(split of from the discussion in the "Android anatomy" thread)
When I started the "Gas Station" story I looked for a potential "bad guy" back on Earth willing to disrupt Europe's and Japan's operation at Saturn and decided to use China.
There isn't much hard facts what is going on in China in Season 0/1/2, only that China is hostile to Fenspace. My interpretation of this was that China's government feared about a loss of control... and Handwavium is a LOT about loosing control. What use is your great firewall and repressive regime if your population can begin to create spaceships, hacker AIs and all kind of crazy tech in their backyard?
I think China is looking for a way to regain a position of strength for dealing with Fenspace without loosing control. The "stealth spacecraft" project might be one result of this politics, but its not necessarily the only Handwavium based space project in China (or even an official one, it might be a black ops project of one powerful faction in China).
in Season 2 China seems to have one of the best waved stealth spacecrafts in Fenspace. Its good enough that the Chinese LOST one of their crafts within their factory when the pilot left the craft without switching off the stealth system. They have yet to find the craft, despite the fact that the craft has no AI so it should not be able to move on its own.
China managed to build a small base on an asteroid in elliptical orbit around the sun without anyone noticing. But the whole project has multiple problems, which might lead to its end in 2018-2020... the first is that all their stealth crafts are HIGHLY quirked, which means it takes a long time to build them and sometimes they are just unusable and have to be wrecked. There is also the problem of building up a secret base in the asteroid without allowing it to go independent, which leads to some self-sabotage of their success.
I assume that some heads rolled (literally) when they fired the shot at Pan (and did not succeed)... for the first time they left evidence about their operations in Fenspace and got nothing for it. The project also learned that their secret "long range bombardment cannon" is not the final answer to Fenspace warfare... even when attacking with total surprise and without any knowledge about their existence and technology among the Fen they did not achieve a full success.
There is also the accident when Ford Sierra rammed an unknown (and invisible!) object in low Earth orbit with the Dragon Wagon... which might also have been part of the "Chinese stealth system", just built into an Earth surveillance satellite.
When I started the "Gas Station" story I looked for a potential "bad guy" back on Earth willing to disrupt Europe's and Japan's operation at Saturn and decided to use China.
There isn't much hard facts what is going on in China in Season 0/1/2, only that China is hostile to Fenspace. My interpretation of this was that China's government feared about a loss of control... and Handwavium is a LOT about loosing control. What use is your great firewall and repressive regime if your population can begin to create spaceships, hacker AIs and all kind of crazy tech in their backyard?
I think China is looking for a way to regain a position of strength for dealing with Fenspace without loosing control. The "stealth spacecraft" project might be one result of this politics, but its not necessarily the only Handwavium based space project in China (or even an official one, it might be a black ops project of one powerful faction in China).
in Season 2 China seems to have one of the best waved stealth spacecrafts in Fenspace. Its good enough that the Chinese LOST one of their crafts within their factory when the pilot left the craft without switching off the stealth system. They have yet to find the craft, despite the fact that the craft has no AI so it should not be able to move on its own.
China managed to build a small base on an asteroid in elliptical orbit around the sun without anyone noticing. But the whole project has multiple problems, which might lead to its end in 2018-2020... the first is that all their stealth crafts are HIGHLY quirked, which means it takes a long time to build them and sometimes they are just unusable and have to be wrecked. There is also the problem of building up a secret base in the asteroid without allowing it to go independent, which leads to some self-sabotage of their success.
I assume that some heads rolled (literally) when they fired the shot at Pan (and did not succeed)... for the first time they left evidence about their operations in Fenspace and got nothing for it. The project also learned that their secret "long range bombardment cannon" is not the final answer to Fenspace warfare... even when attacking with total surprise and without any knowledge about their existence and technology among the Fen they did not achieve a full success.
There is also the accident when Ford Sierra rammed an unknown (and invisible!) object in low Earth orbit with the Dragon Wagon... which might also have been part of the "Chinese stealth system", just built into an Earth surveillance satellite.