?

penny wrote:They are fanatics. Consider the many historical inspirational speeches from the leaders of fanatics, that are so powerful it will prompt the followers to drink poison to kill themselves. They are free to choose, and they are also fortunate to be the chosen ones and privileged to be a part of what is right. So they think. The brain-washing is total by these charismatic leaders. Conformity born out of intimacy instead of cruelty is vastly more powerful. And dangerous. Reverse psychology is probably a Malign staple.

It appears that something more subtle than brainwashing has happened with the workers at Darius. It may be that the LRPB has designed the workers of Darius to be content. From Mission of Honor:

Chapter 38 wrote:Yet for all the years which had been plowed into Darius, all the effort, all the generations of labor, the fact remained that its space stations and shipyards were significantly less capable than Manticore's had been prior to Oyster Bay. Benjamin Detweiler didn't like admitting that, but he agreed with his father; the day someone stopped admitting the truth was the day he could kiss any of his hopes for the future goodbye. And the truth was that, despite the accomplishments of the Alignment's R&D, and despite any tactical advantages which might accrue from the streak drive and the spider, very few star nations could have matched the industrial efficiency of the Star Empire of Manticore. Indeed, Benjamin suspected that even Manticore had failed to grasp just how great an advantage it possessed in that regard.
Over the last five or six T-years, he and Daniel had been trying to introduce Manticoran practices here at Darius, only to discover that the task wasn't as simple and forthright as it ought to have been. If they'd really wanted to duplicate Manticore's efficiency, they would've had to duplicate Manticore's entire industrial base—and its society—and they simply couldn't do that. Their labor force was extraordinarily good at following orders, extremely well trained, and highly motivated, but the kind of independence of thought which characterized Manticoran workers wasn't exactly something which had been encouraged

Daryl wrote:Using an OTL example, consider East Germany versus West Germany just before reunification.
The West Germans were driving Mercedes and BMWs, while the East Germans were driving Trabants, with their bosses driving Ladas. East Germany's productivity was hopeless. As one person said (afterwards), "They pretended to pay us, and we pretended to work".
Yet reasonably quickly afterwards, all Germans were driving Mercedes and BMWs.

And the Trabbies became tourist attractions.

penny wrote:Firstly. I am not so certain that Darius' build rates have been increased. They could have been near war production rates even from the beginning. After all, they could have been discovered at any time.

They couldn't have, again because of timeline.

The spider drive is a recent invention. Up until around 1915, there were no spider drive ships and the MAlign plan for Galactic domination would have included using hordes of wedge ships, initially duplicated from the SLN with TIY help, but later with technology stolen from the Haven Sector navies. That's exactly what we found in Galton: pod-laying superdreadnoughts in two or three classes, rudimentary FTL transmitters, low-power-wedge stealth. This means Galton was producing what the MAlign would have needed and any yards in Darius were redundancy "in case of emergency break glass."

Moreover, we also know the MAN itself was a new navy; see the inner thoughts of Captain Gowan Maddock prior to the PNiE attack on Torch.

Therefore, the MAN and the shipyards building the spider ships are all new, and so is the technology. They couldn't have been in wartime production of something that had just left the R&D labs, with an organisation just founded. This is why I estimate that 100 LDs can't happen before 1940 at the earliest.

And again, this isn't the HV. Consider that we (and the author, I believe) said that what the MA should have done was carve out a section of the galaxy and lived in total isolation. If that had happened, I wonder how even more differently their society and tech would have evolved. Away from the technology, wars and influence of anything going on in the "HV" at large.

Sure, but what's the point of ruling if you can't lord it over those damnable Beowulfans?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

penny wrote:Firstly. I am not so certain that Darius' build rates have been increased. They could have been near war production rates even from the beginning. After all, they could have been discovered at any time.

They couldn't have, again because of timeline.

The spider drive is a recent invention. Up until around 1915, there were no spider drive ships and the MAlign plan for Galactic domination would have included using hordes of wedge ships, initially duplicated from the SLN with TIY help, but later with technology stolen from the Haven Sector navies. That's exactly what we found in Galton: pod-laying superdreadnoughts in two or three classes, rudimentary FTL transmitters, low-power-wedge stealth. This means Galton was producing what the MAlign would have needed and any yards in Darius were redundancy "in case of emergency break glass."

Moreover, we also know the MAN itself was a new navy; see the inner thoughts of Captain Gowan Maddock prior to the PNiE attack on Torch.

Therefore, the MAN and the shipyards building the spider ships are all new, and so is the technology. They couldn't have been in wartime production of something that had just left the R&D labs, with an organisation just founded. This is why I estimate that 100 LDs can't happen before 1940 at the earliest.

And again, this isn't the HV. Consider that we (and the author, I believe) said that what the MA should have done was carve out a section of the galaxy and lived in total isolation. If that had happened, I wonder how even more differently their society and tech would have evolved. Away from the technology, wars and influence of anything going on in the "HV" at large.

Sure, but what's the point of ruling if you can't lord it over those damnable Beowulfans?

It does not matter. My point is that no matter what the slaves were making in the factories, their pace has always been 100%. If some big shot came in one day and said this factory will no longer be making widgets for homes, it will be making 'XYZ'. The pace would still be the same. Slaves do not waste time, take cigarette breaks, etc., etc. A slave's production does not fall off from day to day. The MA's physical infrastructure might be inferior, but their workers' production is not.

So, per the original tendril that initiated this discussion, increasing build rates would not affect the workers. The infrastructure itself, space stations, etc., would have to be changed.

penny wrote:It does not matter. My point is that no matter what the slaves were making in the factories, their pace has always been 100%. If some big shot came in one day and said this factory will no longer be making widgets for homes, it will be making 'XYZ'. The pace would still be the same. Slaves do not waste time, take cigarette breaks, etc., etc. A slave's production does not fall off from day to day. The MA's physical infrastructure might be inferior, but their workers' production is not.

So, per the original tendril that initiated this discussion, increasing build rates would not affect the workers. The infrastructure itself, space stations, etc., would have to be changed.

Again, they are de facto slaves but don't think they are. They can take cigarette breaks, call in sick, etc. They probably do that much less often than completely dissatisfied workers, like those that would exist on Split before joining the SEM, but would still happen. No one is getting whipped and no one is being punished for failing to meet arbitrary quotas, for all we know. They are brainwashed into thinking they have to produce their most and "give 110% to the team" because reasons, but they aren't an astonishing producing machine.

And we know they don't match Manticore's efficiency, because Benjamin Detweiler told us so.

We do know that factories in the HV are effectively plug and play and that any one could produce components that are used for any other, within reason. That's how Beowulf's industries were being turned to producing components for RMN missiles and because RFC himself told us so.

However, there are two caveats there. First, that RFC isn't as good with his economics as he is with his battles. In particular: what was the population of Darius Gamma doing before the spider drive came along? Because my argument is that they weren't building ships, so what were they doing? I'm pretty confident that they weren't building ships because Galton was and Galton thought they were the only Alignment production system, so there couldn't be too many unexplained Alignment actions that weren't traced back to Galton.

Second, it's that "within reason." It doesn't matter if you can produce anything if you don't what to produce. There's a lot of R&D that needs to be involved in figuring out just what needs to be done to build a spider-drive ship, not to mention having the yards in which to build them. You will not produce ten thousand spider drive tractors before figuring out what works and what doesn't; that's wasted resources and opportunity. There's a time delay involved in deciding you need something, figuring out how to produce it, doing so, testing and debugging it, before finally getting to scale.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:However, there are two caveats there. First, that RFC isn't as good with his economics as he is with his battles. In particular: what was the population of Darius Gamma doing before the spider drive came along? Because my argument is that they weren't building ships, so what were they doing? I'm pretty confident that they weren't building ships because Galton was and Galton thought they were the only Alignment production system, so there couldn't be too many unexplained Alignment actions that weren't traced back to Galton.

Though Darius Gamma could have been building a system defense force for Darius -- since the Galton built/crewed ships can't really be assigned to that. And if they rarely leave Darius then there won't be unexplained MAlign formations moving around and giving the game away to Galton.

However, given the timeline of how recently the spider drive was invented, those SDF ships would have to be impeller-drive ships. Darius had time between the end of the 1st Havenite war and scaling up spider production to have built some of SD(P)s -- like Galton also did. That said, like Galton, some of Darius's older SDF units likely are pre-pod designs.

That said, for a system that was trying not to be the militaristic one I don't know how large and SDF they could justify building -- so I'm not sure how many workers they had, and how many slips were in operation, say 25 years ago. They might still need a while to ramp up to high-volume fleet produciton.

Though they might also have build some of the streak transports we've seen in use. It's probably hard for Galton to realize how many there are, and if necessary Galton can be given an explanation that they'd been build (or modified for the larger streak-drive hyper generators) in secret in yards at Mesa. But that still wouldn't add the need for all that many workers or slips -- and those wouldn't required the armor, weapons, and defensive systems of a proper warship (meaning you'd have less pre-existing capabilities to make and install those when you pivot to building LDs).

Jonathan_S wrote:Though Darius Gamma could have been building a system defense force for Darius -- since the Galton built/crewed ships can't really be assigned to that. And if they rarely leave Darius then there won't be unexplained MAlign formations moving around and giving the game away to Galton.

However, given the timeline of how recently the spider drive was invented, those SDF ships would have to be impeller-drive ships. Darius had time between the end of the 1st Havenite war and scaling up spider production to have built some of SD(P)s -- like Galton also did. That said, like Galton, some of Darius's older SDF units likely are pre-pod designs.

Could be and would make sense, except that Captain McGowan describes the MAN as only having a few destroyers and cruisers. They didn't have SD(P)s as late as 1920. I would completely understand his not knowing ships stashed away in other systems... but not in his home system. There's no way a naval officer departing Darius Gamma would fail to see a battle squadron protecting their homeworld.

The alternative is that this gets retconned. That is, McGowan wasn't from Darius, even though he was Mesan Alignment Navy; he was trained elsewhere, not the gaudy, for-show Mesa System Navy that he was impersonating; the ships he thought would kick everyone's ass aren't the spider drive ships we're led to believe he's thinking about. But there are holes in this story: if not Darius or Galton, just where was he trained? Would the same apply to Jessica Milliken, who is not dead yet? And what ships are those if not Galton's SD(P)s and the MAN's spider-drive ones?

That said, for a system that was trying not to be the militaristic one I don't know how large and SDF they could justify building -- so I'm not sure how many workers they had, and how many slips were in operation, say 25 years ago. They might still need a while to ramp up to high-volume fleet produciton.

The impression I have is that Darius was almost entirely devoid of mobile force protection by 1915. They probably had those destroyers and cruisers, sufficient to catch any survey ship or would-be pirate who accidentally showed up, but not any determined foreign navy. They may have had forts and OWPs, but like the lighter mobile combatants, that's a reasonable thing to have.

Though they might also have build some of the streak transports we've seen in use. It's probably hard for Galton to realize how many there are, and if necessary Galton can be given an explanation that they'd been build (or modified for the larger streak-drive hyper generators) in secret in yards at Mesa. But that still wouldn't add the need for all that many workers or slips -- and those wouldn't required the armor, weapons, and defensive systems of a proper warship (meaning you'd have less pre-existing capabilities to make and install those when you pivot to building LDs).

Galton may not have known they were modified for streak drives at all. They built transports according to specs and no one noticed or bothered to ask why the hypergenerators were so bulky. It would be easy to insert the need into the databases and construction plans, then have the ships modified elsewhere. We also don't know how many streak boats there were; maybe all of them had been built in the Darius system, in ostensibly civilian yards.

But my money is actually that the streak drive was known to Galton and all or almost all the streak ships were built there. In-universe, I say this because it's likely the streak drive was part of the Plan when it used Galton, given that it complements and improves the Galton ships. I think that it's the spider drive that made the Alignment decide to revise the Plan and shift more military resources into Darius, which supports the timeline issues above.

Outside the universe, given that RFC seems to be setting up for an extended period of in-action, the lack of streak drive at Galton would be a major red flag, because it's a technology that Simões was quite familiar with. There's circumstantial evidence of "these are not the ships you're looking for" we've speculated about and then there's "this is definitely not where my information went." It's not even something the GA could pretend not to know in order to lull the Alignment into a false sense of security, because they announced to the Galaxy that the Alignment existed on the same breath as they talked about the streak and spider drives. They'd have to officially say "this isn't the end, let's keep looking."

I am unsure about something. Wedges cannot be operated while in hyper? But after exiting hyper into n-space the wedge is brought up rather quickly. Does that mean the hyper generator is cycling or idling while in hyper?

And of course, will a spider drive have the ability to come online as soon as it exits hyper. I know there will be a visible downward bleed of the sails, but can an LD immediately dive, activate its drive?

I also wonder, since an LD can produce intense fields of concentrated gravity, if a field of concentrated gravity can be placed around the entire ship that acts like a black hole absorbing the telltale bleed of the sails when exiting hyper.

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penny wrote:I am unsure about something. Wedges cannot be operated while in hyper? But after exiting hyper into n-space the wedge is brought up rather quickly. Does that mean the hyper generator is cycling or idling while in hyper?

And of course, will a spider drive have the ability to come online as soon as it exits hyper. I know there will be a downward bleed of the sails, but can an LD immediately dive, activate its drive?

Wedges cannot be operated in Wormholes, emergence lanes, and Grav Waves. But in other areas of Hyper (like 95% of Hyper), Wedges are the mode of transit.

Theemile wrote:

penny wrote:I am unsure about something. Wedges cannot be operated while in hyper? But after exiting hyper into n-space the wedge is brought up rather quickly. Does that mean the hyper generator is cycling or idling while in hyper?

And of course, will a spider drive have the ability to come online as soon as it exits hyper. I know there will be a downward bleed of the sails, but can an LD immediately dive, activate its drive?

Wedges cannot be operated in Wormholes, emergence lanes, and Grav Waves. But in other areas of Hyper (like 95% of Hyper), Wedges are the mode of transit.

What??? I thought the sails were the mode of transit.