The mandarins

Talking of News control: it is nearby impossible to stop an ship who turns imediatly araund and jump back into Hyperspace. Michelle hasn´t enough ships to avoid that.

So, in my eyes, the mandarines will know what happend at Meyers and Mesa, but in case of the sollies, do they belive that?

It would take good sensors to pickup the ships in orbit around the planets and determine they were warships not freighters.

Both Mesa and Meyers are quite some distance from Sol in hyperspace, so it would take a while for the ship to reach Sol and pass on the information.

George J. Smith wrote:It would take good sensors to pickup the ships in orbit around the planets and determine they were warships not freighters.

Both Mesa and Meyers are quite some distance from Sol in hyperspace, so it would take a while for the ship to reach Sol and pass on the information.

Visigoth is at most 100 ly from Sol (40 to Beowulf, 60 to Visigoth). That's about 2 and a half weeks for a courier. Faster if that courier just happens to have a streak drive, but then that would raise some more questions.

JohnRoth wrote:

George J. Smith wrote:It would take good sensors to pickup the ships in orbit around the planets and determine they were warships not freighters.

Both Mesa and Meyers are quite some distance from Sol in hyperspace, so it would take a while for the ship to reach Sol and pass on the information.

Visigoth is at most 100 ly from Sol (40 to Beowulf, 60 to Visigoth). That's about 2 and a half weeks for a courier. Faster if that courier just happens to have a streak drive, but then that would raise some more questions.

But what would the sensors of a myopic DB manage to see from that far out?

*** reconstructing so people know what we're talking about. ***

Maldorian wrote:Talking of News control: it is nearby impossible to stop an ship who turns imediatly araund and jump back into Hyperspace. Michelle hasn´t enough ships to avoid that.

So, in my eyes, the mandarines will know what happend at Meyers and Mesa, but in case of the sollies, do they belive that?

George J. Smith wrote:It would take good sensors to pickup the ships in orbit around the planets and determine they were warships not freighters.

Both Mesa and Meyers are quite some distance from Sol in hyperspace, so it would take a while for the ship to reach Sol and pass on the information.

JohnRoth wrote:
Visigoth is at most 100 ly from Sol (40 to Beowulf, 60 to Visigoth). That's about 2 and a half weeks for a courier. Faster if that courier just happens to have a streak drive, but then that would raise some more questions.

George J. Smith wrote:But what would the sensors of a myopic DB manage to see from that far out?

Yeah, I agree, Maldorian's scenario is not all that reasonable. First, most ships plan on coming out as close to the hyper limit as they can, with as great a velocity inbound (ie toward the hyper limit) as they can manage. That probably limits the time they have to determine that something is wrong, cycle their hyper generator and pop back into hyperspace without encountering the hyper limit and getting turned into dust bunnies.

The biggest issue with the scenario is the assumption that Admiral Gold Peak would want to suppress news of the activity. She did at Meyers for operational security: she didn't want to tip off Mesa and the SL that she was on her way, just in case the SL decided to actually support Mesa with a couple of squadrons of death traps, uh, I mean SDs.

JohnRoth wrote:Yeah, I agree, Maldorian's scenario is not all that reasonable. First, most ships plan on coming out as close to the hyper limit as they can, with as great a velocity inbound (ie toward the hyper limit) as they can manage. That probably limits the time they have to determine that something is wrong, cycle their hyper generator and pop back into hyperspace without encountering the hyper limit and getting turned into dust bunnies.

The biggest issue with the scenario is the assumption that Admiral Gold Peak would want to suppress news of the activity. She did at Meyers for operational security: she didn't want to tip off Mesa and the SL that she was on her way, just in case the SL decided to actually support Mesa with a couple of squadrons of death traps, uh, I mean SDs.

Warships attacking the system might want to be really close to the hyper limit, but civilian traffic must have some kind of safety margin in practice. Coming out an hour or so further out doesn't add significant time to the overall voyage and certainly cheaper than the maneuvering required to compensate for an overshoot on the astrogator's bad day.

Don't ships also explode if they try to translate too far into the limit? IIRC, the description of that was "like trying to bounce rotten eggs off a brick wall using a cannon."

munroburton wrote:Warships attacking the system might want to be really close to the hyper limit, but civilian traffic must have some kind of safety margin in practice. Coming out an hour or so further out doesn't add significant time to the overall voyage and certainly cheaper than the maneuvering required to compensate for an overshoot on the astrogator's bad day.

Don't ships also explode if they try to translate too far into the limit? IIRC, the description of that was "like trying to bounce rotten eggs off a brick wall using a cannon."

They do, but there's a margin (IIRC 20% the width of the hyperlimit) where you fairly harmlessly just fail to exit hyper. So you'd have to misjudge pretty badly to splatter on exit. Still, merchant ships probably don't crowd the limit too closely - I don't know that they'd back up a whole hour's flight time, but some reasonable extra margin of safety seems likely.


Just thinking, you can't carry much velocity with you from hyper. The most a freighter could carry on a normal approach (from the Delta bands) is a measly 110 km/s (Sure they start from 0.5c, but bleed off 72% dropping to Gamma, then 78% of that to Beta, 85% of that to Alpha, and finally 92% of that entering n-space). Even a freighter drive could cancel that out in a couple minutes.


A freighter capable of 215g flat out; like the 1.9 mton Starhauler class from SITS needs just 65 seconds at their 80% power level to generate 110 km/s. It'd actually take them longer to achieve turn-over than it would to kill their velocity.

If they were going for maximum possible carry over velocity they'd drop early into the Alpha bands and accelerate back up to 0.5c. That would let them carry a far more respectable 11,991 km/s; the equivalent of almost exactly 2 hours of acceleration at the aforementioned rate.

OTOH it probably takes less than an hour to recharge their hypergenerator - and with their approach they're well below the 0.3c speed limit for entering hyper. So assuming the generator charges before they cross the hyper limit they can just pop back out. (We don't have hard numbers, just that RFC said that military-grade generators cycle faster than civilian-ones and smaller ships cycle faster than bigger one; so to, hopefully, be conservative I roughly doubled to longest military time we had. That was that a 8 mton SD from fully powered-down to jumping took 32 minutes)

On the other hand I think other posters have a good point about how little a civilian-grade or DB sensor suite could see from out beyond the hyper limit. So unless they overheard a radio broadcast about the system being captured it's unlikely they'd know anything had gone wrong before they were too deep into the system to avoid getting corralled by whatever DDs or LACs the occupying navy might have brought along.

Jonathan_S wrote:[...]On the other hand I think other posters have a good point about how little a civilian-grade or DB sensor suite could see from out beyond the hyper limit. So unless they overheard a radio broadcast about the system being captured it's unlikely they'd know anything had gone wrong before they were too deep into the system to avoid getting corralled by whatever DDs or LACs the occupying navy might have brought along.

Remember Shadow of Saganami? The incident in Montana? That was a freighter, and one with a better sensor-suite than most freighters have. Nonetheless, at the time she detected Hexapuma, she was to far inside the hyperlimit to avoid the confrontation with Terekhov. Ok, she had a bit of bad luck, too, because the cruiser was on the far side of the planet at the time they came over the wall. But nonetheless, and keeping in mind that no nonmilitary vessel will have any reason (or the ability) to send probes ahead, there is no chance that anything nonmilitary could detect something unusual in the orbit of a inhabited planet at a time that would allow them to avoid being captured by military vessels.

And in Meyers, I think, there will be at least a patrol or two of LACs (in addition to a sensor net) to guard the limit around the clock, because, if I remember correctly, Gold Peak stationed 2 Squadrons of LAC there for system security reasons.

I don't think Michele would want to send news of the taking of Mesa (if it was 10th Fleet that showed up at Mesa) directly to Earth. It would, however, make a lot of sense for her to send a courier thought the Visigoth Wormhole and run for Manticore via Beowulf to report arriving at Mesa and immediate situation reguarding what she encountered and what is now going on.

Not clear if she had any courier ships with 10th Fleet but she could send a destroyer. Not clear what Visagoth Astro Control's reaction is going to be in either case. If there was any traffic in the outbound lane from Mesa to Visigoth then it is likely that some word at least the arrival of a fleet including SDs in thte Mesa system has gone through and we also don't know how much information in the way of updates went along on other ships going though the wormhole before elements of 10th fleet (if it was 10th fleet) dropped out of hyper near the wormhole and interdicted transit outbound. At that point, they would not want to do anyting about inbound ships except tell them to keep the speed down and divert to a holding location to be boarded for examination. Then deal with them on a case by case basis depending on what or who was found on board.

Visagoth may or may not have any warships near the wormhole. I don't recall what might have been said about the size of their SDF/Navy and we haven't been told if they had anything more than customs and fee enforcement vessels at thier end of the wormhole. It is possible that if Mike sends a messenger very quickly, Visagoth may not have a warship in reach of the terminus in time to stop it or at least challange it.I suspect Manticore would pay the "standard" wormhole fee- whatever that was for courier or warship- rather than just blow through and tell Visagoth Astro Control to blow it out their ear:) Why go out of the way to annoy them, though it is unlikely that a RMN warship is going to allow itself to be boarded by Customs.

Isn't Visigoth one of the pro RF systems?

If it is I would be surprised if they normally had warships at the wormhole to interdict ships coming from Mesa, and depending on how quickly Michelle (if it is 10th fleet) can get a DB or DD through the Mesa end of the bridge, they may not have time to get anything to the Visigoth end to interdict the DB or DD before it clears the exit lane and accelerates off into the wild black yonder.