So I've been thinking, and while I've seen weak evidence for the crisis we'll be facing to be of martial nature, could someone please rehash those? Off the top of my head:
- There are the Irinai Hegemony, which either aren't 'native' to the WCDC's former home setting of Growing Horizons, or were independently transported over into the BT setting a few hundred years ahead of us. Also note that Warringer mentioned "they are contained. For now. And their existance has been hinted at previously." Off the cuff I don't remember that,
but I assume it has to do with the not gonna say to avoid influencing others' ideas into certain directions.
- There's the Clans, who may be fielding WarShips, but I can't shake the impression they'll be just as affected by the crisis as we'll be.
- The IS. They seem to be in a constant low-level civil war and any attempt at any political power becoming hegemon is immediately stabbed in the face. Again, I expect we'll be tacitly joining forces to deal with whatever is coming.
- Whatever 'contained' the Irinai. My brain immediately jumped to the parallel of the unnamed aliens who contained the Primes, and in particular MorningLightMountain, in Peter F. Hamilton's Pandora's Star/Judas Unchained/Commonwealth Saga. These would definitely qualify as an Outside Context Problem, much more than we are to the IS.
Furthermore the successful reactivation of Verdar (the bipedal reptoid Alien Robot), and the information he provided, is rather important:
- 'Irinai Hegemony' is expansionist and/or xenophobic. They invade other planets.
- The 'Union' (I feel like some national/qualifying word was dropped there, @Warringer, but maybe intentional?) are the sort of people that lend help and evacuate peoples facing an invading force. We don't know if that is for preference (pacifistic philosophy, nomadic nature, …), necessity (they simply can't go toe to toe with Irinai forces), happenstance (only small forces present and not enough time for a more measured response), or something else.
- Both the polities are somewhere out there and we haven't discovered them yet. For this there are multiple possible explanations:
- Both are dead.
Since we know by Word of Warringer that the Irinai are 'contained', Murder Hamsters are still a thing. Since something or someone contained the Irinai, we can infer the Union is also probably still around. And if we're (un)lucky, it's them doing the containing.
- One is dead, one alive.
Again, according to Word of Warringer this would indicate that Verdar is both the type and endling of his species, which is just all kinds of sad. Let's just hope this is not the case.
- Both are alive.
The best and worst scenario: we don't know where either are. They might be hundreds of light years distant and two respective scouting missions just happened to run across each other here. In this scenario the Irinai were just committing genocide-of-opportunity. Nothing better than to murder future problems in the crib.
Or they might be really close. Heck, either polity might be already situated in our 90 ly bubble, we simply don't know.
Which is one reason why I keep pushing for regular Survey missions that actually, y'know,
survey. Heck, I'm willing to cede in-depth surveys in the general direction of the Inner Sphere worlds, since those will get slowly explored anyway (and I think if the Irinai or Union were in that region, we'd have heard about it by now, what with us being the first polity with intelligent non-humans), but the other 270° are really in need of more surveying.
Hm… that might be a good new option, actually.
"Probing/Scouting Mission:
The discovery of the alien robot Verdar on Ares tell us some things about what is still out there, but not enough. Let's take a look-see outside of our comfortable corner of space."
This mission would send survey squadrons far outside of our claimed space. With the Hyperwave radio we can keep in contact with the mission, as long as they don't leave the 750ly reception range. Every 100ly the FTL comms delay would be only
9 hours, and even accounting for signal strength degradation, it would still be enough for text messages about the most important discoveries long before the survey squadrons return home.
These missions would be the informational equivalent to stabs in the dark. We'd have only low odds of discovering small or single system polities, but decent odds for any large polity that spans a light century and thus represent a sizeable opportunity/market/threat. We
should head off stumbling over the metaphorical bear in the cave this way.
On an unrelated note, does Verdar get compensation for the patents and discoveries the WCDC researchers derived from his body? I would think so, and given his position I basically assume he has a governmental stipend that pays for anything reasonable he desires, but still. Might be useful to put some percentage of the profits that derived from him in escrow while he finds his feet in our society, and maybe to pay for any mission home he desires to pursue. I mean, I expect Prometheus to be all aboard paying for it regardless, he seems to be the kind of guy who would do that, as would presumably a handful of other people, but it's still better to enable him to choose his options rather than having to rely on others for these pursuits.