Next Bolthole devellopment

Simoes worked on the streak drive, not the spider drive.

C. O. Thompson wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:Before you can reverse engineer a Spider Drive you have to actually have one to be the example. That hasn't happened yet. If you are going to work on improvements or different designes for LACs you would be sticking with what you have for a bit.
Then there is the whole problem of no industry to produce the components and build any new LACs.

I agree with this and I don't recall that the alliance has any drives... they do have the man that designed them however and that combining him with Hemphill and Shannon ought to put a variation of the drive into the alliance hands quickly... In the discussion thread about jobs for treecats, I theorized that 'cats ought to do well in highly stealthed ships as scouts and spies with that, I thought that modified LAC's could be dropped off like a few pods from a ship of the wall as they insert into a system and then do what cats do so well, slink around and report back when they find something hidden.

Some time in the next book, the navy will need to follow up on the exploration ship that went through the wormhole near Torch and got jumped and destroyed.

This would be the perfect place to use such observation ships and what poetic justice to smash the MAlignment with their own tech and methods.

Herlander was on the project to improve the Streak Drive, he had nothing to do with the Spider Drive research.


Edit

Oops, should have gone to the next page before making a comment.

C. O. Thompson wrote:I agree with this and I don't recall that the alliance has any drives... they do have the man that designed them however and that combining him with Hemphill and Shannon ought to put a variation of the drive into the alliance hands quickly... In the discussion thread about jobs for treecats, I theorized that 'cats ought to do well in highly stealthed ships as scouts and spies with that, I thought that modified LAC's could be dropped off like a few pods from a ship of the wall as they insert into a system and then do what cats do so well, slink around and report back when they find something hidden.

Some time in the next book, the navy will need to follow up on the exploration ship that went through the wormhole near Torch and got jumped and destroyed.

This would be the perfect place to use such observation ships and what poetic justice to smash the MAlignment with their own tech and methods.

To use a wormhole you have to use Warshawski sails and a hyper generator. And you'll be blatantly visibly (sail flare) when you emerge.
Normally ships transiting a hostile wormhole would get destroyed long before they got far enough away to drop sails and switch to wedge (or in this case spider).

The stealthiness of your in-system drive is pretty irrelevant if you have to emerge in a known place in a visible way.


I love the irony of turning an enemy's secret tech against them, but this isn't the scenario to do that in.

Duckk wrote:Simoes worked on the streak drive, not the spider drive.

ART, Chapter 17, (Also SoF 20 and CoG 19) has Simoes (as reported to Detweiller) talking about both the streak drive and the spider drive. There's no place else they could have gotten information about the spider drive - Jack McBryde is specifically said to have not been briefed in on Darius.

Simoes is a theoretical hyperphysicist, so his knowledge of the actual production hardware is going to be somewhere between non-existent and very limited, but how much do you have to know about the hardware to say something like: "it works by grabbing ahold of the alpha wall and pulling itself along using specialized tractors. Here's the math."

What I said is accurate. He knows about the spider drive; he didn't work on it in any capacity.

Duckk wrote:What I said is accurate. He knows about the spider drive; he didn't work on it in any capacity.

Do we know that for a fact? All I remember knowing is that his current project is called the "Streak Drive Improvements Project." We don't know what else he's worked on in his career.

In any case, I could have picked a better post to hang this piece off of; the point I was making is that Simoes almost certainly knows enough about the Spider to get the work started in the right general direction. Whether or not they've got captured hardware is important, but not a dealbreaker.

JohnRoth wrote:In any case, I could have picked a better post to hang this piece off of; the point I was making is that Simoes almost certainly knows enough about the Spider to get the work started in the right general direction. Whether or not they've got captured hardware is important, but not a dealbreaker.

We know the principles on on how a fusion reactor works, but we've been "30 years away" from having a working one for the last 65 years or so.

kzt wrote:

JohnRoth wrote:In any case, I could have picked a better post to hang this piece off of; the point I was making is that Simoes almost certainly knows enough about the Spider to get the work started in the right general direction. Whether or not they've got captured hardware is important, but not a dealbreaker.

We know the principles on on how a fusion reactor works, but we've been "30 years away" from having a working one for the last 65 years or so.

Right. Still, Simoes being able to say anything about spider drives suggests he either had some work on them too; that spider and streak drives both have a development history tracing back to some single breakthrough or set of breakthroughs in understanding hyperwall interactions and he's someone who can describe those; and/or that the nerds talked a bit more than need-to-know allowed and he heard things about the spider that he theoretically ought not to have.

I wouldn't get that optimistic about Herlander and spider drive detection, replication, or even understanding. We just have reason to think that having him is measurably better than having no one in that regard.

Y'all, I apologize. I got my drives mixed up in my earlier posts about LACS. I meant to say Streak drives; not Spider drives.
For now, that's problematical as they are twice the size of normal hyper generators. But I believe our GA friends, esp the Manties, could work on reducing that size and expanding its output. They've done it so many times before, why should this be any different.

Another thing that comes to mind about recon drones. I was rereading the Starfire books and it strieks me as odd that the Manties haven't come up with a drone capable of wormhole transit. In that series practically every battle was predicated by either a swarm of AI controlled recon drones going through a warp point, taking a quick scan, and transmitting a message back to their awaiting assault fleets or by some swarm of light craft performing that function. I find it strange that the Manties haven't come up with something similar to this yet. Afterall, simply because they control the grandest Junction ever discovered, doesn't mean every terminus will be friendly (like Trevor's Star at first or that menacing little Wormhole by Torch). Since Manticore can't do much researching and developing at the moment, the only place this can really come from is Bolthole, no?

It's implied that a human has to pilot a ship through hyper.