The Merchant Princes Series/Headscratchers

• Long lost family
  • Ok, so the long-lost family of the Clan discovers the rest of their kin and seeks revenge by surreptitiously igniting and re-igniting a civil war between rival factions. But in the years and decades they were waging this clandestine program, spying on and learning everything there was to know about 'their enemy', they never once thought to ask "Just what is this United States thing they keep talking about"? They never wondered why not a single Clan building was dopplegangered on the world their own pattern took them to? They never once sought to identify where all the Clan's money and high-tech gadgets were coming from?