Manticore exploration?

I think the manticore military might need a new mission. Sending out a few destroyers to make sure all the star charts are right. In just recent time in terms of inaccurate star charts we have Cerberus System, the Refuge System, and the Galton System. And there's Honor's line that goes something like "It's what you think you know." that gets you. Also as a nice side effect I suspect you might run into a few slavers and pirates.

Puidwen wrote:I think the manticore military might need a new mission. Sending out a few destroyers to make sure all the star charts are right. In just recent time in terms of inaccurate star charts we have Cerberus System, the Refuge System, and the Galton System. And there's Honor's line that goes something like "It's what you think you know." that gets you. Also as a nice side effect I suspect you might run into a few slavers and pirates.

The problem is that there are millions of stars to check... and I am not exaggerating. Let's assume for the sake of the argument that the Solarian League Core up to 200 light-years in radius from Earth is accurate (we'll have been scanning that range for 2000 years). Manticore is 512 light-years, so we can easily assume the Verge and the Fringe extend out to 650 light-years.

I'm going to round those numbers down to 60 pc and up to 200 pc respectively, and keep rounding because all the averages here are very inaccurate. That gives us two spheres, of volume ~900,000 and ~33,500,000 cubic parsecs, with the shell containing 32,600,000 cubic parsecs. Multiplying that by the stellar density of 0.14 stars / cubic parsec gives us 4,600,000 stars.

Now, as I said, this is a very inaccurate average. For one, the average stellar density in the Sun's neighbourhood probably does not hold true for the entire volume. The 200 pc radius extends a little above and below the galactic disk, so the density should drop there. For another, the expansion of the Human Diaspora is probably not spherical, especially not since the discovery of wormholes. But while not accurate, it's probably in the right order of magnitude: a few million stars.

Let's remove all the O- and B-type blue giants, because those produce too much solar wind and it would be difficult to live around them with Honorverse-style technology. That removes 0.12% of the total only.

Let's say you can remove all M-type red dwarfs, because they are unlikely to contain habitable planets. Those are 75% of the total. But I wouldn't count on that absence around them, plus if I were trying to hide, that's where I would hide. There's plenty of starlight to power your economy and you don't really need a planet to live on. We have two examples: Galton, where most people did not go down to the Galton planet, and more importantly Yildun (of Technodyne) where there no inhabitable planets at all.

That leaves about a million left.

To quote Douglas Adams, "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is."

I think you can cut those numbers down at lease somewhat. for one you don't have to check the entire galaxy. There's only so fast an impeller drive can go, and so only so much, space that is could potentially be inhabited. You could also ask friendly star nations for a list of star system their ships have visited and strike them form your list of star systems that need to be search. And while i'm not sure about this one i suspect that some star systems even at a distance will be obviously uninhabitable even with honorverse levels of technology.

So you only have to get to 500,000 of them. And we’ll assume it takes a week to get there and check it out. So you need 3.5 million ship/days assigned (not including the month or two to/from base). How many ships are you going to assign to this? 100? So you need 35,000 days to check it out…

Puidwen wrote:I think you can cut those numbers down at lease somewhat. for one you don't have to check the entire galaxy. There's only so fast an impeller drive can go, and so only so much, space that is could potentially be inhabited. You could also ask friendly star nations for a list of star system their ships have visited and strike them form your list of star systems that need to be search. And while i'm not sure about this one i suspect that some star systems even at a distance will be obviously uninhabitable even with honorverse levels of technology.

I'm not anywhere close to the entire Galaxy. The entire Galaxy is somewhere between 100 and 500 biliion stars (turns out we aren't sure).

My calculation was only systems in the sphere with radius 650 light-years / 200 pc from Sol. Impeller ships can reach this and have reached this. We also know that they have access to a wormhole, so they can be even slightly outside that. In fact, with 4 termini, the Felix wormhole is already on the large side, so it's possible it has a bridge that is fairly long.

We don't know if the GA Intelligence has clued in to this possibility, but they should because they did notice that the slave ships were transiting using the Warner-Mannerheim bridge and had infiltrated their WH control. They may not conclude that it's a completely unknown junction, but they must be prepared to assume another WH control has been corrupted and has been hiding transit records. Therefore, the location of where the hideout can be anywhere in that radius.

One would hope that Manticore's ONI would have be tapping that very large number of Manticor Merchant Marine that are former/retired officers of RMN to slip ONI information on the planets they visit, the systems of the same and the various non-Junction wormholes. As we saw in Lacoon I, the RMN BCs didn't have enough information on those wormholes and essential had to enter them blind since the SL Astro Control on them were not cooperative. Yes, I realize that termini fluctuate but even a couple of year old info would have been helpful.

The challenge becomes having all of the members of the GA sharing that information as it is gathered so ONI can compile at least a general list of what is where, who may live there and what is going on.

I do think that the RMN DDs and those of the GA that are also out hunting pirates or other problems are going be to very busy and the reporting home is going to take a long time.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Puidwen wrote:I think you can cut those numbers down at lease somewhat. for one you don't have to check the entire galaxy. There's only so fast an impeller drive can go, and so only so much, space that is could potentially be inhabited. You could also ask friendly star nations for a list of star system their ships have visited and strike them form your list of star systems that need to be search. And while i'm not sure about this one i suspect that some star systems even at a distance will be obviously uninhabitable even with honorverse levels of technology.

I'm not anywhere close to the entire Galaxy. The entire Galaxy is somewhere between 100 and 500 biliion stars (turns out we aren't sure).

My calculation was only systems in the sphere with radius 650 light-years / 200 pc from Sol. Impeller ships can reach this and have reached this. We also know that they have access to a wormhole, so they can be even slightly outside that. In fact, with 4 termini, the Felix wormhole is already on the large side, so it's possible it has a bridge that is fairly long.

We don't know if the GA Intelligence has clued in to this possibility, but they should because they did notice that the slave ships were transiting using the Warner-Mannerheim bridge and had infiltrated their WH control. They may not conclude that it's a completely unknown junction, but they must be prepared to assume another WH control has been corrupted and has been hiding transit records. Therefore, the location of where the hideout can be anywhere in that radius.

David once said that for every dot on a map indicating official human habitation in the human inhabited sphere, there are 50 (iirc) other dots where Humanity has left it's mark - failed colonies, lost colonies, secret colonies mining colonies, secret military bases, pirate bases, slaver way stations, etc, etc... many not on any map...

And for every one of those dots, there are at least 200 (iirc) more dots that humanity has mostly ignored. So if there are 5000 known, populated systems, there are 250000 locations of human habitation, and 50000000 (50 million) total locations on the map to check inside the human inhabited sphere. - and given the ease of travel, you can't localize the opponent to just the human habitable - well there are lots more stars to check off.

Theemile wrote:David once said that for every dot on a map indicating official human habitation in the human inhabited sphere, there are 50 (iirc) other dots where Humanity has left it's mark - failed colonies, lost colonies, secret colonies mining colonies, secret military bases, pirate bases, slaver way stations, etc, etc... many not on any map...

And for every one of those dots, there are at least 200 (iirc) more dots that humanity has mostly ignored. So if there are 5000 known, populated systems, there are 250000 locations of human habitation, and 50000000 (50 million) total locations on the map to check inside the human inhabited sphere. - and given the ease of travel, you can't localize the opponent to just the human habitable - well there are lots more stars to check off.

The big difference is that those systems are not radio-quiet. They could be and thus make it even more difficult. Pirate waystations are probably too small to generate a lot of radio traffic, but neither Galton nor Darius are small systems. Those have billions of people and have been settled for over 150 T-years. Galton in particular had heavy space-based industries for that long; the Darius ones may be more recent, only brought online to build spider-drive ships. But still, with 3 billion humans on the planet, they probably already had resource extractions in their asteroid belts and orbital industries.

So one may pick them up from 50 light-years away due to the noise they are producing.

It's not something the GA Intelligence can take to the bank (we know they can, but they don't). They have to assume the hideout is really hidden. They have no idea how big it is; they know how many people were extracted out of Mesa during Houdini and how many didn't show up in Galton, but that number is probably just a thousand or two. The minimum size has to be derived from the type of heavy industry required for the spider ships that can't be attributed to Galton in the first place.

In fact, the MAlign knowing that they could be reported by a neighbour for making noise would have designed their system so as to not be heard. If they haven't, then it stands to reason there are no close-by neighbours with trading links elsewhere. But since it's David we're talking about, I wouldn't be surprised to learn the Darius is close to an important system.

Brigade XO wrote:One would hope that Manticore's ONI would have be tapping that very large number of Manticor Merchant Marine that are former/retired officers of RMN to slip ONI information on the planets they visit, the systems of the same and the various non-Junction wormholes. As we saw in Lacoon I, the RMN BCs didn't have enough information on those wormholes and essential had to enter them blind since the SL Astro Control on them were not cooperative. Yes, I realize that termini fluctuate but even a couple of year old info would have been helpful.

I think it's pretty clear that they did have a fair bit of info on those wormholes - not just where the terminus area was but the precise vectors for approaching and using them.

From what we've seen of wormhole survey, if you didn't just pop out of it then even after you've nailed down the terminus it's still weeks to months of a survey ship's time to nail down and confirm the approach vectors.

Don't recall the RMN forces during having to stop for weeks at each wormhole for an astronomical survey before being able to enter it.


What they wouldn't have known, without very recent data from local Astro control or very recently transited ships is:
a) when is traffic scheduled to come the other way; and
b) have there been any recent defenses added (minefields, missile pods, naval forces, etc.)

Years old, heck even maybe even weeks old, data isn't going to give you that.

Jonathan_S wrote:What they wouldn't have known, without very recent data from local Astro control or very recently transited ships is:
a) when is traffic scheduled to come the other way; and
b) have there been any recent defenses added (minefields, missile pods, naval forces, etc.)

Years old, heck even maybe even weeks old, data isn't going to give you that.

And then there's the whole act of controlling: if the local team didn't want to help Manticore, then Manticore would need to supply their own personnel. The ships going through need instructions, departure lanes, timing, etc. Plus, there may be a need for customs duty control, inspections, etc. Someone needs to verify that the wormhole isn't being used for illegal activities, such as human trafficking.

The RMN is also on the hook for defence of each. Obviously if they left the locals would just take back, but they also need to protect against an enterprising warlord who would love to get a cut of everything going through.