How solid is the Manticoran strategy?

And you think they will control this to the level you want exactly how?

I assume you addressed me, kzt?

The point that several of us were making is that, given the chaos we can expect to follow as the political landscape sorts itself out in the wake of the League's demise, as well as the sheer scope of the human-settled galaxy, there is in fact no way that the GA will be able to control or manage the fallout.

The best the GA could hope for is a threefold strategy:

1. To use their military and economic muscle to create a zone of relative calm in the space immediately beyond their own borders, in order to keep the upheaval away from their own space as much as possible.

2. To establish or encourage the establishment of pockets or nodes of relative calm throughout the rest of the human-settled galaxy, in the form of star nations that are strong enough militarily to discourage incursions by warlords, pirates and other undesirable elements.

3. To use those nodes as points from which to launch tactical peacekeeping operations and piracy suppression expeditions into the surrounding space, as the only real way in which the GA and their local allies can truly hope to encourage the emergence of a new political order from the chaos.

kzt wrote:And you think they will control this to the level you want exactly how?

As for size limiting, there'll be no direct control, but there will probably be at least some pointing out that the distances involved make large interstellar states difficult to manage. And even harder to defend. And a large interstellar state would have to have a lot more power and influence over local systems than the League did in order to function. Then there's the question of who is in charge?

But realistically, the chips are going to fall all over the place, although I suspect that Nico is probably right when he expects most Core Worlds probably won't want to follow "someone else", and will have relatively small groupings. The most of ones that break that mold will probably be the reformation of multi-stellar entities that joined the League together, and closely aligned parent and daughter colonies. IE, a world that colonized a number of other worlds and kept close ties with them might end up the leader of a group formed from them, such as Beowulf and its daughter colonies, or Haven and its primary colonies forming the core of the Republic.

Kytheros wrote:As for size limiting, there'll be no direct control, but there will probably be at least some pointing out that the distances involved make large interstellar states difficult to manage. And even harder to defend. And a large interstellar state would have to have a lot more power and influence over local systems than the League did in order to function. Then there's the question of who is in charge?

I think rather than Interstellar States, GA diplomats are going to be touting regional mutual defense organizations like NATO, CENTO and SEATO. The degree of participation by the GA or individual GA members will vary, much as the US and the UK varied from leading members of NATO to associate members of CENTO.

Kytheros wrote:But realistically, the chips are going to fall all over the place, although I suspect that Nico is probably right when he expects most Core Worlds probably won't want to follow "someone else", and will have relatively small groupings.

The "Core Worlds" are going to be torn between "going it alone" and "Joining a Treaty Organization." AKA footing the entire bill for self-defense OR sharing the costs of defense with regional neighbors.

Kytheros wrote:The most of ones that break that mold will probably be the reformation of multi-stellar entities that joined the League together, and closely aligned parent and daughter colonies.

We know of twelve star nations that already have twelve other systems in their sights for absorption with long term plans to absorb even more as they "join up" into The Renaissance Factor. On the surface, the RF is going to start out as just another mutual defense organization, with the added attraction of twelve preexisting system Defense Forces. The iron fist in their velvet glove probably won't be obvious for decades.

The GA has to foster as many regional treaty organizations as they can because they don't have the ships or manpower to play policeman over all of human space. They have to foster many little organizations to avoid a repeat of the Solarian League which started out as an analog of the League Of Nations or UN. A lot of little "police departments" keeping the peace on a regional basis is better than a few large armies looking for reasons to justify all of their toys.

Not finding a useful post to snip from, but I'm sort of still addressing the "star system polity" question, with this thought. Given that Manticore now controls the wormholes, and the wormholes basically control regional space, it seems to me the pattern would emulate what happened with the discovery of the Lynx terminus.

In SL space, that might be something along the lines of "y'all who are the closest useful neighbors to this "wormhole network access point" need to get off your collective oligarchic a$$es and come up with a sector governance that our diplomat's can agree to, before we start letting y'all use the wormhole again. Those who vote out an acceptable, human rights guaranteeing, multi-system constitution get first priority".

Big problem is that the transtellars won't want to play that way. Meaning that even the corporate giants need to evolve their business strategy or go the way of the [honorverse fictional] version of a political dodo bird. Maybe that's part of RFC's point related to Laccoon anyway.