Oh, what the heck . . .

Hello Jonothan_S

I apologize for a belated addition to my previous post about a month ago, in that the largest freighters we know of [according to UHH] are 'only' 8.5 million tons, and the interval for a 8.5 MT SD/P was around 85 seconds in AAC, IIRC.

The size limit was because of the compensator limit [also in UHH] and so far there's no mention of the MMM taking advantage of that potential improvement.

The Solarian Dromedary class was designed to make a profit serving a sector or two of the verge, not the SL core systems which require much larger ships, which many SL members like Beowulf have built, though many more preferred to lease them from the MMM until recently.

So far all freighters can transit all wormholes, but warehousing is huge on both sides of any hyper bridge, since its more profitable time wise for the shipper to get the cargo to the hyper bridge warehouse, then load a cargo there to take back, rather than taking all the extra time needed to deliver a single cargo, which might easily be only a small fraction of the ship's capacity, with large odds there isn't a corresponding cargo as large or valuable to take back.

Of course there are many cargoes that are profitable for that very reason, and ferreting out profitable cargoes and routes are critical to the bottom line, NTM closely guarded from the competition.

Christopher Anvil had a series of short stories in Analog in the 1960's mainly, about commercial shippers of the future, some were quite amusing and thought provoking.

RAH's Citizen of the Galaxy also dwelled on interstellar commerce, and 'the People' who took the risk, including single sheets of porn being traded for a diamond by nonspeaking very nonhuman aliens, which the crew probably kept quiet about to keep that particular profit center all to themselves.

L

Jonathan_S wrote:

Theemile wrote:Larger ships may be used on specific, high volume routes and between hub routes. Like how UPS, Fed Ex, or other delivery services do today - they fly 747s between hubs, then smaller planes to regional delivery points, semi trailers to local delivery warehouses, and Brown\White cargo vans to your front door. Occasionally though, they will fly a 747 between point A and point B because there is enough demand to fill the plane with auto parts or fresh pork bellies required on a timely manner to justify the craft. There is no "one size fits all" solution.

That triggered a random thought. I wonder if traffic will ever get to a point, on a given wormhole leg, that it's a sufficient bottleneck that normal traffic will be restricted to ships whose tonnage triggered lock-down of the wormhole most closely matches the minimum safety separation ATC will accept.
(So freighters transfer cargo to speclialized ships that just jump from the warehouse on one end to the warehouse on the other -- think of it as analogous to intermodal freight containers going Chine to Europe using rail to cross the US)

For example if ATC is willing to accept 60 seconds separations between freighters a roughly 6 mton design will, I believe, lock down the wormhole for just about that.
If they were more conservative and wanted longer separations I think the tonnage / time chart would look roughly like this.
_60 seconds | _6.0 mtons
_90 seconds | _7.5 mtons
120 seconds | _8.6 mtons
180 seconds | 10.6 mtons
240 seconds | 12.2 mtons
300 seconds | 13.7 mtons

Hello Drothgery,

Excellent point as usual!

Given the years involved, it seems odd no reporter from the SKM interviewed Pritchart and mentioned what was certainly common knowledge in passing, or the RoH's intel picking that up from the HR delegation, NTM embassies on other planets.

Given the controversies HH was involved in then, among the rest, how any interstellar coverage could avoid explaining the domestic conflict seems amazing, especially considering the amount of data collection possible via all the neutral sources.

But RFC has to tell the story his way, and we all want him to keep going on as long as possible.

L

drothgery wrote:

munroburton wrote:Pritchart's background - and those of her cabinet - doesn't really provide any insights into the thinking of an aristocratic Manticoran politician.

In other contexts, Kevin Usher showed an excellent understanding of how Manticoran aristocrats of High Ridge's circle were likely to act. And the reasons for the High Ridge government's failure to negotiate a peace treaty were common knowledge on Manticore; literally everyone who paid attention to Manticoran politics knew exactly what was going on and why, no matter where on the political spectrum they lined up at. Many thought the government's actions were stupid and dangerous, but they still understood it.

lyonheart wrote:Given the controversies HH was involved in then, among the rest, how any interstellar coverage could avoid explaining the domestic conflict seems amazing, especially considering the amount of data collection possible via all the neutral sources.

It's like how there wasn't a single person in the entire SL who read the publicly available documentation, news reports and memoirs to track the developments and battles in the Haven Sector. I'm pretty sure I could find more then one hobbyist in the US who could discuss at great length the history and details of the multi-sided conflict in Somalia, but nobody of the several trillion in the SL was interested in the RMN?

kzt wrote:

lyonheart wrote:Given the controversies HH was involved in then, among the rest, how any interstellar coverage could avoid explaining the domestic conflict seems amazing, especially considering the amount of data collection possible via all the neutral sources.

It's like how there wasn't a single person in the entire SL who read the publicly available documentation, news reports and memoirs to track the developments and battles in the Haven Sector. I'm pretty sure I could find more then one hobbyist in the US who could discuss at great length the history and details of the multi-sided conflict in Somalia, but nobody of the several trillion in the SL was interested in the RMN?

I am sure there were those hobbyists, the only problem is that they were basically unknown in the halls of power. I suspect that most people in the US with an indepth interest in the minutiae of the dealing of Somali warlords are if not in an intelligence agency, viewed as having an odd but basically harmless hobby. How hard is it for the decision makers to find these people if their area of interest becomes strategically important? i.e. potential intervention in a Chad-Democratic Republic of Congo Border dispute.

It's like how there wasn't a single person in the entire SL who read the publicly available documentation, news reports and memoirs to track the developments and battles in the Haven Sector. I'm pretty sure I could find more then one hobbyist in the US who could discuss at great length the history and details of the multi-sided conflict in Somalia, but nobody of the several trillion in the SL was interested in the RMN?[/quote]
I am sure there were those hobbyists, the only problem is that they were basically unknown in the halls of power. I suspect that most people in the US with an indepth interest in the minutiae of the dealing of Somali warlords are if not in an intelligence agency, viewed as having an odd but basically harmless hobby. How hard is it for the decision makers to find these people if their area of interest becomes strategically important? i.e. potential intervention in a Chad-Democratic Republic of Congo Border dispute.[/quote]

Let us keep in mind that the leadership was not interested in hobbyists. They had their story and were going to keep to it.

Also, the top people were being blocked from a lot of reality by MAlign. We saw how those who suggested that Manticore was really advanced were punished.

When a government wants one point of view, it can make certain no other views, even if those other ones are correct, are not really heard.

Howdy LDWechsler,

Kudos for being spot on with how the official explanation overwhelming any inconvenient facts.

I don't know how many remember the discussion at the bar many moons ago regarding how the military tech fans, modelers, NTM wargamers would have been all over the Manticore-Haven wars, collecting and passing all sorts of details that eventually would start adding up to important conclusions and comparisons with the SLN etc.

RFC had to respond that no, there were not such organised or coordinated groups that would cooperate to find what they could and share it.

He was the author, so it was "Yes sir, three bags full" time.

But I still mumble about it when I can.

L


My father often mentioned how model companies would hire senior retired Intel sergeants from the various services, who knew or had copies of the public information that was the basis of most of their briefings etc, as a considerable addition to their retirement pay, for however long they could spin out sharing all they knew.

ldwechsler wrote:It's like how there wasn't a single person in the entire SL who read the publicly available documentation, news reports and memoirs to track the developments and battles in the Haven Sector. I'm pretty sure I could find more then one hobbyist in the US who could discuss at great length the history and details of the multi-sided conflict in Somalia, but nobody of the several trillion in the SL was interested in the RMN?

I am sure there were those hobbyists, the only problem is that they were basically unknown in the halls of power. I suspect that most people in the US with an indepth interest in the minutiae of the dealing of Somali warlords are if not in an intelligence agency, viewed as having an odd but basically harmless hobby. How hard is it for the decision makers to find these people if their area of interest becomes strategically important? i.e. potential intervention in a Chad-Democratic Republic of Congo Border dispute.[/quote]

Let us keep in mind that the leadership was not interested in hobbyists. They had their story and were going to keep to it.

Also, the top people were being blocked from a lot of reality by MAlign. We saw how those who suggested that Manticore was really advanced were punished.

When a government wants one point of view, it can make certain no other views, even if those other ones are correct, are not really heard.[/quote]

JohnRoth wrote:Where, oh, where is the map. Ah, here it is.

It seems to be somewhere around Rasmussen and Babiiha. Yep, that is a big empty space on the map. So it's somewhere close to the line between Manticore and Nuncio, about halfway between.

Hm.

How do you figure that?

Bolthole distances per textev:

• Sol 395 ly
• Haven ~70 ly -> (wormhole bridge) 583.8 ly

We can infer that it's between ~513 to 653 ly from Haven, and combined with the distance from Sol it is quite a large arc it can fit in.

Joat42 wrote:Bolthole distances per textev:

• Sol 395 ly
• Haven ~70 ly -> (wormhole bridge) 583.8 ly

We can infer that it's between ~513 to 653 ly from Haven, and combined with the distance from Sol it is quite a large arc it can fit in.

Not really. Just two short, 140 ly, arcs on the larger 395 ly from Sol arc. On an astronomical scale 280 ly to search is trivial.

lyonheart wrote:Howdy LDWechsler,

Kudos for being spot on with how the official explanation overwhelming any inconvenient facts.

I don't know how many remember the discussion at the bar many moons ago regarding how the military tech fans, modelers, NTM wargamers would have been all over the Manticore-Haven wars, collecting and passing all sorts of details that eventually would start adding up to important conclusions and comparisons with the SLN etc.

RFC had to respond that no, there were not such organised or coordinated groups that would cooperate to find what they could and share it.

He was the author, so it was "Yes sir, three bags full" time.

But I still mumble about it when I can.

L


My father often mentioned how model companies would hire senior retired Intel sergeants from the various services, who knew or had copies of the public information that was the basis of most of their briefings etc, as a considerable addition to their retirement pay, for however long they could spin out sharing all they knew.

ldwechsler wrote:It's like how there wasn't a single person in the entire SL who read the publicly available documentation, news reports and memoirs to track the developments and battles in the Haven Sector. I'm pretty sure I could find more then one hobbyist in the US who could discuss at great length the history and details of the multi-sided conflict in Somalia, but nobody of the several trillion in the SL was interested in the RMN?

I am sure there were those hobbyists, the only problem is that they were basically unknown in the halls of power. I suspect that most people in the US with an indepth interest in the minutiae of the dealing of Somali warlords are if not in an intelligence agency, viewed as having an odd but basically harmless hobby. How hard is it for the decision makers to find these people if their area of interest becomes strategically important? i.e. potential intervention in a Chad-Democratic Republic of Congo Border dispute.

Let us keep in mind that the leadership was not interested in hobbyists. They had their story and were going to keep to it.

Also, the top people were being blocked from a lot of reality by MAlign. We saw how those who suggested that Manticore was really advanced were punished.

When a government wants one point of view, it can make certain no other views, even if those other ones are correct, are not really heard.[/quote][/quote]


I do not recall the exchange at all.

You need to bear in mind, thought, that we are not talking about someplace with an internet you can just plug into any time you want. You also need to remember that the modelers and hobbyists in question were up against the best military security in the galaxy. And you also need to remember that I never said there was no flow of information about what was happening in the Haven sector to the rest of the galaxy; I said the Solarian League ignored it because it manifestly did no matter and, besides, the neobarbs were probably lying.

I don't quite understand why people find this so difficult to grasp.

In 1938, Japan was a heck of a lot closer, and a lot more accessible, from the United States of American and Great Britain (and Australia) than the Haven Sector is from 99.9% of the human race in the Honorverse. Yes, the shipping lines are there, and, yes, there's a lot of commerce (most of it carried in Manticoran bottoms), but there the shipping traffic to and around the Japanese Home Islands in 1938 was denser (in relative terms) than most Solarian star systems experience in Honor's day.

Despite that, the USN had no idea of the caliber of the guns the Japanese were planning to use for their new battleships, didn't know that the Nagatos were a good four knots faster than they thought they were, didn't know the demilitarized Kongos had been put back into commission, and didn't have a clue about the Long Lance torpedo or the range and maneuverability of the Zero or the Betty bomber (despite the fact that the Zero was actually being used against our Chinese allies and the American Volunteer Group was already flying brutally outclassed P-40s against them. All of this despite the fact that Japan had been identified as our most probable foe in any Pacific War.

So you're suggesting to me that somehow the SLN --- which knows it has 10,000 SDs in commission while the Manties and Peeps between them have less than 1,000 --- and which has the institutional arrogance of 700 years of unchallenged naval supremacy would be worried not about what their equivalent of Japan might be doing fighting their equivalent of China but what Nepal might be up to in its war against Bangladesh?

No, the situations are not, in fact, parallel, but the SLN thinks they are and I find it difficult to believe that there's going to be some highly visible hobbyist organization putting together accurate models of Havenite or Manticoran ships which will somehow magically give the SLN the wake up call it needs.

The USN and RN docked at the same wharves as Japanese cruisers which exceeded treaty mandated tonnage limitations by 20% and carried Long Lances and their various intelligence organizations either never guessed it or else knew all along and simply failed to pass it along to their superiors, for goodness sake! And unlike the SLN, neither the USN nor the RN thought for a minute that its warfighting technology was supreme in all the world based on seven centuries of absolute naval domination not of a single ocean or even a single plant but an entire damned galaxy.

So, yeah, I don't find it at all unreasonable for a willfully blind institution like the SLN (and its affiliated intelligence organizations) to completely ignore information that very well may have been there but which wasn't beating down their doors and windows. Please note that Daud al-Funadhi, among others, was aware there was something Very Strange going on out there in the Fringe. The Alignment knew. Even Technodyne had an inkling. But none of them were able to get to the classified nitty-gritty, and even reports which made it clear that Haven Sector warfighting technology was increasing in capability by leaps and bounds (which is exactly what Luis Rozak and Oraville Barregos were reporting prior to the emergence of Torch) were suppressed by career bureaucrats in uniform who declined to see their rice bowls tipped over on the basis of clearly unfounded, wild, fact-free rumors of impssible new technologies.

Sorry if that seems unreasonable.

Last I knew, Manticore and the SL don't require multiple years of intense study to read each other's languages. Which was the case in 1938. There was a trivial number of US government employees of any type who could fluently read Japanese, particularly the kanji used to discuss military issues.

In additon Japan didn't have a tradition of the free press, which asks uncomfortable questions like "Prime Minister, how is it possible that yesterday that tens of thousands of our sons and daughters got massacred and the entire system almost conquered. How was Home Fleet so rapidly totally destroyed and why didn't home fleet have the weapons 8th fleet had?" Along with reporting the basics of the battle, which a lot of voters find deeply disturbing.

Also you didn't have years in which the various beached officers did what all recent combat officers do, which is write about their war.

Then you have things like the proceedings of the Manticoran budget committes and other legislative bodies that publish things in a democracy with a free press. Which, unlike physical newspapers or huge paper documents, are electronic posts trivially cheap to transport across the galaxy.

So no, I would say the situations are not nearly as comparable.

Now that doesn't mean anybody in authority cares, you have the many distinguished observers of the Russo-Japanese war who decided that this didn't mean anything to their army (they were wrong), but people will know quite a lot about the conduct of the war, the ships and the weapons and they will form groups and mailing lists to talk about it.