Centrum discovers Tertius

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Ashtagon

My guess: They'll "encourage" a final war, while doing their best to protect France, then uplift what's left.

That does sound like the proper solution, but it also doesn't sound like the solution that centrum will be willing to admit to. They are obsessed with their own final war, and while they don't value individual lives much, they place a high price on lives of massive groups of people. I don't think they'll want to set off a final war. On the other hand, they may see it as sacrificing one world to save many others.

Of course, Q11 is actually out of reach. I don't know that they'd do anything different than what they did with infinity. A two front war is unpleasant, yes, but ones does what one must. They may judge Siaku-mon to be the weaker of the two worlds and focus on shifting their quanta first, as homeline appears to be putting up a good fight.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

An alternative scenario would be a Q2 threat to Homeline (perhaps involving a nonhuman civilization). What would Homeline do when faced with a 2027 TL9 magical using parachronic civilization of humanoid turtles?

That's nearly a different thought, perhaps worthy of its own thread, but not really relevant to question at hand.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Tom Mazanec

Suppose Centrum discovers a Shikaku-Mon type timeline on Quantum 11, but with Parachronics. There are a lot of echoes on Quantum 10. What do they do different than they did with Secundus? I know enough about military matters that a two-front war is a Bad Idea!

A two-front war is a bad idea for Germany when they can have a one front war. The phrase two front war just means, "acquiring more enemies then you can handle at a time" rendered into an early twentieth century foreign correspondent's rather jazzy concept of proper milspeak. The mere geographic fact of having two fronts is not harmful and can often be useful if it means you have interior lines(which in turn is staffie-dialect for "having less travel time between the base and the area of operations").

[Ashtagon]

Originally Posted by ericthered

That does sound like the proper solution, but it also doesn't sound like the solution that centrum will be willing to admit to. They are obsessed with their own final war, and while they don't value individual lives much, they place a high price on lives of massive groups of people. I don't think they'll want to set off a final war. On the other hand, they may see it as sacrificing one world to save many others.

Had this Tertius not been capable of travelling the quanta to new worlds, I doubt they'd go for this. But as it is, there's a low probability that the war can be prevented, and a high probability that when it happens, it will spill over into other quanta. While sacrificing a billion (or four) Tertians is a very high price to pay, it's definitely lower than what might happen if Tertius's final war ends up spanning multiple quanta instead of just the one.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by Ashtagon

My guess: They'll "encourage" a final war, while doing their best to protect France, then uplift what's left.

Or… weld the four powers into a single polity, and uplift that. That's a longer-term view but it caters to their wish to avoid nuclear wars as well as to their single-polity worldview.

[Phil Masters]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

An alternative scenario would be a Q2 threat to Homeline (perhaps involving a nonhuman civilization). What would Homeline do when faced with a 2027 TL9 magical using parachronic civilization of humanoid turtles?

Auction the merchandise rights?

[TGLS]

Originally Posted by Tom Mazanec

Well, Tertius is 2027 Shikaku-Mon with Conveyors and Projectors, so what would Centrum think of it?

OK. I'm going to work with the assumption that all powers have parachronic capability (otherwise a probable result could be one power decides their invincible now that they have off-world colonies and they blow-up their homeline). This means in the area in the quantum north of Centrum, they have four players squabbling with each other over the worlds (I seriously doubt they'll all come together, faced with this new possibility).

Centrum could probably imitate the same plan that they have with Infinity with better results, because Tertius is has no experience with echo-snatching and all these powers have much smaller resources than Centrum (though perhaps a tech-edge). Also, with lots of paranoia between these four powers, Centrum could play them off each other, steadily weakening the lot of them. Centrum might decide to pretend to be weaker, to prevent Tertius's powers from deciding to bandwagon against Centrum. I doubt invading Tertius would be something Centrum would consider; invading a more advanced world just wouldn't work.

Infinity would notice that Centrum would be failing to keep up the pressure on them. They would probably remain on guard for a while though, so if Centrum can deal with Tertius quickly enough, it wouldn't matter. However, if it takes too long, Infinity might decide to take the initiative, which may very well be disastrous. As such, the best plan would be to go ahead and start a fire on the south-side of the quantums. If they have heard about Shikaku-Mon, they might decide to just slip some parachronics their way, which would simply be worse for Infinity, given Shikaku-Mon is in projector distance to Infinity. If they haven't head of Shikaku-Mon, I guess Grade 4 Goldstein will get to go ahead with her Nazi plan.

One other consideration. If Centrum is aware of Shikaku-Mon, and how Shikaku-Mon diverged from Homeline, it's plausible that Centrum could try a brute force plot to toss all the convenient Tertius echoes towards Homeline (and perhaps, convenient Homeline echoes towards Tertius), by killing Prince John of Spain (saving, for Homeline to Tertius).

[Tom Mazanec]

With all the spying in Shikaku-Mon, I figure something like parachronics will leak to every Power pretty quickly.