captinjoehenry wrote:so when they did operation breakaway why did they only stay in hyper for 10 years? I mean if you are doing an all or nothing bet for survival and you have anti aging treatments why not stay in hyper for 50 years that won't be too bad admittedly it would be a bit boring for the crews but i mean the survival of your species is at stake and if you stayed in hyper for 50 years you would most likely come out of hyper in a whole other galaxie.
On that thought why not just set out on the shortest path out of the galaxy? i mean if you are really really going for it just leave the whole galaxy in total and if you are fleeing out of the galaxy i know if i were any evil alien empire i would only bother looking for my enemies on planets and not out in intergalactic space. sure it would take hundreds of years but they are bound to have spare cryo pods so they just alternate in and out of cryo. Now this is a fairly far fetched i know but i would think this would be doable and if you do that you can be sure as hell the gbaba won't find you i mean what do they care you are MILLIONS of light years away. Sure you probably wont ever get to go back and kill the gbaba but they sure as hell wont kill you.
If the Terran Federation was safe til it went poking around some 100, 200 ly away from Earth, then 50,000 ly away is pretty certainly safe from the Gbaba. In this case though, 500 ly seems to be the distance: Pei Kau-yung gave a 500 year figure for the Gbaba to show up based on emissions if they would at all then gave another 50% wiggle room for timing Nimue's wake-up call.
So that's a matter of what was considered enough. Why not pad enough far, far more? Well, you do have to worry about cryo pod maintenance; toleration of cryo by the colonists and whatever command crew was in cryo with them; ship maintenance; toleration of sheer time in hyperspace (it may be a factor), by ships, crew, and passengers; and the retention of the initial goals by the crew if they were decades away from the Terran Federation, humanity, and Operation Ark's planning stages. That can offer a lot of opportunity to go wrong - more time in hyper isn't free of risk or cost.
EDIT: the 100s year figure assumes a 5000c speed in hyper and the nearest galaxy is the andromeda galaxy
EDIT 2: if they were in hyper for 10 years at 5000c on a random vector they are very VERY lucky to have found a star in their galaxy at all as the milky way is 100,000 light years across and 10 years at 5000c would most likely carry you out of the galaxy on a random vector and if they did a random vector they might have gone out the top or bottom of the galaxy so WOW they lucked out they totally lucked out that a random vector kept them in the galaxie. So why on earth are the gabba even looking that far? i mean if they are looking that far out whenever they kill a civilization i am amazed that there is anything left in the galaxie.
It's more confirmation that the Gbaba do not go looking, but just wait for visit or betraying emissions and go kill the source.
As to finding a planet, if the 10 years delivered a 50,000 ly voyage (and I think that's off by 49,500 ly anyway), you could still bias your otherwise random vector to place you inside the Milky Way. You'd have to in order to avoid total silliness, after all. Alternatively, they may have had a very random route through hyperspace to cover only 500 ly in straight-line distance for 50,000 ly traveled, to make pursuit really, really stupidly difficult.
Oh and how did they miss earth when they killed that other alien civilization mentioned in the first book? i mean earth was less than 50 light years away as crestfall was 50 light years away from earth and that was the farthest colony.... OK going to stop asking so many questions now *returns to his lair trying to resist the urge to ask even more questions*
If they were killing based on visits or emissions, if the other alien civilization rose, emitted, and got killed, say, in 1900 A.D., Earth would have still been silent and beneath their notice. It would be a stupendous coincidence for that alien civilization (or their radio signals) to have reached the stars even that close to the time we did, and there's no reason to think they didn't die to the Gbaba thousands or tens of thousands of years earlier.
EDIT 3: ok i know i know i said i would stop but i cant
anyways: if the Gbaba have to send scout ships to each star system to check for emissions why not just flee for 20 years in hyper then start up a fully advance colony using all of the TF tech? the shear distance that they traveled should offer more than enough protection from an alien sensor system as any emissions from technology would be blotted out by the local stars emissions and if you are more or less on the other side of the galaxy then the gbaba they surely wont bother you i mean 20 years at 2500c would take you to the opposite end of the galaxy and if you are traveling at 5000c then you could very well just be in a nearby galaxy and in that case the gbaba won't ever find you because otherwise whenever they kill anyones civilization they would go and purge the WHOLE GALAXY of everyone which i think does not happen.
TLDR: if they stayed in hyper even longer they could have just used as much tech as they want.
Yeah. Take that as an indication that there was a significant limit on the time they
could spend in hyper - what, I don't know, but I sketched some possibilities above. One other point - the Gbaba wouldn't have to hit particular systems with scouts for emissions. Radio waves will travel, although they may degrade beyond the Gbaba's ability to make them out over the background noise before too terribly long. Safehold's location was apparently chosen as far enough out that the most Gbaba-paranoid sort would think that the Gbaba would
never come there unless some emissions drew them there - and Langhorne at least wanted to be sure that no such emissions ever would, making Safehold a final destination rather than a bolthole to regroup and return.
