Bad Wormholes?

I have no idea if this has been asked and answered, but I was reading FAQ on the Honorverse about the possibility of attacking through the Torch wormhole and wondered how many wormholes are there and how many lead to Bad Places like blackholes or things like that. I know it's really dangerous to transit an unexplored wormhole, but how common is it that wormholes are listed as too dangerous to use because something on the other side swallows the exploration ships that transit it?

Zakharra wrote:I have no idea if this has been asked and answered, but I was reading FAQ on the Honorverse about the possibility of attacking through the Torch wormhole and wondered how many wormholes are there and how many lead to Bad Places like blackholes or things like that. I know it's really dangerous to transit an unexplored wormhole, but how common is it that wormholes are listed as too dangerous to use because something on the other side swallows the exploration ships that transit it?

Someplace the textev says that there is only one wormhole of no return.

Iirc, there is at least one that nobody has ever returned from. But nobody knows why, as there isn't any method to determine where the wormhole goes before you pop out at the other end and look.

phillies wrote:

Zakharra wrote:I have no idea if this has been asked and answered, but I was reading FAQ on the Honorverse about the possibility of attacking through the Torch wormhole and wondered how many wormholes are there and how many lead to Bad Places like blackholes or things like that. I know it's really dangerous to transit an unexplored wormhole, but how common is it that wormholes are listed as too dangerous to use because something on the other side swallows the exploration ships that transit it?

Someplace the textev says that there is only one wormhole of no return.

It's mentioned in "Torch of Freedom" when they discuss sending in the Harvest Joy for the first ( and last) transit.

In regard to "How many wormholes", accepted implied canon, based primarily on other bits of the text surrounding the Shadow of Freedom/Harvest Joy drama, is that there are either ~100 or ~200 known hyperspace wormhole connections.

The uncertainty comes from the fact that it is unclear from the textev, a reflection by the Harvest Joy's captain on the history of wormhole exploration, whether he is thinking of the total number of first time exploratory one-way transits (recalling that mapping a hyper link takes TWO transits, one outbound and one return), OR thinking of the total number of hyper links ever explored completely, both ways.

So, before the Torch terminus, one killer wormhole, or one-way wormhole, or wormhole into a star, or wormhole into a black hole, or wormhole into a dense debris field, or wormhole into an alien trap, etc, etc, etc. Out of 100 or 200 known termini.

And that etc, etc, etc is very important to understanding story canon. It means that, until some other means is found to locate the far end of a wormhole that ships do not return from, that wormhole MUST be considered a killer anomaly, and NO OTHER SHIPS WILL EVER BE SENT THROUGH from the known end. It means that NOTHING is known about the far end of that hyper link EXCEPT THAT IT EATS SHIPS THAT TRANSIT. And modern hyper physics CANNOT map / understand conditions of the far end of new hyperlink WITHOUT a successful transit.

People on this forum who don't think through the implications of the non-return of the Harvest Joy from the viewpoint of the researchers and authorities on the Torch end keep suggesting ways that the Torch wormhole can be exploited by the GA, or ways that the defenses of the far end can be survived.

Those are totally insane propositions from the standpoint of an Honorverse astrogator. The authorities and astrogators of Torch and the GA DO NOT KNOW what happened to the Harvest Joy. They DO NOT KNOW anything about any defenses on the other side, nor have reason to even suspect enemy action in preference to any of a myriad of potential 'natural' disasters. They ONLY KNOW that the wormhole in Torch is one that ships DO NOT RETURN from. Nor do those ships manage to return through normal hyper in any reasonable time, nor do they manage to relay any form of communication through the human inhabited volume of the galaxy. It is an apparent killer wormhole.

Given the information available at Torch, it makes no more sense to send/take any further ships, research OR military, through the Torch wormhole terminus than it does to have a ship try to synchronize her impeller wedge with a grav wave.

Nor is there any drone or AI capability yet demonstrated in the Honorverse that would be capable of navigating a wormhole route, much less returning from an uncharted distant end terminus without human intervention or outside survey and calculation support. That is, in fact, the reason that the established method of mapping is to risk A survey vessel with a lot of specialized people and survey equipment aboard in the first place.

(Sorry for the rant,
but I just get tired of the people who just don't seem to get these pretty clear and logical constraints from the canon text. And, no, I don't mean you, OP; your question was well couched and reasonable. But the topic of the use of the Torch wormhole by the GA just seems to be one of those big misunderstandings that Will Not Die.)

dreamrider

Well said, friend dreamrider. I concur completely.

Just to add the comments from Torch of Freedom to the thread (for future readers reference)

"Mr. Prime Minister, there's no way anyone could make this process risk free, whatever you do," Wix pointed out. "We could have dropped a decimal point in our analysis of the terminus. Over the last couple of hundred years, we've actually turned up a terminus no one has ever successfully transited. Just one. That's an absurdly tiny percentage of the total, but it has happened. Frankly, though, the possibility of something that unlikely happening would be a lot greater than the possibility that Harvest Joy couldn't get home again—eventually—from the other end of the bridge, wherever it is."
"That's true, Mr. Prime Minister," Zachary agreed. "The longest wormhole leg anyone's ever charted is right on nine hundred light-years long in normal-space terms. The average is a lot shorter than that, and transits of more than three or four hundred light-years are rare. Harvest Joy, on the other hand, has a four-month unrefueled endurance. That gives us a cruising radius of eight hundred light-years before we'd have to re-bunker, and that figure is based on our having to make the entire trip under impeller drive. As soon as we could get into a grav wave, our endurance would go up hugely, so we'd have to go a hell of a lot farther directly away from any settled area of the galaxy before we wouldn't be able to get home eventually."

"We're delighted to be here, Your Majesty," he said now. "It's not all that often anyone gets to survey a wormhole. The number of people who've gotten to survey two of them—and do it in less than three T-years, at that—could probably be counted on one hand." He grinned. "Trust me, it's not going to look bad on our résumés!"

And from War of Honor:

Now she nodded to Hooja in welcome. Neither of them felt any particular need for words of a time like this, and in Arswendo's case, she was reasonably certain that calm was completely genuine. Which was more than she could say for most of the people aboard her ship. She could feel the tension of her entire bridge crew. Like her, they were all far too professional to be obvious about showing it, yet it was almost painfully evident to someone who knew them as well as she did. And not surprisingly. In the entire two thousand-T-year history of humankind's expansion through the galaxy, exploration ships had done what Harvest Joy was about to do less than two hundred times. It had been almost two T-centuries since the Basilisk terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction had been mapped, and so far as Zachary knew, no living officer in the Star Kingdom, naval or civilian, had ever commanded the first transit through a newly discovered terminus . . . until her. And although she'd been a survey and exploration officer for the better part of fifty T-years, during which she'd made more Junction transits than she could have counted, no one had ever made this particular transit before. That would have been exciting enough, but, logical or not, the perversity of the human imagination persisted in projecting potential disaster scenarios to hone anticipation's edge still sharper.

Part o me thinks that the unsuccessfully transitioned wormhole, went to some where that had an armed force waiting for them. possibly a location that mesa wanted to be kept hushed.

SYED wrote:Part o me thinks that the unsuccessfully transitioned wormhole, went to some where that had an armed force waiting for them. possibly a location that mesa wanted to be kept hushed.

That would be interesting. Especially because most people won't have remembered the throwaway line about a "killer" wormhole...

SYED wrote:Part o me thinks that the unsuccessfully transitioned wormhole, went to some where that had an armed force waiting for them. possibly a location that mesa wanted to be kept hushed.

You're talking about the original "killer" wormhole, not the Torch wormhole, right? We know the latter was defended by a task force from Mannerheim.

I doubt it, or at least I doubt the MAlign's complicity. There are only two reasons why the MAlign would want a hyper bridge kept secret: they're using it to shorten their C&C loop, or it goes somewhere they don't want people looking at. In the first case, I have a hard time seeing why they'd care: sure, it would be nice to be able to keep using it, but losing exclusive use isn't a fatal attack on the Plan, and continuing to use it after one end has been discovered is risky. We know that the MAlign is against taking risks that can be avoided.

The only way the second possibility makes sense is if it leads to a planet uncomfortably close to Darius, and that, in turn, suggests that they've scouted every system close to Darius looking for wormhole termini so they can put a permanent guard on them. Rather than that, I would expect that they'd have explored it themselves and done something to gain control of the system, like they did with the Twins to Torch link. I simply don't see it.

dreamrider wrote:In regard to "How many wormholes", accepted implied canon, based primarily on other bits of the text surrounding the Shadow of Freedom/Harvest Joy drama, is that there are either ~100 or ~200 known hyperspace wormhole connections.

...
It means that, until some other means is found to locate the far end of a wormhole that ships do not return from, that wormhole MUST be considered a killer anomaly, and NO OTHER SHIPS WILL EVER BE SENT THROUGH from the known end. It means that NOTHING is known about the far end of that hyper link EXCEPT THAT IT EATS SHIPS THAT TRANSIT. And modern hyper physics CANNOT map / understand conditions of the far end of new hyperlink WITHOUT a successful transit.

...

dreamrider

Not true. The idea that it's a killer wormhole is only one possibility. Enemy action is another. So are several others. The key point here is that they don't know which it is, and sending another ship through would undoubtedly be fatal in either case. Simply assuming that it's a "killer" wormhole is very poor intelligence work, and we're assured that the intelligence people on Torch are quite intelligent.

The discussion about how to get a scouting force through in the face of an enemy task force sealing the other end is a separate issue from the analysis.