tlb wrote:If the SLN really believed all of that, then what did they believe kept the unknown attackers from conquering all of Manticore? The only explanation that I can conceive, if we require the attack to be manned, is that the attackers were a suicide mission and only succeeded by killing all of themselves in the attempt. But that is ridiculous, because it would have left debris that could identify the assailants and the methods they used. Also it is hard to believe that an unknown force would fight until they were all dead.
So the only remaining, logical explanation is that the fighting was done by autonomous machines. Since it is likely that even Solarian ships had used the wormhole junction after the attack (that lone DB cannot be the only one), everyone should know that its defenses were intact. So why did they allow themselves to be persuaded that the attackers had to fight their way in; when a stealth ballistic approach was also possible?
They didn't believe a stealth ballistic approach was possible either. So that left them between several impossible situations. Sherlock Holmes said "when you remove the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." If nothing remains, then your logic was wrong and logically you excluded something that was possible. Finding out where you made a mistake is the difficult part.
Of course, saying that an attacker could not perform a stealth ballistic approach means giving the RMN credit for detecting such a thing, more than the SLN would usually give any neobarb. They'd either have to concede that Manticore had sensitive translation arrays and could catch the translation however far that was and the QRF could have reached in time to intercept (the correct case) or that they had very good scanning and would have detected the attack before it stuck. Maybe they thought the unknown attackers didn't have MDMs and thus had to close to 3 minutes' flight time?
Actually, I take it back. They weren't giving the RMN any credit. They were underestimating the attackers because they estimated those to be no better than the SLN itself. If the SLN is the best there is and the SLN couldn't find a way do it, then no attacker could, right? It may not even be a failure of imagination: it doesn't matter if someone imagined it if it got automatically rejected as "theoretical impractical nonsense" because it wasn't in the SLN playbook.