[Phantom Hoover]

Seriously, those shiftless bastards could've sent an Uriel or two to help splash Kostadin's fighters and take the Morena apart! What's their excuse? There's no obvious explanation in the briefing text: it just says that they can only get small craft through, and if you can fit a tricked out Custos and a Corsair through the series of subspace tubes out into the Kuiper belt you can fit a fighter; and when the very survival of Earth is at stake you'd think there'd be at least a few fighters worth pulling off the line to assist. I imagine there's some sort of sensible, interesting explanation for this but I can't for the life of me think of one.

[-Norbert-]

Timing would be my best guess.

First they need to scramble the fighter, then send them to the entrance of the tunnel and finally manouver them through those tight tunnels. By the time those fighters could have arrived the battle would have been over or as good as over already.

Furthermore it's quite possible that manouvering those tight tunnels would have required a fine-tuning of the jumpdrives first, which takes time too.

And that's assuming that the Fedayeen informed the UEF regulars in the first place. If the Fedayeen were sure they could handle the matter on their own, they wouldn't want to risk exposing their information sources and secret operations to the government.

[redsniper]

Because the whole fedayeen were crammed into that custos. :V

[General Battuta]

Off the top of my head I'm pretty sure the canonical answer is what -Norbert- said. The fractured UEF fleet command structure didn't respond as nimbly and rapidly to an unexpected threat from an unexpected direction as the Fedayeen.

[TrickMagnet]

honestly i'm more confused by the lack of action by the gtva; they actually had active dealing with the kostadin gef's, and even if they were cutting ties due to the suspected double (triple?) cross, i'm sure they had some intel on what kostadin had planned. can't imagine the fedayeen were the only ones who picked up on the giant comet habitat on a sudden crash course with earth.

i mean after all the gtva wanted earth back in their pocket clear of ubuntu influence, they certainly didn't want everyone dead

[General Battuta]

We had a good chat about this on IRC. It's, I think, one of the closest points the story gets to out-and-out contrivance. SOC assets do show up in some branches of the mission, but they don't directly attack the suicide habitat. While it's no surprise that even the intelligence apparatus was caught off guard by Kostadin's insanity, it's odd that GTVI didn't scramble a strike team to hit the habitat itself.

I'm still debating whether to tweak this or to write it off as one of those failures that seems obvious in retrospect, like the intelligence community not putting all the obvious pieces together on 9/11 in time to act.

[AdmiralRalwood]

We had a good chat about this on IRC. It's, I think, one of the closest points the story gets to out-and-out contrivance. SOC assets do show up in some branches of the mission, but they don't directly attack the suicide habitat. While it's no surprise that even the intelligence apparatus was caught off guard by Kostadin's insanity, it's odd that GTVI didn't scramble a strike team to hit the habitat itself.

I'm still debating whether to tweak this or to write it off as one of those failures that seems obvious in retrospect, like the intelligence community not putting all the obvious pieces together on 9/11 in time to act.

Third option: SOC knew about the plan, but also decided that the Fedayeen would probably stop it and coldly decided to let them spend their resources solving it instead of committing their own forces.

[Phantom Hoover]

'Probably' makes for really ****ty odds to gamble the future of Earth on.

[AdmiralRalwood]

'Probably' makes for really ****ty odds to gamble the future of Earth on.

I didn't say it was a good option, or a sound strategic decision; I just suggested it as a possibility.

[crizza]

But they did comitte a clean up squad.
If I'm not mistaken, by the time you capture the habitat and there are still GEF strikecraft around they'll show up.

[Aesaar]

We had a good chat about this on IRC. It's, I think, one of the closest points the story gets to out-and-out contrivance. SOC assets do show up in some branches of the mission, but they don't directly attack the suicide habitat. While it's no surprise that even the intelligence apparatus was caught off guard by Kostadin's insanity, it's odd that GTVI didn't scramble a strike team to hit the habitat itself.

I'm still debating whether to tweak this or to write it off as one of those failures that seems obvious in retrospect, like the intelligence community not putting all the obvious pieces together on 9/11 in time to act.

I figured the Pegasus strike wings that show up are what SOC sent to destroy the habitat.  They could easily manage it.  It's just that they show up slightly too late.

[Phantom Hoover]

They don't show up at all under most circumstances, actually.

[X3N0-Life-Form]

I'd say they show up under roughly half the circumstances: you either fry the habitat, in which case McDuff & whatever other gef ship is still outside, which causes the SOC to show up afterwards to mop up. Or you send in the capture squad, which in most cases requires you to get rid of the big-ass ship that can kill the transport in a handful of shots, and once that's done you will probably be the one to mop up to make sure nobody shoots the capture squad.

[Mars]

I figured another possibility, or perhaps battuta mentioned the possibility when several people discussed this on #bp when Act 3 came out;  The GTVA couldn't get heavy enough assets in there, at least in time to make a difference, from the time they figured out what was going to happen. Even the Fedayeen only found out barely in time, and were hardly able to get a light cruiser in the engagement in time with a Shivan doing the calculation.