Line #11 WMG/TheLostFleet


1	[[WMG: The Syndics gifts in the first book were real]]
2	* The reason the merchant shuttles were staffed with sailors was because the merchants had refused to do it. The ships weren't booby-trapped, and Geary made a mistake when he demanded gifts from the Syndics and then refused to accept them because he was paranoid. The sailors posing as merchants thought it was a suicide mission since they expected the Alliance to take them prisoner, and then deal with them the way they used to do.
3	** Have to re-read it, but didn't the ships go to full acceleration when the Alliance tried to brake via remote control? And then they simply changed the course to aim the ships back at the Syndics?
4
5	[[WMG: The unforgivable thing mentioned under noodle incident was a zombie/reanimation program]]
6	* Think about it. The Alliance worships their ancestors, and to reanimate corpses to fight would probably count as sacrilege. Reanimating a human with memories and personality and all would mean stealing their souls back from the Living Stars, and reanimating them as a non-conscious zombie is at its best disrespectful towards the person that once inhabited the body in question.
7	** Alternatively, they invented brain uploading, preventing the soul from ever reaching its ancestors.
8
9	[[WMG: Dancer/Human Relations]]
10	* I suspect in the space of a single generation both parties are going to become so accustomed to the others' looks that the young are going to be astonished that their elders once thought each other hideous.
11	** Likewise with their different ways of thinking. Humans will do their best to think in patterns and Dancers the same for binary thinking. Also, considering how humanity usually behaves, imitating the Dancers' clothing and customs (once we learn more about them) will become a fad.
12	* Contemplate for a moment the frustration the Dancers must have been feeling over the Humans refusal to talk to them in anything but 'baby talk'. It casts a whole new light on the Dancers insistence on personally returning the Jump Space pioneer's body to 'Kansas' they were trying to demonstrate that they were worthy of being taken seriously - and it seemingly didn't work. Imagine the scene aboard the Dancer ship:
13	-->"Still with the baby talk! Captain pull out my fangs and stab me to death with them I just can't take it anymore! What do we have to do to get these people to talk to us seriously??"
14
15	[[WMG: The Alliance really ''did'' attack first, with or without the covert encouragement of the enigmas.]]
16	* After all, the two sides being not so different is rather unsubtly pounded home in the "Beyond the Frontier" series...
17	** This would be highly unlikely considering Geary is a firsthand witness to one of the opening engagements of the war. It's unlikely the Alliance could have attacked the Synics and Geary been in the dark about the war long enough for the Syndics to counterattack.
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19	[[WMG: The Black Fleet will attack Unity and wipe most if not all of the Alliance Senate]]
20	* It would be fitting for the fleet they built to stop the fall of the government to deal the final blow, and if their programming has been corrupted they might see the senate as an important target to attack.
21	** {{Jossed}}, though they would have tried had Geary not stopped them when they did.
22
23	[[WMG: The "Black Jack" nickname is connected to another NoodleIncident alluded to in ''Guardian'']]
24	* When giving Captain Badaya a pep-talk, Geary alludes to a really major screw-up he committed as a young ensign that was, "so big I won't tell you what it was". He's also been equally close-mouthed about exactly how the nickname got hung on him. I refer my fellow tropers to the LawOfConservationOfDetail...
25
26	[[WMG: The bear-cow ghosts on the superbattleship are an 'artificial herd']]
27	* In order to comfort the herd-accustomed bearcows, some system (designed to be always-on or activate in an emergency) generates the sensation of more bear-cows being present. This way, space-bear-cows are kept from going crazy by the 'presence' of a large herd at all times, even if they're the only living bear-cow on the ship (probably not an issue for the superbattleship, but way more important on smaller vessels). This causes the humans on the captured superbattleship to feel the continual presence of bear-cows, which they interpret as ghosts.
28	** Confirmed in ''Leviathan''.
29
30	[[WMG: The Syndicate Worlds were larger and had more resources and manpower than The Alliance]]
31	* ...because they were closer to the galactic core and had had more room to expand through colonization, whereas the Alliance had been boxed in by the Syndics on one side and various small states on the other. This geopolitical set-up is strongly implied in the ''Beyond The Frontier'' series, and could explain why The Alliance was only able to stalemate The Syndics despite their lesser military-industrial inefficiency and backstabbing.
32
33	[[WMG: The Syndicate Worlds were thought it was easier to attack and annex The Alliance than it was to expand through colonisation]]
34	* Why? [[spoiler: Because Aliens, that's why. The Enigmas were wiping out their colonies, seemingly with impunity. Maybe they figured they needed the resources of The Alliance to be able to stand up to them in the long-run.]]
35	* As shown in the novels, the general idea so far is that the Enigmas may have mislead the Syndicate Worlds into starting the war, making them think that they had their support when they didn't. The war started, they pulled their support and started attacking Syndicate Worlds colonies.
36
37	[[WMG: The "Black Jack" nickname came from a card game]]
38	* Which Geary lost. Badly.
39	** {{Jossed}} in the short story “Shore Patrol”.
40
41	[[WMG: in the Aftermath of the AI Fleet Disaster, Either Geary, or more likely one of his subordinates, sick and tired of the Alliance Governments repeated attempts to murder them out of paranoia, will release a FULL report on what almost happened onto the Public Datanet]]
42	* by this point, it would be GLORIOUSLY cathartic to see the ungrateful bastards lynched by the citizenry
43
44	[[WMG: If the nigh-inevitable LiveActionAdaptation gets greenlit before 2021, Creator/ChrisEvans will be cast as John Geary.]]
45	* If you don't get it, check the {{Expy}} entry on the main page.
46
47	[[WMG: Every race in the Milky Way has one thing their race invents which others cannot due to differences between them.]]
48	* So far in the series every race seems to have a technological trump card that is specific to them and while some technology is universal (like, say, hypernet gates or warships), others can only be invented by certain races because of how they think. This tech can be stolen or gifted, but invention takes a certain mindset.
49	** Kicks have their planetary bombardment defense: They need to protect the herd, what better way to do that than to make sure nothing can hit the planet(the only planet they seem to have too) unless the Kicks want it to?
50	** Enigmas have their quantum worms: A race so secretive they got named after their paranoid tendencies, how would you get info from a foe if you won't talk/trade with them? A very hard-to-find worm that could easily be stealthily inserted into various systems without the risk of openly talking to anyone.
51	** The Dancers are less certain, but maybe theirs is adaptive code: They are master engineers and skilled at building things perfectly. The time and skill it would take for a code to adapt to a completely alien computer without wrecking it is impressive. The code able to 'sense' the patterns the computers run on and configure itself as needed.
52	** Humanity of course, has duct tape: A race that is impulsive, curious, and prone to breaking things. So we made a tape that was sturdy and iconic, able to be used in an instant to temporarily repair just about anything while we race back to get whatever we broke fixed by an expert.
53
54	[[WMG: Dancers can travel for long periods of time in jump space because they can shed exoskeletons.]]
55	* Its stated in the books that jump space makes a human feel like they don't feel right in their own skins, the longer they stay in, the worse it gets. Eventually this feeling will drive humans mad because humans cannot remove their skin so the upper limit of jump drive range is set by the tricks Geary taught the fleet to extend the range. But the Dancers, being some sort of alien spider-wolf, may have an exoskeleton which they can shed in order to relieve the pressure under their 'skins.' They even warn humans against it, well aware (due to the early jump drive test astronaut they found) that humans couldn't handle it. And the Dancers only do it to bring a fleet to help Geary defeat the AI Fleet, so they probably don't do it unless under the most extreme circumstances because its very stressful to shed and regrow an exoskeleton.
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57	[[WMG: Every race tries to invent an AI warship fleet, and it always turns on their masters eventually. Its one of the universe's great filters.]]
58	* And if you survive trying to give an AI a weapon that can destroy your civilization, after that the race is most likely safe barring outside factors.
59	** The Dancers both understanding what was happening enough to bring a fleet back to help Geary defeat the Alliance's AI Fleet says they already went through this and were scared that their new interstellar friends were going to suffer for a step they had yet to take.
60	** The Enigmas would think, 'what better way to make sure no one ever finds out who is attacking? There wouldn't even be people on the ships!' and then they had to blow them all up and went a different direction for their warships not to be found.

Context WMG / TheLostFleet