CG predictions...

[Phill P]

I think you are assuming that the Club's first and foremost purpose is to do a "good job" of governing humanity.

Just the opposite. I have been to the Dynasty Sites and the Zurara and am aware of all their devious double dealings in the past, so I can assure you that you could not be more wrong. My comments about their and Sirius' failures have in fact been an effort to demonstrate that my opinion of The Club, not high to begin with, is that even as a secret society they're pretty rubbish, which for context was in direct response to Ian's statement that a lot of players still blame them for everything.

You can argue their success in some ways but for me they still have no answers to any of the larger problems. In any case growing a little bigger and gaining a small amount of arguable influence as a corporation is still a bit tame and doesn't match up with their inflated reputation as some all controlling secret society.

 

[Phill P]

Though, are we talking "success" in terms of "the project was successful" or in terms of "we got paid"? Because in the latter, Sirius have been very successful lately at extracting money from the Alliance, and the Federation is probably paying Core Dynamics plenty of money to supply Hudson's regular doses of violence. They didn't get the joint-superpower moneypit treaty they wanted thanks to the NMLA, but it still worked out okay for them.

(I'm a lot less clear what Sirius is getting out of supporting Delaine: possibly just propping up a rival to the Consortium on enemy-of-my-enemy principles?)

I dunno, I still think becoming a bit more successful as a corporation and making money out of it is just average corporation stuff and not the machinations of some evil club, just the usual god complex of any company that gets so large. And if they can't do any better against the Thargoids than anyone else so far, the best they can hope for is to still have some marginal success as a company. But remember also this was in response to the idea that there are still some players who think The Club are behind everything. I am not one of them and still think what I always have about them - they're a bit rubbish.

Reminds me of the meme with two people and the first says "how would I go about forming a secret society?" and the second person says "Not going to lie, you're off to a bad start."

Delaine I can't figure out where they were going with that at all. Your guess is as good as any there.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

and the NMLA largely was

I'm not convinced that one was a Club plan in the first place. The major conspiracy seems to have been around some Senators and some Imperial Intelligence and there's really not much to point to it going any further. (I mean, no-one trusts Blaine, and he was suspiciously easily taken in, but if he was involved it was in a very hands-off way)

Sure, there was some opportunism with taking over the peace conference (and maybe with getting Jerome Archer promoted) but I'm pretty sure they didn't initiate it.

 

[forbiddenlake]

Also interesting to note that it seemed a lot easier to get bonds when playing on the cultist side vs playing in the Feds side. Doing the same amount of combat zones (high intensity) for both sides I ended up with 65% more bonds defending cultists than helping the Feds.

Popontia Incorporated was actually involved in two wars in the system at the same time[1], because the CG was was god-handed over an existing war. Perhaps because of this, CZs were spawned very close together, and bond earnings were doubled (and CZ events like propaganda vessels were less reliable than usual).

[1] Elite BGS does not reflect this, probably because this situation should not be possible. I saw it on Inara and ingame but didn't take screenshots sadly.

 

[Rainbro]

I'm not convinced that one was a Club plan in the first place. The major conspiracy seems to have been around some Senators and some Imperial Intelligence and there's really not much to point to it going any further. (I mean, no-one trusts Blaine, and he was suspiciously easily taken in, but if he was involved it was in a very hands-off way)

Sure, there was some opportunism with taking over the peace conference (and maybe with getting Jerome Archer promoted) but I'm pretty sure they didn't initiate it.

The NMLA being able to strike all three superpowers with apparent ease (all the "how did they get past our security"? stuff) suggests to me it went further. There was also the offhand link to the League of Reparation who apparently had a similar comms network to Omega Grid. That could have just been a coincidence to make it easier to introduce the ACT people again, but the League was an Alliance-based group, and again one that was able to strike pretty much anywhere.

Blaine himself is also just a great candidate for a Club head, given his previous role in the Emperor's Dawn storyline and Hengist's poisoning. He didn't necessarily need to be super hands-on, though we have no information on the practicalities of how exactly you pull off something like this. But the NMLA already existed prior to suddenly recieving a lot of new funding, and he would be in a position to identify rebellious Senators and nudge them in the right direction, clearing their path if nothing else to take out those Duvals that are an obstacle between him and the throne.

 

[Rainbro]

I dunno, I still think becoming a bit more successful as a corporation and making money out of it is just average corporation stuff and not the machinations of some evil club, just the usual god complex of any company that gets so large. And if they can't do any better against the Thargoids than anyone else so far, the best they can hope for is to still have some marginal success as a company. But remember also this was in response to the idea that there are still some players who think The Club are behind everything. I am not one of them and still think what I always have about them - they're a bit rubbish.

I don't think we really disagree here, just that what you're saying is "average corporation stuff" is also pretty evil and machination-y. Taking such control over an entire superpower is definitely not a marginal success, either.

In fairness, they can be behind a lot of stuff and also still be rubbish. They're a bunch of rich guys with massive egos, not typically the blueprint for great leadership. Their "genius" plan to manipulate the superpowers into near-war against each other to produce more capital ships to be used against the Thargoids was a complete failure, while causing a lot of damage and death. Big screwup. Years later, we now have some capital ships that can resist shutdown waves...unless the Thargoids use a bigger shutdown wave, which they may or may not be able to do whenever they want now.

The better plan would have been to just release their info and warn people the Thargoids were coming. Maybe even just not deliberately start a war with the Thargoids for various reasons, if you believe that stuff. But they won't do that. GalNet alluded to their goal as furthering the military-industrial complex, and for all their lofty ideals and other ventures, that's basically what they are.

What would be the outcomes if the Club was more successful, in your opinion? They're incredibly rich and influential. They haven't wiped out the Thargoids, but tbh that's a pretty tall order and their actual war with them is still very profitable in the meanwhile. Sirius control the Alliance, Hudson is their puppet, the Empire's recent position is unclear but Blaine is still around.

I also can't really figure out the Delaine stuff. Not everything has to be some far-reaching plot, I guess, some of it is just a quick scheme to make some cash and then drop the crazy pirate.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

The NMLA being able to strike all three superpowers with apparent ease (all the "how did they get past our security"? stuff) suggests to me it went further. There was also the offhand link to the League of Reparation who apparently had a similar comms network to Omega Grid. That could have just been a coincidence to make it easier to introduce the ACT people again, but the League was an Alliance-based group, and again one that was able to strike pretty much anywhere.

It sounds like all three superpowers - and probably anyone else of sufficient importance not to be worried by the PDB - have the ability to set up dark comms networks, so the League having access to an unrelated one via their Alliance sponsor doesn't seem too implausible. Support by rogue Imperial Intelligence agents would certainly be sufficient to bypass security at all of their Imperial targets, and give some decent hints for other stations as well.

The NMLA only hit highly-secured non-Imperial non-Marlinist targets once, in the Nine Martyrs attack, which was a big one-off event and did also take place when most of the heads of state were elsewhere so security attention might have been split. (Now, did Jerome Archer in his Federal Intelligence role find out in advance and decide to be slightly too late to stop it to help reduce the competition? Sure, that's also possible)

Blaine himself is also just a great candidate for a Club head, given his previous role in the Emperor's Dawn storyline and Hengist's poisoning. He didn't necessarily need to be super hands-on, though we have no information on the practicalities of how exactly you pull off something like this. But the NMLA already existed prior to suddenly recieving a lot of new funding, and he would be in a position to identify rebellious Senators and nudge them in the right direction, clearing their path if nothing else to take out those Duvals that are an obstacle between him and the throne.

He's a great candidate for a long-term conspiracy runner out to further increase his power, certainly - and there's plenty of those about - but he doesn't feel like a great fit for the Club specifically because he's never seemed so much into the military-industrial side of things.

 

[Rainbro]

It sounds like all three superpowers - and probably anyone else of sufficient importance not to be worried by the PDB - have the ability to set up dark comms networks, so the League having access to an unrelated one via their Alliance sponsor doesn't seem too implausible.

Depends on if it is really unrelated, though. Just being "dark-comms"/secret shouldn't be enough to draw a comparison, that's not a unique idea. The description is vague but it was referred to as being similar and a more sophisticated "version".

Fair point on the targets. As for Blaine, I guess it just comes down to how much of everything you do blame on the Club. There is always little to suggest any of these conspiracies go further than just themselves, but it seems impossible to me that the Club can exist and not have had a hand in things like Emperor's Dawn, to try and control who would be the next Emperor. In many ways its an equivalent storyline to Starship One, which was from the same era and was finally responsible for the first indirect reference to the Club themselves on GalNet. Blaine also popped up again in the Salome storyline. Emperor's Dawn, too, or at least their name being used in what was definitely a Club scheme.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

As for Blaine, I guess it just comes down to how much of everything you do blame on the Club.

It feels to me - and there's uncertainty as to whether this has been true all along or a change for the post-2020 storyline - that Frontier aren't going for the "single overarching conspiracy" storyline [1] so much nowadays. So there's the Club (Dynasty, Sirius, Starship One, etc), there's Azimuth (Black Flight, Overlook, etc), there's the Consortium (Joker's Deck, Rackham?), and maybe some others.

So the Club can certainly still be behind a lot of things - even if it's just the Sirius-Wreaken-CoreDynamics show that's a lot of influence - without needing to be behind absolutely everything.

[1] There have certainly been games which have done it well, but I'm not sure Elite Dangerous is really suited to that sort of "ah, you ate a sandwich - all part of our plans" sort of super-conspiracy.

 

[Rainbro]

Frontier aren't going for the "single overarching conspiracy" storyline so much nowadays

I can definitely see that as a possibility. I would lean towards that being a new thing though, with the change being brought about maybe in part because of Black Flight being repurposed as an Azimuth operation. And if that's the case, I think Emperor's Dawn being from before all that means they're Club, and by extension Blaine, and then maybe again from him to the NMLA. The Club still having their old reach, but there being other players as well now.

 

[Spaceman-FXL5]

Popontia Incorporated was actually involved in two wars in the system at the same time[1], because the CG was was god-handed over an existing war. Perhaps because of this, CZs were spawned very close together, and bond earnings were doubled (and CZ events like propaganda vessels were less reliable than usual).

[1] Elite BGS does not reflect this, probably because this situation should not be possible. I saw it on Inara and ingame but didn't take screenshots sadly.

Yes, I saw this as was headed to one of them and then changed to the correct CG CZ.

 

[Phill P]

I don't think we really disagree here, just that what you're saying is "average corporation stuff" is also pretty evil and machination-y.

There's a difference in my mind, if not yours. Even though you can argue that in practical terms there are a lot of similarities in the effects of the actions of both, for example a secret society using big companies and other intermediaries to do their dirty work for them isn't much different to a company just doing it themselves, there's still a difference between being a super evil secret society with some agenda for the future of the human race controlling everything and simply being a large company playing at what their money can do and only caring at all about the human race in terms of how they can secure them as a source of more cash. So far Sirius have been the latter for me and none of that secret squirrel stuff is needed to explain it.

Ian's comment about perhaps being in control of some things but not everything sums it up pretty well. Anyone who wants to convince me that the club are still in charge of everything, though, will have to do better than represent them as a pantomime parody of Amazon.

And as I said it's all irrelevant if Sirius can't be part of the solution and do no better against the Thargoids than anyone else. If they can't, so much for being in control. YMMV.

 

[GraphiteGB]

Winters Condemns Oppression of Thargoid Cult - Elite Dangerous: Odyssey

The Popontia conflict and the mass arrest of Far God cultists have received civil and political criticism across the Federation. Shadow President Feli...

www.elitedangerous.com

More filler as they continue to electons next year...

 

[Kryxix]

Subject D-2 Rejects Azimuth​

Seo Jin-ae, the Project Seraph survivor, has refused to have any further contact with Azimuth Biotech following its offer of help.

She is currently in the care of Professor Alba Tesreau, who stated:

“It will come as no surprise that Ms Seo vehemently rejects Mr Rademaker’s proposal. She has relayed horrific details to me about her abduction years ago, and the invasive experimentation at Oaken Point. The fear that Azimuth operatives were hunting her never passed, resulting in total isolation from her former life to protect friends and loved ones. As things stand, she has no reason to trust the organisation responsible for her suffering.”

“Ms Seo’s health has improved, but I’m informed that a significant neural implant grafted into her cerebral cortex – designed to interface with a Thargoid vessel – can never be removed. With her permission, we are working to better understand the manner of the surgeries inflicted upon Ms Seo, along with her claimed interpretation of the ‘Thargoid roar’. I have contacted both Professor Ishmael Palin and Ram Tah for assistance.”

Azimuth Biotech CEO Torben Rademaker expressed disappointment at the response, and cast doubt on Seo Jin-ae’s legitimacy: “In her fragile emotional state, D-2 may be vulnerable to coercion by Professor Tesreau and other ex-Aegis radicals. Our medical teams have access to records detailing the procedures Oaken Point surgeons were carrying out. It would be unwise of Tesreau to choose self-interest over the chance to truly heal D-2.”

In related news, several newsfeeds have reported an initial bump in public support for the reinstatement of Aegis. Following her attendance at the symposium, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Corcoran told the Old Worlds Gazette:

“Operation Tyndareus has been initiated, with forces engaged in protecting the Andecavi system. Yet the Alliance should not rely exclusively on Sirius Corporation for anti-xeno defence. I believe that the return of Aegis is an option deserving serious consideration.”

 

[Ian Doncaster]

So ... what next for CGs?

The recent Galnet articles might be pointing towards some sort of Azimuth-Tesreau conflict, but it's hard to see what it would be about short of Rademaker sending the Musashi to Altair to try to capture Seo.

Up to five flares now, getting to the point where adding more just makes each individual one seem less scary [1]. Still, Tesreau involving Palin and Tah might point towards some sort of research CG on them coming up? I can see that one waiting a little longer until the first one isn't in Col 70, though - in another couple of weeks they should start to be in visual range of the edge of the bubble.

CG ends in Andecavi, Thargoids hang around another week to make the point and then go home? Presumably at least a little delay for variety before they poke the Empire.

Again nothing seeming immediately obvious.

[1] One: we're in trouble.
Three: we're in serious trouble.
Five: wait, they didn't think three was enough? maybe we stand a chance.

 

[zimms]

[...]

[1] One: we're in trouble.
Three: we're in serious trouble.
Five: wait, they didn't think three was enough? maybe we stand a chance.

They know the Trisolarans only built four sophons and got incinerated.

 

[GraphiteGB]

So are the thargoids allready hiding in an empire system or has that gone unnoticed this time...
lol Guess we find out When galnet leak the CG 1 hour early yet again... (they have still not fixed that yet error)

Is it Finaly time to have 4.0 native CG content... is there a hidden Cut scene Audio file ready to play for a 4.0 CG event....

There current cut scene player Loads Audio and video files independently from the HDD there not stored as a combined file...

 

[Ian Doncaster]

So, Sirius supported Alliance CG compared with the independent ones ... total volume and participant count up about 50% on a weekly basis.
Presumably the Thargoids haven't left yet, though?

 

[Cmdr. Numa]

I've murdered Interceptors and Scouts worth 201 million in this CG. Scouts and Interceptors that did nothing except being there and defending themselves. For two additional heatsink charges. I feel dirty now.

 

[Florenus]

I've murdered Interceptors and Scouts worth 201 million in this CG. Scouts and Interceptors that did nothing except being there and defending themselves. For two additional heatsink charges. I feel dirty now.

I don't think they were just tourists though. They were not only defending themselves, as they were attacking human ships on sight while being in human space (after dropping into AX CZ they shoot you first I believe).