This is plausible, but I don't like that human contact now becomes just a coincidence. I mean its not impossible, but who just leaves Chekov's gun chilling on the mantle piece?icekatze wrote:However, a good reason to not send their entire fleet is that the Loroi are still likely to get the word out via couriers that the Umiak have this new advantage. From the Loroi perspective, having lost their farseer advantage, a full-scale all-or-nothing invasion of Umiak territory may now be unavoidable. And if the Loroi are forced into such a strategy, the Umiak can accept the move on their own turf where they have the supply line advantage. All they need to do is sufficiently scare the Loroi into going all in, or damage them enough in the opening move that they don't have the resources and end up getting whittled away.
Of course, but I'm not sure it would take the humans similar times to make contact with both groups. First off the Umiak have a greater industrial capacity (can't remember where I read this but this was the assumption I was working off of) so its more likely they have scouts further out to establish contact at an earlier date and unlike the Loroi they could've potentially avoided wasting any time with armed conflict and instead booked it to Umiak command immediately.icekatze wrote:First, the Terran scouts were out there simultaneously. It would be a remarkable feat for the Umiak to capture a scout, figure out their telepathic resistance, develop a way to copy that resistance, apply it to multiple divisions worth of ships, send those ships on a circuitous route around the front-lines, all before the Bellarmine made first contact.
You're right though, it would be a stretch trying to account for telepathy-invisible Umiak being there at the moment of human-Loroi first contact already if this version was true. Probably not likely the Umiak got their stealth from humans directly then.
Not necessarily, the telepathy-invisible Umiak could be expensive or otherwise naturally rare units that need to be used sparingly and with the benefit of surprise for best effect. As for why they would hide it, that's much more simple, same reason the Allies hid they could crack Enigma in WW2; ships/cities would be sacrificed if plausible orders couldn't be conjured up to move them out of harms way so the Germans never even suspected Enigma was broken.icekatze wrote:Second, I can't think of any reason why the Umiak would hide an ability to mask themselves from telepathy, if they had it. If they had such an ability, I would think that the Loroi would have lost the war during the First Siege of Seren.
Letting the Loroi think they have perfect "sensor" coverage is a pretty big advantage, even if the Umiak can only slip past with small numbers; production rate-limited by either biology (only 1 in x Umiak gets it) or industrial capacity (1 stealth crew costs ties up as much industrial capacity as y fodder crew.) The only alternate I can see is that the Umiak did just recently learn/acquire this ability, but completely independent of human first contact. And its just a coincidence that the first Umiak stealth force attacked the Loroi group carrying the human delegate, who just happens to represent a race with the same ability.
Leaning towards "they've always had it in small numbers, found humans ahead of Loroi, scrambled the closest commander - Kikitik-27 - to intercept human contact with Loroi so the Loroi continue to believe their sensor coverage is perfect"