Dune 7 & 8 (Spoilers): Duncan Idaho?

[Thanas]

I don't. By that point they've gone over the edge. Killing Paul makes him a martyr and in his own words, a symbol. Paul gets killed, the Fremen go crazy and slaughter everyone not on their side, and go rampaging.

And you have evidence to support this? Meanwhile every other crusade lead by a charismatic messiah collapsed when the messiah died. See the many insurrections against Roman rule etc, all of which are applicable to the context.

As for morale and the like, Paul wasn't worried about the Fremen winning without him. He was worried about them committing indiscrminate slaughter. For example, rather then 50 or so worlds pacified, perhaps 500, or 5000.

Right. They cannot take high casualties, their numbers are much to thin for taking that many worlds and without Paul checking up on the guild and the noble houses and securing allies/making sure other alliances do not happen the Fremen threat is much reduced already.

[AMT]

And you have evidence to support this? Meanwhile every other crusade lead by a charismatic messiah collapsed when the messiah died. See the many insurrections against Roman rule etc, all of which are applicable to the context.

Paul's visions which, in this context, can be taken as reliable, show this.

Right. They cannot take high casualties, their numbers are much to thin for taking that many worlds and without Paul checking up on the guild and the noble houses and securing allies/making sure other alliances do not happen the Fremen threat is much reduced already.

Yes, if the Fremen operate without Paul as they would with Paul. Which is the point. They wouldn't. Paul worked to pacify worlds. The Fremen would likely scourge them. If they attempted more conventional campaigns they would lose more and be spread thin. If they glass planets and wipe out populations without anything checking them, then they can continue on.

Remember, the point wasn't that Paul won. The point was to mitigate loss of life. Whether or not the Fremen are victorious without Paul isn't the issue. The amount of casaulties sustained without him to impede them is. And without him, they run, unchecked, across the galaxy, wasting many more lives before being stopped or stopping.

[Thanas]

Yes, if the Fremen operate without Paul as they would with Paul. Which is the point. They wouldn't. Paul worked to pacify worlds. The Fremen would likely scourge them. If they attempted more conventional campaigns they would lose more and be spread thin. If they glass planets and wipe out populations without anything checking them, then they can continue on.

The Fremen are at most 20 million people, of which logically only up to three-four million should be able to fight. They should not be able to support a campaign for long. Heck, for all we know it was only because Paul was able to secure allies that they even managed to take that tiny number of planets they did. Even assume they only take levels of casualties comparable to a single city assault of WWI, that still only gives them a number of planets they can take that is in the low dozens before they run out.

And I very much doubt that without Paul uniting them, they would have managed that much in the first place.

[Setzer]

Well, we really don't have a lot of hard info on Duniverse armies. According to the movie, the Sardaukar number less then two million. If the great houses equal the Sardaukar thanks to greater numbers, there would be less then twenty million soldiers between them. War under House Corrino took the form of raids and assassinations, rather then open combat. There's simply no reason for the Great houses to burden the expense of huge armies that could be raised from huge planets.

[Thanas]

Well, we really don't have a lot of hard info on Duniverse armies. According to the movie, the Sardaukar number less then two million. If the great houses equal the Sardaukar thanks to greater numbers, there would be less then twenty million soldiers between them. War under House Corrino took the form of raids and assassinations, rather then open combat.

Two million Sardaukar sounds too low, because they are worth 1:3 in relation to the numbers. Given that the Duneverse has about a million worlds irrc, that would mean there would only be 6 million troops in toto, which means an average garrison of six soldiers per planet. I do not think that to be realistic.

There's simply no reason for the Great houses to burden the expense of huge armies that could be raised from huge planets.

Given that the nobles will have months, if not years to prepare, I bet they are going to pull out all the stops.

[Crom]

Did Duncan Idaho, in Dune 7, develop prescience as well? I'm curious as to what makes an Ultimate Kwisatz Haderach so ultimate.

[Setzer]

IIRC, the Sardaukar were equal to ten ordinary Landsraad conscripts at their height.

Maybe it's a morale issue. For the Great Houses, the Jihad was an act of political opportunism. They'd seen one of their number replace the Emperor, the Sardaukar were gone, and the Fremen were unknown to them. But to the Fremen, the opposition of the Great Houses was defiance against their Messiah.

[jamsy42]

Did Duncan Idaho, in Dune 7, develop prescience as well? I'm curious as to what makes an Ultimate Kwisatz Haderach so ultimate.

I think he's "ultimate" because he can foresee EVERYTHING. Remember how Paul says his prescience is limited{like sight you cannot see without light}. I'm not 100% sure though.

[Setzer]

That would make Leto II the ultimate Kwisatz Haderach, since he had such powerful prescience that he's grown downright bored with always knowing the future. But that would mean respecting the original books by Frank Herbert, which the prequels aren't willing to do.

[Bilbo]

Did Duncan Idaho, in Dune 7, develop prescience as well? I'm curious as to what makes an Ultimate Kwisatz Haderach so ultimate.

I think he's "ultimate" because he can foresee EVERYTHING. Remember how Paul says his prescience is limited{like sight you cannot see without light}. I'm not 100% sure though.

I thought it was more of a self-created limitation. It was not that Paul could not see the entire future, it was that he was afraid of what he would see and what those visions would force him to do.

The difference between Paul and his son was that Leto II was willing to see all of the future and do what needed to be done no matter how stupid or cruel it might be.

[Dark Hellion]

Thanas, I am curious why you believe that Leto II caused a technological regression? It has been several years since I last read it but the impression I got was that Leto II advanced technology at a scale massively beyond what the Imperium had done. He had just hidden a lot of it away in pseudo-religious bullshit to get around some of the taboos left over from the Jihad and Imperial society.

For example: Leto II says "My father had a 10km tall phallic palace built. But I am the god emperor, my dick is much bigger, build me a 30km tall phallic tower." The foreman goes "But God Emperor, we don't know how to build a 30km tall structure!" And Leto replies, "Figure it out idiot! I am God and if I want a 30km tall penis in my backyard you will damn well build it!" Now the foreman and the engineers and architects all think they are just trying to appease the whims of a demanding god but they are really figuring out a ton about engineering megastructures.

I also think you are dismissing No-globes, No-ships and Ixian predictors a bit too callously. These are huge advancements (well, the predictor is just a re-engineering of old tech) that utterly break the ability to ever go back to anything resembling Imperial society.

Also, as I understand it (again I may be mistaken as it has been several years) the Golden path and the scattering weren't simply about increasing population but about making humanity have wildly divergent cultures and technological bases so that if there was some big threat then someone somewhere would have the societal base to figure out how to bitchslap it. It was necessary for there to be a total collapse of central authority so that there was no baseline tech or culture that could be referenced back to. The old baseline of the Imperium had to be made into an utter failure so that people would not want to repeat it and would try new things.

Paul simply did not have the stomach to do this. He couldn't bring himself to be so cruel as to let trillions to quadrillions die in famine and the warfare that would spring up from such a thing. But the mass exodus was necessary because it made humanity go from a million world empire into a non-unified race that IIRC had colonized much of the visible universe and had populations in the bazillions.

Now, maybe I am mistaken but I always thought that the enemy that Herbert hinted at was humanity itself. That eventually the tripod would collapse and either nuke itself into a stone age it would never recover from or some jackass would destroy the spice cycle and lock every world into utter stagnation. Leto forced everyone's hand by being such a giant douche that the Ixians were willing to go against the post-Jihad taboo and built thinking predictors and the No-stuff and Siona's anti-prescience genetics broke the cycles of prescience. The question about the ability to predict the future was always does the precog read the future or does the precog make the future and these developments rendered the question obsolete.

My impression of the last two books was always that we were seeing the old Dune galaxy because that is what we were familiar with and that there was really a whole ton of shit out there that was probably even better than what we were seeing. If you turn left at Alpha Centauri and go 4 billion light years you run into a Culture-esque civilization with goody-goody AIs and ship avatars that want to cuddle after fucking over a planet and if you turned right you may end up with a civ of super-psychics who could mind control planets and destroy fleets at several light years by concentrating hard. Keep going straight and you hit a civ were the most powerful entity in existence is a time-raping three meter tall statue of blades and barbed wire with the mind of the greatest badass in existence and powered by love. We are just seeing Duncan and Teg and the Bene Tellaxu (sp?) because we know them and want to see what happens next, but there is a very big universe out there full of people and stars.

About some other points real quick:

Fenrig, as a failed KH was invisible to Paul's precog and IIRC it is implied he is the biggest badass in single combat in the galaxy at the time. I believe though that when he chooses not to kill Paul the book says something along the lines of "Fenrig did two great things for the imperium. Once when he agreed to kill a man and once when he declined." It is implied that for a second Fenrig catches a glimpse of the future if Paul is dead vs Paul is alive and makes his choice. I always thought this made Fenrig a very interesting character. He is a harder, crueler and more experienced man than Paul and yet his decision seems to line up with Paul's. It hints that had the Empire continued that bad shit was going to happen.

The Fremen Jihad: As has been stated, the house militaries actually aren't that big. The just can't afford to ship large numbers of troops around with guild pricing so instead they focus on the quality of small numbers of troops. It is also implied that there are naval vessels that have some orbital bombardment capabilities. The Fremen (who had been taught warfare by Paul as well as being directed by him) would likely have used these capabilities (with Atreides ships) to soften up any hardened targets or major resistance points before landing. Since the Fremen have the guild by the balls they only ever need to deal with a single planet's defenses, and can take out any orbital defenses by clustering around a Guild Highliner and systematically destroying them. No one can fire upon them for risk of hitting the Highliner and getting totally cut off by the Guild and the Fremen can rain death with impunity. After that you just need to mop up and Fremen are scary enough in Dune-verse combat to handle that even at 5:1 odds with limited casualties.
The Fremen may have been frothing religious fanatics but they weren't stupid and would utilize their power over the guild (and by extension the Imperial House, Landsraad and CHOAM) to its fullest, with or without Paul. And it wasn't like Paul was the only charismatic leader they had, Stilgar, Jessica, Chani, etc. would all have to be taken out and a decapitation strike like that may have forced the Fremen's hand to destroy the spice and basically kill the galaxy. Paul held back the Jihad because no matter what, once the Fremen figured out that they had the Guild by the throat with control over the spice cycle they were going to kick the ass of the society that had oppressed them for millennium. Paul channeled it from an orgy of self-destructive violence that would collapse everything into a political and military strategy. IIRC it is hinted that he should have let the Jihad lose in all its fury and collapse society so that the road to the scattering started then. Some machine loving house or group (like Ix) would get sick of these rampaging barbarians who ventured out every couple of decades to smash the galaxy controlling the Guild and build a predictor and with spice rendered void all hell would break lose and the scattering would occur.

Basically, you can sum up Imperial Society and all its problems with a paraphrase of Wu-Tang Clan, "Spice moves everything around me." The whole of the first four books is about them breaking the logic of the two phrases of Dune. "He who controls the spice, controls the universe" and "he who can destroy something truly controls it." As long as the Fremen could destroy the cycle of sandworm to melange, no one would fuck with them and they could do what they wanted with the spice. As long as they could do what they wanted with the spice everyone in the Imperium had to dance to their beat. The Guild would transport what they wanted, when they wanted, where they wanted. The leaders of the great houses would eventually have to give in or die from melange withdrawal. Without transportation CHOAM would collapse. And since society had AFAIK run this way thousands of years everyone was seriously pissed but accepted this. They needed Leto II's 3500 year reign of tyrannical douchebaggery to change this complacency into total hatred. Not simply a feeling of "Well that was sorta silly to build society to depend upon a single resource from a single planet" but a feeling of "Fuck that shit! We aren't going to go back to living under some fucking worm god who hands out favors. We'll do this shit ourselves without the spice and without an emperor!" Humanity learned a painful lesson not to rely on the crutch of some single substance or some single leader and learned to rely again on its own ingenuity and capabilities.

Oh, and everyone knows Navigators don't have fish-faces. They have vagina-mouths and enter to music by Toto!

[Thanas]

Thanas, I am curious why you believe that Leto II caused a technological regression? It has been several years since I last read it but the impression I got was that Leto II advanced technology at a scale massively beyond what the Imperium had done. He had just hidden a lot of it away in pseudo-religious bullshit to get around some of the taboos left over from the Jihad and Imperial society.

Then let's see some evidence of that. Meanwhile, the world we see in the books is not highly-technologised.

I also think you are dismissing No-globes, No-ships and Ixian predictors a bit too callously. These are huge advancements (well, the predictor is just a re-engineering of old tech) that utterly break the ability to ever go back to anything resembling Imperial society.

No globes already exist by the first dune book. So not a huge advancement, but merely a reengineering of it to apply to a whole ship.

Also, as I understand it (again I may be mistaken as it has been several years) the Golden path and the scattering weren't simply about increasing population but about making humanity have wildly divergent cultures and technological bases so that if there was some big threat then someone somewhere would have the societal base to figure out how to bitchslap it. It was necessary for there to be a total collapse of central authority so that there was no baseline tech or culture that could be referenced back to. The old baseline of the Imperium had to be made into an utter failure so that people would not want to repeat it and would try new things.

So why not simply send out colony ships with no methods of communicating with them? People whose society collapsed do not make for good colonizers because most of them will just lack the resources to build expensive ships.

My impression of the last two books was always that we were seeing the old Dune galaxy because that is what we were familiar with and that there was really a whole ton of shit out there that was probably even better than what we were seeing. If you turn left at Alpha Centauri and go 4 billion light years you run into a Culture-esque civilization with goody-goody AIs and ship avatars that want to cuddle after fucking over a planet and if you turned right you may end up with a civ of super-psychics who could mind control planets and destroy fleets at several light years by concentrating hard. Keep going straight and you hit a civ were the most powerful entity in existence is a time-raping three meter tall statue of blades and barbed wire with the mind of the greatest badass in existence and powered by love. We are just seeing Duncan and Teg and the Bene Tellaxu (sp?) because we know them and want to see what happens next, but there is a very big universe out there full of people and stars.

That is an argument that is based on nothing. So far, the only thing we have seen coming from the colonization were the Honored Matres, who had a nice little habit of burning planets. That is not progress.

About some other points real quick:

Fenrig, as a failed KH was invisible to Paul's precog and IIRC it is implied he is the biggest badass in single combat in the galaxy at the time. I believe though that when he chooses not to kill Paul the book says something along the lines of "Fenrig did two great things for the imperium. Once when he agreed to kill a man and once when he declined."

That actually is a quote attributed to Princess Irulan iirc.

It is implied that for a second Fenrig catches a glimpse of the future if Paul is dead vs Paul is alive and makes his choice. I always thought this made Fenrig a very interesting character. He is a harder, crueler and more experienced man than Paul and yet his decision seems to line up with Paul's. It hints that had the Empire continued that bad shit was going to happen.

No, all the book says is that there was a deep familiarity between them unless I am massively misremembering things.

The Fremen Jihad: As has been stated, the house militaries actually aren't that big. The just can't afford to ship large numbers of troops around with guild pricing so instead they focus on the quality of small numbers of troops. It is also implied that there are naval vessels that have some orbital bombardment capabilities. The Fremen (who had been taught warfare by Paul as well as being directed by him) would likely have used these capabilities (with Atreides ships) to soften up any hardened targets or major resistance points before landing. Since the Fremen have the guild by the balls they only ever need to deal with a single planet's defenses, and can take out any orbital defenses by clustering around a Guild Highliner and systematically destroying them. No one can fire upon them for risk of hitting the Highliner and getting totally cut off by the Guild and the Fremen can rain death with impunity. After that you just need to mop up and Fremen are scary enough in Dune-verse combat to handle that even at 5:1 odds with limited casualties.

Why would any nobles care if they cause Guild casualties or not? They are screwed either way. And I already admitted very, very low Fremen casualties in my original calculation. So no way is that going to fly.

Paul held back the Jihad because no matter what, once the Fremen figured out that they had the Guild by the throat with control over the spice cycle they were going to kick the ass of the society that had oppressed them for millennium.

He united them in the first place and came up with the plan. Without him, there is no reason to assume the Fremen would ever even attempt blackmailing the Guild.

Paul channeled it from an orgy of self-destructive violence that would collapse everything into a political and military strategy. IIRC it is hinted that he should have let the Jihad lose in all its fury and collapse society so that the road to the scattering started then. Some machine loving house or group (like Ix) would get sick of these rampaging barbarians who ventured out every couple of decades to smash the galaxy controlling the Guild and build a predictor and with spice rendered void all hell would break lose and the scattering would occur.

Wrong. If Ix had built a predictor, there is no reason not to assume the Imperial houses would just have gotten together and nuked the Fremen/taken them out.

Humanity learned a painful lesson not to rely on the crutch of some single substance or some single leader and learned to rely again on its own ingenuity and capabilities.

It is the wrong message. Empires and societies need strong leaders. Without Augustus, there would have been no western world as we know it. I consider that beneficial, not a mistake.

[Setzer]

No globes already exist by the first dune book. So not a huge advancement, but merely a reengineering of it to apply to a whole ship.

I think you've mistaken that with Glow-globes. In Dune Messiah the conspirators need a Guild Navigator to hide them from Paul's prescience. If they had No-chambers, they would have used them. Technological means of escaping prescient vision wasn't invented until the end of Leto II's reign.

[Gaidin]

I think you've mistaken that with Glow-globes. In Dune Messiah the conspirators need a Guild Navigator to hide them from Paul's prescience. If they had No-chambers, they would have used them. Technological means of escaping prescient vision wasn't invented until the end of Leto II's reign.

They had one. The Harkonnens had an engineer that made one(who they proceeded to kill). Meaning they kinda-sorta had to be reinvented anyway.

[Setzer]

I also think that was during Leto II's reign. The Harkonnens spent most of their remaining wealth funding the research for the No-Chamber. Leto II let them do it because he wanted the Harkonnens to bankrupt themselves.

[Gaidin]

I also think that was during Leto II's reign. The Harkonnens spent most of their remaining wealth funding the research for the No-Chamber. Leto II let them do it because he wanted the Harkonnens to bankrupt themselves.

Point being that it was available, at least in secret(to use the word loosely, given Leto II's nature), through a good chunk of his reign. The lasgun technology stored there is implied to be near ancient in Heretics of Dune. It wasn't fleet standard until after though.

[Setzer]

But my point was that no-rooms and the related technology weren't available in the first or second book. Furthermore, Ancient in Heretics of Dune could easily be contemporary in Leto's era as well as Pauls. Without more precise information, there's no way to be sure.

[Dark Hellion]

Thanas, I am like 200km from my books so I am working purely off memory. Assume that there is an IIRC or AFAIK in front of basically everything I am saying. If someone with access to the books wants to chime in one way or the other please feel free.

Then let's see some evidence of that. Meanwhile, the world we see in the books is not highly-technologised.

I will try and go through a few different types of advancement and demonstrate why I had the impression I did.

Engineering: The Imperial Palaces of Leto II dwarfed anything seen in the Imperium. As Mr. Wong has laid out on the main page building megastructures is very difficult from an engineering perspective. I believe that even Fish Speaker HQs on other worlds were built to massive scales and I believe that both the palaces and HQs were built using a variety of off-world and on-world labor thereby spreading this engineering knowledge around the general populace.

Also, with the banning of shields the lasgun became the primary weapon and from what I recall of the descriptions Leto II era lasguns are lighter, have longer ranges, better accuracy and more power than Leto I era lasguns.

Computer science: The one fishspeaker uses what is implied to be a computer to record data. This in and of itself is a huge breaking of the O.C. bible and a massive technological leap. Additionally, even though the Ixian predictor is a huge step. From what I recall of the Dune Encyclopedia such predictors are basically similar to SW nav computers and as such require immense processing power. Additionally it shows that they probably have a general solution to N-body problems, which they may have had at the time of the Imperium or they may have had to solve themselves. If the later, this shows a major conceptual triumph in the field of physics by the Ixians.

Genetic Engineering: During this time the BT do some pretty major stuff. They produce a variety of ghola with interesting properties as well as breed a lot of other random genetic monstrosities. Also, Leto II's use of the Bene Gesserit breeding program produces Siona which is a heady accomplishment in genetics given that Leto II would not be able to predict what genetic path leads to such a goal. This shows that at least Leto II has very good knowledge on how one can use selective breeding to engineer in a trait and given the scale of the program and his purposeful laxity in leaking certain information others such as the BG and BT probably share in the fruits of his knowledge and labor as well.

No-tech: First,

No globes already exist by the first dune book. So not a huge advancement, but merely a reengineering of it to apply to a whole ship.

I don't really recall No globes being in the first Dune. As I remember (and I could be mistaken) the first perfect No globe (and perfection is actually necessary in the face of Dune-verse prescience) was built to house the chick that was to be used to cock tease Leto II. And again, engineering it to apply to a ship is probably harder to do than you seem to be implying. If it was a simple engineering challenge and they did have No globes at the time of Leto I you have to wonder why some Great House (or more likely the Imperial House) did not do so. It would give you huge leverage over the Guild which is basically the best power one can get at the time. I am sure Shaddam IV would have loved to be able to tell the Guild to stuff it on occasion. He's the Emperor of the known universe and yet is still getting ordered around by a vagina-faced worm in a tube.

Besides this, from my recollection tech in the Imperium was generally stagnant before Leto II. While post-Butlerian Jihad they did develop things like the mentats and Guild crap most stuff still in use was pre-Jihad tech. Shields, Lasguns, repulsors, snoopers, etc. Besides the BG breeding program (which Paul proved wasn't well understood anyways) the factions that developed tech like the BT and Ixians where looked at with general suspicion. Under Leto II we get the Fish Speakers reporting device, Ridulan Crystals, and the Ixian predictor and we get a view that looks at technology as a savior from oppression instead of the force for it.

Finally, any and all tech development during Leto II's reign had to happen with the tacit approval. Even if he couldn't see the final product (in the case of no globes and no ships) he would still see the comings and goings of workers and the shipments of materials and as Leto II is the government both de facto and de jure he can send officials with military backing to investigate or if worried just BDZ the planet and their isn't shit anyone can do about it.

So why not simply send out colony ships with no methods of communicating with them? People whose society collapsed do not make for good colonizers because most of them will just lack the resources to build expensive ships.

Again, this is only post- Shaddam IV/Leto I era we are talking about. Who are you going to send out? Everyone who is anyone is a spice addict. You would basically be sending a bunch of fucking peasants out or you would need to invest decades training a crew from the peasantry to do so. And how do you get there in the first place? Guild navigators need spice and as long as Imperial Society remains sacrosanct you can't build a predictor because the O.C. Bible says so. You can try and hope that people don't nuke you but do you want to bet on a society where any thinking machine is a boogeyman not doing so? Plus, how do you choose the crews? Do you send a homogeneous crew from each House in a different direction? Do you mix them up? How do you prevent them from building communications once they get there? Are you just no going to talk to them? What if they get pissed because of this and decide to nuke you for being an asshole who sent them a bajillion miles into some armpit of the universe and won't talk?

It is very hard to build new societies if you cling to the memories of the old one. While they may develop superficial differences they will probably remain beholden to Imperial society for thousands of years and will probably retain much of the same character such as suspicion of machines, the sanctity of the human soul, the reliance on the largess of the powerful, etc. Leto II shattered this. He made it so that humanity looked on the previous society in disgust and thus made them willing to throw out all these old, ingrained beliefs and try to find whatever worked. Patriarchy, matriarchy, democracy, communism, monotheism, polytheism, everything was open again to be tried anew because it was clear that Imperial Society was a wretched failure.

Your objection is sound from the stand-point of economic and engineering practicality. But these practicalities seem to have to be a casualty from the greater sociological goal. Besides, I do not think that the first wave of the scattering would necessarily be coming from impoverished peoples. While Leto II's death probably caused vast religious schism and collapsed the overall government it wouldn't necessarily collapse the resource base of individual systems. Yes, Leto II had engineered Imperial Society to catastrophically fail in his absence and his fall would cause the rest of the governmental apparatus to fall like dominoes the Empire was massive and this would give plenty of time for the Ixians to disseminate predictors to the various localities that maintained the stability and economic power to build spacecraft and no ships and escape the insanity to follow. And afterward those that could build ships would pretty much necessarily have some form of governance strong enough to initiate such a program thus spreading a variety of different forms of governance about.

As long as Imperial Society was king and thus Melange was king there was no escape from the slow death spiral it was headed on. It had to be collapsed with a permanence that would make people willing to throw off the millennium old prohibitions of the O.C. Bible and Butlerian Jihad that had forced humanity into such a stagnation.

That is an argument that is based on nothing. So far, the only thing we have seen coming from the colonization were the Honored Matres, who had a nice little habit of burning planets. That is not progress.

This is a complete non-argument. We know there are numerous civilizations of humanity that exist all over the entirety of the visible universe. We know that the Honored Matres are in some ways failures who are running away. It is also horribly superficial in its treatment of the Honored Matres. I can make the same argument about the GE in SW if I use this logic.
Besides, we have direct proof that there do exist at least pseudo-human societies of greater advancement in the form of the Super Face Dancers and we are given no reason to believe that the Honored Matres are among the most powerful of the post-scattering human civilizations.

Why would any nobles care if they cause Guild casualties or not? They are screwed either way. And I already admitted very, very low Fremen casualties in my original calculation. So no way is that going to fly.

Because attacking a Guild Highliner is a great way to get you blacklisted forever. As you said they are screwed either way but unless the Fremen are going to BDZ your world if you don't attack and risk hitting the Highliners you stand a chance of recovering under Fremen occupation and eventually regaining your power and independence. If you shoot a Guild Highliner you are simply fucked because you will have no trade even if the Fremen are defeated and you may just get BDZed for breaking one of the major taboos of the culture. The Fremen control the spice so they control the Guild. They control the Guild so they control space. Space is the ultimate high ground as so many strategic and tactical analysis on this board has concluded and you just don't need a very big army if you control space.

He united them in the first place and came up with the plan. Without him, there is no reason to assume the Fremen would ever even attempt blackmailing the Guild.

No reason to assume so other than the fact that the Fremen have used their limited control of the spice to bribe the Guild for centuries. It is not a big step to go from bribery to blackmail. The big hitch is figuring out the cycle of worm biology and engineering the basins and collecting enough water to destroy the spice cycle. Then you just need any charismatic leader with grandiose dreams and you end up with the Guild's nightmare situation. The technical capability to do such has been in their hands for a long time and it while in the books took people like Kynes and Paul to utilize this, any schmuck with big goals and political acumen could have done the same. Paul was a lucky stroke because he was a semi-grounded prescient instead of some raging Jihadi that could have arisen and done the same. The thing is that the Fremen are sly and aren't above using bribery, blackmail, extortion and other means to get what they want. So, they have the capability and they have the capacity for it, all they need is someone who can put the pieces together and this did not need to be the Kwisatz Haderach.

Wrong. If Ix had built a predictor, there is no reason not to assume the Imperial houses would just have gotten together and nuked the Fremen/taken them out.

But how would the Imperial House maintain its power if the predictor got into the hands of the Landsraad and CHOAM? What stops the Guild from attempting to nuke Ix first in an attempt to prevent the spread of this tech? The navigators are prescient too. Why would they nuke arrakis anyways? The nobles all still need the spice to live because of their Melange addictions. Nuke the Fremen and they deadman switch the catchbasins and kill the worms. Now all the Great Houses and the Imperial House suffer a slow death unless the BT can make artificial spice. Of course the Guild will want control of that spice to retain their political stranglehold just like all factions will. And once you let one set of nukes fly and totally break the Great Convention what stops the next wave? Especially since you can use predictors to fire them through fold space at targets on the other side of the galaxy.

This is why there is going to be utter chaos. Paul/Fremen control of the spice may twist and strain the balance of power but a predictor totally shatters it. The tripod will utterly collapse. Now the Houses of the Landraad can build massive armies they can transport themselves and just overwhelm the Sardukar. CHOAM can set its own price fixing independent of the Guild and speculation could easily run rampant. But they still all need the spice. The predictor breaks the stalemate of Guild controlled FTL without breaking the need for the spice and just makes Arrakis a bigger battleground because now the Guild can't police it effectively. Having half a dozen factions all fighting over one planet, all armed with enough nukes to roast a few dozen worlds and who all need that planets main resource; that is the recipe for disaster.

It is the wrong message. Empires and societies need strong leaders. Without Augustus, there would have been no western world as we know it. I consider that beneficial, not a mistake.

Societies need strong leaders. The plural can be very important. They need a strong governance but that does not mean they need a dictator or an emperor. You point to Augustus but I could easily point to the hundreds of ineffectual tyrants who have run any number of vast and powerful empires. Augustus is the exception not the rule. Dictators and totalitarian regimes do not tend to lead to good governance and even in real life have been ended in nuclear hellfire. Also, good governance generally relies on some feedback from the people. Leto II was the ultimate tyrant. He answered to no authority at all and his power was absolute. He was anathema to good governance and only his prescience and willpower allowed him to rule as such. But both of these abilities are far beyond the common mans understanding and he ended up looking exactly like he wanted, as a brute and a thug who lorded over the empire. He made himself into a symbol of bad government so that people would not repeat the mistake of giving over all their power to an individual.

[Thanas]

Engineering: The Imperial Palaces of Leto II dwarfed anything seen in the Imperium. As Mr. Wong has laid out on the main page building megastructures is very difficult from an engineering perspective. I believe that even Fish Speaker HQs on other worlds were built to massive scales and I believe that both the palaces and HQs were built using a variety of off-world and on-world labor thereby spreading this engineering knowledge around the general populace.

Nope. We also have the Imperial palace before that (that of House Corrino). Meanwhile, for the various technologies, the old Empire had technology that could terraform planets already.

Also, with the banning of shields the lasgun became the primary weapon and from what I recall of the descriptions Leto II era lasguns are lighter, have longer ranges, better accuracy and more power than Leto I era lasguns.

Evidence? And the lasguns sure are very powerful, seeing as how the primary weapons of the BG which are spoken off in the books are machineguns. Right.

Computer science: The one fishspeaker uses what is implied to be a computer to record data. This in and of itself is a huge breaking of the O.C. bible and a massive technological leap. Additionally, even though the Ixian predictor is a huge step. From what I recall of the Dune Encyclopedia such predictors are basically similar to SW nav computers and as such require immense processing power. Additionally it shows that they probably have a general solution to N-body problems, which they may have had at the time of the Imperium or they may have had to solve themselves. If the later, this shows a major conceptual triumph in the field of physics by the Ixians.

I am not disputing the advances of Ix - however note that this is even foreshadowed in the first dune book, where everybody pretty much assumes that a rim world or Ix will develop a technology that will change the world forever. So I see no reason why it would not have occured in the first place, especially as seeing how with a feudal structure, moving against IX is pretty much impossible.

Genetic Engineering: During this time the BT do some pretty major stuff. They produce a variety of ghola with interesting properties as well as breed a lot of other random genetic monstrosities. Also, Leto II's use of the Bene Gesserit breeding program produces Siona which is a heady accomplishment in genetics given that Leto II would not be able to predict what genetic path leads to such a goal. This shows that at least Leto II has very good knowledge on how one can use selective breeding to engineer in a trait and given the scale of the program and his purposeful laxity in leaking certain information others such as the BG and BT probably share in the fruits of his knowledge and labor as well.

The BT were already hugely advanced, even creating KHs before Leto's time. What advancement do they have that they previously did not have?

I don't really recall No globes being in the first Dune. As I remember (and I could be mistaken) the first perfect No globe (and perfection is actually necessary in the face of Dune-verse prescience) was built to house the chick that was to be used to cock tease Leto II. And again, engineering it to apply to a ship is probably harder to do than you seem to be implying. If it was a simple engineering challenge and they did have No globes at the time of Leto I you have to wonder why some Great House (or more likely the Imperial House) did not do so. It would give you huge leverage over the Guild which is basically the best power one can get at the time. I am sure Shaddam IV would have loved to be able to tell the Guild to stuff it on occasion. He's the Emperor of the known universe and yet is still getting ordered around by a vagina-faced worm in a tube.

No globes were existing in Messiah already, wasn't Duncan created in one?

Besides this, from my recollection tech in the Imperium was generally stagnant before Leto II. While post-Butlerian Jihad they did develop things like the mentats and Guild crap most stuff still in use was pre-Jihad tech. Shields, Lasguns, repulsors, snoopers, etc. Besides the BG breeding program (which Paul proved wasn't well understood anyways) the factions that developed tech like the BT and Ixians where looked at with general suspicion. Under Leto II we get the Fish Speakers reporting device, Ridulan Crystals, and the Ixian predictor and we get a view that looks at technology as a savior from oppression instead of the force for it.

What is the evidence for this change in status? Direct quotes, please. For all we know from the books the worlds were not high-tech and the bible was still enforced.

Finally, any and all tech development during Leto II's reign had to happen with the tacit approval.

No limits fallacy. There is no way leto can control all scientists, especially not with no-globes and those worlds of the rim that were already beyond his grasp.

So why not simply send out colony ships with no methods of communicating with them? People whose society collapsed do not make for good colonizers because most of them will just lack the resources to build expensive ships.

Again, this is only post- Shaddam IV/Leto I era we are talking about. Who are you going to send out? Everyone who is anyone is a spice addict. You would basically be sending a bunch of fucking peasants out or you would need to invest decades training a crew from the peasantry to do so. And how do you get there in the first place? Guild navigators need spice and as long as Imperial Society remains sacrosanct you can't build a predictor because the O.C. Bible says so. You can try and hope that people don't nuke you but do you want to bet on a society where any thinking machine is a boogeyman not doing so? Plus, how do you choose the crews? Do you send a homogeneous crew from each House in a different direction? Do you mix them up? How do you prevent them from building communications once they get there? Are you just no going to talk to them? What if they get pissed because of this and decide to nuke you for being an asshole who sent them a bajillion miles into some armpit of the universe and won't talk?

We know that there already are worlds beyond the reach of the Empire in Dune I. We also know that nobody really knows what they are up to. Hence, colonisation already happened before.

Your objection is sound from the stand-point of economic and engineering practicality. But these practicalities seem to have to be a casualty from the greater sociological goal. Besides, I do not think that the first wave of the scattering would necessarily be coming from impoverished peoples. While Leto II's death probably caused vast religious schism and collapsed the overall government it wouldn't necessarily collapse the resource base of individual systems. Yes, Leto II had engineered Imperial Society to catastrophically fail in his absence and his fall would cause the rest of the governmental apparatus to fall like dominoes the Empire was massive and this would give plenty of time for the Ixians to disseminate predictors to the various localities that maintained the stability and economic power to build spacecraft and no ships and escape the insanity to follow. And afterward those that could build ships would pretty much necessarily have some form of governance strong enough to initiate such a program thus spreading a variety of different forms of governance about.

This is directly contradicted by the famine times.

Furthermore, colonization already happened to some extent before.

This is a complete non-argument. We know there are numerous civilizations of humanity that exist all over the entirety of the visible universe.

Do we?

Because attacking a Guild Highliner is a great way to get you blacklisted forever.

So the choice is being killed or getting blacklisted forever. Right.

He united them in the first place and came up with the plan. Without him, there is no reason to assume the Fremen would ever even attempt blackmailing the Guild.

No reason to assume so other than the fact that the Fremen have used their limited control of the spice to bribe the Guild for centuries. It is not a big step to go from bribery to blackmail.

Yes, it is, or did you miss the point where it took Paul to figure out the whole plan and to unite the people? Did the Fremen even know about the link between the Sandworms and the shoals?

Paul was a lucky stroke because he was a semi-grounded prescient instead of some raging Jihadi that could have arisen and done the same. The thing is that the Fremen are sly and aren't above using bribery, blackmail, extortion and other means to get what they want. So, they have the capability and they have the capacity for it, all they need is someone who can put the pieces together and this did not need to be the Kwisatz Haderach.

Jihads have a nasty habit of spiraling and fizzlign away unless they got an able leader who knows every bit about the enemy they are fighting. So no reason to assume that they will be competent.

But how would the Imperial House maintain its power if the predictor got into the hands of the Landsraad and CHOAM? What stops the Guild from attempting to nuke Ix first in an attempt to prevent the spread of this tech? The navigators are prescient too. Why would they nuke arrakis anyways? The nobles all still need the spice to live because of their Melange addictions. Nuke the Fremen and they deadman switch the catchbasins and kill the worms. Now all the Great Houses and the Imperial House suffer a slow death unless the BT can make artificial spice. Of course the Guild will want control of that spice to retain their political stranglehold just like all factions will. And once you let one set of nukes fly and totally break the Great Convention what stops the next wave? Especially since you can use predictors to fire them through fold space at targets on the other side of the galaxy.

This is why there is going to be utter chaos. Paul/Fremen control of the spice may twist and strain the balance of power but a predictor totally shatters it. The tripod will utterly collapse. Now the Houses of the Landraad can build massive armies they can transport themselves and just overwhelm the Sardukar. CHOAM can set its own price fixing independent of the Guild and speculation could easily run rampant. But they still all need the spice. The predictor breaks the stalemate of Guild controlled FTL without breaking the need for the spice and just makes Arrakis a bigger battleground because now the Guild can't police it effectively. Having half a dozen factions all fighting over one planet, all armed with enough nukes to roast a few dozen worlds and who all need that planets main resource; that is the recipe for disaster.

I disagree. Everything we know of Duneverse combat suggests there would be a huge battle over Arrakis and then everything goes on as before.

Societies need strong leaders. The plural can be very important. They need a strong governance but that does not mean they need a dictator or an emperor. You point to Augustus but I could easily point to the hundreds of ineffectual tyrants who have run any number of vast and powerful empires. Augustus is the exception not the rule.

Justify this assertion. Use the Roman Empire if you want to.

[Setzer]

No-Rooms didn't exist in Paul's time. They used Guild Navigators to shield things from Paul's vision, but technological means did not exist.

[Zed]

No-Rooms didn't exist in Paul's time. They used Guild Navigators to shield things from Paul's vision, but technological means did not exist.

They exist in the prequels, though, but I suspect we all agree that those shouldn't be used in this argument.

[Gaidin]

They exist in the prequels, though, but I suspect we all agree that those shouldn't be used in this argument.

Even were we to go with the prequels, only two were made. The Harkonnens made the first no-ship and no-globe and then pretty much killed off the engineer to prevent other people from learning about them, requiring them to be reinvented anyway. The BG destroyed the no-ship. Implications about the no-globe in the prequel were that it was the one found by Miles Teg in Heretics of Dune.

[Thanas]

No-Rooms didn't exist in Paul's time. They used Guild Navigators to shield things from Paul's vision, but technological means did not exist.

I stand corrected then.

[Setzer]

They exist in the prequels, though, but I suspect we all agree that those shouldn't be used in this argument.

Even were we to go with the prequels, only two were made. The Harkonnens made the first no-ship and no-globe and then pretty much killed off the engineer to prevent other people from learning about them, requiring them to be reinvented anyway. The BG destroyed the no-ship. Implications about the no-globe in the prequel were that it was the one found by Miles Teg in Heretics of Dune.

Yet another reason I'm glad I avoided the prequels. Inventing something and not making use of it is wasteful, and Baron Harkonnen despises waste. Frankly, there's no reason for anyone to develop safeguards against prescience when it's not being used against them. It was only when Paul put himself on the throne that it became a major threat.

It's true that the Corrino Imperium had the technology for megastructures. In Dune Messiah, we learn that Paul's palace was the largest structure ever built up to that time, and it was larger then several cities.

[Manus Celer Dei]

They exist in the prequels, though, but I suspect we all agree that those shouldn't be used in this argument.

Even were we to go with the prequels, only two were made. The Harkonnens made the first no-ship and no-globe and then pretty much killed off the engineer to prevent other people from learning about them, requiring them to be reinvented anyway. The BG destroyed the no-ship. Implications about the no-globe in the prequel were that it was the one found by Miles Teg in Heretics of Dune.

Yeah, but in Heretics it's said the Harkonnen No-Globe found on Gammu by Teg was built after Leto II's reign. It's one of those stupid inconsistencies between the original books and the prequels that's pretty much impossible to rationalize in any sort of sensible way short of just throwing one of the two accounts out the window.