The fate of Carmichael

Duckk wrote:

Carmichael moved into the Beowulf embassy with seemingly zero fuss over moving a large amount of people. And given the mechanics of hyper travel, having large embassies anymore is almost counter-productive, anything you can do with an official ambassador and perhaps a dozen aides is all you need. A few clerks to handle paperwork filing, since that's a little more specialist than generic aide is. Call it no more than two dozen for the official staff of the embassy, that would rise considerably depending on how many brought their families with them.

That seems like a non sequitor to me. Today, we can get to nearly any point on the planet in 24 hours, and we have a communications grid that lets us communicate and send data instantaneously. Yet we still have embassies that range in the hundreds of personnel to handle stuff locally. In the Honorverse, where communications lags can be measured in weeks or even months, you don't want to constantly "call home" unless you really need to. Hence, a large team of people for local support.

Additionally, embassies aren't necessarily just the diplomat and his or her aides. Embassies in major countries serve as liaison points for economic, cultural and scientific activities. For something as big and important as the Solarian League, Manticore would have hundreds of personnel operating out of their embassy: media and public relations teams, business liaisons, experts on international law, and more.

That's not to say they haven't shipped all non-essential personnel back to Manticore by the end of ART, but there nominally would be a lot more people operating the embassy.

I'm basing my assumptions on the size of Honor's official diplomat team. She had three assistants, perhaps a dozen aides in total, and a team of Navy stewards overseen by her personal steward.

While I recognize Honor's team was somewhat special, wasn't the size of the diplomat team in the short story immediately prior to the events of HotQ around the same size? Where Judith busts out of Masada, didn't Prince Michael only have about the same, three "real" diplomats, a few go-fors, and that was pretty much it right?


But I'll grant you the embassy to Old Terra would have been larger to accomodate a bit of a PR team, and some commercial or economic specialists, but if your average diplomacy team numbers less than 20 for the Manticore-Masada and Manticore-Republic teams, I can't quite see the jump to over a hundred for the League for official workers, not including families.

Somtaaw wrote:
I'm basing my assumptions on the size of Honor's official diplomat team. She had three assistants, perhaps a dozen aides in total, and a team of Navy stewards overseen by her personal steward.

While I recognize Honor's team was somewhat special, wasn't the size of the diplomat team in the short story immediately prior to the events of HotQ around the same size? Where Judith busts out of Masada, didn't Prince Michael only have about the same, three "real" diplomats, a few go-fors, and that was pretty much it right?


But I'll grant you the embassy to Old Terra would have been larger to accomodate a bit of a PR team, and some commercial or economic specialists, but if your average diplomacy team numbers less than 20 for the Manticore-Masada and Manticore-Republic teams, I can't quite see the jump to over a hundred for the League for official workers, not including families.

Masada and RH were - more or less, at least - both special delegations. On Masada, there was an official embassy already, but we don't know how many people worked there. Only you can take it for granted that there would be no manticoran families at all - not on Masada out of all places! By the way, Masada then was only of interest because of the looming conflict with the PRH, and as long as there was no treaty between Manticore and Masada, the staff of the embassy there would be as barebones as possible.

On Haven there was no such thing as an official manticoran embassy, after 20 years of open war. Before Honors visit, in the break between the 2 wars, messages were only sent by dispatch boats; that was one of the reasons, that it was so easy for the than-Havenite Secretary of State (Giancola?) to manipulate the documents. It would have been much more complicated to manipulate the negotiations, if they would have been in a face-2-face-modus somewhere on a neutral planet or space-station or so.

Honor (re)opened the embassy with Haven, more or less, in MoH, and because of that, there were no big staff, too. But I think, a few years down the road the Manty embassy on Haven will have a staff of some hundred people plus families. Plus the ones in the consulates through the republic ... Same thing is valid vice versa, too.

Exactly. There's some conflation going on here between the embassy and the ambassador.

Admiral Courvoisier's delegation was specifically to negotiate with Grayson and get them into the alliance. Even then, it constituted a number of people (IIRC it was a couple dozen), and did not include the embassy staff that was already present under Ambassador Langtry. And given that Langtry mentions evacuating "as many non-combatants and dependents as possible" on the Manticoran freighters, it must be a sizable one.

Likewise, Honor's negotiation with Haven was to reopen diplomatic ties. In other words, there was no embassy there, and thus no embassy staff.

Somtaaw wrote:I'm basing my assumptions on the size of Honor's official diplomat team. She had three assistants, perhaps a dozen aides in total, and a team of Navy stewards overseen by her personal steward.

No, the SL was the largest trading partner of Manticore. They have the vast majority of planets with productive industrial economies, which is who conducts extensive financial transactions and significant trade.

Further, due to the structure of the SL Manticore's relations with the member systems matters a lot.

It's possible that Manticore actually maintains 2000+ embassies, so they have one with all the important SL worlds, but instead I suspect they mostly do this via their embassy at New Chicago. Which means the people to do this work at the New Chicago embassy.

Given that Manticore managed to get the ban on transfer to Haven of military tech passed by the SL it's pretty clear they do in fact interact with the the SL's government and bureaucracy and even more with the member systems who needed to be individually convinced to pass that ban.

Something worth considering, is that while Manticore hasn't recalled Carmichael himself, there's no textev regarding the embassy. I think it's reasonable to assume that Manticore has probably already evacuated dependents and non-essential personnel from the embassy. In fact they may have gone so far as to shut-down the embassy itself, just leaving a minimal support staff for Carmichael.

kzt wrote:No, the SL was the largest trading partner of Manticore. They have the vast majority of planets with productive industrial economies, which is who conducts extensive financial transactions and significant trade.

Further, due to the structure of the SL Manticore's relations with the member systems matters a lot.

It's possible that Manticore actually maintains 2000+ embassies, so they have one with all the important SL worlds, but instead I suspect they mostly do this via their embassy at New Chicago. Which means the people to do this work at the New Chicago embassy.

Maybe. OTOH for much of the League it's a shorter transit to Manticore itself than it is to Sol - so things like trade negotiations might more easily be done by that world's embassy on Manticore rather than embassy to embassy in New Chicago. The communication loops to both party's governments are shorter. (Amusingly for much of the League the fastest way to send a delegation or instructions to their embassy or trade delegation in New Chicago is probably by way of the wormhole network and Beowulf.)

Now that's not true for the very closest of the Core worlds, and also there might be instances of multi-lateral talks where it makes sense to do them between everyone's people already in New Chicago; so this isn't to say that the embassy on Earth didn't have a wider responsibility in handling diplomacy with the various sovereign League worlds; just pointing out that it may not always be the primary point on contact.

Jonathan_S wrote:Maybe. OTOH for much of the League it's a shorter transit to Manticore itself than it is to Sol - so things like trade negotiations might more easily be done by that world's embassy on Manticore rather than embassy to embassy in New Chicago. The communication loops to both party's governments are shorter. (Amusingly for much of the League the fastest way to send a delegation or instructions to their embassy or trade delegation in New Chicago is probably by way of the wormhole network and Beowulf.)

There is no SL embassy on Manticore. There were some SL members IIRC, but not a SL one.

kzt wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Maybe. OTOH for much of the League it's a shorter transit to Manticore itself than it is to Sol - so things like trade negotiations might more easily be done by that world's embassy on Manticore rather than embassy to embassy in New Chicago. The communication loops to both party's governments are shorter. (Amusingly for much of the League the fastest way to send a delegation or instructions to their embassy or trade delegation in New Chicago is probably by way of the wormhole network and Beowulf.)

There is no SL embassy on Manticore. There were some SL members IIRC, but not a SL one.

That's what I meant, and though I'd said.
That a SL Member who wanted to talk trade with Manticore (because the League government as a whole doesn't appear to make trade policy or trade agreements) could often more easily talk to Manticore at Manticore than in New Chicago.

If the SL government wanted to talk to Manticore then, yes, they'd almost certainly talk to the Manticoran embassy in New Chicago as that's where the SL Government is located.

kzt wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Maybe. OTOH for much of the League it's a shorter transit to Manticore itself than it is to Sol - so things like trade negotiations might more easily be done by that world's embassy on Manticore rather than embassy to embassy in New Chicago. The communication loops to both party's governments are shorter. (Amusingly for much of the League the fastest way to send a delegation or instructions to their embassy or trade delegation in New Chicago is probably by way of the wormhole network and Beowulf.)

There is no SL embassy on Manticore. There were some SL members IIRC, but not a SL one.

When I read that I originally thought that it sounded crazy. Then I remembered that 1) we have never heard mention of the Solarian Ambassador. The Solarian League is more akin to the EU than the USA in its structure and individual member states of the UE still do their own embassies. Which seems incredibly stupid on the part of the League, which seems to be an ongoing theme. But that makes me wonder why we don't hear more about the chatter between the Foreign Secretary's office and Solarian Core World delegations trying to cut their own deals and smooth out the situation on behalf of their own star nations.

Ok, embassies will often have spouses of staff members employed as support personnel. E.g. the spouse of the press attache might be employed as a day-care worker or a secretary or receptionist. It's like overseas military bases will often employ spouses to work a teachers, mail clerks, officer and enlisted clubs employees etc.