Insanity: Screening elements in the HV

Felix......
Nobody outside various Mannerheim naval personnel and government officials who seem to be Alignment members see to know that Felix has a wormhole terminus. Ok, there are probably not 100% alignment members on the Mannerheim SDF ship that get out to Felix but the entire crews don't need to know there is a worm hole they're a tall.
The MSDF ships that have gone thought the wormhole might be exceptions but it also could be that they (who are NOT Alignment ) on the ships that were involved in the destruction of Harvest Joy MIGHT be aware that they are protecting major secret of Mannerheim which it trying to acquire ownership of a wormhole but little else and are not talking.

The big challenge is that the Felix Wormhole is (as far as we have been told) is the ONLY way that Darius has of moving ships and information between Darius and any other part of the Galaxy since they are currently NOT using the Torch/Twins wormhole. If something happens such that anybody else discovers "parties unknown" are using that wormhole near Felix, then contact between the Alignment and everybody else is going to get cut off.

Yes, Mannerheim can argue that they discovered that there is a potential wormhole there, they have been trying to buy uo ownership's interest even if they say they haven't yet explored the wormhole because it hasn't been explored they are reluctant to draw any attention to it. yeah, well, if they pop out somewhere "close" to anywhere inhabited then that would compromise their attempt to acquire control. ..........but that would get interesting because who controls a worm hole seems to also partially related to who finds it plus who can defend it. Manticre"owes" the Talbott end of the one from the MWJ because they are sitting on it with a warship present and can defend that while Lynx is not actually where the wormhole is. Then there is the Gregor End of the one to the Andermani end of the Gregor Terminus and Manticore came though it/discovered it and are holding it outside hyperlink of an Andermani occupied system.
This does't automatically mean Mannheim is an Alignment ally but is anybody using that wormhole

It would be unbelievably stupid of the Alignment to not have significant defenses on the Darius end of the Felix-Darius wormhole bridge. You don't have to specify an Astro Control operation but somehow they have to coordinate traffic passage from one end to the other even if there is not a readily observable guard on the Felix end where they are trying to avoid anybody seeing ship transits. You can't really argue that they would leave the Darius end of that bridge undefended since they used a squadron of MSDF to interdict the Twins-Torch end.

The Ghosthuters don't have ships but would need assistance in running down leads. Eliminating Alignment moles and spies is a goal but tracking information will take ships and -given current situations cooperation with GA. Either way, identifying Alignment operatives and communications lines is important.

Now the part nobody is mentioning. Should ANYBODY suspect though investigation that a Felix wormhole exits and it involves the Alighemnt- there will be warships dispatched. Mannerheim can complain as much as it wants but the wormhole is outside the hyper limit of a system they DO NOT OWN and though they may have an "interest" they can't (probably) legally object to the GA etc putting a watch force on it. Anything coming out of that wormhole at the Felix end could be intercepted and stopped by the GA etc--of for no other reason than to Identify who they are and where they are from. So, that little effect would shut off the only KNOWN Alignment access to anywhere in the local galaxy. If the Alignment has already explored the at least two (per the wormhole map) other termini beyond 1) Darius and 2) the twins one further wormhole to Torch, we have not yet been told where that is. So---any picket force at the Felix wormhole could interdict any further communications with Mannerheim /the RF or anyones else involved with the GA or SL

I'm going to suggest that any wormhole terminus linked to Felix would connect to somewhere in the local arm of our galaxy. If Fexlix is the Junction, anyone holding a defensive picket at the Fexlis end of the Felix-Darius wormhole is going to close off the Alignment from operations anywhere other than vis hyperspace travel from Darius.

We have no idea how far Darius is by hyperspace only from anywhere else in our own galaxy -so if the GA alone or with the assistance of the SLN decides to interdict emergence from the Fexli wormhole at Felix.......there is a missive cork in a bottle for the Alignment.

Ok Alignment....your move

Brigade XO wrote:Felix......

(SNIP!)

Brigade XO wrote:I'm going to suggest that any wormhole terminus linked to Felix would connect to somewhere in the local arm of our galaxy. If Fexlix is the Junction, anyone holding a defensive picket at the Fexlis end of the Felix-Darius wormhole is going to close off the Alignment from operations anywhere other than vis hyperspace travel from Darius.

We have no idea how far Darius is by hyperspace only from anywhere else in our own galaxy -so if the GA alone or with the assistance of the SLN decides to interdict emergence from the Fexli wormhole at Felix.......there is a missive cork in a bottle for the Alignment.

Ok Alignment....your move

Actually we do know (from a discussion between Benjamin and Daniel about deployment of the Silver Bullets in _To End in Fire_): "Darius was over 130 light years--and one hyper-bridge translation--from the Felix System".

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:Actually we do know (from a discussion between Benjamin and Daniel about deployment of the Silver Bullets in _To End in Fire_): "Darius was over 130 light years--and one hyper-bridge translation--from the Felix System".

The Silver Bullets were deployed in Uncompromising Honor and according the the fan wiki, that is where this distance is mentioned.

Uh, WHY on earth would Darius use the wormhole as the MAIN access? Let alone the ONLY access???

This means a stream of ships would be going to either Twins or Felix. Neither spot would anyone want to attract attention to anymore than Darius. We are told Felix is a 5 terminai junction and the other legs go out to middle of nowhere.

For all we know Darius is right next to an already settled star system.

One could literally most likely find Darius by just "listening" with good ol' amateur telescopes placed every ~50 light years throughout the entire HV(100LY diameter spheres we can already easily scan this 20+++ years ago).

Darius has been producing Vast amounts of EMS noise for 75 years now. Its not like someone like Jessyk or equivalent Beowulf major surveying corporations do not keep track of basic information for transtellar possible routes etc as EMS noise = MORE ships required. Sure, there are small outposts everywhere, but major cities etc will produce far far far more noise and one should be able to EASILY eliminate all the known major star nations eliminating them from the telescopes data gathering scans.

No reason for much "sleuth" human work here. Just let amateur astronomers know and they will do all the work for you. There are going to be amateur astronomers on every settled planet in the future just as there are today and pretty much find most of the "discoveries". Why would this not be true in the future?

Relax wrote:Uh, WHY on earth would Darius use the wormhole as the MAIN access? Let alone the ONLY access???

This means a stream of ships would be going to either Twins or Felix. Neither spot would anyone want to attract attention to anymore than Darius. We are told Felix is a 5 terminai junction and the other legs go out to middle of nowhere.

For all we know Darius is right next to an already settled star system.

One could literally most likely find Darius by just "listening" with good ol' amateur telescopes placed every ~50 light years throughout the entire HV(100LY diameter spheres we can already easily scan this 20+++ years ago).

Darius has been producing Vast amounts of EMS noise for 75 years now. Its not like someone like Jessyk or equivalent Beowulf major surveying corporations do not keep track of basic information for transtellar possible routes etc as EMS noise = MORE ships required. Sure, there are small outposts everywhere, but major cities etc will produce far far far more noise and one should be able to EASILY eliminate all the known major star nations eliminating them from the telescopes data gathering scans.

No reason for much "sleuth" human work here. Just let amateur astronomers know and they will do all the work for you. There are going to be amateur astronomers on every settled planet in the future just as there are today and pretty much find most of the "discoveries". Why would this not be true in the future?

Refuge was only found by an explorer actually going into the dust cloud. Obviously it is much noisier now, but the dust cloud would still screen.

I think that it is highly unlikely that Darius is near another occupied planet, as you said it would be too noticeable. But if there were another dust cloud between it and any occupied planet, then it should be as hard to find as Refuge.

When Darius was first mentioned, I wrote that it would be possible to shield cities and factories from EM emission; but did not seem to be the practice. Secretive as they are, I am guessing a natural barrier; such as the dust cloud at Bolthole.

Note that this would be a very good reason for using a wormhole. Do you want a stream of ships leading to a defendable wormhole or to the actual planet (as happened with Galton)?

Relax wrote:For all we know Darius is right next to an already settled star system.

One could literally most likely find Darius by just "listening" with good ol' amateur telescopes placed every ~50 light years throughout the entire HV(100LY diameter spheres we can already easily scan this 20+++ years ago).

That's still a lot of them. And how precise can they be, directionally? If there are other nearby systems, those will be making noise too and could be masking Darius' emissions.

Darius has been producing Vast amounts of EMS noise for 75 years now. Its not like someone like Jessyk or equivalent Beowulf major surveying corporations do not keep track of basic information for transtellar possible routes etc as EMS noise = MORE ships required. Sure, there are small outposts everywhere, but major cities etc will produce far far far more noise and one should be able to EASILY eliminate all the known major star nations eliminating them from the telescopes data gathering scans.

No reason for much "sleuth" human work here. Just let amateur astronomers know and they will do all the work for you. There are going to be amateur astronomers on every settled planet in the future just as there are today and pretty much find most of the "discoveries". Why would this not be true in the future?

They probably know to do this, now. But I don't think it had occurred to them to do so before. Galton was incredibly difficult to find, at over 150 light-years from Mannerheim. Emissions from over 100 light-years fade into the background noise.

We don't know how big the jump is on the Warner-Mannerheim wormhole. Warner is close to Sol and Mannerheim is not in the League, but some of the RF members that are nearby are, so it's probably 300-350 light-years. That would put the RF in the League's Outer Shell.

We don't know the length of the Felix-Darius leg either. But given the above and given the other two wormhole lengths we know about that aren't the MWHJ (Erewhon's) are 390 and 359 light-years, it could easily be another 350 light-years from Mannerheim/Felix. That could place Darius at up to 700 light-years from Earth, though more likely in the range of 500. That's well past the Verge, getting into the Fringe. There's nearly as much volume in the spherical shell between 400 and 500 light-years as there is in the sphere of 400 light-years in radius. And if you increase that to 600 light-years, you add 142% volume again.

All those amateur astronomers in the Verge and Fringe will have no one to tell. So they've seen a colony out there, so what? There are probably dozens of unregistered colonies in the Fringe. Who is going to listen to them in their local government? What is their local government going to do? And how would anyone even know to pass the information to the GA intelligence services?

Unless they start to crowdsource this activity now, no reports will have reached them because no reports have been made. And if they crowdsource, they'll get tons of false positives - and a lot of innocent true positive detections.

PS: the stellar density begins to decrease after 500 light-years up and down the plane of the Galaxy.

Theemile wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:<snip>
Then what? A piecemeal transit to Darius is stupid. It just gets every ship killed as soon as it arrives. A mass transit would get some 25 ships of the wall through, but no one on the Darius side is going to mistake 25 capital ships for an authorised transit. The transiting ships may take out a chunk of the Darius defences in the process, but they die. It's a suicide mission that only tells Darius to stay on the alert, bring more missile pods around, and disable any IFF codes because the other side has been compromised. And it does not tell the SL where Darius is.
<snip>

Actually it's even worse. Before the start of the series, to defend a wormhole, a ship/fort was required to get within energy range to defend the emergence lane - wedges exploded on hitting the emergence lane, and laserheads didn't have the range to cover the entire width of the lane if exploded outside the lane.

Unfortunately, while the emerging ship was required to coast through the entire length of the emergence lane without it's wedge and could not fire missiles, it could fire it's energy weapons - with the same range as weapons OUTSIDE the emergence lane firing inward. So any defensive weapons were within range of the of the attackers - thus the defenders could be damaged.

Now, laserheads from the major powers have a standoff of 40 or 50,000KM and no portion of the emergence lane is safe from a laserhead. Further, Pods can be setup in clouds close enough to the emergence lane to quickly act, but far enough out that the attacking craft cannot hit them with their offensive weapons, while the forts are even further back, controling them.

The chances of an intact ship reaching the end of the lane and being in the shape to raise their wedge is VERY, VERY small - even if they did survive, they would still need to maneuver free of the resonance zone, and wait 5+ minutes to start their hyper generators to flee the defenders.

“Dat’s assuming dat dey Wussies and dey wanna wun!” Says Bugs Bunny.

I asked awhile ago how long it takes for the MAN to bring up its Spider drive? … Then go to emergency acceleration and evasive maneuvers?

If the MAN does a mass transit with impeller-driven warships, say, insignificant stolen or acquired SLN warships leading the formation, will any trailing MAN ships have enough time to “cloak” then evade?

Question. We all know that ships can be towed through hyper. Can a ship be towed through a WH? Also, I assume ships are normally towed, trailing behind the towing ship. Can a ship be “towed ahead.” Wait… what? Can powerful enough presser beams press smaller ships into a WH ahead of itself?

Question 2. The author said no unmanned warships. But what is the size of the smallest skeleton crew? A skeleton crew of sacrificial lambs.

penny wrote:Question. We all know that ships can be towed through hyper. Can a ship be towed through a WH? Also, I assume ships are normally towed, trailing behind the towing ship. Can a ship be “towed ahead.” Wait… what? Can powerful enough presser beams press smaller ships into a WH ahead of itself?

Question 2. The author said no unmanned warships. But what is the size of the smallest skeleton crew? A skeleton crew of sacrificial lambs.

Probably the smallest skeleton crew is one.

I doubt that you can push a ship through a wormhole, since the process involves bringing up the forward sail and then the rear sail while activating the hyper-generator. Just pushing a ship into it, most likely destroys the ship.

tlb wrote:

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:Actually we do know (from a discussion between Benjamin and Daniel about deployment of the Silver Bullets in _To End in Fire_): "Darius was over 130 light years--and one hyper-bridge translation--from the Felix System".

The Silver Bullets were deployed in Uncompromising Honor and according the the fan wiki, that is where this distance is mentioned.

And I had opened that file and copied from it. Excuse me while I discipline my fingers ...

TLB, Thinksmarkedly et al

Well, I do know we can easily see small planets and their EMS signature from 5 Light Years away. Such as: https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubbl ... i-a-and-b/

Now is that 50 Light years? No.
DO I know personally enough about this topic to say yes/no? No.

As for Cosmic Dust: I was under the impression from an amateur astronomer I talk to fairly regularly and have gone star gazing occasionally with that anything within ~1000 LY is not a problem due to dust. So definiton of "not a problem" is ...well shall we say clouded in opaque dust cloud.

Of course while reading Barnhams compendium, when making a more realistic uh reply: I remember Barnard 68, which is a dust cloud 125pc away(uh, ~3.x LY/pc) so ~375LY away. Can't see a SINGLe star behind it optically. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... ard_68.jpg Of course Bernard 68 is a small dust object. So, seeing around it from a different angle would be ~trivial. Or just use Infrared and we can see through it: https://pressbooks.online.ucf.edu/astro ... smic-dust/ Our neighborhood in HV would be contained ENTIRELY within the inner ring of THIS picture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way ... secs_(2022).png That is not much dust obscured potential regions to hide in.

I know we can check planets for their individual EMS signatures for water etc at ~50 Light years. Though the fidelity of this reading unlike the amateur test piece of the nearest star humans can see with nothing more than a pair of binoculars and tell it is a twin star as shown above using alpah centauri... is well ????

Oh right: I was trying to hunt this down but HV space if modeled on Milkyway where we are is only about 200LY thick and star density falls off quickly past this point. Most give 1000LY number as where ???%%%??? 3 sigma of the stars reside? Is. We are in Orion sub arm where star thickness is less than say Saggitarius arm.

IF you really want to blow your mind(modern finds using much better telescopes than we used to have), most spiral galaxies have perpendicular "hoop" rings to their major plane of their spiral spin direction. These hoops can be upwards of 2Million light years long on their axis, though most are MUCH MUCH smaller. For all we know Sol, could be at the base of such a perpendicular arm looping upwards of 200,000LY or more and attaching back down on the other side of the galaxy. Think HALO(ring world) except in stars perpendicular to plane of galaxy. There are so many Sci Fi Stories I could think about on this perpendicular arm and their lack of interaction with rest of the galaxy where vast majority of aliens are etc.

With so many "belter" communities in the HV living OFF planet and IN space, one would think that with FAR superior viewing of the stars than anywhere on a planet that amateur SKY viewing in the HV future would be a near EVERYDAY occupation with forums dedicated to best planetary shot of nearby star contest of the week or some such continuously happening.

As for collecting the information, Put up a small prize pool money and that will take care of itself. The amateurs will already be doing it and will jump at opportunity to make a little $$ for bragging rights.

I mean common, how many "secret" documents have been exposed to entire world on war thunder forums to "settle" an argument about wagging, uh... measuring their toothpicks and how big and bad their daddy is?

Humanity and their egos don't change, use them

If NOTHING else, this would eliminate vast swathes of space you do not have to scout for potential hidden bases. Small bases you don't care about. Its those monster 100km ++++ shipyards glowing into space with giant fusion reactor signatures glowing in the asteroid belts and refineries closer in that no one can hide. Not the minor Hole in the Wall's leading to Galton.