Re: [GZG] [OT] Books (Weber/White/Meier)

Eric Foley wrote:

>Further comments below Indy's original message with spoiler warning
here...
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>WARNING
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>HERE
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>THERE
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>BE
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>SPOILERS....
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>I thought Shiva Option turned out a little too slippery-slope for my 
>tastes, though.  While the idea that the humans/Orions nuking bug
planets 
>into irradiated goo would send them into a telepathic shock from the 
>simple mass death being sent along the collective mind, once it got to 
>this point the bugs suddenly went from being a genocidal people who
were a 
>dire threat to eat everybody to a passively resisting species whose
final 
>annihilation became a foregone conclusion, and this discovery and 
>resulting slippery slope occurred only a quarter of the way through the
book.
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>The Arachnids' lack of strategic aggressiveness once the first Home
Hive 
>went down is also a little bit mystifying to me when I stop and think 
>about it.  The bugs still knew of a closed warp point that went
straight 
>into Alpha Centauri, with Earth right around the corner if they'd
simply 
>looked a little further, and yet after Pesthouse they never really 
>followed up on this. Sure, they pursued the remaining forces into Alpha

>Centauri, and they portrayed it as a desperate fight in In Death
Ground, 
>but to me it seems a little "eh" that the humans/Orions have no problem

>nuking Home Hives into glowing cinders and yet the 
>supposedly-more-genocidal bugs didn't do the same thing to Alpha
Centauri 
>in the process, either as part of the battle after Pesthouse or in a 
>counterassault after the first Home Hive went down. Would it have been
too 
>much to have at least a few stray anti-matter devices shatter some of
the 
>humans' strategic infrastructure and at least make the final outcome a 
>_little_ less of a foregone conclusion?

You have to get to the planets before you can nuke them, though. The
Bugs 
*did* nuke every Alliance planet they could reach, but in Alpha Centauri

their WP was around five light-hours away from the nearest inhabited 
planet. (Not sure if it says so anywhere in the books, but the star
system 
data is available in the scenario module the books were based on.) The 
Bugs' longest-ranged missiles only had a range of at best 20 
light-*seconds*, and during the follow-up battle at the end of In Death 
Ground the Bugs never managed to get more than a few light-seconds away 
from the WP.

Stray missiles, well... one interesting feature with the StarFire 
inertialess drives is that any stray missile would come to a full stop
once 
its engine burned out, so only the star's gravity field - very weak, at 
that distance - would pull it in towards the orbits of the inhabited 
planets... and that'd take quite a while. (Indy, how long? Would a
hundred 
years suffice? Not soon enough to affect the war, anyway.)

(Couldn't Weber have put the Centauri WP closer to the planets in order
to 
make it a more useful plot device? No, because if he had done that the
Bug 
scouting force would've been detected on their initial transit instead
of 
during their attempt to scout the system :-( )

As for why the Bugs became a paper tiger after Pesthouse, it is quite 
simple: the entire Hegemony consisted of around thirty inhabited star 
systems, against the Alliance's many hundreds of systems. Once the Bugs
had 
run out of mothballed SDNs to reactivate and send into battle, their
only 
reinforcements were new production units... and even though the five
Home 
Hives could easily outproduce any *five* Alliance systems, they had no 
chance in hell against the top five *hundred* Alliance systems.

Put in a different way, ISW4 was essentially modelled after the European

part of WW2 with the Bugs in the role of Italy and Nazi Germany. (The 
Pacific part of WW2 had already been copied - Pearl Harbour, Midway and
all 
- in ISW3, against the equally genocidal Rigellians.) After the
invasions 
of Sicily and Normandy, the end *was* a foregone conclusion - the only 
question being how many more Allied troops would have to die before that

conclusion was finally realized :-(

>...the bugs never got portrayed as a serious threat to anything but far

>outlying systems after Pesthouse, and they never followed up with any
real 
>will to kill even after it became clear that the war had become
them-or-us.

For the Bugs, the war had been them-or-us from the very first skirmish -

that was the only kind of war they ever fought. They still had the
*will* 
to kill after Pesthouse; but they lacked the means to do so.

Regards,

Oerjan
orjan.ariander1@comhem.se

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
-Hen3ry

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