ThinksMarkedly wrote:You're arguing that it is very difficult to find. I agree completely.
We only have one data point of how wormholes were found: Axelrod knowing about the MWHJ from second hand data with civilian sensors of ships that visited maybe once a month. From that, we could think that finding wormholes or at least wormhole junctions isn't very difficult. But the MWHJ is an outlier in every sense, so we can't really extrapolate from it. And maybe Axelrod had some algorithms that were never made public and remain largely unknown (except maybe to a certain alignment that found a wormhole in an unsettled system).
An extreme outlier. By far the largest and most powerful wormhole junction ever detected - with an resonance zone (RZ) powerful enough to cause extremely rough transitions up into hyper and to the destroy ships attempting to reenter normal space within its area. (It has the most termini and has the highest transit mass ceiling ever found)
That makes its grav disturbances stand out like a lighthouse against the background of routine fluctuations that grav sensor see, or even rough areas of hyper entry/exit, that aren't associated with wormholes. The signal level of a termini/junction is a function of the wormhole's power (its transit mass ceiling) and for junctions of the number of other termini).
So it isn't too surprising that someone who knew what a wormhole terminus's "signature" looked like could easily identify a potential one at Manticore even based on fairly casual civilian sensor readings. But a pure point to point wormhole bridge capable of taking no more than a dozen or so megatons at once is going to be a will o the wisp compared to the lighthouse of the Manticore junction