How much more could have been shoehorned into TEIF for background, advancing the plot or addressing the complete lack of what is known by Grayson and Manticore about the tech that was used against them in attacks we know Oyster Bay?
Very powerful grazers that moved around without tripping any alarms. What carried the many weapons delivered in a ballistic phase just before they started hitting. Ok, ALL the sensors on the major station and their on-station records were destroyed but what about remote backup (in real time) on the planets involved and on the military ships that were not caught up in damage/destruction of the attacks? We hear nothing except people are looking though data records.
Galton feels wrong. As has been mentioned, we hear nothing about any preparation or actions to look for or defend against so-far undetectable ships capable of transporting a lot of weapons (including the G-torps as we, the readers know them) which one could reasonably think might be hanging around a massive industrially operation that is a system operating as an arsenal for your enemies? Even if they were in-system (vs being parked way out beyond the hyperlimit "hiding") would none of Harrington's fleets sensors not shown ships that were there when her fleet arrived but vanished?
To this point, the GA and anyone else has seen essentially no warships for the Alignment. Possibly at this point they have a bunch of information on ships used by agents of the Alignment which may or may not have been identified as Streak Drive "private" or commercial ships. Mike Henke's ships have all sorts of opportunity to combe though the traffic data and local astro control information about who was in or had been in systems her fleet elements had to show up in and take hold of the places. Sure, many of the ships being used by the Alignment were of Mesa origin or various transtellars, but a big part of intelligence work is compiling information and sifting. The Alignment has been using puppets and catspaws for a lot of things. Heck they even needed to use Mannerheim's Navy to block the Twins-Torch wormhole bridge.
We know they are building the LDs but other than the Ghosts and the "test bed" Sharks......nothing.
Galton had a lot of "modern" warships up though SDs but that was.....what? A SDF for an armed camp turning out weapons and equipment for ......what? Other than the Cataphracts - used at Torch and Battle of Manticore- what has been found to show anything about the development of the kinds of things that the GA know exist. The GT even if they don't have details or know how it moved around, the stealth to recon MBS and Yeltson's Star, whatever it was that showed up at Beowulf and used grazers to take out the primary control links for the Mantcorian designed pod defense system. No evidence of the killer nanites on Mesa but lots and lots of evidence they have been used against the SL/SLN etc and other incidents. We don't know what Harrington's people found at Galton except what was described being used against them.
The Hosta variant that was picked up by the bow-waves......no mention of any similar readings in the MBS during Oyster Bay----I guess the ballistic packages were moving too slowly to because I find it odd that nothing like that has come up from the intense digging Manticore has supposedly been doing on the attack
Plot driven.......we perhaps will discover a program like GRAM has been set up and that's what is sucking in informaton but not reporting out except to a select few.
Sigh.
