Attacking Darius:

penny wrote:Leonard Detweiler is a strategist extraordinaire. He played with huge building blocks of ceramecrete, not Legos. You might need to research a good recipe for crow.

Leonard Detweiler was not a strategist. He was a geneticist. He had no plans to take over the Galaxy. He got run off Beowulf and went to help found Mesa. He also started Manpower, but even that company wasn't into genetic slavery at all, though their creations were expected to perform indentured labour to pay off their debts.

From what we've been told, he did not create the Detweiler Plan. It's named for some Detweiler and might be him. The Plan and the Alignment (even the Benign one) were created at some point later, after he had already died.

penny wrote:The Galton System's Order of Battle consisted of over thirty orbital fortresses. The smallest was as large as those covering the MWJ. There were fifty SDs to support those fortresses. Expect that number to be dim by comparison to Darius.

I don't, at least not in quantity. I always get the impression from the descriptions we've had that the Darius System is supposed to look like a paradise, not a "forge world" that Galton was described to be. Though I'll freely admit that the description can be deceptive because we've only been shown the city of Leonard and the recreation areas where Alphas go.

But also because having a fully militarised system goes counter to the Alamo Contingency and the descriptions and musings by Benjamin Detweiler in TEiF, that Darius was not militaristic at all. Industrialised and advanced, sure.

We also know for a fact that the MAN had a few cruisers and destroyers up until a few years ago. They only began the build up of spider ships around 1919. They can't have that many ships because the rules of the HV dictate the pace of construction of each system be only so much. It will depend on how much time they are given to build and I don't expect more than 5-10 years.

Jonathan_S wrote:And they were so irrelevant, in the face of 200+ SD(P)s, that RFC doesn't seem to have bothered to write up their deaths -- which logically must have happened at some point during the 3 day bombardment of the forts.

When reading, I got the impression that they actually survived. If those ships decided to not to jump into the middle of the missile waves nor sortie, they wouldn't be attacked.

But thinking about it, that makes no sense. Surely they'd have moved closer to the planet to add to the missile defence. Then they'd be legitimate targets and would be attacked by the incoming missiles. Maybe they never fired their onboard odnance.

But they couldn't have lasted more than a few hours. The RMN designed their SDs to sustain their rate of fire for 2 hours. Honor was attacking for 2 weeks.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:And yet I wouldn't be surprised if they have a single use in mind, because they were created at the behest of the Detweilers, not proper military strategians.

penny wrote:Huh? Wha? Huh?

Leonard Detweiler is a strategist extraordinaire. He played with huge building blocks of ceramecrete, not Legos. You might need to research a good recipe for crow.

Going back to this because you missed my point by talking about Leonard. I was referring to Albrecht and his "sons" B through G.

My point is that they are not military strategists. They may be (and definitely consider themselves) to be strategists at a higher level. They do agree with you that they are far above anyone else in capabilities, though the jury's still out on whether that's actually enough.

But they don't have the expertise to be good military strategists. That means they may miss the forest for the trees and create compromises that make no sense.

Though I said "I wouldn't be surprised," I don't actually think that that will be the case. Especially after Galton, because we know that there were good military people there, like Adebayo, and she was "Detweiler-level" Onion. The Galton Navy did have multiple classes of ship and types, likely able to be effective in multiple roles.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Honor was attacking for 2 weeks.

That two week time span is suspicious. In the paragraph where Honor demands surrender after the forts are severely damaged, she says the following "I gave you an opportunity, three days ago, to surrender you command intact, Your answer was to open fire". At that point the commander agrees to surrender.

This is two pages before the section which ends with the commander saying "From hell's heart I stab at thee, for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee" before she presses "Enter" to initiate the sucker punch.

After Galton, anybody commanding a fleet (or two) going after Darius should keep in mind that:

1) There are still warships that nobody has been able to track and even if they did not appear to engage at Galton, they are still a massive threat.

2) The grazer weapons that have been used by the Alignment are very effective- when they can sneak up on you. So more work needs to be done to try and figure out how to detect them as well as this "invisible" warships.

3) The Alignment has a nasty habit of trying to break off any trail or destroying as much physical evidence of their operations. That includes obliterating buildings or stations with implanted nuclear weapons, installing software self-destruct routines (not under the operators control) into ships, and using nanites to kill captured agents including their own personal.

4) They have been very inventive in their development of systems, particularly weapons systems and there will be nasty surprises.

If you are going to take on Darius or probably just about any Alignment system, perhaps you might think in terms of making some very large MDM missiles and then launching (with strap on boosters ) from a long way out from the hyper limit and slam them in those massive (or any other) orbital forts as a terrifying % of C and use kinetic energy to obliterate them. Give these are the people who ran Oyster Bay, I would't worry any about the debris hitting anything else in the system including planets.

The reason Bloodhound could ID Galton - from as far out as they stopped creeping up on it- as inhabited and had a massive infrastructure was by the amount of electromagnet radiation and other emissions pouring off it. That emissions travel a long way, it just takes a lot of time. The amount of energy etc being picked up by Bloodhound let them calculate how much was being used. And the system was being used as an arms foundry.

Darius will also be equally noisy since they are running a large population, building giant starships in orbit and running (how can the not) massive resource processing and materials fabrication plants. And the communications are unlikely to all be wisper lasers.....there will be a lots of people and equipment making a lot of noise passing information and speech around back and forth in-system.

Darius appears to have kept Galton as a compartmented secret from the vast majority of the Darius population (at least as well as Bolthole has been) so why isn't it reasonable that there is at least one other secret base for the Alignment? They have done a lot of that both on planets (like Mesa) and also with Galton and Darius. Lets not forget the RF- another master web of misdirection and hiding in plain sight of what is/was intended as the point of hope for systems with the fall and destruction of the SL as the most powerful human force in the galaxy while injecting Alignment Philosophy into the surveyors.

They just can't stop doing that.....

tlb wrote:PS: They are not all Alphas, there are also Betas and Gammas.

Don't you see? That is my point. Essentially what you are admitting is that when going up against the MAN, the bidding starts at Gamma. Every Mesan you face will be an Alpha, Beta or a Gamma. As an officer of the GA, where do you think you fit from A to G?

Do also realize, IINM, they are all equal as far as intelligence. The Alphas have the added distinction of, allegedly, having corrected the faults.

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tlb wrote:PS: They are not all Alphas, there are also Betas and Gammas.

penny wrote:Don't you see? That is my point. Essentially what you are admitting is that when going up against the MAN, the bidding starts at Gamma. Every Mesan you face will be an Alpha, Beta or a Gamma. As an officer of the GA, where do you think you fit from A to G?

Do also realize, IINM, they are all equal as far as intelligence. The Alphas have the added distinction of, allegedly, having corrected the defaults.

How do you know that they are all equal in intelligence? That seems highly unlikely. We also have no idea how that compares to the better officers of the Grand Alliance; after all there are genies outside the Onion that also have had their intelligence enhanced.

The thing about correcting faults only applied to the Bardasano line, so far as we know (although it may be a common practice, we just don't know); her line was downgraded from Alpha to Beta while remedial actions were being taken. But we also know that there was thought of crossing her line with the Detweiler line, so I am not sure where that leaves the situation. Anyway we do not have complete understanding of what the Malign considers a fault and what change they would think was an improvement.

tlb wrote:

tlb wrote:PS: They are not all Alphas, there are also Betas and Gammas.

penny wrote:Don't you see? That is my point. Essentially what you are admitting is that when going up against the MAN, the bidding starts at Gamma. Every Mesan you face will be an Alpha, Beta or a Gamma. As an officer of the GA, where do you think you fit from A to G?

Do also realize, IINM, they are all equal as far as intelligence. The Alphas have the added distinction of, allegedly, having corrected the defaults.

How do you know that they are all equal in intelligence? That seems highly unlikely. We also have no idea how that compares to the better officers of the Grand Alliance; after all there are genies outside the Onion that also have had their intelligence enhanced.

The thing about correcting faults only applied to the Bardasano line, so far as we know (although it may be a common practice, we just don't know); her line was downgraded from Alpha to Beta while remedial actions were being taken. But we also know that there was thought of crossing her line with the Detweiler line, so I am not sure where that leaves the situation. Anyway we do not have complete understanding of what the Malign considers a fault and what change they would think was an improvement.

I seem to recall a conversation between Albrecht and someone about how, IINM, the IQ is the same. But the Beta and the Gammas are pretty much guinea pigs for any new research. And only after it has proved itself in the Beta and Gamma lines will it be passed upstream. IOW, the Beta and Gamma lines are essentially filters, sieves, that filter out any faults. That is not to say that they are equal in the number of accoutrements. In fact, I think I remember a conversation saying that some options are only passed upstream; to the chagrin of Betas and Gammas. But I do not think those options have anything to do with IQ.

And do correct me if I am wrong. The Inner Onion is comprised of only Alphas, Betas and Gammas.


Late edit: defaults -> faults. Same as in above post.

tlb wrote:

tlb wrote:PS: They are not all Alphas, there are also Betas and Gammas.

penny wrote:Don't you see? That is my point. Essentially what you are admitting is that when going up against the MAN, the bidding starts at Gamma. Every Mesan you face will be an Alpha, Beta or a Gamma. As an officer of the GA, where do you think you fit from A to G?

Do also realize, IINM, they are all equal as far as intelligence. The Alphas have the added distinction of, allegedly, having corrected the defaults.

How do you know that they are all equal in intelligence? That seems highly unlikely. We also have no idea how that compares to the better officers of the Grand Alliance; after all there are genies outside the Onion that also have had their intelligence enhanced.

The thing about correcting faults only applied to the Bardasano line, so far as we know (although it may be a common practice, we just don't know); her line was downgraded from Alpha to Beta while remedial actions were being taken. But we also know that there was thought of crossing her line with the Detweiler line, so I am not sure where that leaves the situation. Anyway we do not have complete understanding of what the Malign considers a fault and what change they would think was an improvement.

Now don't quote me on this, but I think there is a difference between faults and side effects. I think faults are culled, and side effects are - well, like Bardasano - possibly tolerated. But as I said, if you quote me on that part, I'll deny it.

If you think about it, it makes sense that the Inner Onion would be comprised of Alphas, Betas and Gammas. At first glance one would wonder why Betas and Gammas would be allowed into this exclusive country club, since the Detweiler's are chasing perfection. But they need a guinea pig to test out new research. And that can only be accomplished via another line whose baseline IQ is essentially the same.