[Council] Deep Space Station Completed

Deep Space Station Completed

Sana Calaris, The Cyan Sun

Dilal System, MINOS WASTELAND - Today marks the completion of the Strata space station in Minos Wasteland. The station is expected to serve as a stopover for military patrols and deep space exploration missions as well as a watching point for local peace keeping forces.

"We have seen a sharp increase in pirate activity not only in the MW cluster but all over the galaxy as well,” said Nulius Patikkan, director for the Strata Project. “Given Minos' valuable and strategic position in the new layout of the relay network, Strata station will be a great leap closer to pacification of the region.”

As more systems from the Traverse and Terminus regions get connected to the network, Strata is expected to become a large trading and transportation hub as well, bringing in sizable revenues for Council species that have collaborated in the project.

Stay tuned next week for the live broadcast of the opening ceremony and speech from councilor Sparatus!

Other than a career's worth of 'buyers', 'vendors' and 'haunts'? You've got an odd definition of self-contained.

That's why they're called 'huntresses', not guardians - and I'm not claiming it, it's what happens. That's why it'll be a couple of decades at least before we're not relying, in part, on assistance from our neighbours, whether that be Republics supporting one another, or aid from our allies - that's how long it takes for someone with the Huntress spirit to be trained to be able to find that singular needle of yours. Or rather, tend the sea of needles; focusing on the single enemy, single objective, is a misleading analogy. But unless you've got an infallible security strategy tucked into your corporation's back pocket that you're not telling anyone about, I'm inclined to stick to the belief that it's better to stay the course with the aid of our friends than try to overturn thousands of years of evolving policy in favour of some other system that we're just not suited for.

And it is an objectively terrible state of affairs when your go-to method of dealing with raiders involves spending years training elite soldiers to hunt down the various traders and merchants and warlords who they may or may not have dealt with, literal light years outside your jurisdiction and in an area where the murder of such an individual can and will personally piss off a great many heavily armed people.


Oh obviously.

Ah yes, clearly the only options are that either I am cataclysmically wrong or that I have a literal deux ex machina in my possession.

I mean given the utter impossibility of a third option being present.

Such as the asari Republics doctrine being a hideously poor fit for modern defensive operations.

But that'd just be silly wouldn't it?

It seems discussion with you is only a tiring affair as there's no room for anything but your prefab opinion.
Don't go into politics (you didn't anyway).

Since the installation of the Council never has anything of what you describe materialized or tried successfully. So the most inadequate military in the galaxy is not so inadequate at all, but thanks for stating your opinion. Search Cyone, Lusia, Serrice Guard yourself if you want examples.
Your assumption that we don't have standing military is also faulty. We do.

There in fact are many garrisons and stations throughout Republic space already, most of them not even secret. Adding another one to an underdeveloped border region makes sense.

Since you are a person always taking the last word, you may have it.

That is an...astoundingly petty viewpoint to take frankly. I disagree with you, what of it? Who agrees on everything even with their close friends (don't worry you're not, it's merely a hypothetical)? And, honestly, I'm enjoying the discussion. A tad disappointed at some of the tactics and approaches I've seen thus far but still, it's been enjoyable.

But the moment you realize you're not going to convince me outright you take your ball and go home?

And you call yourself a diplomat?

This isn't a win or lose zero sum interaction Ms. Caenis. And while I am (moderately) apologetic that you feel this way I cannot also help but be somewhat disquieted that your automatic reaction to a point you cannot refute is to snipe back and stalk off.

Would you care to know what you could have done instead? You could have identified objects of value in the region that are worth the overall increase in security. You could have made the case for a gesture of goodwill for the colony of Invictus and the scattered others. You could have acknowledged that yes it can be construed as an overtly aggressive move but if there's one thing the Terminus respects it's strength and one must deal with them in the same way that one might deal with a hungry predator. You could have talked about the importance of founding joint naval defensive operations between Council races to help smooth over some of the lingering political fallout of the war. You could have even elaborated on how establishing what essentially amounted as a tributary of the primary trade routes would be useful for revitalizing a fringe region (one that is, by definition, largely untapped) and maintaining the political integrity of the area while bolstering such industries as heavy metal mining.

But instead you did...this.


...I'm sorry are we talking about raids? Because...those have happened. Fairly consistently actually over the years.

If you're talking about Council Race expansion into nominally Terminus territory and an example of the consequences I'd like to refer you to the massive swathe of space known as the Attican Traverse and its recent history.


A blatant simplification of an issue I went at some lengths to discuss the various geopolitical nuances of but very well, if you'd like to play it that way.

Allow me to boil the central concept I am trying to get you to recognize and satisfactorily reply to down to three words:

things

have

changed.


Perhaps but, as Ms T'Nara has been discussing, it is not the primary focus nor strength of general asari doctrine. My observation was that perhaps it would be in your best interests if steps were taken to address that strategic weakness.


Right then. Allow me to take this opportunity to explain to you what happens in most (most being the key word) discussions about differences in policy or military strategy from people or really any healthy conversation at all.

I make a point.

You make a point.

I address your point.

You address mine.

Thesis > Thesis > Rebuttal > Rebuttal like so, going on for however long.

Currently your process seems to be

Thesis > Thesis > You're Wrong

I suggest you try working on that.

How did we arrive at murdering everyone involved? I was pointing out that raiders, if they intend to operate for more than a few months (which would be quite miserable months, at that), need a support network, and that support network leaves a trail a Huntress can follow.

(Although since you put it like that, can you think of a time in the last couple of years when an elite soldier, having had years of training and experience, acting independently and unconstrained by political boundaries or the threat of a great many heavily armed people that they personally pissed off along the way, might have saved the galaxy?)

(I'm not addressing in detail your arguments regarding raiders being self-contained or not, because you seem to be presuming your hypothetical raiders are operating at STG-levels of concealment. They're not; raiders such as we're talking about are almost always semi-professional crews at best, because anyone with the intellect and talent to be better can see that the cost/benefit analysis just doesn't support going into the business to begin with. Even if they do manage to drag themselves, in spite of their inherent operational shortcomings, up to something like how the STG would conducts itself, we can ask the actual STG for help, and all other factors being equal, they've been doing it longer as an organisation.)

It seemed a fair response in kind; I only brought the matter up because last week you were calling our military model 'essentially pre-war SA doctrine', and I thought if we were going to have a discussion of defensive strategies, we might at least discuss the ones we actually do use. You're the one who's insisting that a military I'm not entirely sure you understand is the worst ever, regardless of the Republics collectively being the safest nation in the entire span of Citadel-era history before that. And it's not like nobody ever tried to attack us before now - everyone looks vulnerable to someone, and everyone gets attacked sooner or later. Those attacks have been blunted more often, and done us less damage when not, every time but one (Reapers), and that just doesn't happen consistently for that long by luck.

Because those people are the pirate's support network and you just spent a good ten paragraphs lecturing me on how that would be precisely the thing that huntresses would target.


Ah yes, the one in a billion success story of the woman in precisely the right place at precisely the right time somehow automatically validates the million other would be vigilantes who died horribly and ignominiously.


Hahahahaha oh my God you're serious

...Right.

Okay.

Firstly: these "semi-professional crews" by and large originate from a war torn region of space that is in an almost perpetual state of conflict. If you aren't deadly competent you die. If you can't handle yourself in combat, you die. If you are unlucky, you die. Through this lovely thing known as the process of elimination the vast majority of pirates and raiders from the Deep Terminus or Abyss who are powerful enough to pose a threat got that way by being the cleverest, strongest, and most savage individuals possible. There are pirate crews with more collective military and paramilitary experience than any given Hierarchy starship to put this in perspective.

Secondly: Do you know how much effort it takes to kill a few weeks between jobs in interstellar space, or in high orbit around a gas giant or ice world in the middle of literal nowhere. Or in docks at the Wreck or Omega or Cartagena under an assumed name?

Virtually none.

None at all.

Thirdly: I would like to take a moment to point out that you did, in fact, just claim that raiding and piracy are not profitable.

I would like to take another moment to laugh in your face once more (this time in the memory of our dearly departed Vedevix who I'm relatively certain would have enjoyed himself immensely reading this)

I would then like to take a third moment to point out in return that obviously it is profitable to an extent since people are doing it and making considerable amounts of money off of it.


Aha heh. Yes.

Would you like me to let you in on a little secret Ms. T'Nara?

This is the reason people tend to not like asari as a whole.

This right here.

Arrogance. It unbecomes even you.


Alright since you're so eager to get down to the heart of the matter:

Asari doctrine, for all it's emphasis on grace and maneuverability and agility, fundamentally functions on a principle of brute strength. If there is a problem that you can not negotiate with, manipulate away, or turn to your friends for aid against the Republics always has the option of its elite commandos who will cheerfully carve said problem into twitching chunks. And, for the most part, that's all well and good, it works for the vast majority of military issues that crop up and eventually the issues in question move on to easier targets.

When the Reapers attacked the Kite's Nest they utterly annihilated Hegemony High Command. The batarians rallied around their fleet, their military and tore right back.

When the Reapers attacked Earth they butchered the lion's share of our fleets in the first several minutes. The Alliance went on to fight a two front guerrilla war from the fall off Earth all the way through to the Crucible Event.

The turians and krogans ground in and fought the Reapers to a bloody stalemate for months and months on end. Forcing the godsquid to pay dearly for the ground they took.

Kahje held out against Reaper siege for virtually the duration of the war without falling.

The volus contributed some of the most devastatingly potent pieces of military tech in existence and provided extensive auxiliary support even as the galactic economy crumbled around them.

The Republic's military was thoroughly and easily outmaneuvered by the Reapers and summarily crushed while the Reapers went on to bombard Thessia to subjugation.

My point, if you haven't guessed it already, is that when push comes to shove the current military doctrine of the asari nations allows for gross exploitation by an invading force unafraid of collateral damage and so can, in many ways, be considered an abject failure even (especially) when compared in context to other Council organizations in similar situations. Were military contributions made by asari during the Reaper War both critical and essential to the War's success. Undoubtedly. The Republics as a whole?

Somewhat less so.

I was 'lecturing' you about how this support network makes raiders traceable.

If you replace 'vigilante' with 'Spectre', which is kind of what I was getting at, I think you'll find - just from what little has been declassified - the odds are rather more flattering.

Oh yes, the war-torn Terminus. It's only in a 'perpetual' state of conflict if you accept any war, in any part of the Terminus, as meaning the region as a whole it at war. That's no more true than the fiction that Omega has gunfights going on in every avenue. War and violence occurs, but so does a vast amount of trade and diplomacy (albeit with a tendency towards gritted teeth, on the latter) that doesn't make the news nearly so often. The Terminus is not some no-holds-barred survival-of-the-fittest machine where every man who survives a fight becomes twice as strong by eating the heart of his foe. It's a collection of semi-independent states rife with corruption, in the government and private sectors, and that saps away constantly at their ability to maintain effective military forces. They don't have the discipline, the support in depth, or the institutional knowledge to make the troops and arms at their disposal count for the same as those of any Citadel nation you care to name.

That's the region your raiders originate from, and they don't magically become better-armed, better-backed, and better-trained by going rogue and resorting to piracy. The ones who survive long enough to gain experience are, by and large, the ones with enough sense to pick weak targets - and you don't get better at fighting by picking weak targets.

I said the cost/benefit analysis sucks, to paraphrase. The profit, in credits or tradeable goods, is the benefit. The cost, if you target Republican citizens, is that if you manage to organise a raid without being noticed and disrupted, and pull it off without being intercepted and killed, you're still going to have the most deadly individual trackers in the galaxy waiting for you to make one mistake.

I think it's just you.

I'm finding myself more eager to get involved in some more stimulating conversation, but since I started here I may as well continue.

Apart from the implicit misunderstanding in saying 'brute strength', rather than the much more illustrative 'precision strength', yes.

I did specifically say with the exception of the Reapers. If you've got any similar examples from the other 2,499 years of Citadel history, I'm all aurals.

(While we're at it though - I'm sure you'll see this as further arrogance, but whatever - I've heard it convincingly argued that our hit-and-run tactics forced the Reapers onto the strategic defensive longer than was the case in any other theatre of the war. It didn't work forever and the results were unsurprisingly tragic when it ran its course, but there's literally no counter to a foe willing and able to absorb any amount of punishment without turning away.)

Excuse me but I couldn't help but wonder when I saw this



Do you consider yourself to be a diplomat, Mr. Aleksanders? Or at least to have some diplomatic skills?

Mr. Hoffmann, he just mistakes my private activities on the extranet with my work. A common misconception
Scarce as my free time is, and lengthy and complacent as his posts are, I'd like to use a popular quote.
Not in my free time and not on the extranet.

How's Athens doing?

And look, just like that you all manage to create an almost cohesive argument; only took three people and several dozen paragraphs but you got it out there. Round of applause for everyone is in order I think. Very proud, very proud I truly think that-


...so close.

So very very close.

Pity.


I'm just going to stop you right there because I aggressively do not care about whatever you're going to say next.

yo, pranked, "pretty" boy.
actually, i would have liked to participate here but you know, work and all, keeping drunk krogan at bay.
then i come home, turn on the extranet and gosh, do i have to read like tons of posts.
keep going, it's fun.

This only proves my point...

Well then, you sound like you must have some very interesting ways to pass time!

And Athens is doing quite well at the moment. While my department is mostly preoccupied with dusting off ancient pottery the whole regional government is quite abuzz lately. With upcoming elections and rigorous rebuilding and urban redevelopment, the place is surely abuzz.

In other news, "Nikolai Aleksanders, CEO of Titan Corporation, declares online that people do not like Asari. PR blunder or just crass ignorance?" is starting to trend on asari sites and discussion boards.

I wouldn't dismiss that so quickly.


Well, Captain Jarral in the terminus managed to defeat Reapers in open combat and turn around entire fronts, and he was a man with a raiding fleet. Operation Supernova was a victory against the reapers in open battle without magical superweapons, and that was Terminus. Which, well, seems to disprove your point that ineffective raiding strategies were the most effective strategy in the war.


By and large people in the nice parts of the Terminus don't become pirates. When was the last time you heard of a Nova Ascendancy Pirate, after all? The men and women (and neutrals, in the case of some indigs) who become pirates generally did not come from nice places. They come from the war-torn shitholes Aleksanders describes. Because they're the only ones with a motivation to go pirating.

Why do you think the alliance army at Torfan, with every advantage imaginable, only won after an utter, draining bloodbath with massive casualties on their side? They took that sort of damage with orbital superiority.

I shall endeavor to weather the rise and fall of my extranet popularity the best that I can.

Granted it's going to be a long and vaguely irritating couple of hours but I think that I'll survive somehow.

So wait, taking the time out of your day to say "I don't have time for this" qualifies as winning the argument now?

And from an asari, no less. I mean shrell, I have centuries less time than you and I still find a way to make a cohesive argument every once in a while.

Jarral's forces were incredibly brave, and (with a couple of glaring exceptions; not that I'm saying the various Citadel militaries haven't had their own missteps) very skilled, but the fact remains that nowhere in the Terminus faced the tonnage of Reaper warships that were committed against the Hegemony (the initial hammerblow, not the forces that remained to harass the survivors), the Alliance, the Hierarchy, the Republic, let alone the blockade the united fleet faced in Sol. They won the battles they won - and I'm not trying to belittle their struggle or enormous sacrifices, or the lives they saved in the process - because the Reapers sent fewer ships.


Incidentally - Arthur, have I been missing threads you've been in, or has it been a while since you were here last? Good to see you again. :)

You are aware that the Omega Raiding Fleet under Captain Jarral was explicitly detailed to the harshest and most troubled fronts where the fighting was the heaviest, yes?

And that that would include, by definition Hierarchy Space.

And the Republics.

And Alliance territory.

And then, in all likelihood, Sol itself as part of the Terminus levees for the battle.

In addition to the multiple fronts across the breadth of extra-Citadel Space.

Yes I'm aware of that. I'm also aware (and this seems to have escaped you) that our side's definition of 'the heaviest fighting', so far as committing hulls and troops was concerned, meant the worst engagement where any meaningful gain was possible. Jarral, and any other commanders who survived more than fifteen minutes, didn't go find the Reapers' largest concentrations and sail in warheads blazing like some children's cartoon, because that would have resulted in them being killed for nothing. They attacked where the Reapers were stretched thin. Where the Reapers moved in strength, they evaded, or if they had to meet, they did so knowing they would lose, but that the time it took for their ships to be sliced apart was time for someone else to improve their position. They were heroic and skillful actions, but they were not some kind of fantasy underdog victories which proved them superior to other fleets.

That goes for any military in the galaxy that saw a Reaper in action, too, and any commander with half a brain will tell you so.