Spoiler Alert!!! New book possibilities/probabilities

SYED wrote:So while mesa would love to get at beowolf, do they truly want the league navy diminished so quickly. Their plan was for the navy to trim each other down, so who ever won, would be easy to deal with in the future. If the league looses too many ships now, then the alliance will gain supremacy and could have an intact enough navy to inferfere with their plane.

The problem is that Mesa didn't properly figure exactly how much more powerful Manticore/Alliance tech is over the Solarian stuff.

And they surely know more about what happened in both Spindle, and New Tuscany than the League does. I thought I read in one or another of the books, that even Lenny Detweiler himself, more or less, rocked back in his chair when he learned how Manticoran battlecruisers owned the fleet under Crandall.


It was one of the prime motivators, along with the recently discovered wormhole connection into the Talbott Cluster, that had Mesa accelerate their Houdini act. Between Manticore suddenly being "too close", and having combat power far in excess of their original plan from centuries ago planned for... the carefully planned campaign is now basically trying to 'pull a Cachat', in the sense of shooting from the hip and improvising.

I wonder if they might attempt oyster operation against the andies, haven and Beowolf. Due to the greater threat of their combined military threat.

SYED wrote:I wonder if they might attempt oyster operation against the andies, haven and Beowolf. Due to the greater threat of their combined military threat.

Maybe. But it's significantly higher risk that the original oyster bay attacks. All three of those are allies with Manticore and presumably have received all the Intel Manticore pulled together from the post strike investigations.
The MAlign can't be sure how much more effective the defenses will be after they are aware of the threat and have takes whatever steps seem practical to counteract it. And he MAlign doesn't seem to have the share ships to risk a major combat loss - not to mention the wild tales Manticore is trying to sell the League about invisible attackers become a lot more credible if they can start producing debris from damaged or destroyed Spider ships...

The alliance is too big a threat to leave as it is, it will quickly become a major power, and people would rather join with them as they control the wormholes. I can see the alliance taking and holding every terminii in human space. It would eaily make them very rich, and allow them greater power in negotiating with other factions.
The alignment might have their own assets and resources, but the sheer capable fleet, and terminii would relagate them to a lesser power. Also, i bet they were hoping to take over a few terminii for them selves.

If they arent going after infrastructure, they need to eliminate the fleet. my best guess is by bolstering the league navy with enough resources that even if by some miracle survive, they will be done. If they wait to build their own fleet, they would be forced to slug it out in naval operations against a trained and experience fleet.

The thing is their plans in the short to medium term depend on the alignment staying hidden, their membership and darius. Darius allows them a place of security to develop their resources. SInce we know there will be a series set in the future i think darius will be discovered, but the majority of the alignment stays hidden. this would allow them to prepare their worlds in the future for the coming battles.

SYED wrote:The alliance is too big a threat to leave as it is, it will quickly become a major power, and people would rather join with them as they control the wormholes. I can see the alliance taking and holding every terminii in human space. It would eaily make them very rich, and allow them greater power in negotiating with other factions.
The alignment might have their own assets and resources, but the sheer capable fleet, and terminii would relagate them to a lesser power. Also, i bet they were hoping to take over a few terminii for them selves.

If they arent going after infrastructure, they need to eliminate the fleet. my best guess is by bolstering the league navy with enough resources that even if by some miracle survive, they will be done. If they wait to build their own fleet, they would be forced to slug it out in naval operations against a trained and experience fleet.

The thing is their plans in the short to medium term depend on the alignment staying hidden, their membership and darius. Darius allows them a place of security to develop their resources. SInce we know there will be a series set in the future i think darius will be discovered, but the majority of the alignment stays hidden. this would allow them to prepare their worlds in the future for the coming battles.

The thing is the Alignment isn't planning any kind of full scale war against the GA any time soon. And the GA can't go after the RF because it would be a PR nightmare which would just make the GA look like they are out to conquer known space and thus encourage the Independent systems to start looking for allies to fight against the GA.

One of the key points of the Alignment's plan is to set things up so that anyone who claims that RF worlds are working for Mesa will be considered either insane or a blatant lier who considers their audience to be brain-dead idiots.

Even if the GA takes out Darius the RF will remain and the RF is actually the only truly irreplaceable part of the long-term plan. Also if they really need a base like Darius they can wait a few decades and build a replacement. If Haven can build Bolthole during a war without Manticore knowing until Haven was ready for them to know and keep its location hidden even after that does anyone really think the Alignment can't build and hide a replacement for Darius?

They cant go after the alignement membership openly, but i bet they each happen to have a developed navy, with suitable logistical support and military infrastructure. They could target military shipyards of such systems, to ensure the leahue does not get any support.
Darius is valuable due to the terminii and the databases on their installations carrying key intelligence. It seems like a safe place to keep the secrets and records of the alignemnt, so if they fell into enemy hands, it could do alot of damage to their operations.ALso, there are a secret infrastructure location, capable of building podlayers and other military assets.
Sure the alignment could build their own bolt hole, and htey might have other secrest systems, but it would be a loss of hteir investment here. It takes time and resources to build such systems.
So i think darius does get taken, as that would allow the alignment to keep going in the future, as the rest of known space, they might se mesa as the enemy, thye wont believe those worlds are alignment without heavy proof. They might develop into hteir own faction, but people might not think of them as mesan alignment, just one of hte many powers of the fallen league. A threat due to they are heavily developed worls each one of them.

Somtaaw mentioned that, now that so many unexpected and unplanned-for developments have screwed up the MAlign's near-future planning, it'll have to start improvising. The thing is that I have to wonder whether the MAlign is any good at improvising? They're excellent at long-term planning and at planning for just about every contingency they can think of, but no one can predict every possibility.

Also, the MAlign as a whole has a serious shortcoming that I think we should consider, namely that of its institutionalized, collective belief in the overall superiority of its star lines' genetics. Despite individual MAlign leaders' intellectual awareness that that superiority is not nearly so clear as the MAlign's official position holds, they have spent many centuries absolutely convinced of the righteousness of Detweiler's belief that genetic engineering will lead to a 'better' kind of human being. That kind of fanatical conviction is what led to the MAlign's errors in judgement in the first place - things such as the Grand Alliance which they never even imagined happening. That caught the MAlign seriously wrong footed, and means that an entire set of predictions and assumptions now have to be replaced on the fly. Even more seriously, one major unplanned-for disaster will inevitably have an unravelling impact on the whole plan. The question arises whether an organization that has internalized, even institutionalized, long-term planning will be able to respond effectively to that unravelling in a timeous manner?

Personally, I do not think so. The MAlign has been used for too long to being the side that acted, not reacted.

SYED wrote:They cant go after the alignement membership openly, but i bet they each happen to have a developed navy, with suitable logistical support and military infrastructure. They could target military shipyards of such systems, to ensure the leahue does not get any support.
Darius is valuable due to the terminii and the databases on their installations carrying key intelligence. It seems like a safe place to keep the secrets and records of the alignemnt, so if they fell into enemy hands, it could do alot of damage to their operations.ALso, there are a secret infrastructure location, capable of building podlayers and other military assets.
Sure the alignment could build their own bolt hole, and htey might have other secrest systems, but it would be a loss of hteir investment here. It takes time and resources to build such systems.
So i think darius does get taken, as that would allow the alignment to keep going in the future, as the rest of known space, they might se mesa as the enemy, thye wont believe those worlds are alignment without heavy proof. They might develop into hteir own faction, but people might not think of them as mesan alignment, just one of hte many powers of the fallen league. A threat due to they are heavily developed worls each one of them.

I think we need to separate the things we know, from the things the GA knows.
The GA does not know about:

The existence of Darius (including Location, population, anything)
The ship building program at Darius
The existence of the Leonard Detweiler class ships (including size, #, capability)
The existence of the Felix Wormhole
The nature of the Torch wormhole or what is on the other side from it
The existence of The Twins
The existence of the Renaissance Factor (RF) (including membership, # anything)
The alignment of any member of the RF with Mesa or the MAlign.

Theemile wrote:I think we need to separate the things we know, from the things the GA knows.
The GA does not know about:

The existence of Darius (including Location, population, anything)
The ship building program at Darius
The existence of the Leonard Detweiler class ships (including size, #, capability)
The existence of the Felix Wormhole
The nature of the Torch wormhole or what is on the other side from it
The existence of The Twins
The existence of the Renaissance Factor (RF) (including membership, # anything)
The alignment of any member of the RF with Mesa or the MAlign.

Although, on your 2nd point, now that Manticore (we assume) has seized control of Mesa it will very rapidly become clear that the ships that carried out Oyster Bay were not built there.

It doesn't immediately indicate that the MAlign has a whole secret system bolthole (Darius), but that possibility may be perceived as more and more likely as their analysts continue to get evidence that rules out other areas where those ships might have been built.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Theemile wrote:I think we need to separate the things we know, from the things the GA knows.
The GA does not know about:

The existence of Darius (including Location, population, anything)
The ship building program at Darius
The existence of the Leonard Detweiler class ships (including size, #, capability)
The existence of the Felix Wormhole
The nature of the Torch wormhole or what is on the other side from it
The existence of The Twins
The existence of the Renaissance Factor (RF) (including membership, # anything)
The alignment of any member of the RF with Mesa or the MAlign.

Although, on your 2nd point, now that Manticore (we assume) has seized control of Mesa it will very rapidly become clear that the ships that carried out Oyster Bay were not built there.

It doesn't immediately indicate that the MAlign has a whole secret system bolthole (Darius), but that possibility may be perceived as more and more likely as their analysts continue to get evidence that rules out other areas where those ships might have been built.

Mesa sees a lot of traffic volume, albeit a little less than Manticore does and unlike Manticore, it doesn't have a binary companion it can declare as a 'closed harbour'. I'm sure the BSC has some arrangements to regularly visit that system and so they all already know the OB ships were built elsewhere.