Impossibility of Piracy

Loren Pechtel wrote:

TheInquisition wrote:By a random band I didn’t mean that you press some button on your drive that sends you to a random band, rather that an attacking ship doesn’t know whether you went up or down or how far up or down so they can’t follow you.

What I'm saying is I think an observer knows whether you went up or down and can follow.

It’s unclear. David has talked about bands, but in a very vague hand-waving way. The only thing I think we know is that if you ascend a level (like gamma to delta) your arrival emits significant energy on the upper level. When you drop a level you emit energy on the lower level.

So don’t know.

kzt wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:

What I'm saying is I think an observer knows whether you went up or down and can follow.

It’s unclear. David has talked about bands, but in a very vague hand-waving way. The only thing I think we know is that if you ascend a level (like gamma to delta) your arrival emits significant energy on the upper level. When you drop a level you emit energy on the lower level.

So don’t know.

True. But it's implied there is a fair amount of hyperspace 'height' between the walls of bands - in Honor of the Queen, for example, Fearless takes four minutes to drop from the Gamma wall to the Beta wall. It's not just 'zip' and you're across to the next band.

So whilst you can't see into the next 'band' to see where your target has fled too, presumably you'll know whether they were at the 'wall' of the band above or below. Which kind of implies by default which way they've gone.

Loren Pechtel wrote:What I'm saying is I think an observer knows whether you went up or down and can follow.

kzt wrote:It’s unclear. David has talked about bands, but in a very vague hand-waving way. The only thing I think we know is that if you ascend a level (like gamma to delta) your arrival emits significant energy on the upper level. When you drop a level you emit energy on the lower level.

So don’t know.

locarno24 wrote:True. But it's implied there is a fair amount of hyperspace 'height' between the walls of bands - in Honor of the Queen, for example, Fearless takes four minutes to drop from the Gamma wall to the Beta wall. It's not just 'zip' and you're across to the next band.

So whilst you can't see into the next 'band' to see where your target has fled too, presumably you'll know whether they were at the 'wall' of the band above or below. Which kind of implies by default which way they've gone.

Isn't it stated somewhere that there are sub-bands?

tlb wrote:Isn't it stated somewhere that there are sub-bands?

Yes, but as I recall its basically a passing reference. The closest I recall is the description of Alice Truman's run from Yeltsin back to Manticore to summon help where she went so high in the Theta bands that "We bounced off the iota wall a day out of Yeltsin".

HotQ also talks about the convoy "cruising along in the mid-delta bands, which translated their .5 C true velocity into an effective velocity of just over a thousand times light-speed". Which may or may not be quite up to the 1089.0c speed listed for the Delta bands in RFC's 'Effective speed by hyper band' table.

But most of the time aside from using the plural "bands" each is talked about more like a monolithic entity. So it doesn't seem like there are hyper-walls between the various Delta bands; and so it's unclear if (or how far) sensors can see into/through other "sub bands" within a give group.


Edit: Did a text search across all the books for "sub-bands" and found only 2 mentions; both in the DESTROYERS (DD) entry within House of Steel. (And no hits for "sub bands")
"The destroyer first came into its own as a screening unit because it was an inexpensive platform that could provide tactical reconnaissance duties as well as deny the enemy those same opportunities. A hyper-capable unit was needed to search in nearby sub-bands when a fleet or convoy was in hyper transit."
"First and foremost, GSN destroyers scout for a deployed battle fleet both while in hyper transit and in normal space. The new doctrine calls for a substantially larger scouting force, spread across multiple hyper sub-bands to maximize sensor performance."

So it sounds like maybe sensors could reach into at least adjacent sub-bands but at a penalty to sensor performance - while putting a DD into that adjacent sub-band would eliminate that cross-sub-band sensor degradation.

There is what David has written and what David pictures in his head. They are not always congruent.

There are walls between the hyper bands. Between the sub-bands is more of a curb, maybe a hedgerow.