Petals of Titanium -- My Life as a Mecha Setting Bridge Bunny Quest

Looking at it, seems we serve the one chosen by council instead of emperor.

So... no, our empress probably has lower legitimacy.

On the other hand, she's not a nutjob like the guy in charge of the HSE seems to be, and from what exposition we got it seemed like the legitimate body for selecting successors IS this council.

However, she also seems to have been chosen because she did nothing remarkable, so its also likely the council chose her to partially control the Empire through her.

UrsaTempest said:

Looking at it, seems we serve the one chosen by council instead of emperor.

So... no, our empress probably has lower legitimacy.

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No, the next ruler is selected by the Imperial Electors, not the previous ruler. She's the legally appointed Empress, he's just the one his dad wanted to get picked

[X] Network with Phoebe

Kinruush said:

I don't think we should expect one of the options to result in all of us dying. That strikes me as unnecessarily alarmist. We still have most of the advantages the officers of the Amaranth were worried about, including the station itself being alerted before they intended it to be. The consequences for our choices, I feel, are more likely to be specific.

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I mean, yeah I don't think that the option I had previously picked would result in everyone dying, that'd be silly. Here's the angle I was looking at it from;

GIven our forces, a key thing we need to do is minimize losses. So the approach best able to do that would be best. My initial grounding for the regular scan was in part that the potential delays would result in less time to provide support and more time of the mechas being forced to hang out on their own, against some decently skilled opposition. I want to keep that as long as possible. On the other hand, the regular scan option has lag too, so if immediate response on our end is required, we're already in deep trouble. So I had to dismiss that as one of my concerns and overall, although I have my resrvations still, high reward won out over playing it safe.

Broken Base said:

I mean, yeah I don't think that the option I had previously picked would result in everyone dying, that'd be silly. Here's the angle I was looking at it from;

GIven our forces, a key thing we need to do is minimize losses. So the approach best able to do that would be best. My initial grounding for the regular scan was in part that the potential delays would result in less time to provide support and more time of the mechas being forced to hang out on their own, against some decently skilled opposition. I want to keep that as long as possible. On the other hand, the regular scan option has lag too, so if immediate response on our end is required, we're already in deep trouble. So I had to dismiss that as one of my concerns and overall, although I have my resrvations still, high reward won out over playing it safe.

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My point is that we can't ignore complexity when we're evaluating risk. So, if we're looking to minimize losses, it's important to note that pushing for speed only helps to minimize losses to or from specific things: to our people who are already engaged or will be engaged soon or from the enemies that are already attacking or about to attack. So, we can't ignore the other problems networking with Phoebe can potentially present. Delays could just mean that it only opens the same targets to risk that the "by the book" approach does, but other problems could include, for instance, technical glitches that misidentify objects, opening us to losses resulting from, say, torpedoes that have paths that aren't properly predicted or aren't predicted at all.

I'm still voting for the option, but it's the one that has the largest spread of potential loss.

Actually, I think I've changed my mind, looking back at the context again. What just happened? We did something unconventional, and we both got our immediate boss pissed off at us, and even the boss that approved of our actions told us to not do it again. What are we doing? An incerdibly risky and unconventional option rather than playing by the book. So in many ways, it's worse than what we get and already got in a bit of trouble for. At least then we weren't in the middle of a battle. Even if everything goes perfectly, which it probably won't, us not doing things by the book will probably just make our standing even worse. If it fails in some way? Yikes.

[X] Do it by the book

Broken Base said:

Actually, I think I've changed my mind, looking back at the context again. What just happened? We did something unconventional, and we both got our immediate boss pissed off at us, and even the boss that approved of our actions told us to not do it again. What are we doing? An incerdibly risky and unconventional option rather than playing by the book. So in many ways, it's worse than what we get and already got in a bit of trouble for. At least then we weren't in the middle of a battle. Even if everything goes perfectly, which it probably won't, us not doing things by the book will probably just make our standing even worse. If it fails in some way? Yikes.

[X] Do it by the book

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Huh. I... wasn't thinking about that.

I guess I'm switching back as well. Third time's the charm, right?

[X] Do it by the book

changing my vote to...
[X] Network with Phoebe

[X] Do it by the book

The argument about pulling another off-the-books incident immediately after the last one convinced me, especially since we picked the Space Princesses setting and not the rag-tag rebellion.

Gazetteer said:

No, the next ruler is selected by the Imperial Electors, not the previous ruler. She's the legally appointed Empress, he's just the one his dad wanted to get picked

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Sounds like the Elector Count system used in Warhammer. A system famous for civil war caused by weak emperors chosen so they wouldn't interfere with the Counts.

Inspired by or coincidental with?

Angelform said:

Sounds like the Elector Count system used in Warhammer. A system famous for civil war caused by weak emperors chosen so they wouldn't interfere with the Counts.

Inspired by or coincidental with?

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Coincidence. I know very little about Warhammer fantasy and fictional inspirations here are fairly obscure -- if I'm ripping anyone off with this system of succession it's Victor Milán. There's a lot of historical precedent for strong aristocracy leading to weak monarchs and vice versa, though, with particularly ambitious monarchs working to gut the aristocracy in order to consolidate more practical authority for themselves (which rarely goes well in the long run -- that only works out so long as the dude in charge is driven and talented, and things usually go to hell a generation or two later when some mediocre guy who just wants to play with clockwork ends up on the throne or whatever).

A bit late but still jumping in.

[X] Do it by the book

Because yeah, I'm a very by the book person most of the time and people already pointed out the potential problems with other options.

We've still got two people out there dealing with a new model with who-knows-how-high specs, and we're concerned about our reputation? We should be doing whatever we can to save our pilots, even if that means taking risks. If we form the habit of being conservative and careful now, in an already high pressure situation, we're not gonna be in a good space to go for broke when we need it to save even more people.
Even if we do this one by the book, please remember that its taking high risk options that can lead to the best rewards. When those rewards are saved lives and turned-around battles, its worth risks.

Counter argument: If we rush we might end up hitting our own mechs due to faulty data. If we mess with the station's sensors we may cripple their guns as well as ours.

Being careful isn't a bad thing. Particularly not when the genera call for the hot-blooded pilots to be the ones overcoming terrible odds to heroically save the day.

It'd strike me as an awfully boring quest if the protagonist's usual best course of action was to be quietly dependable and take no risks. The very virtue of the odd setup (We're following a bridge bunny instead of aforementioned pilots) means that it might be our job to do that instead of whoever's out there.
Besides, its clearly Real Robots. Less of the hot blooded thing going on here.
Though if the HSE starts going all Nadesico Jovians on us... that'd be a treat.

Zeratoth said:

We've still got two people out there dealing with a new model with who-knows-how-high specs, and we're concerned about our reputation? We should be doing whatever we can to save our pilots, even if that means taking risks. If we form the habit of being conservative and careful now, in an already high pressure situation, we're not gonna be in a good space to go for broke when we need it to save even more people.
Even if we do this one by the book, please remember that its taking high risk options that can lead to the best rewards. When those rewards are saved lives and turned-around battles, its worth risks.

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I think that being worried about taking a high risk option right after we were narratively punished, to a degree, for going against what we were told to do and taking a risk a few minutes ago should be factored into the calculus. I think you'd have a point if we had any guarantee that the Phoebe method would work and maybe have some slight drawbacks, and/or the by the book option would have some severe drawbacks and would necessitate a loss of life. That's not what is on the table here. What's on the table here is an incredibly risky situation that may take more time than playing by the book will to go through, and will then potentially contain errors that we ourselves can't notice or predict or even account for because we don't know exactly what they are. The other option is to have decently reliable data with minimal risk of faults, it just takes time, just like the risky method takes time. And I think it's fair to know what the consequences will be for taking the risky action, even if things go well, especially if it blows up in our face to an extent, which it is likely to do. And when I wouldn't say it guarantees the soldier's safety that much more than playing by the book does, so that can't be factored into the calculus in the unorthodox action's favor.

I'm not against doing any risk-taking at all. I want to do risk-taking when the risky option is clearly superior in this situation, the risks can be successfully minimized, or even just properly predicted, and we weren't told literally five minutes ago "Hey you probably shouldn't do unconventional things behind the back of your superior officers." I think the idea that the reaction to that, in a military setting, wouldn't be "Oh hey I should take this unorthodox option even though I can just do the standard option and have reliable results and the unorthodox option has a lot of risks some of which I can't predict and takes time just like the standard option does whe this is the kind of thing I was just told to probably not do, even though I found very valuable information through my cracking." I voted for the riskier option last round because the reward clearly outweighed the risk. So I'd prefer it if people didn't coclude "Oh he doesn't want us to take any risks at all." I want us to be careful about the risks we take, be aware of the consequences, and try to pick the ones where a standard option isn't both available, and isn't inherently inferior to the risk-taking one. And even that might be varaible; it's a somewhat context-dependent thing, like choosing most choices.