On Mon, Feb 8, 2016 at 3:53 PM, Bruce  Johnson
<xxxxxx@pharmacy.arizona.edu> wrote:
>
>> On Feb 8, 2016, at 10:38 AM, Jeffrey Schwartz <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> By mid-1107, the BOE had realized it was more cost effective to hire
>> small merc units to preemptively hunt down and "terminally dissuade IG
>> kinetic business practices.”
>
> So let me get this straight:
>
> We’re talking about known terrorists aligned with a interstellar polity hostile to the Imperium, and criminal arson acts are being committed undermining the world economy and the 3I and local government leaves it to the business to hire "merc groups”?
>
> Sounds much more like the bank manager in question is trying to eliminate competition for his money-laundering/insurance fraud sideline...
>

Spent a lot of time digging everything I could out on the lead up to
the 5th Frontier War on Efate.
Lot of digging thru TNS for the time frame, then the Wiki, then old adventures.
This little slice of 3I history has been where my players have been
playing the last few months of real time, and I worked very hard to
get them caught up in the final months leading up to the Siege of
Efate.

The destruction of the freaking TAS building at Efate starport was
accepted as a "civil war" / "local issue" that the Imperial Marines
were told not to mess with.

The 3I continued denying there was any tie between the IG and the Zho
right up until a couple hundred days before the Zho fleet arrived.
They denied there was any Zho activity on the border worlds right up
until the Zho fleets showed.

Officially.

At the same time, the availability of merc units drops, none of them
accepting contracts, until the 3I drops the hammer on the IG on Efate,
intervening in a 3+ year long "civil war" / "local disturbance" with
massive shock and awe.

So - known terrorists that the 3I repeatedly denied were affiliated
with the Zho in multiple TNS reports, working to undermine the
Imperial presence on Efate, were officially ignored by the 3I.

There's some non-canon text about Efate indicating that the local
gov't wasn't highly trusting of the Imperium, and were particularly
picky about "we don't want the 3I to have an excuse to spread troops
out all over our planet, we'll take care of this ourselves"

It wasn't until definitive proof of Zho involvement was delivered to
both the local "parties of influence" that they agreed there was
off-world influence and that they could trust the Imperium to deal
with it. (IMTU, it was my group of players who captured a Zho spyship
in the process of delivering munitions to the IG that was the final
straw of proof)