Intergalactic Summit

Give the number of the organizer is attack.
I'll give them money at a reasonable action.


To beat is necessary for the structure of government.
Strong and powerful.
Too early to come out of the shadows

I wonder who is behind this ? It is good no human life has been lost in the attack. It could of turned out to be much worse.

The attackers revealing their intentions by going after an Imperial Guard garrison is a very overt move. It brings with it a lot of suspicion and loses you the element of surprise. A large risk for seemingly little gain.

The Imperial Guard is a small cadre relative to the Empire, it is possible that someone wishes to replace members of the Imperial Guard. Force replacement of loyal soldiers with those of different loyalties by leaving vacancies in the roster. Or perhaps to simply deplete their manpower. In my mind, either indicates a precursor to a larger attack and not an objective unto itself... It is very strange.

But god is not on the side of the attackers, they fail and gain nothing yet.

Actually, the biggest news to come of this is that Tom Horn is now a member of a CVA corporation.

Weeiiiird.

These are interesting times indeed for the Region and the Alliance.

This is a very sad day. There is madness in the Empire. It must end.

Gas in the ventilation system? Now, why would the Serpentis do such a thing to the Imperial Guard?

Actually, if I had to guess, I'd say they achieved precisely what they aimed for: Public notice - and a test run.

Consider: the Imperial Guard never actually spotted the explosives. An atmospheric facility was targeted, one of the station's critical systems, and the Imperial Guard were only even aware of the explosives... because they exploded. They've been demonstrated to be lax, and their security porous. If the attackers had wanted to go after the garrison itself, they'd have hit an atmospheric processing facility in a more critical location. And for all anyone knows, they still might. After all, what did they hide the explosives in?

Don't know - nobody spotted the bombs. It's going to take weeks to reconstruct things, even if the containers weren't vaporized in the blasts. And now, they've got publicity. Terrorists attack the Imperial Guard, and the Guard can only lock things down after the bombs go off.

That's terrible optics. It sends the message that the Guard can't even keep themselves and their own facilities safe. How are they supposed to protect the Empress? The Empire? You like to claim you're an experienced and expert soldier, Ayallah. How do you miss that blatant objective so badly as to claim they failed?

And 'someone wishes to replace members of the Imperial Guard'? Three weeks before the coronation is not the time when you're going to be replacing people. Anyone being transferred in now is immediately suspect. Manpower depletion? Really? An atmospheric processing center on what's clearly a low-population section of the station? (If it was a high-population section, there would've been more difficulty evacuating the inhabitants.) Did your training include nothing on asymmetric warfare and terrorism?

Military victories are never the objective of terrorism. At most, they'll be a secondary objective, one used as a demonstration of power in service of the greater objective. And that greater objective is fear. It is public unrest among your target populace. Public unease. And that's achieved via publicity, and an inability for those who claim to be in control to actually take control of the messaging. One attack? That should immediately be glossed over at a time like this, played as 'there was an accident, we're investigating' until after the coronation... but it wasn't. Nobody managed to even get ahead of the story.

Say that there was an equipment malfunction that resulted in some dangerous gas buildup. Say a few pockets of the gas sparked some minior explosions while another killed some hounds. No humans were killed and the facility sustained only temporary damage. Then, after the coronation, you announce that the investigation has determined there were criminal elements involved, and the authorities are already taking steps to apprehend them.

They couldn't even pull that together? Now? After what happened last year, everyone's already thinking 'assassination attempts'. So let's just go ahead and be all 'yup, we've got terrorists on EF stations blowing up stuff belonging to the very people who are supposed to keep terrorists from blowing stuff up, and doing it right under their noses. This is terrible messaging. Absolutely terrible. And what's worse is: the inability to downplay this only increases the likelihood of people seeing completely innocent mishaps are being related.

And if there are other legitimate attacks? This will have been merely the first domino, the first element of the pattern.

It is far too early to claim anyone 'failed' here... except, of course, the Imperial Guard. They failed to spot the explosives ahead of time. They failed to even stop and take into custody the individuals whose 'suspicious behavior' alerted them (along with the explosions... how's that work? 'Hey, Bob, something exploded, should we check it out?' 'I dunno... wait, that guy over there's acting suspicious! Let's check out that explosion!').

The only thing they didn't fail at was evacuating everyone and slamming the doors closed. If this is part of a larger terrorism campaign, the messaging that'll come out writes itself: "Imperial Guard helpless to do anything but run away."

Arrendis is correct. This is just a test run and a gauge of the Imperial Guard's reactions.

Of course, being human and having less advanced technology, they were poor.

To those interested in causing chaos, our comms channels are always open for business.