Retribution Chapter 14 [Spoilers]

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betatester
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Retribution Chapter 14 [Spoilers]

Post by betatester »

So I didn't knew this was going to be the last chapter of Retribution, lots of information to unpack.

We now know that the confederation is going to have peace with Syndicate & Consortium. The confederation is going to sign a cease fire & maybe a peace treaty with syndicate after they have finished sending all the Syndicate POW's to Atrovet. As for Consortium they would be offered the chance to escape another galaxy that would take normally take them 10000 years to travel via hyperspace; so that they can have their own corner to play and don't bother either the Syndicate or Confederation.

Also Finally Jason is going to heavily militarize, he wants to build a fleet that can withstand the entire confederation. I think he is going to need at least 1,000,000 ships in his fleet to able to face the entire confederation alone. we would see that the house of Karinne finally start to exponentially expand and industrialize & militarize.

Once he has finished building all the CBIM's on Karis, I reckon they should seriously think about building them on other Karrine planets as well if they are far enough in their colony development as that would help the house develop the colony faster and also provide a powerful defense & with the new drives the KMS can travel to any planet under attack very quickly so they chances of CBIM's falling in they hands of an enemy reduce even further
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Re: Retribution Chapter 14 [Spoilers]

Post by Belgarion213 »

I really enjoyed that chapter, though it seems like a lot of the negotiations with the new Syndicate are going to fall into Revolutions.It's interesting that Jason is going to heavily militarise now, though I guess its probably the best time of it. I can't help but think that the secret's going to get out eventually, and there's going to be hell to pay. Though maybe the secret will get revealed with the intergalactic race drops by for a visit.

I really liked the Rigger competition, that was a lot of fun and showed just how good the Benga guy was. That man with a Titan and an interface would be a horrifying mix. I can see why people want to keep him:)

As betatester mentioned, it might be time to put a CBIM on a planet outside of Karis, maybe in another galaxy. Though I wonder with a CBIM if we would ever see a Tower and a Hive situation. (Tower and the Hive is a Anne Mcaffre book where the most powerful telekinetics use huge generators to boost their telekinetic power and then basically act as the bedrock for interstellar trade, throwing and catching ships/cargos etc.)
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Re: Retribution Chapter 14 [Spoilers]

Post by Not a ID »

betatester wrote: Sun Nov 04, 2018 5:25 am So I didn't knew this was going to be the last chapter of Retribution, lots of information to unpack.

We now know that the confederation is going to have peace with Syndicate & Consortium. The confederation is going to sign a cease fire & maybe a peace treaty with syndicate after they have finished sending all the Syndicate POW's to Atrovet. As for Consortium they would be offered the chance to escape another galaxy that would normally take them 10000 years to travel via hyperspace; so that they can have their own corner to play and don't bother either the Syndicate or Confederation.
I think the Syndicate is going to have some major Governance issues both short and long-term. Even their military is likely to have some issues shortly. They killed the board in part out of concern about the opening that would present the Consortium, something the Confederation is about to "take care of" for them in the form of that mass-evacuation to a new Galaxy.

Once the Consortium is gone, the Military and Government then have a problem in that they have a huge military apparatus with nowhere to go, and nobody to fight(except each other). Which brings us back to the Board being killed in part due to concerns about the soon to be non-issue of the Consortium.

I think their Benga General "friend" is going to be busy in Andromeda for years/decades to come, and is likely to ask for help, which Jason-the-Shaman is going to obliged to provide.

And then there is the Confederacy itself to consider. MOST of them are smart enough to realize that they're better off as part of it. MANY will test their limits within the post-conflict power structure to see exactly what they can away with. SOME are going to be idiots and throw caution to the wind and demonstrate why they deserve to be called as such.

MANY nations that are part of the Confederacy are likely to see a fair bit of "domestic issues" particularly from the ones who've been outside their own national borders, and liked what they saw while there. Now that "the war" and the immenint threat of death within the decade is abated, people are going to start agitating for change at home. The new colonies in particular will be ones to likely boast "troublemakers" if history is any guide, particularly if the colonists think they can get someone to either be "their France"(American Revolution) or United States/United Kingdom("Monroe Doctrine") depending on the colonial time-frame in question (a large part of the reason for the early "success" of the Monroe Doctrine in the Western Hemisphere is that the UK decided that helping enforce it upon their rivals suited their own strategic interests). For the Confederacy, the member nations who best resemble those historical roles are the Karrines and the Fae Imperium. Not sure right now on which polity gets to be compared to historical France.

But the Karrines definitely get the "protectors of 'the New World(s)'" title, and the Fae "rule the seas" both by way of their control of the Gateway network and their (comparatively) advanced weaponry against the rest of the Confederation, even if that edge has been blunted by the fighting against Andromeda's residents. The gateways are also likely to become a huge flashpoint for somebody "being stupid" now that the threat of impending death is over, it isn't just the superfast hyderdrives and bogenics they want from the Karrines, it is the Gateways too, and they "only" have to anger the Imperium on that front--presumably by "seizing control" (or attempting to) of gateways in their territory, something "completely within their rights as soveriegn governments."
Also Finally Jason is going to heavily militarize, he wants to build a fleet that can withstand the entire Confederation. I think he is going to need at least 1,000,000 ships in his fleet to able to face the entire Confederation alone. We would see that the house of Karinne finally start to exponentially expand and industrialize & militarize.
He has a LONG ways to go before that becomes too much of an issue, and I doubt he needs to reach a Million Ships, or anywhere near that. Their Technological supremacy alone is a significant force multiplier. Of course, that also makes for a huge multiplier effect on every "asset" that gets lost. But it DOES still stand that even with force multipliers being in play, he's going to need a very large and substantial military force, and that is going to take a LOT of resources to both build and maintain, and doing so while also not "throwing flags" up across instellar space for the sheer quantity of resources they're consuming.... Even without information leaks, the resource demands alone are going to pretty much dictate that they colonize worlds plural, and setup (internal) resource extraction and gathering operations "off grid" from everyone else. Which presents another set of challenges of their own.

Then of course, there is the whole population management thing, on top of the information leak aspect. The crew compliments for that kind of fleet is going to be massive, and once you include their families, that is a lot of bodies. Sure immigrants can fill a lot of those holes, as they pretty much still have to fill ALL of those holes. But any intelligence service operating apart from the Kimdori is undoubtedly keeping tabs on a lot of that stuff as well. Sure hiding several hundred stealthy, and not-so-stealthy ships is something that can be managed readily enough so long as the ships involved are practically identical. But how do you account for 5+ Million People who keep coming and going? Granted, clever use of Bionoids could possibly account for some of that, however, it'd almost be easier if most of those 5 million simply "disappeared" instead, but even then, questions would be raised by intelligence services as to where they went.
Once he has finished building all the CBIM's on Karis, I reckon they should seriously think about building them on other Karrine planets as well if they are far enough in their colony development as that would help the house develop the colony faster and also provide a powerful defense & with the new drives the KMS can travel to any planet under attack very quickly so they chances of CBIM's falling in they hands of an enemy reduce even further
This is actually a reasonably valid point, particularly given the resource management side and the CBIMs being able to operate very large numbers of bionoids concurrently. It provides enhanced defenses if a Generation is present, it provides more computational resources and more localized Management, and provides an "off-site backup" as it were, as well as a potential labor pool. But it also comes back to resource allocation and movement challenges, unless they build a second facility for construction of the Biogenic equipment(including the CBIMs), they're going to have a hard time hiding that "they're doing something big" from the other empires.
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Re: Retribution Chapter 14 [Spoilers]

Post by SYED »

Karrines have a lot of advantages that they can capitalize on. Stealth, mobility, communications, armor, shields, weapons, power systems, fighters, ships of the wall. I had this idea they could create a ship designed as a launch platform for missiles and torpedoes, both FTL and non able. The sheer weight of fire, with the variety and tech that they can have would make these ships deadly.
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Belgarion213
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Re: Retribution Chapter 14 [Spoilers]

Post by Belgarion213 »

To be fair, with the Nexus Bridges, and the Translight Hyperdrives, a lot of the issues of shipping experts to the other side of the galactic cluster to set up a CBIM/biogenic production facility are worked around.

I think the main concern Jason has is not defeating enemies but fighting sheer weight of numbers of everybody ganging up on him aka what happened to the original Kahrines when Karis was bombed back to the stone age.

The Syndicate dealing with having 'won' their galactic war is going to be interesting, your right there in that they have been at a constant all-out war footing for 6,000 years. I guess they could try to colonise another galaxy as they were going to do with the Milky Way but I think they would want to consolidate their gains.

You are right in that without the threat of the Consortium or the Syndicate, there's going to be a lot of people testing the boundaries and seeing how things stand in the Confederacy. Still, with the new galaxy that's been opened up there's a LOT of 'real estate' open for people to grab.

Jason is right in that SOMEBODY is going to try and make a grab for the Translight drive, even if they can't use it. The Ruu are probably going to get it soon enough but they are not going to be going expansionist empire like some of the other races are.
betatester
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Re: Retribution Chapter 14 [Spoilers]

Post by betatester »

The War with Consortium & Syndicate has increased the military & tech capabilities of every single Milky way empires aka the Confederation; They have all improved their ships with new tech (better weapons, improved Armour, better defenses, real-time hyper drive, extended hyperspace travel, enclosed armour for naval crews; etc) and they increased their numbers of ships. Also the academy is increasing the tech level of everyone in the confederation; in the long run Karinnes won't be able to maintain their tech lead as billions of scientists & engineers that are in other empires would eventually either manage to overtake Karinnes or have tech parity with them.

The huge tech lead that the Karinnes had before the Consortium and Syndicate attacked milky way is not so huge anymore and the numbers that other confederation empires can field against Karinnes are huge; the KMS can still one shot ships with their heavy weapons but the its backbone is mostly their destroyers and frigates as they had build them up fight the Consortium.

And as stated Jason is going to want to able to withstand the entire confederation; for that he needs numbers to tie down the numbers of ships that would be against him in any hypothetical worst case scenario. On the other hand with Stargates and translight drives opening new galaxies maybe the confederation empires would prefer to colonize new worlds to expand their empires.

The Karinnes can easily manage CBIM/biogenic production on Karis itself as that area is very restricted. If they are worried about spies once the Confederation has peace with Consortium & Syndicate; their presence on Karis and Kosigi should decrease and eventually they would only have the occasional summit on Karis and Jason already has plans to kick them out of Kosigi so that he can start his fleet buildup program. They also have have many other colonies where confederation presence is zero, that could serve as secret factories & mines for the resources the Karinnes need. that's why I think they should keep building CBIMs as that increases their communication and computational capabilities and they are going to need that as the house is still expanding and they are going to kick that expansion into high gear.


Also as Not a ID said CBIMs can serve as remote labour and they can even operate ships that are just manned with bionoids so that Jason can keep building ships and keep on sending them to deep space to hide them just as the Original Karinnes that took shelter on Exile did with their science ship The Defiant. If there's ever a scenario when those ships are needed the CBIMs can operate them without the need to massively train & expand his navy as maintaining a huge naval crew is one way the secret can be leaked regarding KMS fleet program.

In fact the only way this huge fleet can remain secret is if he builds them, mans them with bionoids operated by CBIMs and sends them out straightaway in deep space or flat space to hide them. Jason needs to hide this fleet otherwise he might spark an arms race & other confederation empires might think that the new Karinnes might follow in the footsteps of the old Karinnes and attack Karis straight away to destroy them just as it happened in the civil war
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Re: Retribution Chapter 14 [Spoilers]

Post by kyli »

I have a feeling the the next book will be more like Inception, where there were sometimes months between chapters. Months in book time I mean, not in IRL. Especially in the beginning. The first chapter will probably start very soon after this one ended to tie up more loose ends and then maybe a few month break. That's the feeling I get; give the plot time to develop.
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Re: Retribution Chapter 14 [Spoilers]

Post by Not a ID »

Yeah, I expect there is going to a be a fair bit of time-skipping. The colonization efforts have just barely begun in the New Galaxy, although they've had significant colonization efforts underway within the Milky Way itself for a number of years already. Those colonies are potentially nearing points where some of them could start "feeling their oats" about finding an option more to their liking that isn't agreeable to the empire that founded it.

There likely will be a "peace dividend" at least for a while after the treaties are signed, but there is also going to be a lot unsettled economic disruption in the shorter term as well. Factories that have been running "all out" building parts to feed the Confederation military machine are going to need to find new work now. In some respects, Post-WW2 America is almost relevant, only for the entirety of the Confederation, not just one member.

A LOT of free production capacity is going to almost have to open up on Karin, as they're no longer needing to help build critical components for the entire Confederation, and now lack the justification for continued aggressive production of their own military hardware as well.

But it also cycles back to "Jason is going to have to do a lot of fancy footwork to hide his buildup" as they KNOW that he has that manufacturing capacity, and they're going to wonder when/if those factories "aren't found to be doing anything" post-war. Granted he probably could justify claiming some of them have indeed gone idle, as I understand more than a few were basically operated by the CBIMs with remote bionoids. So they can generate some cover stories on that front, but only up to a point. The Karrines aren't the only ones with Bionoids now as I recall, and the others KNOW the biogenic ones are better/more efficient still.

Kosigi itself is the easier part of the equation, particular with the Kimdori helping mask anything they get up to. But almost guaranteed that many of the Confederation empires are going to find ways to have something parked out somewhere beyond the system's heliopause looking back into the system to (attemot to) watch and record what the Karrines are up to. As I recall, several of them already did have such operations in place at various points in time.

I still strongly suspect the gateways themselves are going to become a flash point between somebody and the Fae, and its likely to be a close run on that or the hyper-drives. It will be "interesting" to see who tries something, and how it gets resolved, as well as if the Karrines end up involved in the Gateway dispute. Sure there are the catapults and IIRC that tech was shared, but still, the Gateways are the next best thing to the Karrine hyperdrives, which is the other item to watch out for. Heaven help the empire that is dumb enough to make a try for both.

Of course, there also are the Nexus Bridges, in that tech can be further refined and turned into something that isn't a huge money-sink. Yes, it can be used to covertly shuffle people around, but not in the kind of numbers needed to staff a fleet capable of rivaling the rest of the Confederation, at least, right now. Although in the interim, I don't think he has to match the entire Confederation, it would take a LOT to get the Fae Empress to act directly against him, particularly if he's given a chance to explain himself. Just getting the Imperium to stay Neutral lowers the bar considerably. Which isn't to mention House Karrin vs the Entire Confederation is unlikely in the extreme, the Kimdori and several others are highly unlikely to ever agree to participate in something like that. Outside of House Karrine being caught doing something truly heinous Which would be very out of character for them to do.

IF the Nexus Bridges becomes "commercially viable" particularly to/from gravity wells, then things get moved into a more bizzare space, I almost hope they don't reach that point. The Karrines "sitting on it" for very long after cracking it also is very likely to be poorly advised, as it cycles back into creating all kinds of problems and other awkward questions for the Karrines when word gets out. (The big ones being: What were they doing with it while it was secret, and for how long?) Best to be up-front about it once they have it, THEN be sneaky about masking how many of them they have/how they're being used. Because well, everyone is going to expect that, because most of them will be trying to do the same thing if its possible with Confederation Tech. :twisted:
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Re: Retribution Chapter 14 [Spoilers]

Post by SYED »

The moon ship yard will be closed to outsiders. The likely can purchase civilian ships built there, but would be then shipped to owner for final fitting.
See if the kimdori can get a complete technical database from both the syndicate and consortium. They tech might not be advanced, but their work a rounds could be adapted into whole new technologies. With the end of the conflict, they don't have to share the goodies.
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