hi hi
entity2636 wrote:If Stillstorm has what appears to be blind spots in her reasoning to us, it is because she appears to only have limited information on the situation in general and has literally been caught with her pants down.
.. Still feels kind of too small to be a full "D-day" kind of invasion to end the war, no?
To say that someone has no biases or faults in their reasoning, being a perfectly logical and rational actor, would be an incredibly bold claim. Stillstorm is limited by a lack of information, sure, but if she was
Laplace's Demon, she wouldn't need reasoning at all. Stillstorm seems to have a somewhat two dimensional (in the psychological sense), one or the other, perspective. That is honestly something that most humans do too, so it's not unreasonable. I imagine it would be more difficult to engage in lateral thinking when your worldview is defined by "true or false, honest or lies."
Perhaps if the Umiak can slip through the Loroi perimeter, they stand a good chance of laying waste to the Loroi's industrial capacity further inward?
Vyrnie wrote:The supposition that the Umiak's primary goal is to wipe out the Loroi's knowledge of humans, and more specifically the human invulnerability to Loroi telepathy & farseers would explain the following:
- Why is the invasion force so small?
I'm not sure that the invasion force is very small. If 6 divisions is enough to challenge the Tinza sector fleet in Sala-128, such that they need to call for reinforcements, then a total of 14 divisions between Sala-128, Sala-101, and Leido is a significant invasion force.
Furthermore, I am not sure the Umiak need to keep their farseer invisibility secret anymore. If they were worried about the secret getting out, they might well have thrown their entire space fleet into the action for a winner-take-all final showdown. However, that doesn't seem to be how the Umiak roll. As Clicky-27 said, without the farseers, the Loroi's defensive strategy is ruined. They could play the long game as they have been at this point, and if the Loroi don't develop a counter to the stealth tech, they've got a good chance of winning anyways.
However, a good reason to
not send their entire fleet is that the Loroi are still likely to get the word out via couriers that the Umiak have this new advantage. From the Loroi perspective, having lost their farseer advantage, a full-scale all-or-nothing invasion of Umiak territory may now be unavoidable. And if the Loroi are forced into such a strategy, the Umiak can accept the move on their own turf where they have the supply line advantage. All they need to do is sufficiently scare the Loroi into going all in, or damage them enough in the opening move that they don't have the resources and end up getting whittled away.
Vyrnie wrote:- How did Umiaks "suddenly" (as far we/Loroi know anyway) become farseer-invisible?
They vivisected the other group of scouts and figured out the mechanism that lets humans be farseer-invisible. Alternatively, they've always had this ability (through convergent evolution, which seems to be a theme in this story...
Those are possibilities, but highly unlikely ones.
First, the Terran scouts were out there simultaneously. It would be a remarkable feat for the Umiak to capture a scout, figure out their telepathic resistance, develop a way to copy that resistance, apply it to multiple divisions worth of ships, send those ships on a circuitous route around the front-lines, all before the Bellarmine made first contact.
Second, I can't think of any reason why the Umiak would hide an ability to mask themselves from telepathy, if they had it. If they had such an ability, I would think that the Loroi would have lost the war during the First Siege of Seren.