No Scorched Earth-Effects of a Living McBryde

SharkHunter wrote: Actually, the GA wouldn't attack through a defended wormhole. Less loss of life and far less expensive in terms of ships, etc. to turn loose their collected spies, astrography whiz kids, NavInt, and scout ships to find the Twins. Once found, the GA plus new Torch builds (like Rozak's ships) are then going to attack from the hyper limit side, to destroy the MAN ships in that system, securing the wormhole first, so that they can put the defensive ships (BC's and junction fort-building freighters/ammo ships, etc.) through from the Haven Sector side.

isaac_newton wrote:

Westbrook 49 wrote:It's an easy scenario to imagine. Here, a couple of lines
Jack glanced as casually as possible at Lajos Irvine. "Do you happen to have any more imagery of the two of them Lajos? Separately?"
The other man nodded. "Sure. I also put a bug in the diner, so I could monitor them further."

SNIP?

Congrats on pointing out such a key moment and its potential consequences...

This could be the start of one of those long running threads on 'if only X had done Y'

Loren Pechtel wrote:I just had a thought here on wormhole assaults.

What if you send through a "ship" that's nothing but a great bomb with a gazillion lasing rods on it?

Weird Harold wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:I just had a thought here on wormhole assaults.

What if you send through a "ship" that's nothing but a great bomb with a gazillion lasing rods on it?

Who are you going to get to crew it? RFC says you can't send unmanned ships/drones through wormholes.

Westbrook 49 wrote:

SharkHunter wrote: Actually, the GA wouldn't attack through a defended wormhole. Less loss of life and far less expensive in terms of ships, etc. to turn loose their collected spies, astrography whiz kids, NavInt, and scout ships to find the Twins. Once found, the GA plus new Torch builds (like Rozak's ships) are then going to attack from the hyper limit side, to destroy the MAN ships in that system, securing the wormhole first, so that they can put the defensive ships (BC's and junction fort-building freighters/ammo ships, etc.) through from the Haven Sector side.

If it's even possible. One thing that RFC has drilled into my head is this: space is big.
Even with McBryde's intelligence, and a dedicated team from Manticoran survey and ONI (hell, throw in Torch and Maya), without an idea of where to look, finding a wormhole from the other side without having is going to be like finding one specific needle in a stack of needles, in a box in a warehouse that's full of piles of needles, all identical. It's possible, to a certain extent, but you need a lot of patience and time.

In this case, a desperate or stupid maneuver-attacking through a defended wormhole-might be the best possible option. I'm not saying it isn't desperate or stupid, but if the GA could get a toehold in the system-LAC's deployed, or a surviving SD(P)-then that could create enough of a tactical situation to develop the ability to capture the Felix System. If that happens, the GA could get their physical hands on a part of the Onion that the MAlign leadership "knows" to be secure, and could start unraveling things by a huge margin.

*shrug* I'm not saying it's likely, I'm just saying it's possible.

SharkHunter wrote: Actually, the GA wouldn't attack through a defended wormhole. Less loss of life and far less expensive in terms of ships, etc. to turn loose their collected spies, astrography whiz kids, NavInt, and scout ships to find the Twins. Once found, the GA plus new Torch builds (like Rozak's ships) are then going to attack from the hyper limit side, to destroy the MAN ships in that system, securing the wormhole first, so that they can put the defensive ships (BC's and junction fort-building freighters/ammo ships, etc.) through from the Haven Sector side.

Westbrook 49 wrote:
If it's even possible. One thing that RFC has drilled into my head is this: space is big.
Even with McBryde's intelligence, and a dedicated team from Manticoran survey and ONI (hell, throw in Torch and Maya), without an idea of where to look, finding a wormhole from the other side without having is going to be like finding one specific needle in a stack of needles, in a box in a warehouse that's full of piles of needles, all identical. It's possible, to a certain extent, but you need a lot of patience and time.

In this case, a desperate or stupid maneuver-attacking through a defended wormhole-might be the best possible option. I'm not saying it isn't desperate or stupid, but if the GA could get a toehold in the system-LAC's deployed, or a surviving SD(P)-then that could create enough of a tactical situation to develop the ability to capture the Felix System. If that happens, the GA could get their physical hands on a part of the Onion that the MAlign leadership "knows" to be secure, and could start unraveling things by a huge margin.

*shrug* I'm not saying it's likely, I'm just saying it's possible.

SharkHunter wrote:I think... Felix is an inhabited system? or am I remembering wrong [?] .... I don't have the books in front of me but when Detweiler was trying to tell someone how to deal with a nearby planet, yada yada yada... What I was saying is that if MacBryde's data has information on ANY Mesa-controlled wormholes, you know that the GA has to do something about it. So the "surveyed" info -- if it was from the other side, leading to Torch -- could be critical.

SharkHunter wrote:I think... Felix is an inhabited system? or am I remembering wrong [?] ....

Torch of Freedom
Chapter Fifty wrote:Felix was an uninhabited star system little more than ten light-years from Mannerheim. The dim K2-class star was brighter than SGC-902-36-G, and it did have one marginally habitable planet, although that was about the best anyone was ever likely to say about it. The planet itself, which had never been assigned any better name than "Felix Beta," was a fairly miserable piece of real estate, with a gravity 1.4 times that of Old Earth, an axial inclination of thirty-one degrees, and a miserly hydrosphere of barely thirty-three percent. With an average orbital radius of right on six light-minutes, it was a cold, arid, dusty, windstorm-lashed, thoroughly wretched lump of dirt, but the Alignment had been considering it as a potential site for further development anyway, because of its proximity to Mannerheim.

The Republic of Mannerheim openly abhorred and despised the genetic slave trade and the outlaw Mesan transstellars which promoted it . . . which was one of the things that made it so valuable to the Mesan Alignment. The fact that Mannerheim's system-defense force was one of the most powerful of the entire Solarian League, and that there was absolutely nothing to associate it with Manpower or the Mesa System's government, didn't hurt, either. As such, it would have been handy, the Alignment had thought, to tuck its secret arsenal away someplace everyone knew was absolutely useless yet was simultaneously close enough to Mannerheim for the MSDF to keep a protective eye on it. Of course, there had been downsides to the proposition, the worst of which was that it would also have been close enough to Mannerheim for someone to innocently stumble across things the Alignment didn't want anyone stumbling over. The chance of someone actually doing that had been remote, to say the least, of course. When it came to concealing things, ten light-years might as well be ten thousand, unless there was something to prompt some busybody into making the trip in the first place.

What no one had expected—until the survey team the Alignment had sent to Felix under cover of the Jessyk expedition completed a thorough analysis of the system primary's emissions—was that there would have been plenty of reason to make the trip, if only anyone had known that Felix was associated with a major wormhole junction. Not on anything like the scale of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction, perhaps, but still considerably larger than most, with no less than four secondary termini.

They led to several interesting places (including the Darius System, which actually had been chosen as the site for the MAN's arsenal), and the Alignment had kept the Felix Junction's existence as "black" as they had the entire colony in Darius.

In fact, although the Alignment had known about it for better than two T-centuries, the MSDF had first become aware of it less than ten years ago. Officially, at least; many of the senior MSDF officers who knew about the Alignment had also known about the Felix Junction from the very beginning. As far as the bulk of the MSDF was concerned, however, Mannerheim had discovered the junction only eight and a half T-years ago, and the decision had been taken to keep its existence a secret because it had only two secondary termini . . . and because the Republic intended to make sure that when its existence became generally known, it was also firmly established as belonging to Mannerheim.

Fortuitously, from the Alignment's perspective, establishing that ownership was going to be complicated and (even better) time-consuming. Useless as the Felix System had turned out to be, colonization rights to it had been purchased by a Solarian corporation better than five hundred T-years ago. Since then, they had passed through the hands of at least a dozen levels of speculators—always trading downward, once the newest owner discovered how difficult it would have been to attract colonists to the system when there were so many other, more attractive potential destinations. By now, there were actually four separate corporations which claimed ownership, and none of them were likely to relinquish their claims without seeking at least some compensation to write off against their bad debt.

Weird Harold wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:I just had a thought here on wormhole assaults.

What if you send through a "ship" that's nothing but a great bomb with a gazillion lasing rods on it?

Who are you going to get to crew it? RFC says you can't send unmanned ships/drones through wormholes.

Loren Pechtel wrote:Why do you need a crew?

Loren Pechtel wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:Who are you going to get to crew it? RFC says you can't send unmanned ships/drones through wormholes.

Why do you need a crew? You have a crew on it that gets it ready for transit but bails before it enters the wormhole. A simple autopilot should be able to keep it going where it's supposed to go. There's nothing to do on the other side, it never goes out of sail mode. (And likely has nothing but the sail unless it can't be carried by another ship.)