Headscratchers / Troy Rising

• What precisely was the Rangora plan in The Hot Gate? Destroy Therm and then... what? Throwing a significant percentage of their remaining fleet to destroy one Earth fortification and not even the most powerful of them was a mind mindbogglingly short-sighted move.
  • As the Rangora POV character will frustratedly tell you, the Rangora who planned the attack are mind-bogglingly short-sighted.
  • Their plan might have been to cripple Thermopylae, destroy Earth's conventional fleet, and then board and capture Therm at their leisure. Which would have been a pretty good plan, if they ever used the recommended number of forces.
    • As far as this trooper's understanding goes, at that point of time, the best course of action for Rangora Empire is to keep Terrans bottled up while they mop up the last remaining Glatun strongholds and solidify their control over the territory they have taken over and the most economical way to stop a Battle Globe is either using a heavy task force of Assault Vectors (as in somewhere in the range of 12 Assault Vectors near gate at alert status, based on some back off the napkin calculations, meaning a total of 18 Assault Vectors constantly standing guard at E.Eridani, also known as the ass end of nowhere.) or an other Battle Globe/Station of their own.
    • At that point of the war, Rangora don't have the Assault Vectors but they still have the mobile Assault Vector support docks and the repair crews. With the Troy being immobilized for about 30 more days and (Parasite) Fleet destroyed, Rangoran ground forces could won the day via boarding action and then Rangoran Navy could have rushed every engineering dock they could spare to Therm in order to take it over and turn it's guns against the Gate, effectively blocking the only avenue over which Terrans could attack.
    • Rangora do not have the production to keep up with the Terran war machine but the power multiplier provided by a ready made BG and a knock-off SAPL might have been enough to stonewall the Terra long enough.

• How in the world could an advanced galactic society, capable of mass-fabricating starships, able to perform genetic scans of people in order to implant brain-interfacing cybernetics in them, and possessing full functional super-AI, not be able to simply artificially reproduce maple syrup? The stuff is like 60% sugar, it's not exactly a complex substance.
  • I might be wrong, but I think maple syrup stops being important relatively quickly. We can probably assume that a big part of the benefit of maple syrup is being able to exploit the initial rush before someone decides to devote R&D and then production time to something that might turn out to be a fad and not worth the long term effort or supply chain disruption of developing and using it. The Glatun who would normally be involved in that might not be putting too much effort into developing a synthetic version because they figure that by the time its ready to ship the new factor would have worn off and the price would have dropped. They're probably working on it but its not considered a priority for those reasons.
  • An easier, true-to-life explanation is that people care way more about the branding of the product than the actual product itself. Sure, there might be zero chemical difference between the natural and artificial versions... except the rich and elite can brag about the exclusivity and superiority the "real thing" over the mass-produced version. Furthermore, given Vernon's business savvy, he probably worked some investment interest into the developing maple syrup market beyond just production - even as artificial maple syrup came onto the scene, he probably still profited from the overall industry.