I agree about 50% with you.
Well, that's a start.
I agree that this would cover the bulk of the missions you wouldn't do by having people simply travel to the target planet to do observation in person.
which is the bulk of your intelligence gathering and analysis, really. For instance, knowing
where to send your agents is helpful. But in military terms,
learning what the enemy actually
does, versus what he's telling his units to do, is
also very useful-and can only be established through observation. An agent on the ground can look at the documents if they're super-awesomely-godlike good, but most
aren't. Agents in Moskow have missed important activities and actions in Belarus or Khazakhstan during the cold war, only to have those things found by observers flying out of
Turkey, or by watching ship movements for changes along the baltic or other coasts. Human beings are creatures of pattern and repetition, six months of observations delivered a month after can be worth MORE than trying to interpret an event or action you learned about yesterday because the document finally got to you.
I think there is meaningful disagreement on 2 points:
- Sometimes, you're in a big hurry to get information right now. A slowboat mission could take weeks, even months to get in position and gather information. Often, that's not an issue at all. But when it is, and you need your signint 5 minutes ago, you better get crafty with pirate points for insertion.
Thus, why you don't rely on
any single method or source.
- Secondly, even when you slowboat in, you need to have a strategy to jump out. Just because you've found a nice spot interstitial in the system somewhere doesn't mean it's also suitable to jump out of at a moment's notice. Especially if you're using some kind of satellite body somewhere to obscure direct observation. And a run back to the regular proximity limit, regardless of which direction you're aiming, could take too long. So if you're able to get the best of both worlds, you found a hidey spot that at least makes a jump out plausible.
Like anything else, that's conditional, situational, and deeply and heavily involved in mapping to work...which means your slowboat missions have to have gone first, since you have to know
where to find those hidey-spots...and you have to know enough about your enemy/target to know they
haven't found them ahead of you. There's a limit to how much data James Bond can find out for you in a short amount of time, and a limit on how much he can carry out in his leg-satchel or whatever BS spy gear Q gives him.
I think we have to agree that one of the conceits of the universe is that you do have to get very close to gather anything meaningfully. In theory you can just park a satellite somewhere between the Oort cloud and the system proper, even a few light minutes away, and just hoover up all the EM that oozes out over time. But then sigint is basically just 2,000 satellites per House/faction, and their intel gathering is amazing.
We know that capability doesn't exist, so have to accept that along with crap weapon ranges and 'Mechs being king, signint requires true liability in proximity to your intended targets.
Fasanomics, Paul. There are huge gapes or 'conceits' in the universe simply because of the blind-spots of the creators. One recent experience was a recent creator insisting everyone goes into naval combat with the atmo drawn down to null, forgetting whole chapters of lore including Harjel, which are supposed to be better because they keep the air in. At a certain point, all this becomes moot, because at the end of the day, the optimal design for anything is going to be something that would be crippled in a real military context. (Why have ANY cargo space on a warship, when it's not relevant to a two-mapsheet table game?)
There's what's in the game, (Zeus rifle has shotgun ranges) and there's what's in the RPG (Zeus rifle is a kilometer-distance sniper/antimateriel rifle that edges on near-invisible distance before it stops being effective).
"Aiming your guns to a distance where they can reliably hit" is different from "Seeing a planet." see the difference here? ONE of those, has a relevance to a two mapsheet tabletop game, the other only matters on a scale you
can't fit on a tabletop.
One more thing back to the Recon issue: Your HUMINT is limited not only by access to an enemy's infrastructure, but also by the fact your agents are handing their reports to a third party government for transmission, and that third party government has a vested interest in crippling your efforts.
Comstar.
Talk to an IT guy, and feed him some drinks, and when he's good and buzzed, ask him if there's anything that goes through his servers he can't, with some dedicated effort, crack right down to the machine code.
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