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What next after To End in Fire

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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Wed Feb 01, 2023 11:48 am

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Somtaaw wrote:Wasn't there mention that the wormhole in Felix that connects to Darius being both significantly weaker -AND- considerably closer to the star than every other known wormhole junction? Or was it the other end of the Torch junction that had those features?


The Twins junction is the very closest one known to mankind, with both wormholes sitting exactly on the hyperlimit and just a light-second apart. There's nothing special about the Felix Junction that I can recall.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by Theemile   » Wed Feb 01, 2023 12:33 pm

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Somtaaw wrote:Wasn't there mention that the wormhole in Felix that connects to Darius being both significantly weaker -AND- considerably closer to the star than every other known wormhole junction? Or was it the other end of the Torch junction that had those features?

If so, then any survey ships the GA uses to unofficially seek out unreported junctions in places like Felix, due to both the odd location and low strength using a 'standard Junction survey pattern' simply wouldn't find it without tripping over it because Lady Luck blessed them.

Which is what I seem to recall how the MAlign found it, almost purely by chance with their Jessyk Combine survey ship, and they've made every effort since discovery to ensure NOBODY else finds that wormhole. And from the time they discovered that stealthy junction, they've been trying to quietly purchase the system out from under other interested parties who don't actually know about the wormhole.


Felix has been colonized and abandoned multiple times, with multiple parties claiming "Ownership" of the system - None of which had a hint there is a wormhole junction in the system. I don't remember how the wormhole was found - maybe transits from the Congo-twins side, maybe from the mentioned random Jessyk survey ship - regardless, there are no obvious signs to previous owners that the wormhole is there. Yes, a deep background analysis of every gravimetric reading known to man by a specialized AI might be able to dig it out - but that AI would be looking at data from EVERY star, not just the populated ones, because nothing obvious is suggesting that THIS STAR has one, thus would take multiple years, at least. I assume someone has already been doing so for this very reason, yet didn't find anything.

I guess an intern at Manticore Astro control could coming running into the PoV command room at any moment carrying a ream of greenbar printer paper, trumpeting that the long running search AI just spit out data confirming a previously unknown wormhole junction in Felix of all places.

But... that would feel a little too Deus ex Machina for me...
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by Jonathan_S   » Wed Feb 01, 2023 1:04 pm

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Somtaaw wrote:Wasn't there mention that the wormhole in Felix that connects to Darius being both significantly weaker -AND- considerably closer to the star than every other known wormhole junction? Or was it the other end of the Torch junction that had those features?

IIRC the Torch terminus is closer in than normal; while the two termini at the Twins are the closest ever seen -- each sitting at a different point along the hyper limit. (Which makes me wonder whether the hyper limit somehow interrupted the wormhole and split it into the twins)

But I can't recall anything about the size or power of the Felix junction.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by Robert_A_Woodward   » Thu Feb 02, 2023 2:19 am

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Robert_A_Woodward wrote:I have thought of a possible way to uncover Felix. It however would be part of a very extensive check of all survey reports of uninhabited systems (officially uninhabited that is). This will be done because of the false report for Galton. OTOH, if the check was just to see if the number of planets (and their orbits) and asteroid belts match the official survey report, Felix would easily pass.


That's impractical. The mean stellar density in our neighbourhood (which admittedly is low, in the Local Bubble) is 0.14 stars per cubic parsec. Galton was 200 light-years (~60 pc) from Mannerheim. A sphere with that radius has a volume of over 900,000 pc³, so it should contain roughly 126 thousand stars. If the GA sent 100 ships in a scouting mission and each took 1 week in average per system to determine if there is a wormhole there (or other nefarious activities) or not, that's a 24-year programme.

Even if you divide that by 2 to account for an average of 2 stars per star system, it's too many to inspect for wormholes (and I don't think it would help, since they'd still need to scan all stars of a star system anyway). Given that evidence shows realising a wormhole is there is difficult enough, 1 week may not be enough. It's probably not enough to rule wormholes out for a sufficient number of systems either.

And this is just the neighbourhood of Mannerheim. The GA intelligence services do know that 3 slaver ships did transit the warp bridge and didn't come back, so they may have reason to suspect that region, though.


I said that it would be an extensive effort (BTW, the SLN could provide 10000 ships for the purpose). I agree that actually searching for wormhole termini (or junctions) would make the process much longer. Note that I wasn't advocating checking all stellar systems within a certain radius, just the supposedly uninhabited systems with survey reports.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Thu Feb 02, 2023 6:08 pm

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Robert_A_Woodward wrote:I said that it would be an extensive effort (BTW, the SLN could provide 10000 ships for the purpose). I agree that actually searching for wormhole termini (or junctions) would make the process much longer. Note that I wasn't advocating checking all stellar systems within a certain radius, just the supposedly uninhabited systems with survey reports.


With the myopic sensor package that the SLN mounted? No, those ships need to have a refit first.

I don't think any ship smaller than a light cruiser is acceptable for this task (and anything bigger than a CA is too expensive). They'll have to be on-station for months on end and that's a CL job. They'll also need to have a trained crew to operate those sensitive sensors.

Let's say they did a two-stage survey, with the first only trying to rule out the vast majority of systems so a second, specialised set of ships can come in and do the extensive survey, ships like the Harvest Joy, which was built on a CA hull. What would the first pass ratio need to be? Let's say they manage to get 25 dedicated wormhole survey ships but each inspection takes 6 months. That means you can inspect 50 systems per year, so to finish within 5 years, you need to reduce the 126k to a mere 300. That's a 99.8% reduction, which I don't think is feasible with the known constraints of scouting and the number of ships I projected.

No, it would need to be an order of magnitude more: 10,000 ships like you said. There's no navy out there that has 10,000 modern CL + CA, not even all of them combined.

Then we have the problem that 10,000 ships from a myriad nationalities and a couple million people involved means a lot of opportunity for the MAlign to infiltrate. There's no way to keep OpSec in such an operation. I'd add that the RF would volunteer to help too, and the Mannerheim Navy would scan the systems closest to its home, thereby reporting that there's nothing to see in Felix. "Move along now and oh btw we think those people in the Jewish League are hiding something, you may want to revisit systems X, Y, and Z."

The thing is, the Honorverse should have the manpower available to have 10,000 civilian wormhole-scouting ships. There should be trans-stellar companies with the wherewithal to fund this, like Axelrod. The upside of finding a wormwhole is too great. But we know that economics is not the best in the HV...
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by kzt   » Thu Feb 02, 2023 8:55 pm

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Running a multi-month survey in a system that you suspect is occupied by a highly stealthy ruthless adversary seems unwise unless you have a death wish.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Fri Feb 03, 2023 12:07 pm

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kzt wrote:Running a multi-month survey in a system that you suspect is occupied by a highly stealthy ruthless adversary seems unwise unless you have a death wish.


Kinda. But a missing ship is still a big sign that you should pay attention to this system. For that reason, the ship should be "mostly" safe. The stealth enemy would probably perform surveillance from afar and not act, unless needed.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by Relax   » Sat Feb 04, 2023 3:01 am

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Robert_A_Woodward wrote:I said that it would be an extensive effort (BTW, the SLN could provide 10000 ships for the purpose). I agree that actually searching for wormhole termini (or junctions) would make the process much longer. Note that I wasn't advocating checking all stellar systems within a certain radius, just the supposedly uninhabited systems with survey reports.


With the myopic sensor package that the SLN mounted? No, those ships need to have a refit first.

I don't think any ship smaller than a light cruiser is acceptable for this task (and anything bigger than a CA is too expensive). They'll have to be on-station for months on end and that's a CL job. They'll also need to have a trained crew to operate those sensitive sensors.


Perspective:
Star density near earth is ~0.004/ly^3 This number is wiki, but it also rings about right to my old astrophysics days. Too lazy to search Burnhams for confirmation. Anyone know a better number?

In radius of 1000LY of earth there are ~4E12 cubic light years. This is roughly extent of the entire Honorverse.

Therefore Honorverse has ~1 million stars.

Subtract every star with a recent survey in last several hundred years and that whittles the number significantly.
____________________________________________________

With modern RD's one would think it would require a tiny fraction of a month to survey an entire system out to ~furthest known wormhole from a star distance.

If you had 10,000 ships, one would think you will probably spend more time transiting between systems than actually surveying them.

Big task, but you could do it in ~1 year or so.

Book timeline needs a pause anyways...
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Sat Feb 04, 2023 2:49 pm

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Relax wrote:In radius of 1000LY of earth there are ~4E12 cubic light years. This is roughly extent of the entire Honorverse.

Therefore Honorverse has ~1 million stars.


Your number "4e12" is off by 3 orders of magnitude (it's 4e9), but the number of stars is correct.

Also, for some reason it appears the Honorverse is actually a short cylinder a few tens of light-years tall, not a sphere. That would considerably reduce the volume to a mere 125 million cubic light-years instead of 4.2 billion. Either that or there's a huge and hugely unlikely coincidence in all distances we've been offered in the narrative. It's not the "plane of the Galaxy," even though said plane is very thin, thinner than a CD proportionately. Said plane is about 1000 light-years thick in our neighbourhood (which means a sphere with 1000 light-years of radius at our position would significantly extend beyond it and would need to account for a much reduced stellar density), because one of the stars we know of, Sigma Draconis, has a very high galactic elevation from position compared to the disk.

This of course stems from the fact that the author is working on a flat map and probably uses a ruler to calculate distances and travel times. We'll be glad that he went to all that trouble instead of making up things out of thin air (or, as the case may be, out of interstellar vacuum) and gloss over this. I've seldom seen any author come anywhere close to this, much less surpass -- only Dennis E. Taylor of the Bobiverse series and Alastair Reynolds come to mind.

Subtract every star with a recent survey in last several hundred years and that whittles the number significantly.


This I disagree with, for two reasons. First, that it whittles down the number significantly: with 1 million stars to survey and given the observed state of human technology, I don't expect there to have been much of a dent. The Core of the SL might have been extensively surveyed, but the Fringe definitely hasn't, as we're still finding new habitable planets there. More importantly, the survey for wormholes doesn't appear to be quick at all and can yield a lot of false positives.

Second and most crucially, the surveys can't be trusted. We know that Galton was surveyed and determined to be habitable, but said survey was purposefully lost, replaced with falsified information. The GA intelligence services know this. They can't count on the reliability of the survey databases to exclude anything. For that matter, they can't really exclude even inhabited systems: Mesa shows how hidden installations could be set up in the far reaches, with a little corruption of the traffic control authorities, and this was a well-known system with fairly moderate shipping traffic.

With modern RD's one would think it would require a tiny fraction of a month to survey an entire system out to ~furthest known wormhole from a star distance.


I don't think that's the case.

With that time, they will be able to find a system that has a previously unknown, technological human colony, though, which we know Darius to be. In fact, they can pick up the emissions from Darius from 10 or 20 light-years away. But this relies on facts we are aware of but they aren't: that Darius is a technological civilisation with powerful emissions, large population, and on a previously uninhabited system.

If the Onion were hiding on Mannerheim, for example, such survey would find nothing. Mannerheim is already a technological civilisation, with its own shipbuilding and a great amount of traffic thanks to the Mannerheim-Warner warp bridge.

Similarly, such survey wouldn't find a civilisation with smaller population and strict emissions control, particularly if they hadn't been there for long. It's entirely possible to build shipyards and habitats inside of asteroids: by hollowing them out, you create the space and you get the materials to build ships with. This is actually the example of Yildun, which has significant shipbuilding installations but no inhabited planet. As the GA intel services don't know the size and scope of the MAlign's remaining hideout, they can't exclude that it is a copy of Yildun in a somewhat smaller scale.

In fact, we can't either. We know Felix has two more termini, besides Darius and The Twins. It's highly unlikely the MAlign hasn't explored them, so there may be surprises there too.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by phillies   » Sun Feb 05, 2023 12:19 pm

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The attention of readers is called to the Astrogator's Handbook
https://www.amazon.com/Astrogators-Hand ... 1929381425
which is a 3D map (in 2-D slices) of stars near the earth, out to iirc 50 LY.

Contrary to comments about flat maps, this author in Minutegirls used the 3D map. There was also a working 3D projection onto a screen, in which you could rotate the projection and insert lines between stars. It was a curious observation that within ca. 30LY of earth all the type G stars were in a remarkably narrow plane.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Relax wrote:In radius of 1000LY of earth there are ~4E12 cubic light years. This is roughly extent of the entire Honorverse.

Therefore Honorverse has ~1 million stars.


Your number "4e12" is off by 3 orders of magnitude (it's 4e9), but the number of stars is correct.

Also, for some reason it appears the Honorverse is actually a short cylinder a few tens of light-years tall, not a sphere. That would considerably reduce the volume to a mere 125 million cubic light-years instead of 4.2 billion. Either that or there's a huge and hugely unlikely coincidence in all distances we've been offered in the narrative. It's not the "plane of the Galaxy," even though said plane is very thin, thinner than a CD proportionately. Said plane is about 1000 light-years thick in our neighbourhood (which means a sphere with 1000 light-years of radius at our position would significantly extend beyond it and would need to account for a much reduced stellar density), because one of the stars we know of, Sigma Draconis, has a very high galactic elevation from position compared to the disk.

This of course stems from the fact that the author is working on a flat map and probably uses a ruler to calculate distances and travel times. We'll be glad that he went to all that trouble instead of making up things out of thin air (or, as the case may be, out of interstellar vacuum) and gloss over this. I've seldom seen any author come anywhere close to this, much less surpass -- only Dennis E. Taylor of the Bobiverse series and Alastair Reynolds come to mind.

Subtract every star with a recent survey in last several hundred years and that whittles the number significantly.


This I disagree with, for two reasons. First, that it whittles down the number significantly: with 1 million stars to survey and given the observed state of human technology, I don't expect there to have been much of a dent. The Core of the SL might have been extensively surveyed, but the Fringe definitely hasn't, as we're still finding new habitable planets there. More importantly, the survey for wormholes doesn't appear to be quick at all and can yield a lot of false positives.

Second and most crucially, the surveys can't be trusted. We know that Galton was surveyed and determined to be habitable, but said survey was purposefully lost, replaced with falsified information. The GA intelligence services know this. They can't count on the reliability of the survey databases to exclude anything. For that matter, they can't really exclude even inhabited systems: Mesa shows how hidden installations could be set up in the far reaches, with a little corruption of the traffic control authorities, and this was a well-known system with fairly moderate shipping traffic.

With modern RD's one would think it would require a tiny fraction of a month to survey an entire system out to ~furthest known wormhole from a star distance.


I don't think that's the case.

With that time, they will be able to find a system that has a previously unknown, technological human colony, though, which we know Darius to be. In fact, they can pick up the emissions from Darius from 10 or 20 light-years away. But this relies on facts we are aware of but they aren't: that Darius is a technological civilisation with powerful emissions, large population, and on a previously uninhabited system.

If the Onion were hiding on Mannerheim, for example, such survey would find nothing. Mannerheim is already a technological civilisation, with its own shipbuilding and a great amount of traffic thanks to the Mannerheim-Warner warp bridge.

Similarly, such survey wouldn't find a civilisation with smaller population and strict emissions control, particularly if they hadn't been there for long. It's entirely possible to build shipyards and habitats inside of asteroids: by hollowing them out, you create the space and you get the materials to build ships with. This is actually the example of Yildun, which has significant shipbuilding installations but no inhabited planet. As the GA intel services don't know the size and scope of the MAlign's remaining hideout, they can't exclude that it is a copy of Yildun in a somewhat smaller scale.

In fact, we can't either. We know Felix has two more termini, besides Darius and The Twins. It's highly unlikely the MAlign hasn't explored them, so there may be surprises there too.
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