Editor’s Loudspeaker: Leaked Report Verified

2946-10-13 – Editor’s Loudspeaker: Leaked Report Verified

Yesterday I posted a highly skeptical breakdown of the leaked New Rheims Investigation report, expecting that before long we would be seeing the complete report and hearing about the committee staffer who, with an axe to grind, had fabricated the wild conclusions of the leaked document.

I was quite wrong. Since I called attention to its existence on this feed, several waves of takedown orders attempted to destroy all datasphere access to the report, but this had only limited success, and it convinced many that the leaked document was genuine.

Earlier today, Delegate Nisi-Bonn, chair of the New Rheims Committee, came out and verified the leaked report and its conclusion. She said that she had been attempting to clear the document with Naval Intelligence through several drafts, and that they had rejected each one, citing the likelihood of civil unrest. While she didn’t say so, I can only conclude that her staff leaked the report at her direction, and I salute her leadership in this matter.

An emergency motion to cut all Navy funding from the Confederated treasury is on the Congressional schedule for tomorrow’s session, which starts about six hours from the publication of this feed item (remember that our studio is on the other side of the world from Congress). It’s being widely whispered here on Planet at Centauri that the Admiralty Council might attempt to invoke their wartime power to suspend Confederated Congress (Article 6, Sections 3-4) to prevent this action.

I am aware that current events and political content is not the purpose for which many of you ingest this text feed. Feel free to filter out Editor’s Loudspeaker feed items; we have an excellent Tales from the Inbox ready to go live on the 16th, on schedule.

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Editor’s Loudspeaker: New Rheims Fallout, Events in Yaxkin City

2946-10-14 – Editor’s Loudspeaker: New Rheims Fallout: Showdown at Congress

What just happened in front of the Congress building in Yaxkin City was nothing short of amazing. It’s the middle of the night here, but Sovanna, Ashton, and I have been in the studio since the end of our usual day, watching the goings-on at Congress from the beginning. Congress was not suspended, the Navy’s budget has been withheld pending a proper house-cleaning, and all three members of the Admiralty Council are said to be preparing letters of resignation. I suspect that the rest of the story is being swept, in order that the Confederated Worlds presents a united front.

Prior to the vote, a few dozen Navy troopers, fully armed and armored, arrived in Yaxkin City and took up defensive positions. Flipping between camera drone feeds, we determined from the unit patches on the troopers’ armor that they were the Marine compliment of Samuel Bosch’s Arrowhawk. Some time later, as the motion to cut funding was being read out in Congress, a much larger force of similarly equipped Navy troopers entered the city, bearing the unit insignias of the battleships Mercia and Koresh. They were halted by the Arrowhawk Marines and met by Bosch himself. After a long and obviously tense conversation which seemed at times almost to devolve into fratricidal gunfire, the new troops fanned out to form a second defensive ring around the city center until the Congressional session ended several hours later.

The official story is that, because of the risk of unrest, Confederated Navy troopers were dispatched from several of the warships in the yards and in orbit to keep the peace around the capitol complex, and it seems that most of the news feeds that are going out along the HyperCast Relay network have adopted this narrative. For those of us on Planet who were watching live, however, it’s clear that this story is not a complete description of what happened.

Nobody in the Navy will ever corroborate this, but what I suspect we witnessed was nothing less than an attempted Naval coup (using the excuse of the Navy’s Article 6 powers) foiled not by civilian officials, but by a faction inside the Navy, represented by, though probably not led by, Captain Bosch.

Ashton is trying to get an interview with Bosch, but I don’t expect him to be successful; it’s only too apparent that it would be career suicide for the man to go to the media with his version of recent events.

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Editor’s Loudspeaker: New Rheims Fallout, Admiralty Council Resignations

2946-10-17 – Editor’s Loudspeaker: New Rheims Fallout: Admiralty Council Resignations

This morning it was announced that all three members of the Navy’s Admiralty Council have announced their resignations following recent revelations about the New Rheims Disaster. Whether this is a tacit admission that they knew all along about the project in violation of the weapons-autonomy provisions of the Treaty of Scherer, acceptance of the fact that the Navy went too far in attempting to cover up the fiasco, or the victory of one faction in the Navy over another, we may never know.

Several other high-ranking officers, including Madara Kruse, the director of the War College who happens to be the last veteran of the Terran-Rattanai War to remain in Navy service, have also announced their resignations. It is being speculated that not all the resignations are of the perpetrators and enablers of the illegal project which destroyed New Rheims; faced with the prospect of a move for Congressional oversight of more of the Navy’s activities in the wake of this scandal, this is probably seen as a good time for senior officers nearing retirement to bow out of the service.

The Naval Survey Auxiliary, reasonably kept completely in the dark about the Navy’s black projects (after all, you don’t even have to be a citizen of one of the Confederated Worlds to join the Auxiliary), has been exempted from the Congressional military funding freeze, as of a measure passed this morning, and its normal activities are resuming. This is a good thing (there are many members of the Naval Survey Auxiliary among this audience, and they provide plenty of content for both Sovanna’s Feedback Loop shows and my own Tales from the Inbox), as it means that the process of opening new Frontier worlds for colonization does not need to wait for the rest of the political process here on Planet to work itself out.

As I mentioned a few days ago, it seems likely that a minority faction within the Navy broke with their chiefs to side with the civilian government over this issue; the coming weeks will show us whether the faction responsible for the whole fiasco retains sufficient power to retaliate against the officers who defied them.

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Editor’s Loudspeaker: New Rheims Fallout, Supplemental Report

2946-10-22 – Editor’s Loudspeaker: New Rheims Fallout, Supplemental Report

Sylja Nisi-Bonn’s committee in Congress released an expanded report earlier today which reflects her staff gaining access to the records of the Navy’s research projects, secret and otherwise. I found it sufficiently interesting to summarize here, but I encourage our readers to locate and look it up themselves.

According to this report, Block A50, the project which resulted in a rogue prototype and the destruction of New Rheims was run by one Colonel Papke, of whom I can find no public news record or profile on the Centauran datasphere. The project was initiated in 2931 with two ships otherwise fit only for surplus: a light cruiser and a frigate whose hull numbers I cannot find.

The objective was at first to produce a full-scale warship which could be operated at full capability, including combat, with only the bridge and command deck crews. Repair and maintenance automation were the focus of the project until early 2940, at which point it seems that there was a change in focus, and the project began to experiment with a fully automated design with, at first, only a lone crew member – the commander. Later, even this onboard control measure was made optional; the ships were configured for full autonomy. It was these 2942 changes which began to violate the Treaty of Scherer, and it seems the Block A50 staff were aware of the illegality of their efforts, and increased their secrecy.

The vessel which caused the catastrophe at New Rheims was evidently the project’s cruiser prototype, which suffered some sort of technical fault while being moved under its own power to the Navy’s Cajetan evaluation range, charged its star drive, and disappeared. This was four days before it appeared off New Rheims, for its ultimately fatal confrontation with a Naval Survey Auxiliary training unit and Samuel Bosch’s patrol squadron. For four days, large portions of the Navy hierarchy knew that they had lost a fully-armed, AI-controlled warship, and no attempt to raise the alarm was made.

It was to prevent exactly this sort of accident for which the automation provisions of the Treaty of Scherer were drafted; as such, Colonel Papke and anyone else who can be linked to the project’s later phase could legitimately be called war criminals, if this were not a peacetime incident.

The Treaty has, until now, largely had no effect on the Navy; the ability of well-trained human personnel to repeatedly change the terms of engagement in order to fool the most optimally configured automated weapon has been a universally acknowledged fact at least since the Corona Wars of the 26th century. Early 2942 would be shortly after the end of the Brushfire War; I can only conclude that the actions of the automated flotilla of Cold Refuge (who obviously are not signatories to the treaty) during the final battles of that conflict might have suggested to some military minds that fully automated warships had a place in the Navy’s line of battle.

I did some independent research on the Navy’s interactions with the Cold Refuge flotilla, and discovered a familiar name – Samuel Bosch. Evidently, Bosch, who served in the Brushfire War, wrote a very favorable report on the military usefulness of the Cold Refuge flotilla, and recommended research into adopting some of their methods in Navy service. He did acknowledge the limitations of the Treaty, of course; his recommendations were carefully written to fall within treaty restrictions.

I now wonder whether my analysis on the fourteenth (Editor’s Loudspeaker: New Rheims Fallout, Events in Yaxkin City) regarding Bosch’s role in the whole scandal was not accurate; it’s likely his report was part of the reason for the change in focus for the Block A50 effort.

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