Good god, this turned out very long. Promise I'm not trying to Jaegerbomb you, bro.
I think when people say "SAINT can arrest people" they're talking like laymen and just mean "SAINT can detain people and take them into their custody," unaware that "arrest" has a very special legal definition. But make no mistake, SAINT can detain those individuals they need to in pursuit of a mission, just as a Rikugun Century or Uchuugun armor team could detain prisoners of war until they are processed. Saddam Hussein was not initially detained by any military police officers and they didn't accompany the raid to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden, for example (look it up), so it feels odd to add a weird layer of operational bureaucracy that doesn't even exist in real life militaries.
But I'm over here betting you're talking about "
arrest" in a legal sense rather than "arrest" as a colloquialism meaning "detain." So hopefully we're in agreement and are just talking at this point.
I added that specific mention of Special Branch working with SAINT because their relationship will be much closer than many corps are with SAINT however I can remove this mention if you think it redundant.
I do think it's very redundant, but that's your choice, Wes's choice, or the reviewer's choice (not sure in what order) to reconcile. I'd appreciate it if it were removed, yes, but if you can't see the reasoning behind what I'm saying then there's nothing to be done.
I mentioned the Director saying that because you've gone on record OOC in Discord several times stating the fact and I thought it would save time.
I am generally fine with the part about the director being liaised with. But I don't think Shida would have ever gone on record talking about what SAINT does or does not do, especially because the question's answer goes without saying. "Of course Star Army Intelligence can't charge people with crimes. I suppose it's a high complement that other members of the admiralty don't even know what we actually do." So I am fine with the liaising going on and being included, but not the other part, which sort of flows into my next point...
My personal opinion is that a few of the specific mentions of SAINT — honestly just on the OOC page — seem out of place and try to define an already working/detailed setting element from the outside. That odd mention boils down to what the opening bullet point summarizes (since the meat of the "SAINT's counterpart" section isn't majorly false itself, just redundant):
SAINT gather intelligence. We act on this information if it regards citizens or soldiers of the Star Army, SAINT does not.
And that isn't accurate. SAINT gathers intelligence. But it also acts on that intelligence in some cases. In most cases, intelligence is used to inform another organ of the Star Army that it's most pertinent to, at which point that organ acts. Fleets wage space war. Rikugun conquers and garrisons planets. SAINT pursues clandestine missions and targets. Logistics uses intelligence to alter their supply routes in cases where the Star Army's might can't guarantee safety. MPs police the Star Army and perform formal arrest duties.
See what I'm getting at?
All of the Star Army's actions can be based on the intelligence SAINT gets (or that any other organ of the Star Army gathers in the course of their operations), but no part is barred from acting upon intelligence that falls within its purpose and range of specialty.
I aimed to clarify specifically because it seems like a misconception which continues to be perpetuated despite you going on record saying they don't.
In sum, I don't think that SAINT should really be mentioned at all in the OOC section because
it appears the inclusion and focus is unnecessarily addressing another part of the Star Army (all of the Star Army is all of the Star Army's counterpart).
Your fleshing out of the MPs is awesome and I think it should be sufficient to deal with the misconceptions about SAINT that
I myself have constantly corrected over the years. My feeling is that making an awesome MP article and making the MPs actually prominent does more to fix the issue than choosing to redefine how SAINT works.
The SAINT article does its best to include other parts of the Star Army, but changes nothing about how those other parts of the Star Army themselves work. I'm of the opinion that interconnecting setting elements should optionally enhance each setting element rather than force those setting elements to behave differently. So that's why it's kind of unfathomable to me why SAINT is specifically getting a bunch of OOC explanation when Logistics, Command, Operations, Rikugun, etc aren't mentioned at all.
Do the SAMPs assigned to the Rikugun work as individual actors, or do they form whole MP battalions and do traditional MP stuff during war? How does the court martial process work? Are there Judge Advocates? Do captains and XOs have any judicial powers or trial powers on their own ships? Are there special MPs who look at or monitor freight safety for SA Logistics? Is there a part of the SAMPs that works with SA Operations to plan occupation law enforcement for invasion operations?
The above are the kinds of things I think are important for players to know because they highlight what the SAMP
can do rather than what some unrelated part of the Star Army with its own page
can't do.
