Weird Harold wrote:<snip> I'm pretty sure that all of the Renaissance Factor members are Shell worlds, not Core. There are none old enough to be Core worlds.
Theemile wrote:Visigoth is a core world, it's ~20 light years from Beowulf IIRC. At that range it was either overlooked for centuries or was one of the first dozen or so colonies.
Weird Harold wrote:Visigoth's WH connects to Mesa, not Felix. Visigoth is probably closer to Felix than Beowulf, but there's no clues as to how close Visigoth might be to Felix.
The closest named system we know of is Mannerheim (4 ly, IIRC) and have no references to place Mannerheim in the Core.
Theemile wrote:I wasn't referencing the wormhole, I was specifically referencing Visigoth - you said no Renaissance members were in the Core and Visigoth is.
For the record, Visigoth is 60 light years (direction unspecified) from Beowulf:
Italics are the author's, boldface is my emphasis.Storm From the Shadows, Chapter 10 wrote:It would no doubt have helped, in some ways, at least, if Leonard Detweiler had fully worked out his grand concept before establishing Manpower. No one could think of everything, unfortunately, and one thing Mesa's geneticists still hadn't been able to produce was prescience. Besides, he'd been provoked. His Detweiler Consortium had first settled Mesa in 1460 PD, migrating to its new home from Beowulf following the discovery of the Visigoth System's wormhole junction six T-years earlier. The Mesa System itself had first been surveyed in 1398, but until the astrogators discovered that it was home to one of the two secondary termini of the Visigoth Wormhole, it had been too far out in the back of beyond to attract development.
That changed when the Visigoth Wormhole survey was completed, and Detweiler had acquired the development rights from the system's original surveyors. The fact that the planet Mesa, despite having quite a nice climate, also possessed a biosystem poorly suited to terrestrial physiology helped lower the price, given the expenses involved in terraforming. But Detweiler hadn't intended to terraform Mesa. Instead, he'd opted to "mesaform" the colonists through genetic engineering. That decision had been inevitable in light of Detweiler's condemnation of the "illogical, ignorant, unthinking, hysterical, Frankenstein fear" of the genetic modification of human beings which had hardened into almost instinctual repugnance over the five hundred T-years between Old Earth's Final War and his departure for Mesa. Still, however inevitable it might have been, it had not been popular with the Beowulf medical establishment of the time. Worse, the fact that Visigoth was barely sixty light-years from Beowulf had guaranteed that Mesa and Beowulf would remain close enough together (despite the hundreds of light-years between them through normal-space) to be a continuous irritant to one another, and Beowulf's unceasing condemnation of Detweiler's faith in the genetic perfectability of humanity had infuriated him. It was, after all, the entire reason he and those members of the Beowulf genetic establishment who shared his views had left Beowulf in the first place.