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You mention that the Umiak are OCD. At best this is hyper detail oriented. At worse, they worry about every little thing, espesialy when there is no need to (often almost ritualizing the process and have to fallow it to a tee or have a Blue Screen of Death effect on their brain). Yes this is an over simplification of the disability, but this sounds like some of my relatives.

Has this ever been exploited as a weakness either amongdt themselves in wars past or with the present conflict?

Who is the head of state of the Umiak Hierarchy? and what is their title?

saint of m wrote:You mention that the Umiak are OCD. At best this is hyper detail oriented. At worse, they worry about every little thing, espesialy when there is no need to (often almost ritualizing the process and have to fallow it to a tee or have a Blue Screen of Death effect on their brain). Yes this is an over simplification of the disability, but this sounds like some of my relatives. Has this ever been exploited as a weakness either amongdt themselves in wars past or with the present conflict?

The Umiak as a group are detail-oriented and decentralized; this sometimes means that the individual moving parts don't always have the big picture in mind, but that's sort of by design... the Umiak central command deliberately leaves most local commanders in dark on a lot of information. This is partly a cultural preference, but partly a strategic necessity in a war against a telepathic enemy who are exceptional interrogators. Most of the time, this practice fits in fine with the Umiak modus operandi; most Umiak operations are routine and very well defined: either defend this location, or conduct an attrition attack on this location and inflict as much harm as you can (if you can make it back, great... if not, that's fine too). However, when the plan breaks down, as it did during the Loroi Semoset offensive, the Umiak forces can suffer from a lack of decisive direction that can be exploited by a clever commander.

At an individual level, not all Umiak are the same; some are more obsessive than others, and some are more flexible.

Carl Miller wrote:Who is the head of state of the Umiak Hierarchy? and what is their title?

There is no single nominal head of state. The Hierarchy is run by a massive bureaucracy, headed at the top by a Byzantine arrangement of councils and committees. It's always true that if you go high enough you'll find one individual who makes the decisions, but few outside the corridors of power (even among the Umiak population) know who that is.

Arioch wrote:There is no single nominal head of state. The Hierarchy is run by a massive bureaucracy, headed at the top by a Byzantine arrangement of councils and committees. It's always true that if you go high enough you'll find one individual who makes the decisions, but few outside the corridors of power (even among the Umiak population) know who that is.

Would it be fair to say the individual(s) making the decisions more or less happen to roll in these decision-making slots due to circumstances?

GeoModder wrote:

Arioch wrote:There is no single nominal head of state. The Hierarchy is run by a massive bureaucracy, headed at the top by a Byzantine arrangement of councils and committees. It's always true that if you go high enough you'll find one individual who makes the decisions, but few outside the corridors of power (even among the Umiak population) know who that is.

Would it be fair to say the individual(s) making the decisions more or less happen to roll in these decision-making slots due to circumstances?

It's not a formal position. Umiak humility and dislike of the concept of despotism means that most of the titled positions (like committee chair or speaker) are functionaries that are precluded by rule from exercising much real power; nevertheless, in any organized group there's always going to be one top dog, whether formal or informal. One becomes top dog by cultivating allies or building coalitions or crushing enemies or amassing personal power and influence or by being a master manipulator or by being feared by both allies and enemies alike... or all of the above.

Do the Umiake and their Allies know where the main worlds of their Loroi are and vice versa, and can't get to it because of the military forces between them and their goal?

Aside from the sporadic nature of Umiake fleets (with Ships being outdated flying with ones that are state of the art) are there any other noticeably weaknesses the Umiake have that have been exploited/are exploitable?

Are there any allied races on either side of the conflict that will like humans a whole whole lot from the get go (either as friends or a side dish with a light salad...Space opera, had to put that in) or are they mostly going to distrust the pink skins?

saint of m wrote:Do the Umiake and their Allies know where the main worlds of their Loroi are and vice versa, and can't get to it because of the military forces between them and their goal?

The Umiak almost certainly know where the Loroi homeworlds are since they've captured so many of them and had them for so long. I don't think the Loroi have detailed information about Umiak space and I'm not certain how much difference it would make if they did. The information we've been given indicates to ME that the Umiak would likely be unfazed by the loss of their homeworld, far less than the worlds it would take to reach them at least.

saint of m wrote:Do the Umiake and their Allies know where the main worlds of their Loroi are and vice versa, and can't get to it because of the military forces between them and their goal?

The Umiak had a pretty complete map of Loroi territory even before the war; although Umiak traders were only allowed in frontier systems, they had contact with many other species (some of whom are now on the Umiak side) who had regular dealings with the Loroi. Since then, the Umiak have captured multiple Loroi planets, and held them for more than ten years. At this point, there is very little about the Loroi that the Umiak do not know.

The Loroi picture of Umiak territory is much more fragmentary. The Umiak have a very closed society, and movement within Umiak territory is tightly restricted. The Loroi are very good at interrogation, but prisoners can't give up information they don't know. Loroi intelligence has a pretty good picture of the near portion of Umiak territory, and a cursory idea of the layout of the Umiak heartland and its major production centers, but they know very little about the far portion or even how far it extends.

These main worlds can't be directly attacked for the same reason that the Allies couldn't attack Berlin in 1941: there are enemy forces in the way.

saint of m wrote:Aside from the sporadic nature of Umiake fleets (with Ships being outdated flying with ones that are state of the art) are there any other noticeably weaknesses the Umiake have that have been exploited/are exploitable?

If there had been, the war would probably be over by now.

saint of m wrote:Are there any allied races on either side of the conflict that will like humans a whole whole lot from the get go (either as friends or a side dish with a light salad...Space opera, had to put that in)

Yes.

Given the way FTL works in Outsider, fleets would have to physically go through enemy forces to reach a target. They can't warp all the way to their destination - they have to go one star at a time. And if you don't have accurate survey maps of enemy territory, finding traversable jump links between stars is going to be difficult and dangerous. You could lose a whole task force to an unexpected gas giant because you didn't know it was there.

I am under the impression that most recources can be easily gathered by strip minning astroids as any given large one could have more precious metals, iron, hydrogen, and other materials humans haved used in construction, technology, and so on then has been dug up on Earth.

That said, what reasources could the Umiak need on a plannet other then organics?

Also, what do they eat and how do they produce their food?

I can guess genetic manipulation on some level. Earthlings have done for as long as we figured out how to tame critters under selective breeding, with only more chemical and cellar level modification done in the last few years, so I can see them taking the next fifty steps ahead of us.

saint of m wrote:I am under the impression that most recources can be easily gathered by strip minning astroids as any given large one could have more precious metals, iron, hydrogen, and other materials humans haved used in construction, technology, and so on then has been dug up on Earth. That said, what reasources could the Umiak need on a plannet other then organics?

Asteroids will be rich sources of minerals, but working in low gravity on an airless radiation-bathed asteroid is going to be expensive, even at high tech levels, so I think planet-bound mining of geologically-formed mineral deposits will probably still be more cost effective for some minerals. In high-tech construction using plastics and composite materials, organic polymers will be as important as minerals, and these are generally only found on planets (in fossil deposits or grown as specialized crops). Housing is also much cheaper to build planetside rather than in space.

saint of m wrote:Also, what do they eat and how do they produce their food?

I can guess genetic manipulation on some level. Earthlings have done for as long as we figured out how to tame critters under selective breeding, with only more chemical and cellar level modification done in the last few years, so I can see them taking the next fifty steps ahead of us.

Umiak eat the same kinds of things that we do (sugars, carbohydrates, plant and animal protein, fats) and produce them in a similar manner (through farming and animal husbandry). These are no doubt industrialized to a great degree, with gene-tailored plants and animals mass-produced on an industrial scale, but that's nothing humans don't do right now.

How old is the current Umiak civilisation? It seems that they were already an industrial species when they finished conquering their co-evolved planetary rivals (roughly 1000-2000 years after the fall of the Soia). Did they then resort to infighting or did they jump into space and become a spacefaring species? (which would make them substantially older then the Loroi). Do they have an innate cultural hatred of any Soia-related species due to their suffering at the time of the empire ?

Arioch wrote:

saint of m wrote:If given the opportunity, what is the likelihood they would or could use a biological weapon, such as a engineered virus, on a target planet? I thinking is it will probably not be killed by this disease themselves, unless it crosses over to them, and they can have it dispersed swiftly (such as by touch or by birds). Let the disease kill of the target population, and you can sift through the rest at your leisure.

I think that biological weapons are hard to deliver with precision, hard to control (viruses mutate rapidly), and relatively straightforward to counter (if you can engineer a virus, they can engineer a vaccine).

Straightforward? Not really. Making a vaccine takes time and research.

Now, make a virus that has a really long incubation period, attack a Loroi plant and bombard it, but don't destroy it fully. Launch virus missiles among the regular bombardment ones.
Wait for the Loroi relief effort.
As Loroi travel to and from the planet, the virus spreads. When it hits, it hits in multiple places and spreads rapidly. Massive damage before a cure can be found.

Also, instead of totlal destruction of enemy towns, massive damage might be preferable. That way the enemy must expend resources on search & rescue, relief and re-building, bleeding him even further.

The other thing to consider about the relative effort required to extract space resources vs planetary ones: extorting resources from a planetary population costs the Umiak nothing if that population believes they will be wiped out for not delivering. Resources gained with zero Umiak labor involved will be competitive, even if it isn't being done very efficiently, all else considered. At least in the short run, as Mr. Tucker pointed out.

TrashMan wrote:

Arioch wrote:

saint of m wrote:If given the opportunity, what is the likelihood they would or could use a biological weapon, such as a engineered virus, on a target planet? I thinking is it will probably not be killed by this disease themselves, unless it crosses over to them, and they can have it dispersed swiftly (such as by touch or by birds). Let the disease kill of the target population, and you can sift through the rest at your leisure.

I think that biological weapons are hard to deliver with precision, hard to control (viruses mutate rapidly), and relatively straightforward to counter (if you can engineer a virus, they can engineer a vaccine).

Straightforward? Not really. Making a vaccine takes time and research.

Now, make a virus that has a really long incubation period, attack a Loroi plant and bombard it, but don't destroy it fully. Launch virus missiles among the regular bombardment ones.
Wait for the Loroi relief effort.
As Loroi travel to and from the planet, the virus spreads. When it hits, it hits in multiple places and spreads rapidly. Massive damage before a cure can be found.

Also, instead of totlal destruction of enemy towns, massive damage might be preferable. That way the enemy must expend resources on search & rescue, relief and re-building, bleeding him even further.

The problem with Bio Weapons is their delivery, not their effectiveness.

The USSR had an extensive Bio Weapons program, despite the treaties they had signed with the USA on the matter. Suffice to say that they had tampered with several viruses and the result was something that would make an offspring of Ebola and the common flu look tame in comparison.

They were intended to be used as a follow up weapon in case of a nuclear war, wiping out whatever survivors were left at the enemy side. The problem that offered the biggest roadblock was that viruses and bacteria are very fragile, they can't tolerate multiple gravity accelerations and decelerations, and that's before the problem with the extreme temperatures in a variety of delivery methods.

What they came up with was something that the US intelligence service initially thought to be a joke, a very slow subsonic missile that would gradually decelerate before impact. Even with this delivery method they didn't expect more than 30% of the payload to survive the journey to the target.

I don't know what possible delivery systems the Umiak could come up with but the fact still remains that it would be very hard for viruses and bacteria to survive the temperature of an atmospheric entry and the sudden stop of an orbital drop.

Mr.Tucker wrote:How old is the current Umiak civilisation? It seems that they were already an industrial species when they finished conquering their co-evolved planetary rivals (roughly 1000-2000 years after the fall of the Soia). Did they then resort to infighting or did they jump into space and become a spacefaring species? (which would make them substantially older then the Loroi). Do they have an innate cultural hatred of any Soia-related species due to their suffering at the time of the empire ?

It is generally believed that Umiak interstellar civilization is older than the Loroi interstellar civilization, but it's not clear by how much; nobody knows the dates of the Umiak timeline or the location of their homeworld (including most of the Umiak that you're likely to run across). If the Umiak have been steadily expanding (which seems likely), then there's a limit to how long ago they could have started. The Loroi theorize that, assuming that the Umiak creation story is true, the post-Fall rebuilding period for the Tizik-tik and the subsequent struggle with the Hal-tik must have been drawn out over many tens of thousands of years.

TrashMan wrote:Now, make a virus that has a really long incubation period, attack a Loroi plant and bombard it, but don't destroy it fully. Launch virus missiles among the regular bombardment ones. Wait for the Loroi relief effort. As Loroi travel to and from the planet, the virus spreads. When it hits, it hits in multiple places and spreads rapidly. Massive damage before a cure can be found.

All of this has been tried before; it's kind of "Total War 101." The Umiak left some nasty surprises for the Loroi when they started losing territory in the Semoset offensive.

Both sides have very sophisticated medical technology that can detect pathogens, even if they can't immediately cure them. There is very little direct access to enemy populations in this war, and whenever it does happen, the affected system is usually quarantined and carefully screened for this sort of thing. In addition to their many other shortcomings, biological agents are much more difficult to spread between star systems than they are between cities on a planet; an infected individual can't just hop on a plane and be spreading the disease far and wide in a matter of hours the way one can in a terrestrial example.

An interesting option for someone with sufficient biotech is the binary plague, two pathogens that are by themselves harmless, possibly even beneficial, and would spread throughout the target population without ever killing anyone. If they both infect the same individual they then become extremely lethal, though you probably want some incubation time. Then you deliver the initial infection to two widely separated points of the target population. If the initial infections don't get caught, you'll have dozens of outbreaks as it spreads through a mixing population.

It'd be an effective way to start a war, all the delivery problems the umiak and Loroi face now would probably still stop it cold.

One of the other shortcomings of using viruses as weapons is that they mutate rapidly. Viral epidemics tend to be short; a lethal pathogen burns its way through the population and then disappears, having shifted into a variety of less-lethal variant forms that don't kill the host (which is usually not beneficial for a parasite). That's the problem with molecular machines in general; most viruses don't even have enough gene information to reproduce on their own (they require the host's genes for that), much less implement any kind of error-correction scheme. No matter how carefully you engineer your virus, after six months or so and millions of generations, it won't be the same organism that you engineered.

Ironically, the best was to win a total war is to target the population.

and I don't mean in the "kill it", but "make life miserable for them".
Destroy farms, food and water processing/manufacturing, infrastructure. That means your enemy now has to provide relief effort. Which means shipping in food, re-construction work. That takes manpower, time and effort. Resources that are not used against you.

Turn every civilian into a problem that takes away resources instead of adding them to the enemy.
Bleed the enemy dry.

TrashMan wrote:Ironically, the best was to win a total war is to target the population.

and I don't mean in the "kill it", but "make life miserable for them".
Destroy farms, food and water processing/manufacturing, infrastructure. That means your enemy now has to provide relief effort. Which means shipping in food, re-construction work. That takes manpower, time and effort. Resources that are not used against you.

Turn every civilian into a problem that takes away resources instead of adding them to the enemy.
Bleed the enemy dry.

Which is exactly what the Umiak have been trying to do with their attacks and their attempts to break through the Loroi lines