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Treason & Uprising

Discussion in 'Access Guide to the Human Sphere' started by eciu, Apr 27, 2018.

  1. eciu

    eciu Easter worshiper

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    Soooo .....

    Why nobody had yet fully delved into speculation that whole Uprising is a CA scheme (hello speculos) to undermine Human Sphere forces/defences and internal power in order to prep some bigger intrusion/offensive on HS front (Paradiso/Acon going full Cadia or being captured)

    (tldr; all of japanesee nobility are speculos in disguise)
     
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  2. Stiopa

    Stiopa Trust The Fuckhead

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    I just had to:

    [​IMG]

    Also, the basic idea is sound, though I don't know if CB will want to push the story in this direction (full-scale invasion, I mean).

    I'd actually like that. It would open very interesting possibilities, like the idea someone had some time ago about joined PanO/YJ Defence Force, defending Svalarheima against CA.
     
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  3. eciu

    eciu Easter worshiper

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    I'm almost 100% sure that Friendly Fire would kill more humans than CA.

    You know, old habits die hard.
     
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  4. xagroth

    xagroth Mournful Echo

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    It's not hard to "delve deep" into the concept: CA agents impersonating key personnel on the chain of command, falsifying orders and signatures, and making sure that all gets out.

    Heck, they can even say that Psychocrane's rant was never done in front of a Warcor, but another I-SS agent who was, in truth, a speculo recording it for further distribution.
     
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  5. sarf

    sarf Well-Known Member

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    Or warcor was paid by CA agent to retrieve and display biased point of view on whole story.
     
  6. Section9

    Section9 Well-Known Member

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    The problem is that there are far too many Agents involved in the genocide for all of them to be Shas infiltrators. And that's just on Shentang/Kuraimori.

    Because believe me, I'd much rather this be godsdamned Shasvasti than humans.
     
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  7. precinctomega

    precinctomega Member

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    It's Hanlon's Razor, though, isn't it? Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.

    Sent from my CUBOT CHEETAH 2 using Tapatalk
     
  8. Hecaton

    Hecaton EI Anger Translator

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    It would be the best save for the quality of the fluff/writing direction, from what I can see. It would be a bit of an asspull, though, since B4ckd00r wasn't resolved until Uprising was already finalized.
     
  9. Stiopa

    Stiopa Trust The Fuckhead

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    They don't really need to be that widespread. A single impersonator here and there, and you can really mess up the whole chain of command with just a few troops. I think there was an old fluff piece about Oyama killing a Speculo that infiltrated a commanding officer's staff. There's no reason to believe there aren't a few of them working to get the pressure up on both sides.
     
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  10. Shiwen

    Shiwen Commissar, Yu Jing Political Work Department

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    Agreed, and it goes even further than the military command chain. The unfortunate thing about humans is that we can be shortsighted and brutal and awful, and for a well-placed Shasvastii agent nothing needs to be invented whole-cloth, its a matter of making sure the commander sees positive performance reviews for the racist and the hothead so they get promoted while the compassionate or reasonable candidates are implicated in a scandal or die in a car accident, of ensuring certain eyes see certain information that has been phrased in certain ways to play on their personal and cultural biases so they make poor decisions.

    Something like the Chinese-Japanese tensions at the heart of Uprising are a particular weak point, where minor things like the phrasing of a memo, carefully engineered, could ripple out and have dire consequences.
     
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  11. Eldritch

    Eldritch Well-Known Member

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    If there were enough shape changing infiltrators to pull off something as elaborate and large as Uprising...

    ...then why didn't they just win instead?

    Oh you can perfectly manipulate every single major faction of humanity across multiple planets at the highest levels without any detection much less identification into elaborate mass murder that undermines their power to work together and resist to an external existential common threat.

    You can't use that same influence to even oh I don't know conquer a planet or two? Any more directly useful application of the abilities and agents required to pull that off? Anything?

    If I were the CA and was behind this I'd fire the whole shape shifting armada behind Uprising for blatantly assing about instead of just ending it already.
     
  12. Section9

    Section9 Well-Known Member

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    Oh, hey, PO! You probably know me better as Lion in the Stars from other fora.

    The problem is that this wasn't a single isolated event, or even a battle-losing single screwup.

    This was a number of screwups, at which point the mantra goes to Fleming's Rule: "Once is an accident, twice is coincidence, and three times is enemy action."


    Very much this.
     
  13. Stiopa

    Stiopa Trust The Fuckhead

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    I don't think we're on the same page here. We're not saying that the whole Uprising, Human Sphere reaction included, was instigated by Speculo agents.

    What we have is a theory that CA found an existing weak point and used a few impersonators to make a bad situation worse. An atrocity here, an overreaction there, a false report passed to the higher ups, an unoficcial order from "superior officer" that they won't look too hard at what their subordinates are doing to contain the situation... the equivalent of prodding both sides with a sharp stick and vanishing to let them sort it out between themselves. Other factions simply jumped on the whole train wreck for their own reasons, as expected. Perfect example of "divide and conquer".

    Trying to openly conquer territory, no matter whose, would have the opposite effect and make the Human Sphere more united in the face of an increasing CA threat. Also, there's no need for this. Current CA detachment is a vanguard, not the main invasion force. It keeps humans off-balance, gathers intelligence, and mounts operations to destabilize the Human Sphere, so the main force will have an easier time dealing with it. EI has time.

    Not to mention that we have no idea how many Speculos are available to Paradiso outpost. 50? 60? 100? I'm pretty sure there's not enough of them to throw them all into a single risky operation. You don't win wars by keeping all your eggs in one basket. Pun intended.
     
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  14. Eldritch

    Eldritch Well-Known Member

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    No, we aren't.

    Because you describe and require an utterly fatally compromised command structure in order to create the situation you describe.

    You require an entire population of Japanese ethnicity to co-operate with a really really bad plan.

    You require an entire vast intelligence agency to be completely blinded on ALL fronts across multiple planets.

    You require an entire vast military to be completely compromised on all fronts across multiple planets.

    You require basically all internal policing in a vast multi planet nation to be compromised.

    You require multiple media agencies and civilian communications networks across multiple planets to be compromised.

    A vast state apparatus that censors and controls these media and communications networks also needs to be compromised, across multiple planets.

    You require every other human faction in the game to willingly, eagerly and without a second thought or consequence to put "jumping in for their own reasons" ahead of the strength, unity and therefore survival of the very human sphere itself. Suggesting all of them need to be rather substantially compromised at very high levels.

    You require the O-12 and basically the entire international diplomacy apparatus to be utterly compromised to make decisions against humanity and their own nation's best interests.

    All those compromised groups have to happen without being noticed. You probably need to infiltrate basically any and all organizations remaining to pull THAT off.

    There is a point at which an author hands a group or multiple groups an idiot ball so vast that just fluffing your hair up, waving your hands and saying "Aliens!" isn't going to make the situation any more or less ridiculously destructive to suspension of disbelief.
     
    #14 Eldritch, Apr 28, 2018
    Last edited: Apr 28, 2018
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  15. Mahtamori

    Mahtamori Well-Known Member

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    Nah Aleph did it. They saw a weakness and wanted it excised before CA could take advantage of it at a critical moment, but didn't like what the Kuge represented so didn't want them to win more than sufficient to be a useful tool.
    *paranoia intensifies*
     
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  16. Stiopa

    Stiopa Trust The Fuckhead

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    Not really. You'd be surprised how much can be done by exploiting habits and assumptions of people in any organized structure, military or not, without even adding Speculo abilities and experience to the mix.

    Not really. You only need to create a situation in which going with a bad plan will be their best bet.

    Which is what we all agree happened. IS failed pretty badly at their job (and it can actually be understandable if there were one or two Speculos in a good position to supress or misfile a few reports that might otherwise raise some red flags).

    Not really. Create a big enough mess and media will jump on it with no steering required. State control has its limits, and people in charge of it can be misled or simply mistaken as to what is the best course of action.

    Not really, given that the defining trait of human policies both in Human Sphere and real life is "grab all you can and fuck the other guy". Strength? Unity? Who cares, if you can get your own nation's game a couple of points ahead of your rivals.

    Not really. You only need to put them in a situation with bad or worse choices. And this not accounting for policy makers being simply able to make mistakes. There's enough real life examples to discuss them for weeks.

    The bottom line is that you're not accounting for human stupidity, shortsightedness, greed, institutional inertia, nationalism, and a legion of other flaws that make people in charge make stupid decisions.

    Again, this doesn't have to be a big scale operation as much as an exercise in efficiency. You identify a situation where a slight prod will make the wheels come off, and you supply that prod. At this point people act on their own, and either you've predicted their behaviour correctly, or you didn't (and you can isolate key decision points beforehand and make sure there are contingency plans in place).

    Being a paranoid doesn't mean they're not trying to get you.
     
    #16 Stiopa, Apr 28, 2018
    Last edited: Apr 28, 2018
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  17. Varsovian

    Varsovian Well-Known Member

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    Warren Ellis?

    Anyway, I do agree with what you said: people can be really fallible and prone to bad decisions. So, a few alien infiltrators subtly influencing things by the ways of command structure and bureaucracy, could absolutely cause trouble.
     
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  18. Solar

    Solar Well-Known Member

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    Sometimes, the maddest shit happens that seems to make no sense, and multiple failures cascade into a situation where they can't stop it.

    The O-12 is crippled in this situation because it needs to maintain the careful balance that allows YJ forces to continue to provide security to the Paradiso fronts and Acheron blockade. Imagine if, during WWII, Stalin had been forced to launch a brutal repression campaign against, say, what used to be Kazakhstan, failed to lock it down, and Kazakhstan became fiercely independent. If you're Churchill and FDR, are you going to kick off? No, the Red Army is vital to the European theatre and also keeping IJA resources allocated to their own western theatre. You keep your mouth shut, even though it's awful, because realpolitik means you have to.

    The O-12 probably thought "this is awful, we have to do something" before strategic analysts and high level decision makers said "but we have no good options," and also the situation is constantly changing and evolving. You're also talking about stuff happening on YJ territory. Are you going to launch O-12 backed operations, violating their sovereignty? Only PanO has the resources to do that, and then you're kicking off another NeoColonial War while the Paradiso War is ongoing, involving troops from all sides.

    No. The Sphere is in a delicate situation, where further destabilisation could be catastrophic. Everyone else stands by and lets it happen, because they need to ensure that whatever happens, what comes out can continue to fulfill its international obligations in a time where those obligations are "help us fight against an implacable alien menace promising subjugation or annihilation of interstellar humanity"
     
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  19. Shiwen

    Shiwen Commissar, Yu Jing Political Work Department

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    (bad form reposting one's own terrible meme attempt, but)

    It doesn't take ten thousand or even ten Shasvastii infiltrators to get Uprising. it only takes one:

    YANJING FILE TOP SECRET.png


    More seriously, a lot of people are on a lot of different pages on this. Personally I see a place for Speculo agents in the events of Uprising. That doesn't fix Uprising in of itself, doesn't explain away all its flaws, any more than being able to trace all the overt calls for war crimes to the Yuandun Division fixes ISS incompetence at counterinsurgency. You can stack Shasvastii, Yuandun-are-atypically-bad, all-the-fluff-is-from-biased-media, Yu-Jing-about-to-consolidate-Noviy-Cimmeria-and-produce-more-Teseum-than-Ariadna, Kuge-secretly-reconstructed-Tokyo-out-of-manekinekos-and-beckoned-all-the-good-luck-in-the-Sphere and you still wont be able to explain away all of Uprising's issues.

    Others probably disagree vehemently, but the sort of discussion in this thread, to me, is going to end up being less about constructing a narrative where the Shas Did It All, and more looking at what role CA infiltrators could have played, and how effective they'd have been.

    On that note, if I were told I was limited to a single Shasvastii agent, and thus had to pick out a single point in all this where a Shasvastii could be at play with the most impact, it'd probably not be a spy in StateEmpire high command rephrasing memos to be racist (that's agent #2). The whole Japanese secession is actually channeled through a single point already, isn't it? A man so unremarkable he was able to somehow slip by unnoticed, who had the trust of the Kuge and negotiated with all the foreign powers and all the mercenary companies...

    Shapsehifting and ships with cloaking devices would go a long way (if maybe not ALL the way) to explaining this particular seeming-impossibility, how such an agent might accomplish these tasks under the nose of the ISS and Yanjing. To the Japanese, he is their trusted operative, personally carrying out their tasks, and of course his advice that they must launch their rebellion immediately was excellent! To the various powers, and to the intelligence agencies looking for patterns, he is a different person every time, a random face lost in the noise. How many smugglers using fake identities move about the Sphere? A lot, the key to finding this agent was the pattern he had to be leaving, and if he is moving between some meetings in a stealth ship not the ISS-monitored Circulars, there ISN'T a pattern to link disparate meetings together, at least not one human intelligence services know to look for.

    At the time Uprising breaks out, you're an infiltrator needing to act fast due to the exposure of the CA's infiltration web by b4ckd00r, pushing the secession to launch becomes key, since while you've avoided leaving traces of a pattern as a JAPANESE agent, once the Human Sphere figures out a list of individuals the CA has subverted they'll have data points, start working out new algorithms to detect patterns, a cloaking device doesn't mean you don't leave traces, and once the humans have one Aleph and the ISS run it and suddenly the careful setup you'be been building 'for' the Kuge could be exposed. Plus, Onyx Contact Force is on Dawn, specifically on Noviy Cimmeria which Yu Jing increasingly controls, triggering a war there and splitting control between YJ and Japan gives that force some breathing room to consolidate and expand operations.
     
  20. Stiopa

    Stiopa Trust The Fuckhead

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    Anyone here familiar with the Honor Harrington space-opera saga will immediately see how a few agents in key positions can influence whole nations, either by acts of their own or by bribing corruptible personel in other important position, ensuring that officers and bureaucrats with the correct mix of stupidity and ability end up where you need them, and by subtly influencing the flow of information. Granted, in HH it's pushed to the limits of suspension of disbelief and then some, but the scale of the whole operation is much bigger as well.
     
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