Spider drive ships and technical limitations

tlb wrote:

quite possibly a cat wrote:If the Mesan Alignment is clever their next batch of nano will infect people going to bolthole, record the star locations and give them Bolthole's location. This can be followed up by extreme (like 6mo.) long range missile fire. Since there isn't any civilian habitation in the system and its not even claimed by any star nation they can just let the missiles self target. Heck, they could even do something like use missile impeller wedges on planets.

The nano that you reference has to be tailored to the target's DNA and can only do actions that can be simulated ahead of time; so it does not know coordinates or passwords that the attacker does not know.
We have snippets of Bolthole showing that is was a lost colony found by the Legislaturists, so of course there is civilian habitation and it is now part of Haven.

tlb wrote:We have snippets of Bolthole showing that is was a lost colony found by the Legislaturists, so of course there is civilian habitation and it is now part of Haven.

Galactic Sapper wrote:

tlb wrote:We have snippets of Bolthole showing that is was a lost colony found by the Legislaturists, so of course there is civilian habitation and it is now part of Haven.

Huh, that blows my theory of bolthole out of the water (maybe). I had been assuming it was a previously undiscovered warp bridge in an uninhabited Havenite system, with the other end in a habitable system out in the ass end of unexplored space. Even if someone found the near end of the bridge, they'd have no way of knowing where the other end was - and any unauthorized ship that pops through gets met with concentrated energy fire the way Harvest Joy did.

I guess I expected rfc to have intended it as a long term teasing play on words - Bolthole being a literal wormhole the Legislaturists could bolt through if they needed to.

I haven't been following snippets, since I prefer to read the full product end to end when it's done.

JohnRoth wrote:Actually, your theory is almost right. There is a secret warp bridge to elsewhere from somewhere close to Haven involved. It just turns out that elsewhere is close to what everyone assumes is a failed colonization attempt in the middle of a whole bunch of stars that are very unpromising for having useable planets, so they haven't been systematically explored.

This isn't part of UE. It's a separate novella titled Dark Fall, and it will be one of Bain's free library offerings one day Real Soon Now.

quite possibly a cat wrote:

Joat42 wrote:The MA has the nanotech to stop their crew leaking any information.

But I have been thinking, the nanotech isn't fool proof - there is one way to debrief MA personnel but it's a bitch to set up even when all the conditions align perfectly.

Let's suppose you actually manage to capture someone from a Alignment ship. There are several potential scenarios

1) He's actually a crew member with defective nano.
2) He's full of the nastiest most insidious nano-weapons Darius can create and you just doomed your empire.
3) He was lied to about Darius's location and he tells you the coordinates to another extremely anti-social star nation with a strong belief in MAD and automated weapons.
4) He doesn't know Darius's location and believes that Oyster Bay was undertaken only as a response to the Green Pines Massacre and only targeted military assets. The Treecats are sure to take that well.
5) He isn't a person at all, but a bunch of self-replicating nano and other microscopic robots capable of running brain simulations, flight, and gray gooing any organic matter; he just slaughtered your entire crew and is simulating your brain to extract every scrap of classified information you once knew. He's currently on his way to subsume the rest of the GA military.
6) Some horrifying combination of 2,3,4,5 and other ideas I haven't thought of.
..snip..

JohnRoth wrote:Fair enough. I believe that Zach McBryde is a synthesizer, that is, someone who can pull a lot of apparently unrelated things together into something interesting. It's quite possible he worked on the Streak Drive and Spider Drive, but there's no textev that I'm aware of to that effect.

Peregrinator wrote:

JohnRoth wrote:Fair enough. I believe that Zach McBryde is a synthesizer, that is, someone who can pull a lot of apparently unrelated things together into something interesting. It's quite possible he worked on the Streak Drive and Spider Drive, but there's no textev that I'm aware of to that effect.

In most places he's described simply as a "scientist" but in Cauldron of Ghosts (the e-ARC, at least), he is said to be a physicist:

"But Zachariah was a physicist. He wasn't a weapons expert like Gail Weiss, but he could solve simple intercept problems, and he'd solve[d] this one long since." (location 6865-6866 in the Kindle version)


It makes very little difference. These were Mesan (Malign) weapons. So he obviously knew something about them and as a physicist probably could figure out a lot more.

But he got away. The real question will be who knows what was done who was left behind.

Anyway, spider drive is just speculation on my part. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

JohnRoth wrote:Fair enough. I believe that Zach McBryde is a synthesizer, that is, someone who can pull a lot of apparently unrelated things together into something interesting. It's quite possible he worked on the Streak Drive and Spider Drive, but there's no textev that I'm aware of to that effect.

Peregrinator wrote:In most places he's described simply as a "scientist" but in Cauldron of Ghosts (the e-ARC, at least), he is said to be a physicist:

"But Zachariah was a physicist. He wasn't a weapons expert like Gail Weiss, but he could solve simple intercept problems, and he'd solve[d] this one long since." (location 6865-6866 in the Kindle version)

Anyway, spider drive is just speculation on my part. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

ldwechsler wrote:It makes very little difference. These were Mesan (Malign) weapons. So he obviously knew something about them and as a physicist probably could figure out a lot more.

But he got away. The real question will be who knows what was done who was left behind.

tlb wrote:You are right that the important question is whether anyone left behind will know anything. But there is no reason to assume that a given Mesan scientist knows more about a Malign weapon than that it exists, because of compartmentalization. The text specifically states that he is NOT a weapons expert.

As he'd told Gail, he'd always relized that something like Darius Gamma had to exist, if only to build the warships towards which so much of their research had been directed. (Shadow of Victory e-ARC, Kindle edition, loc. 13777)

As he'd told Gail, he'd always relized that something like Darius Gamma had to exist, if only to build the warships towards which so much of their research had been directed. (Shadow of Victory e-ARC, Kindle edition, loc. 13777)


So he's a physicist, and works on the MAlign's warships, but not on the weapons. Again, that leads me to believe that he works on the spider drive.