Hi John Roth,
Thanks for finding that clarifying textev, since the UoHH also states the SL then had a radius of only 'roughly 98 LY' from Sol, in the chapter 6 Interstellar Politics and Imperialism, section-B The solarian League; but I'm quite willing to accept 90 LY as the original 'core' radius.
BTW, I found your reference UNDER one of my post-it notes.
If RFC's references to 300-400 LY being a radius not diameter [possibly some kind of typo etc], then my remembered figure and arithmetic error was off by a factor of 8, which is rather embarrassing, but the fact no one else caught or pointed it out indicates almost everybody accepted it without checking or made the same error, so shame on you all too.
The revised figure for the SL, based on an assumed 50/50 split between 300-400 LY radius is some 190.645 M LY^3, or barely 4.55% of the volume out only 1000 LY from Sol [about 1/22], which is low since 2000 LY from Sol is well within reach for colonization in about a year and a half, even using old freighters, with cryo cheap enough to pack more gear or colonists, depending on the priority,etc.
A 90 LY radius means ~3,054,510 LY^3, and at the adjusted figure of ~106,864 LY^3 per member, there were less than 29 inhabited systems within 90 LY of Sol, with an average radius of 29.43555 LY each, double my earlier figure, or only 7-10 days apart by even slow freighters.
Quadrupling the volume of the 'core' over 600 years is rather slow, roughly adding a new system about every 7 years.
One interesting feature of that data is that it makes Manticore closer to Sol than all but 1-2 members of the league including Beowulf [2.5 within ~268,000 cubic LY], not the previous other 18 I've mentioned before.
The textev has never stated Beowulf is the closest member to Sol, just the first successful extra-solar colony in 2103 AD, yet 2000 years is plenty of time to fill in missed habitable systems nearer Terra, so if there's only one or two, what might we soon learn about them?
Then again, given Beowulf's relative major proximity to Sol, though there's another system also 40 LY away, the league ought to know a lot more about Beowulf than they do; ie much more contact, including business, schooling, marriages etc.
NTM, being effectively that close to Sol [40 LY, only 1 or 2 members closer] ought have reduced the 'neobarb' epithet aimed at Manticore centuries ago.
The systems on the other side of the wormhole bridges into the SL had accepted membership into the league 3 out of the 5 that we knew of in UoHH [back in 1998 in MTH], but now a dozen or two termini appear to be in the SL, and how many junctions of such termini still extend beyond the SL when its 300-400 LY, not the ~100 of the Honorverse Wikia?
L
JohnRoth wrote:Trying to establish the size of a spherical "core" or "shell" won't work. I think the following two excerpts from
The Universe of Honor Harrington will make this clear.
UoHH wrote:The best speed possible in hyper prior to 1273 pd was about fifty times light-speed, a major plus over light-speed vessels but still too slow to tie distant stars together into any sort of interstellar community. It was sufficient to allow establishment of the oldest of the currently existing interstellar polities, the Solarian League, consisting of the oldest colony worlds within approximately ninety light-years of Sol.
So 90 ly is the approximate size of the Solarian League in 1273. It is now over 6 centuries later.
and
Uohh wrote:In addition, of course, the discovery of wormhole junctions and a technique for their use imposed an entirely new pattern on the ongoing Diaspora. Theretofore, expansion had been roughly spherical, spreading out from the center in an irregular but recognizable globular pattern. Thereafter, expansion became far more ragged as wormhole junctions gave virtually instantaneous access to far distant reaches of space.
...
Once initial access to the far end of a wormhole junction had been attained, the habitable world at the far end (if there was one) tended to act as the central focus for its own "mini-Diaspora," creating globular quadrants of explored space which might be light-centuries away from the next closest explored star system.
The notion of a "core," "shell" and "verge" is a useful abstraction, but it doesn't conform all that well to any astrographic reality. It's closer to a political reality.
