Alistair wrote:Quote from "In Enemy Hands"
Equally apparently, the leak in the embargo spurted both ways, for a source within the League Navy reported that the League's R&D types were now experimenting with their own version of the short-range FTL com system which was one of the RMN's most valuable tactical advantages. Their success was extremely limited to date, but they were headed in the right direction, and the progress they'd made, not to mention the basic concepts upon which their efforts appeared to be based, suggested that someone had been sharing data with them. It was always possible that an agent within the Allies' own military had passed the information on, but the Peeps, who'd seen the system in action and undoubtedly had sensor readings on it (not to mention the possibility that they might have captured a transmitter sufficiently intact to permit them to reverse-engineer it), were more likely suspects. And if they could, in fact, provide information to help the League develop that sort of capability, then a quid pro quo that sent more capable military hardware back to Haven in return would seem only fair.
Soo if the SL was experimenting with the FTL why did it take them sooo much by surprise later on??
25 years ago or so, I wrote a paper in College on FELs (Free Electron Lasers), unable to get my hands on an actual FEL, most of my paper was written using details from published documents - most over 10 years old by the time I accessed them. Most of these were either Government sponsored college experiments, or (more limited) work done in government labs.
So you can assume, that the US government has been working on FELs for at least 35-40 years (more actually). Recent advances have allowed the US Navy to say that they may be putting a limited energy FEL (for anti-missile, drone and plane use) in a ship in the 10-15 year timeframe.
So we're looking at easily 50+ years of development to get an item that we have demonstrated working examples of into a useable product.
Now to the Honorverse.
The SLN team probably realized the same as Honor that you can wink a ship's wedge (a technology they can already build); but how do you do this quickly and how much energy will it need? And of course, they are probably on a shoestring budget (relatively), and they are taking the slow, milestone approach to the problem, trying to hit the set milestones in the time allotted, so they can get the next small paycheck, so they can continue to the next milestone, lather, rinse, repeat.
Eventually, the current team will miss their milestones, and that project will end. Later, another project will pickup, usually with a different team (and little access to the other team's top secret notes), and will progress a little further until milestones are missed, then the team is disbanded.
Lather, rinse, repeat...
The details Byng is relating are probably projections from the current research team (or the last team's details Byng had access to). They are probably X years from prototype hardware, and what was related was just their estimates for what it would take to actually build it knowing what they know now.
