Mesan Alignment Questions...

I have reread the books several times and the same questions keep popping up in my mind.

Basically I realise that the MA is supposed to be the big bad boogie man that no one really knows much about as of yet and we have only a fraction of the whole picture but so far everything I have read points me to their entire plan being ridiculously over complicated when so many simple alternatives were available.


For example, who plans on a 600+ year campaign to set up an event in order to conquer the galaxy while setting up the entire strategy to be seemingly the most inefficient and over complicated grand strategy of them all.

If they had spend the same 600 years exploring, colonizing and building up their strength as far from the rest of Humanity as possible they could have waged war by the time of the 20th century and easily win without the risk of Manticore and Haven upsetting their plans.

Start with one system, Mesa, and then expand in secret from there on in and in 600 years they might have ended up with a well organized and armed empire of their own which could have easily swallowed the Solarian League and every other nation in the known Galaxy. Over those same 600 years the Solarian League would grow at an extremely slow pace.


Think about Bolthole only 500 or 1,000 heavily industrialized systems far from the Solarian League and following a timeline that only your side knows about.


If you were the guy at the helm on day one of the Mesan Alignment, how would you structure you plan if the end goal was to take over humanity?

The problem is that the bigger they grow the higher the chance of accidental discovery becomes. We are talking about a very long time-frame here. Any discovery may likely result in activation of the SLN's reserve fleet in a panic and the idea of serious genetic modification of the human genome would be deep-sixed for good.

One planet is not too hard to keep under wraps. But 10 planets, 100 planets? Once they get discovered people will try to communicate with them and ask about trade etc. Then it would be extremely difficult to keep their secrets or stop evil outsider propaganda (i.e. the truth) being broadcast to their citizens (and cloned slaves).

They also have to deal with defectors as well. When you use a hostile approach to conquer people they will generally fight you and even if they lose, they will hate you and your culture/philosophy etc. It would be hard for the MA to grow faster than the rest of the galaxy when it has a 2000+ planet 'head start'. The more planets they develop the higher the chance of discovery. It would be almost certain that they would be discovered before they reached 'parity' in production capabilities, at which point they would be embroiled in a long war and eventually be crushed.

Imagine how people on Earth would react today if a Nazi moon base actually existed and was discovered. There would be near universal hostility and public outcry for the base to be attacked and the people there locked up (or just plain nuked, considering the logistics).

BobfromSydney wrote:It would be hard for the MA to grow faster than the rest of the galaxy when it has a 2000+ planet 'head start'. The more planets they develop the higher the chance of discovery. It would be almost certain that they would be discovered before they reached 'parity' in production capabilities, at which point they would be embroiled in a long war and eventually be crushed.

And the 2000+ planets would be making their own technological progress as well in the meantime. If you could keep tabs on all of that for your own use, then you wouldn't be slipping behind, but the tabs will drive up the odds of detection and defection as you make them more extensive.

The Alignment did go for secret colonization and development in addition to the "core" let's-you-and-him-fight plan: it's Darius. They figured they could use, control, and hide a single world. If they'd committed fully to the "hidden empire" plan, presumably they would have been operating under the same assumptions and circumstances that only left them trying to use, control, and hide a single world as part of this plan. That suggests that they either had good reason to suppose the hidden empire couldn't remain hidden (or remain their empire) on any larger scale, or they were hugely misinformed or irrational at the beginning too.

So the hidden empire wasn't a realistic possibility. Why not, I don't know either. Maybe it's nothing we'd find plausible if we did know. But whatever it is, does seem to be operating in the Honorverse background.

One possibility - it's a form of irrationality at the beginning, mind you - is that they really, really wanted to stick it to Beowulf more than they wanted to win. They wanted the League, Beowulf's baby, a gift to humanity in the wake of Earth's last attempt to improve the species wholesale, to turn into a monster, corrupted and tarnished before mother's horrified eyes, and they wanted to show up and kill it as humanity's true knight in shining armor. For that, a real hidden empire would be a luxury, not a necessity, and more planets would mean more exposure. They established Darius only because they may have needed that much and - more to the point - they felt they had an opportunity given the route to it to keep it hidden with practically perfect security.

JeffEngel wrote:One possibility - it's a form of irrationality at the beginning, mind you - is that they really, really wanted to stick it to Beowulf more than they wanted to win. They wanted the League, Beowulf's baby, a gift to humanity in the wake of Earth's last attempt to improve the species wholesale, to turn into a monster, corrupted and tarnished before mother's horrified eyes, and they wanted to show up and kill it as humanity's true knight in shining armor.

Seems about right.
Because (as has been brought up by others here before) if they'd spent that 600 years not stirring up anti-genetic modification feelings through their genetic slavery programs they probably could have brought much of the galaxy to see Beowulf's Life Sciences Code as too restrictive, and gotten them in favor of Mesa's greater willingness to make the genetic mods that people want for themselves of their offspring.

Basically a well run 600 year PR campaign was pretty likely get them their stated goal. But not their unstated goal of dismantling everything Beowulf created and rubbing their success in Beowulf's face. (Getting shut down and exiled really seems to have given the Detwilers a 'thing' about Beowulf)

Sigs wrote:I have reread the books several times and the same questions keep popping up in my mind.

Basically I realise that the MA is supposed to be the big bad boogie man that no one really knows much about as of yet and we have only a fraction of the whole picture but so far everything I have read points me to their entire plan being ridiculously over complicated when so many simple alternatives were available.


...

A couple of points:

1) At the time the MAlign was formed, there was a much fresher memory of the horrors of Earth's "Final War" and much more prejudice against "Genies." Any nation or organization that espoused a philosophy of "genetic uplift" was going to get the reputation that Mesa and Manpower earned.

2) Public opinion and real-politic can accept the existence of one renegade bastion of "genetic supremacists;" they would have a LOT more problems with a 600 system empire with the same philosophy. I doubt that an open-source version of the MAlign would ever be allowed to grow to 600 systems.

3) The current MAlign plan pits enemies against each other with little or no application of MAlign resources. In the beginning, conservation of resources by manipulating others would be an imperative for what was essentially one mad-man and a small, mostly family, group of followers. Even 'today' the inner core of the 'Onion' is not much more than a single mad-man and a small, mostly family, group; possibly even more "family" than Leonard Detweiler and Company included in the beginning.

4) You're trying to establish a "better," more rational plan to conquer the universe without considering that the founders of the MAlign were not terrible rational people. The whole impetus for the MAlign boils down to, "If they won't accept my genius, I'll MAKE them accept my plan." or something similar. That's not a rational start; why would you expect them to shift to a rational strategy later?

It's not so much about conquering as the Detweilers showing that they are RIGHT.

Weird Harold wrote:

Sigs wrote:I have reread the books several times and the same questions keep popping up in my mind.

Basically I realise that the MA is supposed to be the big bad boogie man that no one really knows much about as of yet and we have only a fraction of the whole picture but so far everything I have read points me to their entire plan being ridiculously over complicated when so many simple alternatives were available.


...

A couple of points:

1) At the time the MAlign was formed, there was a much fresher memory of the horrors of Earth's "Final War" and much more prejudice against "Genies." Any nation or organization that espoused a philosophy of "genetic uplift" was going to get the reputation that Mesa and Manpower earned.

2) Public opinion and real-politic can accept the existence of one renegade bastion of "genetic supremacists;" they would have a LOT more problems with a 600 system empire with the same philosophy. I doubt that an open-source version of the MAlign would ever be allowed to grow to 600 systems.

3) The current MAlign plan pits enemies against each other with little or no application of MAlign resources. In the beginning, conservation of resources by manipulating others would be an imperative for what was essentially one mad-man and a small, mostly family, group of followers. Even 'today' the inner core of the 'Onion' is not much more than a single mad-man and a small, mostly family, group; possibly even more "family" than Leonard Detweiler and Company included in the beginning.

4) You're trying to establish a "better," more rational plan to conquer the universe without considering that the founders of the MAlign were not terrible rational people. The whole impetus for the MAlign boils down to, "If they won't accept my genius, I'll MAKE them accept my plan." or something similar. That's not a rational start; why would you expect them to shift to a rational strategy later?

A minor nit - it was more than just a family group that went to Mesa - a significant number of medical professionals from Beowulf emigrated with him (text ev is from CoG I believe).

fallsfromtrees wrote:A minor nit - it was more than just a family group that went to Mesa - a significant number of medical professionals from Beowulf emigrated with him (text ev is from CoG I believe).

Yep, that's why I qualified it as "mostly" family.

A better nit might have been the definition of "small group." I don't know of any hard numbers in textev, but I get the impression that Detweiler's "small" group might have run into five or six figures.

From memory I think it may have been a third of the Beowulf medical corpus.

Weird Harold wrote:

fallsfromtrees wrote:A minor nit - it was more than just a family group that went to Mesa - a significant number of medical professionals from Beowulf emigrated with him (text ev is from CoG I believe).

Yep, that's why I qualified it as "mostly" family.

A better nit might have been the definition of "small group." I don't know of any hard numbers in textev, but I get the impression that Detweiler's "small" group might have run into five or six figures.

Here is the operative quote from Cauldron of Ghosts:

Benton-Ramirez y Chou shrugged. “I suppose it’s possible our ancestors overreacted, although I’d argue they had good reason to. On the other hand, Detweiler was damned arrogant about his own position. He was deeply and profoundly pissed off by how…firmly his arguments were rejected, and it would appear the present-day members of this ‘Mesan Alignment’ have taken his own overreaction to truly awesome heights. When he shook the dust of Beowulf from his sandals and emigrated to Mesa, he took with him a sizable chunk of the Beowulfan medical establishment. A larger one, really, than the rest of Beowulf ever anticipated would follow him into exile, although it was still only a tiny minority of the total planetary population.

So it depends on your definition of a 'sizeable chuck". I think Bob from Sydney is probably near the mark (BTW Bob, I was in Sydney for vacation in March; beautiful city).