Brigade XO wrote:The formal war with the SLN is ended- sort of. Now we get to see the Post-War and what happens after, particularly what the SL Assembly does with the new Constitution and what kind of backlash comes from the litteraly millions of people are going to be unhappy (vastly, passionately, deeply) with the outcome, kind of like the American South at the end of the American Civil War.
Then there are all those trans-stellar companies who's rice bowls have just been shattered. Lots of bad feeling there.
So we also have the Alignment who is still hiding in the shadows though their existence has been confirmed (to those who want to keep their heads in the sand or other reasons) which is a war not even begun to fight on the side of the GA. Oh, they want to fight it but firsst they have to find the enemy and some solid targets to hit.
Messy, very messy.
I will say only that most of the average citizens of the SL won't have any particular bone to pick with the GA once the true history of the war comes out and the new constitution has time to settle in. There will be individual star systems --- especially the Sol System, itself --- which will obviously feel very aggrieved. "Hey! Just because the SLN killed fifty or sixty million of your citizens and did trillions of credits of damage to completely neutral systems, that was no reason to come bust up our stuff! We didn't do nuffin to youse guys! It was them nasty old Mandarins, so why you wanna go and pick on us? Meanies! An' we're gonna get even, too --- so there!" The fact that Honor didn't kill one single person (civilian or military)in her entire incursion into the Sol System won't mean a solitary damn to them any more than it would to any other entitled bunch of people. Their problem is going to be the new constitution, which won't let Terra-based cliques run the entire League any longer (and the entrenched bureaucrats, lobbyists, and pressure groups are gonna hate that!) The rest of the League is actually likely to come out of it figuring Sol got what it deserved (after all, all those other systems certainly aren't going to blame themselves for it!), and once they figure out how much better they like the new constitution, they're probably going to figure it makes a lot more sense to do business with the SEM and the RH than it does to beat any dead equines.
Now, you're durn tooting those folks whose rice bowls just got smashed are gonna want revenge, but their power's just been pretty drastically trimmed back. A lot of them are likely to want to fish in the Sol System itself when all the reconstruction contracts come through, of course, but most of them are going to be brooding over all they've lost. At the same time, most of them are business people. They may hate the Manties from here to Hell and back, but business is business . . . at least as long as they don't get caught.
Things are going to be messiest in the ex-Protectorates and among the newly independent star systems, and there's going to be plenty of troubled water for ambitious fishermen to chuck sticks of dynamite into where those areas are concerned. Absent machinations of the MA, however, it's unlikely any of them are going to pose existential threats to the GA's members.
