Bluesqueak wrote:
Dilandu, if the Gbaba are as good at detection as you think, the entire premise of the series is destroyed. There can be no Safehold, because the Gbaba have already detected the planetary system, and will have noticed the energy produced by an entire fleet of Interstellar spaceships.
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Not really. The ships went through the hyperspace, and we do not know how long they deccelerated in realspace. And they could use, for example, solar/magnet sails, to shred a lot of excess velocity without powering high-power drives.
But mainly, its nessesary assumption, because without it there would be no plot. If we go completely realistic here, then we quickly came to conclusion that operation Ark was inefficient, and the PICA-crewed ships would be much better solution (especially after RFC confirmed the existence of "manumited PICA's", thus rendering his own arguments for the Ark project essetnially meaningless
) Still, without their assumption there would be no plot of the series, so here we must just took it for granted.
So they can hide the energy event of spaceships, they can hide one-off energy events like the high tech gear for terraformingHiding heat sources on the planets IS simple. Planets, especially geologically and biologically active, tend to have sporadic high heat emissions, that could even have some pattern. Hiding something in space is MUCH more problematic, because sporadic heat-emitting events in vacuum are quite rare.
Possibly they could even hide a one-off event like making a moon a bit bigger
If they could hide SUCH ammount of energy, than hiding the whole civilization would be child play for a Federation. Just build some sort of Faraday's sphere around planetary magnitosphere, to ground EM emissions.