Theemile wrote: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.
Why I advocate not destroying as much of Frontier Fleet as possible. Even obsolete hulls can scout.
What you do is send each ship allocated to check out the maximum number of systems they can based on their bunkerage. Cruisers could cover hundreds of them in a single voyage. If any do not report in as expected or even greatly overdue, you send a pair of more capable ships down the same route to check more carefully.
If those do not return either, that's when you send a ship to each location on that route. It's a slow, lengthy process of elimation, but controlling the wormhole network allows the ships to go on arcing courses in the Verge, so saving some time on return voyages.
1,600,000,000 stars(about 1.5% of the Milky Way, incidentally) with, let's be generous and say 10,000 scouting ships that can visit 100 systems in six months. Those ships would visit two million star systems each year, so... it should only take 800 years to rule every last one of them out.
Ah well. So much for that idea. I still think it's the only option if the Alignment doesn't make any more mistakes or the GA simply can't dig up any effective sources of intelligence, though.
cthia wrote:Not saying that you aren't right, but I'm just curious, does textev explicitly state that the MAlign are constructing traditional naval ships of war other than the cowardly ships of war we've seen? Even so, wouldn't that just make them just as vulnerable to GA fire as say the SLN?
Yup, it's in there somewhere. The RF members are to use their SDFs as the Alignment's backbone, with the Spiders of Darius as an ace up their collective sleeve.
Elsewhere in textev, it says that Solarian observers were present with both Manticoran Alliance and PRH forces throughout the first war. They therefore saw both sides of the weapon and doctrine revolution.
I wouldn't be surprised if Mannerheim was amongst the observers and their SDF already has podnought designs drawn up, with plans for constructing modest numbers of them. They may be limited to Cataphracts for now, but Manticore's podnoughts have already radically changed their pod designs(capacitor, fusion, apollo) at least three times, even if they did need a semi-major refit to maximise Apollo's effect.
All the Alignment needs to do is wait until the secret of the missile drive ring baffle finally leaks out and the RF Navy can upgrade. Even with only cataphract pods for now, having podlayers and improved fire control(and missile defense) will give them the advantage over standard SLN and SDF units.
