On Rereading HELL'S GATE

The discussion is confused enough that I'm not clear on what everyone has said but my take at this point is that much of the criticism of the Arcanan plan is a result of 20/20 hindsight. Was it sub-optimal for contacting Sharona, or for contacting us, yes it was. It doesn't follow from that that it wasn't the best possible plan.

As I reflect on it I think the Arcanans had three dominant concerns in setting out their first contact procedures.
1) Make sure the other side knows that we are too tough to conquer.
2) Don't start any fights, but if they start one win it in pursuit of point 1.
3) Gather information, while keeping the others from doing so as much as possible, so that we can do a decent threat assessment of these people to determine our negotiating position.

Is this the set of priorities most likely to produce peaceful relations with Sharona, no. Is this the set of priorities most likely to produce peaceful relations with the modern west, no. But that is not that limits of human civilization. Is this the set of priorities most likely to produce peaceful relations with the Roman Empire? How about the Aztecs? Or the Spanish Empire that conquered them? Or any of the Islamic Caliphates? Or the 19th Century European Empires? Or the People's Republic of China? Or the USSR?

The Arcanans are coming in with the pessimistic assumption that if the other side thinks they can be conquered easily and cheaply the other side will try it. That is reasonable. That is how humans throughout history have usually worked. That is in fact exactly what the Arcanans did. In other words it was the Sharonans failure to convince mul Gurthik that they were to strong to be conquered that produced the war. I don't think they could have done that but it is worth remembering that mul Gurthik had Skivron confirm the Sharonans did not have magic before he arranged the attack.

In sum the thinking behind the Arcanan plan is, if we aren't at rough parity with these people we are screwed whatever we do. Therefor it makes sense act confident and hope we can back up that boast. Might this confidence produce a few boarder incidence yes, but the distances are too great for that to spiral into a war by accident. Note without mul Gurthik things probably would have been worked out peacefully, eventually.

Nicholas

n7axw wrote:
Ah, what a job of "surviving" that survey crew managed. I think we're going to continue to disagree on this one, PeterZ. From my perspective, had there been a way of stablizing the situation until the real diplomats could arrive,the result could have been much better.

Force present and available doesn't necessarily mean that there has to be a battle. All it really has to mean is that you prevent the other guy from walking away with the jewels until there can be some agreement on who gets the jewels or some way of dividing them up.

I am having a hard time coming coming up with examples of honest to goodness good faith negotiating that actually succeeded when there wasn't at least some parity of force involved. I can come up with multitudes of examples of situations when there wasn't parity, what negotiations really were was the dominant party telling the weaker side how it was going to be. In order to see that all you have to do is watch the news.

Sharona had no provisions in play for looking after its interests and the bottom line turned out to be an expensive war and a destablization of its politics at home. Not a good result.

Don

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What was the primary reason for the Arcanans to control the situation? To control the information flow. They assumed that physical control of the encountered party would control the information.

The Sharonans have had two prior first contacts; cetaceans and apes. Both of these societies and all the sentient species that comprise these societies have had some form of Voice communication. Their fundamental world view assumes instantaneous communication will be available for multiverse exploration.

Sending a primarily military fighting force to explore the multiverse just in case they run into another multiple universe society which happens NOT to have instantaneous communication of at least a close approximation of their Voice network so that if things go into the crapper they can secure the first contact individuals and the information they can't hope to stop from being transmitted is in all likelihood excessive. (Pardon me for the German-esque sentence). Nothing wrong with the military. Sharona has military units at the forts guarding the portals. Had Sharona encountered another Voice capable society, they would have recognized that they could not secure the first contact no matter how screwed up it was. The information would have gotten out and trying to secure the individuals would have simply added tension from another altercation or confrontation.

The Arcanans' jingoism is a product of their inexperience in dealing with and even recognizing other sentient beings. Their world view is much narrower as a result. They believe they could control a screwed up first contact encounter with sufficient military force. Sharona believed that controlling the information being sent out to the authorities of their first encounter is nigh impossible. Why bother trying to control the encounter no matter how confused it got if they could not massage the information being sent out? Get clear of the situation and let higher authority deal with it.

The Sharonans were right since the Arcanas had hummers. The Arcanas belief that only they had communications capability past hearing and line of sight was wrong. Their policy assumed they could control the information by controlling the first encounter group. Faulty assumptions on the Arcanans side. Stupid ones really.

That's my point, Nicholas. In your analysis Arcana's lack of experience assumes the first contact society will be primarily considering conquest if possible. Not too outrageous an assumption given their history as recent as 200 years ago and Mythalan attitudes in general.

Sharonans' experiences and assumptions are different. They know it is possible to live in peace with VERY different sentiets. Part of what makes this possible is that there is an infinite amount of living space and resources available in the multiverse. Absent competition for scarce resources, peace is only a matter of understanding. Voices are good at achieving understanding even between different species. Why take additional risks no matter how small that may escalate a bad situation into a worse one? The Voices in the diplomatic corps can sort things out. They are good at that.

You simply can't assume that people whom you are making first contact with are benign any more than it is safe for me to leave my door unlocked...even in tiny little Viborg, SD. If a stranger comes to my door, I evaluate the risk factor before they get invited into the living room. In the unfortunately less than ideal world we live in, that is only prudent.

Yes, Arcana is seeking to limit info to the other side until there can be some assurance that contact will be friendly. The same should be true on both sides and everybody should understand the concern and it is everybody's best interest to recognize that trust is earned, not automatically bestowed.

Don

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Don, Arcana isn't being unreasonable, they are extrapolating their limited experience in several ways to form assumptions about the entire multiverse. It is unreasonable to expect anything more. That doesn't make it a good set of assumptions.

Yes, they might well run into would be conquerors in their travels. Plan for that. Yet, they plan on discovering an opponent without long-range communication. That is a stupid assumption since they do have such communication means. Forcing a confrontation with the Sharonans only makes sense if they CAN limit how much information about the contact is sent on to the home world.

Requiring Arcanan units to force that confrontation after blood has been spilt to control the contact and the information only works if whoever Arcana encountered did not have a means of communication. Assuming that the encountered society DOESN'T have such means is stupid, because your side does have such means. The set of Arcanan assumptions are completely laced with jingoistic attitudes.

They assume a less capable encountered society and plan to peacefully confront that society with military force. Yes, they wish for a peaceful encounter. They also mandate a forcible confrontation if blood has been shed to control the situation and the information. They assume that a sufficiently large force will overwhelm those encountered and limit the information flow. This only works if those they encounter do not have long range communication. If the encountered group, any encountered group, does have long range communications on par with Arcana's own capability, the encounter quickly informs the encountered societies leaders that they have just encountered a group of aggressive militaristic expansionists.

The kind of encounter Arcana bases their worst case scenarios around.

n7axw wrote:You simply can't assume that people whom you are making first contact with are benign any more than it is safe for me to leave my door unlocked...even in tiny little Viborg, SD. If a stranger comes to my door, I evaluate the risk factor before they get invited into the living room. In the unfortunately less than ideal world we live in, that is only prudent.

Yes, Arcana is seeking to limit info to the other side until there can be some assurance that contact will be friendly. The same should be true on both sides and everybody should understand the concern and it is everybody's best interest to recognize that trust is earned, not automatically bestowed.

Don

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PeterZ wrote:Requiring Arcanan units to force that confrontation after blood has been spilt to control the contact and the information only works if whoever Arcana encountered did not have a means of communication. Assuming that the encountered society DOESN'T have such means is stupid, because your side does have such means. The set of Arcanan assumptions are completely laced with jingoistic attitudes.

They assume a less capable encountered society and plan to peacefully confront that society with military force. Yes, they wish for a peaceful encounter. They also mandate a forcible confrontation if blood has been shed to control the situation and the information. They assume that a sufficiently large force will overwhelm those encountered and limit the information flow. This only works if those they encounter do not have long range communication. If the encountered group, any encountered group, does have long range communications on par with Arcana's own capability, the encounter quickly informs the encountered societies leaders that they have just encountered a group of aggressive militaristic expansionists.

To be fair, even if it's not to control the initial message (as might happen if the other side could get a message off) the Arcanans might well see it as an advantage to seize control of everyone involved in a violent confrontation. After all they have lie detection spellware, and grabbing everyone involved and determining the objective truth of the mater (or at least everybody's individual subjective truths) could permit a far better second contact - deliberately reaching out to parley with the other side.

And they were probably guilty of assuming that the limitations of their long ranged high speed communication method (hummers) applied to everyone. Specifically that it took time to compose a message, and if you locked people away from their stuff that it would prevent ongoing communication.


So they might have been assuming a worst case is basically a one-shot low detail warning message of the capture; and then they'd still have time to one-sidely extract information before any additional communication could happen. (They were horribly wrong about that; and the immediacy of the Voice contact made the fuck-up at Fallen Timbers far more devastating than if the Sharonans had just been able to Flicker a handwritten note that they were under attack - but that's the kind of long range communication mechanism that Arcanan could envision. Not something that doubles down on the immediacy of a TV broadcast by shoving the participant's emotions along with the moving picture)

I would one thing, Jonathan. Jasak's encounter allowed for the surviving Sharonan to give as much information to his group as there was and send that message off within the limitation of hummers. The ensuing conflict developed over several hours. That's plenty of time to prepare a hummer message and record the majority of the encounter on a sarkolis crystal.

Assuming Fallen Timbers approximates the most likely time line for first encounters, Arcana should have planned for a reasonably accurate description of the encounter to get out. They did not. They assumed those they would encounter would be far less technologically advanced. Stupid assumptions.

PeterZ wrote:I would one thing, Jonathan. Jasak's encounter allowed for the surviving Sharonan to give as much information to his group as there was and send that message off within the limitation of hummers. The ensuing conflict developed over several hours. That's plenty of time to prepare a hummer message and record the majority of the encounter on a sarkolis crystal.

Assuming Fallen Timbers approximates the most likely time line for first encounters, Arcana should have planned for a reasonably accurate description of the encounter to get out. They did not. They assumed those they would encounter would be far less technologically advanced. Stupid assumptions.

I tend to think you're right; but I'm going to go at least one more post being devil's advocate.

Fallen Timbers took a long time to develop, but the critical part where they actually made contact was pretty brief.

The hummer/flicker style messages would have been something like:
* Party member returned injured from unusual/archaic weapon - assume first contact gone wrong
* Abandoning camp and heading for portal fort
* Crap, think we're being followed by force of unknown size and composition
* Force appears to be closing; going to ground in fallen timbers to avoid being caught in the open
* Pre-written message 3 of 6: Peaceful contact failed; they attacked.

From the time the Arcanan's opened up with their magic weapons there really isn't time to write up a decent description of them and their effects and send it out. You can prepare multiple prewritten contingency messages to quickly dispatch, but by definition those can't handle unexpected data. Maybe you can rapidly scrawl a few extra words, but not much military intel as you're being overrun. And in this case they barely had time to burn their maps and notes; much less add additional detail to reports (though they didn't actually need to; what with the live Voice transmission that Arcana couldn't have reasonable anticipated)


Those series of messages are a long way from preventing any contact. But its also a long way from what Arcana actually got, which was Live TV + actual emotions (terror, hate, etc) sent to whole worlds. They still could have semi-reasonably expected that any messages that escaped wouldn't be evocative enough to vastly diminish chances of establishing a diplomatic solution.

Thank you for continuing the Devil's advocacy in this matter. It allows more responses.

The recon griffins actually capture images on their recon crystals. There is no reason that a crystal couldn't capture both sight and sound of quite a bit of actual events before being sent off. Sure most of this is pre-recorded and they would have to stop recording some time before things go tot he crapper. How much time is debatable. Still, what can be sent represents quite a bit of information leading up to the attack including how they approached/tracked.

Jonathan_S wrote:I tend to think you're right; but I'm going to go at least one more post being devil's advocate.

Fallen Timbers took a long time to develop, but the critical part where they actually made contact was pretty brief.

The hummer/flicker style messages would have been something like:
* Party member returned injured from unusual/archaic weapon - assume first contact gone wrong
* Abandoning camp and heading for portal fort
* Crap, think we're being followed by force of unknown size and composition
* Force appears to be closing; going to ground in fallen timbers to avoid being caught in the open
* Pre-written message 3 of 6: Peaceful contact failed; they attacked.

From the time the Arcanan's opened up with their magic weapons there really isn't time to write up a decent description of them and their effects and send it out. You can prepare multiple prewritten contingency messages to quickly dispatch, but by definition those can't handle unexpected data. Maybe you can rapidly scrawl a few extra words, but not much military intel as you're being overrun. And in this case they barely had time to burn their maps and notes; much less add additional detail to reports (though they didn't actually need to; what with the live Voice transmission that Arcana couldn't have reasonable anticipated)


Those series of messages are a long way from preventing any contact. But its also a long way from what Arcana actually got, which was Live TV + actual emotions (terror, hate, etc) sent to whole worlds. They still could have semi-reasonably expected that any messages that escaped wouldn't be evocative enough to vastly diminish chances of establishing a diplomatic solution.

PeterZ wrote:I would one thing, Jonathan. Jasak's encounter allowed for the surviving Sharonan to give as much information to his group as there was and send that message off within the limitation of hummers. The ensuing conflict developed over several hours. That's plenty of time to prepare a hummer message and record the majority of the encounter on a sarkolis crystal.

Assuming Fallen Timbers approximates the most likely time line for first encounters, Arcana should have planned for a reasonably accurate description of the encounter to get out. They did not. They assumed those they would encounter would be far less technologically advanced. Stupid assumptions.

Yeah. Perhaps not stupid, but certainly an unfortunate oversight, especially when it became clear that Sharona's weapons, particularly their rifles, were more advanced than anything Arcana had. But that was for after the encounter.

Prior to Fallen Timbers after they find their man dead, I'm not sure what Jasek should have done. He could have retreated back through the swamp portal. His normal completely understandable assumption was that their potential opponents were military. That, after all, was how Arcana handled exploration. The fleeing Sharonians could have been a unit scurrying back to a much larger parent unit who then would come loaded for bear.

That assumption could represent the blind spot you are referring to, Peter. If so, I agree even though the merits of civilian vs. military exploration have been argued for years in Portalis. So the idea of civilian exploration wasn't new on Arcana. At any rate, the discovery that the Sharonians were civilians didn't happen until later.

At any rate, I agree that Arcana should have assumed that the strangers they were encountering would at least have something comparable to their own ability for long distance communication.

Don

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