Allanea wrote:
The UN before it got a common military.
Okay.
The suicide ships are focused on the industrial centers. The Operatives do depopulation strikes.
Industrial centers like what? There's never any mention of hitting the important industrial centers.
Edit: By that I mean the
orbital or otherwise space-based industrial centers. The ones that produce the warships and keep them supplied.
So basically, they're not infiltration specialists. Thank you for conceding my point.
Yes. They're special forces with an eye towards infiltration.
By causing massive civil unrest and destabilizing the very fabric of Earth civilization.
Which doesn't help at all when the UN still has this large and well-armed fleet and (now) a very good reason to genocide every man, woman, child, and indentured servant on Freehold.
From the POV of people who come up with such policies, a random person who just breaks a rule is just as bad as a gangsta
Sure. I'll buy that. The problem is that tracking chips in everyone lets you nail both of those groups (ie jay-walkers and genuine criminals) with similar amounts of effort.
– and beside, a fictional society doesn't have to be 100% thought-out, it just has to be 'feasible'.
True, it doesn't have to be completely thought out down to the last detail, but you most definitely have to think about the details you do include. And it's pretty clear that Williamson didn't.
Brain chips are a horrible violation of privacy, but they basically ensure that you can catch anyone who commits a crime. Rape, theft, and assault should
not be anywhere near common in a society with said chips.
Some people think that police and authorities actually BENEFIT from a high crime rate so they could use it to scare the populace. I am not sure I agree, but apparently MZW does.
While this would in fact make some sense, it's pretty clear from the snippets we saw in Freehold and The Weapon that the UN people weren't very scared. They were too busy eating. Like hungry hungry hippos. Also, a government not cracking down on crime when it has the extremely easy capability to do so doesn't make much sense either. Governments tend to like order, and crime is, by its nature, disorderly.
The swords are not compulsory for everyday carry.
They carried them on a space ship boarding action. That's worse than usual, because the only melee weapon that's worth the mass on such a mission would be a bayonet. Even an axe wouldn't be helpful because there's not much to cut aboard a space vessel.
And at any rate, the machete is in itself a sword.
Yes, and it's only really useful in one specific circumstance (ie when you've got thick jungles to hack up.)
Besides, operative swords aren't mentioned to be machetes.
I take it you concede my points regarding the fail of UN militaries,
I concede that the UN has less experience with conquest than the first two books led me to believe, yes. However, I still maintain that the UN army having a policy of interventionism does not jive with incompetence on the scale we saw in The Weapon.
and regarding the Operatives not being, in fact, infiltration specialists.
Yes. Very well. My assertion there was a knee-jerk reaction to them being used to infiltrate and genocide a planet of billions.
However, that doesn't really change the fact that operative training still sucks pretty hardcore from a plausibility standpoint. If you're training special forces, you'd logically focus on skills they'd need. Namely, stealth, shooting, bomb making, etc. We got some of this with the zero-G training, but the 'you're dropped in the middle of nowhere with your comrades. There is only one bag of beef jerky between you! You must fight for it!' style bullshit is just stupid. Exposure training is one thing. The exposure training we saw in The Weapon is so over the top as to be pointless.
Also, the whole process of becoming an operative is ass backwards. The only people who stay in are the lamers who are too weak to ring the bell, while the strong guys, the ones with the willpower to ignore the DIs beating on them, are able to get out. Freehold literally weeds out the best candidates.
"Please tell me that you haven't heard military gossip about a fleet of invisible battleplates."