Motivational Poster

Trivia

The words "ULTIMA RATIO CIVITUM" is engraved on every personal weapon, crew served weapon, and on a special plate installed on all military vehicles and spacecraft of the Freyan armed forces and the armed forces of the Confederation of Ursa Major.

Yes, I know (Ayn) Rand said that a gun is not an argument two centuries ago...

My grandfather once told me that were it not for the distance and the vacuum of space (between Eos and Freya) it would have been possible to hear the Eosians sneering at us for that particular practice.

Of course that sneering ended after their world was invaded and occupied by the Neomarxists.

-- Admiral Elizabeth Weymouth, Lectures on History and Moral Philosophy.


Now some people think it is a bit silly of us to engrave a phrase in ancient Latin on our weapons, vehicles, and spacecraft.

But consider this, all of our g-carriers, tanks, and other military vehicles are designed to carried aboard standard commercial starships. The dimensions of the cargo holds are in turn determined by the dimensions of the old Terran ISO-cargo containers which are still in common use. The dimensions of the standard cargo containers were originally determined by the requirement that they be carried on a standard railroad flatcar. The dimensions of the railroad flatcar was in turn determined by width of the wheels and tracks. This standard was adopted in imitation of the standard width of carts and wagons built in the British Isles, which used wagon trails first marked out in the time of the Roman Empire. Which in turn used a standard width chosen by a wagon builder in Ancient Rome.

Now, given the influence that a unnamed Ancient Roman wheelwright had on the design and deployment of military technology in the twenty-third century, is it really that silly of us to adopt an Ancient Latin slogan for our own use?

-- Ibid.

A Message From Rob Devenport

Hello,

Yes, the TML and all of TravellerCentral.com are down. I'm using an
old subscriber list to notify everyone, so if you've unsubscribed in
the last several months, I apologize for sending this to you. And if
I've missed anyone that you know of, please let them know the status.

A couple days ago, a cracker penetrated the TravellerCentral.com
server and deleted all files, possibly in retaliation for Tod stopping
an attack a month ago where someone tried to usurp the server and set
up their own rogue mail server. The recent backups are lost (and Tod
had been within a week of putting a new backup system online too).
He's going to go back to an older backup and rebuild the system (with
tightened security measures).

Since he doesn't believe the attacker overwrote files but just mucked
up the inodes, he's hopeful that much of the user data can be
recovered - it will just take a good deal of time.
The plan is to get the server and basic services (mail server) back up
as soon as practical, I think maybe within a few days, then get user's
data back if possible, which may take a few weeks.

I'll send more details as they become available, or if you have
questions, let me know. With luck you won't hear from me, but from the
list when it's up again.

And as for that cracker miscreant, I just hope they get within range
of my FGMP...

Rob Davenport
TML listmom2
_

Quote of the Day

More intellectual background stuff.

As a rule when all other factors are equal it is the numerically larger military unit that will prevail. Therefore it is the task of those who raise, train, and deploy the armed forces of a nation to see to it that all other factors are never equal.

-- E.N. Keller, The Concept of War

_

Quote of the Day

In literature and cinema there is a concept, the idiot plot, a scenario that only occurs because one or more characters behaved like idiots.

Of all the worlds of the Human Union one world had the industrial might, and thus the potential to create military power, to stop the Freyani.

March¹, the oldest and most populous of the Human colonies, the capital of Humanity in the post-Yellowstone² era, did nothing.

Nothing was done when the Freyani secretly build a navy and cut loose from Humanity.

Nothing was done when the Freyani and their Objectivist allies hunted down and murdered the Progressive activists and the Gordonian³ warriors who liberated the planets Konkin and Eos from capitalist oppression.⁴

Nothing was done when the Freyani sent the fleet carrier Victorious across Human Union space -- unimpeded -- to commit the Gordonian Holocaust.⁵

Nothing was done when the Freyani mercilessly crushed the Republic of Aurore.

When Oliver Richard Kaiser, and the last and greatest leader of Humanity, tried to rouse the people to resist the Freyani, it was too late.

Because the leaders of the planet March and Humanity in General refused to act a new dark age has descended upon us as we now live under the grinding oppression of the Freyan Empire.⁶


-- Anthony Ellsworth, The Empire of Greed

Sounds like the fellow is a bit biased...


1. Alpha Centauri A-Three. Named for President John March, the successor to President Dick Cheney and founder of the Omaha Pact.

2. Extinction event. The super volcano in Yellowstone National Park erupted on September 4, 2182, burying most of North America in ash, and effectively terminating agriculture on the planet for at least five years. Roughly 99 percent of the Human Race died in the subsequent disorders.

3. A morally darker version of the Dorsai.

4. Needless to say the folks on Eos and Schwartz (the renamed planet Konkin) have a different view of the relevant events.

In the decades following the Yellowstone Event a practice had evolved where if a resource extraction firm could not obtain a sufficiently favorable deal from a local government they would invent a "liberation front" -- usually a handful of crackpots in the back room of a leather bar -- and hire a Gordonian military contractor to put the liberation front into power.

Armand Marteau, the owner of Spinward Mining, wanted control of lanthanum deposits on Eos, a planet settled by descendants of the Peikoff Faction of the Objectivist Movement. Because his agents could not create a front on Eos, they instead created one on the planet Konkin, a Libertarian Anarchist colony named after Libertarian Anarchist author Samuel Edward Konkin III. The new "sovereign" state then staged a "liberation" of Eos.

The first Freya Pact, an alliance of three worlds -- Freya, Galtswelt, and New Texas -- carried out the liberation of Eos. The red stooges were hunted down and given no quarter. On the other hand the Gordonian mercenaries immediately surrendered and attempted to redeem their repatriation bonds.

The Interim Committee that governed Eos refused to the honor the bonds. In their view the mercenaries were not soldiers of a legitimate state but were instead paid members of a homicidal conspiracy. In other words, they were willing capital criminals.

The ground troops from Freya and Galtswelt carried out the order to execute the mercenaries. The contingent from New Texas refused to carry out the execution of mercenaries in their custody. The New Texas forces and their prisoners were then ordered off the planet Eos. Thus breaking the first Freya Pact.

To this day the Eosians see the government of New Texas as accessories after the fact of the mass murder of Eosian citizens.

The remnant of the pact forces went on to liberate the planet Konkin.

5. The Gordonian private military contractors and their corporate sponsors carried out a vendetta against Eos and the remaining members of the first Freya Pact through legal and other means.

It was after the judicially staged murder of two members of the Eos Interim Committee, who were on a diplomatic mission to March, that drastic action was taken.

A chain of fuel caches was secretly created which allowed a task force centered on the newly built light fleet carrier Victorious to make on unimpeded transit to Gordonia and carry out a high yield nuclear bombardment of the planet's industrial and population centers.

This effectively terminated the vendetta.

6. Riiiiigt. The Society of Consent is sooooo oppressive to some people...
_