SPOILERS: To End In Fire eARC discussion

Exactly......no G-torps with undetectable drives and no "invisible" starships.

Why would a system, apparently dedicate to being the arsenal and major R&D location for the Alignment not have either of those two things being use in it's own defesnse?
Sure, it is possible that all the R&D and prototypes were on the stations which self destruct....but not to use them in defense?
And then there is Streak Drive......will ANY ship or pieces or plans for Streak Drive be found in Galton?
We are told that some of the Houdini people were sent to (directly) Galton. Are any of them on stations which were not destroyed? Are any on the planet in that high security/non slave area? Did any of them survive and what were they doing that was so important that they had to be slipped out of Mesa with Houdini but they ended up a Scapegoat II? Really? You hauled them all the way to Galton as really really essential personal and that was a place that was going to be yet another sacrificial cut-out in the Detweiler plan?

Do you start to wonder if the Alignment has gone off the rails and is being controlled by psychopaths with God complexes?

Maybe only way RFC could easily figure out how to wrap up the series quickly is by the "plan" to not be updated.
Bureaucracy is essential even for supermen. So, when they decided to unveil their Spider drive Torps etc, they forgot to update their cutout plan(Galton) and the details got dropped in the middle? After all it is glaringly obvious to one and all by dearth of the Spider Drive @ Galton.

Could the MALIGN make an argument that the GA doesn't know of the Spider drive?... I know Simones and a certain news conference which even Detweiler commented on... But could a lower level flunky who is in charge of "updating" the plan NOT know this? Maybe said Bureaucrat is sequestered at Darius and never heard said news conference???

Only thing I can come up with. SNAFU's happen

Brigade XO wrote:Exactly......no G-torps with undetectable drives and no "invisible" starships.

Why would a system, apparently dedicate to being the arsenal and major R&D location for the Alignment not have either of those two things being use in it's own defesnse?
Sure, it is possible that all the R&D and prototypes were on the stations which self destruct....but not to use them in defense?
And then there is Streak Drive......will ANY ship or pieces or plans for Streak Drive be found in Galton?
We are told that some of the Houdini people were sent to (directly) Galton. Are any of them on stations which were not destroyed? Are any on the planet in that high security/non slave area? Did any of them survive and what were they doing that was so important that they had to be slipped out of Mesa with Houdini but they ended up a Scapegoat II? Really? You hauled them all the way to Galton as really really essential personal and that was a place that was going to be yet another sacrificial cut-out in the Detweiler plan?

Do you start to wonder if the Alignment has gone off the rails and is being controlled by psychopaths with God complexes?

Brigade XO wrote:Exactly......no G-torps with undetectable drives and no "invisible" starships.

Why would a system, apparently dedicate to being the arsenal and major R&D location for the Alignment not have either of those two things being use in it's own defesnse?

There's only one possible reason: this is not their source and whoever owns them didn't share with Galton. Which happens to be the truth too.

And then there is Streak Drive......will ANY ship or pieces or plans for Streak Drive be found in Galton?

I think so.

We are told that some of the Houdini people were sent to (directly) Galton. Are any of them on stations which were not destroyed? Are any on the planet in that high security/non slave area? Did any of them survive and what were they doing that was so important that they had to be slipped out of Mesa with Houdini but they ended up a Scapegoat II? Really? You hauled them all the way to Galton as really really essential personal and that was a place that was going to be yet another sacrificial cut-out in the Detweiler plan?

Something like 80% of the people evacuated by Houdini went to Galton, not Darius. Which means Houdini was a colossal waste. Which is going to be yet another datum in the series of discrepancies pointing to "there's another hideout" because the intelligence services may be able to put together who was sent to Galton and who never showed up. The number of people whose identities they can confirm left Mesa because the records of the last 6 months of Houdini were intact but can't be found in Galton and no one there has seen then is going to be too high to be explained by accidents in transit and by their dying during Alamo alongside everyone who'd ever seen them.

In this particular case, it's not an unforced error: the MAlign did not know the records survived at Mesa and probably still doesn't.

Do you start to wonder if the Alignment has gone off the rails and is being controlled by psychopaths with God complexes?

"Start" ?

Relax wrote:Maybe only way RFC could easily figure out how to wrap up the series quickly is by the "plan" to not be updated.
Bureaucracy is essential even for supermen. So, when they decided to unveil their Spider drive Torps etc, they forgot to update their cutout plan(Galton) and the details got dropped in the middle? After all it is glaringly obvious to one and all by dearth of the Spider Drive @ Galton.

Could the MALIGN make an argument that the GA doesn't know of the Spider drive?... I know Simones and a certain news conference which even Detweiler commented on... But could a lower level flunky who is in charge of "updating" the plan NOT know this? Maybe said Bureaucrat is sequestered at Darius and never heard said news conference???

That's unlikely exactly because of the passage you're thinking of. The Detweilers knew Simões was speaking specifically about the spider and streak drives, by name. There's zero chance they considered the existence of the spider drive to still be a secret. The principles behind it, sure.

The bureaucracy is possible. Houdini was already on-going when the Strikes happened and one assumes the Alamo Contingency had existed for over a century. I find it more likely they specifically decided not to have the spiders there than to risk losing the technological secret, even if it means the whole point of the Alamo Contingency is moot.

Jonathan_S wrote: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)

Given the MAlign's demonstrated stealth capabilities I would think Honor would be very reluctant to hyper to anyplace that looks like a good idea to hyper to.

ThinksMarkedly wrote: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.

I can't believe they would deliberately leave such holes to protect the tech as that reveals Darius. If they want to disappear Galton must be a convincing sacrifice.

I think what we are actually looking at is some underlings who tried to make do when faced with the impossible.

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.

Except in current usage grasers can't exist. The old school was x-rays were a band below gamma rays, but these days x-rays come from electron shells and gamma rays come from nuclear processes. Bomb pumped lasers and the like are x-ray lasers, not gamma ray lasers. Why the physicists have gone this way I don't know because now you can't tell the difference between a hot x-ray and a cool gamma ray.

Loren Pechtel wrote:Given the MAlign's demonstrated stealth capabilities I would think Honor would be very reluctant to hyper to anyplace that looks like a good idea to hyper to.

Indeed.

One difficulty is that an SD force attempting to escape the blockade does not need to slow down at the hyperlimit -- they can continue running well past it. If attempting to run to the other side of the hyperlimit, the distance of 10+22 light-minutes would allow an SD force pulling 500 gravities to reach 0.25 c, so they wouldn't even have to decelerate to translate to hyper. However, that speed is towards the hyper limit, while Honor's force attempting to block them would be in front of them. So the speed they've accumulated is irrelevant for the purposes of evasion. It's actually counter-productive, since it would allow the her missiles to have even greater range.

So avoiding the stealth traps is actually quite doable. The blocking force can drop out of alpha anywhere within about 90 million km of the escaping force, outside the hyperlimit, and accurately launch at it using Apollo. It has to stay in n-space for about 15 minutes anyway, so the hypergenerators can cycle, which is more than enough time to make an alpha launch, cripple any defences, then evaluate and launch again if necessary. To be more effective, they'd probably wait for the runners to get closer to them, as they have to wait 15 minutes before going.

But 15 minutes is too short for a stealth attack that couldn't predict where the blocking force would drop.

With spiders, 15 minutes gives them a range of 600,000 km, one one-hundredth of the radius of the worst case scenario. I'd completely ignore those, since they can't hope to catch the blocking force. The number and density of them is just stupidly high: if you need a hundred torpedoes per cubic light-second and the force can appear at anywhere within 100 light-seconds, you need 100 * 100^3 * (4 * pi / 3). That's 418 million torpedoes.

With Hastas, assuming an acceleration like the Ghost Rider's of 3500 gravities, that's 14 million km (plus the warhead's own range but that has to be launched as close as possible). That's far more doable, since you only need about 8 clusters of Hastas prepositioned so they can get to within firing range of the blocking force before it hypers out. But as we've seen, the secret of tracking Hastas is out, so the attack wouldn't be stealthy. It would need to be overwhelming instead.

None of this saves the escaping force, though.

Loren Pechtel wrote:I can't believe they would deliberately leave such holes to protect the tech as that reveals Darius. If they want to disappear Galton must be a convincing sacrifice.

I don't think there was an alternative.

If Darius got discovered before Galton, the game was over anyway, so this case doesn't count. But if Galton was discovered first, it couldn't be defended. Doesn't matter if it had spider or not: the forces of the GA would eventually wear them down. The MAlign needs decades more of industrial output and more work on the Plan before they are ready to face the GA.

So if Galton was going to fall anyway, best not let your secrets fall with it.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

I don't think there was an alternative.

If Darius got discovered before Galton, the game was over anyway, so this case doesn't count. But if Galton was discovered first, it couldn't be defended. Doesn't matter if it had spider or not: the forces of the GA would eventually wear them down. The MAlign needs decades more of industrial output and more work on the Plan before they are ready to face the GA.

So if Galton was going to fall anyway, best not let your secrets fall with it.[/quote]

Wellllll......if the plan was to destroy several major stations rather than have them (and all the equipment, files and those people who actualy knew what was going on with Galton) destroyed by rather thorough means such as massive fusion weapons (perhaps several in each instillation file shutting off ALL the reactors in each facility containment at the same time) then just perhaps you could afford to have a few G-torps attack the GL force --and burn themselves to a vapor while doing it as they are designed to--so you let the other side know the weapons are here......and now "all gone". How you address the invisible ships is more than I can come up with because you don't want any of them actually subject to a set of sensor scans while their Spiders are not engaged.
But, yes, you could use and self destruct a few G-torps to give the impression they were there. Essentially vaporize a few very large stations and building ways etc with integral manufacturing and supposed R&D areas MIGHT let a case be made that this was the place they came from but the ultimately self-inflicted destruction was some sort of defiant but ultimately horrific effort to do more than kill off anybody who knew anything and any information on technical breakthroughs and plans for things like Oyster Bay But they you really can't leave even dummy plans (missing all the critical invisible and interesting weapons and what ships and people involved and how they got there and back and where are they now (you know, little iffy stuff) just lying around in a protected but not under 20 layers of back up self destruct protection like the Alignment is want to do, So, the Alighment really thinks that it is going to pull a big one over on the rather stupid "normals" of the GA and SL.

Pull the other one

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:I can't believe they would deliberately leave such holes to protect the tech as that reveals Darius. If they want to disappear Galton must be a convincing sacrifice.

I don't think there was an alternative.

If Darius got discovered before Galton, the game was over anyway, so this case doesn't count. But if Galton was discovered first, it couldn't be defended. Doesn't matter if it had spider or not: the forces of the GA would eventually wear them down. The MAlign needs decades more of industrial output and more work on the Plan before they are ready to face the GA.

So if Galton was going to fall anyway, best not let your secrets fall with it.

The issue is that Galton is supposed to be the decoy final base. The one that, if it has to be sacrificed in extremis, would fool the Grand Alliance into thinking its all over and they've totally won (and hence will never even look for Darius).

But holding back secret weapons which you know the enemy is aware of undermines that deceptive scheme.

Yes, you don't want to turn that tech over to them if you can help it, but if that's what's necessary for the deception to work then it's crazy not to make that sacrifice.



After all the spider weapons are unlikely to be enough to save Darius - the same production limits that ultimately doomed Galton will ultimately doom Darius even if the spider weapons do miraculously destroy most of the first fleet to attack the place. (And they'd need many decades, probably centuries, of being left alone unsuspected to hope to redress the power imbalance). So hording those weapons won't ultimately save them if they're discovered too soon; but trying to horde them dramatically increases the chances of being discovered by ruining the plan to "fake their own deaths".