The choice here seems to be one internal diplo team for 20 vs red squad for 4 and perhaps some ships and maybe the 8-point Tellarite HI. There is the final 10-point engineering team, but it's out of Rigel's deteriorating support, which may not be wise. Perhaps we should spend 10 and save 10, too.
I'm not sure we CAN save 10, but we can certainly choose not to spend all we have.
Any internal diplomacy teams we recruit are likely to be assigned to prop up war support. We could make a rough estimate on how long such a team would take to pay for itself, but I'm not sure how long we've had the internal diplomacy teams in play doing that, so we might not have a big enough sample size.
Huh, so in retrospect the Lion was probably another victim of the mentats.
Honestly, I
really doubt it. We lost the
Lion on a separate mission at more or less the same time we
met the Licori. The anomaly is somewhere near Licori space, but we had no indications of it being an artificial phenomenon back when we first encountered it.
It is far more likely that either;
1)
Blizzard fell prey to a natural phenomenon related to the one that swallowed up the
Lion, or
2) While the event that befell the
Lion was naturally occuring, AFTER that, mentats started poking it.
This will make a good propaganda piece at least, especially if we can turn any of the mentats.
Well, the Harkonnen-expies having trouble maintaining reliability and loyalty among people they abuse seems probable. I bet we can do that.
On the other hand, it
also helps to explain some of the demented behavior we've seen from mentats. A person who knowingly signs up to lose decades of life in exchange for hypercharging their mental capacities may be a glory hound or a short-sighted, reckless individual... But a person who has such a thing
forced on them will feel intense regret and know they have little to live for except their work. They may be even crazier.
I too am not so sure we want to spend all 20 points. We're getting to the point where I'd rather ration war support for the long term. Maybe we should have unassigned the Federation Council Emergency Committee.
Maybe, but the catch is that we might want to bring in a 15 or 20-point asset at some future time. It's hard to be sure.
