Brigade XO wrote:My guess is that Galton did NOT build the Streak Drive ships. They may have had input on initial research but -given the paranoia and the intention to sacrifice Galton as a bait & switch for the Alignment brains location- everything would have been swept up and removed.
So far nobody has working plans or a sample of a Streak vessel and the Alignment wants to keep it that way. Makes no sense to build them at Galton and risk loosing control.
That Streak ships were used between Hole-In-The-Wall and probably Darius given the round trip times the have been calculated only means that they used them on time sensitive runs to smooth the flow of information etc. It has been said that it's not likely anybody will identify a Steak ship just on visuals and since they are only going to use that function in hyper they should be safe. Of course it is also probable that any streak ship in danger of being boarded or captured is going to go BOOM.
You're right that it's an advantage that the MAlign would not want to lose. So it's possible they didn't allow Galton to have streak drive ships, but that would be another hole in the Alamo Contingency. Not as big as having SDs show up from nowhere, but bigger than there being no spider drive in sight. And it makes the spider drive's absence more acute if no streak drive is found either.
As I said before, Simões was a streak drive physicist, so he knew the thing was being prototyped somewhere because he probably received data from the prototypes. And Harahap was running around in streak drive ships while working for Mesa. In fact, the ability for a newly recruited operative to run around from Talbott and Mesa on a streak drive courier tells me its classification level had been sufficiently lowered. This and the fact that 80% of Houdini evacuees ended up at Galton tells me that the MAlign sacrificed a lot of research in the name of Alamo. The Streak Drive wasn't revolutionary, it was just application of brute force, so someone would have eventually stumbled upon it.
So my money is on Streak Drive ships having been built at Galton.
If nothing else, the fact that Simões had defected and told the Galaxy about the drive he knew a lot about and the one he'd only heard about, and the fact that Harahap had joined the Manties should have prompted the MAlign to make sure the streak drive was found in the Galton databases, if it hadn't been there all along. The problem in this scenario is that just inserting into the databases wouldn't cut it. As a scientist working on the very thing, Simões would have had access to data obtained from prototypes and he'd have known exactly when he received such data. They'd also need to insert the people who would be able to tell they had built streak drive prototypes and couriers, sufficiently back in the past to account for everything the GA knows for a fact. Moreover, finding no ships in the system with that technology, from couriers to SD(P)s, simply wouldn't be believable, meaning they needed not only data and people, but also actual ships with the thing. And that then means technicians who built them and maintained them. That's a lot of people.
If they had omitted that information from Galton, they're screwed. There simply wasn't time to insert it, the hardware, and the people to make it believable between realising Simões had defected and the GA showed up (Simões showed up in Manticore in May 1922; Tenth Fleet showed up in Mesa 5 months later, ending Houdini). Don´t forget they need to make it believable only for the GA, they need to make it believable for the Galton population too, who is going to be interrogated and can't be allowed to believe they were pawns. The majority of technicians simply couldn't have shown up during Houdini because of the timing and because they're not high value enough. And as I said in the spoiler thread, it's worse to find the insertion in process than to not find anything at all. One is a curious and admittedly concerning discrepancy; the other is a major tampering by an outside force.