SPOILERS TEiF: the future of the Alignment on Darius

munroburton wrote:That's not happening. Objects in the lane have to move slowly for several minutes to exit, then they have to find the outbound lane, realign with it and enter that lane as slowly as they exited. By then, any manner of automated defenses has acted. Nothing ever survives to exit the inbound lane, let alone the rest of the process.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Why do they have to move slowly? There's nothing in the physics of the transit lanes that forces that for the object, it's only the wedge that is the problem. So use a different propulsion and manoeuvring system: rockets. It can't be that difficult. It is just rocket science after all.

And if you can send one, you can send several too and hope one of them makes the transit back.

I don't expect this will happen. David has been pretty adamant about what can transit a wormhole. But my point is that in-universe they can't know what David is thinking and therefore the Alignment can't bet the farm (or the planet) on that NOT happening. Aside from losing access to the wormhole, this would be a completely unnecessary risk.

A rocket provides no defensive cover, plus a rocket is slow compared to a wedge and it takes a small (but not negligible) amount of time to reconfigure from sails. A greater amount of time (depending on the size of the ship) is spent to recycle the hyperspace generator and until that is done the ship is stuck in a known volume of somewhat normal space surrounded by ships with energy weapons.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

munroburton wrote:That's not happening. Objects in the lane have to move slowly for several minutes to exit, then they have to find the outbound lane, realign with it and enter that lane as slowly as they exited. By then, any manner of automated defenses has acted. Nothing ever survives to exit the inbound lane, let alone the rest of the process.

Why do they have to move slowly? There's nothing in the physics of the transit lanes that forces that for the object, it's only the wedge that is the problem. So use a different propulsion and manoeuvring system: rockets. It can't be that difficult. It is just rocket science after all.

And if you can send one, you can send several too and hope one of them makes the transit back.

I don't expect this will happen. David has been pretty adamant about what can transit a wormhole. But my point is that in-universe they can't know what David is thinking and therefore the Alignment can't bet the farm (or the planet) on that NOT happening. Aside from losing access to the wormhole, this would be a completely unnecessary risk.

That is slow, for the Honorverse. Stuck under sail in n-space conditions until they exit and can use the impeller to reposition themselves for the return trip, they're limited to a few dozen gravities, IIRC. Even allowing for fusion thrusters boosting that to or by 150g, this is approximately the maximum impeller speed of many freighters.

I think if they send a swarm to make transit, it'd be easier upon the swarm to be able to run for hyperspace rather than trying to retransit, especially through a terminus they haven't been able to map and probe. Honorverse wormholes aren't as easy to use as most sci-fi wormholes tend to be.

My point is that the timing isn't totally in the Alignment's hands. When they decided to use Mannerheim to claim Felix, they set into motion an inevitable sequence of events. They can delay those events and incorporate them into their greater plan, but those events have to happen eventually. But we know that greater plan has suffered a serious setback, costing several decades. Can they string the Felix process out by that much more? I'm not so sure.

Even if you could get past the RFC prohibition on unmanned hyperspace ships, there would still be at least a few problems with the piggyback done hyperspace ship getting to where it can deliver any information.
The first, and most critical is that any ship using a wormhole is going relatively slowly when it exist at the end of it's transit. It then has to -once they re available (remember, the ship is using its sails not the normal impeller function) and accelerate out from the wormhole. If the ridership does not have a sail deployed (that would probably be fatal) then it would have to detach and get enough room between the mother ship and itself BEFORE bringing up it's own wedge. What are the odds that whatever blasts the exiting ship ---before said ship reconfigures it's sails and starts to gather way under impellers and before it can get any useful information from it's sensors---is going to see some "part" of the entering ship seperate and then bring up a wedge? Probably fairly high. They are essentialy saturating the exit lane with active sensors and a 2nd wedge coming up is going to be a really noticeable thing. But the ridership is still going to be moving relatively slowly, probably isn't going to have active sensors engaged (trying to be really really stealthy) untill X amount of time after transit and hope to coast out and avoid detection.

Second, the rider ship, IF it manages to avoid detection, is still going to have to figure out where it is. That means that it is going to have to apply all of the passive sensor capability it has to picking up stelar cartography data and run comparisons against existing stellar data for things like quasars, pulsars, and what stars it can detect to see what it can recognize. There are a couple of points here. One is that might be doing that while it is basically gliding out of the exit lane at some vector imparted by it's carrier ship to try and sneak away or it gets sufficiently far from it's carrier- flips it's impellers to max and runs like hell, hoping to survive till it gets to the calculated hyper-limit of the wormhole, and do that with some computer trying to suck down data and figure out where said hyper limit is. Ah, well.

So how big is the ridership? It has to be at least Dispatch Boat sized but probably larger. It may not require an environmental suite of systems to carry people but it certainly is going to carry enough hydrogen and or water to keep it's fusion reactor running for a long time. Probably years. Why? Because if it is able to exit the system it emerged into, and has calculated a potential destination that will bring it back into range of a GA location that will be able to receive it, it has to get there in hyperspace and may or may not have to drop out of hyperspace to refigure where it is and where it is going based on updated information. Has to be hyperspace---just setting a course in n-space and going at best cruising speed isn't going to cut it as there is "stuff" in n-space and more things you have to avoid to go from point a to point b. Of course there is always the chalenge that gravity waves represent and going from somewere not in your database to point X though hyperspace area not yet explored is.....iffy.

Ah well. Bon Voyage.

Another tactic to survive a wormhole ambush: Build something big. I'm talking fortress sized. While it moves it's not really a ship--it's wormhole capable and that's it. Beyond that, it's a great volume of a structure consisting of large, strong containers of gravel. Tucked away inside is a shielded, powered down hyper-capable drone.

The defenders will pound it to wreckage--but the sheer mass of material around the drone will keep it from being destroyed. They won't find out the drone is inside until it's away from the wormhole and they try to examine the wreckage--and the drone isn't limited to human-tolerable acceleration.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

munroburton wrote:I agree, it won't be how they get caught out. But you've done a good job of illustrating why they can't keep a lid on Felix forever. It's much too valuable in comparison to the nearly useless(at least commercially) bridge from somewhere in Haven to Bolthole.

In fact, there's a system of wormholes within one-week's travel from one another that could form a great circuit through the Core:

1. Warner
2. Mannerheim
3. Felix
4. The Twins
5. Congo
6. Erewhon
7. Terra Haute
8. Hennesy
9. Manticore
10. Beowulf

We don't know how far Beowulf is from Warner. We know Warner wasn't the closest target to Sol they were planning for Operation Rat Catcher, and it might be on the other side of Sol from Sigma Draconis, but both are still in the Core. I seriously doubt it would be longer than the Gregor-Basilisk transit through Silesia was for the RMMS, and it would be through MUCH richer regions.

That actually begs the question: are wormholes more common than we or they had thought?

I've just remembered one more thing: Warner is one week's travel from the Sarduchi-Włocławek Warp Bridge, which connects it to the Madras Sector, which the GA has just freed from OFS oppression. The Mannerheim and RF businesspeople, if they weren't controlled by the MAlign, should be salivating at the opportunity that those newly-opened markets could mean for them.

I dont suppose that anyone has a sketch of these wormholes? particularly Mannerheim, Felix, Twins & Congo

isaac_newton wrote:I don't suppose that anyone has a sketch of these wormholes? particularly Mannerheim, Felix, Twins & Congo

The last map that I have seen was from 2019 on the thread included below. It does show Calvin's Hope, but not the wormhole that Haven uses to access the system. I am not sure that I have seen a map that shows Mannerheim and the other members of the Renaissance Factor, much less any wormhole associated.
"Bolthole Location"

isaac_newton wrote:I dont suppose that anyone has a sketch of these wormholes? particularly Mannerheim, Felix, Twins & Congo

No. As tlb said, we don't know where the other members of the RF are, except for Visigoth, which is in the map he linked to.

We do know that Felix is only 12 light-years from Mannerheim.

I've just found the distance between Beowulf and Warner. [i]Uncompromising Honor[i] has this:

Uncompromising Honor, 54.3% wrote:Daniel frowned, rubbing his lower lip as he did some mental math. Warner to Beowulf was 103 light-years. For a standard freighter, that worked out to thirty-five days or so [...]

Uncompromising Honor, 54.5% wrote:"It's only about eight days from Warner to Sol under streak drive [...]"

A streak ship has an effective speed of 3000c for a warship, which we should assume this courier that Daniel and Benjamin were talking about. Ignoring acceleration and band transitions because "about eight days" is already pretty imprecise, that gives us about 66 light-years. So Sol, Beowulf and Warner form a triangle with sides 66, 103 and 40 light-years. That pretty much places the three systems on a direct line and, thus, Warner is on the other side of Sol.

(Wikipedia says Sigma Draconis is actually less than half that distance and at 18.77 light-years, we can get pretty precise distance measurements via stellar parallax)

That means Warner does lead into the heart of the Core. Going from there to Beowulf would pretty much mean a stop in Sol for more cargo. That's an extremely lucrative route.

In the map linked above, my guess is that Warner is one of the stars opposite Beowulf from Sol (towards the bottom of the map). Given that Maya is about at 2 o'clock in that map and given how Chuck Gannon scrolled the map in front of Kingsford, my guess is that the RF also on the right side of the map. If they are marked stars in the map, my guess would be that bunch of stars bypassed by the Phoenix Cluster wormholes. If they aren't marked, my guess would be somewhere at 4 or 5 o'clock.

Also, it appears the Verge is pretty close to Warner on that side of the League.

Shadow of Victory, ch. 44 wrote:Nor would it take long for Frontier Fleet to respond if they did send for help. Thanks to the Włocławek-Sarduchi warp bridge, Włocławek was little more than a week away from the Frontier Fleet naval base in the Warner System, which also happened to be the location of an OFS sector HQ.

(emphasis mine)

It's unclear if the OFS sector HQ is in Sarduchi or in Warner, but that's not important. The important part is that Sarduchi is just over a week from Sarduchi. 8 days under regular Eta band for warships is about 47 light-years; 9 days is 53. That places the verge at about 100 light-years from Sol on that side.

tlb wrote:

isaac_newton wrote:I don't suppose that anyone has a sketch of these wormholes? particularly Mannerheim, Felix, Twins & Congo

The last map that I have seen was from 2019 on the thread included below. It does show Calvin's Hope, but not the wormhole that Haven uses to access the system. I am not sure that I have seen a map that shows Mannerheim and the other members of the Renaissance Factor, much less any wormhole associated.
"Bolthole Location"

thanks for that.

Interestingly I see I was in that conversation too! must like maps...

BTW for some reason I had it in mind that Bolthole was located somewhere round the 'back' of Manticore, and not right in the SL space.

tlb wrote:

isaac_newton wrote:I don't suppose that anyone has a sketch of these wormholes? particularly Mannerheim, Felix, Twins & Congo

The last map that I have seen was from 2019 on the thread included below. It does show Calvin's Hope, but not the wormhole that Haven uses to access the system. I am not sure that I have seen a map that shows Mannerheim and the other members of the Renaissance Factor, much less any wormhole associated.
"Bolthole Location"

thanks for that.

Interestingly I see I was in that conversation too! must like maps...

BTW for some reason I had it in mind that Bolthole was located somewhere round the 'back' of Manticore, and not right in the SL space.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I've just found the distance between Beowulf and Warner. Uncompromising Honor has this:

Uncompromising Honor, 54.3% wrote:Daniel frowned, rubbing his lower lip as he did some mental math. Warner to Beowulf was 103 light-years. For a standard freighter, that worked out to thirty-five days or so [...]

Uncompromising Honor, 54.5% wrote:"It's only about eight days from Warner to Sol under streak drive [...]"

A streak ship has an effective speed of 3000c for a warship, which we should assume this courier that Daniel and Benjamin were talking about. Ignoring acceleration and band transitions because "about eight days" is already pretty imprecise, that gives us about 66 light-years. So Sol, Beowulf and Warner form a triangle with sides 66, 103 and 40 light-years. That pretty much places the three systems on a direct line and, thus, Warner is on the other side of Sol.

Actually based on some other quotes around the Streak drive I think it needs to be significantly more than 3000c. Actually, we know from the speed by hyper band chart originally from (IIRC) More Than Honor that the Iota bands have a velocity multiplier of 6000c, which implies a warship speed there of 6000c*.6 = 3600c.

But based on the quotes below I calculated that streak drive would need even more than that; meaning it cracks not just the Iota wall but the Kappa one as well.

"It's only sixty light-years from Beowulf to Mesa via the Visigoth Wormhole. That's only five days for a streak boat" - SftS
"the voyage from New Tuscany to Mesa, which would have taken anyone else the next best thing to forty-five T-days, had taken Anisimovna less than thirty-one" - MoH

We've no numbers from the books or chart on Kappa, but to cover in 31 days what takes any other dispatch boat 45 means that Kappa is ~1.45x faster than Theta. Meaning it's got to have a velocity multiplier around 7258c and thus a warship speed around 4354.8c. (And cross checking that against the other quote: 60 LY / 4354.8c gives you 5.03 days; so that checks out)


That means that your "about eight days" of streak travel actually should give a range, ignoring acceleration, of about 95 lightyears (rather than 66). And a triangle of 40, 103, and 95 LY would put Warner way off to the side of the Beowulf/Sol line.