Mesan Alignment post war

ThinksMarkedly wrote: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.

It's odd, but the most successful intelligence operation in the world did have such a center, but not exposed to the world. They put the Lubyanka only 6 minutes from the Kremlin, despite the fact that their spies worked very long way away and it often took weeks to get reports back and forth. And the various agents who ran spies on the outside only knew a very limited about the big picture and generally had no idea who else was running spies. And it all worked pretty well for 70 years.

Sigs wrote: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.

Rufino wasn't a strategic-level decision-maker and that's what this position necessitates. At best, that was Bardasano and we did hear Albrecht thinking she was too aggressive and might need to be be culled. Rufino probably had suicide implants too. Whoever this person is needs to have either a very long time out or no time out, plus control of the reset mechanism for their top-level assets. That sounds like Collin Detweiler.

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

"Control freaks."

With the power to terminate anyone they don't like. Note also how no one but Albrecht (and presumably his clones) knew anything about the RF.

That mitigates the disloyalty.

The same way Switzerland maintains their military.

And they're renowned for their military prowess.

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?

Send spies and observers. The Manticoran SIS and the BSC would probably care enough to.

That ruins the Plan.

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

The point is that it might happen or it might not. Can they bet everything on the certainty it will?

And the alternatives are what?

Not leave.

If you're asking which one has more chance of success, assuming said success requires at least 30 years, given that Darius has a limited lifetime measured in the same time frame, I'll agree with you. They would be no worse than at Darius.

The question is whether staying at Darius and executing the plan before Darius is discovered is possible.

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.

The chance of discovery grows with the number of people who know the secret. The majority of the Alignment was dedicated to the genetic improvement and the people who were part of that had a very clear reason not to divulge what they were doing, plus the fact that they were probably employees of Manpower. Even then, the operation must have been small for centuries. The other aspects of the Alignment were probably just a dozen people.

A civilisation of hundreds to a thousand systems is not something that can be kept secret.

Sigs wrote: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.

That's a backup plan you ignore once you launch. You don't count on it succeeding. That's not your main plan and you don't send your main people on them.

There's also the danger that they will come back with a different genetic variation and think to overthrow you.

tlb wrote:

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?

cthia wrote: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.

As long as Mannerheim has to guard some of the wormhole junctions, then there never will be zero links. But that link might be difficult to find.

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

Wale, I'm not so certain I can ultimately agree with that lack of self control when the dust settles, although I can certainly empathize with your logic. The emotional loss of their parents seems to have fueled their centuries old anger to go Nova. But, they are Alphas.

Besides, I'm not so certain the MA SHOULD back off. They have the initiative. In wars, you don't give up the initiative. In this case the initiative is the market they've cornered in their unprecedented technology. The GA has been chasing that cat since it was let out of the bag, but thus far, no cigar. The MA shouldn't give them time to produce and smoke THAT particular cigar. It's the lynchpin of their advantage, and conceding that advantage would hang them.

The MA has made a few mistakes along the way of a CENTURIES old plan. A few. So what? Their batting average still rounds off to damn near a thousand, and they've hit quite a few home runs, pulled off a couple grand slams and batted a whole lot of other runs in. And they still have runners on base set to score.

I say regroup and crank up the heat! Let the nanites loose and let the LDs run free.

This is the end game, the bottom of the ninth.

Besides, the author teased me that the LDs are complete! Surely we all remember that feeling we get, having ordered and received a brand new car off the assembly line with that new car smell, beckoning us to take her for a spin at the nearest junction. Even an Alpha can't resist that new car smell. The Whales and Sharks smell blood.

Sigs wrote:

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?

Get pushed to the backburner somewhat by newer crisis? Sure. But it's not just the Queen. The SEM's house of Lords also has lifetime members; so there's a lot of continuity within that government.

And while the MA may get temporarily ignored for immediate crisis we're talking about an surprise attack far larger than Pearl Harbor or 9/11; but without any ability to retaliate. It's going to be a long damned time before wanting to find and deal with those responsible goes away. (If nothing else is an enormous bloody shirt that one politician can wave to attack another for not doing enough to prepare/search/whatever. And so just that will tend to keep it fresh)

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.

Again it's not just the Queen. You've got all those members of Lords who aren't getting replaced and lived through the trauma of OB. They're not going to forget quickly. And it's going to be such a large part of the national discussion that it'll be baked into their children pretty well too - especially since there's been no resolution that would help people collectively put it behind them.

It won't be the only thing they focus on. But I'd be shocked if a still hidden MAlign wasn't a steady factor in their planning for centuries.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Rufino wasn't a strategic-level decision-maker and that's what this position necessitates. At best, that was Bardasano and we did hear Albrecht thinking she was too aggressive and might need to be be culled. Rufino probably had suicide implants too. Whoever this person is needs to have either a very long time out or no time out, plus control of the reset mechanism for their top-level assets. That sounds like Collin Detweiler.

No, what you need is someone who knows how to build an intelligence network from the ground up, who has field experience and who has the necessary background to organize and train the people necessary to expand the network. Right now the MA has very little in the way of assets in Haven and at most low level assets in Manticore, all of their SL assets have big shiny suicide buttons in them and that network likely wont last long so what they need is not a strategic level thinker with no field experience, its someone who has been there and done that, who has the experience, knowledge, training and the ability to spot potential targets.

And they're renowned for their military prowess.

Seeing as no one has invaded them for a few centuries I think we can safely say their military is perfectly capable of fighting.

Send spies and observers. The Manticoran SIS and the BSC would probably care enough to.

That ruins the Plan.

Ruins their plan and still leaves them in an advantageous position. Being found out if they try to amend their current plan would leave them in a significantly worse position, one where a couple of squadrons of SD(P)'s and a few regiments of Marines can end them and their entire organization whereas here they would have a lot of distance between themselves and any potential enemies and their potential enemies cant really launch an immediate invasion the second they find the MA because the MA is far away and they know nothing about their capabilities. This gives them a lot more options.

The point is that it might happen or it might not. Can they bet everything on the certainty it will?

What exactly are they betting on this?

Not leave.

If you're asking which one has more chance of success, assuming said success requires at least 30 years, given that Darius has a limited lifetime measured in the same time frame, I'll agree with you. They would be no worse than at Darius.

The question is whether staying at Darius and executing the plan before Darius is discovered is possible.

Yes, very much so. You don't need to move the entire population, you need a seed population from Darius to a new system with enough technical support to be able to rapidly expand their population and industry.

The chance of discovery grows with the number of people who know the secret. The majority of the Alignment was dedicated to the genetic improvement and the people who were part of that had a very clear reason not to divulge what they were doing, plus the fact that they were probably employees of Manpower. Even then, the operation must have been small for centuries. The other aspects of the Alignment were probably just a dozen people.

A civilisation of hundreds to a thousand systems is not something that can be kept secret.

You move 2 million people x LY away from humanity without divulging to the RF what you are doing and in Darius this is presented as expansion into a new system, a backup. You move your 2 million people, start expansion in the new location, since the MA controls what the population of Darius knows, and you definitely don't take the people from Houdini with you, what are they going to miss? The people of Darius don't know where the rest of Humanity is yet you expect them to do so from thousands of LY away without being exposed to human history, geography or society.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
That's a backup plan you ignore once you launch. You don't count on it succeeding. That's not your main plan and you don't send your main people on them.

Ok how do they salvage their current plan?

Jonathan_S wrote:Get pushed to the backburner somewhat by newer crisis? Sure. But it's not just the Queen. The SEM's house of Lords also has lifetime members; so there's a lot of continuity within that government.

Not when in 50 years Talbott and Silesia start being included into the imperial government and the military wholesale. You cant really have the House of Lords dominated by two systems with 15% of the Imperial population. Soon enough nuncio, montana and all the other Talbott systems will have representatives into the government, representatives that will be sympathetic but will not have lived through that on a personal level and they would have a whole host of problems to deal with that don't include something happening decades or centuries earlier.

And while the MA may get temporarily ignored for immediate crisis we're talking about an surprise attack far larger than Pearl Harbor or 9/11; but without any ability to retaliate. It's going to be a long damned time before wanting to find and deal with those responsible goes away. (If nothing else is an enormous bloody shirt that one politician can wave to attack another for not doing enough to prepare/search/whatever. And so just that will tend to keep it fresh)

To the small % of people who were affected personally by OB, the rest of the empire which makes up close to 80-85% of the population and will in 50 years be include in the government and military it will be something bad that happened decades ago, but not something to waste money on when there are more pressing needs.

Again it's not just the Queen. You've got all those members of Lords who aren't getting replaced and lived through the trauma of OB.

But I would assume they will be flooded with new members from Silesia and Talbott over the enxt few decades which will surely limit their impact.

They're not going to forget quickly. And it's going to be such a large part of the national discussion that it'll be baked into their children pretty well too - especially since there's been no resolution that would help people collectively put it behind them.

In Manticore it will, In nuncio it probably will be a shorter discussion before they turn around and continue working on building up Nuncio.

It won't be the only thing they focus on. But I'd be shocked if a still hidden MAlign wasn't a steady factor in their planning for centuries.

Depends on the SL, if it ends up being reduced to a couple of hundred systems, the GA would have its hands full on so many fronts that the MA might slip in importance.

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...

Sigs wrote: 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?

Jonathan_S wrote:Get pushed to the backburner somewhat by newer crisis? Sure. But it's not just the Queen. The SEM's house of Lords also has lifetime members; so there's a lot of continuity within that government.

And while the MA may get temporarily ignored for immediate crisis we're talking about an surprise attack far larger than Pearl Harbor or 9/11; but without any ability to retaliate. It's going to be a long damned time before wanting to find and deal with those responsible goes away. (If nothing else is an enormous bloody shirt that one politician can wave to attack another for not doing enough to prepare/search/whatever. And so just that will tend to keep it fresh)

Jonathan_S wrote: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.

Sigs wrote: 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.

Jonathan_S wrote:Again it's not just the Queen. You've got all those members of Lords who aren't getting replaced and lived through the trauma of OB. They're not going to forget quickly. And it's going to be such a large part of the national discussion that it'll be baked into their children pretty well too - especially since there's been no resolution that would help people collectively put it behind them.

It won't be the only thing they focus on. But I'd be shocked if a still hidden MAlign wasn't a steady factor in their planning for centuries.

Without a doubt, there will be a day of remembrance set aside. But it is not just the Yawata Strike that will keep memories alive; it is also the murder of about 40 million with the destruction of the Beowulf orbitals, because of the close ties between Manticore and Beowulf. Even if the fervor of the hunt dies out because of a lack of clues; there will still be changes to perimeter security and building codes required by the perceived failures to prevent deaths.

Perhaps in several generations, if the Malign is absent, you are correct that focus will shift by everyone from their threat. But when the Malign does reemerge, if people recognize them as that forgotten threat, then all the old feelings will revive in full. However if the connection is not made, then they are just be a new problem for a new day.

The Alignment has Darius and a private wormhole network.

They have the RF and it is growing. The RF was designed to start the process of building an alternative to the SL when it disintegrated under the Detweiler plan but that didn't go so well and now there is the GA (which is it's own set of challanges) a vastly larger SEM and we guess we will see a SL 2.0 that will not be sheading quite so many systems.

But the RF is there and it will be spreading the basic philosophy of the Alignment, fairly quietly at first and preparing the ground for a groundswell of movement to eclipse the Beowulf Code and other things without outright war. The plan was for the League to shatter and it had to get to that position by something like what it actualy did set in motion with Opperation Buccanear and destroy what was left of it's prestige and any moral voice. That was SUPPOSED to have also crused or at least equaly damage the earlier victorious PRH as it slid down the path the Alignment pushed it on.

All of that (the RF leading the buildout of the Alignments moral and ethical takeover) can still happen but the counterwelight of a GA and allied powers will be there. They will have to recognize what is happening to even think about being able to start doing anything about it.

Mesa was ALWAYS going to burn in one way or another. Houdini was accelerated and that created lots more deaths (in the earlier time frame) and the Alignment didn't get as many people out as they wanted to because they had to accelerate. Albrect used an EXISTING network of preplaced demolitions to destroy essentialy all the major and minor Alignment phisical locations (and everybody still there plus "collateral damage". Early on in the series they talk about Mesa being sacrificed to cover the Alignment leaving and so the whole Manpower and genetric slavery and blatant genetic manipulation would be destroyed. It sounded like Mesa would be positioned to get a major attack by somebody -not specifying who- to wipe out Manpower and that probably would have been the point where the Final Flourish was used and blamed on the attacker. And it probably would have been some fragment of the SL trying to recovere the power and gain moral high ground in the Wasl of the SL Succession...and then fail misrabley as the Alignment sets off all those blasts and paints that Successor state as having committed the EE violation.

The Alignment ALREADY uses deep space meetingss to make transfers. The last instance we see is the moving of the containers used to defeat the Moriatry System at Beowulf. What we have not seen is the nuts and bolts of their still existing egress and ingress covered by the Mannerheim SDF.

If what the next round of books is going to have as primary charaecters are Honor's children then you are looking at probably 20 (though 50 would be better for the Alignment) years of resetting the board to crush Beowulf (and that is their plan) and create a cadre of non-Aignment people who are spreading their ideas through hundreds if not thousands of systems.