Jonathan_S wrote:Borealis wrote:I would imagine a way to establish 'ownership' of the system to prevent anyone else from settling in and performing their own surveys.
Mesa wouldn't want to make things too obvious by putting in a huge amount of infrastructure, but creating a slave based drug factory would at least allow the overhead cost of being able to watch the wormhole terminus to break even.
In retrospect they'd have almost certainly been better off leaving the system vacant and trusting that nobody stumbled across it in the next hundred years or so.
Remember, at the point they founded Verdent Vista they weren't expecting the military tech advances that came out of the Manticore Haven wars, and therefore were on a much more leisurely schedule for reaching their endgame. I'm sure that timeline played into their decision to grab it officially rather than trusting to obscurity.
Actually, I'm trying to remember. Do we know how long ago the planet was settled?
But if they'd known they might need their secret backdoor into the Haven Quadrant as soon as the 1920's PD they might have been more willing to trust to obscurity.
There were three primary reasons for the decision to colonize Congo:
(1) The security of the wormhole had to be safeguarded at any cost, and that meant keeping anyone else from discovering and exploring it. Given the fact that it was in such close proximity to Erewhon, that it was a star system which was likely to have a life-bearing planet, that exploration would undoubtedly get around to checking that out as soon as Erewhon had the opportunity, and that it is now to check stars' gravitic profiles for possible wormholes, the only way to prevent someone else from exploring the wormhole was to secure ownership of the star system for themselves.
(2) Once they surveyed the system themselves, they recognized the pharmaceutical cornucopia that Congo/Verdant Vista represented. They also realized that anyone else who surveyed the system was likely to recognize the same thing, which meant that anyone else who surveyed the system (and somehow missed spotting the wormhole) was extremely likely to colonize/claim the planet because of its inherent value. By establishing their own claim to it ASAP, they preempted that outcome.
(3) By securing control of the system, they also secured the right to police and control all traffic into and out of the system. That put them in the strongest position to ensure (A) that no one had the opportunity to discover anything about wormholes that they weren't supposed to discover and (B) to manage the system's traffic control in a way which would preclude someone from "stumbling across" a Mesan Alignment ship transiting the wormhole.
They could have used a different front organization to seize control of the star system. They chose not to because every additional layer they worked through offered an additional opportunity for something to slip through the cracks and (more importantly) because Mesa was so repugnant to most of the galaxy and such a pariah that legitimate shipping was extremely unlikely to come anywhere near a Mesa-claimed star system. That was another major factor in controlling access to the wormhole junction and the possibility of a genuinely neutral observer seeing something he shouldn't see.
Now, it can certainly be argued that the decision worked out . . . poorly, but to be fair that was because of circumstances beyond the Alignment's control, including a rogue Havenite intelligence officer and a Manticoran aristocrat willing to kick over the traces and pursue a policy he could be pretty sure wasn't going to make his own government happy. And, of course, the turn the war took with the introduction of the MDM and (especially) Apollo hadn't happened yet when they made their decision about how to proceed in Verdant Vista's case.
