Safehold vs Gbaba

Bluesqueak wrote:

DMcCunney wrote:It depends on what the TF's leads them to believe the Gbaba will do. I don't see the Gbaba searching the wreckage after they destroy a ship, and I don't think the TF planners did either.

Dennis, we know the Gbaba took prisoners and interrogated them. It's in the first book. The first book also mentions that they've learnt to understand English. We also know they destroyed planets with great big KEWs. So where did they get the prisoners from, if not from planets?

From ships.

So they can and do either search the destroyed ships, or they check out the wreckage. Just as the Federation does, looking for the best way to destroy the enemy.

Yes, we know they took and interrogated prisoners from TF ships early on. It was the early stages of the war, when the TF counter-attacked and actually took back a couple of worlds from the Gbaba.

Prisoner interrogation would be standard on both sides, in terms of "Learn as much as possible about your enemy to more effectively fight them." From TF prisoners, the Gbaba would get the idea that there were multiple worlds settled by humans in that direction, and they needed to look over there to find and neutralize the threat.

Unfortunately, the TF discovered the hard way that what they had been fighting were Gbaba frontier forces, but then the Gbaba fully mobilized. The turning point was when the main TF fleet got annihilated by the Gbaba, and humanity from that point was in a losing defensive battle.

By the time the Gbaba reached Earth, it's a safe bet they knew it was humanity's home world, and destroying it would kill the cancer it represented. Kill everything in the sky, make sure nothing got away, and bombard the planet in a manner that would make the OBS turning the Alexandria Enclave into Armageddon Reef look like a minor exercise.

I see the decoy fleet taking pains to insure none of their personnel would be taken alive to reveal Operation Ark, and quite possibly set the ships to self-destruct once they'd suffered serious damage. The ships that were fake passenger transports and industrial nodes would get special attention to make sure they didn't leave anything revealing behind by being blown into dust bunnies.

Since Earth was humanity's home world whose destruction was the Gbaba goal from the start, and the point of the decoy fleet was to look like a last ditch colony fleet to save some of humanity, once it was destroyed there would be little point in wreckage searching. The Gbaba concern would be finding and killing leakers to make sure nobody escaped.

It's entirely possible they might have searched wreckage, but I just don't see a reason for them to bother at that point.
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Dennis

Bluesqueak wrote:But I think there was a 'folorn hope' that all the ships might just possibly break contact with the Gbaba and so get through- so volunteer 'colonists' would be more useful in that unlikely event.

No, the combat fleet must be completely destroyed. Otherwise the Gbaba will hunt for the escapees until they find them.