Houdini/MA

C. O. Thompson" quote="JohnRoth wrote:

SYED wrote:The thing is the discovery of the Lynx terminii really undercut their plans. It brought mantie influence and reach far closer to Mesa, and forced a whole ne situation to form. If the mantie were kept further away from Mesa, the plan would have succeeded.

That was half of it. Once Manticore discovered the Lynx terminus, the MAlign wasted a lot of time trying to take it away from them, or busting up the Talbott Quadrant, or other stuff that wasn't guaranteed to work.

If they'd have started Houdini as soon as they got news of the Lynx terminus, they'd have had another five years to move people off of Mesa. That might actually have been enough, since the Lynx terminus was discovered sometime in 1917, and Detweiller gets the news about Simöes in 1922/06. That's a good five years to move about a 100,000 people off of Mesa without raising ripples.

As it was, they had only about 4 months between the "oh, shit" moment and when Tenth and Second fleet arrived.

Of course, that would't have been as exciting a story.

I agree John... Detweillers continue to operate from a position of hubris and when they finally accepted that the wheels were falling off they panic and dropped too many pieces.[/quote]


FYI the Lynx WJ was discovered in roughly late 1917 or early 1918 PD, but first transit wasn't until early 1919 PD

And until the transit was made they didn't know that the wormhole went to the Talbott quadrant.

JohnRoth wrote:

SYED wrote:The thing is the discovery of the Lynx terminii really undercut their plans. It brought mantie influence and reach far closer to Mesa, and forced a whole ne situation to form. If the mantie were kept further away from Mesa, the plan would have succeeded.

That was half of it. Once Manticore discovered the Lynx terminus, the MAlign wasted a lot of time trying to take it away from them, or busting up the Talbott Quadrant, or other stuff that wasn't guaranteed to work.

If they'd have started Houdini as soon as they got news of the Lynx terminus, they'd have had another five years to move people off of Mesa. That might actually have been enough, since the Lynx terminus was discovered sometime in 1917, and Detweiller gets the news about Simöes in 1922/06. That's a good five years to move about a 100,000 people off of Mesa without raising ripples.

As it was, they had only about 4 months between the "oh, shit" moment and when Tenth and Second fleet arrived.

Of course, that would't have been as exciting a story.

Or, if they had just left well enough alone, nothing would gave happened. Manpower has been pumping out slaves for >400 years and Mesa has been the center for less than savory deals for that entire time... yet no one discussed sending task forces to eradicate them... until they actively started meddling with Manticore, and Talbott. If they hadn't futzed around in Talbott, and hadn't launched OB, no one would be fisvuss I ng send task forces against them.... except those wack jobs at Torch.

I think they are so used to their slave operations being used to cover the alignment plans, that they could not conceive of a way of hidding their activities with out it. So the whole Lynx situation was to preserve their long term developed cover.

SYED wrote:I think they are so used to their slave operations being used to cover the alignment plans, that they could not conceive of a way of hidding their activities with out it. So the whole Lynx situation was to preserve their long term developed cover.

Almost, but not quite. What I think is that they weren't supposed to abandon Mesa this early; the genetic slave trade was only part of the reason.

The big issue is that Mesa becomes a liability during the process of selling the rest of the galaxy on the uplift program, and it has to be out of the way for long enough for the stench of the genetic slave trade to be ancient history.

That's a benefit-liability tradeoff. I see the benefit of having Mesa as a headquarters with the established covert links in the various transstellars (including Manpower, but there are others) begins to diminish when the Solarian League comes apart. Then the situation becomes too chaotic for those long-established and stable communication, command and control channels to work reliably.

While they were always planning on leaving Mesa, it wasn't scheduled until a good deal later. Leaving the people aside, reworking the intelligence gathering and the C&C loops to operate out of Darius instead of Mesa was going to take a good deal of planning, and they were going to need a certain amount of chaos to keep the final legs of the trip secret.

JohnRoth wrote:
While they were always planning on leaving Mesa, it wasn't scheduled until a good deal later. Leaving the people aside, reworking the intelligence gathering and the C&C loops to operate out of Darius instead of Mesa was going to take a good deal of planning, and they were going to need a certain amount of chaos to keep the final legs of the trip secret.

Yes. After the Battle of Lovat, Pritchart and Theisman had no other option but the Battle of Manticore for victory. OB was supposed to be conducted by the Lenny Dets which are still in early construction. The Sharks were training vessels never intended for any operations, especially OB.

SEM and RoH were supposed to keep pounding each other. Janus was supposed to squirt more hydrogen into the SL/SEM reactor. OB would come along for the SLN to finally polish off SEM after they polished off RoH, leaving poor li'l Beowulf all alone with no allies. Then MA could begin Houdini.

Houdini got rushed, they discovered that they were not going to be able to 1) take out as many people as they planned (and believed they would need aloing with various family members etc as per some logic) and then decided to "cover" the inability to dissapear the people by using "terrorism" bombings.
And then....I guess they always planned to just use nukes to "clean up" the physical remnents of their installations and so used that to insure that all those who were not going to make it out got vaporized.
.....Sorry, we screwed up, you get to die. Boom.