So, in terms of deadly women...

I have a new contestant to offer. I was rereading in Cauldron of Ghosts -- there's a conversation between "the wife" and Detweiler, as she is looking at (paraphrasing) the research on "the latest weaponization of the mutagenic nanotech"...

This is bad.... very very bad.

What think y'all? is this how they plan to nail Beowulf?

If they want a deniable "accident", then no. If they just want to laugh hilariously at the videos of billions of Beowulfers dying horribly, then sure.

They gain enormous strategic advantages if they deniably (or otherwise) blow up some critical industrial nodes at Beowulf. Essentially Haven has started producing virtually all their ships with the assumption that they are going to get their weapons and fire control from Beowulf, and much of the surviving core production tech from Manticore are building them. Plus Manticore has ordered all their new production hardware from Beowulf. What happens if all the sudden there are no parts or missiles to install in the Haven ships, and there won't be any for a few years? And you just lost the industrial base that was going to supply Manticore with new production hardware and the few people who had actual experience in building the equipment.

It would kind suck to be part of the GA, now wouldn't it?

They are smart enough to realizes that if they get caught it is very bad for them as it is taking the gloves off for retaliation strikes against themselves. Even with them having deniability do they really want to risk opening up that can of worms and getting hit by a bio-weapon that meant for someone else that is even deadlier to their engineered lines then normal humans.

kzt wrote:If they want a deniable "accident", then no. If they just want to laugh hilariously at the videos of billions of Beowulfers dying horribly, then sure.

They gain enormous strategic advantages if they deniably (or otherwise) blow up some critical industrial nodes at Beowulf. Essentially Haven has started producing virtually all their ships with the assumption that they are going to get their weapons and fire control from Beowulf, and much of the surviving core production tech from Manticore are building them. Plus Manticore has ordered all their new production hardware from Beowulf. What happens if all the sudden there are no parts or missiles to install in the Haven ships, and there won't be any for a few years? And you just lost the industrial base that was going to supply Manticore with new production hardware and the few people who had actual experience in building the equipment.

It would kind suck to be part of the GA, now wouldn't it?

I have no doubt that in the next book the alignment will try to take out Beowulf, I don't think it will be easy.

1. Beowulf knows about the alignment, and "knows" that they are a primary target.
2. Beowulf knows about the spider drive and the "invisible" star ships.
3. Beowulf knows about the weaponized nanotech.

Knowing is half the battle, and among other things, top priority will be to install mycroft in beowulf.

darrell wrote:

kzt wrote:If they want a deniable "accident", then no. If they just want to laugh hilariously at the videos of billions of Beowulfers dying horribly, then sure.

They gain enormous strategic advantages if they deniably (or otherwise) blow up some critical industrial nodes at Beowulf. Essentially Haven has started producing virtually all their ships with the assumption that they are going to get their weapons and fire control from Beowulf, and much of the surviving core production tech from Manticore are building them. Plus Manticore has ordered all their new production hardware from Beowulf. What happens if all the sudden there are no parts or missiles to install in the Haven ships, and there won't be any for a few years? And you just lost the industrial base that was going to supply Manticore with new production hardware and the few people who had actual experience in building the equipment.

It would kind suck to be part of the GA, now wouldn't it?

I have no doubt that in the next book the alignment will try to take out Beowulf, I don't think it will be easy.

1. Beowulf knows about the alignment, and "knows" that they are a primary target.
2. Beowulf knows about the spider drive and the "invisible" star ships.
3. Beowulf knows about the weaponized nanotech.

Knowing is half the battle, and among other things, top priority will be to install mycroft in beowulf.

Which is why I threw in the pot many posts ago, that if I were the MAlign, I'd coordinate an attack on the heels of the SLN seeking payback from Beowulf, essentially using another orchestrated SLN attack as a diversion. I'm thinking that a properly timed MAlign strike in conjunction with a fumbling SLN would busy the GA too much and make them misstep over their own egos of superiority and overconfidence regarding the League. And the GA's new detection system may not be as effective, if they have their mind elsewhere.

In gridironese, it would be a reverse sweep play to the outside with the MAlign following its blocking.

Or the equivalent of a screen play.

cthia wrote:

darrell wrote:I have no doubt that in the next book the alignment will try to take out Beowulf, I don't think it will be easy.

1. Beowulf knows about the alignment, and "knows" that they are a primary target.
2. Beowulf knows about the spider drive and the "invisible" star ships.
3. Beowulf knows about the weaponized nanotech.

Knowing is half the battle, and among other things, top priority will be to install mycroft in beowulf.

Which is why I threw in the pot many posts ago, that if I were the MAlign, I'd coordinate an attack on the heels of the SLN seeking payback from Beowulf, essentially using another orchestrated SLN attack as a diversion. I'm thinking that a properly timed MAlign strike in conjunction with a fumbling SLN would busy the GA too much and make them misstep over their own egos of superiority and overconfidence regarding the League. And the GA's new detection system may not be as effective, if they have their mind elsewhere.

In gridironese, it would be a reverse sweep play to the outside with the MAlign following its blocking.

Or the equivalent of a screen play.

I don't believe it will be possible. How far is it from darius Beauwulf? It is 2 T months for the vote to succeed the SL.

Figure at least 2 weeks to get a courier to darius, another 2 weeks to plan and mount the operation, at least 2 weeks to travel to Beaowulf through hyperspace, (unless they want to use the wormhole network now that manticore has taken it over ) Than at least 2 weeks to maneuver in normal space and position for the attack. (they can only translate in about a light week out, instead of 2 light months like they did at manticore. (anyone want to bet that Beauwolf DOSEN'T have the same type of deep space sensor array that manticore does?)

Is darius further away from Sol / Mesa?
Does it take longer than normal to mount the operation? Is Beauworf farther away from Darius in hyper space?
Does Beauwulf detect the ships translating in so close?

If any of the 4 fails, no attack.

In addition, add to this that a deep space array that can detect a hyper transit at 6 light months is 720 times more powerful than a shipboard array that can detect a hyper transit at 6 light hours.

A spider drive apparently can't be detected by a shipboard gravitic array at 1 light second, since it "grabs" the alpha wall, I would bet that you get close enough, you can detect it. Presuming it can be detected at 1/2 light second, it would be detected at 12 light minutes by the planetary array. This might be the reason that the ships coasted and didn't use their drive inside manticores hyper limit.

darrell wrote:
A spider drive apparently can't be detected by a shipboard gravitic array at 1 light second, since it "grabs" the alpha wall, I would bet that you get close enough, you can detect it. Presuming it can be detected at 1/2 light second, it would be detected at 12 light minutes by the planetary array. This might be the reason that the ships coasted and didn't use their drive inside manticores hyper limit.

The Grand Alliance knows about the new drive now and has a rough idea of how it works. I'd bet their detection ability is going to ramp up rapidly now that they know what to look for.

Beowulf is now aware of the Alignment and is certainly going to be doing something. We don't know what that something is and we don't know if it involves a significant amount of new or enhanced security for Beowulf itself or the system.
Beowulf already knows that the SL is going to do something. They have to presume that the SL can't just let them vote to leave and have that stand. What they are going to do to mess with Beowulf ceceeding is another question. We don't have actual answers. We do have that 10 million casualty figure but not what, how, where.

From Albrect's wife to be working on weaponized nanotech, that is both very specific and very general. The weapons to turn people into assassins by nanotch is "weaponized" nanotech. If the Alignment uses another- different- nanotch weapon in the same way, that could be at least a flag that the same party that the Manticore, Haven and the Aldermani have been claiming used such a weapon (as fantastic is it sounds to the Sollies) MIGHT be involved. Trouble is, you have to 1st find a use of such weapon, identify it as a nanotch weapon and then theorize that it is the same people who used the nanotech zombie weapon.

We are told in the story that the weapons appears to need to be both specificaly tailored to the individual it is used on and has a somewhat limited range of capability to make them do things. More or less, once it's trigger has been tripped, it forces the person's body to do a set series of actions. That gets tricky because you need to put the person infected into a position where the trigger and the means of accomplising the actions come together.

We also see the counter-intellegence agent on Mesa who dies when Victor has him. That appears to have been from something- probably nanotech- which was introduced into him years ago and doesn't do anything as long as he continues to get periodic refreshment of something that keeps it from acting. It wasn't so much that Victor triggered a suicide condition, it was that the agent was too long without the inhibitor. You can see where the Alignment might have a number of people they planned to abandon in Houdini (as well as setting a safety trap on people they though might get taken by the opposition -any opposition- and they will "just die". All those so inoculated will be dropping dead on Mesa right in the middle of all that unpleasentness of who ever it is that is about to militarily invest the system and chaos breaks out along with Seccie and slave riots. Too many heart attacks, other stress realted deaths....go ahead, try to prove that with a medical system that is crashing and swamped in casualties.

Want to create a lot of problems on Beowulf? All those fusion plants in the system for power sources. Over years, slip the assassin nanotech into people who actually control a number of those and have access to things that could cause reactors to lose containment. Not possible you say? Put worms into control programs and just let them sit. The person who is going to activate such a worm is very likely to die in the resulting breach.

The Alignment is going to want to watch and savor whatever they inflict on Beowulf. Killing the entire population doesn't inflict the kind of pain they want to see.

Every month that goes by theoreticaly puts more machinery and equipment to rebuild the Manticore (and Grayson) infrastructure into the systems that need it. I would be most surprised if Manticore was not buying the replacement equipment from Beowulf at the same time as having them build the new military equipment and weapons. They just can't allow the rebuilding of capacity to linger.
That is also going to mean that there will be people from Beowulf over at Manticore and Graysom helping. The question is how long is it going to take before Manticore can get any compleated production facilities built and into production. They have to build essentially all the feeder processes for materials and manufacturing. At some point those new factories are going to be starting to turn out spair parts along with new equipment which will lighten (if nothing else goes wrong) the load on Beowulf for production of Manti/GA military gear.


You are right, Beowulf is a target for so many reasons. There are some alternatives though we don't have enough data on them .
Erwhon could also be making materials, parts and equipment for Manticore. They were pissed about High Ridge, not blind and stupid. They will sell Manticore (and probably Grayson) anyting they get paid for. If they have capacity they will take the contracts and ship the goods.
The Aldermani also have an intact industrial base. It ends up being that political/economic question and although the Aldermani might worry about Manticore down the road being an impediment, they have to see what is going on. Having Manticore (and now Haven) fall will only make them a target sooner rather than later by the likes of the SL (with the OFS) and the Alignment. At this point, the SL still has to go through Manticore to get at the Aldermani. The deal in partitioning Silesia demonstrates that the Elizabeth, and her Government at least understand political nescssity and making a reasonable agreement to finally bring stability to Silesia. So, perhaps weapons but definately manufacturing equipment, and a wide range of products for parts and support will be sold to Manticore.

The fundamental reality is that Beowulf security has been depicted as pretty hopeless. Have you read beginnings? They didn't have any real internal security, known manpower operatives can openly travel around Beowulf and nobody notices.

So anything you provide the Beowulf for production and general use will go to the MA. It's their main target and they been setting up for centuries. So a decision to build Mk23 there means that you are also delivering the entire technical data package on how to build them to the MA in short order. Same thing with the KH2s.