I agree with Charley. I think a massive influx of refugees provides lots of interesting story telling opportunities. We can even look to real life parallels with Syria for inspiration in regards to the varied range of political, economical, and xenophobic responses.
Oh I'm not disputing that point at all, rather I was referencing when the first set of refugees arrives into Alliance space, these will most likely be refugees from Terminus fleeing up the Hydian Way from the initial invasion. This initial set of refugees would most likely have Ssi-Ruuk forces pursuing to try and capture them. A brief skirmish between those pursuit forces and an Alliance patrol would likely occur and would actually help provide the flux that would see more refugees flee into Alliance space after the Ruuk leaves the Alliance alone to focus on the Empire, the false notion being that the Ruuk are afraid to enter Alliance space after being repulsed in the brief border skirmish.
I thought the Refugees were heading somewhere in the Anot sector? I was not aware the Alliance was going to engage any forces at this point.
"Refugees" is a pretty broad term. There are going to be lots of different kinds of refugees, fleeing for different reasons, and those reasons will likely lead them to different places. In the initial aftermath, any refugees fleeing from Terminus are likely to go to somewhere (relatively) close within Imperial space. The average citizen is not going to have a damned clue what is going on at Terminus, so they'll definitely want to get far enough away so that they feel like they're out of dodge, but they're not necessarily going to want to arse around crossing the border into Alliance space, and they're not necessarily going to race headlong for the opposite side of the galaxy. The Greater Javin is a good candidate for those kinds of people: it's far enough from Terminus to feel out of reach, but close enough that people can still "go home" if they expect the Empire to swoop in and fix the problem, etc. Another category of refugees are going to be people from worlds that the Ssi-Ruuk haven't attacked yet. You're going to have people from nearby worlds who think "oh no, they'll be coming for us next", and so pack up their belongings and flee to the hills - like people fleeing the major cities and jamming up the highways in movies like Independence Day, once the alien ships are looming overhead. To start with, those refugees won't necessarily flee far (the Greater Javin is again a good candidate), but as the conflict progresses you're going to see more and more people wanting to flee before the war gets to them. If it seems quite apparent that the Ruuk are only going after the Empire and not the Alliance, that's a situation where we might see the refugees pushing across the boarder, looking for protection from the folks that the Ruuk aren't going after. This may eventually lead to the Ruuk starting to target the Alliance, since they will be conveniently collecting together all sorts of slave and entechment fodder in convenient little refugee camp buffets. We may also see people trying to move around inside the Alliance as well: people wanting to move further back from the border so that they're not in the line of fire should the Ssi-Ruuk turn on the Alliance. This is something that the Alliance may actively want to do, preemptively exacuating some of those nearer worlds so that a) there's no population there to tempt the Ruuk to attack, and b) if the Ruuk do attack, there are going to be less casualties than if we tried to rescue everyone at the last minute. The Alliance is probably pretty woke as far as dealing with sudden planetary devastation (thanks, Empire!) so this may well be quite in character for them. As far as this thread though, we don't actually NEED there to be refugees yet to have a discussion about refugees. The average citizen of the galaxy may think that the attack on Terminus might be an isolated incident, but the Alliance's top brass knows about the covered up Ruuk attack in the Gordian Reach, they know (or can at least guess) what the Ruuk are about, and to their minds refugees are an absolute inevitability. Talking about the Alliance's preparedness to accept and transport refugees, their preparedness to relocate/feed/care for/etc those refugees... that's the sort of thing this thread is designed to talk about. We're not here to make decisions, we're here to establish what the Alliance is capable of doing should it come to that. It's exactly the same as discussing our military preparedness: the Ruuk aren't attacking us (yet), but we're still talking about what resources we have available to react in the event that they do.
All good points and I guess the only other thing I'm looking for is what's the timing of the thread in regards to the attack on Terminus? Like what's the approximate date if Terminus is happening squarely on 12.00.00 ABY?
I'm reluctant to explicitly nail down a date just yet. Once the Invasion: Terminus thread actually gets into the details of what is happening, people may want to do an Alliance Senate and/or Defense Committee reaction thread. If they decide they want it to have been a couple of days before word from Terminus started getting out (from refugees, or sending in spies, or whatever), I don't want to have stated a date for this thread that doesn't jive with that. It's certainly happening within the first few days, though. The Alliance has just found out (either today, or last night), and this is all the relevant people getting together to start brainstorming options. It is absolutely before the Alliance military will have had any sort of contact with the Ssi-Ruuk - that sort of thing probably won't start happening until after Eriadu at the earliest.
Small request here, folks: please chime in here in the OOC if you want to take part in this, before diving into the thread. This is potentially going to be a very crowded affair, and if we're not careful it's going to get chaotic and messy with people posting off at different tangents. Everyone is welcome, but at least for this initial stage, lets try and use the OOC thread to form an orderly queue, so that we can be somewhat deliberate in how we're moving the thread forward. Threads that are a scattershot of different people posting different things tend to get stuck and stall out, in my experience. This is going to be extra important by the time we get to the actual discussion, because if Person A gets a post off while Person B is trying to write theirs, Person C is going to have a headache trying to get everything to line up. Give us a wave in here before you jump in, and try to let conversations run their course a little bit before we jump to a different point of focus. If that means we end up getting stuck waiting on a particular person, we can jump off that bridge when we come to it.
My apologies. Anne Phoenix is entering the fray. Do you wish for me to modify or remove my post?
It's fine as it is, but if you'd said something first we could have steered towards a more meaningful entrance for you, is all. We don't want this to turn into a cocktail party, so these initial conversations are set dressing, not something we're likely to dwell on.
ok guys long day and I have to be back at 7 am so I will post tomorrow night after work.
