Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: Iterations

Clearly, the trial is not going well, and King is a lackluster prosecutor at best.

Here was the original text for Erkins for prosecutor back in Crimes Old and New for your information.

[ ] - Appoint Wasoné Erkins to prosecute Dole Yudikon. Shouldn't the Captain have a special insight into people who think purely in terms of power and advantage? She might be herself honorable, she of all of you, she probably spent the most time in the company of those like Dole Yudikon.

Still, I objected to Erkins at the time because as a former mutineer, the obvious move for the defense would have been to effectively place Erkins on trial instead and that still applies now.

[ ] Retain King as lead counsel for the prosecution, but urge him to press home a moral argument rather than a legal one. Enogra might not be persuaded, but losing the crowd would be catastrophic. We can withstand judicial exoneration by a jury of one outsider so long as Dole Yudikon is forever tarnished.
This option is about seeking a conviction in the count of public opinion instead of a legal one which is an approach I am reluctant to embrace.

King is not a great prosecutor but my gut feeling favors not interfering with King due to the usual advice of don't change lawyers mid-trial. Still, I am not a lawyer and would be willing to hear arguments for the other options.

[ ] Transmit the data on a closed channel, as requested. There is nothing untoward about Zakharov's request, which means we should have no problem acceeding to it without amendment. This is a moment for setting positive precedents.

I feel that this is the most safe and sensible option here.

I have no clue on the legal/political stuff.

For the data request:
[ ] Transmit the data on a closed channel, as requested. There is nothing untoward about Zakharov's request, which means we should have no problem acceeding to it without amendment. This is a moment for setting positive precedents.
Committing the Skagway and a load of medical supplies is a major gamble at the moment.
Likewise, unencrypted transmission basically tells everyone that we have the datacore. Although it is reasonably likely that it will become common knowledge soon anyway.
However, we cannot ensure freedom of information if the datacore is stolen or attacked.

Agreed that we should keep the Skagway at home. Showing up unexpectedly with a warship might not be received well, and we should keep it close to home until we have a better handle on our pirate problem. The Skagway represents a major chunk of our military power right now.

Also agreed that a closed channel is fine. We can still transmit requested data to other factions later, and @HousePet makes a very good point that this avoids announcing our ownership of the datacore to all and sundry, which is probably wise until we're sure we can fend off any possible raiders.

TaliesinSkye said:

Agreed that we should keep the Skagway at home. Showing up unexpectedly with a warship might not be received well, and we should keep it close to home until we have a better handle on our pirate problem. The Skagway represents a major chunk of our military power right now.

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Yeah. Showing up with the very same warship that Zakharov chose to send away would not be well recieved by the University of Planet.

I feel that we do not have any really good options for the trial. All the options have possible problems and pitfalls. It seems the feeling here seems to lean toward keeping King. The update notes that King was not really a terrible choice. "Whether King was a bad choice? Hard to say. Probably not." King is probably the least problematic possible prosecutor we could have picked. If we keep King, do we let him continue his current arguments or focus on scoring a moral victory/conviction in the court of public option instead?

[X] Keep him. There is nobody better-suited to argue the case, and anyway only King is fit to see out the strategy already unfolding.

[X] Transmit the data on a closed channel, as requested. There is nothing untoward about Zakharov's request, which means we should have no problem acceeding to it without amendment. This is a moment for setting positive precedents.

Very gratified to see some familiar faces. Thank you for sticking with me. Welcome, new readers!

To give some time for voting and discussion, I'll not return again to the remaining draft materials before tomorrow.

Some prompts and considerations to assist you as you make your choices:

At least two (Tomorrow Institute, University of Planet), and perhaps more factions are independently aware of your possession of the Unity Data Core. It's still unclear by whom the Marines were attacked when they recovered it using the Skycrane. Better than even odds say that the Nautilus Pirates, given their scope of operations, would also have detected both the outbound and return flights. If Enogra knows, and he probably does since its possession by the Peacekeepers is not a secret within the walls of Warm Welcome itself, then that's as many as five. But those arguing in favor of operational security make a point worth considering very closely: better five knowing than, say, twenty.

@BoredStudent correctly observes that King isn't necessarily a bad choice. Since the next phase of the trial is the presentation of evidence for the defense, it may help to preview the list of witnesses.

• Private First Class Lauren Park, United Nations Marine Corps. Park was one of the Marines who chose to take service during your first encounter with Terrance LaCroix.
• Lance Corporal U Niccolo Myat, United Nations Marine Corps. Myat was one of the Marines who chose to take service during your first encounter with Terrance LaCroix.
• Major Fong Na Spínola, United Nations Security Forces. Spínola is a former protégé of the Unity's Executive Officer, General Francisco d'Almeida, the man broadly considered most-responsible for the Unity crackup. Following Captain Garland's assassination, D'Almeida gave the order to dissolve the Mission. Badly wounded during the Unity Crisis, Spínola is still on the sick lists.
• Gim Dong-Sung, a factor with the Dai Sung Corporation, a sub-contractor to Struan's Pacific Trading Company. Gim is one of the Relief Station refugees and held a relatively high posting in that colony's hierarchy. One of Yudikon's inner circle. Gim's service record indicates that he was awakened in one of Unity's aftermost cargo bays, where the fighting and radiation were hottest.
• Rylance Torquay, a senior instrument mechanic, worked in the Big EZ at the same time that Yudikon was there. He received a nearly fatal concussion from a Spartan less-lethal munition during the fighting in the Unity greenhouses and has been in your sick bay until now.
• Tavares van Deventer, a humanitarian services coordinator in the Big EZ during Yudikon's posting. Since landfall, he has been a general laborer assigned to irrigation teams in Warm Welcome.
• Warrant Officer Klaisel Mercator, a shuttle pilot posted to Singapore before selection for the Unity Mission. Yudikon came to Singapore once his contract for service in the Big EZ had expired. Singapore was the first place Yudikon worked for Struan's. Mercator served as one of the load-masters during final preparations for departure from Unity. Mercator was a rover operator in U.N. Relief Station.
• Dr. Skace Giesler, a data librarian who participated in the emergency jettison of the Unity Data Core. Giesler is a supervisor who works in Warm Welcome with the team responsible for the care and feeding of the Data Core.

So 1/2 of the defense's witnesses are military types, which King is best at interacting with. Could be enough to give him an in during cross-examination. Also avoids the negative image of swapping prosecutors in the middle of a trial.

[X] Keep him. There is nobody better-suited to argue the case, and anyway only King is fit to see out the strategy already unfolding.

[X] Transmit the data on a closed channel, as requested. There is nothing untoward about Zakharov's request, which means we should have no problem acceeding to it without amendment. This is a moment for setting positive precedents.

aledeth said:

So 1/2 of the defense's witnesses are military types, which King is best at interacting with. Could be enough to give him an in during cross-examination. Also avoids the negative image of swapping prosecutors in the middle of a trial.

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A good point. These are among the reasons why I favor keeping King as prosecutor.

[X] Keep him. There is nobody better-suited to argue the case, and anyway only King is fit to see out the strategy already unfolding.

[X] Transmit the data on a closed channel, as requested. There is nothing untoward about Zakharov's request, which means we should have no problem acceeding to it without amendment. This is a moment for setting positive precedents.

As an aside, the IOEZ rather reminds me of the Sea State from Earth by David Brin- a giant refugee amphibious state of the stateless, climate refugees from drowned nations clustered around a ramshackle assemblage of mothballed vessels. The difference from say the Raft from Snow Crash is that it's protected by the remnant of the Swiss Navy, after its home nation was destroyed by the international community for refusing an ultimatum to divulge banking secrets (it's a long side-story.)

[X] Keep King, but request Erkins advise him on the next stage of the prosecution. With refinement of his current approach, King can both appeal to the military men and the moralists with Erkins teaching him the ways to rouse popular indignation. Their odd couple working relationship will either cohere into hybrid vigor, or they will fail and it will be very amusing.

[X] Transmit the data on an open channel. Information must be free. We must learn from the painful lessons of the Americans from Earth's final century. Justify the action by citing the necessary U.N. Charter clauses and bureaucratic regulations mandating open communications protocols. Also on a metaplot level, maybe this act of defiance against tyranny will cause the Data Angels movement to arise early, though pseudo-canonically they were actually a Morgan probe unit that were tired of being exploited.

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