2007-09-24, 06:40 | Link #182 | |
物語は、もう、おしまい……?
Join Date: Jan 2007
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Age: 43
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When anything stops improving, it stagnates and rots to oblivion. When any nation doesn't keep its eyes open and weapons ready, it opens itself to invasion and destruction. I frankly do not understand how does improvement and ever-readiness differ from culture to culture. The underlying concept for self-improvement should be very simple: learn, not only from mistakes (both yours and those of others) but also from successes as well, understand what had led to those mistakes/victories, improve if possible, and apply. Rinse and repeat. And ever-readiness is even simpler: keep your eyes open and don't sleep. If there are any differences, it might be in the manner that different people use to apply these simple but crucial ideas. Me 2 cents. *cloaks*
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2007-09-24, 07:44 | Link #183 |
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Join Date: Sep 2007
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Lets take Europe and China of the past centuries as example.
China: Slow to improve, a lack of threats and very conservative. Europe: Constant conflict with a high cultural focus on improvement. Now TSAB has more in common with old China, they do keep a ready force, but there hasn't been any real incentive to improve. Also they have a bias against the use and study of lost logica, which further limits improvement. If people want to say "The TSAB sucks" Go right ahead, but think about why they turned out that way. |
2007-09-24, 08:16 | Link #185 |
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Join Date: Sep 2007
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There have always been examples in history whenever the enviroment allows it.
But the drive for improvement is more then an idea. It is also nearly a state of mind, for you must: not think too highly of yourself (no arrogance), be willing to invest and allow people to express their ideas. |
2007-09-24, 09:16 | Link #188 | ||
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Join Date: May 2007
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The TSAB has wasted 150 years so far. The sooner it starts taking the study of tactics seriously, the better, and the Cradle battle is as good a place as any to start. Quote:
Four is a small sample size to work with to judge Nanoha's effectiveness as an instructor but the failures do begin to add up. From what we've seen of the Forwards in combat, the TSAB's training standards must be particularly low or Nanoha may not be such a great instructor. Did Teana turn out well because of or in spite of Nanoha? There is also Hayate who went through command training and seems to have emerged worse at actual command. BBM has already conceded that TSAB training sucks. What about TSAB leadership? Episodes 17 and 21 speak for themselves. Just what is the TSAB actually competent at? Even if the TSAB's only task was to locate Lost Logia, its poor capabilities at investigation, intelligence gathering and SIGINT mean that the TSAB will have problems finding those Lost Logia in a timely manner if it finds them at all.
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2007-09-24, 10:00 | Link #189 | ||
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Further, the event will inevitably be averaged against the rest of their experience. Quote:
A Combat Instructor is kind of like a Specialist trainer. Her job is to quickly identify strengths and weaknesses of people and try to improve their strengths. She has to teach the shooters how to be snipers, the brawlers how to be martial arts experts, and so on. In that sense Nanoha did well. Tactics or moral-psychological conditioning is probably outside her purview. She might teach Teana how to shoot faster and more accurately, with greater power, but teaching her how to use cover is a different purview. But then, considering that her officer training was all of three months long, it is doubtful she is qualified to teach a lot of tactics anyway. |
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2007-09-24, 10:02 | Link #190 | ||
物語は、もう、おしまい……?
Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: In the Horizon
Age: 43
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It is not as if the TSAB are the only one with supposed superior technological advances. The Jail Incident shows that rogue elements have the capacity to challenge their claim to power, with the proper support and funding. If Yuuno alone can help Nanoha train herself into a AAA magus capable of fighting an equally strong magus with far more combat experience, I seriously doubt if other cannot do the same. It seems to be that the High Council may have suffered the illusion that the Midchildans have achieved all that can be achieved and all that remains is to make sure that this state doesn't change. This is a common mistake, and a common bane of all empires that has reached the zenith of their accomplishments, whether real or perceived. There is no excuse for anything to allow their environments and circumstances dictate their need to improve. The TSAB was probably established to keep the peace, and also to keep people from misusing the LL. Since LLs can pretty much be found almost anywhere, with no restrictions as to who can use them, this reason alone should be motivating enough for TSAB to make sure that their forces are up to the task. Quote:
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2007-09-24, 10:24 | Link #191 | |||
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http://forums.animesuki.com/showpost...&postcount=175 For its persistent and systematic inability to consistently draw the right lessons from its experience and its ineptitude at training its junior officers and NCOs into effective leaders, the TSAB has nothing to blame except for itself. Quote:
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2007-09-24, 15:11 | Link #192 | |||||
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And I have a feeling that their history books will show that this incident as another example of pushing to far and put the blame at the TSAB high command. Quote:
That isn't a normal situation. Quote:
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A very basic/simple strategy, which works in normal cases. Quote:
So what were you talking about? |
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2007-09-24, 17:07 | Link #193 | |||||
物語は、もう、おしまい……?
Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: In the Horizon
Age: 43
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(There are times when governments rely on the reputation of their military to make sure people listen to them. Uncivilised as it may seem, the threat to use force is often referred over the actual deed, since it helps to prevent unnecessary causalities.) And it's not slow advancement in terms of technological and military growth that plagues the TSAB. Our friends here have repeatedly pointed out the holes in the TSAB's way of doing things. And recently we are also hinted how bad their manpower management may be, with Mirificus pointing out that both Alto and Vice could have performed better in other postings compared to what they were assigned to at the start of the season. The inability to recognise talent seems to be an ongoing thing in the TSAB, and even Hayate herself laments the fact that the TSAB regards elite magi or Rare Skill Users of her like to be no more but convenient tools, and they may not even be assigned to a posting that would bring their talents to full play. Is this not sad, not only to the magi in question, but also the TSAB itself? Also, I don;t quite understand how future historians will regard this as an example of "pushing too far". Who pushed what too far? Quote:
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However, I must add that being rare does not equate to being impossible. And a team of well-trained A-ranked or even B-ranked magi terrorists (equivalent to the Armed Troopers) can still post a sizable threat. Imagine a squad of Tiana Lansters, equally cunning, ruthless and well-equipped in the hands of one like Scaglietti or worse. Quote:
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I apologise if this seems rather incoherent.
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2007-09-24, 18:24 | Link #194 | ||||||
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2007-09-24, 18:31 | Link #195 |
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Join Date: Dec 2005
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One point about the TSAB...
In the real world, we don't have any examples of "too much progress". There are no examples of a society having progressed technologically to the point where that technology destroyed them; we can talk about global warming, and we certainly have myths of such societies, but there are no actual historical occurrences of that. It's GOOD to be more advanced than the other guy. This is plainly not true for the TSAB. The events that destroyed Al Hazard or whatever you want to call it were plainly civilization-altering for them. The TSAB as a government is considerably younger than the United States, and the "mythological" period of the Velka Saints isn't any older than the later colonization period of our world, where we have extensive historical knowledge. Frankly, they got kicked in the collective balls, really hard. Getting too powerful, too successful, too advanced in their structure is a very, very bad thing that will bring the whole structure crashing down on everybody. SF is full of civilizations that progress to a point and then kind of coast - they make advancements here and there, but not at the breakneck pace we're used to these days. Eventually you've got all the stuff you reasonably want, your people are pretty happy, and you're the only one left developing more powerful weaponry - why go past that point and threaten your current happy existence? Of course, the TSAB has to deal with a lot of Lost Logia, some of which are genuinely dangerous to their entire civilization. This means they can't just put the guns down, as it were, but they can't afford to make the same mistake again just to counter the old threat... Finally, it's hard to evaluate the TSAB in light of the context of a magical girl show, even if it is Nanoha. We had a small army and a super-battleship defeated by a freakin' squad, folks, with a bit of local forces for backup. Clausewitz and Rommel and even Sun Tzu simply fail in the face of that kind of power imbalance. The only things we can really conclude are that there are certainly a bloody lot of people in the TSAB, and Nanoha, Fate, and Hayate aren't the new Three Admirals (well, maybe they aren't), so theoretically the rest of them should be something more than useless. And for all we know, they are - Chrono, for example, kicked a lot of ass personally, back in A's. But obviously there's something in the structure of their training and organization that is preventing the cream from rising to the top... ...or it's entirely possible that the naval forces simply co-opt the best officers and the ground forces are the dregs that can't manage the prestige foreign postings. Again with the Imperial Britain model - there's no glory belonging to the rag-tag army that's holding the ground that nobody can invade because the navy's doing the real job of defense. You don't rise socially or politically with an army commission - unless that's the best you can manage, in which case you're already at a disadvantage compared to the dashing heroes of the navy. And the TSAB has it even worse, because they don't have an India (that we know about)... they aren't really imperialists, so there's no foreign places for that army to be deployed to in order to get some battle experience and honors. |
2007-09-24, 19:16 | Link #196 | |||||
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2007-09-24, 19:54 | Link #197 | |||
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On the other hand, we have at least six ships of a completely different class defending Midchilda. Even if we presumed that Chrono has other ships in his fleet that are unarmed, it really changes nothing as a navy with non-trivial force projection capabilities will usually have more auxiliary ships than warships. The greater the firepower and range of a fleet, the greater the logistical train it entails. What was really notable was that the TSAB had both the means and the will to concentrate six ships armed with conventional weapons (by TSAB standards) into a single task force against a single target and have them attack it in concert. The weapons they were using are clearly far more precise than Arc-en-ciel. If it was truly a last ditch effort, the TSAB could simply have accepted the collateral damage of an Arc-en-ciel-class weapon which brings us back to the original quotes regarding the TSAB Navy. Quote:
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It seems pretty difficult to reach the conclusion that the and primary role of those six ships, as originally designed, is as a mode of transport for mages unless you had already assumed that they were transports.
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Last edited by Mirificus; 2007-09-24 at 21:45. |
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2007-09-24, 21:44 | Link #198 | |||
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Join Date: Jul 2007
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But then, maybe we could be optimistic and say that the TSAB Sailing Force Staff learned that ships need to be armed thanks to YnS. Quote:
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They may not know that the Doc was prepping a ship, but the cannons will be useful against a large range of contingency measures. To support this, for all the supposed confusion at Sailing Force HQ, Chrono's fleet did sortie pretty fast - the Cradle sortied, and almost immediately Chrono's fleet sortied. Given the usual readiness status of the TSAB (they take 3 hours just to prep 40 mages to the point when they could travel, and organizing a ship for combat is more complex than a platoon), for them to have moved so fast suggested they had already been on maximum alert and specially prepped, rather than random armed ships being suddenly called to action. As for the mages, I'd strongly suspect every mage that could be crammed onto the ships were in fact there. In the event, there was nothing to do by the time the fleet arrived but to scuttle the Cradle, but assuming a worst case scenario where RF6 was decimated (as nearly happened), the mages will be needed for a wide range of possible duties, from new teams to assault the Cradle from the inside (maybe Chrono will then get his sorry a*s off his chair), to assisting with the drones down below. As it is, a large force of mages will be helpful for the post-battle cleanup. |
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2007-09-24, 22:22 | Link #199 | |||||
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Last edited by Mirificus; 2007-09-24 at 23:35. |
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