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

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.

They would know this information in any case - from Simões.

Peregrinator wrote:They would know this information in any case - from Simões.

David explicitly told us that not only does he not know where Darius is, he also has no idea that it exists or that the twins exist. Which to me is pretty clear indication he's setting up that everyone on Darius is going to live happily ever after.

kzt wrote:

Peregrinator wrote:They would know this information in any case - from Simões.

David explicitly told us that not only does he not know where Darius is, he also has no idea that it exists or that the twins exist. Which to me is pretty clear indication he's setting up that everyone on Darius is going to live happily ever after.

...for now...

Seems I recall Albrecht & Colin (maybe Daniel) discussing the return of Cachat & Zilwicki and saying something to the effect of "Damn, we're barely into Phase I and no one was supposed to know about the MA until way into Phase III.

Al the nukes were not in the plan. They had to speed up the process because of Albrecht's very real fear that Admiral Gold Peak would act on her initiative and lead an expedition into Mesan space. as soon as Simoes defected, whatever the purpose of Houdini "might have been" it suddenly became "all the rats fleeing the sinking ship".

And knowing there is Darius, just knowing there is Bolt hole, gets the GA no closer to finding it than SEM ever got to finding Bolthole.

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.

The original plan was to pull out and let Mesa devolve into a civil war at the same time the Solarian League was disintegrating into chaos. There would have been no resources or interest in investigating Mesa.

The nukes, both sets, were a stopgap when they had to implement before the League's disintegration had really set in. As I said before, their real error was trying to keep Manticore out of the area rather than simply bailing out. If they'd have pulled the trigger on Houdini two years earlier, they'd have been gone.

Their basic problem is that they were overplanning, and forgot about Helmuth von Moltke's aphorism: "No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy." Or, to generalize: "No plan survives contact with reality intact."

Von Moltke the Elder dealt with this by preparing for contingencies and then expecting his field commanders to exercise their initiative within the constraints of the general objective. Albrecht Detweiller was simply too good at planning, and surrounded himself with people who were also good at planning, so things fell apart when they had serious resistance that they hadn't planned for.

JohnRoth wrote:The original plan was to pull out and let Mesa devolve into a civil war at the same time the Solarian League was disintegrating into chaos. There would have been no resources or interest in investigating Mesa.

The nukes, both sets, were a stopgap when they had to implement before the League's disintegration had really set in. As I said before, their real error was trying to keep Manticore out of the area rather than simply bailing out. If they'd have pulled the trigger on Houdini two years earlier, they'd have been gone.

Their basic problem is that they were overplanning, and forgot about Helmuth von Moltke's aphorism: "No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy." Or, to generalize: "No plan survives contact with reality intact."

Von Moltke the Elder dealt with this by preparing for contingencies and then expecting his field commanders to exercise their initiative within the constraints of the general objective. Albrecht Detweiller was simply too good at planning, and surrounded himself with people who were also good at planning, so things fell apart when they had serious resistance that they hadn't planned for.

Well if you go back to what would have been the original original plan I'm pretty sure it was supposed to be purely preventative; that they'd pull everybody out long before there were any hints that Mesa was anything more than it appeared to be. There would be no defector, no intel officers realizing that the actions and economics didn't add up, and critically no use of Spider ships prior to evacuation.
Trying to covert it on the fly to cut off an active investig where clues are already in the hands of Manticore was a very poor 3rd best approach.

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.

One problem with them taking everyone out openly in Mesan SDF (not Alignment- they are two different organizations with 2 different uses for the Powers That Be) ships is they'd never think of it.

The whole core of the Onion and their Master Plan has been covert for centuries. Staying covert is so ingrained by now that just shuttling everyone up to the SDF ships and heading for the hyper limit in mass would never occur to them.

The Master Plan isn't unraveling because it was a bad plan. The idea is rather ingenious. It just calls for extreme discipline because it is intended to be done in the tiniest of increments with long periods of near dormancy between the incremental advances to slow or escape detection. It's unraveling because the current set of Detweilers are pushing up the schedule for a combination of reasons- including impatience and, in my opinion, hubris. That's the problem with super men, they tend to start believing their own press clippings and propaganda.

This set of Detweilers has pushed the action in a few instances and derailed the plan's scheduling by revealing a few vague hints and little whiffs of something going on in the background or lurking in the undercurrents of galactic politics and trade by doing too much in too short a time frame.

Somtaaw wrote: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.

You're missing the point. The whole point of Houdini was to disappear tracelessly. That can't happen as the GA will not find at Mesa things they know exist. This proves there's another world somewhere--and thus it's not traceless.

Simply shipping the people out (don't use spider ships in Mesa but you can transship to them nearby) leaves a lot more evidence they ran but that's irrelevant--so long as there is evidence of another world it doesn't matter how much evidence there is.

Loren Pechtel wrote:You're missing the point. The whole point of Houdini was to disappear tracelessly. That can't happen as the GA will not find at Mesa things they know exist. This proves there's another world somewhere--and thus it's not traceless.

Simply shipping the people out (don't use spider ships in Mesa but you can transship to them nearby) leaves a lot more evidence they ran but that's irrelevant--so long as there is evidence of another world it doesn't matter how much evidence there is.

How does Houdini prove there is another world somewhere? Why not assume there was a dispersal of the MAlign instead of a "migration."

The only thing evidence of Houdini proves is that the core of the Onion is no longer on Mesa and they destroyed as much of the outer layers as possible on the way out. There's no evidence whatever that everyone evacuated to the same place.

kzt wrote:David explicitly told us that not only does he not know where Darius is, he also has no idea that it exists or that the twins exist. Which to me is pretty clear indication he's setting up that everyone on Darius is going to live happily ever after.

I find it hard to believe that Simões would not have been part of Operation Houdini. And if he is a part of it, I doubt that a man of his intelligence would not have deduced the existence of a secret planet, even though he doesn't know what it is named or where it is.