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[X] Plan Tradition and the young.
Traveller, The Rise of Empire: A Naval Design, Procurement and Command Quest
- Thread starter 4WheelSword
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KleverKil'Vanya
Ortillery Operator
I mean at this point I don't trust any of these chuckle fucks to run the system, none of them are even semi viable governments given the sheer stupidity they exude in every update featuring them. Why not Stellaris them?
grimely
Twink Death Sufferer
There's been a lot of discussion, and I may have missed this, but I did read through the leading plan and.... I don't know. Trying to get free and impartial trials for the surviving Dynasts without demanding, stridently, that they be given into Home custody just isn't going to work. They've already been found guilty as far as S'taxu is concerned, the trial isn't about justice, it's about showmanship. They will be executed after its end, and they're going to carry the sins of all their ancestors on their backs when they go. This isn't something we can really politely talk over. We either draw a red line, and accept the consequences, or accept that there's no way to save any of them except maybe the child.
For me the more important point is that we basically are post-factum okaying the bombing of Dynasts and only care if at least some of them would survive - and not too much too ("maybe we would evacuate some of them, maybe not, who cares"). Whoever started the exchange is off the hook. And if it was PMC or Cassalon who did this, then we effectively reward them.
If we are going to keep being aligned with PMC, and keep accepting the S'Taxu servicemembers into the HSWS, then we are more or less paving the way for S'Taxu-Daughter coup against the Citizen Council (maybe using the nukes too).
This would NOT be limited to S'Taxu. The consequences of our decisions/indecisions would be brought Home. We can only choose what those consequenses would be.
I mean I do not exactly care if WE coup the Citizen Council, but I do not like if someone else would do this and we are just "yeah whatever".
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Mostly because we are too polite to demand the answer.
We are one of those who are responsible, to be frank. We did not care to learn more about S'Taxu factions and how likely they are to come to blows, and we've kept a single IC as a tripwire roce - which proved to not be enough. If we had more, we could shot down the missiles and kept the panet safe.
Now we are reacting to the capatstrophe, and we choose to do so in most meek and inefficient way possible.
That's because we are reluctant to leverage our hard power. We want to solve everything via diplomacy and concilliation, when that should be the domain of the Civilians' Council. Idiots or not, it's their decision and our role should be at best advisory.
Coyote Niff
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I know this might be hard to believe, but generally the job of a military force is to fight and win-not to want to fight, and especially not to enjoy fighting. You can be damn good at something, proud of your ability to do it, and still never want to do it unless you have to. War is politics by other means, and personally I believe politics can be war by other means. Every treaty struck and trade deal signed is one less bullet hitting one less body and killing one less person.
All of that is correct, but it misses the point. We should not be the ones making the decisions, we should be the ones implementing them. Why are we building the diplomatic ship if not for the Council to be in a better position to enforce their solutions? And in our situation, we can raise an objection that the outcome the Council demands is infeasible, but if ordered to act regardless we should still follow that order. So far the Council were idiots and refuse to elaborate on their reasons, but their orders were not illegal.
Rat King
Izutsumi-pilled
If we're going to get into a shooting war, I want it to be for a reason that's not "well, we have a hammer and this problem looks an awful lot like a nail."
To recap. We've struck a treaty where the PMC Junta was not to go to the inner planets and Dynasts were not to nuke the other surface factions, implicitely (at least; do not remember if explicitely) because we were supposed to keep them from doing this by our force.
Now planet is nuked, Dynasts are taken out, PMC Junta is soon to control the planet. We are conducting a half-hearted negotiations to maybe spare the 11-year old Dynast from execution (but water off our back if they refuse and kill them all, our line is to tell our government that we tried and that's it).
So, we had a treaty, it fell apart violently, our reaction is "meh, doesn't matter, water under the bridge".
I believe everyone making treaties with us in future will take a note of this.
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Rat King
Izutsumi-pilled
I mean, our (non-Dynast) partners are acutely aware that a lot of our people died trying to prevent it - whether our station crews who were executed and stabbed in the back or who fought to control the stations and prevent the launch and the men and women on the Sakumo - which actually did its utmost to prevent surface detonations before it was forced out of the battlespace. We upheld our end of the bargain as best we could.
Yeah S'taxu will just see us a bunch of pushovers. Sometimes not taking a hardline against people means they see you as a spineless coward they can bully. We failed, and instead of taking our pound of flesh in retribution, we tried to talk it out and let those we were sworn to defend die. That means we're not only cowardly, but spineless and fickle too. All too often a silken glove is only going to make it vastly more likely that a hard Iron fist is not only ideal but necessary later, and if this was a PMC false flag which I find increasingly likely, they will 100% try to do this again except against Home itself.
[X] Plan Hard-Nosed, High handed
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In this case, I doubt the Council thinks their instructions would result in a shooting war. We are in a superior position and the Council expects us to leverage it. That said, the fact that there is no elaboration and we don't know the Council's grand strategy is annoying to me.
No, we didn't, not when it came to the asteroid ship. It still crossed the demarcation line despite it being our explicit job to prevent it. Plus, we undermined our trust when we sidelined the Dynasts from that yards deal. The leading plan was even named 'Just Junta'. As much as it was the Dynasts who pushed the button, it is our inability to stay committed to prior alliances that resulted in nuclear fire.
[X] Plan Hard-Nosed, High handed
Coyote Niff
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I don't think we even know if the Indefatigable properly crossed the line of contact before the Dynasts launched; my reading of initial logs of the incident pre-Bowshot and the latest update indicates to me that the point where the threat track came up on SWS radar is when they came up to combat speed and were contacted by Sakumo. There was a possibility of a confrontation, but if it had crossed the line before the strikes it would have been a target for orbital retaliation just as Sakumo was.
Does not seem like we really did. A token force of a single IC was not enough neither to prevent the nuking nor to prevent the PMC takeover (and it indeed did neither of that).
Now we have a choice to try to find and punish the perpetuators, or let them go feeling free to attempt any future daring bombings.
Are there consequences of breaking the treaties that we are guarantors of? Or are there no consequences?
We were also, again, implicitly the guarantors that the Dynasts would not be killed by the PNC. We may argue that our civgov are dumbasses to make us to do this, sure. But we were, and our choice is to tell their capturers "well, shoot them, but please try to make in in the way that would have our CivGoc appeased - we are in this with you against them".
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We never should have backed the Dynasts in the first place.
Rat King
Izutsumi-pilled
They shoulda thought of that before staking their whole existence on holding their homeworld at nuclear gunpoint.
But we did. It was decided for us by the Citizens' Council. We didn't even attempt to harmonize the deals, we just straight up went against the established foreign policy and thrown our support behind the Junta.
Rat King
Izutsumi-pilled
And I'd do it again.
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Yeah, which was based.