Path to Darius (Spoilers)

SYED wrote:Do we know where parmley station is, zack might head there soon? Perfect for ambush and the details can easily passed on.

We don't know exactly where Parmley station is (except close to Yamato's Nebula, which doesn't help much), but that it's close enough to Erewhon that they would send repair ships and Sharon Justice would send a dispatch boat there from Erewhon.

So that could mean from 20-100 LY away, which leaves it wide open.

And yes, Zach (or other escapees) may be heading there, since the Ballroom/Beowulf haven't been telling people about the change in ownership.

Will it work out that way? Time and the MWW will tell...

Say those 2 scientists have tye needed navigational data. This would mean a suprise attack and siezing the felix junction. They could go after the center of go after th other terminii. We know the twin and felix has fleet elements.a nd darius it welt might have defences. The unknown terminii might bot he so defended. Darius is guarded as it s thrir bolthole, felix vecause it is in the core and the twin due to the risk of torch. The other verge terminii due to the lack of travel are easily missed.
That juntion us claimable bt the kingdom of torch supported by the allianxe.

SYED wrote:Say those 2 scientists have tye needed navigational data. This would mean a suprise attack and siezing the felix junction. They could go after the center of go after th other terminii. We know the twin and felix has fleet elements.a nd darius it welt might have defences. The unknown terminii might bot he so defended. Darius is guarded as it s thrir bolthole, felix vecause it is in the core and the twin due to the risk of torch. The other verge terminii due to the lack of travel are easily missed.
That juntion us claimable bt the kingdom of torch supported by the allianxe.

I would be rather surprised if either of them know enough about Felix to identify it. They probably know something, because The Twins are enough of an anomaly that pretty much every MAlign astrophysicist knows about it, but as far as location goes - that's almost certainly in a different security compartment. As Zack told Jack at one point - the astrophysicists are still arguing about how it affects hyperspace theory. I think he mentioned something about six different, incompatible theories.

As far as claims go, there are four competing claims for the Felix system; Mannerheim is pursuing acquiring all four of them, very, very quietly. Whether this matters once the Solarian League turns belly up is questionable, but since Mannerheim is in effective possession, and it's acting like one of the good guys, this poses a slight, barely discernible impediment to Torch claiming it. Then again, Mannerheim being in possession might cast some slight doubt on their being one of the good guys.

JohnRoth wrote:...this poses a slight, barely discernible impediment to Torch claiming it. ...

I should think the minor detail that Torch has no direct connection to the Felix WHJ would be more of an impediment.

The RMN has had a hobby of collecting worm holes and junctions as of late...

Could it be that the break would come when it seized Felix? I'm not aware that they know about it, but that could come as a consequence of mucking around Mesa and following up on leads developed there.

I don't have any trouble imagining the RMN paying a visit to Mannerheim as a result of info gathered from a stray computer or a disgruntled individual who got left behind on Mesa when he should have been lifted out on Houdini...

None of this sounds likely, but I suspect that when the onion starts to unlayer, it will because of something very unlikely indeed.

Don

--snipping--

JohnRoth wrote:That's one way of doing it. Another way would be to correlate ship arrivals and departures at hyper bridge terminals using their emission signatures. Correlating arrival and departure times between, say, Visigoth and Beowulf might turn up some interesting things, eh?

Exactly the type of thing I'm thinking about. Plus any other "Mesa records" from the Mesa end, Parmley, Monica, New Tuscany, Madras, etc. because our friendly neighborhood Anismova got around...

n7axw wrote:The RMN has had a hobby of collecting worm holes and junctions as of late...

Could it be that the break would come when it seized Felix? I'm not aware that they know about it, but that could come as a consequence of mucking around Mesa and following up on leads developed there.

I don't have any trouble imagining the RMN paying a visit to Mannerheim as a result of info gathered from a stray computer or a disgruntled individual who got left behind on Mesa when he should have been lifted out on Houdini...

None of this sounds likely, but I suspect that when the onion starts to unlayer, it will because of something very unlikely indeed.

Don

We know that Manticore does not know about the Felix Junction. No one left on Mesa knows about the Felix Junction, either. Almost no one on Mannerheim knows about the Felix Junction. The Mesan Alignment has been extremely careful not to leave clues around concerning the Felix Junction. They have successfully hidden the Felix Junction for over a hundred years.

SWM wrote:We know that Manticore does not know about the Felix Junction. No one left on Mesa knows about the Felix Junction, either. Almost no one on Mannerheim knows about the Felix Junction. The Mesan Alignment has been extremely careful not to leave clues around concerning the Felix Junction. They have successfully hidden the Felix Junction for over a hundred years.

And of course even if they do eventually find and seize it that doesn't necessarily lead them to Darius.

Losing the Felix wormhole junction would inconvenience the MAlign, but they could still get to and from Darius; they'd simply have to take longer by going through hyperspace instead of using the wormhole.


But holding a junction, or terminus, doesn't give you any useful information about the other terminus. You can't measure even a rough bearing towards it, much less a range estimate. You can determine how many termini there are, but you don't know a damned thing about where they are until after you've gone through them. And going through the Darius terminus is certain to get you very very dead.


At best you can hope forcing them to travel through hyperspace might eventually lead to some indirect clues about the location of Darius. If you can spot traffic coming from it then you might be able to analyse it and slightly narrow down its location. Or potentially even trail a ship back to it (of course that doesn't work if they've got streak drive and you don't). But this is all a long shot.

A thought here:

Stars run about 4,000 stars per 100 ly cube. Wormholes are typically a few hundred ly. That means that simply checking every uninhabited star within range isn't an impossible task by any means. One destroyer is adequate, it doesn't need to ever cross the hyper threshold. Pop in, look for the electronic emissions of an inhabited world and leave. If you find an inhabited world not listed as such you come back loaded for bear.

Loren Pechtel wrote:A thought here:

Stars run about 4,000 stars per 100 ly cube. Wormholes are typically a few hundred ly. That means that simply checking every uninhabited star within range isn't an impossible task by any means. One destroyer is adequate, it doesn't need to ever cross the hyper threshold. Pop in, look for the electronic emissions of an inhabited world and leave. If you find an inhabited world not listed as such you come back loaded for bear.

The longest "known" wormhole is >900 lightyears - this gives a sphere with a radii of say 1000 light years. this gives a region of ~4x10^9 cubic light years. Your number gives 4 stars per .1 light year cube, so we can say there are ~1.6x10^9 stars in the region to check.

Have fun - Good luck and start soon.