Eagleeye wrote:cthia wrote:It seems the SLN still suffers from inexperience. No member of the GA would hyper into a potentially deadly system where enemy fire may be lurking and assume you've arrived first. Without sending in a pattern of drones into the inner system to clear the advance.
It is obvious that Vice Admiral Hajdu Gyôzô attained his rank by stealing from the poor and giving to the richly arrogant.
I don't know if I'd call it inexperience. It's more like an ingrained habit and a lack of imagination - or so I read it, at least. After all, at the time he arrives, Hypatia is still part of the Solarian League (even if Kolokoltsov and his cronies are afraid that the referendum will change that) - and so, in a way, friendly territory. And there's textev that he knew about the peculiarities of the systems policies - like, that they don't announce referendum results until the last ballot is truely accounted for, for example.
In addition, he simply couldn't imagine, that Hypatia would call for a manticoran presence in the system before the referendum was officially finished. Ok, that you could possible put under the headline of inexperience - after all, somehow one has to learn (and survive the experience) that even the most improbable events can actually happen, especially in a warlike situation like this. And the SLN didn't fought any war for several centuries, as we all know.
Indeed, and very good points Eagleeye. It's just that they expected it in the case of Beowulf, and even sent tonnage long before the fact in hopes of bullying their political weight around. Why not expect it for Hypatia as well, since the dominoes are beginning to fall? Which, as you've agreed, is something that certainly wouldn't have been missed by any of the T's and H's — Harrington, Hearns, Henke, Hemphill, Tourville and Theisman — in the GA; some of the more experienced cream of the crop. I'd just like to see them - was expecting them to or at least hoping they would - send someone to do the job in UC that actually appears to have earned the command. It's not as if it's still business as usual for them where they're dealing with a bunch of frightened, inexperienced system defense forces. They should have long gotten a handle on that.
I decided to throw Hemphill in the mix since she's part of the advising team. Albeit, it isn't fair since it seems to be no one atall advising the SLN.