Mesan Alignment - Back on Balance

pappilon wrote:WOW! Been gone a month ...and look at the place. Read through this entire thread today.

Answering some things without spoilers to Cthia will be difficult but I will try. (1) The RF is 12 (or 13?) systems with their own SDFs, Mannerheim's being the largest, most modern by GA standards, and most powerful among equals (The RF).

(2)MAN: Are we assuming Alpha naval officers have the hubris of Pavel Young and the rich kid that was with Helen on their snotty cruise? Any decent young Alpha Line ensign fresh out of the academy would be wise to learn whatever she could from some Gamma Line SCPO with 10 hash marks on her sleeve.
Likewise said LtJG EWO of said Alpha Line would be wise to listen to her Beta Line ATO. and so forth up the line. Yes, at some point the Alphas will rise to the top of the chain of command as all other lines will rise to their lowest level of incompetence. Military discipline and chain of command should enforce reason.
The critical thing is not genetic lineage but training, experience and, last but never least, competence should rule the day.

3) Government: The planetary government of Darius is an Oligarchy of B-G clones at the top with whatever agencies they need under them and some ruling body board of directors like Mesa & Beowulf as the public face similar to the Mandarins of the SL. But the states/provinces/whatever smaller regional governing bodies can very well be democratically elected, as can the city governments.

4) Speeding up of end game. Houdini was sped up because of the events in the Talbott Sector. Oyster Bay was sped up because of the totally unpredicted Operation Beatrice which came ->||<- that close to succeeding. Also Filareta was already in place with a use or eliminate clock ticking regardless, so we may as well use him. Albrecht was disappointed that Filareta did not even scratch 8th Fleet's paint.

5) Sharks & Lenny Ds. Sorry, nobody gets to fly the MIG 23 on first day of flight school. No spoiler hre: The Lenny Ds were mostly 2 years from completion at he end of one of the last books. UH only advances the time line 6 months or so, RFC has previously posted. So some are much closer to being finished than the rest, always were, but implausible to think any are finished with only 6 onths elapsed. Which does not mean all the technology going into them is not completely developed.

4) Most potential spoiler, so ALERT
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RFC said previously that he was at the point where Barregos was about to or had launched Operation Sepoy, so safe to assume the RF (and others?) did the same by the end of the book.

Dauntless wrote:the question can't be answered without massive spoilers.

n7axw wrote:Had the Detweilers been willing to rely on salesmanship, they could probably have gotten most of what they wanted. The real issue is that they want to jam what they are after down everybody elses throat...

Don

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Sigs wrote:

n7axw wrote:Had the Detweilers been willing to rely on salesmanship, they could probably have gotten most of what they wanted. The real issue is that they want to jam what they are after down everybody elses throat...

Don

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And thats why they will lose. Even the RF might be questioning if the Detweilers have what it takes especially how things went down in the last stages of the book and how exposed they are now. They have done some shady things since they were introduced and now everything they did comes back to haunt them as the League and all core systems will be searching for a place to lay the blame for the last attack.

JohnRoth wrote:
Not necessarily. What put a spoke in the Detweiler Plan was King Roger's secret research program and then military buildup. Without that, Haven would have rolled over Manticore like a tsunami. Even with that, it took a number of very capable people to stem the tide.

Both the Detweiler Plan and the Harrington Plan focused on breaking up the League. Neither one is spelled out in detail, but we know that the Detweiler Plan had the Protectorates rebelling, beginning with Maya. The Harrington Plan was focused on economic pressure.

Now, that's not what happened. What did happen is somewhere in this Pearl: http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... ngton/31/1 , but I'm not going to say exactly where or what it was.

However, if you think of what happened in the last book before UH, it ought to be obvious. I won't say it was obvious, because I certainly didn't expect it even though I had put together all the pieces and said exactly what was going to happen in a post on this forum - and still didn't see the conclusion.

So where did Albrecht go wrong? He didn't consider what might happen if Manticore actually won the conflict with the SL. He concentrated on taking out Manticore as a factor, and didn't have his nose rubbed in his strategic failure until the "Oh, Shit" moment when he was informed that Haven had allied with Manticore. At that point it was too late. The conference on Mannerheim had occurred two months previously (22/04), and Albrecht had pulled the trigger the following month (22/05).

All he could do was accelerate Houdini and concentrate on vanishing down a rabbit hole and pulling the hole in after him.

cthia wrote:Oyster Bay was nothing less than an act of desperation.

IMHO, if they were going to pull that trigger, they should have set the gun for fully automatic and totally leveled Manticore. Which wouldn't have been advisable unless they could do the same for Grayson, Haven, and key systems of the League as well.

IOW, if they didn't want to simply relocate to some secluded part of the galaxy and do their own thing like everyone thinks they should have, then their plan should have been to wait, wait and wait. . . then exterminate. Doing absolutely nothing at all. Not even unveiling their nanites. Then, when everything is ready, let everything out of the bag at once. An all encompassing Oyster Bay as the first peek out of the MA would have been devastating. By the time the galaxy recovered, the RF would have carved its niche from the remaining rocks and a new era is born.

As it stands, the MA only served up Oysters on a half shell.