Pages 121, 122: Followers

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icekatze
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Re: Pages 121, 122: Followers

Post by icekatze »

hi hi

The Loroi, the Umiak, and possibly their allies have been fighting over the Naam system for years. They have already been there for a long time, and the Bellarmine's path into the system dovetails into a legitimate entry point from Umiak territory. (The system the Bellarmine jumped into Naam from is only one jump away from Umiak held space.)

There is no need to know about the Bellarmine ahead of time in order to cross paths in an inbound jump-trajectory.

The fact that the attacker closed distance to 850 kilometers instead of destroying the Bellarmine from 20,000 to 50,000+ kilometers away, which would be an optimal distance for a plasma focus, suggests that they made the choice to destroy the Bellarmine only after close inspection, rather than having planned to destroy it in advance.

Jayngfet
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Re: Pages 121, 122: Followers

Post by Jayngfet »

Yes, but that would require a ship, or ships, be positioned to attack the Loroi but refuse to. If I understand the details right firing like that also opened them up to detection. For it to be the Umiak they would have to prioritize attacking an unaffiliated ship over attacking a ship that's presently attacking their own forces.

Not to mention that even that distance is rather close in terms of space. For the Umiak to detect the ship when no other ship, including other Umiak ships, were able to raises a number of questions. Additionally ther's the obvious problem in that the Bellarmine was hit in such a way as to be totally destroyed. It was bisected, then each section was hit again just to confirm it was dead. All of this happened within minutes of the Bellarmine entering the system.

The attack on the Bellarmine is rather unambiguously premediated, and from someone who at least had an idea of what they were shooting at. There odds of any of that happening any other way are simply too high.

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icekatze
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Re: Pages 121, 122: Followers

Post by icekatze »

hi hi

There is nothing unambiguous about it.

The Umiak have been shown, first hand in the comic, to hold portions of their forces in reserve. Having reserve units is honestly a very common, very rudimentary military strategy. One of the primary functions of having reserve units is to respond to unforeseen events.

While hiding inside the protoplanetary disk afforded the ships inside some measure of cover, any ship in open space would be easily detectable. The disk itself is going to disk shaped, and the Captain Hamilton's choice of moving to the edge of the disk, put it into a very narrow volume of space. Any other ships that had jumped into the system from that corridor and were looking to hide, would necessarily find themselves in a similar region of space. In the hours that it took for the Bellarmine to travel from the jump point to the edge of the Proplyd, any other ship in the Proplyd would have had some opportunity to travel there too, especially since all of the major combatants have better propulsion than the Terrans.

Alexander Jardin's mission has been adversely affected by some truly absurd coincidences, but sometimes that's just how the luck of the draw works. Sometimes random chance does unexpected things like that.

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Re: Pages 121, 122: Followers

Post by Absalom »

Here's my current thought: the Umiak have been bringing lightly-staffed semi-drone fleets to Naam for years. The uncrewed ships follow a simple heuristic of "drift predictably-investigate anomalies-destroy/evade intruders-allow friendlies to dock". They aren't fully functional, but they have enough capabilities to protect themselves, mostly with non-detection. They drift predictably because a skeleton crew, calculated to be either below Farseer detection thresholds or easily confused with message drone crews, is also in the proplyd, constantly maintaining the ships. 27 spent a while in the proplyd, because his fleet was escorting the crew intended to bring the stockpiled ships up to functional (though probably still skeleton-crew) status.

The unknown vessel detected an active anomaly, slowly approached to investigate, detected active weapons fire in system (no sense giving yourself away if you can't be mistaken for the norm), detected no "all clear" indications, and thereby fired. Either that, or didn't detect the Bellarmine until shortly before Bellarmine detected it, triggering a "close contact" branch in it's evasion routine.

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icekatze
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Re: Pages 121, 122: Followers

Post by icekatze »

hi hi

A drone ship is a possibility, although I expect that Captain Hamilton was right. It's too far away from the battle to be a picket ship. If it is the Umiak, they must have more going on in the system than the Loroi realized.

Looking at it from the attacker's perspective though, I find myself more convinced that it is a third party. Suppose you're in a sneaky ship, sneaking around. Then, some random starship, the likes of which you haven't seen before, heads straight for you; and when you try to figure out who they are, they start broadcasting stuff at you. My first thought, as the captain of the sneaky ship would be, "How did they find us?"

If I were the Umiak, who is just now testing the sneaky ships for the first time, I would want to have the answer to that question in the worst way. And since I'm trying to dominate the theater of combat, I wouldn't hesitate to take it or use a show of force, like revealing my fleets at the edge of the Proplyd.

If I were a third party trying to keep my presence unknown, I would be worried about the answer, but more than that, I would want to eliminate all evidence and every witness. Then I would get away, rather than spending lots of time sifting through the wreckage for answers, which could give away my presence.

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