SLN, and MAlign playing catch up with Manticoran superiority

penny wrote:Question. Finding Bolthole alone, could represent one of those varying missions for an LD to get in very close. If the correct Wormhole is found that leads to Bolthole, is it possible for an LD to skulk in very close and ... 'Surprise! Everyone put your hands up! Push any buttons and you die.' The people in ACS need time to delete files. These people are civilians, and civilians cannot be expected to be trained, or be so quick, to sacrifice their life for an ideal. I suppose that these personnel should be retired naval personnel. But I wouldn't bank on it.

At any rate, shit happens!

Standard ACS for the Manticore wormholes is a civilian agency (although I wouldn't underestimate their training after decades of war).

One could assume that the wormholes leading to Bolthole are protected by military or intelligence guys, well drilled, due to the high military value of Bolthole. That's not something you outsource to the lowest bidder - they managed to keep the location and - for a large part - even the existence secret for decades.

I won't claim things cannot happen, but don't underestimate their safety measures.

Joat42 wrote:We've been over why many of us think Galton is a retcon written in to put a pin in the current story-arc and that shows, it all comes down to "scouts think they found the MAlign" and then "we blasted those bad acting Nazi's into tiny bits" with some interludes and expositions thrown in to give a modicum of authenticity to Galton's existence, there's little else in TEIF.

At least Galton is an undeniable proof that the Mesan Aligment exists.

But there are still enough unconnected strings that should point the intelligence guys to the fact that there must be something else.

penny wrote:Also, even the lowest technician can look out of the windows on any observation deck and note the constellation. Their latest i-phone can capture images of the constellation as well. Someone might be able to recognize it because of who-knows-what.

Warships don't have portholes or observation decks. They'd be weaknesses in the hull.

But other personnel transports might, so may the stations and yards where the ships are being constructed. Whether you can see any useful constellations from inside the Refuge System's dust cloud is up for discussion. Given that medium- and long-range observations failed to see an inhabitable planet there at all, it's not impossible, but planets are much more difficult to see than stars.

As for captured images, I'm sure the same OpSec procedures that keep the navigation databases clean would apply to any other data storage carried by anyone. You don't bring any un-approved mass storage device with you and you're arrested if you try to leave with something that wasn't issued to you. What was issued to you is subject to censorship, the same way that sending emails aboard a warship would be.

You can't remove someone's knowledge (in the HV), but you can prevent them from taking high-fidelity data with them. The most that anyone not in the Top Brass should know is that:
a) it takes about a week to travel from the far terminus of the wormhole
b) the near terminus of the wormhole is a month's travel from Haven
c) the system is surrounded by a dust cloud
d) it's a binary star system with the bigger partner being a bright A-class star
e) there are five asteroid belts
f) the system has a native human population descended from a lost colony ship

No one but navigators and Top Brass need to know that the far terminus is the Calvin System.

The problem is that the native population is being educated and is working on the yards, along with the temporary expats, and those will know their history. They kept the Dark Fall saga alive for nearly 1500 years, and they must all know now that they are the descendants of the Calvin's Hope colony ship. It'll be impossible to contain that datum.

And that's not even considering Pritchart's promise to the native Sanctuarians that they deserve to be public in the Galaxy and have the freedom of travel, same as any other citizen of the Republic of Haven.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Warships don't have portholes or observation decks. They'd be weaknesses in the hull.

Not true, there are at least two stories that reference them:
Echoes of Honor:

Chapter 46 wrote:"If you'd like a ringside seat for it, Sir, you can watch the main plot here on Flag Bridge. CIC will be keeping an eye out for Tactical, and I'm sure Citizen Captain Ferris will be watching his maneuvering plot carefully. But I rather enjoy watching the translation bleed myself, so I normally have the main plot configured to take a visual feed from the forward optical heads. Or you can also watch it directly with the naked eye from the observatory blister."

Shadow of Saganami:

Chapter 28 wrote:Helen opened the hatch and started to step through it, then stopped abruptly.

She'd discovered the small observation dome early in her second week aboard Hexapuma. It was never used. The optical heads spotted along the cruiser's hull, and especially here between the boat bays, gave multiply overlapping coverage. They allowed the boat bay flight control officer far better visibility from the displays in his command station than any human eye could have provided, even from this marvelously placed perch. But the dome was still here, and, in some emergency, with the normal command station knocked out, someone stationed here might actually do some good. Personally, Helen doubted it, but she didn't really care, either. Whatever the logic of its construction, it gave her a place to sit alone with God's handiwork and think.

Theemile wrote:The last I saw, the MBS was about to overtake the economy of SOL, not the SL in total. Now, of course, it tanked the SOL economy, so that is now a meaningless litmus.

That's not entirely correct, in ART chapter 31 when Captain Gweon goes through his economic report, he says this:

"In fact, our projections over at Economic Analysis indicate that we’ll reach a tipping point at which the combined economies of Manticore and Haven will effectively match the economic power of the League within no more than ten to fifteen T-years."

Now, considering it's Gweon giving this estimate it may well be tainted by MAlign to steer the mandarins into a desirable direction, so keep that in mind.

tlb wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Warships don't have portholes or observation decks. They'd be weaknesses in the hull.

Not true, there are at least two stories that reference them:
Echoes of Honor:

Chapter 46 wrote:"If you'd like a ringside seat for it, Sir, you can watch the main plot here on Flag Bridge. CIC will be keeping an eye out for Tactical, and I'm sure Citizen Captain Ferris will be watching his maneuvering plot carefully. But I rather enjoy watching the translation bleed myself, so I normally have the main plot configured to take a visual feed from the forward optical heads. Or you can also watch it directly with the naked eye from the observatory blister."

Shadow of Saganami:

Chapter 28 wrote:Helen opened the hatch and started to step through it, then stopped abruptly.

She'd discovered the small observation dome early in her second week aboard Hexapuma. It was never used. The optical heads spotted along the cruiser's hull, and especially here between the boat bays, gave multiply overlapping coverage. They allowed the boat bay flight control officer far better visibility from the displays in his command station than any human eye could have provided, even from this marvelously placed perch. But the dome was still here, and, in some emergency, with the normal command station knocked out, someone stationed here might actually do some good. Personally, Helen doubted it, but she didn't really care, either. Whatever the logic of its construction, it gave her a place to sit alone with God's handiwork and think.

And that description clearly seems to imply a size quite a bit larger than portholes. Thus, more like picture windows. An "observation dome" should be a perfect place to study the heavens.

Of course, when criminals kidnap their victims, they oftentimes blindfold them to keep the hideout a secret. In the same way, I suppose the observation deck(s) aboard any ship to and from Bolthole could be closed.

I recently put a new "hard drive" in my PC. A 4TB device that looks like a credit card. Sure you can restrict what people take out on phones and tablets, but an equivalent to our SD cards or such? A fingernail sized bit of thin film?

Daryl wrote:I recently put a new "hard drive" in my PC. A 4TB device that looks like a credit card. Sure you can restrict what people take out on phones and tablets, but an equivalent to our SD cards or such? A fingernail sized bit of thin film?

A microSD card today is smaller and has more storage than what Sci-Fi writers from the 1990s thought was possible! I don't think they're going to get any smaller because they become too tiny to handle. Our fingers aren't getting more dextrous than they are.

But you can subject people to searches to figure out if they are smuggling data out. This is not new.

A bigger difficulty would be for people like Honor who have cybernetics in their body, meaning they must have some data storage of some kind. What are they going to do, reset the firmware to defaults?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:A microSD card today is smaller and has more storage than what Sci-Fi writers from the 1990s thought was possible! I don't think they're going to get any smaller because they become too tiny to handle. Our fingers aren't getting more dextrous than they are.

But you can subject people to searches to figure out if they are smuggling data out. This is not new.

A bigger difficulty would be for people like Honor who have cybernetics in their body, meaning they must have some data storage of some kind. What are they going to do, reset the firmware to defaults?

Though unless you're dealing with active spies -- in which case you've far more serious problems -- the workers may get sloppy but in general they should be in favor of keeping the base's location secret. (After all, they're the ones who'll get blown up if the wrong people find it)

So you shouldn't need to search them for any storage devices. It'd be more about making rules that make inadvertent leakage of data that might disclose the location less likely.

Things like restricting devices with cameras, limiting the observation areas, or applying censorship to messages home would go a long way. (Could someone smuggle in a camera or smuggle out uncensored information? Probably. But if you make the workers aware of why you're doing it that should sharply limit their interest in bypassing those security measures)

In the Prologue of _On Basilisk Station_ (this is a meeting of the People's Republic of Haven's cabinet), it is mentioned that Manticore's gross system product, c. 1900PD was 78% of that of Sol System (which, BTW, is a small fraction of the Solarian League economy). Of course, the Sol gross system product took a big hit 2 decades later in _Uncompromising Honor_.