The problems on Cork could be retconned to an industrial accident which poisoned the atmosphere , or an ill-advised experiment-gone-wrong with MOX bombs (something the Mollys have been interested in according to rumours).
I don't see why the Phantoms would have done it, since they tend to ignore the unlawful factions in favour of bringing down the Houses.
' Wrote:^^
Finding out that the Phantoms set up the Corsairs is actually a really good idea (of course, we'd need the Phantoms' input). It would remove the burning question of: if the Corsairs managed to bring in a whole fleet to Londonderry and nuke every square inch of its planet, why isn't Londonderry under Corsair colors already?
Keep the ideas coming, the Molly Republic is looking to get all of Londonderry's infocards updated and we could use more suggestions.
Oh, and one other thing, nowhere does it say that the history of the real Cork should in any way affect the outcome of events in-game.
Not to press the real life influence on Discovery, but if the game is going to draw on crude stereotypes, people ought to be at least somewhat informed about a little more to the background to the people being used than what we currently have: "Molly" Republic? Hello. Separatists from the "Brets"? Hello.
Gold?
All we are actually short is a few leprechauns.
Incidentally, the real-life corsairs even raided the south-west coast of Cork in the 16th and 17th century. Feelthy corsairs.
How solid is this history? All I can find is this:
Planet Cork Infocard Wrote:Planet Cork was once the home of Mollys. In 802 A.S., an invading Corsair fleet bombed the planet with thermonuclear bombs. All Mollys who did not escape from the planet were killed either by heat or by radiation. With its surface uninhabitable for at least 400 years from now due to harsh radiation, Cork became a monument and reminder to the Mollys who their true enemies are.
I just checked over Mull, Lisburn, Aranmore, and the four guard stations for news and rumors, and found no information about Planet Cork. I looked at the station orbiting Planet Cork, (Kilrea Orbital Station) and it has no infocard. Both of the abandoned stations have beacons next to them that tell the history of their respective station, but divulge no further information about "Planet Cork."
The Gaians would be openly hostile to Corsairs if they decimated a planet. Major diplomacy changes between the two parties need to happen, or "history" needs to change.
@Athenian: I'm sorry but it wasn't my decision to call the faction the 'Mollys'. It was pretty obviously created to mirror the Irish separatists of the real-life variety but nowhere does it say the Mollys are any more Irish than anyone else in Bretonia. Nor should they be. If you think about it, they are of the exact same blood as the rest of Bretonia. So why do they use Irish names for everything? Who knows, maybe they saw the Irish as kindred spirits in their fight and adopted their language, kind of like when all the scholars and religious types spoke Latin during the Middle Ages.
I'm fine with using real-world names for places in FL, even having them vaguely related to those same real-world places. But there's no need to reenact historical events to a tee.
If I could on the side of my Molly/Junker mining ship, I'd write "For the Mollies in memory of Cork".
I don't know too much about Cork, only that the Corsairs were gits and bombed it.
Bombing a planet to inhospitable levels is only lower than a supernova bombing.
A planet is big.
Still, I'd like to see more information about the Cork incident.
EDIT: I never call the Mollies pure Irish, I call them Irish, Scottish and Welsh, anything against England! Oh wait, that is my line these days... hmm.. Anyway my point is valid, the Mollies are not all Irish, they're disgruntled militaristic miners who were pushed WAY too far. Desperate times mean desperate measures, no matter the nationality.
I certainly hope that in the end revelation will come that shows that somebody else was behind it. It just makes no sense and most of the community agrees on it... Or at least we discover that some Corsair/rebel/lunatic was behind it, more terrorist-like (some version of Mon'Star) and that can conclude the whole story.
Well, history is written by the victor, I suppose.
One thing I would like to know as a Molly is exactly to what the "Molly Republic" are planning on changing everything. Am I going to log on one day and Discover that I am part of a race of super saiyan ninjas from a planet where the seas are made of milk and honey?
Cork, as is, gives Mollies a reason to be very angry.
Take it away and Mag would have retired and Pato would be working on a Mining Ship.
With regards to the Corsairs, America dropped "Little Boy" on Hiroshima and "Fat Man" on Nagasaki, razing cities to the ground. It proved a viable, if reprehensible method of warfare and resulted in a surrender. In Freelancer the scale is different: Planets are named after cities.
We can't discount Cork entirely, since it's so integral to the Mollies at the moment.
But in logical RP, it can't have been as bad as it's made out to be.
It's ludicrous to think that the Mollies could have enough population to populate the planet with enough people for the bombing to be an astronomical catastrophe. It's just not possible that there would have been enough people.
So, yes, we accept that Cork was nuked.
But it couldn't have been cities that were completely destroyed.
Perhaps a few colony ships and a bunch of mining colonies.
Does it matter how many people were killed? Seriously?
Let us say the Corsairs killed one thousand people. What's that? A naval engagement?
Thirty thousand, the size of a small town I lived in.
One million?
Ten million?
At what point do you reach "a million deaths is a statistic"?
Remember that a burning world is a symbol. People lost families in that conflagration, and they damn well want some payback.
Does it really matter if billions did not die?
What would you want to do to a nation that just bombed your street, killing three of your family members, your neighbour, your neighbour's dog, the family on the other side of your neighbour whose daughter you'd been seeing for a month, the people across the road who invited you to barbecues and knew your father (now deceased) from work in a factory.
So to say, "oh the Corsairs bombed the only planet we had, never mind, at least they only killed a few hundred thousand of us," seems a mite callous.
A couple things about Londonderry don't make much sense...like the fact that there's another system, which the molly's own, which has better gold than dublin...that doesn't really help the push for Dublin independence(not that they can ever get it, because if they do, they cease to be an 'interesting' faction).
Cork...Bombed in 802, only 50 years after the Founder's Day Revolt...which is to say, the miners of one station revolted, fled the station, and set up camp on arranmore.
Scant time for the construction of those bases, or the expansion of the molly population into the planet and those bases...just looking at the time period, and the expected reasonably low numbers of BMM revoltees, I'm not sure how there is any number of mollies left by this point, especially given the loss of any number of lives on Cork.
On Cork as an RP device...Mollies don't need, and never did, up untill it was added to the game by the UoG (what version, if I can ask that?) any extra reason to be angry...and especially unhelpful is their anger against anyone but Bretonia, especially Bretonia's enemies, the Corsairs.
That the mollies -had- a planet doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
There couldn't have been more than a few thousand on the planet, as there couldn't have been, 65 years ago, more than a few thousand founders. Say, 5000, and we're pushing it for base population.
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