' Wrote:Generally speaking, you are right. But that story has weak spots, making it less plausible.
Every active infrastructure requires supply/maintaining and generates some kind of activity around it. Which is hard to pass unnoticed. Espcecially is it's sized to build a giant sleeper ship. Moreover, is the Coalition managed to to not only find out about but also infiltrate the sleeper ships (AFAIR it was them who sabotaged the Spanish ship), how come that the Alliance did not even notice the whole construction of French ship? Well, the Coalition didn't noticed it too, since they would have destroyed it (France had no fleet to defend it, right?). That level of successfull top-secretness seems to be hard to believe in.
Yeah, I'll agree it's shaky. Suppose that the Alliance didn't much care, the higher ups weren't paying attention (they did have bigger problems, after all), or France was really good about making it look like they were building their fleet back up. As for the Coalition not noticing, what's to say they didn't? If they constructed it behind the lines, it would be guarded by the remaining Alliance fleet even if the rest of the Alliance had no idea. Still, yes, it's shaky. If they held off on the bigger parts of it until after the first five sleeper ships went off, then it fits a little better, though.
Quote:With no competition there is no progress, especially with no competition (or rather fighting) here and now (think of pre-Columbian South America). And a lot of resorces usually leads to wasting them (think of gas mileage of an average car vs gas prices changes).
You're absolutely right, necessity is the mother of invention. However, you can spur good capitalist spirit without having to burn resources racing against other major powers, especially given something you thought of:
Quote:On the other hand, since the Gallia is a monarchy, they could employ serious long-term planning.
They've been planning this for centuries. Technological incentives, nationalist fervor, and matching themselves up with what their unknowing partners in Sirius were coming up with? There's competition and capitalist drive, just not the kind that drains your budget to keep up appearances for your neighbors.
Quote:Now there is even something less plausible (both in cases of Rheinland and Gallia). Navy, - or generally speaking any army - can't be just accumulated over time. Just having a ship operational and crew trained cost a lot. Both money and resources. So if the Gallia have fleet larger than other Houses combined, it means they have larger industry, more resources and bigger population than all of the Houses combined. Just for the purpose of maintaining it.
They don't have a larger navy than all the houses combined- they have a navy substantially larger than the forces of any given house would normally have, and the Sirian fleets are also depleted from two vicious space wars in as many decades. (Yes, Gallia has been fighting too- I'll get back to that.) Kusari lost almost everything in the Nomad War, what they have deployed against Bretonia is essentially everything they've rebuilt in the past twenty years (ironically, their ships were rebuilt using Bretonian resources- which is why Bretonia's fleet didn't explode after the Nomad War). Rheinland burned up the vast majority of their resources building what they used in the Nomad War, and lost a lot of the ships to the Nomads (both those directly controlled and the ones destroyed by those directly controlled in the aftermath), as well as to Kusari- you don't obliterate a house navy without losses, even if you are pulling out all the stops. Liberty kept most of their fleet, and as such are the best equipped to oppose Gallia right now- but even they are fighting a war against Rheinland, and running into similar problems as Rheinland did in the Eighty Years War.
Speaking of the Eighty Years War, that's what I was referring to with the Rheinland Empire. By the time that war started, Rheinland was believed to have a fleet capable of crushing any other house (not all of them combined, but any one of them), even by outside analysts. This is in vanilla lore. In invading Sigma-13, they didn't fight any real pitched battles- the GMG let them take the system, then picked at them across the next eighty years until their forces, once vastly outnumbering any other house, consisted of a handful of battlegroups, all but one of which were destroyed in the Battle of Yanagi Cloud. Imagine a war like Vietnam, but rather than it ending when the U.S. couldn't maintain popular support, have it end when the U.S. runs out of tanks. That might help you get an idea of how big the Rheinland Imperial Navy was.
With that in mind, the Gallic Monarchy has a lot in common with the old Rheinland Empire. Nearly limitless resources (which Rheinland has since exhausted), efficient if brutal government, several centuries. Gallia also has more planets, thus more living space, thus more people, thus more infrastructure. They're bigger than any house, that much is obvious. Not bigger than all of them combined- but bigger than any given house, roughly on par with any two combined, I'd say.
Now, I said the other house fleets have been depleted due to war, but Gallia has been fighting for these past few decades too. There's a very big difference, though- the wars in Sirius have been almost entirely fought in space, with ships. When you fight in space, you lose ships, you lose a lot of supplies. The Second Gallic War, however, has been mostly fought on land, in some cases with little more than rocks and mining equipmnt. The Gallic Army and the people of Marne (and Quillan) have taken the brunt of it, with space battles of consequence being few and far between for the majority of the war. Yes, a lot of people have died- but there's a lot of people in Gallia. While the Gallic Army is bruised and battered, the Royal Navy is just getting warmed up.
Quote:And this is the part requiring suspension of disbelief most: the isolation not working both ways. During hundreds of years Gallia was able to gather vital intell about the Houses - more than enough to keep their engineering evolving. But the Houses did not even had a clue about existance of the Gallia. A lot of people found this unbelivable (yeah, I've read almost whole topic). I guess most of them hope to find at least unexpected _and_ brilliant explication behind this. (I mean, sth more than "oh, Gallia knew about the other Houses from the beginning so it was easy for them" or - Cthulhu forbid - "Gallia had better counter-intelligence"). Explaining it is a challenge.
The people of Sirius also have no idea that their most important technology comes from Ageira scientists decoding and translating data crystals bequeathed to them by the Daam-K'Vosh. I haven't put aside the possibility that the houses knew, or were at least suspicious, that there was an outside force using the Junkers. However, more than simple paranoia, there's not much to be done about it- your average Junker wasn't kept in the loop, unless you interrogated a leader you wouldn't have anything to go off- and even then, you only have what they say. Even if some people in the houses suspected (or knew), who's going to believe them? Following a Junker group back through the minefields would be nigh impossible without a dedicated effort, and as you're well aware: at first glance, it does seem ridiculous, doesn't it? :P
Quote:And finding the explanation(s) could be extremely rewarding for players, if only what they find is not Applied Phlebotinum, which is what we fear of.
As infocard lead on the dev team, I do what I can to make sure the text in the game is consistent and doesn't force people to swallow their logic. There's a lot of relics from older days that need cleaning, but trust me- we're working on it. I enjoy finding people both reasonable and skeptical- if I can't convince people like you, then chances are something's wrong.
