>Big fleet actions are and still will be important. The political game
>will be extremely important.

Oh, yes. Of course. I didn't mean to imply otherwise. It's... hmm.

It's more like, having a giant awesome fleet is no longer quite as important as it once was. What's going to make or break you (it seems to me) is having an Utena Tenjou or Jim Kirk to put in command. That's going to be your primary force multiplier right there; look at the Battle of Titan.

As was discussed upthread, Captain Davidson is probably pretty good at her job. PRETTY good. But even if she'd been completely unshackled by circumstances and politics, Utena would probably still have absolutely destroyed her.

Ideally, of course, you probably want both a giant awesome fleet AND crazy good people to be put in command. But it kind of seems like the crazy good people are getting to be more and more important.

>But the covert actions can be
>game-changers without anyone really knowing until it's too late. I
>give you the fact that there was a cloaked ship in-system that
>presented an excellent precis of what was actually in-system, giving
>the relief fleet information on ships, commanders, and their location
>within the system, which meant that Task Force TRIDENT could drop out
>of hyperspace with a full assault plan already underway - hell, with
>the Interdictors, they just plan for THOSE to pull them out.

One of Grand Admiral Thrawn's best tactical innovations. (In Star Wars, not UF.)

I find it quite hilarious that the Earth Alliance respects Genom's trademark of the name "Interdictor" enough to come up with their own name for the same kind of ship. It's a bit like if the UK had been able to trademark "battlecruiser" and other nations had to come up with their own term.

Captain Davidson really WAS kind of hanging out their with her ass in the breeze, wasn't she?

>The Earthforce group failed at intelligence - really, they should have
>a covert station on B6 just to keep an eye on things, and transmit the
>information... and if they did, you might want to think about why that
>task force lacked that information.

To be fair, (above and beyond the fact that there's a ton more going on with Tau Ceti than just the battle) much like the now-sacked Admiral Kimball, the Earth Alliance probably figures that a quick force response force is something you put together in hours, rather than minutes.

Now I'm imagining that the intelligence officer in charge of that (still-hypothetical) covert station is probably perennially frustrated. "Your reports are constantly too late to do any good!" Well, no shit, buddy. These people make decisions fast, and when we know about them at all it's because we see the fuckin' metagate opens right before they cram half the IPSF through it. We can't collect comms traffic to do sigint on because the Psi Corps still hasn't figured out a way to intercept lens traffic, now have they? And that's on top of the fact that both Hutchins' bastard and his little... gloom cookie teenaged sidekick have parapsychic talents that apparently involve matter transportation across interstellar distances!

(And then the drinking starts.)

It's probably not the easiest job in Earthforce Intelligence. :)

>This has gotten far afield from my original point, but still, the
>great game is still running - fleets, politics, covert operations and
>operatives, all of them have their place, and no one of them
>automatically trumps any other one of them. Don't rule anything out.

True, but some of them are weighted heavier than others, one imagines.

-Merc
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