Insanity: Screening elements in the HV

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

penny wrote:The MWJ has rush hour traffic. Just like LA!

I can accept that. I wonder what its peak times are? Is it twelve-hour rush-hour traffic? Anyway, nothing changes.

I can't think of such a thing. It should be roughly evenly distributed throughout a day. There's no reason for the Junction to operate on any one planet's time: ships will be arriving at nearly uniform times because their origins have very different calendars and the distances are also going to average out the arrival times.

The worst that can happen is that the warehouse some ships use only operate 10 hours per 22.45 hour (one Manticore day) and therefore they start their journey from a warehouse through the Junction at specific times. But I don't see how such a warehouse operator would be big enough to cause such disturbances in traffic. They'd make more money by operating 22.45/10 (I think Manticore weeks are 10 days, aren't they?).

You might get some clumping of traffic that originates from a local planet. While the planet obviously always has the full spread of time zones if it's got one city that's the most common destination for shipping and shore leave you probably get a greater concentration of ships leaving during that city's daytime.

But locally originating traffic is going to be a minority of Junction shipping; far more is going to be simply passing through and it's schedule will depend on when it arrived at the first terminus which will depend on when it left whatever previous port it departed from.


More likely you'd get semi-random clumping. So rather than a, say, 9am rush every day you'll get weird and basically randomly distributed lulls followed by a rush of a bunch of ships wanting to use it at once -- just because their scheduled happened to coincide.

And so right after a rush, as the backlog of ships waiting builds, Astro Control will likely start reducing the separation between ships, moving closer to their hard limit of 1 minute minimum separations (or the minimum allowed by lockdown; whichever is longer) until the backlog starts shrinking and then they'd ratchet up the intervals again.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:The transiting of a ship may induce further disturbances, I agree. I find that likely, and also more likely that bigger ships induce bigger disturbances.

Probably some. But I'd guess it might be lower than the disturbance / flare you get when you exit hyperspace.

When exiting hyper you're moving from an band of higher energy to a lower energy state and so the extra energy needs to bleed off. Plus we know that translating across a hyperwall (in either direction) bleeds off a massive portion of a ship's velocity (and that the slower the ship was moving prior to translation the weaker their emergence flare is -- presumably because they had less velocity to bleed off).

The books don't way whether a wormhole transit has a similar velocity bleed effect (though ships seem to be moving slowly enough on approach that you shouldn't get a major velocity bleed signal anyway) -- and since you're translating from normal space to normal space you also shouldn't have to bleed off energy coming from the higher energy either. So that all makes me guess the any emergence flare would be much smaller and weaker than a hyperspace exit flare. (That said, the sensors around the Junction are right there so they should have no trouble seeing even a much weaker flare. (But it shouldn't be enough to blind them -- after all, their designers would know exactly how powerful the flares they'd need to look for are)

penny wrote:Jonathan, what you're suggesting.

The MWJ has rush hour traffic. Just like LA!

I can accept that. I wonder what its peak times are? Is it twelve-hour rush-hour traffic? Anyway, nothing changes.

And of course they're going to detect the transit. What I am positing is that under certain conditions, stealth and unprecedented tactics, they are not going to detect the spider drives.

The Junction is probably not going to have too much in slow time but that's probably relative to what termini you are talking about. At the moment, Silesia has two of them- Gregor and Beowulf one service each end of Silesia. Hennessy is out by Erwhon and the Maya Autonomous Area and will be dealing with SL traffic. We don't see Matapan talked about at all there will be traffic.

Airports- big cities with multiple big airports like NY, Chicago, Washington DC etc are more than just destinations on shuttles going point to point. They are also waypoints and refuling stops (and add or drop passengers) on routes going further along. They are going to be staffed 24/7.

And they are operating in the air traffic reality of 360º and spread out to a couple of 10s of thousands of feet within their control area, getting traffic coming in, normally on some schedule. The Junction is operating with the added with 7 pairs of traffic lanes and they may or may not be all within the elliptic of the MBS. I do't recall if it's like spokes on a wheel or scattered around the sphere of the juction like porcupine curled into a ball.

Wormhole Junctions are the same, a junction perhaps more so because a lot of ships may only just use it for the short-cut and not stop. They arrive and accelerate at maximum permissible rates out of the lane and the rest of controlled "air space) before changing course for the next destination. Canals- particularly Panama and Suez - have backlogs of vessels waiting to transit. Some can't make advance reservations for a particular day/night time slot and will just have to wait in the holding area (orpeding transit achoreage areas) till -after the payment of transit fee has cleared the Canal's bank- will be put in the transit rotation. Cruise ships pay a premium for a daylight transit, the passengers want to see the canal etc. A little while back, Panama opened a second canal to handle the SuperMax ships so there volume went up- ships that couldn't earlier fit though the original locks. Still, the areas around both ends of the Panama Canal is full of ships waiting their turn to pass though.

Suez has problems now but those are mostly in the area near Yemen and people firing rockets and missiles at ships. As has been mentioned by someone else, a lot of shipping- all of the cruise ships and a lot of commercial transport- have elected to sail around Africa rather than go though a war zone. More expense, need to re-jigger logistics for fuel, food, other stores and crew rotations- and penalties for not making deliveries on time. There are a finite number of places shipping can stop for fuel and supplies on the way around Africa on your way to the Indian Ocean and beyond. A lot more ships vying ford that port facilities are there. Oh, there are still ships going though the Suez Canal but the numbers are way down.
Back in- April I think- a cruise ship (no passengers on board, not sure if it was with skeleton crew) did go through the Red Sea for Suez as the company felt it has compelling reasons to take the risk and we were told that a USN frigate acted as "goalkeeper" on the northerly side between it and land to intercept anything fired at it. Just to be clear.....Insurance companies don't like war zones and along with passenger and crew safety, the insurance companies are going to yank coverage if you are talking about taking 2000+ passengers through the Red Sea now.

Given I mentioned the Alignment and LDs, my thought was that the LDs could creep in and deploy pods similar to what they did with Oyster Bay so they will be well distant when impeller drives light off after the pods push out their payloads. Warheads already fed coordinates from passive sensors on the pods or go into auto-targeting on impeller wedges. And, yes, targeting transfer stations to in-systems, the warehouses, repair facilities and especially the Astro Control stations would be great targets. Chaos, destruction, interruption of trade and probable loss of confidence in SEM to keep shipping safe in their own back yard.
Then the LDs crawl on spider legs out into the deeper black and go reload and find more people to kill and things to destroy.

The Twins

Twins are oftentimes supernaturally aware of each other.

This is a very interesting conversation. Brigade XO really reeled me in. Thanks. I do enjoy the conversation and the plethora of information given here in one place. A lot of it I was not aware of. Again, thanks.

Could it be that the WHs are so complicated that they have not been fully mapped yet? Hold that thought.

Whenever I think of this anomaly, I find it interesting that my brain always conjures up the same thing. There are two WHs in the same system, and my brain wants to associate them with each other, in some manner.

There are two men in every silo where each of them are responsible for turning their own key simultaneously to launch the ICBM. It is the same in a nuclear submarine. Two men each with a key that must be turned simultaneously.

What if something extraordinary happens when “the two keys” of the WHs are turned at once (transits made at the same time)? That just may initiate something out of the ordinary.


If the magnitude of a WH is directly related to distance traveled, would two WH in the same system have an effect on each other? Would simultaneous transit offer advantages, or disavantages, or both? Is it even possible? Pardon the loaded rhetorical question.

If one of them is shut down for 17-hrs. Will it affect the other? Could they be quantumly entangled? What if they are connected somehow? Can they even be shut down?

Maybe one WH can transit the maximum number of ships through and the other WH can soothe its pain. They might advantageously affect each other by resetting each other's maximum transits.

With the Twins, there may no longer be a limit on the number of ships a navy can bring through. That could be a defining advantage; times ten when the enemy is ignorant of the possibility. Quantum entanglement certainly makes many possibilities available to the author. Simultaneous transits could make the distance traveled a few times greater than the previously known limit of 1000 light years. It could mean distances of 2,000? 3,000? Without knowing the key – and that a key exists – certain distances could be too impractical to travel the long way around.

The MAN just ain't gonna be an easy foe. One may be disappointed if one is expecting the MAN to be another gorilla's face painted on a paper tiger.

penny wrote:The Twins

Twins are oftentimes supernaturally aware of each other.

This is a very interesting conversation. Brigade XO really reeled me in. Thanks. I do enjoy the conversation and the plethora of information given here in one place. A lot of it I was not aware of. Again, thanks.

Could it be that the WHs are so complicated that they have not been fully mapped yet? Hold that thought.

Whenever I think of this anomaly, I find it interesting that my brain always conjures up the same thing. There are two WHs in the same system, and my brain wants to associate them with each other, in some manner.

There are two men in every silo where each of them are responsible for turning their own key simultaneously to launch the ICBM. It is the same in a nuclear submarine. Two men each with a key that must be turned simultaneously.

What if something extraordinary happens when “the two keys” of the WHs are turned at once (transits made at the same time)? That just may initiate something out of the ordinary.


If the magnitude of a WH is directly related to distance traveled, would two WH in the same system have an effect on each other? Would simultaneous transit offer advantages, or disavantages, or both? Is it even possible? Pardon the loaded rhetorical question.

If one of them is shut down for 17-hrs. Will it affect the other? Could they be quantumly entangled? What if they are connected somehow? Can they even be shut down?

Maybe one WH can transit the maximum number of ships through and the other WH can soothe its pain. They might advantageously affect each other by resetting each other's maximum transits.

With the Twins, there may no longer be a limit on the number of ships a navy can bring through. That could be a defining advantage; times ten when the enemy is ignorant of the possibility. Quantum entanglement certainly makes many possibilities available to the author. Simultaneous transits could make the distance traveled a few times greater than the previously known limit of 1000 light years. It could mean distances of 2,000? 3,000? Without knowing the key – and that a key exists – certain distances could be too impractical to travel the long way around.

The MAN just ain't gonna be an easy foe. One may be disappointed if one is expecting the MAN to be another gorilla's face painted on a paper tiger.

Basically -- we don't know, we don't know, we don't know, we don't know.

About the only thing we do know is that the MAlign scientist also don't know much about them.

Torch of Freedom wrote:a never before observed hyper-space phenomenon: a pair of wormhole termini, less than two light-minutes from one another and less than ten light-minutes from SGC-902-36-G itself. In fact, they were precisely 9.24 light-minutes from the star, which put them exactly on its hyper limit, and made them the only wormhole termini in the explored galaxy which were less than thirty light-minutes from a star.
No one had ever encountered anything like it before, and even all these years after its discovery, the Mesan Alignment's hyper-physicists were still trying to come up with an explanation for how the "SGC-902-36-G Wormhole Anomaly" (also known as "The Twins") had happened when all generally accepted wormhole theory said it couldn't have. There were currently, Trajan had been told, at least six competing "main" hypotheses.

That's almost the entire text in the entire series about them.


I would guess that they don't do anything especially weird; and mostly do function independently of each other. But that's a pure guess because we don't know

Something occurred to me. The MBS utilized the MWJ to corner the market on trade. Could they eventually corner the market on WHs too? If push comes to shove and the GA has to go to battle over the Twins, between all of the members of the GA, who would actually assume ownership? Galactic law essentially says that whoever is powerful enough to take the WH, owns it. The HV has never heard that possession is nine-tenths of the law.