Honor awakened a sleeping GIANT

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Which they did. The GA scouting forces were not detected at all. The first clue Galton had of being detected was when Honor crossed the hyperwall with 250 superdreadnoughts.

tlb wrote:What makes me wonder is the remark when Honor's force arrived, that was something on the order of "well this is certainly not a scout".

markusschaber wrote:Yes. They knew the GA might be on hunt for them, as Detweiler jr. informed them. So they expected there might be some scouts coming. As they did not detect the actual scouts, the size of the footprint told them that they must have missed them.

What proof do you have that they did not detect the scout? If they had detected a scout, then it would be in hyperspace speeding back to the Grand Alliance before they could reach out to the translation point.

I agree that the size of the footprint made clear that Honor's fleet was not a scouting party.

tlb wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Which they did. The GA scouting forces were not detected at all. The first clue Galton had of being detected was when Honor crossed the hyperwall with 250 superdreadnoughts.

tlb wrote:What makes me wonder is the remark when Honor's force arrived, that was something on the order of "well this is certainly not a scout".

markusschaber wrote:Yes. They knew the GA might be on hunt for them, as Detweiler jr. informed them. So they expected there might be some scouts coming. As they did not detect the actual scouts, the size of the footprint told them that they must have missed them.

What proof do you have that they did not detect the scout? If they had detected a scout, then it would be in hyperspace speeding back to the Grand Alliance before they could reach out to the translation point.

I agree that the size of the footprint made clear that Honor's fleet was not a scouting party.

The proof is that they wondered how the Grand Alliance fleet knew where the inhabitable planet was (“.. it could suggest they stumbled across us more or less by accident, not through any systematic penetration”). If they had noticed a scout, they wouldn't be speculating.

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:The proof is that they wondered how the Grand Alliance fleet knew where the inhabitable planet was (“.. it could suggest they stumbled across us more or less by accident, not through any systematic penetration”). If they had noticed a scout, they wouldn't be speculating.

I agree. Galton was definitely not aware they had been discovered. If they had noticed the scouts, they would have been.

tlb wrote:What proof do you have that they did not detect the scout? If they had detected a scout, then it would be in hyperspace speeding back to the Grand Alliance before they could reach out to the translation point.

I don't have any hard proof.

But when they GA investigated the system, only a few ghost riders on balistic courses came close to the system (and still "stay well out of the inner system"), at 40% of light speed. No scout ship actually entered the system, they all transitioned three light weeks out of the system (assuming the sensors are as good as manticorans and could detect a transition within 2½ light weeks) and stayed at least one light week out when dropping and recovering the drones. So unless their sensors have been a log better than those of the GA, all they could possibly detect were a few Ghost Riders, balistically passing close to their system, which is very unlikely. (Source: The planning meeting with Rear Admiral Garlan Thwaites, commanding the RMNs survey command.)

And the fact that they've detected "just a few week impeller traces" when the GA flooded the system with their recon drones, together with the fact that they didn't detect the (Hermes?) platform used as relay until it started sending 200.000km close to crick, strongly suggests that they could not detect ballistic ghost riders which did not enter the inner system.

And the other hint is is that they've reacted a bit surprised by the arrival of the force. Had they actually detected the scouts, they wouldn't be surprised by the size of the footprint of the fleet. Exactly that "Whatever it is, it's not scouts" shows that they didn't expect the full fleet to arrive, so they had not detected the scouts a few weeks before.

Btw, in the meeting with Audrey O'Hanrahan, HH herself talks about the Malignment could teach the "Hydra lessons about growing secondary heads. Even if we lop this one of, there's no saying we'll have gotten every bit of the tumor". So at least some people in the GA are open to the idea that Galton may not be the last hideout of the alignment.

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:The proof is that they wondered how the Grand Alliance fleet knew where the inhabitable planet was (“.. it could suggest they stumbled across us more or less by accident, not through any systematic penetration”). If they had noticed a scout, they wouldn't be speculating.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I agree. Galton was definitely not aware they had been discovered. If they had noticed the scouts, they would have been.

One the one hand you might be right. But on the other hand, they are not saying that the Grand Alliance sent out a fleet to randomly check systems; they are saying that the GA must have stumbled upon data that suggested some targets, rather than having a spy ("systematic penetration") who pointed to the location of Galton. That is something they could have said, specifically because they saw the scout (which meant that the GA did not have a exact target, but instead had a range of possibilities).

tlb wrote:One the one hand you might be right. But on the other hand, they are not saying that the Grand Alliance sent out a fleet to randomly check systems; they are saying that the GA must have stumbled upon data that suggested some targets, rather than having a spy ("systematic penetration") who pointed to the location of Galton. That is something they could have said, specifically because they saw the scout (which meant that the GA did not have a exact target, but instead had a range of possibilities).

Ah, yes, I see what you're saying. And you (and they) are partly right: the Alliance did stumble on some data that showed roughly where to search, which was the triangulation of the Mannerheim Terminus, the Hole in the Wall transit times and the Cataphract deliveries to Filareta. With that, they added some unsubstantiated rumours of a habitable system having been discovered in the region, but no records of that ever existing (that's probably not an uncommon occurrence, but 99% of the time it's just old spacers talking).

But it wasn't a piece of information pointing at Galton alone, it was a mere region of space. So there was some scouting to determine which system in that region was the enemy held one. So they were wrong that there was no scouting: there was and they missed it.

BTW, markus, welcome to the forum!

ThinksMarkedly wrote:BTW, markus, welcome to the forum!

Thanks!

tlb wrote:One the one hand you might be right. But on the other hand, they are not saying that the Grand Alliance sent out a fleet to randomly check systems; they are saying that the GA must have stumbled upon data that suggested some targets, rather than having a spy ("systematic penetration") who pointed to the location of Galton. That is something they could have said, specifically because they saw the scout (which meant that the GA did not have a exact target, but instead had a range of possibilities).

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Ah, yes, I see what you're saying. And you (and they) are partly right: the Alliance did stumble on some data that showed roughly where to search, which was the triangulation of the Mannerheim Terminus, the Hole in the Wall transit times and the Cataphract deliveries to Filareta. With that, they added some unsubstantiated rumours of a habitable system having been discovered in the region, but no records of that ever existing (that's probably not an uncommon occurrence, but 99% of the time it's just old spacers talking).

But it wasn't a piece of information pointing at Galton alone, it was a mere region of space. So there was some scouting to determine which system in that region was the enemy held one. So they were wrong that there was no scouting: there was and they missed it.

Why are you so sure that they missed the scout? The only way (that I know of) to be sure that it was data that suggested a region (which was their supposition), and not a spy that gave the exact location, involved them noticing the scout.

If a spy had given an exact location, the fleet would still have sent a scout ahead; so just the presence of a scout does not suggest anything. Also if Galton had NOT noticed the scout, then the appearance of the fleet would not have suggested anything.

The critical piece of information that suggests data mining, and NOT spying, is the time lapsed between the scout and the appearance of the fleet. In the actual event, the lapsed time was enough for the scout to return to Manticore, the GA to assemble the fleet and the fleet to travel to Galton. This is an indication that multiple scouts were sent out with no guarantee of a result. If the location of Galton was known, the fleet would have rendezvoused with the scout at some place much closer, after a much shorter interval.

Can you suggest a better reason for the people at Galton thinking that it was data mining, and not spying?

tlb wrote:Can you suggest a better reason for the people at Galton thinking that it was data mining, and not spying?

I can't, because I don't think they came to that conclusion either. There's no indication they or the Alignment still in Darius knows how their system was found. They can speculate any way they want, but they have no evidence for things one way or the other.

The only way they'd know that the system was targeted is if they caught scouts in other systems. That would allow for the conclusion that the Alliance didn't know which system exactly it was.

I don't know if Galton had such listening platforms in nearby systems, as an early-warning tripwire. A sufficiently paranoid actor with sufficient resources would do that, but there's no indication that the Galton military did such a thing. And even if they did, there's no indication they saw the scouts.

All we know is that when the GF did come, it was a surprise. If they had known they had been scouted, they could calculate the window of time for likely GF arrivals based on travel time to and from Galton, via suitable wormholes. At this point, they still had some level of Intel that could tell that the GF was preparing for something, plus they had streak drives to beat the GF from the Manticore system. But they were not at any level of readiness, so that tells us that Galton did not detect the scout.

I mean, at least, that's the conclusion I came to, which seems to be what the text strongly implied. I may be reading too much, but I don't think I'm the only one.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I can't, because I don't think they came to that conclusion either. There's no indication they or the Alignment still in Darius knows how their system was found. They can speculate any way they want, but they have no evidence for things one way or the other.

Luckily, now that the war is over and the threat utterly destroyed, the truth be revealed.