Safehold vs Gbaba

evilauthor wrote:

DMcCunney wrote: One question is whether a ship in hyper can detect another ship in hyper, and if so, at what distance?

Go reread OAR. One reason that the original Safehold colony needed a diversionary fleet (the one the original Nimue died in) was because a Gbaba scout was following them, but was too far away and too fast to be engaged with weapons.

So ships CAN detect and follow each other in hyper, and presumably that detection range covers much if not the entire border of a star system's limits in hyperspace. If it didn't, it should have been easy for ships to slip away without detection.

That said, "detecting a ship" and "picking out details" aren't the same thing. Hence why the diversionary fleet even worked; at the limits of hyperspace detection, the Gbaba scout couldn't tell that the individual ships it was seeing were in fact TWO ships flying close together. A momentary break in sensor contact allowed the refugee ships to separate from the decoy ships and go hide in normal space while the decoy ships went to the Gbaba to be destroyed, thus fooling the Gbaba into thinking they killed all the ships because the ship destruction count matched the number they saw leaving the Solar System.

The impression I get is that Safehold hyperspace works very much like Honorverse hyperspace, minus the grav currents and grav sails that use them and what not.

isaac_newton wrote:
one thing I never quite understood was why the originally stealthed ships needed to switch with the non-stealthed ships - who then became stealthed and legged it to pastures green...

at least, that is how I understood the 'swap over'.

Anyone shed some light on the subject?

Bluesqueak wrote:I wouldn't be surprised if they had, for example, volunteer 'colonists' in cryosleep to be believable corpses.

evilauthor wrote:

Bluesqueak wrote:I wouldn't be surprised if they had, for example, volunteer 'colonists' in cryosleep to be believable corpses.

Actually, now that I think about it, the "colonists" in the decoy fleet could have just been a bunch of empty clones. Federation tech is clearly good for cloning after all. And since the colonists are in cryo, they don't have to do anything except provide bodies. So a decoy "colonist" can just be a cloned human body with no mind ever put into it.

Bluesqueak wrote:Yes, I was wondering if they'd use actual corpses, since we've been told that cryosleep and death is almost indistinguishable.

DMcCunney wrote:

Bluesqueak wrote:Yes, I was wondering if they'd use actual corpses, since we've been told that cryosleep and death is almost indistinguishable.

The "bait and switch" was to let the actual colony fleet make a clean breakaway. I'm not sure there'd be a point to real or fake corpses aboard the decoy passenger transports. Doing so assumes the Gbaba could tell whether they were occupied from a distance, and how much they'd care. If they blew it out of the sky, what it might contain was irrelevant. I don't see them boarding to check.
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Dennis

Bluesqueak wrote:

DMcCunney wrote:The "bait and switch" was to let the actual colony fleet make a clean breakaway. I'm not sure there'd be a point to real or fake corpses aboard the decoy passenger transports. Doing so assumes the Gbaba could tell whether they were occupied from a distance, and how much they'd care. If they blew it out of the sky, what it might contain was irrelevant. I don't see them boarding to check.
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Dennis

Yes, but what happens if a ship 'breaks its back', as happens so often in the Honorverse? No, the Gbaba probably can't tell from a distance whether the ship has 'colonists' on board or not - but they can tell if there's debris, and they can tell if there's absolutely no sign of anybody but crew in that debris. If the ship breaks its back, they could go over and check out the wreckage.

Remember - one thing the Terran Federation know is that the Gbaba have seen the 'secret colony' trick before. They have to presume the Gbaba will not only destroy every ship they can find, they'll check to ensure nothing survived and no-one escaped.

This is the existence of our entire species at stake. Would the Federation really risk a 'cut-price' decoy?

DMcCunney wrote:The "bait and switch" was to let the actual colony fleet make a clean breakaway. I'm not sure there'd be a point to real or fake corpses aboard the decoy passenger transports. Doing so assumes the Gbaba could tell whether they were occupied from a distance, and how much they'd care. If they blew it out of the sky, what it might contain was irrelevant. I don't see them boarding to check.

Yes, but what happens if a ship 'breaks its back', as happens so often in the Honorverse? No, the Gbaba probably can't tell from a distance whether the ship has 'colonists' on board or not - but they can tell if there's debris, and they can tell if there's absolutely no sign of anybody but crew in that debris. If the ship breaks its back, they could go over and check out the wreckage.

Remember - one thing the Terran Federation know is that the Gbaba have seen the 'secret colony' trick before. They have to presume the Gbaba will not only destroy every ship they can find, they'll check to ensure nothing survived and no-one escaped.

This is the existence of our entire species at stake. Would the Federation really risk a 'cut-price' decoy?

DMcCunney wrote:It depends on what the TF's leads them to believe the Gbaba will do. I don't see the Gbaba searching the wreckage after they destroy a ship, and I don't think the TF planners did either.
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Dennis

DrakBibliophile wrote:If you talking about how the Gbaba originally found the Terran Federation, David Weber has said that the Gbaba had visited the area of Space that the TF once was long before humans had left Earth (when they destroyed at least one Alien Civilization).

From what David Weber said, the Gbaba left listening posts in that region of Space that Terran space travel triggered.