Notes from Weber--SPOILER WARNING!!!

Hutch wrote:Still wondering what is going to happen to those SD's out in Tasmania...they do represent the single most powerful force in the whole SL--I wonder who the commander is and what he/she may be thinking....

Probably much along the same lines as Filareta was, deprived of what little optimism he had.

If I were the GA, I'd consider sending a blockade force to prevent them from going anywhere else. The problem with that are manifold, how long would the blockade be maintained? What to do with another 600 obsolete SDs(and the 3.6 million crew aboard them) if they surrender? Will the Solly flag officer comply or try something? What are the consequences of attacking the League on its own territory, especially if Solarian casualties continue to be severe?

Furthermore, since the MAlign's plan calls for the SLN to be destroyed by the RMN, there might be some unseeable benefit to preserving as many SLN vessels as possible. Certainly, Frontier Fleet's units would be hugely useful if the Grand Alliance finds it has no option but to search for Darius the hard way.

munroburton wrote:

Hutch wrote:Still wondering what is going to happen to those SD's out in Tasmania...they do represent the single most powerful force in the whole SL--I wonder who the commander is and what he/she may be thinking....

[/b]Probably much along the same lines as Filareta was, deprived of what little optimism he had.

If I were the GA, I'd consider sending a blockade force to prevent them from going anywhere else. The problem with that are manifold, how long would the blockade be maintained? What to do with another 600 obsolete SDs(and the 3.6 million crew aboard them) if they surrender? Will the Solly flag officer comply or try something? What are the consequences of attacking the League on its own territory, especially if Solarian casualties continue to be severe?

Furthermore, since the MAlign's plan calls for the SLN to be destroyed by the RMN, there might be some unseeable benefit to preserving as many SLN vessels as possible. Certainly, Frontier Fleet's units would be hugely useful if the Grand Alliance finds it has no option but to search for Darius the hard way.

Probably wishing his/her uniform was brown not white

Relax wrote:We know the BF bases are based either entirely or nearly so from the Final War. At that time, the SL did not exist and neither did the Shell except as colonies outside the Final Wars influence. Then FF came about to "Help" the Shell and now 700 years later, the protectorates. I would expect major FF depots to be in the Shell.

I agree. There is no evidence that I am aware of that has BF bases outside of the core. Of course, one can ask just what comprises the core. I have seen estimates of almost 1800 systems in the core and have seen it asserted that the core comprises a comparatively small area relative to Sol. Do you have an answer to this one?

Don

2017 was the soonest I was expecting a new book anyway, and I wonder what the chances are of it being long enough to be broken into two books again.

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n7axw wrote:

Relax wrote:We know the BF bases are based either entirely or nearly so from the Final War. At that time, the SL did not exist and neither did the Shell except as colonies outside the Final Wars influence. Then FF came about to "Help" the Shell and now 700 years later, the protectorates. I would expect major FF depots to be in the Shell.

I agree. There is no evidence that I am aware of that has BF bases outside of the core. Of course, one can ask just what comprises the core. I have seen estimates of almost 1800 systems in the core and have seen it asserted that the core comprises a comparatively small area relative to Sol. Do you have an answer to this one?

Don

For what it is worth, both are possible. Near Earth, every system with a marginally habitable world got colonized early. Any system with any natural resources - pretty much any system - has had thousands of years to develop permanent habitats. Any system with a world that terraforming it some and it-forming the colonists would have been colonized before the Beowulf Code and Final War prejudices made extreme it-forming the colonists less accepted.

Further out, you'll have places like the Talbott Cluster, with a very low density of colonized systems. It's not like stars are thinner out there - it's that all the other stars just happen not to have picked up permanent settlement yet, and may not do so given current standards for picking systems.

Why Silesia is so densely colonized is a mystery still. The obvious answer would have been a wormhole from the Core smack dab into it, but in that case, it'd've been a lobe of the League and traffic wouldn't hit it through Gregor and Basilisk. Maybe the first Silesian colony took off in bright hopes like Haven and bankrupted itself terraforming the heck out of everything nearby....

n7axw wrote:I agree. There is no evidence that I am aware of that has BF bases outside of the core. Of course, one can ask just what comprises the core. I have seen estimates of almost 1800 systems in the core and have seen it asserted that the core comprises a comparatively small area relative to Sol. Do you have an answer to this one?

Don

"The 'Old League,' as it's popularly known. The Solarian League as a whole has an official membership of 1,784 planets—that's not counting the hundreds more under Solarian rule in the Protectorates—which exist in a volume of galactic space measuring between three and four hundred light-years in diameter." - Web Du Havel

1800 seems to be the overall number of League members, both Core and Shell. A while ago, I made a pile of guesses based on remarks by Web, him being a noted in-universe expert on political systems, and the averages given for size of assembly delegations. All very vague and inspecific stuff to start with.

IMO, there are about 700 core members, with about 500 being relatively new additions in the Shell. The remaining 600 or so are between them. The core members are likely a mixture of founding members, their earliest daughter colonies and the rest of the early slowboat colonies which didn't travel much further than 100-200 light years.

What I really want to know is where those six SLN depots are. I figure they're either sitting at six points on the ends of a XYZ axis intersecting Sol(the galactic disc is 1,000 LY thick, after all) or in a more or less hexagonal arrangement parallel to the galactic disc. This is information that should be common knowledge in Honorverse as it is known that Earth wet navy bases are located at Faslane, Plymouth, San Diego and Norfolk, amongst many others!