[Axem]

That 14th AoA question recently posted sprouted question in my head.

What if Admiral Steele was in command of the 14th during AoA? Would Sam have decided to request a transfer to the 14th in the first place? Could Steele have mobilized forces faster to take care of the Duke before it jets off? Does he take a fighter out and busts through the Lucifer's reactors with his bare hands? Is Steele's heart tender enough to be shaped by the distressing events that he decides to not submit to the GTVA's original plan? Or does Steele decide to start an outright war with the Vishnans from the get go? (Let's say he took Serkr with him too)

I really don't have any personal thoughts (yet), except that a lot of AoA is based off of having both Beis be part of this alternate dimension field trip. Perhaps "higher powers" required them to be there through subtle manipulation, but who knows how a sudden change could have changed everything else.

[AdmiralRalwood]

Does he take a fighter out and busts through the Lucifer's reactors with his bare hands?

That would take balls. You might even say it would take...

  ...BALLS OF STEELE.

[Lowane]

Steele would have stopped the Duke in its tracks, then defeated both the Lucifer and Sathanas. He then would have easily destroyed the Dante and the Preserver before jumping back, where he would have captured Sol within two hours. All in a day's work.

You know tis true.

[swashmebuckle]

Age of Steele = 42

THink about it

[Luis Dias]

This question is about predestination and counterfactuals. I find it interesting. There are two modes of these types of questions. For instance, we can say "If Darius hadn't been alive, AoA wouldn't have been made". Seems straightforward. But imagine the following sentence: "If the Archduke Franz Ferdinand hadn't been assassinated, World War One would have never existed", it doesn't seem to fly as well as the first. The reason is that at some level, we gather that WW1 was "bound" to happen sooner or later anyway, that if it wasn't event X to trigger it, it would have been Z or Y. Some could even say the same for the first example. Something like AoA would have been made sooner or later, because something like that would have been "in the air", so to speak. Or, alternatively, we could speak of other kinds of stories more well known, etc. (like, say, Star Wars, whose ideas it used were definitely "in the air" by the time it came out).

What if Steele had been in control of the 14th? Then I would surmiss that the higher powers (Vishnans, etc.) would have mobilized and influenced a very different lot, a very different set of people. Instead of Sam, someone else close to Steele would have been meddled with. If Steele had been influenced to capitulate as admiral Bei was, I think that the biggest setback would be that the Tevs wouldn't have had Steele as a backup admiral. Perhaps they then would have had Bei himself! And now we would be playing against Bei!

[procdrone]

Steele would have stopped the Duke in its tracks, then defeated both the Lucifer and Sathanas. He then would have easily destroyed the Dante and the Preserver before jumping back, where he would have captured Sol within two hours. All in a day's work.

You know tis true.

Everything there. Nothing to add.

[General Battuta]

I would advance that Bei would handle the unforeseen situation in AoA much better than Steele.

[Luis Dias]

I would advance that Bei would handle the unforeseen situation in AoA much better than Steele.

Totally agree with this. Although how much it depended on humans and how much depended on Vishnan meddling is up for grabs. Clearly it is far from 100% vishnan control, given how "disappointed" they were afterwards, but if high enough value, you'd think Steele could also "handle with it" well because the Vishnans would make sure of it.

But yeah, Steele wouldn't like it to be up against such kinds of manipulations. It could end up horribly wrong, and the whole shebang would have to be culled. Perhaps the Vishnans made sure it was Bei who got into that dimension, and made sure Steele didn't.

[Phantom Hoover]

Steele's weakness is his failure to recognise the human fallibility of his subordinates; I think that would have been tested much more in the parallel universe than in Sol. The old Narayana cryptogram also suggested that his skill in combat wouldn't work nearly as well against the Shivans.

[leoben]

Hm - knowing what we know after three acts of War in Heaven and AoA, to me it seems likely that the Vishnans wouldn't have seen anything worthy of 'salvaging' in a Steele-led fleet in the first place. In the infinite multi-verse, this scenario probably happened or has been simulated by the great psyche. They chose a universe where conditions for a preferred outcome were more...favorable. My 2 cents.