The bombing of Cork

[Sprolf]

Does it matter how many people were killed? Seriously?

Let us say the Corsairs killed one thousand people. What's that? A naval engagement?

Thirty thousand, the size of a small town I lived in.

One million?

Ten million?

At what point do you reach "a million deaths is a statistic"?

Remember that a burning world is a symbol. People lost families in that conflagration, and they damn well want some payback.

Does it really matter if billions did not die?

What would you want to do to a nation that just bombed your street, killing three of your family members, your neighbour, your neighbour's dog, the family on the other side of your neighbour whose daughter you'd been seeing for a month, the people across the road who invited you to barbecues and knew your father (now deceased) from work in a factory.

So to say, "oh the Corsairs bombed the only planet we had, never mind, at least they only killed a few hundred thousand of us," seems a mite callous.

You misunderstand me, and state my points even further.

I still said that Cork is a viable plot point and we're not discounting it.
I also said that there couldn't have been too many people (in the galactic sense) who died on the planet.

So the reason the Mollies hate the Corsairs? ...

Because Cork has now been sown with salt.
Not necessarily because it was a massacre.



EDIT:
And, as a note, there are few things in Discovery I dislike more than Cork. It is just... senseless. Illogical.
But we can't really get rid of it now, as it's so firmly established in RP. So we have to try to deal with it and make sense of it.

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[Ayem]

Bretonia don't need a war with Kusari, but they got one.

Bretonia have a Kusari battleship in Leeds. Two KNF owned space stations.

You know what? Business is booming on BAF player ships.

Give people a person, a reason to fight, and they will fight. Give them nothing except a disgruntled attitude towards the guys in the next gold field along due to the previous generation of miners being a little mistreated and you have the great dearth of Molly activity that I experienced for a long time. There is a reason my characters have [Molly] at the end of their name. It's because when they were first created Mollies weren't a dying breed, they were a dead breed.

I give my respect to the Republic for putting some more bums in Molly ships, but I disagree with anything that will make the Corsairs any less of an enemy to the Mollies.

Perhaps that's just a hangover of the time that I started though, influenced by the current events. There was a treaty with Bretonia then, so I was given only one target. The Corsairs.

Because Cork has now been sown with salt.
Not necessarily because it was a massacre.

Kill one hundred people and try to call it anything other than a massacre. It would have been a massacre. It -would- have been a massacre. Look at the Zoner threads that deal with attacks on freeports. A few hundred people dying is a tragedy and they damn well know that.

The fact that Cork is uninhabitable is written right there in the infocard, what is there to change? Yes, it's been sown with nuclear fallout. Got that. Got that when I first went and looked at the infocard all those many months ago. That's the -point-. That's what happens when you use nukes. It is a method of warfare. What is illogical about it? I would like you to explain the leaps of logic you used to come to that conclusion.

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[Sprolf]

You misinterpret what I'm trying to say and are currently shooting wonderfully useful ammunition out into space.

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[Phaedrus Zeta]

By that same token, I could argue that Omega 49 was added was added when system standards were lower.

Yes, giving Zoners with a general neutralbertarian/anarchist philosophy a huge planet which will need some form of organised government made sense.

So did them telling the Corsairs about it, who were in vanilla considering taking over FP9 for the biodomes, loss of freeport access be damned. Who were then of course perfectly fine with Zoners having a huge fertile planet as long as they could have an alternate route to get at the mollies....

This always bothered me...
:mellow:

[Lucend]

Another option that could work is to recon the entire thing and make Cork a living, breathing planet, then have a large event where Corsairs attempt to invade and come after Cork. (Much like the RM/TBH war) We could run through all the battles and in the end, have the same situation we have now but with much -much- more interaction and history behind it. (Potentially causing some diplomacy problems)

We could even get the phantoms into it, or any other terrorist group that wants to kill a planet.

Just throwing ideas out there.

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"The thirteen saloons that had lined the one street of Seney had not left a trace. The foundations of the Mansion House hotel stuck up above the ground. The stone was chipped and split by the fire. It was all that was left of the town of Seney. Even the surface had been burned off the ground.
Nick looked at the burned-over stretch of hillside, where he had expected to find the scattered houses of the town and then walked down the railroad track to the bridge over the river. The river was there."

Osaika Moto, the Fall and Rise of a Kusari Farmer

Juan Lucendez, √ Corsair

[BaconSoda]

Sure, the Phantoms could have framed the Corsairs, using Osiris' to fool the Mollies. But I don't see the motivation. Phantom input please?

Err, mostly everyone is on vacation. In my limited knowledge, I cannot find a motive. Why the Phantoms would do something that would likely make two sides that are already played out against each other look suspiciously at them is beyond me. Risk is far greater than gain.

Onto my take on Cork:

In vanilla, the Mollys already fought the Corsairs for their gold fields (mind, gold is a valuable ship building commodity, and the Corsairs need more ships for piracy, their lifeblood), as did the BMM and IMG. Reading BMM and BAF rumors, it is said that the explosion of Corsair activity into Dublin might destroy the Mollys completely in ten or twenty years.

Now, looking at vanilla again, were the Mollys really enemies in the eyes of the Corsairs? Not ideologically, no. They were engaged in a turf war over a very precious mineral. Nothing more, nothing less. If the Mollys didn't shoot the Corsairs for being there, I'm sure the Corsairs would just look the other way when a Molly appeared.

However, to the Mollys, he Corsairs are a larger problem. They are skilled pilots and they want gold. This strikes at the very lifeblood of Molly life. What would happen if the Corsairs got a constant supply of gold in their holdings? Supply would increase at Trafalgar and demand (with the price) would decrease. It would be a disaster for Molly funding. So, the logical thing happened: the Mollys shot at the Corsairs to protect the future of their revolution.

Cork represents a very interesting opportunity for both the Mollys and the Corsairs. From the Corsairs point of view, it might come as a warning to a troublesome thorn, as a mob boss would do to a competitor. Simply a sign that says "Do not make us angry, we have the means to, and we will, mess you up." It might have been a plan to subjugate the Mollys into the Corsair empire completely, with a surrender like Hiroshima or Nagasaki. But, it certainly was not a cold blooded move against a mortal enemy.

In its current state, the Mollys can view Cork as one of two things: an idol demanding revenge or a warning to keep off the greater part of the Corsairs' toes (at least for the time being). This depends on the character's view, though. If someone is idealistic (and lets face it; no one wants to play a scumbag these days besides me), the view of Cork as a testament to the eternal menace that is the Corsairs. If a character is simply trying to live in a changing Sirius or is a coward or, well, any number of non-hero things, then the warning view might be better. Of course, it all depends on how people play their characters.

But, one might ask how Cork was bombed. Well, the answer is even simpler than one might believe. Omega-49 wasn't always common knowledge. It just seems too easy to pin Cork's current state on the rumors that the Zoners sold the Dublin Jump-Hole's coordinates to the Corsairs before the Mollys. Or, at least it seems too easy to me.

EDIT: Whether it was a nuclear holocaust of a sowing of salt is irrelevant, I think. Either way, these points would really work...

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[8:32:45 PM] Dusty Lens: Oh no, let me get that. Hello? Oh it's my grandma. She says to be roleplay.
[12:49:19 AM] Elgatodiablo: You know its nice that you have all that proof and all, Bacon... but I just don't believe you.

[ugliestmoose]

Ayem, chill out, no one's arguing that the Mollys are very pissed off (slight understatement) at the Corsairs for bombing Cork. But the question that the OP had and that some others have brought up is what do other parts of Sirius think about the bombing - and then the scale of the attacks is actually pretty important. If it was the destruction of a few mining settlements, then the rest of Sirius won't bat an eye, but if it was a nuclear holocaust with hundreds of thousands killed and the entire planet made uninhabitable, then you can be sure that the Mollys would be getting plenty of pity hugs and the Corsairs possibly losing allies (especially the Gaians).

The difference between complaining about Omega 49 and Londonderry is that Londonderry is a guard system under control of the official Molly faction (which right now is the Republic). Please don't go telling us that it cannot be changed and is forever set in stone when guard systems get updated all the time. I know it's a small sample, but judging from this thread alone I'd say that the majority of people wouldn't have a problem seeing Londonderry revised. All we want is to flesh out the infocards, anyway.

Once again thanks for all the suggestions. Doing a "rewind" and actually playing out the destruction of Cork would be cool, but enemies be warned: Londonderry is swarming with OORP barghests with inferno/MR combos:D

[Janus]

The reason I asked the question in the first place is because I have definate plans for Molly and Zoner characters, possible plans for Order and Corsair ones. I already have a Hogosha.

For the Molly, it's easy, the Corsairs are murderin' son's o' bitches. It also helps solidify why he'd deal with the Outcasts despite them being slavers and drug addicts.

The Hogosha attitude is also fairly easy, they likely just won't care. Kusarian's care about Kusari.

As to the others, there IS a difference between taking out a few colonies and wiping out a entire planet. Even if Cork remains uninhabiitable, that difference remains. In my view, it should have an impact on Zoner/Corsair and Order/Corsair relations. It hasn't, largely it seems because it's been pretty much ignored until very recently.

It also turns the Corsairs from cutthroats and pirates into genocidal maniacs, something I'm not sure the Corsairs are exactly happy about.

On a side note, and to illustrate why this matters to me.. My trader (Liberty based independent) has had run ins with both Gaians and Molly's recently. As a result, he has stopped trading with BMM.

[DAnvilFan]

Where is the photographical evidence that Cork was bombed?

We have footage of FP7 getting destroyed. We have footage of FP11 being raided by LSN Tundra and FP9 being bombed by Ghost.Ships. But what, no proof of Cork getting nuked aside from a blimp that is mentioned in the Molly's Guard System?

Which Corsair faction did this? Was it OPG, HAF, TBH, Benitez, the Voss? Who among the players actually initiated this event? You can point at Ghost.Ship#11 and say that he bombed FP9. You can't point at a single Corsair player and claim this about Cork.

Some chap making Discovery updates decided to create Corsairs as mass murderers and world destroyers and that's it? Nobody bothered to actually ask how the Corsairs feel about it. And now we are forced to swallow this as an RP event?


The bombing of Cork needs to be re-written as Molly propaganda. Nothing outside that planet mentions a single thing about the bombing and the issue was never brought up by anyone until a week ago. Cork is the only planet in Sirius to be completely nuked and we're to believe that not a single source mentions this anywhere? If this event occured 100 years ago, that's fine. You could pull it off as history. But the bombing is listed as happening 15 years ago, which means that most of the Corsair characters being Roleplayed right now were alive at the time. Now all of these players are forced to deal with a barely mentioned, but astronomically severe event that labels them as a world destroying, mass murdering people. With the only others being Nomads.