Suspension of Disbelief.

Silverwall wrote:The other thing I find somewhat hard to swallow is the big hundreds of years conspiricy of the Mesan Alignment. No historical secret organisation has managed to keep itself hidden for any period of time without at least legends of it's existance cropping up.

Also how do they prevent agents/operatives such as McBride and Simoes from developing doubts once sent undercover on the planets they are infiltrating? All it takes is a couple of agents realising that what they have been fed all thier lives is wrong/biased etc once out in the field and for them to go to the Authorities in Beowulf for the thing to be blown. Once they are out in the real world you can't keep them all under surveliance and control.

However this compliaint is one I have for an awful lot of media, I find the "Big Secret Conspiricy" one of the hardest plotline to put into a realistic setting. Even the conspiricies of the villians in pure fantasy such as James Bond films are more believable than these big multi decade conspiracies such as the MA and the similar ones everywhere in the media these days.

cthia wrote:MWW thinking that he can just kill off Honor Harrington without a mass exodus of pitch fork wielding rabid animals on all roads leading to South Carolina.

hanuman wrote:Hey guys, I've seen several posts that complain about the failure to encounter advanced, space faring alien species.

I think it is worthwhile to remember that humanity, by the time of "On Basilisk Station', had settled a volume of space about a thousand light years across. Humans might have explored a few hundred light years beyond that, but not much more. That is a tiny volume of space compared to the size of our galaxy, which according to Wikipedia has a diameter of 100 000 - 120 000, maybe even as much as 150 000 - 180 000, light years.

There is no logical reason to insist that more than one advanced, space faring species would have evolved within such a tiny volume of space, or within a slightly larger volume that would have enabled humans to detect them in the two-and-half or three millennia since the advent of modern astronomy.

Even within the volume of space that humans have explored, they had encountered at least two relatively advanced species, and had discovered the remnants of one non-canonical extinct space faring species.

Don't get me wrong, it's entirely possible that somewhere in the Honorverse Milky Way several or even many advanced space faring species might have evolved in close proximity to each other, at more or less the same time as humans (or even much earlier). However, it seems illogical to me to expect a generally even spread of such advanced civilizations across the galaxy. Far more probable that the emergence of space faring civilizations would occur in patches of relative abundance in a field of relative scarcity. And that, in case of the Honorverse, humanity just happened to evolve in one of the less densely-'populated' regions of space.

kzt wrote:

cthia wrote:MWW thinking that he can just kill off Honor Harrington without a mass exodus of pitch fork wielding rabid animals on all roads leading to South Carolina.

I would have been really annoyed if he'd killed her off the way he killed Kuzak. I still don't understand how nobody noticed how she and her command staff had taken up smoking crack.

kzt wrote:

cthia wrote:MWW thinking that he can just kill off Honor Harrington without a mass exodus of pitch fork wielding rabid animals on all roads leading to South Carolina.

I would have been really annoyed if he'd killed her off the way he killed Kuzak. I still don't understand how nobody noticed how she and her command staff had taken up smoking crack.

Somtaaw wrote:Wait what? I thought Kuzak was one of the few survivors of BoMa?

Could have sworn the only real casualty of Third Fleet (that was named, and been introduced to us readers anyways) was McKeon.

cthia wrote:But what is it that you say I missed about Kuzak and crack, kzt?

Silverwall wrote:The other thing I find somewhat hard to swallow is the big hundreds of years conspiricy of the Mesan Alignment. No historical secret organisation has managed to keep itself hidden for any period of time without at least legends of it's existance cropping up.

Also how do they prevent agents/operatives such as McBride and Simoes from developing doubts once sent undercover on the planets they are infiltrating? All it takes is a couple of agents realising that what they have been fed all thier lives is wrong/biased etc once out in the field and for them to go to the Authorities in Beowulf for the thing to be blown. Once they are out in the real world you can't keep them all under surveliance and control.

cthia wrote:Related to that, that you've just reminded me that I had problems with, is the MAlign had sleeper cells who didn't even know they were sleeping. Huh?

By the way, you're not a Manticoran, you're a Mesan and we are activating you now.

Mission of Honor said wrote:"You're right," Pritchart agreed. "On the other hand, let's not get too carried away. They may think they're superwomen, but I don't see why we should start thinking of them that way. I don't doubt they could do exactly what you're describing, Tom. In fact, that may well be what they did to the Old Republic. But however long they've been planning, they've still got to hold themselves to a manageable level of complexity. They've got to be able to coordinate everything, and we've had enough experience trying to coordinate the Republic to know how tall an order that can be even when we don't have to worry about keeping communications lines covert. Which has particular point in a case like this, I suspect, since I tend to doubt they could bury their sleepers quite as deeply as you've just suggested. There's got to be at least some contact somewhere if they aren't going to lose their assets simply because someone dies before she gets around to telling her son or daughter 'Oh, by the way. We're actually secret agents for the Mesan Alignment. Here's your secret decoder kit. Be ready to be contacted by the Galactic Evil Overlord on Frequency X with orders to betray the society you've been raised all your life to think of as your own.'"

On 2011-06-17 RFC wrote:The other thing I’ll say is that the Alignment has lost a LOT of its “sleeper” lines over the centuries. It always assumed that it would lose quite a few of them and based its plans on letting a line go (and having redundant backups in place) rather than risking exposure by trying to “salvage” or hang onto one when there was no suitable generational candidate or there was a communications failure.They have also resorted to assassination in more than one instance to tie off potential loose ends. In the case of the Renaissance Factor’s leadership cadres, the “sleepers” are not individual family lines but of groups of allied families, and “the onion” is replicated within those families. These planets have been settled for far shorter periods than most League systems, their elites were infiltrated by the Alignment early on, and clandestine Mesan support (economic, political, and lethal [where serious obstacles can be removed by a discreet assassination or two]) to help them along has been a major factor in how they have become and remained as locally powerful as they are. But it wasn’t until the current generation that any members of those families were let into the full strategy, and even then that knowledge was limited to very carefully selected, screened, and groomed individuals. The same thing holds true within the ranks of the militaries of the RF’s member star nations, and, in fact, MA influence within the military is largely restricted to a single one of the RF’s navies (which one is left to the reader, based on textev already presented <G>), which is the main reason Darius was necessary in the first place.