Bolthole location

Anyone know what story/stories have the location of Bolthole? The one I'm thinking of has its location described by how many light years it is from several different "known" locations.

thanks in Advance

It is called Dark Fall.

It is included in Uncompromising Honor and is also available on Baen. https://www.baen.com/darkfall

Cheers!

Just a little FYI, Calvin's Hope is 200 ly from Sol and 150 ly from Beowulf, and Bolthole is 9.7 ly from that.

The thing is, Beowulf is ~44 ly from Sol so the figures in Darkfall must by rounded otherwise they don't intersect.

I think I found a possible location. Look at this map, the center of the red dot should be Calvin's Hope and the star just below must then be Bolthole. It's the best candidates with the distances given I can find.

Joat42 wrote:Just a little FYI, Calvin's Hope is 200 ly from Sol and 150 ly from Beowulf, and Bolthole is 9.7 ly from that.

The thing is, Beowulf is ~44 ly from Sol so the figures in Darkfall must by rounded otherwise they don't intersect.

I think I found a possible location. Look at this map, the center of the red dot should be Calvin's Hope and the star just below must then be Bolthole. It's the best candidates with the distances given I can find.

Well, another issue I have with those maps is that the galaxy, at the scale we're talking about, is not flat. The disc of the galaxy is indeed only 1/100th of the diameter, which means a CD or a DVD is actually to scale on first approximation. But that means it's 1000 light-years thick.

Take this map, for example. There should be a lot more stars close to Sol, though that of course would have made it unreadable.

The distances of several wormholes are known:

• Beowulf: 475 ly
• Hennesy: 712 ly
• Lynx: 612 ly
• Matapan: 472 ly
• Erewhon-Terra Haute: 390 ly
• Mesa-Visigoth: 586 ly

Dividing them by the distance to Beowulf gives us:

• Beowulf: 1.00
• Hennesy: 1.50
• Lynx: 1.29
• Matapan: 0.99
• Terra Haute: 0.82
• Mesa: 1.23

If I measure the length of the lines in the map and divide by the length of the Beowulf line, I get:

• Beowulf: 1.00
• Hennesy: 1.49
• Lynx: 1.22
• Matapan: 0.98
• Terra Haute: 0.83
• Mesa: 0.77

The only one to show any distance in the other dimension is Mesa. The other ones are within 6%, so within the measurement error and could be said to be basically all on the same plane.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:..snip..
Well, another issue I have with those maps is that the galaxy, at the scale we're talking about, is not flat. The disc of the galaxy is indeed only 1/100th of the diameter, which means a CD or a DVD is actually to scale on first approximation. But that means it's 1000 light-years thick.

There where some earlier maps that actually showed that the stars where above/under the galactic plane.

Regardless of the inherent problems of a 2D map representing a 3D space, the location I approximated for Bolthole shouldn't be far from the mark unless the maps published so far doesn't contain the systems discussed in Darkfall.

Joat42 wrote:Just a little FYI, Calvin's Hope is 200 ly from Sol and 150 ly from Beowulf, and Bolthole is 9.7 ly from that.

The thing is, Beowulf is ~44 ly from Sol so the figures in Darkfall must by rounded otherwise they don't intersect.

I think I found a possible location. Look at this map, the center of the red dot should be Calvin's Hope and the star just below must then be Bolthole. It's the best candidates with the distances given I can find.

Hah - for some reason I had it in my mind that Bolthole was somewhere in Manticorean dominated space, not in the SL.

Did they forget about radio in the Honorverse?

With Bolthole only a few hundred light years from almost every major solar system, someone should have noticed their radio emissions.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:Did they forget about radio in the Honorverse?

With Bolthole only a few hundred light years from almost every major solar system, someone should have noticed their radio emissions.

No, they didn't. The society in Sanctuary had lost all technology and by 1900 PD they were still equivalent to Renaissance. Da Vinci would have been ecstatic to have access to radio -- Marconi wouldn't be born for another 300 years.

So Sanctuary wasn't receiving anything because they didn't know there was anything to be received and no one was receiving from them because they weren't emitting. They've only begun emitting in the past 20 years.

Even now, a planet in that radius may not notice a new source in all the radio noise of all the other neighbours.

isaac_newton wrote:

Joat42 wrote:Just a little FYI, Calvin's Hope is 200 ly from Sol and 150 ly from Beowulf, and Bolthole is 9.7 ly from that.

The thing is, Beowulf is ~44 ly from Sol so the figures in Darkfall must by rounded otherwise they don't intersect.

I think I found a possible location. Look at this map, the center of the red dot should be Calvin's Hope and the star just below must then be Bolthole. It's the best candidates with the distances given I can find.

Hah - for some reason I had it in my mind that Bolthole was somewhere in Manticorean dominated space, not in the SL.

Well, according to Darkfall the northern terminus of the bridge is ~70 ly from Haven and the bridge itself is 653.17 ly long. That means it has to be in the SL sphere when it is located only ~200 ly from Sol.

Considering the tentative location of Calvin's Hope and the bridge distance the only location for the wormhole in Haven is either the Cerberus system or an unnamed system east of Fordyce which lies east of Haven.

I can generate a map with all the intersecting distances if someone is interested.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:Did they forget about radio in the Honorverse?

With Bolthole only a few hundred light years from almost every major solar system, someone should have noticed their radio emissions.

That hypotheses needs 5 elements to work:
1. Someone needs to listen with quite sensitive equipment.
2. The colonists would have had to foreseen the need to build a transmitter before they where volcano-blasted back to the stone-age.
3. The listener would have to know that they didn't colonize Calvin's Hope so they could point their equipment at the new system.
4. There had to be some system setup before they left that a radio-message would arrive at around 750-770 PD (like ~700 years after they left).
5. Angus Calvin chose the target system for the specific reason of getting away from Earth and it's politics, which would have been a lie from the beginning.