u/revan4ever

I think we all might be missing an obvious answer as to why the "fight" with Ms. "I've also go a dollchip" Maiko is so lackluster. Maiko brags to us that she has "A" dollchip. Nothing Judy says indicates she made more of her specially modified dollchips beyond the two for Tom and Roxane. There's no evidence to indicate that what Maiko has is anything but the standand dollchip she had already, maybe with some last minute modifications done by an underground ripperdoc in a last minute attempt to ape Judy's expertly made creation. With that in mind, remember Judy mentions she downloaded multiple different combat movesets into her chips to make them as dangerous as they are. It's quite possible V losing to Tom made Maiko underestimate V and only add one or two movesets to her chip (think the David vs Katsuo rematch at the beginning of "Edgerunners"). TLDR: Maiko loses so spectacularly because she installed the Temu version of Judy's combat chip😜

In "Thone of Light" Kor Pharon and his sorcerers have terrible (for them) visons of the Emperor somehow returning (Insert Rise of Skywalker joke here), hope resurging in the Imperium, and even the fall of the Black Legion AND the chaos gods, as well as the coming of "A most terrible child". While the much debated (and debunked) "Star Child" (aka the supposed coming reincarnation of a discarded shard of the Emperor's soul), could the “child” in question be The Warp Entity version of the Emperor? As it stands there are technically two Emperors. The "real" emperor, who's the sorry corpse on life-support on the golden throne, powering the astronomicon and keeping the demons in the webway trapped, and the Warp Entity Emperor, who was brought into being through the power of belief from the imperium's worship of the "real" emperor. Supposedly its the T.W.E. Emperor who is responsible for empowering the saints and performing most (if not all) of the "miracles" attributed to the Emperor. The GW writers keep flip flopping on how much either Emperor did what, and use the two interchangeably. Since he was created by the people of the imperium, T.W.E. Emperor could be interpreted as the "child" of humanity. What's more, its possible that in a final effort to avoid becoming "The Dark King" The real emperor on the throne in the moment of his death might try to transfer all his remaining power into T.W.E. Emperor when the Golden Throne finally stops working. That kind of power boost might be enough for T.W.E. to give the forces of Chaos the smackdown that Kor and his buddies were worrying about.....

The UC outright won their first conflict with Freestar : The Narion War, but unrest among their own civilian population forced them to pretty much give Freestar everything it wanted: Recognized independence, control of Narion, The Clinic, and a check on further UC expansion. Despite losing, all Freestar gets is a slap on the wrist. All apparently because of how angry UC civilians were getting over the war. Then comes the Colony War. Once again Freestar get its @$$ kicked, losing every major engagement (that we the player knows about). The UC even gets revenge on the people of Narion: Niira is reduced to barren lifeless rock, and there are no major settlements left in Narion (besides the clinic) by the time of the game. Then comes the Battle of Cheyenne. UC officers outright refuse orders to fire on Freestar civilian volunteers, despite said volunteers being perfectly happy to slaughter UC ships in turn. Considering the UC previously gave up Narion out of Fear of civil unrest, they had to be absolutely sh*ing themselves over the possibility of a mass desertion/defection in their armed forces if the war went on any longer. While we aren't given too much info on the UC populace's reaction to the Colony War, the fact that the UC was deploying Xenoweapons on civilian targets, (like Vesta's Pride) plus their top admiral condemning a major UC city to be eaten alive by terromorphs, probably didn't make the war to popular on the homefront either. >!The addition of the "Terran Armada" DLC makes this even more apparent, as the UC government was apparently aware of one mass desertion event already.!<

Even post Colony War, we see at least one star member of the UC military who's willing to disreguard her commanding officers in the name of her own personal code(Captain Myeong).

The justification Vae Victus initially gives us for his destruction of the Londinium spaceport during the terromorph outbreak (which is presumably the same explanation he gave his superiors to hide the secret of the Lazarus plant) is that he couldn't properly quarantine the planet with The colony War ongoing, and destroyed the spaceport to keep the terromorphs from getting offworld. This seems to be the narrative the U.C. pushes in the Vanguard Museum. The thing is, terromorphs are still just animals. They can't fly spaceships, and if they boarded an evac ship, they'd just eat the crew and leave the ship drifting (or just break something critical and/or cause a hull breach the first time they tried to tunnel). That leaves the only way the terromorphs could get offworld is if they dominated a human pilot to specifically smuggle them offworld. The problem with that explanation (aside from the question of if the terromorphs are actually that smart) is that human's under terramorph influence don't really seem to be capable of much more than going berserk. Did the UC just assume V.V. was trying to cover up his inability to save the City by making sure no survivors made it out? If so, why push V.V.'s narative when they went ahead and put him on trial? If they were ok with labeling hm a war criminal, why try to defend or spin doctor a decision whose justification falls apart upon any kind of examination? Hiding the lazurus plant from potential freestar spies on Londinium would have been a satisfactory explanation for V.V.'s superiors, and would have explained the UC attempting a flimsy cover story to obfuscate things.... Except V.V. makes it clear he kept his bosses completely in the dark about the plant. So is the UC just trying to mitigate the damage to their rep by association (and half-@$$ing it because they hate him too), or am I just judging the capabilities of enthralled humans by the limitations of Bethesda npc ai? Is there any in-game lorebooks or data entries that say if human thralls are capable of operating complex machinery?

Also, just for @#$%-s and giggles, here's a TLDR depicting my idea of how V.V.'s debriefing on the destruction of the Londinium spaceport went down:

V.V.: I had to destroy the spaceport to contain the terramorphs! There was no way to safely quarantine the planet with the war going on!

U.C. Official: Wait, can humans under the terramorph's influence pilot starships?

V.V.: Uh, no. They just sort of run in circles or go berserk.

U.C. Official: Are the terromorphs smart enough to operate a starship?

V.V.: Uh, no, they're still just animals.

U.C. Official: So they're went any mind-controlled pilots trying to smuggle the terramorphs offworld, and the terramorphs themselves weren't capable of flying off planet, why was there any need for a quarantine? Even if a terramorph snuck onto a ship without the pilot noticing, they'd just eat the pilot and leave the ship drifting!

V.V.: Uhh.... reasons.

U.C. Official: .....Send him to forever prison.

Hull definitely had some legitimate grievances against the Freestar's government... but he's also a hypocritical, possibly delusional P.O.S.. The narrative Hull tells you is that his decimated troops were seconds from winning the Colony War when the Freestar government chickened out and sued for peace, rendering the sacrifice of nearly everyone under his command in The 1rst Cavalry pointless. He then defied orders to stand down and tried to end the war on his terms, and was unjustly punished for it, along with all his surviving officers. However, examining the actual events of the colony war, both from in-game lore and what the devs tell us, almost none of what Hull told us was true. Hull spent almost the entire war stuck on one moderately important planet (Niira) trying unsuccessfully to take it back from U.C. forces. Winning Niira wouldn’t have really tipped the war one way or the other, and while Hull was busy losing all his troops without accomplishing anything, the war was actually being won (yes, the Freestar actually won the war) in space at Cheyenne by civilian volunteers. Said civilians being the ones to actually win the war makes Hull’s vitriol towards the “common people” of Freestar all the more suspect. Hull claims he’s angry at them for failing to protest the imprisonment of Hull and his officers, but it seems more likely he’s resentful of them for “stealing” “his” glory in the war, rendering all his efforts and losses at Niira pointless by succeeding when he failed….

Also, as a side tangent: It’s possible Captain Myeong from the “Groundpounders” side quest was the one who destroyed The 1rst. If asked about her title of “The Shield of Parduk Pass” it’s revealed she destroyed a Freestar mech battalion in a trap she set….