What's next for the Honorverse

tlb wrote:

ncwolf wrote:It’s not just the slave ships at that station (and their headings, which probably are misleading), but there are the traffic records of Mesa. Consider the passenger liner which was blown up; it had made a trip to Darius before. The ship returned to Mesa, so that gives you a round trip time. If you know the speed of the liner, you know how far away it’s destination lies.

Now, the problem is our heroes have heard of streak drive, but they don’t know it’s parameters well, not like conventional ships. However, Damien H. can give them an idea of the speed of a streak drive equipped courier boat. That will give the good guys—-Henke and Zilwicke especially—-an idea where to look. I think Darius is fairly close. Close enough that astronomical observation from Mesa might could find out that there is a planet there.

Isn't there at least one secret wormhole transit (note the route of the cargo to Beowulf) on the way to Darius. When we first heard of Darius there were some very optimistic people in the forum who thought an optical search could turn something up. I believe that is highly unlikely.

You’re right. There’s one from Torch that is guarded by the alignment navy, and there is, IIRC, a two hyper bridge route. I don’t think either comes out in the Darius system but nearby.

ncwolf wrote:It’s not just the slave ships at that station (and their headings, which probably are misleading), but there are the traffic records of Mesa. Consider the passenger liner which was blown up; it had made a trip to Darius before. The ship returned to Mesa, so that gives you a round trip time. If you know the speed of the liner, you know how far away it’s destination lies.

Now, the problem is our heroes have heard of streak drive, but they don’t know it’s parameters well, not like conventional ships. However, Damien H. can give them an idea of the speed of a streak drive equipped courier boat. That will give the good guys—-Henke and Zilwicke especially—-an idea where to look. I think Darius is fairly close. Close enough that astronomical observation from Mesa might could find out that there is a planet there.

tlb wrote:Isn't there at least one secret wormhole transit (note the route of the cargo to Beowulf) on the way to Darius. When we first heard of Darius there were some very optimistic people in the forum who thought an optical search could turn something up. I believe that is highly unlikely.

ncwolf wrote:You’re right. There’s one from Torch that is guarded by the alignment navy, and there is, IIRC, a two hyper bridge route. I don’t think either comes out in the Darius system but nearby.

OK. There are two pieces. The first is the Felix junction, which is in Felix, 10 ly from Mannerheim. It has four remote termini. One goes to Darius, one to The Twins and two to locations we haven't been clued in on yet. The Twins have a second hyper-bridge to Torch. This has been known to the fans for a while, but it's a secret in-universe.

The second piece is a hyper-bridge from Mannerheim to Warner, which is 103 ly to Beowulf. I don't know whether this is public knowledge in-universe.

Also, I find it amusing that anyone would think the GA doesn't know how fast the streak drive is. They do have hyper-physicists, and the hyper-physicists have theories that explain things pretty well. The only thing missing is actual experimental verification,

JohnRoth wrote:Also, I find it amusing that anyone would think the GA doesn't know how fast the streak drive is. They do have hyper-physicists, and the hyper-physicists have theories that explain things pretty well. The only thing missing is actual experimental verification,

And in fact they have one hyper physicist who's kind of an expert on the thing ...

JohnRoth wrote:Also, I find it amusing that anyone would think the GA doesn't know how fast the streak drive is. They do have hyper-physicists, and the hyper-physicists have theories that explain things pretty well. The only thing missing is actual experimental verification,

Well without Simones input it seems to me that they wouldn't be sure how many additional hyper bands the Streak drive would let you climb.

So even with theoretical knowledge of the velocity multiplier in the Iota[1], Kappa, Lambda, Mu, etc. bands you won't know how fast a streak drive is until you know what its ceiling is. Though if you get elapsed transit time between two known points you can work out the minimum additional hyper bands that would be necessary to achieve that journey -- or you can just get the information about the extra bands a streak can access directly from Simones


[1] Actually the velocity multiplier of the Iota bands would be experimentally known even without the ability to send a ship there. All FTL signals, including grav sensor readings of a ship's wedge/sails, move at the speed of light of the next higher hyperbands. So in normal space FTL signals propagate at 62x lightspeed, but in the Eta bands they're only 1.164x the speed of light within the Eta bands. Similarly being able to experimentally measure the FTL propagation speed in the Theta bands (1.2x faster than the Theta bands' c) lets you trivially calculate the velocity multiplier of the Iota bands -- and thereby validate your theoretical models

Jonathan_S wrote:

JohnRoth wrote:Also, I find it amusing that anyone would think the GA doesn't know how fast the streak drive is. They do have hyper-physicists, and the hyper-physicists have theories that explain things pretty well. The only thing missing is actual experimental verification,

Well without Simones input it seems to me that they wouldn't be sure how many additional hyper bands the Streak drive would let you climb.

So even with theoretical knowledge of the velocity multiplier in the Iota[1], Kappa, Lambda, Mu, etc. bands you won't know how fast a streak drive is until you know what its ceiling is. Though if you get elapsed transit time between two known points you can work out the minimum additional hyper bands that would be necessary to achieve that journey -- or you can just get the information about the extra bands a streak can access directly from Simones


[1] Actually the velocity multiplier of the Iota bands would be experimentally known even without the ability to send a ship there. All FTL signals, including grav sensor readings of a ship's wedge/sails, move at the speed of light of the next higher hyperbands. So in normal space FTL signals propagate at 62x lightspeed, but in the Eta bands they're only 1.164x the speed of light within the Eta bands. Similarly being able to experimentally measure the FTL propagation speed in the Theta bands (1.2x faster than the Theta bands' c) lets you trivially calculate the velocity multiplier of the Iota bands -- and thereby validate your theoretical models

That's pushing the secrecy a bit too far. Of course, the physicists are going to know what's going on in the testing. There were plenty of physicists involved in the Manhattan Project even when it was more a case of engineering.

Problems do arise. And Simoes was a WORKING member of the team there. That means he was getting data from working streak drive ships to make them even faster.

And the increases were useful but not spectacular. I vaguely recall at one point either Anismova or Bardisoma saying that four days had been knocked off a trip of a few weeks. That's really good but it's not spectacular.

Don't forget Roddenberry's rule: No matter how fast your ship goes there has to be a way to stop it or there's no drama.
Notice the many times communicators were lost or conditions were such they couldn't be used. What kind of stories would you have if the heroes could simply be transported away whenever they were in real danger?

Same here. Yes, there are ships that go really fast but that will not determine the final end.

Damian/Plays-with-Fire already had a good idea that he was on ships that got places a lot faster than was normal. How much faster is a question. What the GA scientists and make of his estimates is another one.
As far as the officers and crews of the Houdini evacuee ships go, some of them know there was something odd about some of the passengers. It is unlikely that any of those ships would get anywhere close to Darius or the secret wormhole network. The simplest thing would have one link in each evacuation chain meet with another ship well out beyond normal transit lanes and transfer the Houdini people. The receiving ships would be Alignment crews and cycle back to where they could hand off the evacuees to ships going into the secret network.
Then, the original evauating ships could continue on to other destinations and more or less vanish into general traffic on other jobs. Some of them quite legitimate if probably somewhat shady ventures that look more like standard merchant shipping which are transporting things. While there are security issues, those evacuation ships represent a lot of useful assets for moving covert assets and materials plus picking up agents reports. Nothing obvious, just freighters doing business, even going back into standard trade. Might be relativly easy to slip them back into legitimate commerce since they seem to have been doing that kind of thing for the Alignment (through a lot of cut-outs) before. The slaver ships would be more difficult but they could be retrofitted to become almost normal freighters. Covert assets.

ldwechsler wrote:Problems do arise. And Simoes was a WORKING member of the team there. That means he was getting data from working streak drive ships to make them even faster.

No. He had never even seen the hardware. It was apparently a one-way thing.


"Is he in a position to damage anything that's already been accomplished?"
Bardasano leaned forward over her desk, folding her forearms on her blotter and leaning her weight on them while she watched McBryde intently.
"No, Ma'am." This time McBryde spoke without even a shadow of a reservation. "There are too many backups, and too many other members of his team are fully hands-on. He couldn't delete any of the project notes or data even if he were so far gone that he tried—not that I think he's anywhere near that state, at this point at least, you understand. If I did, I'd have already yanked him. And as far as hardware is concerned, he's completely out of the loop. His team's working entirely on the research and basic theory end of things."

SharkHunter wrote:What's next? Here's my thoughts:

I suspect that we'll need a bit of a novel to replace some of the characters who were killed in the Beowulf strike. Plus some suspicions as to how the "Renaissance Factor" is so well organized, so quickly.

More disorganized mayhem in the Verge and former Protectorates... given that we kind of think that Darius is a Verge system... Plus the Alignment has been cut off from its money tree, aka anything headquartered on Mesa or quasi-supported by OFS.

The dynamic duos that are becoming trios (Zilwicki, Cachat, and Harahap), (Henke, Oversteegen, Terekhov and Co.), and (Foraker, Hemphill, add someone associated with the trove from Ganymede), etc. further their investigations leading towards an equalizer for the Spider drive and some target localization (aka the neck of the woods where the rabbit hole is located)... and ...

...cliffhangers. A few red herrings. Maybe some more authors playing in the Honorverse?

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Keep in mind that Abigail Hearns was introduced in an anthology story, as was Helen Zilwicki.

Possible "More than Honor" anthologies could develop some current known characters, such as "continued adventures of Tremaine & Sir Horace", Rachel Mayhew (seen as Abigail 2nd edition, Carson Clinkscales commanding a CA in the Verge, the multiple new characters introduced in UH.

Just my thoughts
-- Stewart

stewart wrote:

SharkHunter wrote:What's next? Here's my thoughts:

I suspect that we'll need a bit of a novel to replace some of the characters who were killed in the Beowulf strike. Plus some suspicions as to how the "Renaissance Factor" is so well organized, so quickly.

More disorganized mayhem in the Verge and former Protectorates... given that we kind of think that Darius is a Verge system... Plus the Alignment has been cut off from its money tree, aka anything headquartered on Mesa or quasi-supported by OFS.

The dynamic duos that are becoming trios (Zilwicki, Cachat, and Harahap), (Henke, Oversteegen, Terekhov and Co.), and (Foraker, Hemphill, add someone associated with the trove from Ganymede), etc. further their investigations leading towards an equalizer for the Spider drive and some target localization (aka the neck of the woods where the rabbit hole is located)... and ...

...cliffhangers. A few red herrings. Maybe some more authors playing in the Honorverse?

--------------

Keep in mind that Abigail Hearns was introduced in an anthology story, as was Helen Zilwicki.

Possible "More than Honor" anthologies could develop some current known characters, such as "continued adventures of Tremaine & Sir Horace", Rachel Mayhew (seen as Abigail 2nd edition, Carson Clinkscales commanding a CA in the Verge, the multiple new characters introduced in UH.

Just my thoughts
-- Stewart

There's a bit too much of well, let's not leave any threads hanging here in all of this.

I doubt there will be much in the way of anthologies. They don't sell all that well.

And we don't have to know how many kids Abigail and Indy have, etc.

Some of that may just come in through the next arc. You know, having Admiral Stearns running a fleet or something on that order.

Remember that Honor's kids are about a dozen plus years away from going to the Academy. And a few years beyond that to actually serving, even a snottie cruise.

So the characters we see now are going to be higher ranking officers. If Helen were a lieutenant it would be ridiculous. She should become a full lieutenant within a couple of years. Likely she'd be a Commander, captain of a destroyer, at least.


And so forth.

ldwechsler wrote:What's next? Here's my thoughts:

I doubt there will be much in the way of anthologies. They don't sell all that well.

And so forth.

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I do not know how well "House of Steel" did, I bought one. We have not seen "House of Lies" (Haven) or background books on Grayson, Erewhon, SL or Andies; so there are platforms there that are essentially releases from RFC's Tech Notes and Tech Bible, with some from BuNine. Maybe too much Tum, te, tum, tum.

-- Stewart