BEOWULF - THE KARMA SUITSYA

cthia wrote:
HHow did Beowulf not aid? And how are the Manties not League enemies?

Distance yourself as a reader who hates all things Mandarin. Beowulf was complicit.

Joat42 wrote:Explain in detail how Beowulf was complicit, because so far you haven't managed to produce one coherent argument why they where complicit.

pappilon wrote:Yes, they are guilty of notifying an ally of theirs with whom there have been ...incidents. There is no IMMANENT (as in warships passing through Beowulf/Manticore's WHJ headed for Earth. At this point there ios no declaration of war on any side. Immanent invasion does not apply. Sorry just legality. And for some law is law. And Constitution, no matter how dead or inconvenient is still the law above all other laws.

About divorce, there's a hole in the fence between you and your neighbor, you've known about it for years, you know your wife's been "popping over" to visit the neighbor since the hole was discovered. And NOW you act all angry and enraged that "there's something awfuwwwy scwewy going on awound here." Now that she's filing for divorce?

Joat42 wrote:

cthia wrote:I addressed the trap thingy elsewhere. One of Beowulf's mistakes, IMO, is that they didn't inform the Mandarins that the RMN knew they were coming. The RMN did that. But the RMN is a batch of neobarbs. Beowulf isn't. The Mandarins simply thought the RMN was bluffing. Of course, any idiot navy would have known the gorilla was on its way. The Mandarins didn't trust anything they said. Why wouldn't they try and bluff themselves out of the path of the oncoming juggernaut? "The Manties are pissing in their boots."

That's not in the book. Just you projecting again.

What Kolokoltsov thought was that the Manties may be bluffing but regardless he thought it was better to let it play out because the alternatives also sucked.

If you happen to have the book near you - just read chapter 14:

Innokentiy Kolokoltsov, ART, Chapter 14, excerpt wrote:Of course, even if they were actually terrified, they’d be sending him exactly this sort of correspondence. Diplomatic threats cost nothing, and the temptation to run a bluff, to convince Kolokoltsov they could do to Filareta what they’d done to Crandall—especially if they really couldn’t—had to be overwhelming. If they could frighten him into calling Filareta off, they ran the table without having to fire a single missile. Which would also just happen to save them if they didn’t have any missiles left to fire.

Which is all well and good, but doesn’t change the fact that they may actually be able to do exactly what Carmichael’s threatening. And if they are, and if they really are prepared to hand all their notes to someone like O’Hanrahan…

His expression turned bleak as he contemplated just how damaging the publication of Carmichael’s correspondence could prove if things went to hell on Filareta. Yet it would be almost as damaging to take the ambassador’s “advice.” Sending the stand down orders Manticore was demanding could only be seen as a sign of weakness. It would damage the League’s prestige still further, and that could only worsen the consequences they all feared in the Verge and the Shell, which didn’t even consider the personal consequences to him and his colleagues. Or, for that matter, the potential constitutional train wreck when everyone began assigning blame and, in the process, revealed just how threadbare the pretense of representative government in the Solarian League truly was.

But if we don’t order him to stand down and it turns out remotely as badly as Carmichael’s warning us it will, we’ll have all of those consequences plus the deaths of thousands of our own spacers!

Jonathan_S wrote:SNIP

They may not have specifically pointed to Beowulf as their source but the Mandarins knew Raging Justice wouldn't be a surprise, and had time to call it off. But like you said, they refused to listen - but even then Manticore did it's best to resolve the invasion, while maintaining their sovereignty, without loss of life. (The "trap" was only plan B)

pappilon wrote:

Joat42 wrote:SNIP

And after the first transit of ships is destroyed the forts never have to fire another shot. The next group through enters the debris field and takes itself out of existence with no wedge or bow walls to peotect them from impacts.

We saw that in another transit where ships crashed into othrs and the tugs had to clear the wreckage to avoid worse.

Armed Neo-Bob wrote:

pappilon wrote:SNIP

And after the first transit of ships is destroyed the forts never have to fire another shot. The next group through enters the debris field and takes itself out of existence with no wedge or bow walls to peotect them from impacts.

We saw that in another transit where ships crashed into othrs and the tugs had to clear the wreckage to avoid worse.

ldwechsler wrote:
Yet Beowulf gets blame. It depends on who's doing the spin. Also, Beowulf's delegates seem not to have used the "all your ships would have been destroyed" defense. That could be a factor as well.

ART, Chapter 7, snippet 1 wrote: Everything we have heard and been able to piece together, however, suggests they’ve concentrated their defenses to cover the Junction from their side more throughly than at any time since the Star Kingdom took Trevor’s Star away from the People’s Republic. At the very least, the forces they already had in place have to be at a very high level of alert.

ART, Chapter 7, snippet 2 wrote:“At the same time, I think we’ve probably seen a bit more of Manticore here than the Office of Strategy and Planning’s seen in Old Chicago. I’m not trying to cast any aspersions on the analysts and planners in question”—there might, Caddell-Markham thought, have been just a hint of insincerity in that last little bit—“but everything we’ve ever seen out of the Manties suggests their first reaction to any threat, especially to their home system, is going to be to kill it. And whatever they may have used at Spindle, I think we can safely assume they have even heavier weapons defending the home system.”

n7axw wrote:Kolokoltzov was gaming the system in the only way he knew. What the Mandarins failed to understand was that the rules had changed and Manticore wasn't playing their game.

Don

cthia wrote:

n7axw wrote:Kolokoltzov was gaming the system in the only way he knew. What the Mandarins failed to understand was that the rules had changed and Manticore wasn't playing their game.

Don

Indeed Don.

Beowulf's failure was in their accounting -- of the repercussions regarding their behavior. Which obviously leads to the planet reaping concussions of angry, scorned, chest-pounding, ugly, hairy gorilla.

If the concussions are really the design of a Malignant instigator, well, it isn't like they had to push the garish gorilla all that much. It is as if the gorilla really believes that anyone else really believes that they drove all the way there simply to turn all the way around and return home without incident if the vote didn't go their way. After all, the gorilla has always been known to be agreeable, respectful, understanding and kind over the years to all of its wives.