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What next after To End in Fire

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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by Garth 2   » Sun Jan 29, 2023 5:03 am

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tlb wrote:
tlb wrote:However, since there actually is a good alignment (now the Engagement) on Mesa; why would a truly good alignment need to hide?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:That's the million credit question. Audrey is smart, so she may ask that. But she's also got a major blind spot.

phillies wrote:Because people are plotting to destroy it, or would be, if they knew about it.

Please explain. The good alignment on Mesa (called the Engagement now, I believe) has always been in a position were it could be destroyed, but instead has been tolerated as an opposition group. To a certain extent this is because the Onion was using it as a cover and a place to recruit. So why would anyone care about a "good" (meaning non-violent) group that cut itself off from all but the smallest contact in order to hide? That may protect themselves from infiltration, but it also cuts them off from information and influence (except at a clandestine level).


I expect that partly because the "leopard doesn't change their spots" the GA and friends know that the Detwiller conspiracy (Mesan Alignment) has hidden it's plans and activities within other organisations for centuries with none of their internal/external security agencies getting a hint of its presence. So, any thing that looks remotely like part of the MA is going to be of interest.

Also, one could assume that Phobes interaction with Audrey was under the heading of "damage control". The MA is going to have do a lot of reassuring of its deep cover agents, as to why they need to stay in place with the Engagements emergence.
As this new organisation does fundamentally and openly achieve the Detwiller goal (just without the "genetic class structure" the MA want's to embrace), whilst simulations reflecting the history of the MA.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by Brigade XO   » Mon Jan 30, 2023 10:25 am

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1) IF you find the secret wormhole at by Felix and, having determined that it is a probable lead to the Alignment AND
You get the-- Republic of Mannerheim--BC (and anything else Mannerheim has near Felix NOT MANPOWER----off of Felix.....
(...so the GA effectively dealers war on Mannerheim by seizing a wormhole by a system Mannerheim is negotiating to buy,,...wonderful)

Although it is NOT mentioned directly in the books, the other end of ONE of the wormholes from Felix leads to the system that contains Darius. In what universe is the Alignment not going to put serious defensive systems and ships covering the inbound lane to the Darius end. They could be 90 year old surplus SLN ships, brand new state of the art Mannerheim ships or any variation of the LD's and spider drive Alignment warships you care to think up.
The exit to Darius will be a death trap.

2) The Alignment has spent centuries both rewriting their own history and screwing with any part of humanity they want to manipulate into helping the Alignment gain total supremacy. They routinely kill people (as at Beowulf) and in Oyster Bay in the multiple millions at a go and bleed systems and multi-system polities (Empire of Manticore, Republic of Haven, and anybody who is useful as a tool or is in their way like the Solaria League.

They -the Alignment- not Leonard Detweiler- ended up setting up Manpower and in effect all of Mesa as a decoy and sacrificial offering to the universe so to cover their tracks on everything they had done. So, Houdini is also a really cold-blooded way of getting rid of your (in the Alighments view) the people who are members but no longer need along with taking the opportunity to blame the Ballroom for much of the carnage the Alignment inflicted on Mesa at the end ....and then set up the Final Flourish to blame the GA for the bombs the Alignment planted to "tidy up" so much there.
Galton, at least the second sacrificial offering where "the bad alighment" was and did Oyster Bay and provided all those weapons for so much death and destruction including the failed burning off the surface of Torch.
And they routinely install nanites in their own people (as well as others) to kill them if they don't get updated, if they are about to do something that will expose a network or the Alignment connection or they become a "liability" to the cause.

They have a lot to hid, they have spent countless money and killed millions and millions hiding what the really are, what they have done and what they intend to do. They lie, they kill, they "revise" history--we have seen that several time where the books just plain state that they keep changing the narrative to hide what they have done -and will do in the future.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by Brigade XO   » Mon Jan 30, 2023 10:39 am

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If you do a time-shift for, say 30 years, your going to still have a lot of know characters around but your going to have to introduce and develop people who provide critical or at least supportive merit to the story.

How many of you would be happy if the next full novel essentially starts out by intimating that NOTHING significant happened nor was progress made in the last 30 years and a bunch of people we may have seen last as babies or young children are now in mid-level positions of importance and suddenly will blossom into.....well, explode into massive importance after following quasi uneventful careers?

Nobody is going to stand for the Aliens that attacked and the present result is Safehold showing up to causes an alliance between the GA, the Alignment and Preston of the Spaceways.

So the story has to develope.

And showing it 100yrs into the future is just painful........The newly reformed and augmented GA shows up, defeats the Alighment and turns the survivors -of which there are not that many- into useful and moral pilars of humanity by causing mutations in their base genomes using Honor Harrington's great grandaugher's genetically modified version of the Alignment's suicide nanite.
You heard it first here :)
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Mon Jan 30, 2023 1:44 pm

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Brigade XO wrote:1) IF you find the secret wormhole at by Felix and, having determined that it is a probable lead to the Alignment AND
You get the-- Republic of Mannerheim--BC (and anything else Mannerheim has near Felix NOT MANPOWER----off of Felix.....
(...so the GA effectively dealers war on Mannerheim by seizing a wormhole by a system Mannerheim is negotiating to buy,,...wonderful)


Strictly speaking, since that system is not Mannerheim sovereign territory, they would not be declaring war on Mannerheim. The GA would have as much right to place forces in the Felix system as Mannerheim does. In fact, they wouldn't be declaring war on the owners of Felix either, since the wormhole junction likely lies beyond the "territorial waters" of the system.

So long as no one shoots at each other, that is.

The GA only needs to stand place ships standing off from Mannerheim's. The Ghost Rider drones would be able to approach much more and would suffice to impede any transit of unknown ships. Remember that ships come out of a transit with very, VERY bright Warshawski sails that are 200 km in diameter. There's no hiding that, so no LD could transit without the picket forces knowing so.

Smaller ships could transit in the belly of an innocuous freighter. And, of course, Q-ships could transit, but the risk is great that the drones would pick up that there's something different about them.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by Jonathan_S   » Mon Jan 30, 2023 4:31 pm

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:Strictly speaking, since that system is not Mannerheim sovereign territory, they would not be declaring war on Mannerheim. The GA would have as much right to place forces in the Felix system as Mannerheim does. In fact, they wouldn't be declaring war on the owners of Felix either, since the wormhole junction likely lies beyond the "territorial waters" of the system.

So long as no one shoots at each other, that is.

The GA only needs to stand place ships standing off from Mannerheim's. The Ghost Rider drones would be able to approach much more and would suffice to impede any transit of unknown ships. Remember that ships come out of a transit with very, VERY bright Warshawski sails that are 200 km in diameter. There's no hiding that, so no LD could transit without the picket forces knowing so.

Smaller ships could transit in the belly of an innocuous freighter. And, of course, Q-ships could transit, but the risk is great that the drones would pick up that there's something different about them.
That presumes that they can find Felix (and its significance) without making the suicidality dangerous opposed transits from Torch to the Twins to Felix. (Because in those they almost assuredly would immediately be fired upon -- just like Harvest Joy was when she made that first transit)

And the defenders aren't likely to allow a random "innocuous freighter" through any of those termini because none of those wormholes have routine traffic.

And the one between Torch and the Twins has no traffic -- it's verboten to MAlign traffic too (unless/until they use it to launch something from the Twins to Torch)

But for the other termini, well every ship that transits them should be known to the defenders because those wormholes are all secret and not open for shipping. So it couldn't be just any freighter, you'd need to find a freighter that was scheduled to use them and basically capture it, with its databases intact, and then gets its captured crew to cooperate or else work out how to impersonate them well enough to avoid suspicion as you took it on its scheduled trip through the wormhole.

Good luck with all that!
Last edited by Jonathan_S on Mon Jan 30, 2023 11:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Mon Jan 30, 2023 10:31 pm

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Jonathan_S wrote:That presumes that they can find Felix (and it's significance) without making the suicidality dangerous opposed transits from Torch to the Twins to Felix. (Because in those they almost assuredly would immediately be fired upon -- just like Harvest Joy was when she made that first transit)


Indeed. Right now, there's absolutely nothing pointing at Mannerheim, much less Felix. The GA may suspect that the MAlign is using a wormhole (because the GA is using one), but that helps in no way. They need to triangulate.

No, the wormhole won't be the first step. Unmasking the RF is probably going to come first. Somehow.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by Brigade XO   » Tue Jan 31, 2023 5:40 am

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Unmasking the RF is not something lightly undertaken. At this point we don't get shown anything (other than a very high interest in Felix) by Mannerheim which may be known outside of it's military and politicians. I'm sure there is a file somewhere at Mannerheim with the official reasons why they are looking to acquire the system but it will not be common knowledge.

We do have the raid at Warner (at the other end of the Warner-Mannerheim bridge which provided more data in the ultimate finding of Galton, but little else. Sure, the SLN has taken notice of Mannerheim - or at least the RF- but since nobody there has used anything remotely close to the weapons used by the Alignment or specifically Galton, they are just a concern as a unknown but rising player created by the alliances of several systems which were - we presume in public anyway-moved to do that by the SL's actions with Buccaneer etc.
The Felix wormhole is not on any charts nor in the original reports of the survey ship that investigated it. If I remember correctly, it was an Alignment affiliated ship that found the wormhole. And the Alignment has a habit of making starships encounter "hazards of navigation" to prevent crew or record from exposing secrets it wants to keep.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by Robert_A_Woodward   » Wed Feb 01, 2023 2:11 am

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Brigade XO wrote:Unmasking the RF is not something lightly undertaken. At this point we don't get shown anything (other than a very high interest in Felix) by Mannerheim which may be known outside of it's military and politicians. I'm sure there is a file somewhere at Mannerheim with the official reasons why they are looking to acquire the system but it will not be common knowledge.

We do have the raid at Warner (at the other end of the Warner-Mannerheim bridge which provided more data in the ultimate finding of Galton, but little else. Sure, the SLN has taken notice of Mannerheim - or at least the RF- but since nobody there has used anything remotely close to the weapons used by the Alignment or specifically Galton, they are just a concern as a unknown but rising player created by the alliances of several systems which were - we presume in public anyway-moved to do that by the SL's actions with Buccaneer etc.
The Felix wormhole is not on any charts nor in the original reports of the survey ship that investigated it. If I remember correctly, it was an Alignment affiliated ship that found the wormhole. And the Alignment has a habit of making starships encounter "hazards of navigation" to prevent crew or record from exposing secrets it wants to keep.


I have thought of a possible way to uncover Felix. It however would be part of a very extensive check of all survey reports of uninhabited systems (officially uninhabited that is). This will be done because of the false report for Galton. OTOH, if the check was just to see if the number of planets (and their orbits) and asteroid belts match the official survey report, Felix would easily pass.
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(first sentence of Chapter VI of _Space Viking_ by H. Beam Piper)
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Wed Feb 01, 2023 2:30 am

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Robert_A_Woodward wrote:I have thought of a possible way to uncover Felix. It however would be part of a very extensive check of all survey reports of uninhabited systems (officially uninhabited that is). This will be done because of the false report for Galton. OTOH, if the check was just to see if the number of planets (and their orbits) and asteroid belts match the official survey report, Felix would easily pass.


That's impractical. The mean stellar density in our neighbourhood (which admittedly is low, in the Local Bubble) is 0.14 stars per cubic parsec. Galton was 200 light-years (~60 pc) from Mannerheim. A sphere with that radius has a volume of over 900,000 pc³, so it should contain roughly 126 thousand stars. If the GA sent 100 ships in a scouting mission and each took 1 week in average per system to determine if there is a wormhole there (or other nefarious activities) or not, that's a 24-year programme.

Even if you divide that by 2 to account for an average of 2 stars per star system, it's too many to inspect for wormholes (and I don't think it would help, since they'd still need to scan all stars of a star system anyway). Given that evidence shows realising a wormhole is there is difficult enough, 1 week may not be enough. It's probably not enough to rule wormholes out for a sufficient number of systems either.

And this is just the neighbourhood of Mannerheim. The GA intelligence services do know that 3 slaver ships did transit the warp bridge and didn't come back, so they may have reason to suspect that region, though.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by Somtaaw   » Wed Feb 01, 2023 10:35 am

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Wasn't there mention that the wormhole in Felix that connects to Darius being both significantly weaker -AND- considerably closer to the star than every other known wormhole junction? Or was it the other end of the Torch junction that had those features?

If so, then any survey ships the GA uses to unofficially seek out unreported junctions in places like Felix, due to both the odd location and low strength using a 'standard Junction survey pattern' simply wouldn't find it without tripping over it because Lady Luck blessed them.

Which is what I seem to recall how the MAlign found it, almost purely by chance with their Jessyk Combine survey ship, and they've made every effort since discovery to ensure NOBODY else finds that wormhole. And from the time they discovered that stealthy junction, they've been trying to quietly purchase the system out from under other interested parties who don't actually know about the wormhole.
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