SPOILERS: To End In Fire eARC discussion

And I apologize for dumping several responses in a row here -- but that happens when finally being able to read an old thread.

cthia wrote:The cotton I am tiptoeing on in this spoiler thread is beginning to stick to the very thin ice. I am beginning to hear details that are coming close to making me bug out, as in tuck tail and run.

Anyway, I read two pages of the freebie, or rather glossed over two pages. But one thing caught my eye. The smart fabric that was used to camouflage the entire main operation on an island for at least decades. It is stated that this smart fabric is state of the art even in the HV. And nobody else has it or anything like it. It fits the notion I always maintained that the MA had a lot of time on their hands and will unleash a lot of new technologies upon the Galaxy.

At any rate, will this smart fabric have a use on warships? Will it be an added layer of stealth from the naked eye that will enable an LD to get close enough to a skunk to steal its stink?

I suspect it's very closely related to the optical stealth system we're told that the Sharks and Ghosts already had. IOW I think it already is a warship system for them.

However warships can be detected by emissions that are very hard to shield, not just be seeing them. So even perfect optical stealth is unlikely to let an LD "get close enough to a skunk to steal its stink"; at least not if the "skunk" is paying attention.

Last one for the moment

jtg452 wrote:They never would have cross the hyper limit no matter what direction they headed.

The GA was outside the limit and could go into hyper as quick as their generators could cycle (about 4 1/2 minutes according to the book). Once in hyper, they could cross the system while in hyper (or go around the gravity bubble or whatever it it) and come back out in front of the Galton force before they could cross the limit. The Galton ships would have never gotten to a point where they could go to hyper because the GA fleet had the maneuver advantage and hyper gave them the means of heading off anyone trying to leave the system. If they stayed in a group, one task force (of the 4 making up the GA fleet) would have been enough to put an end to them.

Though with a bit of luck Galton could have used the attempt to break out as a trap for detachments of the Grand Fleet. Start moving Hasta IIIs, or better to preserve those, just use their paired stealth tug plantform to move some standard Cataphract pods out where they can reach the most probably area for a GA detachment to hyper in to rain down Mk23s on the 'escaping' MAlign units. Once the trap is set send those SDs to their death in the hopes that Honor will divert a small enough detachment to be seriously damaged by the pre-placed missiles. Even if she moves the whole fleet, once she hypers in she's stuck for well over 4.5 minutes as the hyper generators build back to the fully charged state, she won't have the shells of recon drones and anti-missile LACs already in place (yeah, they'll be launching as soon as she hypers in, but guess reasonable right about where her forces will appear and the missiles will be arriving well before the screen has gotten all the way out into position. So in that trap scenario the ships will be more vulnerable than they'd been turtled up behind their in depth defenses.


And of course, that whole attempt might just fail, but give Honor the room for a flash of maneuvering brilliance in this otherwise by the numbers siege; ordering the interception force to some unexpected spot that's still able to bring the MAlign ships under fire before they escape. (Or simply swatting them with extremely long range Mk23 fire without detaching a single ship)

Jonathan_S wrote:Finally reading this thread and chiming in, as I got the book from the library a couple days ago and just finished it.

Welcome to the joys of joining a months-old discussion... happened to me a month ago.

I agree that Galton should have had recon drones equipped with graser heads. (Even if they were just their Beta drones; with very stealthy impeller drives). Not only because of the endurance issue you mentioned for Galton having pulled off Oyster Bay, but also we're explicitly told that to scale them down into Cataphract Galton's designers had to reduce the power of the graser.

Oh, endurance. Here's another question: do the Hastas have the endurance that Oyster Bay did take? Manticore knows exactly what transition was the prelude to the attack and the attack itself down to the millisecond. That was about two months apart.

If the Hastas don't have that endurance, then either they had to be carried by stealth ships that weren't seen on Galton or they weren't the weapons used in the attack.

I expect that when the analysists back at the various navies' Admiralties or R&D divisions start comparing the data from the fighting at Galton with the sensor readings Manticore got from Oyster Bay that they'll pretty quickly spot that reduced power level, and resulting lower than expected damage.

Another good point and a VERY telling one. The RMN has very precise measurements of the power levels of both events. One could argue that the prototype weapons deployed for OB were massively overpowered and thus not something that could be done in a volume fashion, but I don't buy it. They worked just fine when firing and they had lasted several months while in transit.

One more thing now: the MAlign did ship graserheads from Galton (presumably, to a blackhole) just so that there was a record of weapons being delivered in time to be used in Oyster Bay... but the specs on those weapons that were shipped won't match what got used. There will be no doubt that the documentation found in Galton has been doctored.

There were a few other things that jumped out at me. I didn't like the scene where the name Bolthole was almost shared with the Ghost Hunters. First it was pretty damned sloppy to start to use that name outside of the most cleared circles; but second because they compounded the error by needlessly giving away that the alliance R&D was collocated with an major industrial base/shipyard in a secret system (by saying that the hypothesized secret system with the MAlign/Other Guy's industrial base and shipyard was their counterpart to the partly named location, "Bo-", where alliance R&D was located) If they'd kept that to themselves all the Ghost Hunters (and hence the League) would know is the GA has an big R&D center that someone started referring to as "Bo-".

I didn't like it when I read the book, but now that you've mentioned it and with a month of hindsight, it occurs to me that it may not have been sloppy, but intentional. The GA intelligence services knew about Bolthole by name, for a long time before even Tourville came calling and delivered a bunch of ships with dedication plaques saying "Built at Bolthole, 1919 PD." They knew that because those ships were being built somewhere that they couldn't find. Anyone in the Solarian League intelligence services who cared to pay attention to the war, even retroactively, would know that too. And the Ghost Hunters definitely fit in to this category.

I don't think the name "Bolthole" is classified. Like codenames, they don't give much information if accidentally leaked, but they do allow those who do know about it to know what they're talking about. Of course, someone can pretend to be in the information classification loop by knowing the appropriate codenames...

What that conversation did was to confirm that such a research centre did exist and the GA won't be telling the Sollies, even the good friends from the Ghost Hunters, where that is just yet.

And finally I was bothered by the short system sensor detection range that was used as the basis for the high speed scouting run. Honor says that the Manticoran system sensors can pick up a hyper transit at 2.5 lightweeks and so the scouts trying to confirm El Dorado (Galton) will aim to drop out at 3 lightweeks.
But multiple previous books (SftS, MoH, and SoV) show that the Manticoran system can detect even sneaky low energy transits at light months! And in fact the Sharks sneaking in for Oyster Bay were detected at one light-month, and the DesDiv 265.2 “the Silver Cepheids" showed up and closely searched that area a light-month from Manticore. (It's just that the spider drive let them clear the area without being tracked; whereas it's implied that a wedge, presumably even a low power stealthed one, would have been seen or tracked)

And all it would have taken to fix this is to extend the internal timeline of the book. Rather than planning to hit El Dorado within a few months, stretch it out to, say, a year. That doesn't have to make the book any longer, just change some dates to allow more time for the survey to drop out further away and a longer wait for the Ghost Riders to make their closer pass.

I made the same comment before, though I don't know on which thread.

We know the time it took for the hyper emergence footprint to travel to Manticore's sensor net: 12 hours. Given it was on the alpha band, that's a 31 light-day transit. Now, maybe I'm mis-remembering and 12 hours is not the time for the signal, but the time until the ready-Ddron appeared. But the destroyers wouldn't have travelled in the alpha band all the way. I've just quickly calculated for the bands from Alpha to Epsilon and, assuming a 15-minute delay between transitions both going up and down ((2n-1) * 15 min total, where n is the band number) and assuming the squadron was ready to go, Gamma provides the optimum travel time compared to distance covered: they'd cover 25.95 light-days. If it's a half-hour between transitions, then Beta is better, covering 23.94 light-days.

Either way, any numbers I run come up with more than 3 light-weeks.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:And finally I was bothered by the short system sensor detection range that was used as the basis for the high speed scouting run. Honor says that the Manticoran system sensors can pick up a hyper transit at 2.5 lightweeks and so the scouts trying to confirm El Dorado (Galton) will aim to drop out at 3 lightweeks.
But multiple previous books (SftS, MoH, and SoV) show that the Manticoran system can detect even sneaky low energy transits at light months! And in fact the Sharks sneaking in for Oyster Bay were detected at one light-month, and the DesDiv 265.2 “the Silver Cepheids" showed up and closely searched that area a light-month from Manticore. (It's just that the spider drive let them clear the area without being tracked; whereas it's implied that a wedge, presumably even a low power stealthed one, would have been seen or tracked)

And all it would have taken to fix this is to extend the internal timeline of the book. Rather than planning to hit El Dorado within a few months, stretch it out to, say, a year. That doesn't have to make the book any longer, just change some dates to allow more time for the survey to drop out further away and a longer wait for the Ghost Riders to make their closer pass.

I made the same comment before, though I don't know on which thread.

We know the time it took for the hyper emergence footprint to travel to Manticore's sensor net: 12 hours. Given it was on the alpha band, that's a 31 light-day transit. Now, maybe I'm mis-remembering and 12 hours is not the time for the signal, but the time until the ready-Ddron appeared. But the destroyers wouldn't have travelled in the alpha band all the way. I've just quickly calculated for the bands from Alpha to Epsilon and, assuming a 15-minute delay between transitions both going up and down ((2n-1) * 15 min total, where n is the band number) and assuming the squadron was ready to go, Gamma provides the optimum travel time compared to distance covered: they'd cover 25.95 light-days. If it's a half-hour between transitions, then Beta is better, covering 23.94 light-days.

Either way, any numbers I run come up with more than 3 light-weeks.

Snipped the other bits because they make sense, and I've nothing really to say to them.

I did eventually see your post in one of the other threads; there were just a lot of spoiler threads happened to start wading through this one first.

And I just found the other quote I was thinking of, about the sensor range of Manticore's arrays exceeding the range they'd picked the Sharks up at; it was hiding in SftS

Storm From the Shadows: Ch. 41 wrote:In the case of a star system like Manticore, those arrays could be literally thousands of kilometers across, with an exquisite sensitivity capable of picking up things like hyper-footprints and often even impeller signatures light-months out from the system primary, vastly beyond the range possible for any shipboard sensor.

As for how far out the Sharks inserted you were correct in remembering the 12 hours was for the time it took their sensor signal to arrive. We're also specifically told, multiple times in multiple book, it was "one light-month" (which as you pointed out does roughly cross-check with that "over twelve hours old").

(Pardon the massive wall of quotes; but parts of these were interesting to me beyond the simple "one light-month")

Storm From the Shadows: Ch. 51 wrote:This maneuver had been tested against the Mesa System's sensor arrays by crews using the early Ghost-class ships even before the first of the Shark-class prototypes had ever been laid down, and Task Force One had practiced it over a hundred times once the mission had been okayed. Despite all that, Topolev still cherished a few reservations about the entire operation. [snip]
Both groups of his [Shark] ships slid gradually, carefully towards the hyper wall, making the slowest possible translation back into normal-space.
It was physically impossible for any ship to cross the hyper wall without radiating a hyper footprint, but the strength of that footprint was-to a large extent, at least-a factor of the base velocity the ship in question wanted to carry across the wall. The alpha translation's bleed factor was roughly ninety-two percent, and all of that energy had to go somewhere. There was also an unavoidable gravitic spike or echo along the interface between the alpha bands of hyper-space and normal-space that was effectively independent of a ship's speed. Reducing velocity couldn't do anything about that, but a slow, "gentle" translation along a shallow gradient produced a much weaker spike, as well.
No translation, however slow and gentle, could render a hyper footprint too weak to be detected by the sort of arrays covering the Manticore Binary System. Yet arrays like that, because of their very sensitivity, were notorious for throwing up occasional "false positives," ghost translations that the filters were supposed to strain out before they ever reached a human operator's attention. And the most common ghosts of all normally appeared as a hyper footprint and an echo, which was precisely what Topolev's maneuver was supposed to counterfeit.
Under normal circumstances, there would have been very little point to deceiving the arrays where a simple hyper footprint was concerned, given the fact that those same arrays would almost certainly have picked up the impeller wedge of any ship headed towards the system. Even the best stealth systems were unreliable, at best, against a sensor array which could measure eight or nine thousand kilometers on a side, and Manticore's long-range sensors were even larger-and more sensitive-than that. Closer in, where the gradient of the stellar gravity well provided background interference and there were dozens of other gravity sources to clutter the landscape and turn the master arrays' very sensitivity against them, yes. The really big arrays were all but useless once you got within a light-hour or so of a system primary or a wormhole junction. That was where the shorter-ranged sensors aboard warships and recon platforms took over, and with good reason. But this far out was another matter entirely. Really good first-line stealth systems might manage to defeat the big arrays at this range, but no betting man would care to risk his money on the probability.
Fortunately, Frederick Topolev had no need to do anything of the sort.
[snip]
"Translation completed, Sir," Lieutenant Commander Vivienne Henning, his staff astrogator, announced. "Preliminary checks indicate we're right on the money: one light-month out on almost exactly the right bearing."

Storm From the Shadows: Ch. 51 wrote:Given the range on the possible footprint, the datum was over twelve hours old. Footprints, like gravitic pulses, were detectable by the fluctuations they imposed on the alpha wall interface with normal-space, which meant they propagated at roughly sixty-four times the speed of light. For most practical purposes, that equated to real-time, or very near to real-time, but when you started talking about the detection ranges possible to Perimeter Security Command's huge arrays, even that speed left room for considerable delays.
It seemed like an awfully long way to go for very little return. There'd been no sign of an impeller wedge, which meant no one was out there accelerating towards the star system. If there'd been an actual hyper footprint in the first place-which Epstein frankly doubted was the case-it had to have been some merchantship coming in with appallingly bad astrogation. Whoever it was had popped out of hyper a full light-month short of his intended destination, and then promptly (and sensibly) popped right back into hyper rather than spending the endless weeks which would have been required to reach anyplace worthwhile under impeller drive.[snip]
better safe than sorry. That could have been the motto of Perimeter Security Command instead of the official "Always Vigilant,"

(Though I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be "sixty-two" not "sixty-four"; though either way that's coming out to 11.x hours; so it must have been slightly further out than exactly 1 light-month [30 light-days, or 720 light-hours] to get an FTL signal delay of over 12 hours)

Mission of Honor: Ch. 3 wrote:The four destroyers of the Royal Manticoran Navy’s Destroyer Division 265.2, known as “the Silver Cepheids,” had been sitting a light-month from Manticore-A for two weeks [snip]
DesDiv 265.2 had been sent to check out what was almost certainly a sensor ghost but which could, just possibly, have been an actual hyper footprint.

Shadow of Victory: Ch. 29 wrote:At the moment, courtesy of the very faint hyper signature picked up by one Lieutenant Commander Epstein’s section and kicked up the chain by that same Lieutenant Commander Epstein, DesDiv 265.2 was approximately one light-month from Hephaestus. And from Drescher’s broad grin—it would never have done to call it a smirk, of course—they damned well hadn’t found anything when they reached the signature’s locus. Which meant it truly had been a sensor ghost…and that SOP required Cepheids to maintain and overwatch on the location for the next two T-weeks.

So, just when do we find the various analysts both in the Fleet sent to El Dorado and back at the various ONI operations start asking pointed questions about why NOTHING that would have like the platforms that hit the various stations etc in Oyster Bay at Manticore and Grayson have been found or noted? Major grazers on missiles but NOT anything like what could be used to sneek in as close as the GTs did and then slew the grazer beams around. Same thing for the effectively invisible starships (except for that downward transition to N-space way out from Manticore) being used to any identifiable piece of defense of El Dorado to do stuff like attacking the GL fleet? Oh, and nothing about ANY ships what were on sensor records (either from the recon mission or from when Harrington & company arrive) of a vessel of any sort which is there one moment and then just gone.
And, yes, given the really really really good sensors and tactical equipment of the GA fleet, grazer fire from points not occupied by "something" that would show up on sensors, one could conclude that none of the "invisible" drive devices or ships were used. Why? Because the grazer fire from the Silver Bullets was picked up at Beowulf but nobody could tell what it came from. I have to think that somebody in the intelligence or weapons analysis areas would think to look at the data of what happened to things like the Hesperus Station and the Grazer fire from out of nowhere at Beowulf specifically at the defence system and see what "might" be similar or differnt about it?

Because we are fairly sure that all mention and equipment that ended up being used with Spider Drive ships and weapons was vacuumed out of El Dorado files. If this was the hidden industrialized munitions factory and HQ of the Alignment.......who did that and where is/was that stuff comming from. Tum the tum tum kind of stuff.

Jonathan_S wrote:(Though I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be "sixty-two" not "sixty-four"; though either way that's coming out to 11.x hours; so it must have been slightly further out than exactly 1 light-month [30 light-days, or 720 light-hours] to get an FTL signal delay of over 12 hours)

It should indeed be 62. See http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/entry/Harrington/95/1http://www.davidweber.net/posts/15-hyperband-graph.html

As for the light-month... that's an ill-defined metric, since months don't have the same length. 62 times light would need exactly 12 hours to cover 31 light-days, which most months are.

Maybe we're talking about 730-hour months, which is the average month duration in a 365-day year.

Maybe it should even be 730.5, so it's one twelfth of a light-year, which is defined as a 365.25 light-day space.

But the Hayden Planetarium defines the light-month equivalent to 30 light-days (thanks Neil!).

Brigade XO wrote:So, just when do we find the various analysts both in the Fleet sent to El Dorado and back at the various ONI operations start asking pointed questions about why NOTHING that would have like the platforms that hit the various stations etc in Oyster Bay at Manticore and Grayson have been found or noted? Major grazers on missiles but NOT anything like what could be used to sneek in as close as the GTs did and then slew the grazer beams around. Same thing for the effectively invisible starships (except for that downward transition to N-space way out from Manticore) being used to any identifiable piece of defense of El Dorado to do stuff like attacking the GL fleet? Oh, and nothing about ANY ships what were on sensor records (either from the recon mission or from when Harrington & company arrive) of a vessel of any sort which is there one moment and then just gone.
And, yes, given the really really really good sensors and tactical equipment of the GA fleet, grazer fire from points not occupied by "something" that would show up on sensors, one could conclude that none of the "invisible" drive devices or ships were used. Why? Because the grazer fire from the Silver Bullets was picked up at Beowulf but nobody could tell what it came from. I have to think that somebody in the intelligence or weapons analysis areas would think to look at the data of what happened to things like the Hesperus Station and the Grazer fire from out of nowhere at Beowulf specifically at the defence system and see what "might" be similar or differnt about it?

Because we are fairly sure that all mention and equipment that ended up being used with Spider Drive ships and weapons was vacuumed out of El Dorado files. If this was the hidden industrialized munitions factory and HQ of the Alignment.......who did that and where is/was that stuff comming from. Tum the tum tum kind of stuff.

The data awasn't vacuumed off their files. It was never there in the first place. There were some people who knew it existed and I doubt there more than a dozen total in the entire system, including the Top Two commanders. Those knew what Alamo Contingency was and they were prepared to die to prevent any of their knowledge from falling onto the GA's hands. But having something in one's heads and having files is not the same thing.

I suspect a lot of data survived because of Honor not returning fire. Because of that, I expect the intelligence services will be able to tell what was deleted from what was never there in the first place. Plus, there'll be NO ONE left in the system who has a clue what a spider drive is. You can't keep that a secret from the entire population if it had been developed there.

As Jonathan reminded me, there WERE records about warheads being shipped out of Galton to seemingly be used by the Yawata and Beowulf strikes. But what about the torpedo bodies? The sensor readings will clearly show that they were not Hasta bodies -- if no other reason than that Hasta didn't exist at the time of OB and there's pretty good paper record from Technodyne (captured at Ganymede) of how that was developed. This is even assuming those graserheads match the power output measured at both incidents.

So, this seems like a major blunder by the MAlign part. Quite uncharacteristic, actually, compared to how well-executed Houdini was and how difficult it was to finding those clues.

The only theory I have is that, like Houdini, the plan to sacrifice Galton had been in place before the spider drive was invented, before two Strikes were launched, and a top-down decision was made not to share that information with Galton, without a proper assessment of how that weakened the plan in the first place. Or, alternatively, that such an assessment was done, but it was felt that it was best to leave those inconsistencies to be discovered rather than risk losing the technological secret on the spider drives.

PS: graser = Gamma Ray Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation; grazer = animals that graze (cows). Not an uncommon mistake... about 25 years ago, I remember an exam that asked students to write an essay on leisure (in Portuguese, "lazer") and a good third of them extolled the virtues of light and radiation.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:PS: graser = Gamma Ray Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation; grazer = animals that graze (cows). Not an uncommon mistake... about 25 years ago, I remember an exam that asked students to write an essay on leisure (in Portuguese, "lazer") and a good third of them extolled the virtues of light and radiation.

However if this space cow grazes an object, then the object will explode (along with the cow). Instead of graser torpedo, some have settled on G-torp, which is easier and avoids the problem.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:So, just when do we find the various analysts both in the Fleet sent to El Dorado and back at the various ONI operations start asking pointed questions about why NOTHING that would have like the platforms that hit the various stations etc in Oyster Bay at Manticore and Grayson have been found or noted? Major grazers on missiles but NOT anything like what could be used to sneek in as close as the GTs did and then slew the grazer beams around. Same thing for the effectively invisible starships (except for that downward transition to N-space way out from Manticore) being used to any identifiable piece of defense of El Dorado to do stuff like attacking the GL fleet? Oh, and nothing about ANY ships what were on sensor records (either from the recon mission or from when Harrington & company arrive) of a vessel of any sort which is there one moment and then just gone.
And, yes, given the really really really good sensors and tactical equipment of the GA fleet, grazer fire from points not occupied by "something" that would show up on sensors, one could conclude that none of the "invisible" drive devices or ships were used. Why? Because the grazer fire from the Silver Bullets was picked up at Beowulf but nobody could tell what it came from. I have to think that somebody in the intelligence or weapons analysis areas would think to look at the data of what happened to things like the Hesperus Station and the Grazer fire from out of nowhere at Beowulf specifically at the defence system and see what "might" be similar or differnt about it?

Because we are fairly sure that all mention and equipment that ended up being used with Spider Drive ships and weapons was vacuumed out of El Dorado files. If this was the hidden industrialized munitions factory and HQ of the Alignment.......who did that and where is/was that stuff comming from. Tum the tum tum kind of stuff.

The data awasn't vacuumed off their files. It was never there in the first place. There were some people who knew it existed and I doubt there more than a dozen total in the entire system, including the Top Two commanders. Those knew what Alamo Contingency was and they were prepared to die to prevent any of their knowledge from falling onto the GA's hands. But having something in one's heads and having files is not the same thing.

I suspect a lot of data survived because of Honor not returning fire. Because of that, I expect the intelligence services will be able to tell what was deleted from what was never there in the first place. Plus, there'll be NO ONE left in the system who has a clue what a spider drive is. You can't keep that a secret from the entire population if it had been developed there.

As Jonathan reminded me, there WERE records about warheads being shipped out of Galton to seemingly be used by the Yawata and Beowulf strikes. But what about the torpedo bodies? The sensor readings will clearly show that they were not Hasta bodies -- if no other reason than that Hasta didn't exist at the time of OB and there's pretty good paper record from Technodyne (captured at Ganymede) of how that was developed. This is even assuming those graserheads match the power output measured at both incidents.

So, this seems like a major blunder by the MAlign part. Quite uncharacteristic, actually, compared to how well-executed Houdini was and how difficult it was to finding those clues.

The only theory I have is that, like Houdini, the plan to sacrifice Galton had been in place before the spider drive was invented, before two Strikes were launched, and a top-down decision was made not to share that information with Galton, without a proper assessment of how that weakened the plan in the first place. Or, alternatively, that such an assessment was done, but it was felt that it was best to leave those inconsistencies to be discovered rather than risk losing the technological secret on the spider drives.

PS: graser = Gamma Ray Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation; grazer = animals that graze (cows). Not an uncommon mistake... about 25 years ago, I remember an exam that asked students to write an essay on leisure (in Portuguese, "lazer") and a good third of them extolled the virtues of light and radiation.

The weapons were the Cataphracts used at Torch (the PNiE diverted way out Yonder to pick them up), and Raging Justice used at Manticore (the weird Manifests the Filareta was analyzing).

And at Galton they will find ... Cataphracts, just like they suspect.

Theemile wrote:The weapons were the Cataphracts used at Torch (the PNiE diverted way out Yonder to pick them up), and Raging Justice used at Manticore (the weird Manifests the Filareta was analyzing).

And at Galton they will find ... Cataphracts, just like they suspect.

Yes, and the transit time of the weapons to both Filareta and the PNiE is what led the intelligence services to notice those had to come from the MAlign somewhere, not from Technodyne. And it does seem like they came from Galton. Galton certainly had the means to construct those Cataphract missiles and did use a version even later than Filareta's against Honor. So it makes perfect reason that Galton was the source of those, as they were "unclassified" for Galton and Galton had the industry designed for this anyway.

But it's not what we were talking about. We're talking about the graser torpedoes that were used against the MBS stations, Blackbird and the Beowulf ones. Those were not Cataphract variants with graserheads and they were not carried aboard Hastas.