Centuries later, in another interstellar spaceship, Dominic Flandry looks out a viewport at stars chaotic to the untrained eye. However, his trained eye:
strains out the dimmer stars;
finds always visible markers like the Magellanic Clouds;
estimates the distance of the nearest giant, Betelgeuse, by its brightness.
In addition, he remembers the coordinates for their recent rendezvous and the star that they are approaching is sufficiently uncommon that there will be only one or two in any neighborhood. Thus, although he has been abducted and transported to a secret Merseian base, he has a good idea of where he is, galactically speaking.
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Tsk, tsk, it would have been smarter of the Merseians not to allow Flandry any kind of contact with navigational instruments, precisely because his Naval training would enable him to pick up potentially useful information. Don't make life easier for your enemies!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
In this case, the navigational instrument was merely a viewscreen but you are essentially correct. Of course, they thought he was not going to return home but they were wrong about that and should have taken any risk.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Exactly! However reasonable it seemed, the Merseians were over confident!
Finally finished the first drafting of my new article. I'll want to go thru it, polishing and correcting it, but I should be sending it to you in a few more days. I fear I am not as fast a writer as you are!
Ad astra! Sean
You shouldn't make assumptions. That's why "need to know" is the default rule in intelligence work -- you never know when something's going to be useful to the other side.
Above: should NOT have taken any risk.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And I agree the Merseians slipped up about Dominic Flandry. They underrated him because of his youth and humble rank. The only way any enemy of the Empire could be SURE about Flandry would be by killing him. And making SURE he was actually dead. Remember Anna Comnena's story about Bohemond of Antioch!
Ad astra! Sean
One the one hand, self-confidence is essential; on the other, arrogance leads to failure. It's always a balancing act.
Eg., if you study the Partition of Africa, you find that time after time Europeans took almost insane chances, confident they could beat the locals if only they could get them/force them/provoke them into a stand-up fight. It usually worked -- in fact, it often worked -because- it was so audacious.
There's a chapter about it in the classic Victorian manual, "Small Wars", where the author recommends it as a strategy of calculated risk to avoid the possibility of a prolonged guerilla war, where the hostile climate and difficult logistics will increase the costs and play to the locals' strengths (being close to their sources of supply, local knowledge, adaptation to the climate) rather than their weaknesses (lack of firepower and fire-discipline/maneuverability).
But occasionally it lead to fatal underestimation of the opponent: Lord Chelmsford at Isandhlwana, for example, or the Italians at Adowa.
We have three stages here: Anderson's well-informed texts; my comments on them; well-informed comments on my comments!
Paul.
Post a Comment