Hi SWM,
You may be right, the SLN trusts Visigoth and saves the money.
OTOH, it's only ~60 LY from Beowulf, ~100 from Sol so its rather near the several dozen old league core worlds who generally have only LAC's, and as a WHJ its a major high speed threat axis, NTM the political popular aspect of 'protecting' them from or by 'watching' Mesa, though betting the CO's haven't been MAlign members for decades if not centuries is a very bad idea.
If there are any brains in the SLN, having a base at Visigoth makes a lot of sense by being able to guard and protect 3 different regions from just a single location, which ought to make a lot of sense to somebody sometime somewhere in the SLN.
Before we recently learned about so many new wormhole bridges there were only 4 other termini in the SL, one of them being Erewhon [other 3 then still unknown], and while the procedure was to make the other end system a member, putting a SLN base at the SL's end especially if its near the core just seems common sense, before getting into letting the FF roam free through the other end, looking for opportunities for the OFS...
So far, all the new wormhole bridges have been in poor systems, and I suspect the SLN or at least BF, prefers larger more affluent systems for fleet bases, by which Visigoth qualifies, which might also account for no permanent SLN termini guards in these newly discovered bridges.
OTOH, for those new termini that don't have a base or station, I wonder of its a budget issue; the civilians don't see the need, and the SLN would rather spend the money elsewhere, ie more ships, while the termini system certainly doesn't have the influence yet to change that.
L
SWM wrote:Lyonheart, what makes you think there would be a large SLN force at the Visigoth Junction? There wasn't at any of the other wormholes that Manticore has captured.