To those who say that the PanO "Steel Wall" would cause outright and total war between PanO and Yu Jing how do you explain the fact that the Sphere have not decented into total war following these incidents. A Nomad team attacks a company facility located in PanO territory that supplies the PanO military (Operation Icestorm) A HaqqIslam team attacks a Yu Jing Civilian orbital through the Food court no less!! (Operation Red Veil) (Bonus: the real target was the books of a PanO firm) The fighting on Flamia Island do somehow not spill over into the rest of the Sphere even though in results in the occupation of Nomad and Yu Jing territories. (Flamestrike) The fighting by the Wotan wromhole that results in the near destruction of two ships and a shipyard (Nomad and Yu Jing assets) and the across the board attack from all faction against all other faction. (Strikezone: Wotan) If all those incidents do not lead to total war why should the PanO "Steel Wall"? especially if it was clearly not in Yu Jings interests to start have to fight both the Insurrectionists and PanO .
@berynius 1. Those are very small scale deniable operations. Taking animé elements into account, they're reasonable. The steel wall by comparison was shooting down soldiers in their thousands. It's about scale. It's about when you can say "no-uh we didn't do it, your intel is wrong". 2. Who the fuck knows? There's a difference between treading close to the limits of what's believable and completely flunking international politics and border agreements since from the dawn of civilization.
Op Icestorm is a team of 6 troops total. Deniable, because it's so small. "Vandalism." Even if you increase it to the 9 troops of Beyond Icestorm, it's still "vandalism." Op Red Veil is another team of 6 troops. Deniable, because it's so small. "random theft" or even "a competing corporation stealing data" (this is a cyberpunk setting, corporations acting like nations is totally possible) Again, even if you increase the total troops involved to the 9 of Beyond Red Veil, it's still a case of "random theft" or "a competing corporation stealing data" Read up on the BRIXMIS (and other intelligence-gathering missions) during the Cold War. There were fatalities in those missions. For that matter, the U2 shootdown in 1960 didn't escalate beyond "Hey, stop spying on us" and a prisoner exchange. Flamestrike is a bit tougher to deny, but it could be written off as "gangs fighting over territory", since no individual encounter was over 40 individuals in total. Wotan is even simpler. "That was the Combined Army" Everyone knows that the Combined Army is operating in and around Paradiso, so any military operations can be blamed on the CA. "Any remains of another nation's servicemembers are strictly an alien attempt to drive a wedge between members of the Human Sphere." But the Steel Wall on Earth? There's no Combined Army to blame. You're talking about tens of thousands of troops involved, and probably 2000 casualties. And direct tracks for PanO installations, ships, stations, and/or aircraft firing on YJ troops while said troops are inside YJ territory. That's major league act of war, the likes of which the US and USSR never even approached during the Cold War.
I wonder what would have happened if USA would have gone and deployed their air force, army and navy in Chechnya while Russia was "suffocating terrorism"... and Chechnya is an independent territory And judging by the reports of people having the book, let's all welcome our new Mary Sue overlords, the killer anime waifu samurai in space. Because it wasn't enough to give PanO Space Marines apparently.
What's new about that though? They have always been the samurai/ninja/anime sectorial from the get go, only difference is they are now their own faction instead of part of Yu Jing....
Dunno, the strong Mary Sue stink i suppose, and the fact they are omgsocool at the expense of other faction
It will depend on how they are treated from now on both fluff and gamewise. They got their big release and will have stuff to come for sure but if they keeping pulling of big ops for free and digging up super high tech shit out back its gonna be a problem. If.
Once the Steel Wall gets into the picture, he has to change his mind. We would need to know how much travel time adds going through wormholes and maybe what was the distance between the 2 black holes in the Earth-YJ route... but in the end the comms delay would be "send data to dispatch boat on Eath's jump point, Dispatch Boat goes to YJ's jump point"... I doubt O-12 has control of jump points, and I doubt PanO, if it has defense installations on Earth's jump point, will try to shoot or impede the passage of a YJ's diplomatic mailboat (because it's very likely YJ has installations there aswell, that jump point goes to their system, even if there is a small stop in the middle. Anyway, once Japan is recognized by the O-12 as an independent nation, the only available avenue is political maneuvering. Can't "reannex", since it's an O-12 recognized nation. As it's been noted, "grab the bodies, dissect the Cubes". I doubt ALL of them had "suicide pills" in their Cubes... The Cube fluff is... inconsistent, I think it was added because it was nice, modern and all that, but it's more an RPG mechanic that something that really works on the long run... I mean, Zoe (from Bakunin) has a Cube, and a body that breaks down (or something like that), one would think that hopping to another body would resolve that, and given enough records, it would also give her a new identity to avoid those Tunguskan mafia... Cubes/Cortical Stacks opens a lot of options & plots, but also closes tons of traditional plots... The human sphere is at war against the CA, and cannot have an internal war because the external enemy would gain enough of a foothold to conquer it all with much more ease and speed. Allowing Black Ops to go on, but taking note of those and presenting the proof in backroom deals. Why risk when you can win something in exchange from what they attempted to get from you? More or less, cube fluff is not consistent or defined enough... After all, it seems like the only way to stop a cube is to physically remove it from the body (that's the way the Teutons do it to face the CA), but also there is no backup unless you are Aleph and if the cube is lost you are as good as dead (can't understand why, really) unless you are the Fiday character, who carries no Cube but leaves a copy of himself on Alamut before going out on a mission... but the Paradiso N2 campaign rules would list him as dead if he fails the only roll he is allowed xD
I was thinking much longer term, Sun as strategic genius with a plan. It is certainly trying to read a lot between the lines. Once PanOceania intervenes directly, the internal war cannot be resolved without starting the external war. From this a number of things cascade: Japan succeeds at declaring independence, O-12 grants them nation status. But does this defeat Sun's scheme? Not necessarily! That O-12 recognition is as much an external element as PanO willingness to institute a blockade. That is a front in the political war. The maneuver there is to push O-12 politically to withdraw recognition of Japan, or find legal means to find the original recognition of Japan as a nation invalid. Once invalidated Yu Jing troops return to their breakaway territories, defeat the now-illegitimate Japanese government, and the internal war is resolved. The events of Uprising seem immediate and resolved to us as readers, but thats because none of us will be alive in a hundred years, our timescales are small. Next year or next decade or a mortal lifetime from now, to essentially-immortal Recreation Sun and the essentially-immortal Party officials he's speaking to, remains a valid length of time for a 'temporary' withdrawal.
Cubes can be removed and one can get an "old way" backup if needed it is just the information in the cube or back up will be outdated, I do not know if cubes can be encrypted they definitely can be destroyed, maybe the operatives have a small explosive charge in their cube that detonates if tampered?
Well, the problem is that the InfinityVerse has moved 2 years or so since its commercialization 12 years or so ago, I think, so speculating something that might happen 10-20 years in the future of the timelime... Let's roll with it anyway. Why should Yu Jing want to reabsorb those territories and that population? Firsts, we need to see if O-12 and PanO or Japan will be pushed to grant war reparations to YJ, since they went in the middle, demanded an outcome, and start a big precedent that might not be that good of an idea... Add to that how YJ annexed Japan the first time around, by buying their national debt... Certainly the bureaucracy will take its time to determine if, legally, YJ needs to receive money for all of its losses, not only of land, but of infrastructure and military assets that PanO shot at. The military assets are easy to give value, and should be payed by PanO if they shot without O-12 backing (or by O-12 if they claimed retroactive authorization) and will be quite "irrelevant" in the amounts we are talking about. The land, space stations, and infrastructure lost by YJ to the Japanese nation are something else entirely, since their position, resources that can be exploited, and investment with return expectations should be taken into account. But the point is not exactly the final value, but... If Yu Jing gets an economic compensation for those losses, why grab again the Japanese in the future? The "United Asian" idea is lost. The competition with PanO would have been going for years, without the Japanese adding. The Japanese have already proven to be more trouble than they are worth. The Kuge have shown that, if they don't have all of their power, they will plot and bicker until they get whatever they want... even if they end up losing more than they had before. Essentially, no human faction should want to annex Japan anymore, no matter the offer the Kuge do in exchange. And there is little incentive to do so by force, since if they indoctrinated so heavily their people while under YJ's control, how much heavier will that get after years of unsupervised control by the "evil" kuge? So, in the end, the Japanese are alone when it comes to swim or drown. They might be used as allies, but I doubt anybody trust them politically.
"Outdated" backup as in? How long does it itake? In Altered Carbon we see the owner of PsychaSec had a 5 days cycle of backup... And while you might argue that once a year is ok for normal people, let's talk military... And say "before starting the mission", at least for normal situations (I doubt the JSA had a good backup system until the end of the Uprising, and we should assume they managed to blow up the Backup installation where their cubes were in YJ). As for the encryption, I would say that it would be a risk because if you lose the decryption key, that person is effectively dead forever. In EP (and Takeshi Kovacs Book 2), backups are like programs, that can be running or not, and the only way to access their data is to run them and do an old-fashioned interrogation. Finally, for the blowing charge, a more useful measure is to write a subroutine that lets the mind to delete itself regardless of the system it's "running" in if the mind so decides, but endless copying could lead to isolate and lock that subroutine so it cannot do it anymore... after which is a matter of running the old fashioned "run the emulation at top speed and see if the mind gets bored enough to want to talk". Mind you, "tampered with" can't really be wired, since a Cube is a simple device: it's there, copies everything from the mind, and it's easy to "extract" (if you don't mind butchering the neck of a corpse), then you slot it into a checking unit, it runs, and everything happens afterwards (ID, debriefing, and resleeving if relevant). I'd say the best hope a captured JSA cube has is for his/her intelligence to become outdated before they break and talk, and that O-12 forced a "cube exchange" between the nations (not that they won't keep copies of those cubes... damn black ops! XD).
Diomedes backs himself up before each mission the old way, same with Hussein, others we do not really know, Knauf had a back up of him made when he quit, the Monique Gailard seems to had at least a few days or even weeks old back up, others less important people seem to not have a hard back up, only their actual cube. The hard back up technology seems to be both old and problematic (painful? takes time? cannot be updated?) we do not know what encryption is used in Cubes, if any at least for normal people, they have been used to extract information and missions for example against Monique have been with sole purpose to destroy the Cube after killing the subject.
The Kuge don't survive a re-annexation, there would be no second chances there. For sure, payment of compensation might encourage Yu Jing to 'write off' Japan, and I'd be interested if there was anything pointing to that in the Uprising book since it could shed a different light on the matter, but one thread that seems to DEFINITELY be in the book is that Yu Jing is proud, for better or for worse (from the sounds of things just for worse in this case). I don't think that the 'Pan-Asian' ideal at the core of the faction's identity is dead at all, that is a material reality in the moment but not at all representing an ideological or cultural shift. Japanese independence represents a blow to Yu Jing's unity, its pride, and its ideals. Reclaiming the wayward state will persist as a goal for those reasons, the perceived gains in those areas well worth the cost of re-suppressing the population.
Well on top of Yu Jing, everybody else has yet to claim the things promised, Japan has a lot to pay. One of the small, post uprising fluff, I like from the book is Sun Tze strategic analysis of the Japanese navy, they have too many small dispersed territories and too small navy to defend them, on top of that, they do not have the construction facilities to repair or construct new vessels and he makes it top priority they remain that way.
Yeah...basically that part was all about the next Campaign I reckon...everybody and their mother will try to get the Kurage Station....guess who'll get it...PanO or Ariadna :-P unless they somehow give fluff reasons why anyone would NOT want to grab Kurage station for themselves and instead support the Japanese there...
Also Yu JIng will lose and the JSA will obtain shipyards. Or something like that. And the CA will be defeated on the sidelines with noone paying attention to them because despite last campaign's improvements they don't have the numbers to do anything.
I think the drawback is that it's bulky. And Knauf's backup was the mandatory one they made every once in a while (infiltrated operatives do not get to trust their Cube will be recovered, so...). Cubes don't need to be encrypted, just to be so densely packed and filled with interconnections that it could take years to datamine anything concrete, opposed to "just run the cube in a simspace and interrogate the dude". We know that copying tech exists, btw, the Tohaa Diplomat sent several copies of its cube to provide reports to Tohaa!Command in one of the fluff narrations, can't remember if it was Dire Foes or what... some doors opens there. Except winning the ITS Challenge XD
Cubes can indeed be copied, but most seem to not have the resources to do it, others do it the old way so they do not leave a cube behind.
