Mesan Alignment post war

Sigs wrote:

tlb wrote:
I am not sure that the present management of the Malign has the self control to draw back now for even a short respite.

The question is if they had the self control and erased their tracks how would the GA and SL react? How long can the Queen and the current SEM/RoH leadership beat the MA drum before the people replace them or ignore them?

Well since the current SEM leadership is mostly expected to live another couple hundred year; and Beth is well known for keeping grudges stuffed and mounted... And Oyster Bay will remain in living memory for probably at least a century beyond that...

And that memory of Oyster Bay is going to seriously limit any thought's of replacing the ruler of the SEM just because she'd still focused on the group that slaughtered millions of her subject, without any declaration of war, and then disappeared.
RoH was of course less impacted by OB, and due to term limits will turn over it's leadership more frequently.

But to get to the point where the Star Empire isn't still focused on them? Probably two complete generations from now, minimum. So effectively only the grandchildren or beyond of those alive during OB are still around; and with prolong that's probably as much as 800 years from now.

That's a damned long time for the MAlign to hide and keep their system stable and expanding; which seems to require keeping the fooled slaves of Darius from figuring out that they're not really free.

Jonathan_S wrote:Well since the current SEM leadership is mostly expected to live another couple hundred year; and Beth is well known for keeping grudges stuffed and mounted... And Oyster Bay will remain in living memory for probably at least a century beyond that...

And over the enxt 100 or so years a whole other generation of politicans will come on the scene, with a whole host of other issues to deal with. During the next two hundred years the Galaxy will probably be in a state of turmoil and at some point the MA goes on the back burner due to a more immediate threat, say the SL comes back for round two, would the GA really have that many resources to devote to the MA if the SLN is pounding on them with technologically equal forces?

And that memory of Oyster Bay is going to seriously limit any thought's of replacing the ruler of the SEM just because she'd still focused on the group that slaughtered millions of her subject, without any declaration of war, and then disappeared.
RoH was of course less impacted by OB, and due to term limits will turn over it's leadership more frequently.

Im not taking about replacing the queen, I am talking about the queen
being considered irrelevant by the people because how long can you keep a threat up? How long can the GA spend money hunting for the MA if the MA doesn't leave any breadcrumbs? I mean for all the GA knows, they could have committed mass suicide in Mesa when 10th Fleet showed up.

But to get to the point where the Star Empire isn't still focused on them? Probably two complete generations from now, minimum. So effectively only the grandchildren or beyond of those alive during OB are still around; and with prolong that's probably as much as 800 years from now.

Are you sure? An economic collapse of some sort, with a pandemic throughout the empire, maybe a revolt thrown in and a war just to complete the disaster and they will still worry about OB? Unless the MA keeps sticking their noses in the GA, eventually the GA will have significantly more pressing issues to deal with than something that happened 100 or 200 years ago.

The current generation will die off in a century or two, and the next generation will grow up with a whole array of different threats and the MA wouldn't be on their radar as long as the MA doesn't do stupid stuff and keep getting caught.

That's a damned long time for the MAlign to hide and keep their system stable and expanding; which seems to require keeping the fooled slaves of Darius from figuring out that they're not really free.

And that's the whole point, get out of Darrius. Because if they don't get out of Darius eventually someone will find them and they are screwed, if they build up their vision somewhere else and expand they can defend themselves in 100 or so years against the GA, unless they manage to piss of the galaxy all at once.

cthia wrote:Nice thread Sigs.

My time has somewhat abandoned me at the moment. My loss. But, while driving by ...

Sigs wrote:What happens with the GA if the MA really did manage to cover their tracks?

What happens fi there is no link between Darrius and Mesa?

One cancels out the other doesn't it? Or is a moot point. Or implies the other. Or something like that ...

If the MA managed to cover its tracks, then there IS no link between Darius and Mesa.

As far as the MA crawling back in it's shell "indefinitely," well, indefinitely may be just long enough for everyone to have become complacent when they attack. Several years? A few years? One, year? ... considering the human nature of man and might.

Sigs wrote:That is what interests me, the GA and the SL can be pissed at the MA only so long before other more pressing concerns start taking away their attention and even with prolong their attention would be only so long before the current generation is dead or retired. It will be soon enough that a different generation of politicians take the reigns from the old guard and there is only so long they can beat the MA drum before the population gets tired of it. So at some point the search for the MA becomes a historical study and not an active operation.


Soon enough, ONI will be putting their shitpumps on the MA desk because they will be needing their best and brightest on the hot spots of the day rather than the hotspots of 50 years ago.

Absolutely. IOW, life must go on, even for the mighty GA.

For what it's worth, I don't think it'll happen, because of the human element surrounding the author. He isn't a spring chicken, and, the teasing he put down in one of his podcasts about the Ghost Hunters ... "I won't tell you how that all turns out, whether they find them or not." Well, that in itself is an admittance to me. Actually, David CAN'T shut that door. It's his tie-in. Well, he can, but I'm betting he won't, or the Ghost Hunters as a meaningful part of storyline, per se, will have been nothing but filler, therefore, a waste.

cthia wrote:For what it's worth, I don't think it'll happen, because of the human element surrounding the author. He isn't a spring chicken, and, the teasing he put down in one of his podcasts about the Ghost Hunters ... "I won't tell you how that all turns out, whether they find them or not." Well, that in itself is an admittance to me. Actually, David CAN'T shut that door. It's his tie-in. Well, he can, but I'm betting he won't, or the Ghost Hunters as a meaningful part of storyline, per se, will have been nothing but filler, therefore, a waste.

It is true of many things that have come up in the forum; that they may be possible in the Honorverse, but we never expect RFC to permit them in the story that he controls. Some examples are destruction of an inhabited planet by a fractional C spacecraft, Leonard Detweiler class warships sneaking into Manticore orbit to demand its surrender or the Renaissance Factor achieving galactic domination.

As to what the Malign might do; I do not expect them to abandon Darius, because its location is central to their plans. But let's hope that the next book and a Covid-19 vaccine will arrive before the end of next year, so that we can see where RFC is taking us.

cthia wrote:Absolutely. IOW, life must go on, even for the mighty GA.

For what it's worth, I don't think it'll happen, because of the human element surrounding the author. He isn't a spring chicken, and, the teasing he put down in one of his podcasts about the Ghost Hunters ... "I won't tell you how that all turns out, whether they find them or not." Well, that in itself is an admittance to me. Actually, David CAN'T shut that door. It's his tie-in. Well, he can, but I'm betting he won't, or the Ghost Hunters as a meaningful part of storyline, per se, will have been nothing but filler, therefore, a waste.

The end of the RMN is coming as well, right now the RMN is the Royal Manticoran Navy but soon enough it will be the Imperial Navy, not in name but in function. In 100 years the Prime Minister might be from Nuncio, the First Lord of the Admiralty might be from Montana, the First Space Lord from Silesia. Parliament would be from the empire and as such would bring representatives that can feel compassion for Manticore and what it went through with OB but they wouldn't have been personally affected by it and it would not carry the same weight to them. When the Star Empire becomes the Star Empire really and truly over the next 50 years there would be so much internal disagreements and problems on top of the external threats that the SEM will probably not be able to devote as many resources to the MA as they will want to.

tlb wrote:It is true of many things that have come up in the forum; that they may be possible in the Honorverse, but we never expect RFC to permit them in the story that he controls. Some examples are destruction of an inhabited planet by a fractional C spacecraft, Leonard Detweiler class warships sneaking into Manticore orbit to demand its surrender or the Renaissance Factor achieving galactic domination.

As to what the Malign might do; I do not expect them to abandon Darius, because its location is central to their plans. But let's hope that the next book and a Covid-19 vaccine will arrive before the end of next year, so that we can see where RFC is taking us.

Their plans are in shambles and they seem bent on sinking their own ship so I agree, I don't think they will change anything, I personally think the way they are written in the books is that they will throw more tantrums on a galactic level, kill more people until everyone in the galaxy is thoroughly done and gunning for them probably including the RF.

They are written as petulant little children, they have no problem killing tens of millions of innocent people but the second mommy and daddy die at their own hand suddenly the war is real to them and they have to lash out and punish the GA for daring to get to Mesa before mommy and daddy can leave. No problem killing millions of people, no problems killing their own people by the tens or hundreds of thousands but the second their parents die its a tragedy, they have no self control and no common sense so it seems to be heading for a face to face with the Grand Fleet.

Sigs wrote:That's why they leave someone competent in charge that knows what they need to do to build networks throughout the galaxy. Its not like they will build a network and forget about it until those people retire or die and then start from scratch.

You mean the control freaks with surname Detweiler? The only person they'd entrust to such a task is one of them. The temptation otherwise is too great for such a person: this person will be controlling a vast network of spies and assets with the ability influence things. If the masters are 5 years out of communication, this person can quickly make their own empire.

Either way, if there's a centre somewhere that controls the spies, the risk of being found is still there. The masters thousands of light-years away are irrelevant. This is a single point of failure.

And that would be a problem if you are at the tail end of your plan and are planning on war, it is not a problem if you are 200 years away from your plan. The MA wont need to have 10,000 SD(P)'s with the newest tech at all times for the next 600,700 or 1,000 years, they need to maintain a proper military so they build experience and naval tradition, if their ships are 20,30,40 or 50 years behind the rest of the humanity its fine as long as they work on cutting that time down and expanding their network.

How do they maintain their naval tradition without wars or piracy? At best they can do police actions, catching deserters and black market traffic.

If they do have wars, it won't take long for one of the factions to turn to the rest of the Galaxy for help.

If the MA builds a tradition of freedom of research, invests a lot of resources into research and development they will come up with interesting and unique products. They may invest 1,000,000 times as much as the GA does in research and their only invention is a can opener that works a little faster but truly what are the chances? They already came up with a number of technologies that the rest of the galaxy did know about or wasn't even considering.

They can do all that but the result can still be they came up with nothing that gives them a strategic advantage.

We've been investing in fusion research for the past 50 years and we're still as far from a working fusion reactor as we were 45 years ago. Graphene has made great strides and it's "the material that can do everything, except leave the lab." But everybody can watch cat videos on their phones.

If the MA adopts the mindset of nothing is off limits, invest money in every research project no matter how unlikely it is to produce results and something will come out of it.

It's likely, but it's not a guarantee. So are they willing to bet their future on the possibility?

The worst part is that the answer will be "yes."

And how exactly do they find the rest of humanity?

There may be residual, anecdotal knowledge that hasn't been redacted that allows someone determined enough to point in the right direction. Things like O- and B-type stars or red giants that were known in antiquity like Sirius and Betelgeuse, or pulsars known in modern times. Someone may even remember they're looking for a G2V star whose closest planetary system is a binary G2V + K1V with a distant red dwarf, both of which are within 10 light-years of a very bright A0-A1 V (Sol, Alpha Centauri, Sirius). Once you take off in the right direction, you just have to be close enough to hear all the noise we produce in the EM spectrum, travelling at the speed of light.

Another way is to steal the coordinates that must still be in the Top Secret folder, or bribe one of the officers making the regularly scheduled trips to the relay buoy and RV with the dispatch boat.

How many people will be oh so jealous of the wars, genocides, and oppression that the rest of humanity is experiencing?

There are a lot of people with such interests today. Some of them we call "anthropologists" and "sociologists." And in a population of one trillion, one in a million is still a million people.

And when that happens they deal with it. Cant really have the answers for every potential problem of the next few hundred years. It might happen and it might not.

They have to succeed every time in catching that before the person or group actually makes the trip.

I feel a solution like moving away from humanity and building up their empire will be better than most others, when they are ready they have plenty of options. They can conquer humanity, they can destroy the galactic order and swoop in afterword's, they can open their borders and show everyone how superior they are, or they can decide to fortify hundreds of systems between humanity and their nation, and blow away anyone who approaches their space. That's the beauty of options, having them gives you freedom, planning for redo to their current plan only a few hundred years later leads to the exact same problem, one mistake or unforeseen obstacle and mission fail with no back up.

If they weren't trying to stay hidden, I would agree with you. Go far enough away that it's extremely difficult to make trips. Improve your society the way you want it to go and don't try to force it on the rest of the Galaxy. If someone people want to emigrate or immigrate, let them. This was tried multiple times over the Honorverse history. To name two: Grayson and Nuncio.

Trying to stay absolutely hidden, with a thin line of communication so they can steal technology and stay abreast of current events, over an extended period of time, is statically impossible.

Sigs wrote:And that's the whole point, get out of Darrius. Because if they don't get out of Darius eventually someone will find them and they are screwed, if they build up their vision somewhere else and expand they can defend themselves in 100 or so years against the GA, unless they manage to piss of the galaxy all at once.

By the way, has anyone given a thought what it would take to uproot the entire Darius population and move it away on a 5-year journey?

The system's population is 2 billion non-slaves and 1.9 billion slaves. Assuming they'll want to move only the non-slaves, just how many ships are required to move a population that big? A sleeper ship as big as a CL might carry 100,000, so they'd need 20,000 ships. But if they built 1000 a year and took 1 year to build each, we're looking at 20 years to build them. For ship 10x as big but only as big as a BC, they'd only need 2,000 ships, which could be completed in 3-4 years.

If all the yard space is present. If they still have to design the ships, build the stasis pods and the shipyards, add another 5 years.

Then there's all the shuttle movement. If a shuttle can carry 400 people into orbit (less than an A380), that's 5 million trips. If you can handle no more than 4,000 shuttles in operation at a time (people aren't evenly distributed over the planet), that's 1250 round-trips. Bringing people to the spaceport, with their belongings, loading them aboard, then unloading would optimistically take 1 day, meaning nearly three and a half T-years to lift everyone off the planet.

That actually means you don't need to build all the ships at the same time. You can build about 600 a year and load them as they become ready. But even then that's a 5-year process to get everyone off Darius, not including the preparatory steps to get there.

And this is assuming they have a destination scouted. If you want to be 2 years by current travel on streak drive and you need to start researching suitable, habitable planets now, that's a minimum of 5 more T-years.

The way I see it, unless this had been part of the Detweiler Plan for the last 20 years or so, there's no way they could pull this off with anywhere as a cohesive unit. That is likely the about the timeframe they have for the conclusion of the Plan anyway, so they won't be looking at this contingency. And there's absolutely no evidence that they have this contingency: if they did, they would have kept all the newcomers from Mesa in stasis and in orbit in the first place.

The only thing I'd give them is to have a few backup sites to Darius already known, but only within a couple of months' travel away.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
You mean the control freaks with surname Detweiler? The only person they'd entrust to such a task is one of them.

Or, you know like Rufino Chernyshev or one of his subordinates. They need someone on the ground who can be discreet, who is competent and knows when to take a risk and when not to take a risk.

The temptation otherwise is too great for such a person: this person will be controlling a vast network of spies and assets with the ability influence things. If the masters are 5 years out of communication, this person can quickly make their own empire.

If they have that much of a problem with loyalty they are already screwed.

Either way, if there's a centre somewhere that controls the spies, the risk of being found is still there.

Unless they packed their bags and sailed away to a planet 250,000 LY away in a different galaxy and blew up Darius on the way out there is always a chance of discovery, that cant be avoided. Anything they do has a chance of discovery and everything they do has a chance of failure.

How do they maintain their naval tradition without wars or piracy? At best they can do police actions, catching deserters and black market traffic.

The same way Switzerland maintains their military.

If they do have wars, it won't take long for one of the factions to turn to the rest of the Galaxy for help.

And the galaxy will do exactly what? Unite to defeat the big bad MA? Where the MA is concerned something like 95% of the galaxy doesn't know, doesn't believe, doesn't care or a combination of the 3, what exactly would this do? Get the big bad RMN to come after the MA?

They can do all that but the result can still be they came up with nothing that gives them a strategic advantage.

And they can come up with game changer discovery after gamechanger discovery.

We've been investing in fusion research for the past 50 years and we're still as far from a working fusion reactor as we were 45 years ago. Graphene has made great strides and it's "the material that can do everything, except leave the lab." But everybody can watch cat videos on their phones.

And look at the interesting ways we can kill eachother in great numbers. The MA is starting with the same base level of technology, they have motivated people and could have an ever growing pool of resources to fund research from, I don't think that the SKM can come up with all of this game changer after game changer technologies in 60 years but the MA wont be able to advance past their starting tech level in 600 years without the help of the rest of the galaxy.

It's likely, but it's not a guarantee. So are they willing to bet their future on the possibility?

And the alternatives are what?

The worst part is that the answer will be "yes."

Again, what are their alternatives?

There may be residual, anecdotal knowledge that hasn't been redacted that allows someone determined enough to point in the right direction.

Yeah but the right direction has about 100,000,000 stars before they hit Human space...good luck with that.

Another way is to steal the coordinates that must still be in the Top Secret folder, or bribe one of the officers making the regularly scheduled trips to the relay buoy and RV with the dispatch boat.

Ok let me ask you this, so what if the rest of humanity finds the MA in 200 years? They may panic a little, they may get excited but would they automatically unite to conquer the MA? At worst the MA would have to face the GA.

They have to succeed every time in catching that before the person or group actually makes the trip.

No, they don't. If it happens that you miss one so what? Will the galaxy unite to destroy the big bad Alignment?

If they weren't trying to stay hidden, I would agree with you. Go far enough away that it's extremely difficult to make trips. Improve your society the way you want it to go and don't try to force it on the rest of the Galaxy. If someone people want to emigrate or immigrate, let them. This was tried multiple times over the Honorverse history. To name two: Grayson and Nuncio.

Realistically that would be the best option, if they had started that 600 years before, they would have had a vast successful civilization rather than one planet, being hunted by the most powerful fleet in existence. I am putting a scenario where they try to accomplish their goals by different means, you are presenting a scenario of if they were a different organization with different goals. Chances are, in 600 years time they will have a sprawling civilization with issues of their own and they will not want the head ache of incorporating the rest of humanity into their nation.

Realistically, the effort they made, the resources they spend on trying to execute their plan they could have invested in changing the League from the inside into what they wanted very gradually and in 600 years the SL would have been a very different, instead, here they are 600 years after the concept was born, sitting on one industrialized planet, being secretly allied to a dozen 2nd rate systems trying to recover their plan and its not going well for them and will likely not go well for them.

Trying to stay absolutely hidden, with a thin line of communication so they can steal technology and stay abreast of current events, over an extended period of time, is statically impossible.

No its not. Creating an organization meant to overthrow galactic order and keep it hidden is statistically impossible yet it happened in the books. They infiltrated the League, Manticore, Haven and probably a dozen other nations all without anyone figuring it out. They manipulated nations for decades or centuries without anyone figuring it out, but running and hiding is impossible. Yeah, Sure.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
By the way, has anyone given a thought what it would take to uproot the entire Darius population and move it away on a 5-year journey?

You don't need to uproot the entire population, you need to send an expedition, equipment, and a plan. They can grow their population in a lab and the fun way too, so population growth would not be a problem, even starting with a couple of million people would be enough to set up a base and make it self sufficient.