hanuman wrote:Vince wrote:It's light months, IIRC.
Thank you for the correction.
Still, that raises a question. How many light hours/days/months across is a star system's diameter? Because I suspect that Manticore needs only a few arrays to cover the entire double system, if that many.
Like Vince said, it depends on what you define as the system.
But House of Steel tells up that (at their furthest apart) the two stars are 827 light minutes apart. If their outermost planets were also as far away from each other as possible then that would bring the distance between Wyvern (Manticore-A VII) and Fenris (Manticore-B VII) up to 1242 light minutes (or almost 21 light hours). Even the Junction is only 7 light hours from Manticore-A, so even in the worst configuration you're only talking about maybe 25 light hours between every piece of real-estate you care about. But the Oort cloud could be almost a light year away from the star; but still bound (ever so tenuously) to its gravitational pull.
The arrays around Manticore-A could easily cover the interesting parts both systems (although IIRC you still need local arrays to see stuff inside the hyper limit; the giant multi-km system arrays get "blinded" by all the gravity signatures in there).
Now I wouldn't be surprised if Manticore-B had it's own system arrays anyway. For one thing it would give more timely information to Gryphon or any fleet units nearby, and for another it would provide some redundancy if anything happened to Manticore-A's arrays. (And RFC implied that the arrays weren't especially expensive for a major power when he said it wasn't worth raiding to destroy them - so if they don't cost a major fortune why not put in an extra array next door
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