SharkHunter wrote:I am in agreement that "just taking out the Mandarins" ends the Solarian League, for a simple reason: if it were that easy, the Alignment would have done it. The Mesans know it won't work, the League has to fall into smaller size chunks.
That or Honor and the RMN's strategy would be to decapitate the monster itself. They could have beat street via the wormholes taken in just Lacoon 1, let alone 2, and then blitzkrieg controlled the planetary orbitals of Earth AND Mars from "Sol system Polar North or South" WAY before Filereta even finished assembling his forces. At which point -- as they've surmised, Manticore is the aggressor and the remaining seventeen hundred plus systems or some chunk of them eventually come up with the tech and steamroller the Star Empire, etc. following a formal declaration of war in the Solarian Assembly or it's remnants.
Besides which, at this point in the Honorverse, the SEM doesn't care if the League breaks up into manageable pieces, even if they don't fire so much as a hand pulsar or LAC size point defense cluster to make it happen. The SEM/Grand Alliance knows that they have enough firepower -- or will shortly, to blow every known SLN shipyard into orbital debris, at which point they have...
Something like the nightmare of the Silesian Confederacy. What QEIII and company DO care about is insuring that what comes next isn't worse, aka that the universe ends up with the stable, "sentient-being's rights honoring" sectors and systems. not a bunch of warlords with great big starship navies and no morals.
Meaning that the SLN or the SLN bits aren't the biggest problem anymore, though defending Beowulf might be. Big problem is that you have a single set of folks gunning to dismantle and then commandeer the whole enchilada of human-controlled space and have around twelve planetary systems with billions of genetically enhanced "supermen" taught from birth that they have the right to run the galaxy, and their amoral leaders backing the Detweiler's big play.
that's a pretty good post. The part about the SL devolving into something like the Silesia Confederacy (but 100 times worse) is well taken. I do however have to point out you made an error in the last paragraph. The vast majority of the people on the systems that will be the RF are ordinary humans. Not alfa lines, beta lines or gama lines, but ordinary unaltered humans. The leaders and people aligned with the MAlign have had to keep it a secret because they know how the rest of the population would have reacted if they knew who they were and who they were truly loyal too. Badly.
There is simply no way that there could be billions of people in those twelve systems (goddess.. I just had a flashback to BSG. The Twelve Colonies) could be genetically enhanced and know about it and not have spilled the beans somewhere on the air or in literature so someone else found out about it. Especially the SL leadership. So those lines are very well hidden.
We probably need to look at Henke / Gold Peak's example in Meyers.
She offered a treaty relationship IF the system / planetary government legitimately secured basic rights for all its citizens.
She explicitly noted that the treaty benefits would NOT happen if those basic rights were not guaranteed.
Somehow I doubt that will be boilerplate for all treaties. At some point the SEM will have to accept that it -will- have to make treaties with stellar nations that -don't- treat their citizens as the SEM wants them to, but the government of said system is willing to be peaceful to the SEM as long as the SEM keeps its nose out of their business. It's called reality. In making international treaties, even when you have a clear military advantage, you do not always get to dictate how the other side manages its own internal affairs. It's even worse when the stipulation is clearly one sided, and it gives the side dictating the terms unequivocal control over the other side. If the SEM is trying to make friends of the collapsed SL successor states, having stipulations like that will not help the SEM's reputation by trying to meddle in the internal affairs of other nations.
There's likely going to be some very ugly and dictatorial forms of government forming in the coming chaos, so the SEM won't really be able to pick and choose who it wants to do business with in order to attain the peace it wants, unless it becomes the evil it is trying to fight. ie the SEM/.GA becomes the next Solarian League by taking over every system that does not conform to their viewpoints. Which would only end up convincing everyone that the SEM purposefully caused the collapse of the SL just to eat as much of it as it could.
