"Why are you still alive?"

munroburton wrote:Wormhole links are unpredictable. One of the things which derailed the Alignment's timetable, if not quite their entire plan, was the discovery of the Manticore-Lynx bridge.

Which brought Manticore about four to six hundred light years closer to Mesa. From that point onwards, much of the Alignment moves have been reactive and probably improvised - the half-baked Talbott resistance, Monica affair, Byng and Crandall's deployments. They were forced to launch Houdini much earlier than intended and even then it did not succeed 100%, costing them their shadow emperor.

The prematurely launched Oyster Bay was also completely reactive(to Apollo), whereas the original OOB would have been completely proactive. This turned it from a total tactical success into a total strategic failure as it planted the seed of a Haven-Manticore alliance.

Loren Pechtel wrote:I think the defector was an even bigger factor than the wormhole link. The wormhole pushed them into a bunch of stupid moves but I don't think that was nearly as bad as the leak.

If you are talking about Herlander Simões, he was not known to have defected until after Filareta had already been ordered to attack. If you are talking about Jack McBryde, they thought his actions had been contained and even used Green Pines to help cover Houdini.

Or are you specifically referring to the fact that Herlander Simões and the knowledge that he brought are the reasons that the Grand Alliance was formed? Personally, I think the combination of Oyster Bay and Herlander were important. Oyster Bay made it clear that there was an unknown party interfering in the war and Herlander put a name and a motivation onto that party; together it was made clear that war between Haven and Manticore had been forced onto them.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Leonard never spelt it out very well want he really wanted. He never did write the Plan. When we talk about the Detweiler Plan, we've all assumed it was the Leonard Detweiler Plan, but we've also been told that it was created after his lifetime.

So maybe it's named for a Richard Detweiler that lived 100 years later or so, and was the one that faked his death.

tlb wrote:You are wrong, RFC has talked at some length about the argument between Leonard Detweiler and the Beowulf establishment that lead to the creation of Mesa and Manpower Inc. Here is a piece of that:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Thanks for the post. I stand corrected on most things. And also, Leonard did have a diary and did publish things so what he thought on a lot of subjects was well-known.

But I stand by saying he didn't write the Plan. His vision wasn't for a takeover of the Galaxy's genetics. In a section of your quote of RFC, he talked about how Leonard would uplift the human race by making those mods available to all, possibly for free as it got passed to children of manumitted former indents. So it seems like he wanted Humanity to be uplifted, and was willing to accept some things others (Beowulf) found questionable for the end goal, but he wasn't going to impose it on anyone who didn't really want it.

Much less the means towards that end that were written into the Plan, which included corruption, warships, causing wars, nanite compulsion, and nanite-triggered involuntary "suicides." Let's remember that the Solarian-Haven War was part of the Plan, but was means to an end, not an objective itself.

Some of the confusion is over what is meant when we talk of "Leonard Detweiler's Plan". The Engagement is faithful to his original vision or plan. Then there is the plan that has mutated over the centuries under the control of his heirs. The first major break between Leonard and his heirs occurred when the assassination was faked and the Detweilers went undercover; it was at that point that indentured servants became slaves.

I thought I was being clear in stating "instead they remained faithful to the plan as originally stated by Leonard Detweiler. It was Leonard's heirs that eventually corrupted the plan into one of universal domination."

tlb wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:I think the defector was an even bigger factor than the wormhole link. The wormhole pushed them into a bunch of stupid moves but I don't think that was nearly as bad as the leak.

If you are talking about Herlander Simões, he was not known to have defected until after Filareta had already been ordered to attack. If you are talking about Jack McBryde, they thought his actions had been contained and even used Green Pines to help cover Houdini.

Or are you specifically referring to the fact that Herlander Simões and the knowledge that he brought are the reasons that the Grand Alliance was formed? Personally, I think the combination of Oyster Bay and Herlander were important. Oyster Bay made it clear that there was an unknown party interfering in the war and Herlander put a name and a motivation onto that party; together it was made clear that war between Haven and Manticore had been forced onto them.

Herlander Simões caused the formation of the Grand Alliance, the enemies they were playing against each other suddenly joined forces and turned on the MAlign. To me that's by far the biggest setback for them.

runsforcelery wrote:Now, it can legitimately be argued that Beowulf, in eschewing a program of direct, explicit, targeted improvement of the human baseline turned its back on the potential to improve the human race as a species. That was, in fact, Leonard Detweiler’s position. And, for those of you who have asked, Leonard Detweiler probably would’ve been horrified by the Alignment’s current strategies and policies. Detweiler never envisioned the horrendous dehumanization of genetic slaves. In fact, he never specifically referred to them as “slaves” at all. Don’t get me wrong — for his time, and considering the culture from which he sprang, he was an incredibly ruthless bastard, perfectly prepared to create thousands or even millions of human beings who would be second-class citizens. He had, however, almost a patriarchal perspective on the genetic “indentured servants” he created, and the Mesa constitution’s provision for manumission of genetic slaves was inserted at his insistence. Moreover, he regarded the creation of the “indentured servants” as a priceless opportunity to incorporate superior characteristics into them and (through them, in the fullness of time) into all the rest of the human race. They were to be his laboratory, in which individually valuable genetic traits would be developed, enhanced, and conserved in the process of solving individual specific needs. In a sense, this was the same logic as the Beowulf code’s willingness to modify colonists to better suit them to their new planetary environments except that by commercializing the process on a large-scale basis, Detweiler was creating a far larger experimental population with a view towards eventually combining all of those individually engineered traits into a single genetically superior species.

So, if the Mesan Engagement is true to this vision, then what exactly would it entail? I think they would need to develop a package of improvements that would be offered to every parent-to-be at the lowest possible cost (free, if possible); these might include a mild general intelligence boost, enhanced reflexes and coordination and improved development and lifespan (even before prolong treatment). We know that trying to get too fancy with intelligence can cause problems, but something on the level of what the Meyerdahl mods did have been tested over time. Because this basic package is intended to be offered to everyone, it does not need to be gene locked nor include heavy gravity mods. What the package must not do is change the child to the extent that the resemblance to the parents is lost.

Have I missed anything?

PS: I do not really want to get into an economics discussion. We know in the Honorverse that there are planets that give prolong to all its citizens and there are other planets that are too poor to do that (one of the benefits the Talbott Quadrant received in the Star Empire was prolong for all that could use it). I am simply suggesting that however it is paid, trying to get something like this to all inhabitants of the galaxy is going to be hugely expensive, so that needs to be factored into the plan.

Loren Pechtel wrote:I think the defector was an even bigger factor than the wormhole link. The wormhole pushed them into a bunch of stupid moves but I don't think that was nearly as bad as the leak.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

tlb wrote:If you are talking about Herlander Simões, he was not known to have defected until after Filareta had already been ordered to attack. If you are talking about Jack McBryde, they thought his actions had been contained and even used Green Pines to help cover Houdini.

Or are you specifically referring to the fact that Herlander Simões and the knowledge that he brought are the reasons that the Grand Alliance was formed? Personally, I think the combination of Oyster Bay and Herlander were important. Oyster Bay made it clear that there was an unknown party interfering in the war and Herlander put a name and a motivation onto that party; together it was made clear that war between Haven and Manticore had been forced onto them.

Herlander Simões caused the formation of the Grand Alliance, the enemies they were playing against each other suddenly joined forces and turned on the MAlign. To me that's by far the biggest setback for them.

Oddly, that leak was ultimately the result of another unpredictable wormhole link. For some reason, Manpower openly colonised Torch after the Alignment found it.

No wormhole, no Torch to liberate, no reason to visit Mesa to work out what they were really doing in Torch. No defector.

It's not the first time the Alignment has been kicked in the teeth by wormholes either. They found Felix/Darius in such a manner that they felt compelled to write Galton off, turn it into a decoy and start over.

munroburton wrote:It's not the first time the Alignment has been kicked in the teeth by wormholes either. They found Felix/Darius in such a manner that they felt compelled to write Galton off, turn it into a decoy and start over.

That's an interesting insight. Wormholes can't be predicted, so when they come, they change everything. Maybe that's how it'll happen again?

BTW, I repeat Galton wasn't written off at the time of the discovery of the Felix Junction. My feeling is that it was an integral part of The Plan up until the perfection of the spider drive, which is when the MAN started bulking up from a few "carefully hidden destroyers and light-cruisers." It just so happened that, having the luxury of possessing two hideouts, one was made even more hidden than the other, by using one as proxy for the other, so if worst came to worst, it could be written off. That was the Contingency.

munroburton wrote:It's not the first time the Alignment has been kicked in the teeth by wormholes either. They found Felix/Darius in such a manner that they felt compelled to write Galton off, turn it into a decoy and start over.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:That's an interesting insight. Wormholes can't be predicted, so when they come, they change everything. Maybe that's how it'll happen again?

BTW, I repeat Galton wasn't written off at the time of the discovery of the Felix Junction. My feeling is that it was an integral part of The Plan up until the perfection of the spider drive, which is when the MAN started bulking up from a few "carefully hidden destroyers and light-cruisers." It just so happened that, having the luxury of possessing two hideouts, one was made even more hidden than the other, by using one as proxy for the other, so if worst came to worst, it could be written off. That was the Contingency.

I do not think that I can agree about Galton. The whole distinction of Galton as a military camp like Sparta and Darius as an ideal republic like Athens had to have started almost at the first. Then using Galton as the military industrial center of the Malign interactions with the outside, made it even more liable to discovery over and above the lack of a secure wormhole connection.

The discovery of the spider drive is much too recent to explain the differences, the Ghost ships used in Oyster Bay were the first working models.

The simple fact that Darius was inherently more secure (because of the difficulty of assaulting a wormhole), meant that Galton became expendable.

Galton was convenient. It is also yet another example of the Alignment subverting exploration - their tentacles have been into everything- and snipping off places as hideouts and to pillage.

Of course they weren't going to drop Galton when the Felix Wormhole (and then Darius) were discovered, it was a fully developed & industrialized system acting as their clandestine arms and materials manufacturing site. Darius is probably much more secure a base though if they loose the ability to use the Felix Juntion to get to the Felix system it will make things much more complicated. From Galton it's "just" using hyperdrive to get places even with vast distances. From Daris we don't really know what the time costs of getting from another terminus in the "private wormhole system" to anywhere will be. Torch is problematical since starting to use the Torch end of the wormhole is going to attract a lot of unwanted attention.

Since we don't know exactly when they decided to set up the part of the program for which Houdini was designed to lift significant assets (people important to the advancement of the Alignment and it's etc) we also don't know where they decided to go when that long term planning to abandon Mesa as a scapegoat was thought up. Why is this important? Where did they initially intend to decamp too and did they have that location actually located?
If it was Galton then the "reserve" on the surface of Galton makes more sense as they would want to keep the equivalent of Seccies in a more restricted situation from Alignment population of genetic slaves (aka worker bees) while still having the use of them- unless, of course, we need a clearer picture of what they did with that Non-Starline population of Darius and how many of them interact with the Starlines on a daily basis or live in close proximity to them.

Perhaps, we don't have any data on this, Galton was going to be the destination when they would sacrifice Mesa and that situation was altered when Darius was found. Ultimately the Alignment makes a lot of truly cold-blooded decision in long term planning and the whole "culling" idea which seems to be the default option when things don't work out as planned. After all, these are not real people to them if they are not useful.

Does anyone else get that feeling of dichotomy of outlook by the Alignment as to the genetic slaves/ species, vs the Star Lines? They are ALL essentially clones and/or variations on thousands of sub-lines with genetic modifications and experiments. But the Star Lines are, of course, higher in the structure of humanity (or at least their vision of their position vs the non-Detweiller improved piece of it) They are true believers in their position of superior beings vs humanity.
If they have yet another hidden system that can support them, it is going to be interesting. And how many people- that are important and matter to the top of the Alignment- can you lift out of Darius if things get ugly. And who makes that decision?

munroburton wrote:Oddly, that leak was ultimately the result of another unpredictable wormhole link. For some reason, Manpower openly colonised Torch after the Alignment found it.

No wormhole, no Torch to liberate, no reason to visit Mesa to work out what they were really doing in Torch. No defector.

It's not the first time the Alignment has been kicked in the teeth by wormholes either. They found Felix/Darius in such a manner that they felt compelled to write Galton off, turn it into a decoy and start over.

The fact that the Torch wormhole was one of the essential precursors of the defection is just bad luck to me, I won't call colonizing it a mistake.

Pushing him to the point he was unhappy enough to defect is a clear mistake on their part and to me it's their biggest goof.