Plus Silver Bullet is hard to defend against.
45 minutes or 60 minutes isn't enough time to evacuate anything of decent size. 36 hours should have been honestly, but Hypatia obviously doesn't use my standards. I mean, they didn't even have a Deadman Switch based doomsday weapon to point at the Solarian League! They should have just been able to say "That's nice. If you nuke our habitats our doomsday weapon will glass every Sollie planet. So feel free to glass the Solarian League we can't stop you."
Eyal wrote:
We know that Manticore doesn't always rely on comprehensive simulated tests before deployment - if they had, Fearless would never have been modified as it was in the first book. And I imagine it's even more rushed in war time, with systems being operationally deployed without sufficiently thorough testing.
IIRC, Fearless did great in training exercises taking out more weight in ships than was lost by several fold. Not to mention the value of simply forcing your opponent to honor the threat. It never should have been deployed alone like that though.
Manticore... hasn't really done the right thing. Compared to the SLN their doing good, but they've also engaged what is piracy when they attacked nearly every neutral star nation with a hyperbridge.Frank777 wrote:The logic of 'we approached Mesa, they bombed themself, nobody believes us, we have a big problem' does not hold for me. For several books we see that Manticore does the right thing, experiences gigantic spinning of the news by sollies, and moves on. When bombs are not set off by Manticore, and when people claim to be part of the Mesan plot without knowing anything of the terror actions earlier experienced, it clearly means the enemy has laid more false tracks than expected. No need to panic, just tell it as it is, as done before. The despair shown is out of character. Who cares what others spin ? What does this mean, now, for us Manties? Can we find cracks in the patterns? What can we learn?
Also telling it like it is, would probably backfire horribly. They DID take part in the first couple nukes. If they tell it as it is they go "We only provided technical assistance to the terrorist behind the Green Pines Massacre."
It matters how others spin it because if the rest of the galaxy decides Manticore needs to go, they can remove Manticore. At a minimum Beowulf can stick a knife in Manticore's back pretty easy. They're providing Manticore's missiles right now.
Or the galaxy could decide to signal to the Oyster Bay attackers "We don't care if you wipe out Haven and Manticore. So feel free to strike again and hit their planets."
Or the rest of the galaxy could just decide to cut trade ties. Manticore depends on trade, especially the cash from the hyperbridges. Honestly, I'm not sure if they have the culture to inflate their currency and correctly handle their war debt competently without the income from the Manticore Junction.
Those techniques weren't used though. Also they did bring treecats.What eludes me, however, is the logic. There is evidence of very strong spying and new techniques to enslave people up to the point of immediately making them unwilling assasins. So far, only Manticore is capable, due to their allies the 'cats, to find them, and so they do on Manticore, succesfully.
Manticore has not been dealing with much in the way of terrorism. They've had a little light terrorism in the Talbott cluster and that level of terrorism would have been no real threat. In fact, the Grand Alliance is in bed with terrorists (the Ballroom), something they would never do if they were concerned with terrorism. The Ballroom is 100% Mesan terrorists!So *WHY* (in capitals, italic, bold and printed in font size 100) would you ever put your important people outside this safety umbrella for a large conference? You bring the outside folks in, never the reverse. Chances are that the three huge bombs made would never have been put there on Manticore. If we can consider this kind of options nowadays with terrorism on the whole planet earth, how much more would Manticore consider such safety after decades of war and experience?
And all that said, they can only be so paranoid and this research conference is a low risk event all things considered. There are much bigger vulnerabilities that Manticore hasn't fixed.
The Malign could have inflicted way more damage if they wanted to and went about it calmly. Why not rig a slave's microbiome to invade and destroy Manticore's biome? Why not try a reprise of Oyster Bay targeting planets? Why not fire up an impeller wedge on the surface of Beowulf?
The only reason the Beowulf attack happened was the Malign leadership lashed out at the first target they could. If the Malign does that people will die and Manticore should be grateful the damages was so minimal. They can't just sequester their people forever.
P.S. Frank777 you'll notice I'm only responding to the points you called out as on shakier ground. I'm in a good deal of agreement about the other points.
P.P.S. Sorry RFC, I guess UH is just the one book I like the least.
