"Why are you still alive?"

munroburton wrote:They could skip the red dwarves and concentrate on the F/G/K type stars. Those make up about a fifth of all stars, so three and a half million stars. If we ignore mismatched binaries for this exercise, that could be as few as two million locations to check.

10,000 ships taking one week to check each location could complete a grand survey of this lower bound in just four to five years. Including all red dwarves extends this to about twenty to twenty-five years.

I've suggested it before, the SLN could probably accomplish this sort of hunt on a timescale short enough to disrupt the Alignment's plans. Nobody else has the sheer quantity to do it.

It occurs to me--we are looking for a system that has been colonized for a long time. There's another way to find it that doesn't require checking every star and risking one's hyper footprint being seen. (After Galton I'm sure the sensors at Darius have been way upgraded.)

Send out a fleet. They aren't going to stars at all, they're going to points on a grid that is say 30ly apart. Upon arrival they point a radiotelescope at every star within say 20ly. They are simply looking for stars that are unduly noisy in the radio band. No signals will be picked up at that range, but the star should still be radio-noisy. Especially of interest are frequencies commonly used by navigation radars.

This will result in some false positives that have to be probed very carefully, but it greatly cuts down on the number of spots that must be visited.

(And my 30ly is being conservative--against our tech Earth would be spotted at a considerably greater range.)

Loren Pechtel wrote:Locally we have missing bodies on the local highest mountain, some months ago a hiker found a long-dead body in the desert (and not far from a popular trail) and read up on the Death Valley Germans--without the case gnawing on a S&R guy (note: Wikipedia simply says hikers searching for their fate and doesn't say they were S&R) and finding them 13 years later they probably never would have been found.

At sea the same thing could happen, the sailplane gets blown out to sea and goes down. Floating debris is found, the body is not--presumably fish food at that point.

We lost an entire aeroplane a few years ago, even with almost full satellite coverage on the planet. MH 370.

munroburton wrote:They could skip the red dwarves and concentrate on the F/G/K type stars. Those make up about a fifth of all stars, so three and a half million stars. If we ignore mismatched binaries for this exercise, that could be as few as two million locations to check.

Reducing to a fifth doesn't help. Reducing to 1/10000th makes it merely a very difficult task.

10,000 ships taking one week to check each location could complete a grand survey of this lower bound in just four to five years. Including all red dwarves extends this to about twenty to twenty-five years.

Dedicating 10000 long-endurance ships for 5 years is not going to happen. The cost for that is prohibitive.

I think that dedicating 100 ships is going to be the absolute upper limit.

Loren Pechtel wrote:It occurs to me--we are looking for a system that has been colonized for a long time. There's another way to find it that doesn't require checking every star and risking one's hyper footprint being seen. (After Galton I'm sure the sensors at Darius have been way upgraded.)

Send out a fleet. They aren't going to stars at all, they're going to points on a grid that is say 30ly apart. Upon arrival they point a radiotelescope at every star within say 20ly. They are simply looking for stars that are unduly noisy in the radio band. No signals will be picked up at that range, but the star should still be radio-noisy. Especially of interest are frequencies commonly used by navigation radars.

This will result in some false positives that have to be probed very carefully, but it greatly cuts down on the number of spots that must be visited.

(And my 30ly is being conservative--against our tech Earth would be spotted at a considerably greater range.)

I thought of that too, but like I said above, it doesn't seem HV tech is up to the task. Then again, the Manticore Alliance was searching for Bolthole, so they must have some way of doing that. They were just searching in the wrong direction.

But this all assumes that HV late-Diaspora planets do make EM noise in the first place. It's entirely possible that we cut back on our EM spectrum emissions or at least on omni-directional ones and switch to dedicated links. On Earth, most of the Internet and phone traffic is not carried by satellite, but by under-sea fibre optic cables. We still have EM spectrum TV and radio, but the trend appears to be to wind those down and instead use the Internet. Wireless service is using less and less power so as to increase battery life, and using frequencies that get attenuated very quickly too. In space, you don't have the option of laying a cable from one planet to the other, but you also won't be doing omnidirectional transmission either because it's a waste of power. All transmissions in space are going to be heavily directed.

And this is all assuming you're not paranoid. If you are, then you'd insist on laser links in space, no navigational beacons, only extremely low-power wireless transmissions on the surface, etc.

Besides, a sphere 30 light-years in radius has a volume of 27 millionths volume of a sphere 1000 light-years in radius. You'd need 37037 listening expeditions, so even each ship performed this task 100 times, that's 371 ships.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:Locally we have missing bodies on the local highest mountain, some months ago a hiker found a long-dead body in the desert (and not far from a popular trail) and read up on the Death Valley Germans--without the case gnawing on a S&R guy (note: Wikipedia simply says hikers searching for their fate and doesn't say they were S&R) and finding them 13 years later they probably never would have been found.

At sea the same thing could happen, the sailplane gets blown out to sea and goes down. Floating debris is found, the body is not--presumably fish food at that point.

We lost an entire aeroplane a few years ago, even with almost full satellite coverage on the planet. MH 370.

Yup, but that wasn't an accident. To pull this off they need an accidental "death."

tlb wrote:I realize that there are deaths which do not result in a body being recovered, but I was talking specifically about a death that should have been caused by the nanite protocol. If the Inner Onion chooses a death for Gail that means a body should show up for an autopsy, then the splinter group has to have enough penetration to ensure that a fake autopsy report can be generated and believed.

She just has to have an accidental death before the order to trigger her nanites comes.

At that point the splinter group will have to house and feed her for the rest of her prolong enhanced life in a way that never invites suspicion. Frankly, in a closed society like Darius, that is going to be much harder than just faking her death would be.

That is the most difficult part, actually. Where on Darius can she disappear to? And what's her usefulness to the resistance at that point?

Unless they have an underground railroad to get people out of the Darius System.

The current cover story is that Galton was the "Bad" Alignment and Darius is the "Good" Alignment, which knew about the others and took advantage of some of their excesses in Houdini. For that to be successful when Darius is found, then people of Darius should be made aware of Galton. So the problem with Gail is not that she knew Galton existed, but that she and others on her team were active in designing its defense. So it is not just Gail that is a security risk, but everyone on that team. I doubt that they will all be programmed to die in ways that do not leave a body behind.

Indeed, but the rest of the team is not as useful to the resistance. If they can't be turned, they can't help. In fact, if they can't be turned, they may not need to be terminated in the first place, because they won't give up the information if Darius is accidentally found.

That's still a stupid plan, in my opinion. How is Darius ever going to be confused with a "good" Alignment? Or is it totally unprotected, with no spider-drive ships to be found?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I thought of that too, but like I said above, it doesn't seem HV tech is up to the task. Then again, the Manticore Alliance was searching for Bolthole, so they must have some way of doing that. They were just searching in the wrong direction.

Note the lightspeed problem--my approach relies upon it being a world with major development for a long time.

But this all assumes that HV late-Diaspora planets do make EM noise in the first place. It's entirely possible that we cut back on our EM spectrum emissions or at least on omni-directional ones and switch to dedicated links.

I do agree most of the omnidirectional stuff will go away. We are seeing less and less of it even at current tech levels.

And this is all assuming you're not paranoid. If you are, then you'd insist on laser links in space, no navigational beacons, only extremely low-power wireless transmissions on the surface, etc.

I don't think you can get rid of radar, though. The r^4 range limit means radars are big transmitters.

Besides, a sphere 30 light-years in radius has a volume of 27 millionths volume of a sphere 1000 light-years in radius. You'd need 37037 listening expeditions, so even each ship performed this task 100 times, that's 371 ships.

Not impossible, and I think I'm being pretty conservative in figuring 30ly.

Loren Pechtel wrote:I don't think you can get rid of radar, though. The r^4 range limit means radars are big transmitters.

Why do you need radar?

Not impossible, and I think I'm being pretty conservative in figuring 30ly.

In detection, maybe.

But that assumes this hideout has existed for longer than 30 years, which cannot be relied upon. We know it has been there for 190, but the GA cannot assume that. They don't know how big the population or the industrial base in this hideout system is. They're going to know soon enough it has to have a shipyard capable of building the Ghosts and industry for building the torpedoes and Silver Bullets, but the lower time limit for that isn't very high. For all they know, this system may have a very small population whose task is only this war footing and the build out for them only started 20 years ago.

In fact, this means that unless Milliken tells them that there is an inhabited planet around a F, G, or K-type star which she could see with her naked eye, they can't exclude the red dwarves either.

tlb wrote:The current cover story is that Galton was the "Bad" Alignment and Darius is the "Good" Alignment, which knew about the others and took advantage of some of their excesses in Houdini. For that to be successful when Darius is found, then people of Darius should be made aware of Galton. So the problem with Gail is not that she knew Galton existed, but that she and others on her team were active in designing its defense. So it is not just Gail that is a security risk, but everyone on that team. I doubt that they will all be programmed to die in ways that do not leave a body behind.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Indeed, but the rest of the team is not as useful to the resistance. If they can't be turned, they can't help. In fact, if they can't be turned, they may not need to be terminated in the first place, because they won't give up the information if Darius is accidentally found.

That's still a stupid plan, in my opinion. How is Darius ever going to be confused with a "good" Alignment? Or is it totally unprotected, with no spider-drive ships to be found?

The Inner Onion certainly does not know whether members of the team can, or cannot, be turned by a resistance; so that is not the reasoning they will use to determine if someone should be terminated. They certainly do not want to have loyal analysts that die under nanite control to avoid questioning; because that is the telltale sign of the "Bad" Alignment.

Speaking of the spider ships; if Gail is a security threat, then what about all the crews of the Ghost and Shark ships that participated in Oyster Bay and their families that might have figured out what they did? Come to think of it, as a weapons analyst, Gail must have known about Oyster Bay and most likely the Silver Bullets at Beowulf (perhaps even the bombs in the orbitals). So why is she suddenly a security risk over the defense of Galton, that is the least of what she must know.

It is a stupid plan, made worse by the lack of spider-drive ships at Galton and the apparent need to help plan their defense from Darius. If Galton had the spider-drive, than Darius could claim to have stolen the plan for it. In fact Oyster Bay really should been run out of Galton. Now I desperately want the next book to see how this all gets explained.

tlb wrote:The Inner Onion certainly does not know whether members of the team can, or cannot, be turned by a resistance; so that is not the reasoning they will use to determine if someone should be terminated. They certainly do not want to have loyal analysts that die under nanite control to avoid questioning; because that is the telltale sign of the "Bad" Alignment.

Speaking of the spider ships; if Gail is a security threat, then what about all the crews of the Ghost and Shark ships that participated in Oyster Bay and their families that might have figured out what they did? Come to think of it, as a weapons analyst, Gail must have known about Oyster Bay and most likely the Silver Bullets at Beowulf (perhaps even the bombs in the orbitals). So why is she suddenly a security risk over the defense of Galton, that is the least of what she must know.

Good point. I was thinking that Gail was a security risk because she had a higher Coefficient of Turning than any of the others, for some reason. There must be some determination of what that is, because you really can't simply terminate anyone who's received classified information just because they have. Those are usually your best people, so terminating them is at a minimum a waste of investment; at worst, it's going to be noticed and cause resentment.

It is a stupid plan, made worse by the lack of spider-drive ships at Galton and the apparent need to help plan their defense from Darius. If Galton had the spider-drive, than Darius could claim to have stolen the plan for it. In fact Oyster Bay really should been run out of Galton. Now I desperately want the next book to see how this all gets explained.

As discussed in other threads, I don't think the Inner Onion could convince itself of giving up its ace in the hole, even if rationally as we're discussing it would have been better. It would have reset the advantage (which we right now find dubious), but it would have given the hiding a better chance of being believed.

By the way, why did they need Gail for this? She wasn't allowed any more intel than Galton had. The military people in Galton should be at least as competent as she was but possibly more highly motivated. She did know more and she knew that using the Ninurta or spiders could have made some difference, but those were specifically disallowed.

Maybe it was just contingency. The more brains and eyeballs you have at the problem, the greater the chance a sudden inspiration will strike. So maybe they thought they had little to lose by having Gail run the simulations. Which possibly means she is not that big a security risk as the resistance may believe.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Dedicating 10000 long-endurance ships for 5 years is not going to happen. The cost for that is prohibitive.

I think that dedicating 100 ships is going to be the absolute upper limit.

I can't agree with that. First, we know the League and its non-member neighbours have been severely underspending on defence for centuries - that the colossal SLN was actually quite diminutive for the wealth and resources available to that region of space. Consider that Manticore(outperformed in absolute output by several dozen League systems whilst outperforming them in GDP per capita) produced and threw away something like three hundred old-fashioned wallers in barely fifty years, with the leaner and meaner Republic of Haven getting over 1,000 SD(P)s built in barely a decade.

Second, it's been clear since OBS that the Diaspora never ended, that even as Earth collapsed into its Final War, the first colonies were sending out their own colony ships. We may not have seen them, but there has to be a huge number of long-endurance scout ships constantly looking for new systems to sell the rights to.

Unlike a Starfleet-style centralised exploration model, the commercialised version sees multiple companies competiting against each other. The consequence of that should be that survey ships are forced to use the best hyper technology possible. In the past such scouts were prepared to spend 20 years in hyper, without Warshawski sails or sensors, just to survey systems like Manticore - and then another 20 years back to sell their data.

I see no reason for those practices to not have continued. Indeed, they would have accelerated as humanity went from one Earth colonising hundreds of systems to thousands of systems doing the same, especially after the hyper-capable colony ship came along. That means they need lots of scout ships.

Unfortunately, most such existing scout ships are possibly up to 20 years away at up to 3,000c(60,000 light years, covering a vast chunk of the galaxy) and of course there is no way to recall them. But they should exist and infrastructure to produce them should exist. If the League really, really wanted to actively search for threats lurking within a certain radius of Solarian space, they absolutely could get it done.

I suppose that's the sort of thing Galton's sacrifice may avert, although I'll continue to argue that the way Galton's initial survey was falsified should be all the proof they need to order a re-surveying of local stars.