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So if you didn't see it how do you know someone is dead?

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So if you didn't see it how do you know someone is dead?
Post by Puidwen   » Fri Mar 12, 2021 6:17 pm

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Honor Harrington
Amos Parnell
Andre Warnecke

All of their deaths have been faked.
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Re: So if you didn't see it how do you know someone is dead?
Post by kzt   » Fri Mar 12, 2021 8:53 pm

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Puidwen wrote:Honor Harrington
Amos Parnell
Andre Warnecke

All of their deaths have been faked.

Stop with your silly conspiracy theories. Listen to the consensus of the experts. They have all the information you don’t.
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Re: So if you didn't see it how do you know someone is dead?
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Sat Mar 13, 2021 12:39 am

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Puidwen wrote:Honor Harrington
Amos Parnell
Andre Warnecke

All of their deaths have been faked.


It is pretty difficult, given sufficient technology and access to the person in question. Haven could have sent a finger or an ear of Honor's back to Manticore to prove they had had her (not that it was a doubt that Prince Adrian was getting captured). Haven also had a lot of experience in creating doctored footage, so one more wouldn't be immediately suspicious. They also had enough background on Honor to predict how she'd react.

Warnecke faked his own death. People have been doing that for millennia and I don't think that's going to easily change. As for Parnell, I doubt very much was known of him in the first place. Yes, he was a high-ranking military commander in the PRH, so I'm sure Manticore intelligence had extensive files on him, but at the same time InSec would have seen to it that little personal information was leaked out in the first place. Knowing where he lived, the routes he took to get to the Octagon, etc. Besides, he wasn't the only one that was "disappeared" at the time anyway.

On the other hand, technology helps seeing through fakes too. Forensics technology can determine if a corpse, even if burnt completely, is of the person in question, if you have enough details of them. This would have been Warnecke's main obstacle: if the Confederacy forces had wanted to, they could have disproven the death (this is where a proper set of bribes comes in, the human factor).

Similarly, I think that a few outfits in Manticore probably saw through the montage and were claiming that it was a fake. But who's going to believe outliers in the media? Even if the Manticoran cyber security services determined that it was, indeed, a composite, what are they going to do? Honor's capture was not in doubt. Most of Prince Adrian's crew eventually made its way to POW camps, where presumably Manticore liaison personnel did interview them.

Finally, for all Haven knew, Honor was dead. They simply hadn't had the footage of an execution. So, in fact, Honor faked her own death, which in turn was faked to Manticore.
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Re: So if you didn't see it how do you know someone is dead?
Post by SharkHunter   » Mon Mar 15, 2021 11:43 pm

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Puidwen wrote:Honor Harrington
Amos Parnell
Andre Warnecke

All of their deaths have been faked.


Authorial handwavium aside, the trick to faking your own or another death is to avoid unwanted analysis. For example, in the book version of the Hunt for Red October, they hide the fact that they stole the ship by sinking another US sub nearby but deep enough that the Soviet era navy can't reasonably explore, provide a video tape of an underwater remote retrieving a piece of hardware, then turning over the hardware in question as "recovered"... vs. taken off the ship. So everybody has the most logical evidence in hand, and not much reason to question it.

So in Parnell's case -- pure vengefulness, and they wanted his confession to cover their tracks. Couldn't get that if they killed him, so haha on you Amos we'll park your a-- on a prison planet and kill your family instead

Honor's? plenty of folks in the RMN knew that the PRH had put out a murder charge against her, and that Cordelia Ransom was a witch with a capital B. Makes sense for Ransom to want to kill anybody with integrity vs. obsequiousness, and if the imagery was good enough... hard to see why it wouldn't have been accepted as was. Of course, the fact that the reverse was true -- Ransom dead, HH alive? with no video evidence. Just desserts of the well-designed plot flavor.

Warnecke probably got away with it simply because Silesia is a cesspool and they didn't really want to look that hard, right?

Which makes deciding who Albrecht Detweiler was and what about the true onion a copperplated -ith to decode, no?
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Re: So if you didn't see it how do you know someone is dead?
Post by Puidwen   » Wed Mar 17, 2021 1:06 pm

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SharkHunter wrote:
Puidwen wrote:Honor Harrington
Amos Parnell
Andre Warnecke

All of their deaths have been faked.




Warnecke probably got away with it simply because Silesia is a cesspool and they didn't really want to look that hard, right?



Didn't Silesia also fake up their own imagery of Warnecke being executed?
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Re: So if you didn't see it how do you know someone is dead?
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Thu Mar 18, 2021 11:02 am

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Puidwen wrote:Didn't Silesia also fake up their own imagery of Warnecke being executed?


Since it's Silesia, nothing prevents both from being true at the same time...
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Re: So if you didn't see it how do you know someone is dead?
Post by kzt   » Thu Mar 18, 2021 6:57 pm

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:Since it's Silesia, nothing prevents both from being true at the same time...

Trust the government experts! And the media, they are licensed by the government to ensure they tell only the truth! Stop listening to these ridiculous conspiracy theories.
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Re: So if you didn't see it how do you know someone is dead?
Post by jtg452   » Fri Mar 19, 2021 8:43 am

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Puidwen wrote:Honor Harrington
Amos Parnell
Andre Warnecke

All of their deaths have been faked.

You didn't expect the Havenites to admit that they had lost Randsom when they thought Harrington was killed, did you? Or that Harrington had taken a whole ship and it's crew with her when she went out like a Viking in a blaze of glory, do you?

Don't forget, it was a State Security ship and folks like that rely on their aura of invincibility. Admitting that they lost a major combatant while trying to execute a woman already in custody- that they had taken from the Navy that had- finally- defeated her doesn't do that aura a whole lot of good.

Faking the execution was also a psy-op move externally and, internally, was a way to save face while covering the blunder up.

In Parnell's case, on one hand, it was to put an 'end' to the Harris Assassination as a news item so it would fade away in the public spotlight. On the other hand, it was also a ploy to use against Parnell himself to build up his sense of hopelessness in an attempt to convince him to cooperate.

Warnecke's faked execution was simply the Sillies' attempt to sweep the fact that they couldn't catch him under the rug. In other words, more political face saving. They were hoping that he was already dead (and there was some evidence that he could have died) and couldn't come out and prove them wrong.
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Re: So if you didn't see it how do you know someone is dead?
Post by Brigade XO   » Sat Mar 20, 2021 8:16 am

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I'm not sure of the logic in Ransom taking Honor and select members of her surviving crew to Hades for the execution. It would have made more sense to bring her to Haven and do a nice show trial...just to be all nice and staged managed legal before killing her. Taking her to Hades and burning out her medical replacement parts is just torture Same with the beatings and degrading her crew. Beyond now having taken Honor and much of the crew of one ship, it has gone over into propaganda and if they had taken her to Haven they probably could have gotten much more out of her (no constraints on "adjusting her" at that point and still executed her after having paraded her and various crew as trophies.
Ultimately faking her death probably falls under making lemonade when someone hands you lemons (and you really don't want them) as nobody either at Hades or Haven (other than a select few on the regular navy ship she forced to accompany her) had any real idea about what happened. Even with somebody knowing that more than the one small craft made it off Ransom's ship before that one shuttle was destroyed in the minefield, the odds of anybody surviving if they made it down to Hades was small. So it's plot driven.
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Re: So if you didn't see it how do you know someone is dead?
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Sat Mar 20, 2021 1:36 pm

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Brigade XO wrote:I'm not sure of the logic in Ransom taking Honor and select members of her surviving crew to Hades for the execution. It would have made more sense to bring her to Haven and do a nice show trial...just to be all nice and staged managed legal before killing her. Taking her to Hades and burning out her medical replacement parts is just torture Same with the beatings and degrading her crew. Beyond now having taken Honor and much of the crew of one ship, it has gone over into propaganda and if they had taken her to Haven they probably could have gotten much more out of her (no constraints on "adjusting her" at that point and still executed her after having paraded her and various crew as trophies.
Ultimately faking her death probably falls under making lemonade when someone hands you lemons (and you really don't want them) as nobody either at Hades or Haven (other than a select few on the regular navy ship she forced to accompany her) had any real idea about what happened. Even with somebody knowing that more than the one small craft made it off Ransom's ship before that one shuttle was destroyed in the minefield, the odds of anybody surviving if they made it down to Hades was small. So it's plot driven.


She couldn't bring them to Haven, where Pierre and Saint-Just could control her. The narrative that Honor was a convicted criminal was already established (she transmitted from Barnett), but the rest of her crew wasn't and should've been given the status of POW. It's not clear what she was going to do with them later, but I doubt she would have allowed to go to a POW camp after taking the detour to Hades -- if she wanted that, she wouldn't have had them aboard PNS Tepes at all. The whole thing was a power play by Ransom, against both Manticore and the Alliance, as well as the other members of the Committee.

Moreover, she had an ulterior motive towards the crew of PNS Count Tilly, and Tourville and Foraker in particular. At Hades, with only StateSec personnel around, and usually the worst of the worst, she could control everything (even though it was ostensibly Saint-Just's domain). In the Haven system, there was no way she could do anything against the Tourville, who would then fall under the protection of Adm. McQueen. He was, at the time, one of the only COs to have any victory whatsoever on the PRH side of the war. So instead of whatever she had planned for him after openly disagreeing with her, he'd be decorated.

Besides, it was clear at this point that she believed her own lies. That meant she wasn't at all stable. With that consideration, how hard is it to believe she wasn't making rational decisions, for the good of the Republic?
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