Isn't the base smack dab in the middle of Novy Cimmeria, which was apparently controlled by Yu Jing (up until Uprising at least)? A little out of reach for Ariadnan agents perhaps, but am surprised the StateEmpire didn't make use of it or clear it. Perhaps there was an agreement at the end of the Commerical Conflicts where some bases were to be abandoned and left off-limits, and PanOceania decided they could violate under cover of the Japanese secession in the area.
I think it was more to show there were cooler heads, but they did not prevail. Why this happened is still unexplained, but there are a few possibilities, the most straight forward would be Shasvastii infiltrators disrupting and circumventing the command structure to create chaos within the Human Sphere. Another is that the Emperor of Yu Jing felt threatened, (or infuriated), by the rise of the Japanese Emperor, and in his effort to capture or kill him, ignored the very sensible advice of Sun Tse. Aleph was actually not endorsing the uprising, but did not want to get involved. This is probably my favorite excerpt in the book. Saladin and Sun Tse both appear to be using unauthorized memory storage, and backups to shield their private thoughts from Aleph, and do not seem to fully trust its motivations. However, both seem unsure if their mistrust is actually programmed into them for some unknown reason, and if they are still just cogs in the massive machine. Ariadna has not explored, let alone occupied all of Dawn. Pan-O re-occupied bases it had built on unoccupied islands, and I do not think they would have had trouble keeping at least a few secret from Ariadna, (something about having much better technology...). The re-occupation of these bases happened in the last days of the uprising as well, so Ariadna has not had much time to react. I expect it will be a point of contention in the next campaign.
That's called a de-confliction line today, originally used to keep Aircraft out of Artillery fire zones. Artillery fire doesn't care that there's an airplane in the way, and airplanes don't like 50+lb artillery shells landing on them. These days, they seem to be used to prevent American and Russian planes from shooting at each other (or locking radars onto each other).
Blowing up an entire civilian area would have been even more of a war crime than just unleashing Antipodes and Dog Warriors in one.
I mean if there was a fuel leak and the first fusi of the gunship was chuffing a durry what can you do?
It wasn't secret, because Ariadna complained about it. But apparently Ariadna doesn't take umbrage with PanO re-militarizing in what's basically a demilitarized zone... everyone except PanO has to act like cowardly idiots, apparently, sans Yu Jing who acts like overconfident idiots, for this hackneyed fluff to work.
Haqq were mostly lawful right? If they were hassassinating Yuchinos left and right I didn't catch it yet.
That actually suggest that the Old Man in the Mountain (an AI, it has been speculated...) might have suffered a buffer overload, like Aleph, when facing the sheer stupidity in the Human Sphere; and probably was too busy trying to locate the CA plants, like Aleph... Frankly, I hope all this Uprising serendipity can be pinned on the CA (meaning they supported and helped things to reach this point, but where NOT the sole architects, neither the sole helpers, neither the instigators), but that "it was CA plants" does not become the recurring theme. I mean, we already have the "A wizard did it" meme, we don't need the "A Speculo moved it along" new one...
In the dire foes its implies yasbir does a bunch of killing to help the uprising along including yu king agents looking for the reporter with the info about blowing up that nomad boat and all the JSA in Wotan. Red veil was basically a cover to get the stringer off the orbital even if it had its own purpose.
So what's Xi Zhuang do then in that section? Slip on a Kuge banana peel and knock himself out against a steel wall, only to wake up in prison?
The reoccupation was not secret. There is not mention of Ariadna knowing the location of the bases before hand. There is also no indication the state of the military bases upon Pan-O's return, but I do not imagine it would take them long to rebuild or repair a former installation.
This is indirectly hinted at in Outrage. Not that any of the events in Outrage have anything to do with the Uprising, but that there may be multiple different plots at play behind any given operation. Spoiler: For those that haven't yet read the manga and don't plan to: PanO needs to clean up their double-sleeved agent problem, which is massively illegal. YJ is using evidence of an operation in YJ territory on Svalarheima (that just so happens to be PanO's clean-up op) for leverage in O12 sessions. Druze are doing their usual criminal things. Eeeewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww. [ /with feeling ] Where's the :puke: emoji? The more I hear about the fluff the less I like it. (Cue Darth Vader 'I have altered the fluff. Pray I do not alter it any further.') How the crap would Ariadna NOT know the location of a former PanO installation that was abandoned due to the treaty at the end of the Commercial Conflicts? Air travel ain't stealthy unless it absolutely has to be (the design compromises are severe, and really jack up the price of the beast, compare B1B with B2 prices), and orbital entry/reentry is utterly impossible to conceal (it's the kind of thing that can be detected from about the orbit of Jupiter in our system with 1970s tech). If I were Ariadna, I'd take this up with PanO to patch things up with YJ. You mention that you're wanting to kick PanO in the short-and-curlies, and would consider looking the other way while YJ stomped the JSA at Kurage Station. (If you think the various Intelligence Agencies don't talk to each other, you're not paying attention. There is always one 'official' agent at every Embassy and Consulate expressly for those 'official contact' issues. Then there's a whole bunch of 'Non-Official Cover' agents doing the fieldwork.)
I was quietly waiting for somebody to either spend 5 minutes on Google or with a basic knowledge of military history to respond to that little reference. But given the rest of Uprising I don't feel I'm far off. I nearly posted a certain photo of a South Vietnamese officer holding his pistol up to the head of a Viet Kong officer with the caption "new character image for Xi Zhuang", but I thought that might be going too far... so I deleted it from the post. Still not sure if it was too far, or basically spot on with the overall tone. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On the issue of the "stealth bases", this is a universe with TO camo systems. I think we can safely assume stealth tech has gone further. So it's not entirely unreasonable to think PanO might have been able to set up a secret base or two well outside Ariadna on Dawn.
