectacularly powerful boom. Along with lots of X-rays and a shockwave running through the rest of the structure at much more than the speed of sound.

I'm not convinced you could turn an entire shipping container of lithium hydroxide into a fusion bomb, but I concede your point. If they were willing to use nukes, and able to smuggle them into the station, they could take out the entire station from the civilian zone.

kzt wrote:If I remember correctly a Honorverse interstellar shipping container is 50 meters long by 10 meters by 10 meters. Assume it is full of lithium hydroxide, so 4500 cubic meters of it, with a grav implosion bomb in 1 cubic meter and 499 cubic meters of reflectors. I suspect it will make a spectacularly powerful boom. Along with lots of X-rays and a shockwave running through the rest of the structure at much more than the speed of sound.

wasn't that just the small size, what Norbrandt could easily move around during her insurrection? Or was there reference to other shipping containers?

Because 50x10x10, that's only around 5x the size of a standard sea shipping container? When we're shipping anywhere upto a (few) thousand on our piddly sea-faring ships that generally aren't displacing more than 1-2 mtons and even tramp freighters are in the 2-4 mton range should be hauling considerably more.