Defense of Felix

tlb wrote:So you really see nothing strange in the Grand Alliance sending ships a very long distance to invade the area patrolled by a neutral system?

penny wrote:If their research has led them to the conclusion that the system contains a WH that is the route for criminal activity against the GA, then no?

What would you expect the GA to do in that case; accept abject pacifism? 'Nah, ain't nothing going on here.' And just swallow it hook, line and sinker?

What research could that be, which did not also implicate Mannerheim, the system with the ships guarding Felix?

tlb wrote:

penny wrote:How does that follow?

So you really see nothing strange in the Grand Alliance sending ships a very long distance to invade the area patrolled by a neutral system?

The Question Penny needs to answer is this:

There are 5000 known populated stars in the Honorverse, and an additional 50,000+ stars inside that sphere that are not known to hold human habitation. For every dot on the map of a known human settlement, there are 150 dots that represent some former, hidden, or un-noticed human settlement or outpost.

Why in all that noise, would the GA attack Felix of all places?

Felix, to the best of our knowledge, is completely off the GA's radar currently. There are no inhabitants, just a failed colony like scores of others, with a handful of rights holders, fighting their ownership in the courts. There is no official traffic, just the MAlign's hidden traffic, and the Nearby Mannerheim which is using the abandoned system as a unofficial naval base. Even this is not unusual - Manticore and other powers routinely patrol nearby unoccupied systems to look for pirate activity, update star charts, and exercise their units.

So Why Felix? and not Wanda, or Broudy, or Topaz? or Star 113-14-227?

Theemile wrote:
The Question Penny needs to answer is this:

There are 5000 known populated stars in the Honorverse, and an additional 50,000+ stars inside that sphere that are not known to hold human habitation. For every dot on the map of a known human settlement, there are 150 dots that represent some former, hidden, or un-noticed human settlement or outpost.

Why in all that noise, would the GA attack Felix of all places?

Felix, to the best of our knowledge, is completely off the GA's radar currently. There are no inhabitants, just a failed colony like scores of others, with a handful of rights holders, fighting their ownership in the courts. There is no official traffic, just the MAlign's hidden traffic, and the Nearby Mannerheim which is using the abandoned system as a unofficial naval base. Even this is not unusual - Manticore and other powers routinely patrol nearby unoccupied systems to look for pirate activity, update star charts, and exercise their units.

So Why Felix? and not Wanda, or Broudy, or Topaz? or Star 113-14-227?

-blink-

Time and research or whatever serendipitous reason has led them right to Felix, the same as what led them to Galton. Breadcrumbs can be dangerous.

tlb wrote:

tlb wrote:So you really see nothing strange in the Grand Alliance sending ships a very long distance to invade the area patrolled by a neutral system?

penny wrote:If their research has led them to the conclusion that the system contains a WH that is the route for criminal activity against the GA, then no?

What would you expect the GA to do in that case; accept abject pacifism? 'Nah, ain't nothing going on here.' And just swallow it hook, line and sinker?

What research could that be, which did not also implicate Mannerheim, the system with the ships guarding Felix?

Guarding Felix or protecting Felix. The burden of proof is not on the defendant.

tlb wrote:So you really see nothing strange in the Grand Alliance sending ships a very long distance to invade the area patrolled by a neutral system?

At this point, there is nothing to connect either Mannerheim or the Felix System (which has not yet shown up on the GA's radar at all in any mention) with the Alignment.

The closest you can come is that the traffic that ultimately lead to the discovery of Galton used the Mannerheim-Werner wormhole bridge. There is, however, no reason to suspect that either system was involved with the passage of the ships (any of them, freighters, DBs whatever) since the hasn't been any information that any of those ships did more than transit the wormhole. Nothing indicates they ever entered either system. There is little reason for either Star Nation to have done a Customs inspection of ships that otherwise are in compliance of normal rules of transit. If I remember correctly, Warner was strongly anti-slavery but unless they has an actual reason to do a full search of ships in transit, they wouldn't have stopped and boarded them.

Felix is going to be in all sorts of navigation indexes but there is no reason for the GA or almost anybody else to go there based on the information in those indexes. Nobody filed a report of a wormhole - at least nobody not connected with the Alignment and I believe the people involved in that managed to get their ship destroyed and the Alignment buried everything except that the resource poor system existed.

That there are conflicting claims as to ownership is of record somewhere but, again, there is no particular reason for something like the GA to have its curiosity piqued by that....it's primarily a dispute about who has the right to do mining and extractions in a system without habitable planets and from what we have been told, not much there that is presently worth the costs of development of extraction and tranport.

No reason to go scouting.

tlb wrote:So you really see nothing strange in the Grand Alliance sending ships a very long distance to invade the area patrolled by a neutral system?

penny wrote:If their research has led them to the conclusion that the system contains a WH that is the route for criminal activity against the GA, then no?

What would you expect the GA to do in that case; accept abject pacifism? 'Nah, ain't nothing going on here.' And just swallow it hook, line and sinker?

tlb wrote:What research could that be, which did not also implicate Mannerheim, the system with the ships guarding Felix?

penny wrote:Guarding Felix or protecting Felix. The burden of proof is not on the defendant.

This not a court of law. If the research says that Felix "is the route for criminal activity against the GA", then Mannerheim is going to be strongly encouraged to give the forces of the Grand Alliance everything that they have or know. Complete with inspection teams to encourage thoroughness. With overwhelming force in this situation it is easier to make an apology afterwards than bothering to ask permission.

tlb wrote:

tlb wrote:So you really see nothing strange in the Grand Alliance sending ships a very long distance to invade the area patrolled by a neutral system?

penny wrote:If their research has led them to the conclusion that the system contains a WH that is the route for criminal activity against the GA, then no?

What would you expect the GA to do in that case; accept abject pacifism? 'Nah, ain't nothing going on here.' And just swallow it hook, line and sinker?

tlb wrote:What research could that be, which did not also implicate Mannerheim, the system with the ships guarding Felix?

penny wrote:Guarding Felix or protecting Felix. The burden of proof is not on the defendant.

This not a court of law. If the research says that Felix "is the route for criminal activity against the GA", then Mannerheim is going to be strongly encouraged to give the forces of the Grand Alliance everything that they have or know. Complete with inspection teams to encourage thoroughness. With overwhelming force in this situation it is easier to make an apology afterwards than bothering to ask permission.

That statement is valid in life, not simply and only in a court of law. It is simple and fair. If you accuse me of something -- better yet, if you come to my front door accusing me of something -- you had better have some proof. Simple, practical and fair; which is probably why it was adopted by a court of law.


Just how will that be accomplished, except on paper. Overwhelming force is not going to encourage an entity who thrives on secrecy to give away classified information that isn't exactly kept in a filing cabinet. So when the GA does not find anything and apologizes, then what?

Let me help you with that question. You have now caught up with the premise of the discussion.

How the GA finds out about Felix is actually pretty much irrelevant. I don't think it'll be via data correlation at all, but via leak from human intelligence. And specifically I think her name is Jessica Milliken.

But as I said, how they come about it is irrelevant, because the first thing they're going to do is confirm it. Whether they do it covertly because they believe this is used by criminals or the MAlign, or overtly because they think it's just a great economic find, is again irrelevant. If it's covert, then the scout ship that is sent may have a chance of observing a transit and reporting back. But if the ship is discovered and destroyed, that is also information.

So if the GA's survey ship or scout got destroyed, they send a stealth scout with even more care. Felix may already be infested with spider drive ships, but it doesn't have fixed installation gravitic arrays that can detect and track wedges a light-hour out. Worse, they can't track Ghost Rider drones that well, so this scout will have launched a handful of drones to observe the Junction, then translate back up to the alpha band. It comes back 12 hours later at an RV point, collects the drone data and translates back out in less than 5 minutes. Rinse and repeat.

And scouts are cheap. The GA must have at least a thousand of them. So even if one scouting expedition fails, they can keep sending them.

Meanwhile, Felix can't be used for secret transits any more. More importantly, spider drive ships can't use it because you can't hide the 200-km wide bright, shining Warshawski sails after the transit. So those drones that are now observing the Junction will get very good readings on the nature of the spider drive and the capabilities of the ships using them.

The next step up from this is the denial as I described before: launch missiles at the ships that have just transited, to force them to defend themselves, expend munitions, and possibly take damage to their stealth screens.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:How the GA finds out about Felix is actually pretty much irrelevant. I don't think it'll be via data correlation at all, but via leak from human intelligence. And specifically I think her name is Jessica Milliken.

But as I said, how they come about it is irrelevant, because the first thing they're going to do is confirm it. Whether they do it covertly because they believe this is used by criminals or the MAlign, or overtly because they think it's just a great economic find, is again irrelevant. If it's covert, then the scout ship that is sent may have a chance of observing a transit and reporting back. But if the ship is discovered and destroyed, that is also information.

So if the GA's survey ship or scout got destroyed, they send a stealth scout with even more care. Felix may already be infested with spider drive ships, but it doesn't have fixed installation gravitic arrays that can detect and track wedges a light-hour out. Worse, they can't track Ghost Rider drones that well, so this scout will have launched a handful of drones to observe the Junction, then translate back up to the alpha band. It comes back 12 hours later at an RV point, collects the drone data and translates back out in less than 5 minutes. Rinse and repeat.

And scouts are cheap. The GA must have at least a thousand of them. So even if one scouting expedition fails, they can keep sending them.

Meanwhile, Felix can't be used for secret transits any more. More importantly, spider drive ships can't use it because you can't hide the 200-km wide bright, shining Warshawski sails after the transit. So those drones that are now observing the Junction will get very good readings on the nature of the spider drive and the capabilities of the ships using them.

The next step up from this is the denial as I described before: launch missiles at the ships that have just transited, to force them to defend themselves, expend munitions, and possibly take damage to their stealth screens.

Even if the GA finds a wormhole, and sees Traffic passing through it, All it knows is Mannerheim has a secret wormhole - unless it gets a drone close enough to see a spider ship make a wormhole transit. If the average ship transiting is just a standard freighter or dispatch boat (remember, this is a population cut off from the universe, so I wouldn't expect many of either) then there is no smoking gun identifying the Malign.

And as for tracking Spiders?

1) we have only seen them used in 1 op to date, and no where else, so it's not as if there is constant movement of spider ships, with the Ghosts reporting back on every movement or happening of the GA fleets. That is being done by the normal spy network with Streak drives.

2) the Mannerheim forces in Felix don't seem to be aware of them - the majority of the normal Mannerheim sailors aren't in the conspiracy, so there can't be too many weird things happening in Felix or else the normal sailor would know about the weird ships, with weird shapes and weird invisible drives going back and forth through the secret wormhole.

3) We still don't have confirmation that the spider ships can create sails and use a wormhole - the only answer from David on the topic was something akin to "Wouldn't that be foolish if the Alignment created warships that couldn't use wormholes or grav waves?" Which is not saying that the Alignment in all their military wisdom didn't simply accept the limitation of no sails as a feature of this generation of warship was a small price to pay for invisibility to gravity sensors.

penny wrote:

Theemile wrote:
The Question Penny needs to answer is this:

There are 5000 known populated stars in the Honorverse, and an additional 50,000+ stars inside that sphere that are not known to hold human habitation. For every dot on the map of a known human settlement, there are 150 dots that represent some former, hidden, or un-noticed human settlement or outpost.

Why in all that noise, would the GA attack Felix of all places?

Felix, to the best of our knowledge, is completely off the GA's radar currently. There are no inhabitants, just a failed colony like scores of others, with a handful of rights holders, fighting their ownership in the courts. There is no official traffic, just the MAlign's hidden traffic, and the Nearby Mannerheim which is using the abandoned system as a unofficial naval base. Even this is not unusual - Manticore and other powers routinely patrol nearby unoccupied systems to look for pirate activity, update star charts, and exercise their units.

So Why Felix? and not Wanda, or Broudy, or Topaz? or Star 113-14-227?

-blink-

Time and research or whatever serendipitous reason has led them right to Felix, the same as what led them to Galton. Breadcrumbs can be dangerous.

But if you had that info, wouldn't that expose the RF as part of the conspiracy first? This whole argument was that the GA would go directly to the Felix system and find the wormhole without exposing the RF. Any paper trail, or bread crumbs, etc, that go to Felix, also expose the RF (or at least a member) as complicit in the affair as part of the trail, and then to Felix - not Felix and then the RF in turn.