A Critique of historical Imperial Reclaiming Policy

Fiction Portal Intergalactic Summit
41

You’re the one who insists that even though they have more territory, numbers, and industrial output, in a war of aggression where they’d have shorter supply lines and their allies’ assistance, we’d be able to win. You’re saying the Republic can take on the Empire and the State, successfully, without the Federation. If we’re on our own, they are already unstoppable.

That’s the whole point of the alliance with the Federation. The simple fact that it endures through all of the crap both sides have put it through should be a pretty solid indicator that you’re wrong. It’s you who wants to guarantee our extinction, even if you’re too bullheaded to see it.

Funny thing about war, Miz: until it starts, you retain the option to start one. Once you do, you can’t really say ‘oops, do-over’ so easily. I’ve already told you what I think we should be doing: looking for a way to change the strategic situation, to alter the basic math of the conflict before we start it.

At the very least, we should stop turning a blind eye, officially, to the continued Imperial Navy raiding operations in the Republic. Start taking those ships intact, and force squadron commander after squadron commander to publicly admit what they were doing, and where those orders came from. Make it clear that the Republic considers that raiding an act of war, and lobby the State to acknowledge that those raids constitute initial aggression by the Empire—that they’re under no obligation to render aid. Assure them as best we can that we’ll keep the Feds from trying to fully retake Luminaire, or initiating wider hostilities. Feck, we’ve got reason enough to stand together against either of the expansionist powers.

And then, once the groundwork’s been laid for a fight we can win… then the next time one of those golden pigs so much as buys a collar in a pet store in the Republic, we burn them all to the ground. But none of that’s been done. None of it. And without it, no, we can’t win that fight. We can’t take on half the cluster by ourselves.

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42

Mizhara Del’thul, I won’t say I hope you find a way, but I will say I wouldn’t at all be disappointed. The sooner the Empire has the freedom to retaliate in full, the sooner we can finally put an end to this rebellion once and for all.

As far as pilot Arrendis’ fate after the dust has settled? Well, I would be willing to allow my Marshal Protector to keep her so long as she agreed to keep Arrendis on a very, very short leash.

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43

Mitara, you know Alizabeth is a friend of mine, and I wish her nothing but the best. But if she tried to follow that order, I would rip her implants out through her spleen and choke her medical clone with them.

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44

You seem to not quite understand how such a war would work. It’s not about taking all their space, burning all their planets and facilities and going for a total victory. The goal is to raise the stakes and make the price they’d pay for not surrendering their practice of slavery far too high to sustain. They genuinely can’t afford even total victory in a war with us, as it’d leave them so weakened that they’d fold in on themselves and die.

You think we couldn’t do that quite nicely? Bleed any forces that try to extend into our space to death, while performing a rather perpetual and continuous campaign of guerilla warfare in their own space? Of course we couldn’t brawl the State and Empire and win, but that would never have to be the goal either. Supply chain raids, hit and run on new facilities every day. Quick thrusts of a rapier then gone, rather than whatever brute force solution you’re imagining.

They’re slow. They’re bloated. They’re only ever dangerous in their brawls and as has been shown time and time again, they can be denied that when they’re defending and if they try to attack the defender’s advantage would allow them to be bled a dozen times before they reach their destination and by then we could brawl the remains.

How long do you think the Empire could maintain that without losing the will to keep paying the price for their choices?

The goal of the war wouldn’t be total domination. That’d be ridiculous. It’d be the release of all our people, and the abolishing of slavery across their Empire. That is a price someone like Catiz would be willing to pay instead of watching her Empire realize how fractured it would become and then eat itself.

Imperial Navy raids in our space? Everyone already knows they happen and the only thing that’d happen if there was any ‘official’ recognition of it is that our raids into their space would get the same treatment and it’d become a “they did it first!” “Nuh uh!” all the way back to the Day of Darkness and the State sure as hell wouldn’t start breaking their treaties over that stuff.

What the State knows all too well though is that they can’t afford to weaken themselves in such a conflict as long as they haven’t nailed down perfect treaties with the Federation first. Those two nations are still enemies, and the State leaving itself vulnerable would be idiotic of them, and they’re far from stupid.

Mitara Newelle, I can’t exactly say I have any fondness for you, but I will never stop admiring your naked and honest hostility. It’s downright refreshing to see it in a sea of appeasers on my side, and the pretenses of ‘peaceful Reclaiming’ on yours. I’m glad to see you recognize which one of Arrendis and I would be… eheh, amenable to a leash. Don’t worry about her bark, her bite doesn’t have much pressure to it. Appeasers rarely do, in the end.

I’ll return the hope for a resolution to our… conflict. It will be interesting to see the expression of the Amarr when they finally have to come to terms with the fact that some of can’t be broken, and are now beyond killing.

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45

I think the simple and effective response would be for them to reinforce and fortify the border systems of the Empire. That’s where that ‘shorter supply chain in their own space’ and ‘greater numbers and industry’ come in, you know. And no, unless you manage to disable the CONCORD systems and cynosural security, a guerilla war in space you need to access through stargates is really not all that easy.

Then they begin probing strikes of their own, while the State assists in shoring up the defenses. It’s all well and good to claim the State would sit it out, but the entire reason they have the treaty you say they’d break because they’re scared of the Fed… is because they want the Amarr to help defend against the Fed, just like we want the Fed to help defend against the Amarr.

You keep talking about how ‘fractured’ the Empire is, and yes, maybe at one point in the last few years, it was getting close to that level of fracturing… but it’s pretty clearly not at the ‘all it needs is a hammerblow to make them turn on one another’. If it did, the death of the Empress, followed up by the invasion of Khanid, would’ve given us a good look at Amarr society starting to turn on itself.

It didn’t happen. What happened was the same as you’d expect from any group when suddenly faced with a violent outside force: they pulled together. And that’s all you’d achieve. You’d shore up their fault lines for them, and then they’d never budge.

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46

:thinking:

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47

You should have learned by now from experience that cynosural jamming does damn near nothing versus guerilla warfare, and if the Tribes do go to war I suspect CONCORD is no longer an issue.

In the end though, you have drawn your line in the sand. A coward’s one, but a line nonetheless. On one side, you cower and on the other are all the people you betray and abandon. I suppose it’s too much to ask for a freeborn to consider them more than chattel for sacrifice.

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48

Yep. That’s what I’m doing alright.

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49

The old Amarrians were much more advanced than all of the slaves that they took. In my point of view if they had not captured these people as slaves the civilizations would not have advanced to a technological point as high as the Empires and they would eventually have been taken into slavery or absorbed by another more technologically advanced people.

Besides all that has happened is in the past and the Empire can hardly release millions of slaves without it having devastating effects throughout all known space.

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50

As little as I enjoy sticking my nose into another culture’s business, I have to say that I think the Empire has been hurt by slavery as much as their client races have been. Slavery is economically inefficient, but more than that, your slaves become responsible for whole sectors of your industry which then become beneath the dignity of your own people.

Industry is a great spreading tree, and it never flourishes when the roots are constrained.

Whilst the Empire’s industry is stable, it can’t be said that it is terribly innovative. Given the growth of the Republic over the last five years, it is very possible to foresee a time when it might be in the best interests of the Empire to put aside slavery - but will it be agile enough to do so, if that time comes?

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51

We’d re-established spaceflight and colonies in multiple systems. And we’re not talking about ‘oh, look, you’ve set up a colony on an asteroid in the next star system over’. Starkman Prime—or as it’s been named since you pigs murdered the entire population, Arzad II—is over 10LY from Pator. The three advantages the Amarr had were numbers, surprise, and being a race of savages attacking a peaceful people who hadn’t known war in centuries.

Screw your ‘much more advanced’ nonsense. You were cowardly, delusional, sky-fairy-worshipping monsters then, and you still are.

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52

The Amarr, aside from the Udorian wars, have only ever been successful in reclaiming those peoples in which they already had significant superiority over in terms of military strength and technological advantage. As a people, they’re about equivalent to those capsuleers who manage to successfully hotdrop and destroy a frigate with carriers and proceed to slap each other on the back and congratulate themselves on how brave they were for such an accomplishment.

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53

The fact remains that we defeated you. I am just trying to prevent the imminent conflict that could destroy the economic and military might of both the republic and the empire.

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54

‘Defeat’ implies there was a fight. Congratulations on walking into the home of an unarmed family, murdering the parents and enslaving the children, and claiming you ‘defeated’ someone. Such glory, you cover yourselves in.

You plate your ships in gold so your people will forget their empire is made of bullshite.

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I do not claim any glory from us enslaving such an inferior society. We were superior and so we took what should be ours.

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56

The strong survive while the weak fall. That is the way that our world works.

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57

Then God is irrelevant if the Empire is just playing the zero-sum game of conquest, genocide, and ethnic cleansing of other peoples.

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58

Uh … Mr. Zateki? I really hope you’re not intentionally repeating the idea of “might makes right?” It lies pretty much at the heart of the Sani Sabik heresy, so you might not only be setting yourself up as an easy target for Arrendis but also setting off alarm bells among your fellow believers right now.

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59

Sure it is. That’s why nobody cooperates, and each of us had to develop spaceflight, stargates, cloning, and pod technology all on our own in small rooms on fifty thousand different worlds.

You’re an idiot. The very existence of societies—even Amarr society—is a rejection of that model. The very fact that you’re a capsuleer—beneficiary of a technology given to the empires by the Jove—disproves it. If you want to go back farther, the simple fact that they didn’t wipe the Empire out completely after kicking your arse at Vak’Atioth means you owe your very existence to that ideal being a lie.

ETA: @Aria_Jenneth: sorry it that was a little… brief. Still waking up, getting in my first mug of Hug Juice. I’ll be more verbose later. He’s still an idiot.

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60

Are you all seriously trying to engage an obvious imperial troll in a productive dialogue?

I only have one word to say to this troll and his Amarrian superiority theory: Vak’Atioth.

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