On 18Jun2020 0304, Phil Pugliese - philpugliese at yahoo.com (via tml list) wrote: > One thing that really bothered me about The Rebellion was that a > backwater domain like Illelish suddenly had all those enormous fleets > to deploy. Against the Core Fleet, which would almost certainly be all about the brass and the chrome. While it's not up with Vland (let alone the Solomani Rim), Ilelish has quite a few hi-pop worlds. That said, the only really large and effective fleets are probably the Solomani Rim fleets (the Marches, Corridor, coreward Vland, and Daibei will have experienced fleets, but probably not super-large ones), because it's the heavily developed sector with a hostile peer just over the border. Looking at sector populations, the Rebellion probably only lasted because the Solomani jumped in and thus pinned the Solomani Rim fleet down. Then everything fragments, because the new Emperor not only has a dodgy claim (survivable) but has just shown himself to be ineffective (not survivable), so the fence-sitters go independent. Of course the core problem was Dulinor's lack of guts. If he'd stayed in Capital, sitting on the throne, he might've sold his coup. As it was, he admitted he'd failed when he fled. Works for me. -- Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>