Brigade XO wrote:So in the Honorverse we have all sorts of place that have probably been visited but essentialy unknown or forgotten even if there are humans still living there.
We have the now SEM with it's Junction, massive navy with strong tradition and expereince in commerce protection and even more massive merchant marine fleet. And yet while "Manticore" or even the RMN knows about a lot of places and things, it doesn't have or can't seem to access information. Oh it probably has recoreded where pirate bases have been and all sorts of places it's ships have been. It also maintains records and relationships for place it needs to deal with or are interesting for military/polictial/trading reasons, but there is a lot it doesn't know. Like when they were sending out warships for Lacoon II and while the commander we see taking a chain of wormhole bridges knows where they are and something about the closest inhabited systems (from the appendexes of his order) he doesn't have the local detail such as would be provided by local Astro Control. Probably any given MMM star freighter captain or 1st officer (or navigator) will have all sort of information in their memories and probably written down for their own use, much of that is not uploaded to any centralized database.
I am in full agreement with your basic point. However, under King Roger, the intelligence service began harvesting all knowledge encountered by the merchant marine. Certainly this was strongly directed at technology, but there was no reason that it could not include astrographic knowledge to build up an atlas of known space. Obviously if merchant ships did not visit, then no knowledge could be returned.
We have discussed at various times the difficulty of finding Darius or Bolthole. I do not think there is a systematic way to uncover them. Even lost colonies are basically impossible to locate, if the organizers had the survey data scrubbed the way that Manticore did. The colony for Calvin's Hope was only located because Haven had a new wormhole and so put more effort into checking what was at the other end.