What next after To End in Fire

The only use that I can imagine is to have several Ghost spy ships located far enough away, so that no one would would be aware of them; but where they could record the events of the battle to give feedback to Darius on how things worked out. For example, give a warning about the bow wave produced by Shuttlecock.

weekstonz wrote:The only use that I can imagine is to have several Ghost spy ships located far enough away, so that no one would would be aware of them; but where they could record the events of the battle to give feedback to Darius on how things worked out. For example, give a warning about the bow wave produced by Shuttlecock.

Hello weekstonz

Welcome to the forum. Grab an Old Tilman and make yourself comfortable.

What you're saying could have happened, but it's unlikely. The MAlign did not know when Galton would be discovered. Benjamin Detweiler went there to ensure everything was ready (and to introduce the system to us) but there was no timeline. When Pheobe was talking to Audrey O'Hanrahan, she said they had no idea which of the MAlign hideouts had been discovered -- the militaristic one or the peaceful one. In fact, when Honor dropped from hyperspace, the Galton defenders were completely surprised.

Not knowing when the GF would show up, the MAN would need to station a Ghost indefinitely. That actually means three: one on-station, one in transit, one home for refit and cycle the crew.

Stationing a ship in that system is also a risk: what happens if it develops an engineering fault and can't leave after the GF has taken over? What happens if its stealth systems fail and the wrong people see it in Galton? What happens if entirely by accident the GF scouts arrive nearby? Those are all low-probability events, but that doesn't mean the risk is automatically acceptable.

And besides, it wouldn't have learnt more than what O'Hanrahan will report in the public and what survivors will be able to tell.

Why do you think it has to be a ship? I see no reason you couldn’t apply the stealth tech to a buoy. A few of them would give you a pretty good idea of what happened in broad strokes. If you have a tap on the defense network via a laser or something that would give you a lot more, but might not be worth it.

kzt wrote:Why do you think it has to be a ship? I see no reason you couldn’t apply the stealth tech to a buoy. A few of them would give you a pretty good idea of what happened in broad strokes. If you have a tap on the defense network via a laser or something that would give you a lot more, but might not be worth it.

Because RFC has ruled that there is no automated hyperspace travel. If it is something other than a ship with people inside, then it can't return to Darius with the information. That means something has to come and get it and that thing's hyper footprint on arrival is the riskiest portion of the insertion. By definition, it has to arrive after the system has fallen to the GA, meaning that it will be crawling with GF ships.

It couldn't be smuggled out in the near-term because all travel from Galton nationals will be restricted for that time. The GA is also unlikely to have been infiltrated by an agent placed in a position that could collect this data.

Smuggling out is more likely after reconstruction starts and civilians are allowed in the system and Galton nationals are allowed to travel. But by that time, the system will have been in GA hands for months or a year, so this network could have been detected. Ideally the in-the-know MAlign members would have sent a self-destruct order (and things exploding in the middle of nowhere is not news), but we haven't heard this happening.

kzt wrote:Why do you think it has to be a ship? I see no reason you couldn’t apply the stealth tech to a buoy. A few of them would give you a pretty good idea of what happened in broad strokes. If you have a tap on the defense network via a laser or something that would give you a lot more, but might not be worth it.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Because RFC has ruled that there is no automated hyperspace travel. If it is something other than a ship with people inside, then it can't return to Darius with the information. That means something has to come and get it and that thing's hyper footprint on arrival is the riskiest portion of the insertion. By definition, it has to arrive after the system has fallen to the GA, meaning that it will be crawling with GF ships.

It couldn't be smuggled out in the near-term because all travel from Galton nationals will be restricted for that time. The GA is also unlikely to have been infiltrated by an agent placed in a position that could collect this data.

Smuggling out is more likely after reconstruction starts and civilians are allowed in the system and Galton nationals are allowed to travel. But by that time, the system will have been in GA hands for months or a year, so this network could have been detected. Ideally the in-the-know MAlign members would have sent a self-destruct order (and things exploding in the middle of nowhere is not news), but we haven't heard this happening.

The Peeps used buoys in The Short Victorious War and the Malign used them for target information in Oyster Bay; so there is NO reason why they could not have been emplaced around Galton to give feedback to Darius on how the actual attack and countermeasures fared. The Ghost-class recon ships could have emplaced and recovered them without anyone in the Galton system knowing (that includes the GA).

It is true that this might not have taken place, but I would consider it an intelligence failure on Darius' part if the information was not gathered.

Edit 1: On thinking further about this, Darius will have a good idea when the invasion fleet should arrive, unlike Galton; remember that Darius has an agent working with the reporter that is going along for the ride. Which means that they can get Ghost-class recon ships in place shortly before the invasion arrives to view the battle and then leave without anyone knowing. I fully believe that it was a lie when the reporter was told that it was not known which colony was found, because Darius is accessed through a wormhole.

Edit 2: Pondering some more, even Galton should have had a reasonable idea of when the invasion would occur. Assuming that they have the sort of gravitic sensor array that a good military would demand, then they should have detected the transition by the survey ship (which would be gone before they could respond). Then it is just a matter of computing the round trip travel time and guessing how long it would take the Grand Alliance to put the fleet together.

"The Reporter" is going to be watched like a hawk to make sure she doesn't pass information.

We have seen routine scouting of target systems by DDs etc of navies so why not have Ghosts cycle through an approach way outside Galton and swap off observe duties? These are Alignment Navy crew, they do their jobs and certainly be able to handle the kind of remote approach that the Manticore Exploration Service (aka stealth target observation) used to detect Galton. And we are talking Alignment stealth they used to scout targets for Oyster Bay and that tech surely hasn't been available to Galton.. They know where the system is, they know what the capabilities are, heck they probably know what semi-blind spots the Galton sensor nets and monitoring systems are. So they Spider in to a spot way out of Galton's range and creep in- then send in drones to get updates.
How likely is it that Anybody's scouting force or an assault force is going to drop right on top of a Ghost that came in from more than a light month outside Galton?
Heck a Ghost could be sitting a light day outside of Galton doing passive gathering of when it was attacked by the GA and provide detail on the tactics on both sides and what was left.

And what exactly is the difference between the "militaristic" Alignment hideout and the "peaceful" one" I mean beyond one acts like a German military dictatorship and the other is somewhat more light and fluffy with "slaves that don't know they are slaves" and is producing fleets of ships to slip close and devastate inhabited planetary systems down to -probably- creating extinction level events though "collateral damage". Oh, they want to "improve" humanity, though it's only themselves and their flunkies and living tools they want to improve.

Sorry, Darius should have been keeping a clear eye on Galton if from only a couple of light-weeks away to see how things worked out.

tlb wrote:The Peeps used buoys in The Short Victorious War and the Malign used them for target information in Oyster Bay; so there is NO reason why they could not have been emplaced around Galton to give feedback to Darius on how the actual attack and countermeasures fared. The Ghost-class recon ships could have emplaced and recovered them without anyone in the Galton system knowing (that includes the GA).

It is true that this might not have taken place, but I would consider it an intelligence failure on Darius' part if the information was not gathered.

Intelligence failure or not, I don't think it happened. I would also think it would be par for course for the MAlign to be arrogant enough to think they didn't need this intelligence.

The Solarian-designed buoys that the Peeps used in SVW were at this point over 20 T-years old, and even back then the procedure was detected. Not the buoys themselves, but the destroyers that came to collect information or at least their actions. The GF would have had far more resources at disposal, a knowledge of enemy stealth ships, so they'd be watching the hyperlimit and far beyond it like hawks. Those Ghost-class ships would need to be inserted far out, at least a light-week.

And they'd risk walking into a trap to collect the information. They wouldn't know going in if the buoys were intact and there were no GF stealthed ships waiting to pounce.

I think it's far more likely that the MAlign considered the information of too little value to risk further detection, especially if Galton was to be interpreted as the last redoubt.

Edit 1: On thinking further about this, Darius will have a good idea when the invasion fleet should arrive, unlike Galton; remember that Darius has an agent working with the reporter that is going along for the ride. Which means that they can get Ghost-class recon ships in place shortly before the invasion arrives to view the battle and then leave without anyone knowing. I fully believe that it was a lie when the reporter was told that it was not known which colony was found, because Darius is accessed through a wormhole.

Edit 2: Pondering some more, even Galton should have had a reasonable idea of when the invasion would occur. Assuming that they have the sort of gravitic sensor array that a good military would demand, then they should have detected the transition by the survey ship (which would be gone before they could respond). Then it is just a matter of computing the round trip travel time and guessing how long it would take the Grand Alliance to put the fleet together.

Neither of those is likely.

The material from O'Hanrahan would have been inspected first, held back or sent on a random time-delay so as to not give notice to anyone that they were leaving. She'd have agreed on preparing a few stories ahead of time to be published after leaving, so as to give the impression she was still around. Whether she liked this or not is immaterial, because it would have been a precondition for being aboard in the first place.

She wouldn't have gone along with this plan either, because she had no love for this militaristic sect. Phoebe told her that they didn't know whether the "good guys" or the "bad guys" had been detected, but O'Hanrahan would have been read in a little bit once she agreed to the initial conditions, so she would know this was a militaristic system. Therefore, she would have felt no need to communicate with Phoebe and thus violate the trust of the GA if she perceived no danger to her GA.

There would also have been no time to get the information to Galton before they arrived, even had she managed to slip in a clue, accidentally or not. We don't know what route the GF took. I don't think they'd have used any wormholes on their way, whether they controlled them or not, because those are informational and literal funnels. The GF had 250 superdreadnoughts so they probably had at least 5x as many smaller ships plus fleet train. That's some 3 days to transit everyone. This means they probably went straight via hyperspace from their staging area. We don't know for sure where that was, but the most likely place was Trevor's Star like Eighth Fleet had previously done. But either way, the point is that the fleet would have gone on information black out much sooner than actual launch date, with misdirection to boot.

As for the gravitic sensor array, we know it didn't detect the scout ship. We've discussed whether one light-week versus one light-month out was a mistake by RFC (and I think it was, or at least a retcon), but the point is that the scout ship passed completely unnoticed. The scout ships were inserted into the candidate systems much further out than any known gravitic sensor array were know to be capable of detecting. Plus, those were ships on the smaller side, not big lumbering freighter that Manticore detected (and a messy transition at that to hide the Sharks).

Brigade XO wrote:And what exactly is the difference between the "militaristic" Alignment hideout and the "peaceful" one" I mean beyond one acts like a German military dictatorship and the other is somewhat more light and fluffy with "slaves that don't know they are slaves" and is producing fleets of ships to slip close and devastate inhabited planetary systems down to -probably- creating extinction level events though "collateral damage". Oh, they want to "improve" humanity, though it's only themselves and their flunkies and living tools they want to improve.

Sorry, Darius should have been keeping a clear eye on Galton if from only a couple of light-weeks away to see how things worked out.

You can't see anything from that far out. By the time you realise something is happening, it's too late to do anything to get more information.

They'd need to be far, far closer, to be able to get any useful intel from the battle. At worst 12 light-hours (which is just under the distance between Manticore A and B), and even then I'd wonder the level of detail is useful. Ship-borne gravitic sensors get myopic at a few light-minutes, going completely useless by a few tens. So if they wanted to get intel, they'd have to have a series of sensor buoys some where much closer by, and I've argued that this risked detection. Both by the GA once they did take over and scoured the system for intel, and by the Galtonians who weren't supposed to know they were being watched.

Brigade XO wrote:And what exactly is the difference between the "militaristic" Alignment hideout and the "peaceful" one" I mean beyond one acts like a German military dictatorship and the other is somewhat more light and fluffy with "slaves that don't know they are slaves" and is producing fleets of ships to slip close and devastate inhabited planetary systems down to -probably- creating extinction level events though "collateral damage". Oh, they want to "improve" humanity, though it's only themselves and their flunkies and living tools they want to improve.

Sorry, Darius should have been keeping a clear eye on Galton if from only a couple of light-weeks away to see how things worked out.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:You can't see anything from that far out. By the time you realise something is happening, it's too late to do anything to get more information.

They'd need to be far, far closer, to be able to get any useful intel from the battle. At worst 12 light-hours (which is just under the distance between Manticore A and B), and even then I'd wonder the level of detail is useful. Ship-borne gravitic sensors get myopic at a few light-minutes, going completely useless by a few tens. So if they wanted to get intel, they'd have to have a series of sensor buoys some where much closer by, and I've argued that this risked detection. Both by the GA once they did take over and scoured the system for intel, and by the Galtonians who weren't supposed to know they were being watched.

Galton's stealth capabilities are not at the level of the Grand Alliance and the Malign did manage to get spy buoys into Manticore's home system to give targeting information to the missile pods during Oyster Bay. So suppose they sent their ghost-class spy ships to Galton ahead of the calculated invasion time and place them above and below Galton just outside the hyper limit. The GA will probably send surveillance drones in all directions to guard against stealth attacks, but their main attention will be toward the forts. The Ghosts will record as much as they can with their downward or upward view and have orders to transition out if they are individually in danger of being discovered.

Actually instead of being directly over or under Galton, they might be perpendicular to some point on the line extending out from Galton to the hyper limit.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Intelligence failure or not, I don't think it happened. I would also think it would be par for course for the MAlign to be arrogant enough to think they didn't need this intelligence.

-- snip --

The material from O'Hanrahan would have been inspected first, held back or sent on a random time-delay so as to not give notice to anyone that they were leaving. She'd have agreed on preparing a few stories ahead of time to be published after leaving, so as to give the impression she was still around. Whether she liked this or not is immaterial, because it would have been a precondition for being aboard in the first place.

She wouldn't have gone along with this plan either, because she had no love for this militaristic sect. Phoebe told her that they didn't know whether the "good guys" or the "bad guys" had been detected, but O'Hanrahan would have been read in a little bit once she agreed to the initial conditions, so she would know this was a militaristic system. Therefore, she would have felt no need to communicate with Phoebe and thus violate the trust of the GA if she perceived no danger to her GA.

There would also have been no time to get the information to Galton before they arrived, even had she managed to slip in a clue, accidentally or not. We don't know what route the GF took. I don't think they'd have used any wormholes on their way, whether they controlled them or not, because those are informational and literal funnels. The GF had 250 superdreadnoughts so they probably had at least 5x as many smaller ships plus fleet train. That's some 3 days to transit everyone. This means they probably went straight via hyperspace from their staging area. We don't know for sure where that was, but the most likely place was Trevor's Star like Eighth Fleet had previously done. But either way, the point is that the fleet would have gone on information black out much sooner than actual launch date, with misdirection to boot.

As for the gravitic sensor array, we know it didn't detect the scout ship. We've discussed whether one light-week versus one light-month out was a mistake by RFC (and I think it was, or at least a retcon), but the point is that the scout ship passed completely unnoticed. The scout ships were inserted into the candidate systems much further out than any known gravitic sensor array were know to be capable of detecting. Plus, those were ships on the smaller side, not big lumbering freighter that Manticore detected (and a messy transition at that to hide the Sharks).

At the point when Phoebe is talking to the reporter, the Malign agent knows that Galton has been discovered; there is no other reason to be talking about two colonies. The Malign are still the only group with the streak drive, which makes your concerns about timing irrelevant; particularly if the fleet will not use any wormhole. So a cargo ship carrying the news that Galton had been discovered could possibly drop off the Ghosts shortly before the invasion fleet arrives.