?

penny wrote:Seeing as though the streak drive is really top secret, if there were any examples they would be destroyed. And any top secret files should have been too. The MA is too top-secret, compartmentalized and paranoid to make that mistake. Especially since Galton was warned that they might have company calling.

I hope all those question will be answered when we get the next book by Marisa Wolf and David Weber, that promises to begin the wrapup the Crown of Slaves/Alignment story arc following Eric’s death. There is a possibility that novel will launch the next generation of Harringtons’ story arc.

penny wrote:Thanks. That I don't recall at all. I must've been 'pillow talking' with Honor.

Seeing as though the streak drive is really top secret, if there were any examples they would be destroyed. And any top secret files should have been too. The MA is too top-secret, compartmentalized and paranoid to make that mistake. Especially since Galton was warned that they might have company calling.

So, all research from Galton goes to Darius where it splits off and goes into different directions, eh? Which means the streak drive may have been improved. Is there another band in hyper available for conquest?

I'm sure Galton attempted to wipe the information. But I suspect that it was fairly widely deployed within the Galton navy - so while, yes, it is a significant secret it seems more along the level of how the post-Grayson compensators are secret. You try your very best to keep the implementation details secret to the extent it doesn't significantly impact your ability to benefit from use of the technology.

But being widespread enough you can benefit from it means mode places for the hardware or useful details to exists, and so requiring a larger clean up effort to keep hidden after defeat. You'd need to wipe out the R&D files and samples; but also the manufacturing lines, maintenance manuals on warships and yards, spares in the yards, installed generators aboard warships and couriers -- and then you'd have all the people trained on building or maintaining them. (Now anti-reverse engineering protections build into the actual hardware can slow down attempts to duplicate the functionality simply from capture warships; but those protections are never perfect)

There's plenty of room for RFC to plausibly allow any level of leakage he wants after Galton's capture.



As for higher hyper bands -- presumably. Streak, as we know it, unlocked the iota and kappa bands (above theta); and there's no reason to think that 10 bands is all that there are. So presumably some additional breakthrough might unlock access to the lambda bands, or beyond.

penny wrote:So, all research from Galton goes to Darius where it splits off and goes into different directions, eh? Which means the streak drive may have been improved. Is there another band in hyper available for conquest?

We know they were trying to improve. That's what Simões was working on after all. Whether that can lead to new hyper bands, we don't know.

Jonathan_S wrote:As for higher hyper bands -- presumably. Streak, as we know it, unlocked the iota and kappa bands (above theta); and there's no reason to think that 10 bands is all that there are. So presumably some additional breakthrough might unlock access to the lambda bands, or beyond.

Indeed, but unless there are several more that can be accessed, or the multiplication factor is reversing trend and going up again, more bands are not a game changer. They will be extremely important for commerce, because time is money and if you shrink your transit times by 25%, you gain one trip for every four or five you were making. Or, conversely, it connected more markets to the same products, because they can now be reached in reasonable time.

But for war? Not so much. You can move your ships faster, but a 25% improvement is not going to be tactically important for any generic battle. By the time any reinforcements arrive, the battles are long over. It might be important in some other scenarios, similar to the commerce one above: ships that wouldn't otherwise have legs to reach a particular location now will, the time between visits in systems is shorter, etc. This may allow some ships to be able to avoid certain wormholes too, if necessary.

Now, if the lambda and mu bands added 1.5x each, we're talking about 3x faster than theta. That begins to get interesting.

Galton may have been the place of initial development for the Streak Drive but that doesn't mean that any of the ships built there- other than perhaps test vehicles- had it installed. The Galton Navy wasn't going anywhere. Sending the information to Darius and building the several ships we have seen/been told had Streak Drives could have all been done at Darius and then they were deployed as needed.

Note that it has sounded like Streak drive ships are equipped with self-destruct systems and the crew are prepared to use them. A lot of stations and forts at Galton were destroyed, some in the last round of fighting including the bunch that were command destroyed by the Galton Command. Good way to clean up any loose ends of people and files that might be around, not to mention any tooling in storage. Mesa wouldn't have been a reasonable place to build Streak Drive ships, it was also going to be trashed and there were probably too many chances that somebody would have tried to steal information on it and sell it on. Darius is primarily closed system where the people building the ships aren't going anywhere. Transferring a SD ship to one of the Alignment crews with "good" paperwork and history is relatively simple using cutouts and false trails, particularly if the ship in question has a fusion reactor containment failure to remove evidence.

Herlander is a differnt discussion, He was a researcher and theory guy doing secret work on computers within Gama Center in a very high security environment. Anything he produced would be sent on- to Darius you would presume- but he's not taking files home. He is also not being moved away for work.....like sending him off to Darius..because then you would have had to disappear him without his wife (very important in other research) and at the time there was no urgency. Ok, he was becoming a problem after the "culling" of the daughter but although McBride probably was certain that Herlander was going to end up dead when he stopped being useful in the research, that could have been handled as a "medical" thing like a stroke because his physicians would be Alignment and he was known to be dealing with massive mental problems with the death of his daughter.
Oh, if you want to get interesting, just how was the death of the daughter handled since she was culled as a failed experiment but there would have had to be a trail of paperwork to fit when she finally died. Lots of people dying on Mesa.
Always fun talking about the Alignment operations.

Brigade XO wrote:Galton may have been the place of initial development for the Streak Drive but that doesn't mean that any of the ships built there- other than perhaps test vehicles- had it installed. The Galton Navy wasn't going anywhere. Sending the information to Darius and building the several ships we have seen/been told had Streak Drives could have all been done at Darius and then they were deployed as needed.

You could. But 99.99% of the people at Galton have no idea any other MAlign system or navy exists.

So if you invent a better hyper drive, and then refuse to equip your navy with it, you'll have the inventors, testers, and anybody in the know all honestly thinking you're hamstringing the final defense of Leonard Detweiler's grand vision.

You can't explain that it's being sent elsewhere who can use it better; and thus should be buried and wiped from the knowledge of Galton. You'd have to justify why you weren't giving your navy that possible edge should the hidebound reactionary forces of Beowulf (and friends) come to forcibly stop the grand march of human progress as envisioned by the great Detweiler.

It's probably safer for the secret to allow secret tech invented on Galton to actually be used by Galton's defenders -- that way if it has to play it's final role as sacrificial decoy you don't have all those suspicious enemy intelligence folks possible digging up suspiciously loose ends of breakthrough tech that isn't followed through on. Better to treat is a normal secret military tech and accept the risk that if Galton falls that your enemy might eventually reverse engineer it than to increase the risk that they'll see through the deception and Galton's fall won't buy you the necessary time to ensure your actual base is never found.

Brigade XO wrote:A lot of stations and forts at Galton were destroyed, some in the last round of fighting including the bunch that were command destroyed by the Galton Command. Good way to clean up any loose ends of people and files that might be around, not to mention any tooling in storage.

I do not remember any station that was command destroyed at Galton. That final command was to fire the missiles hidden among the living spaces and so on. The forts were destroyed by the GA, but that does not mean that factories were. Technicians from the GA were going through the databases at the end of TEiF. There are things that the puppet masters at Darius wanted found in those databases, such as the fake plans for Oyster Bay which people at Darius really believed that they carried out.

Brigade XO wrote:Oh, if you want to get interesting, just how was the death of the daughter handled since she was culled as a failed experiment but there would have had to be a trail of paperwork to fit when she finally died. Lots of people dying on Mesa.

I would not be at all surprised to learn that Francesca's cause of death was entered as "euthanasia by lethal injection due to poor quality of life". The LRPB does not need to hide its professional opinions, this has nothing to do with covering for Houdini.

tlb wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:A lot of stations and forts at Galton were destroyed, some in the last round of fighting including the bunch that were command destroyed by the Galton Command. Good way to clean up any loose ends of people and files that might be around, not to mention any tooling in storage.

I do not remember any station that was command destroyed at Galton. That final command was to fire the missiles hidden among the living spaces and so on. The forts were destroyed by the GA, but that does not mean that factories were. Technicians from the GA were going through the databases at the end of TEiF. There are things that the puppet masters at Darius wanted found in those databases, such as the fake plans for Oyster Bay which people at Darius really believed that they carried out.

From the May 1924 PD chapter:

"The visual display flared suddenly as the two remaining command fortresses vanished in the eye-tearing brilliance of nuclear explosions" ... 'Missile launch!' Megan Peterson snapped."

Brigade XO wrote:A lot of stations and forts at Galton were destroyed, some in the last round of fighting including the bunch that were command destroyed by the Galton Command. Good way to clean up any loose ends of people and files that might be around, not to mention any tooling in storage.

tlb wrote:I do not remember any station that was command destroyed at Galton. That final command was to fire the missiles hidden among the living spaces and so on. The forts were destroyed by the GA, but that does not mean that factories were. Technicians from the GA were going through the databases at the end of TEiF. There are things that the puppet masters at Darius wanted found in those databases, such as the fake plans for Oyster Bay which people at Darius really believed that they carried out.

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:From the May 1924 PD chapter:

"The visual display flared suddenly as the two remaining command fortresses vanished in the eye-tearing brilliance of nuclear explosions" ... 'Missile launch!' Megan Peterson snapped."

So my memory was incomplete, the heavily damaged forts were completely destroyed on command (eliminating the people that knew of Darius). BUT no other station, whether living quarters or factories, were destroyed at that time; so they are all available to be examined. In particular the fake plans for Oyster Bay and the real plans for the streak drive can be expected to be found.

At this point we have no idea of what the GA technicians and intelligence people have found in Galton, that being either in what was on the planet (and not destroyed during the battles one way or another tough the GA didn't hit the planet with weapons), surviving stations or forts, any ships- interstellar or otherwise, or wreckage that anybody has gotten too before it moved too far out of the system to make recover or even investigation practical.

Among the things they might be looking for is anything related to:
a Streak Drive,
anything related to what we are calling the G-torpedos,
any ship or manufacturing that uses something other than impeller wedges for movement,
any plans for what the Alignment was calling Oyster Bay.
anyny plans or specs for the Galton Navy or non-military interstellar craft.
Do ANY of the shipyards or supporting fabrication infrastructure still exist, even if only parts with heavy damage.
Any records of shipments of weapons- or anything else- out of system and delivery points or end-users.
Any "Astro control" records of non-Galton shipping visiting the system.

What are the chances that the GA is running medical testing on the (at least) remains of identifiable senior military and non-milady personnel to try and identify any "interesting" modifications to DNA as is suggested by what is already known/belived of the Alignment? Then there is a similar search for the labs and incubation/rearing facilities which Galton would have been using for both it's work forces and the general population from which it would have been getting it's military and "civilian" population? It sounded in the books that Galton was initially staffed from Mesa and it was controlled/managed primarily a military hierarchy which is presumed to have been part -if not the headquarters- of the Alignment and "tubing" their offspring (as well as genetically modifying them "perhaps" outside the Beowulf Codes) would have been a regular way of having both children of the controlling population and probably a Mesan style production of worker general population

Of course, the whole End in Fire progression sequence of the battle of Galton quite possibly did a wonderful job of obliterating much of what the GA would want to find.