Attacking Darius:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

phillies wrote:Of course, there is the constraint that the galaxy, most of it, is flatter than a pancake, perhaps 100 LY thick (lots of stars beyond, but not most of them, so one of your coordinates is sort of known.

It's actually about 1000 light-years thick and even past that it's not a sharp edge (there's definitely no energy barrier there that gives ESP powers to people who cross it). There are stars past that, it's just that the density drops off. There are stars out 200,000 light-years in the diffuse halo, though those are also older Population II stars and unlikely to have habitable planets.

Another thing is that they don't need a planet. With sufficient technology -- which everyone definitely has-- they can set up shop in space habitats and therefore by in any of millions of stars.

Pop 2 stars are going to be heavy metal poor, as well as planet poor. I don't think HV fabricators are up to assembling atoms from a soup of protons, neutrons and electrons.

Theemile wrote:With Honorverse fusion reactors, who needs a star?

You still need a gas giant somewhere to grab hydrogen and planetesimals for building blocks, but you don't NEED a star - any black space in space will do for an Honorverse Hab.

That's the 3rd reference to 3 days I've seen to that horrible og STtS episode. What gives?

You're right, a simple gas giant, even a small one suffices. But finding out outside of a star system is pretty difficult since they, you know, are planets. And planets don't emit light.

However, another option is a brown giant. Those do emit light, a bit of it. And they have plenty of hydrogen and helium.

[quote="Theemile"}

With Honorverse fusion reactors, who needs a star?

You still need a gas giant somewhere to grab hydrogen and planetesimals for building blocks, but you don't NEED a star - any black space in space will do for an Honorverse Hab.

That's the 3rd reference to 3 days I've seen to that horrible og STtS episode. What gives?[/quote]
Navigation and hitting a point far outside a system are the only drawbacks I see.

We know that astrogators have issues with calculating their jumps so they can come out close enough- but not too close- to the hyper limit and that's like braking a car close to a wall- but not too close.

I can't imagine that they would be any more accurate hitting a specific mark in n-space between systems. If anything, it would be harder.

I fully expect the first mission to Darius will end in disaster for the GA, and they will tuck their tails between their legs and flee. Oftentimes you do not know what to pack when you go on a long road trip. You may find out that what you need isn't even produced yet. One very common occurrence is realizing you didn't pack enough stuff, a worry which often leads to overpacking, but failing to bring along a heavy enough coat.* The GA will be a long ways away from its supply lines and it won't/can't be the same business as usual of demonstration launches and probes sent into the inner system. Probes will be mysteriously eaten and LACs destroyed. Sending in huge launches hoping to hit something will turn out to be a huge waste of missiles. And the GA's supply ships may be destroyed. The GA's impressive acceleration will only tend to serve them up in a Spider's nest more quickly. You have to move about slowly in a system where there are hidden pitfalls and traps.

What does one do in this situation? One flees!

*It is hard to know the weather in a far away place. And the Darius System will be a cold hot hell for the GA.

cthia wrote:What does one do in this situation? One flees!

Well, yeah. Someone has to come back with the data gathered. And if there's no chance in actually winning, don't throw away crews and ships! The GA doesn't shoot commanding officers who fail, much less those who retreat in the face of insurmountable odds.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Theemile wrote:With Honorverse fusion reactors, who needs a star?

You still need a gas giant somewhere to grab hydrogen and planetesimals for building blocks, but you don't NEED a star - any black space in space will do for an Honorverse Hab.

That's the 3rd reference to 3 days I've seen to that horrible og STtS episode. What gives?

You're right, a simple gas giant, even a small one suffices. But finding out outside of a star system is pretty difficult since they, you know, are planets. And planets don't emit light.

However, another option is a brown giant. Those do emit light, a bit of it. And they have plenty of hydrogen and helium.

They could have built a Dyson sphere or some function of it. Costly, yes. Very costly. And unlikely. But I never boarded the bus that the MA were financially hamstrung. When you are tapping into your neighbor's energy grid, the cost of energy doesn't matter. The MA may have been channeling funds and materials from the wasteful SL for centuries. And the RF systems may have been sending unfettered funds home unchecked for centuries as well.

cthia wrote:They could have built a Dyson sphere or some function of it. Costly, yes. Very costly. And unlikely. But I never boarded the bus that the MA were financially hamstrung. When you are tapping into your neighbor's energy grid, the cost of energy doesn't matter. The MA may have been channeling funds and materials from the wasteful SL for centuries. And the RF systems may have been sending unfettered funds home unchecked for centuries as well.

The RF systems have certain parts of their governments subverted, but their full governments and population aren't within the Onion or even necessarily sympathetic to the MAlign plan (much less its means).

That sharply limits how much funding those deep cover plants could have funneled out of their system GDP and into MAlign hands. A bit of dark funding slipped that way, sure. But providing any significant part of their GPD in support of the MAlign would be such a vast black hole of disappearing funds that the scandal could likely topple the government.

These places aren't iron fisted military dictatorships; the MAlign plants aren't unquestionable supreme rulers and so don't have unlimited power to use to system economic muscles as they like. (After all an iron fisted military dictatorship would be an ineffective at being the shining beacon that can be the nucleus for attracting disaffected ex-League worlds; and that's their primary mission)


And even if the MAline did have control of a few dictatorships they could fully exploit - having enough GDP disappearing to meaningfully fund the kind of military forces we're talking about would have eventually attracted attention -- which could have let to the MAlign's premature exposure. Money transfer, especially on that scale, creates paper trails and those can lead to exposure. (After all it doesn't do much good to move a stack of untracable credit chips to Darius when the funds are meaningless there - to take advantage of external funding you've got to use it to buy things from external markets and ship them into your hidden domestic market -- creating even more paper trails)


Better to have use the centuries to build up their own internal economic and financial strength; taking only very minimal seed corn from the cover Mesan transtellars or any RF friends. Amounts of funding and materials too small, and too far in the past, to be likely to attract attention.

Jonathan_S wrote:The RF systems have certain parts of their governments subverted, but their full governments and population aren't within the Onion or even necessarily sympathetic to the MAlign plan (much less its means).

That sharply limits how much funding those deep cover plants could have funneled out of their system GDP and into MAlign hands. A bit of dark funding slipped that way, sure. But providing any significant part of their GPD in support of the MAlign would be such a vast black hole of disappearing funds that the scandal could likely topple the government.

These places aren't iron fisted military dictatorships; the MAlign plants aren't unquestionable supreme rulers and so don't have unlimited power to use to system economic muscles as they like. (After all an iron fisted military dictatorship would be an ineffective at being the shining beacon that can be the nucleus for attracting disaffected ex-League worlds; and that's their primary mission)


And even if the MAline did have control of a few dictatorships they could fully exploit - having enough GDP disappearing to meaningfully fund the kind of military forces we're talking about would have eventually attracted attention -- which could have let to the MAlign's premature exposure. Money transfer, especially on that scale, creates paper trails and those can lead to exposure. (After all it doesn't do much good to move a stack of untracable credit chips to Darius when the funds are meaningless there - to take advantage of external funding you've got to use it to buy things from external markets and ship them into your hidden domestic market -- creating even more paper trails)


Better to have use the centuries to build up their own internal economic and financial strength; taking only very minimal seed corn from the cover Mesan transtellars or any RF friends. Amounts of funding and materials too small, and too far in the past, to be likely to attract attention.

On top of that, what happens in Darius stays in Darius.

What I mean by that is all of the infrastructure and navy in the system has stayed in the system. The billing, as such, would be internal. They aren't importing any more. The system is self-sustaining.

No imports, no trail either on paper or in tracing ship movements in the outside world. If you don't move, then you don't make tracks and Darius isn't moving as far as the outside galaxy is concerned.

The influx of ships into the system from Houdini is exception. The weak link is those evacuations that happened by conventional ships (like Zach McBryde)to a point where they could be transferred to streak drive vessels for the last leg. That leaves points of contact between a known ship the ship that ferried them to Darius.

cthia wrote:They could have built a Dyson sphere or some function of it. Costly, yes. Very costly. And unlikely. But I never boarded the bus that the MA were financially hamstrung. When you are tapping into your neighbor's energy grid, the cost of energy doesn't matter. The MA may have been channeling funds and materials from the wasteful SL for centuries. And the RF systems may have been sending unfettered funds home unchecked for centuries as well.

A Dyson sphere or swarm actually pays for itself in the medium-term. You do need a large, initial capital investment, in the form of equipment to create the first solar energy collectors (which includes cloud scoops to fuel the ships necessary to move the ore in and collectors out). But once a sufficient number of them are in place that they can supply the factory itself with a surplus of power, it's a runaway process. The surplus of energy can be sold or be used to create other things that can be sold. This surplus therefore pays for the salaries of any workers you need, assuming the whole process isn't automated.

The surplus of energy can be so great that can use it in energy-inefficient processes, like creating anti-matter in large particle accelerators. Provided you have a safe way of handling it, you could sell it to power ships and weapons. Even if not, the surplus of energy brings the cost of energy down (supply & demand), which means every single energy-intensive process is cheap, which lowers the cost of almost everything tangible. That has a cascading effect in the economy, since now you can provide for a high quality of life to everyone at minimal cost.

This is what futurist Isaac Arthur called the "Dyson Dilemma": if Dyson spheres (or swarms) are inevitable, why do we still see any stars at all?

None of this is likely to happen in the HV, though. If any system would have created a swarm of energy collectors, it would have been Sol, followed by Sigma Draconis, the oldest settled colony. That hasn't happened. And I made this point earlier in this thread: no system in the HV has had this incredible exponential industrial and population growth that is possible, so Darius won't either. Something is holding the growth in check and I suspect it's simply the Author's Silver Hammer (read: we won't get an explanation).

Especially since the MAlign and Manpower were using capital-inefficient processes like slavery. They're not interested.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

cthia wrote:They could have built a Dyson sphere or some function of it. Costly, yes. Very costly. And unlikely. But I never boarded the bus that the MA were financially hamstrung. When you are tapping into your neighbor's energy grid, the cost of energy doesn't matter. The MA may have been channeling funds and materials from the wasteful SL for centuries. And the RF systems may have been sending unfettered funds home unchecked for centuries as well.

A Dyson sphere or swarm actually pays for itself in the medium-term. You do need a large, initial capital investment, in the form of equipment to create the first solar energy collectors (which includes cloud scoops to fuel the ships necessary to move the ore in and collectors out). But once a sufficient number of them are in place that they can supply the factory itself with a surplus of power, it's a runaway process. The surplus of energy can be sold or be used to create other things that can be sold. This surplus therefore pays for the salaries of any workers you need, assuming the whole process isn't automated.

The surplus of energy can be so great that can use it in energy-inefficient processes, like creating anti-matter in large particle accelerators. Provided you have a safe way of handling it, you could sell it to power ships and weapons. Even if not, the surplus of energy brings the cost of energy down (supply & demand), which means every single energy-intensive process is cheap, which lowers the cost of almost everything tangible. That has a cascading effect in the economy, since now you can provide for a high quality of life to everyone at minimal cost.

This is what futurist Isaac Arthur called the "Dyson Dilemma": if Dyson spheres (or swarms) are inevitable, why do we still see any stars at all?

None of this is likely to happen in the HV, though. If any system would have created a swarm of energy collectors, it would have been Sol, followed by Sigma Draconis, the oldest settled colony. That hasn't happened. And I made this point earlier in this thread: no system in the HV has had this incredible exponential industrial and population growth that is possible, so Darius won't either. Something is holding the growth in check and I suspect it's simply the Author's Silver Hammer (read: we won't get an explanation).

Especially since the MAlign and Manpower were using capital-inefficient processes like slavery. They're not interested.

The Honorverse is a long way away from dyson building. They're still getting most of their resources out of asteroid belts, instead of emulating the Dahakverse's regular cracking of planets. To illustrate the significance of that difference, Sol's entire belt is approximately 4% of the mass of our moon.

And even the Dahakverse hasn't embraced star-mining yet. Sol constitutes 99.8% of mass in the local system.

A dyson demands every single atom from every planet and asteroid in the local star system and more. Sure, it will give you fantastic amounts of energy collected from that star and you can do a lot of things with that energy but it won't produce any additional matter for you.

Which means that without energy-matter conversion technology(Trek's replicators) or the ability to harvest matter directly from a star, it's just a very expensive, very large power source.

And the HV doesn't have a power source problem. They get more than enough from fusion, solar and warshawski sails in grav waves. Raw resources are still their development bottleneck, perhaps due to a lack of specific technology. I'm not sure why they can't or don't crack Mercury-type planets open and mine them yet.