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(Spoiler!) What's Next for the Honorverse?(Spoiler Warning!)

Join us in talking discussing all things Honor, including (but not limited to) tactics, favorite characters, and book discussions.
Re: (Spoiler!) What's Next for the Honorverse?(Spoiler Warni
Post by pappilon   » Tue Apr 10, 2018 8:15 pm

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Joat42 wrote:So you are saying that everyone that has had any kind of dealings with the MAlign et al (directly or indirectly) either is going to keep their mouths shut or they know nothing?

That means that the MAlign is flawless in keeping everything secret and they don't do any mistakes.



Lots of people have done business with the Malign, Those good Ole Boys at New Tuscany, The Republic of Monica, Barregos & Roszak at Smoking Frog, Admiral Kingsford, SLN, ... Lots of people, lots of dealings, not a lot of actionable data.

Not flawless in keeping secrets, just very compartmentalized. There are probably crumbs out there, somewhere. Finding them in the storm and putting them together is quite the puzzle.

Also ruthless at destroying evidence. They may have missed something, somewhere, but they blew everlovin' outta Mesa to destroy it, so its not for lack of trying or being shy about collateral damage.
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The imagination has to be trained into foresight and empathy.
Ursula K. LeGuinn

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Re: (Spoiler!) What's Next for the Honorverse?(Spoiler Warni
Post by JohnRoth   » Tue Apr 10, 2018 9:17 pm

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Joat42 wrote:
kzt wrote:The RMN captured some 200 ships built at Bolthole with entirely intact computer system and not a single clue as to where Bolthole could be emerged.


I think RFC addressed that question in a post a while ago. Deliver the newly built ships with scrubbed computers. And there where 5 (I think) people outside of Bolthole that new it's location, compare that to the amount of people that was involved in Houdini - and I'm not just counting the people in the know.


That'll work for warships that are exported from Bolthole and will never return there. It doesn't work for the ships carrying high level people (like Theisman) and information back and forth. Of course, it's the first that got captured, not the second.

We can construct a method of isolating them, though, since the trip is two sections with a wormhole transit in between. You just make sure that the Calvin to Bolthole segment isn't anchored to the galactic frame of reference. The Bolthole end of the terminus could be anywhere as long as you make sure that nobody tries to do astronomical observations.

That leaves the Haven to wherever leg, but I'd expect that the terminus on that end is surrounded by forts, minefields and similar. And that the people who know where it is are a carefully picked bunch that don't go on unsupervised vacations to Back of Beyond.

Joat42 wrote:There is even textev for a couple of people quietly wander off during Houdini when their handler got dead if I remember correctly.


Those two people showed up on Darius toward the end of SoV, so they aren't wandering around like lost lambs.
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Re: (Spoiler!) What's Next for the Honorverse?(Spoiler Warni
Post by pappilon   » Wed Apr 11, 2018 3:43 am

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Joat42 wrote:There is even textev for a couple of people quietly wander off during Houdini when their handler got dead if I remember correctly.


JohnRoth wrote:Those two people showed up on Darius toward the end of SoV, so they aren't wandering around like lost lambs.


Jack McBride's brother and ... friend. IIRC. And probably got 500 bonus points and the Stripes award for completing their mission without their GHOUL.
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The imagination has to be trained into foresight and empathy.
Ursula K. LeGuinn

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Re: (Spoiler!) What's Next for the Honorverse?(Spoiler Warni
Post by Joat42   » Wed Apr 11, 2018 10:18 am

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kzt wrote:
Joat42 wrote:I think RFC addressed that question in a post a while ago. Deliver the newly built ships with scrubbed computers. And there where 5 (I think) people outside of Bolthole that new it's location, compare that to the amount of people that was involved in Houdini - and I'm not just counting the people in the know. There is even textev for a couple of people quietly wander off during Houdini when their handler got dead if I remember correctly.

They trained up entire fleets there. So I tend to suspect that every single astrogator on every one of those ships knows exactly where they were built.

"Second Fleet was a new organization. The old Second Fleet had been dissolved after Thunderbolt, and the new one's skeleton of veteran units was receiving primarily new construction, straight from completing working up exercises under Shannon Foraker's direction in Bolthole."

Being somewhere doesn't necessarily mean you know where you are. Going to and from Bolthole without leaking it's location is quite easy, you have one astrogator that sets up a bunch of random dog legs in hyperspace and no one on the ships has no clue where they are anymore. It's not like they have any scenery passing by which give clues.

---
Jack of all trades and destructive tinkerer.


Anyone who have simple solutions for complex problems is a fool.
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Re: (Spoiler!) What's Next for the Honorverse?(Spoiler Warni
Post by Joat42   » Wed Apr 11, 2018 10:32 am

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pappilon wrote:
Joat42 wrote:So you are saying that everyone that has had any kind of dealings with the MAlign et al (directly or indirectly) either is going to keep their mouths shut or they know nothing?

That means that the MAlign is flawless in keeping everything secret and they don't do any mistakes.



Lots of people have done business with the Malign, Those good Ole Boys at New Tuscany, The Republic of Monica, Barregos & Roszak at Smoking Frog, Admiral Kingsford, SLN, ... Lots of people, lots of dealings, not a lot of actionable data.

Not flawless in keeping secrets, just very compartmentalized. There are probably crumbs out there, somewhere. Finding them in the storm and putting them together is quite the puzzle.

Also ruthless at destroying evidence. They may have missed something, somewhere, but they blew everlovin' outta Mesa to destroy it, so its not for lack of trying or being shy about collateral damage.

I didn't say my suggestion would produce exact information, I said it could improve the chances of finding the MAlign and it would be a "somewhat" tedious task for the information analysts. :)

And the very act of destroying evidence is information in itself which gives you a starting point to go backward from (that is, if you know about the destruction).

---
Jack of all trades and destructive tinkerer.


Anyone who have simple solutions for complex problems is a fool.
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Re: (Spoiler!) What's Next for the Honorverse?(Spoiler Warni
Post by kzt   » Wed Apr 11, 2018 12:30 pm

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Joat42 wrote:Being somewhere doesn't necessarily mean you know where you are. Going to and from Bolthole without leaking it's location is quite easy, you have one astrogator that sets up a bunch of random dog legs in hyperspace and no one on the ships has no clue where they are anymore. It's not like they have any scenery passing by which give clues.

So sure, other than thats what astrogators do. And the ships navigation systems. Ships have equipment to rapidly figure out where they are by locating stars that are visible anywhere in the galaxy, its how they determine useful things like exactly where they are exiting hyper. Its like handing out GPS units and expecting people to use it to navigate around and yet not figure out where they are.
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Re: (Spoiler!) What's Next for the Honorverse?(Spoiler Warni
Post by JohnRoth   » Wed Apr 11, 2018 3:23 pm

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kzt wrote:
Joat42 wrote:Being somewhere doesn't necessarily mean you know where you are. Going to and from Bolthole without leaking it's location is quite easy, you have one astrogator that sets up a bunch of random dog legs in hyperspace and no one on the ships has no clue where they are anymore. It's not like they have any scenery passing by which give clues.

So sure, other than thats what astrogators do. And the ships navigation systems. Ships have equipment to rapidly figure out where they are by locating stars that are visible anywhere in the galaxy, its how they determine useful things like exactly where they are exiting hyper. Its like handing out GPS units and expecting people to use it to navigate around and yet not figure out where they are.


Yep. That's why having a hyper transit in the middle is valuable. Moving warships from Bolthole to Haven (or wherever they're going to be next) is relatively easy. One crew takes them from Bolthole to Calvin and through the transit, parks the ship, scrubs the computers and returns to Bolthole. The next crew boards the ship and takes it to its destination, scrubs the computers and returns to the wormhole terminus. The real crew takes the ship and works up.

There are a bunch of holes in that process, but I don't think one can do much better. The real problem comes if you've got the same ship going back and forth between Haven and Bolthole. And there are a number of examples of exactly that in the story, including one in Dark Fall.
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Re: (Spoiler!) What's Next for the Honorverse?(Spoiler Warni
Post by kzt   » Wed Apr 11, 2018 3:34 pm

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Like the part of the text that says the ship works up at bolthole and then the ship and crew get assigned to the field forces.

It implied that a lot of the training facilities for the RHN are located there too, as she gets crudités for greatly improving the standard of training.
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Re: (Spoiler!) What's Next for the Honorverse?(Spoiler Warni
Post by runsforcelery   » Wed Apr 11, 2018 4:32 pm

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kzt wrote:Like the part of the text that says the ship works up at bolthole and then the ship and crew get assigned to the field forces.

It implied that a lot of the training facilities for the RHN are located there too, as she gets crudités for greatly improving the standard of training.


Quite a few of the first tranche of modern Havenite SDs actually worked up at Bolthole, and that was where Shannon developed the training syllabus which substantially improved enlisted crew capabilities (remember; they used to rely on plug-and-replace even for minor faults and had significant maintenance issues) as well as improved tactical skills.

Very few ships have worked up at Bolthole since. Even for those that did, the crews arrived aboard ships who were assigned solely to the run to Bolthole from Haven itself. They worked up aboard ship without worrying about celestial fixes or anything of the sort, because those aren't needed for training maneuvers. The ships' computers are then scrubbed of all astro data they might have recorded at Bolthole and a "passage astrogation crew" takes over the navigation home (just like "passage pilots" take ships through the Panama Canal today). They arrive at Haven having made the voyage through hyper. No one on board (aside from the passage crew) knows how high in the bands they've gone or whether they made a straight line flight or one with multiple dog legs, and no two passage flights are the same duration (understanding, of course, that each "passage flight" could consist of scores of ships), so it's impossible to calculate a distance factor even to and from the Havenite end of the warp bridge. The passage crew then scrubs all record of its astrogation from the ship's computers, hands astro back to the regular crew, and boards the next shuttle back to Bolthole.

You cannot prevent the embarked crews from knowing the trip required a wormhole transit, but aside from the personnel actively involved in the astrogation, that's all anyone really knows.

Now, there were bunches of people involved in the original survey, and there are bunches of people who have been involved in the shuttle flights. Most of the folks who were involved are safely deceased, thanks to Cordelia Ransom, if they were Legislaturalist officers, and courtesy of "Dead-Men-Tell-No-Tales" Saint-Just, after he and Pierre took over management of Bolthole, if they weren't Legislaturalists. Some of them are still left, however, and the passage crew represent a very sizable slice of personnel, so eventually the exact location is likely to leak one way or another, but it will definitely be a nontrivial exercise to break the security wall to make that happen. It's not quite as difficult as it would be to steal the football codes from SAC. but it's a real toughie.

The folks on the Manticoran side who actually know Bolthole's location are very limited in number. Recall that the only internal PoV on this that you saw was in the mind of one of Honor's most trusted staff officers, who is "treecat-vetted" and cleared for "Cut-Throat-Before-Reading" security classifications.

Can the secret be kept forever? Of course not, and I never suggested that it could. Can it be kept A Really, Really Long Time? Sure it can!

Darius is more vulnerable in some ways and even less so in others. It lies at the other end of a known but (so far as the rest of the galaxy knows) unsurveyed warp bridge. Even ships using other termini of the same wormhole won't have a clue that there is a Darius Terminus unless they use really sophisticated instrumentation on their way through, which would be kinda hard to hide . . . and would have Serious Consequences if the MA spotted them doing it. It is, however, the working up point for the Alignment's entire naval force, and that force has been dispatched through hyper-space on operations, including Oyster Bay, which means a much greater slice of its personnel know its location completely irrespective of the wormhole terminus. The Alignment, however, has an additional ace in the hole in that its astrogation personnel are even better protected against interrogation drugs than anyone else's; they just drop dead if they're captured or deliberately reveal that classified information. As soon as one of their ships is captured and, for some reason, the fail safes fail (not real likely with Honorverse tech, but not completely impossible by any means), there will be oodles of astro data leading back to Darius.

So the two sides have differing levels of exposure and differing scales/means of protection, but both of them are still pretty secure at this moment.

Note that I said "at this moment." :twisted:


"Oh, bother!" said Pooh, as Piglet came back from the dead.
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Re: (Spoiler!) What's Next for the Honorverse?(Spoiler Warni
Post by kzt   » Wed Apr 11, 2018 4:40 pm

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Well, yeah. "At the moment". I really thought that comment about how MA hyperspace physicists had written PhDs on the Twins was going to be the pointer, but nooo. :)
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