On 04Jul2023 0609, Phil Pugliese - philpugliese at yahoo.com (via tml
list) wrote:
> What is, IMO, very, very unreasonable is that Dulinor could've set up
> such a vast conspiracy w/o exposure & that he could've militarily
> mobilized  his 'backwater' domain w/ no significant hostile frontiers
> into the massive military machine it became overnight w/o anyone taking
> notice & in such a short period of time. (how many years were there
> 'tween the restoration of of the ArchDukes & The Rebellion?)
> Way too silly to allow for 'suspension of belief'.
> They must've 'really tied one on' over at GDW in order to come up w/ that.
> Almost as bad as that 'Virus' thing!

I would say that he didn't. The conspiracy was small, and he had limited
manpower to start. That'd be part of why he ran away after his coup
didn't go off absolutely perfectly (and being an amateur he hadn't
really planned for it not going perfectly).

As for mobilising huge fleets, apparently all the imperial core sectors
had stupid amounts of hardware lying around. Though actually, they
didn't have that much, because a lot of Lucan's forces came from
stripping the border sectors, and note that Dulinor rapidly switched to
fighting a defensive war against Lucan whilst Lucan proceeded to commit
that common error of absolutist tyrants - refusing to concede ground or
leave one enemy on the backburner to allow dealing conclusively with
another - i.e. Lucan tried to fight all his opponents (and that meant
every other faction except Deneb and Daibei) at once. Thus Dulinor
didn't need to be a peer of Lucan in numbers to hold him at bay, which
is all he really managed.

So it's not outside the bounds of possibility. As for Virus, having seen
the mess fairly 'weak' attacks can make of the internet, I don't find
Virus more unreasonable than gravtics, reactionless manoeuvre drives,
meson guns and screens, and Jump drives that give FTL travel.

--
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>