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What next after To End in Fire

Join us in talking discussing all things Honor, including (but not limited to) tactics, favorite characters, and book discussions.
Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by cthia   » Sun Feb 27, 2022 8:33 am

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tlb wrote:
cthia wrote:Or the long shot that I suggested in another thread. Key personnel could have been whisked away on a spider ship. Galton was a good chance to test the effectiveness of the LD.

"Ah, you can't see us can you? But we shall meet again, and since this eye exam has determined that you are blind as a bat, it won't be so pretty for you next time."

I see no evidence in To End in Fire for this. The system was flooded with recon drones, so there was no possibility to load a ship while the fight was on. If they had wanted to do that, it would have been possible to do so before the arrival of the Grand Alliance; but then you could have used a regular passenger ship. What Darius would never want to do is to expose such a ship to a system full of people who were not aware that a spider drive existed.

The only use that I can imagine is to have several Ghost spy ships located far enough away, so that no one would would be aware of them; but where they could record the events of the battle to give feedback to Darius on how things worked out. For example, give a warning about the bow wave produced by Shuttlecock.

Evidence withheld by author per a need to know basis, for the next book?

The point is Galton was a good opportunity to test the effectivness of the spider drive. And a freighter using a spider drive could already have been docked with the station in anticipation of an attack. Without exposing the system to the drive. The drive could have been activated only upon the GA coming over the hyper wall. It could have been towed to the station, and/or moved on thrusters coming in to dock.

I also don't buy the notion that Darius wasn't aware of the bow shock. What navy doesn't test their own weapons.

I still think an LD could have been operating in the system, even if only before the attack. Why not test the effectiveness of the LD on one of your own systems, as an exercise. Key Alignment personnel could have been placed on the stations and manning the sensor platforms in anticipation of a visit and ready to cover for any anomalies that are detected.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by tlb   » Sun Feb 27, 2022 10:46 am

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cthia wrote:Evidence withheld by author per a need to know basis, for the next book?

As you say, maybe we will see in a future book.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by Jonathan_S   » Sun Feb 27, 2022 12:38 pm

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cthia wrote:
The point is Galton was a good opportunity to test the effectivness of the spider drive. And a freighter using a spider drive could already have been docked with the station in anticipation of an attack. Without exposing the system to the drive. The drive could have been activated only upon the GA coming over the hyper wall. It could have been towed to the station, and/or moved on thrusters coming in to dock.

Except the required hull form for a spider drive, and the 3 bow to stern rows of emitters sticking out is so distinctive, and so utterly counter to the hull form required for impeller driven ships, than anybody with even the slightest familiarity with the look of a normal ship would immediately know, from even the most passing of glances, there was something deeply, deeply, weird about this hypothetical spider freighter.

Basically you can't keep it secret if you've got it docked at a space station. Way too many people can see it, and how weird it is -- and unless all of them are cleared for the secret (which they wouldn't be at Galton) that's going to cause talk, possibly photos, and generally create a large enough footprint that the fact it was there is likely to leak out.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by tlb   » Sun Feb 27, 2022 4:17 pm

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tlb wrote:One thing that comes to mind immediately is that Galton should have all the technical references for the streak drive and they may have the manufacturing to build them. That is, if their orbital manufacturing facilities were not part of the big blow up at the end of the book. I do not remember if the final explosions were limited to the fortresses or including some factory sites also.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:We don't know what exactly Honor destroyed, but she fired 2 million missiles. That's a LOT of infrastructure. Possibly everything that was able to contribute to the military effort, which to me includes the heavy industries. So it's possible the system is able to feed itself, but it's no longer an economic powerhouse.

By the way, if each missile, given economies of scale, costs $250,000 Manticore dollars, Honor fired half a trillion dollars in missiles.

After rereading To End in Fire, I believe that the manufacturing and housing orbitals were spared. The fire was concentrated on the forts and warships; which were all destroyed, except for the biggest forts, as part of the surrender demands at the end of 72 hours of shooting. Then the two remaining forts were destroyed in the suicide act that launched the final missiles.

There is mention that databases in at least one of the habitats were already being read before Honor left for Manticore. Despite what has been said about possible security, it makes sense that there are databases that could be read; since the whole idea was to leave records and evidence that Galton was the source of all that happened.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Wed Mar 02, 2022 1:47 am

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Jonathan_S wrote:Except the required hull form for a spider drive, and the 3 bow to stern rows of emitters sticking out is so distinctive, and so utterly counter to the hull form required for impeller driven ships, than anybody with even the slightest familiarity with the look of a normal ship would immediately know, from even the most passing of glances, there was something deeply, deeply, weird about this hypothetical spider freighter.

Basically you can't keep it secret if you've got it docked at a space station. Way too many people can see it, and how weird it is -- and unless all of them are cleared for the secret (which they wouldn't be at Galton) that's going to cause talk, possibly photos, and generally create a large enough footprint that the fact it was there is likely to leak out.


So taking the next logical steps to prove by absurdity: the only way for an evacuation to have happened would be if:

  1. A spider ship was already loitering in the system before the GF arrived (there wouldn't be sufficient time to send word for it to come and its arrival before the end of the battle)
  2. The spider ship would have inserted very far from the inner system because Galton did have hyper footprint detectors, like most major systems do. Yes, the Galton Navy defenders might erase the information, but only if they knew to look for it. Making it automatic would also insert a weakness in their defence mechanisms for something the GF might do.
  3. The evacuees would need to accept leaving during the battle for a destination unknown, by parties unknown to them.
  4. The evacuees would need to leave on a regular, wedge ship during the battle when the inner system was flooded with GF recon drones, of capabilities speculated but not certain (and we saw how the Galton sensors failed to detect a Ghost Rider less than a light-second away)
  5. The wedge ship would not be noticed and blown up as a valid military target, or worse, covertly followed by the GF all the way to the spider ship that must not be detected.

I don't think ANY of the above is reasonable, much less all of them together.

Moreover, the only two Alignment agents on Galton we know for sure knew of Darius were quite ready to accept on the Alamo Contingency in case the GF came calling. They had no expectation to evacuate and those were Inner Onion personnel. So why would anyone "lesser" than them be evacuated?

Finally, who would be valuable enough to evacuate? Not those that were evacuated from Mesa by Houdini, because they were already deemed not to be important enough to go to Darius in the first place. All the R&D databases in Galton were copied to Darius periodically, so there's no knowledge there that would be missed. Military personnel in Galton has the same experience in actual fighting as in Darius: none. And all they'd know is conventional fighting, so they wouldn't contribute much to the MAN.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Wed Mar 02, 2022 1:55 am

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cthia wrote:I also don't buy the notion that Darius wasn't aware of the bow shock. What navy doesn't test their own weapons.


I don't think it was a matter of detecting or not detecting, but a question of when it would be detected. The Galton defenders were expecting it to remain undetected for just a bit longer, which would put them much closer to the targets and leaving the GF much less time to counter it.

Would a spider have the same problem? That's a good question and only the author will be able to answer that. Was it a question of velocity relative to the interplanetary medium, or was it a question of the wedge? If it was the former, then a spider at the same velocity would have the same problem and their attack range is roughly the same. Unless it's moving at a much lower speed, but in that case that also gives the target more time to react too.

I still think an LD could have been operating in the system, even if only before the attack. Why not test the effectiveness of the LD on one of your own systems, as an exercise. Key Alignment personnel could have been placed on the stations and manning the sensor platforms in anticipation of a visit and ready to cover for any anomalies that are detected.


Why test the effectiveness before it's really needed and thus give away the element of surprise and give the biggest concentration of GF military personnel a chance to get good reading on you ship?

As for covering the anomalies, see above. It inserts a weakness on purpose.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by Brigade XO   » Sat Mar 05, 2022 11:27 am

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We were told that at least some of the Houdini people were taken to Galton. Now, that makes sense from a standpoint of using then in various R&D work but it occurs to me that they would be doing double duty if they were also plants to make the GA (or whomever) think that this was the place that all the Houdini people were evacuated too from Mesa.

That does carry some significant dangers, the 1st being that if they were important enough to be part of the emergency-rushed Houdini, then they might have information that the Alignment doesn't want to fall into anybody's hands. Or a few were included who didn't have any true Alignment specific critical information but were useful researcher and were placed in locations what were not likely to be destroyed if/when Galton was discovered and Alamo was used.

There might even -although it would be terrible OpSec- that some of them are on the planet at Galton and a "copy" of the Houdini list (a great portion of it) would also be in some planetary database which would provide proof (and living examples) that this is where all those people were evacuated too. Most of them would have been living and working on the various stations and forts that were destroyed in the attack by the GA. So sad....boo hoo ....and another crop of heroic martyrs for the glorious history of the Alignment till it needs to be redacted after the subjugation of Normals.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Sat Mar 05, 2022 6:25 pm

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Brigade XO wrote:We were told that at least some of the Houdini people were taken to Galton. Now, that makes sense from a standpoint of using then in various R&D work but it occurs to me that they would be doing double duty if they were also plants to make the GA (or whomever) think that this was the place that all the Houdini people were evacuated too from Mesa.

That does carry some significant dangers, the 1st being that if they were important enough to be part of the emergency-rushed Houdini, then they might have information that the Alignment doesn't want to fall into anybody's hands. Or a few were included who didn't have any true Alignment specific critical information but were useful researcher and were placed in locations what were not likely to be destroyed if/when Galton was discovered and Alamo was used.

There might even -although it would be terrible OpSec- that some of them are on the planet at Galton and a "copy" of the Houdini list (a great portion of it) would also be in some planetary database which would provide proof (and living examples) that this is where all those people were evacuated too. Most of them would have been living and working on the various stations and forts that were destroyed in the attack by the GA. So sad....boo hoo ....and another crop of heroic martyrs for the glorious history of the Alignment till it needs to be redacted after the subjugation of Normals.


There's hardly any need for that, since the Mesa Traffic Control databases actually survived. While those people's departures weren't explicitly noted --they were recorded as having died, after all-- the GA intelligence services did manage to glean a lot of data, including pinpointing Zach's departure. So the full Houdini list isn't necessary, but would be welcome of course.

That list wouldn't exist on Galton, of course. At best, it would be the Galton section of the arrivals. That's actually very possible, since the Galton services did process a hundred thousand new immigrants, then also assigned lodging, work, paid salaries, etc. All this bureaucratic information is there somewhere and underpaid workers may have left backdoors on, failed to install the latest "security" upgrade, copied onto a data slate to take home to work on while they had a flu, or any number of other mundane things that workers do to non-Top Secret information (and sometimes to Top Secret too).

I find that shipping that many people from Mesa to Galton only to write them off is a huge waste for the Alignment. There's no way that losing Galton was part of the plan -- as the name said, it was a contingency in case of discovery.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by tlb   » Sat Mar 05, 2022 6:37 pm

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:I find that shipping that many people from Mesa to Galton only to write them off is a huge waste for the Alignment. There's no way that losing Galton was part of the plan -- as the name said, it was a contingency in case of discovery.

Of course it was a waste, but the hope was that it would not happen. Nobody expected Galton's location to be pinpointed as quickly as it was. But losing Galton, once its location was known, was part of the Plan; the wastage would be worthwhile if and only if the Grand Alliance bought the deception that Galton was the ultimate source and headquarters of the Mesan Alignment.

Since we expect that deception to fail, then only the waste remains.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by jzulauf530   » Wed Jun 15, 2022 12:29 pm

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The huge red flag to the GA should be the fact that they didn't run into the weapon systems they *know* the alignment had to have to execute Oyster Bay. No spider drive starships or missiles were used.

This seems like a huge blunder from the MA's point of view. Might as well scream, "nah, nah, missed me!"
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