[SoV Spoiler] Houdini, what's the point??

I don't get it. What in the world does the Alignment think it's going to accomplish with Houdini?

When the GA takes Mesa notable will be what they do not find: the Oyster Bay and Streak drive tech in any form. Likewise, the nanotech assassination stuff won't be found.

Oops--since that stuff wasn't from Mesa there must be another Alignment world out there. Presto, Houdini is exposed. It doesn't matter how carefully they managed to cover their personnel tracks, the missing hardware will give them away.

Thus, forget secrecy, use the Mesan fleet to take off everyone they wanted to, it would have gone much smoother and they would be no worse off.

(Sure, they could have destroyed it to cover their tracks but there would be no reason to do so unless they didn't really fall with the loss of Mesa. Thus there's more.)

knowing they are out there and finding them are two very different things.

plus with all those nukes going off they are going to be a long time working out what all these structures did. sure some are obvious but some won't be, this is going to buy time for MA to perfect their camouflage and get the RF worlds starting to create their pockets of civilisation in a galaxy gone mad.

Well Mesa also wasn't supposed to be taken this early in the game. The Mesan Alignment has always been the true rulers of Mesa, so as soon as they pulled out, under the cover of Houdini, the planet was intended to rip itself apart in a civil war between seccies and citizens.

By the time anyone had the thought to go check out Mesa, that civil war should have already been fought to it's conclusion, and the whole planet absolutely shredded. Any invader looking for evidence, would then have had no choice but to conclude any evidence they were looking for, was destroyed in the civil war.


Any other plan to pull critical personnel out, would have been an off-the-cuff, ad hoc operation. Any military personnel could attest, an evacuation plan that gets formed on very short notice, will leave considerably more evidence and even some of the critical personnel they were supposed to evacuate; than sticking to an older plan that may not perfectly cover current circumstances.

Plausible deniability for Solly consumption, I'd think.

If the GA had taken Mesa relatively intact, investigations could find all sorts of Alignment evidence to back up the Zilwicki-Cachat theory.

I fully agree Houdini left behind far less evidence than what I am suggesting. However, Houdini is only of value if it leaves behind no evidence of it's existence. As it stands the GA will quickly figure out that Darius exists, the only question is where it is.

Thus simply take everyone out on the Mesan SDF ships, wreck the computer cores and call it done. The Alignment would be in a better shape than it is now with more than 10% culled and however many more who were killed in the final set of blasts.

Meanwhile, they have left behind evidence of their barbarism.

Loren Pechtel wrote:I fully agree Houdini left behind far less evidence than what I am suggesting. However, Houdini is only of value if it leaves behind no evidence of it's existence. As it stands the GA will quickly figure out that Darius exists, the only question is where it is.

Thus simply take everyone out on the Mesan SDF ships, wreck the computer cores and call it done. The Alignment would be in a better shape than it is now with more than 10% culled and however many more who were killed in the final set of blasts.

Meanwhile, they have left behind evidence of their barbarism.

Which still comes down to what I pointed out. NOBODY was supposed to have even considered coming near Mesa this close to Houdini. The whole framework of the MAlign's objectives is coming crashing down, due to inherently unpredictable interactions that even the wildest of contingency plans done centuries ago, couldn't have thought up. And if the plan had been going properly, Mesa would have torn itself apart in the civil war between the Seccies and Misties & company, with revenge atrocities followed by counter-revenge, etc etc.

You're right, that under the existing conditions, Houdini really only accomplished approximately 50% of it's goals... namely, evacuating 100% of the critical personnel, who are involved in research, or other MAlign plans; without properly covering the fact that they were supposed to have simply disappeared as just one more casualty amongst millions.


But if they'd come in openly with MAlign ships, trashed everything in orbit, and openly pulled their people out, that would only have even further reinforced the point you're raising about how Darius (or something in that nature, like Bolthole) exists, because somebody would have noticed Mesa building lots and lots of ships due to its wormhole traffic.


They continued with Houdini, because of:
a) They had no choice but to evacuate certain personnel, because they were inside the Onion, or were involved in R&D
b) it's the least 'bad' option they had, to evacuate said key personnel
c) they didn't actually expect anybody to be arriving this soon, so the chaos portion of Houdini (the Mesa civil war) barely had time to start before coming to a halt

I think the OP has a point. To rephrase the question, how disastrous would it have been for Malignment to leave Mesa in the dark of the night without the preceding nuclear mayhem? Even if the goal was to implicate Manticore.... so what? Fog of war and all of that; we march on!
The strategy may have bee written long ago but it wasn't written in stone; things change.

npadln wrote:I think the OP has a point. To rephrase the question, how disastrous would it have been for Malignment to leave Mesa in the dark of the night without the preceding nuclear mayhem? Even if the goal was to implicate Manticore.... so what? Fog of war and all of that; we march on!
The strategy may have bee written long ago but it wasn't written in stone; things change.

And I think they would have been better off without the mayhem. Just load onto ships (no need to blast their way in) and leave. Houdini only has value if it's undetected--and I don't see that it can be undetected at this point. I'm not at all sure the original version could have worked due to the tech problem but I'm sure the current one has no chance at all of success and certainly cost them at least 20% of their membership.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

npadln wrote:I think the OP has a point. To rephrase the question, how disastrous would it have been for Malignment to leave Mesa in the dark of the night without the preceding nuclear mayhem? Even if the goal was to implicate Manticore.... so what? Fog of war and all of that; we march on!
The strategy may have bee written long ago but it wasn't written in stone; things change.

And I think they would have been better off without the mayhem. Just load onto ships (no need to blast their way in) and leave. Houdini only has value if it's undetected--and I don't see that it can be undetected at this point. I'm not at all sure the original version could have worked due to the tech problem but I'm sure the current one has no chance at all of success and certainly cost them at least 20% of their membership.

Houdini was bad as planned sure, but also keep in mind, the nukes were only used as part of the plan to accelerate Houdini. That was in the text-ev, that even Detweilers son [I think it was Colin?] wasn't exactly happy about that sort of collateral damage, but as a whole agreed that they [the Alignment] had no choice but to accelerate the whole Houdini process, or risk the even worse probability of actively being caught.

Which leads [again ] back to my point, that Houdini wasn't planned to cover anyone moving on Mesa this early in the game. Nukes being used as an accelerator or not, the original plan dictated Houdini be done well before anyone caught on that Mesa was doing something "fishy".



As for ships, if you were in the MAlign's shoes, you couldn't risk showing off spider-drive ships, because they are ultra unique hulls that are total departures from "how everybody else builds ships". Or you're using standard impeller drives, in which case, somebody is gonna wonder why suddenly a whole ton of passenger liners suddenly arrived at [and departed from] Mesa either together, or in a statistically strange & small time frame.

Either option would draw more eyes towards Mesa, and not have incited planetary chaos as part of the cover. It's also very likely the research labs [like the Gamma Center] had their own self-destructs blown, in addition to the nukes we were actually told were used, which had the specific mission of enraging the misties.

Somtaaw wrote:
They continued with Houdini, because of:
a) They had no choice but to evacuate certain personnel, because they were inside the Onion, or were involved in R&D
b) it's the least 'bad' option they had, to evacuate said key personnel
c) they didn't actually expect anybody to be arriving this soon, so the chaos portion of Houdini (the Mesa civil war) barely had time to start before coming to a halt

You can see (c) in Albrecht's conversation with Evelina, just before he triggers the final nuclear destruction of the remaining members of the onion in Shadow of Victory.