Cross posting update from RFC

GregD wrote:At which point, every single bit of storyline they tried to create with Galton goes away.

Because if Darius has weapons that were used against the MA, and Galton didn't, then Darius was always running the fight.

So that means immediate war with the Andermani Empire, Selisia, The Star Empire, and the Republic of Haven, with the Solarian League all sitting on the sidelines or helping attack Darius (because it was the MAlign who got all their people killed fighting the Manties).

Not a winning strategy

I don't think there's any chance of a different strategy. They can't let word of Darius existence leak out. It doesn't matter if the people who've found them know it's a MAlign redoubt; the simple fact that it's a lost colony would generate a lot of news and bring tourists, sociologists, spies, and reporters. There's not much a chance of keeping the secret out after this. There are too many people on Darius who would talk and say they were evacuated from Mesa too.

If a trader ship stumbles upon Darius, it'll simply be seized or destroyed. Its owners will wonder what happened, but unless this starts happening frequently enough that insurers and other strategists start to take notice, it's not a going to change much.

But if a military expedition comes to Darius, then Darius has to prepare for war. Even a single scout going missing is enough to warrant a follow-up search, probably in greater force to overwhelm unprepared defences. That means they have to become prepared. Probably even striking out first.

Sigh.
Torch provides an major set of bridges for the SL/SLN to start repairing the damage accumulated over centuries. That was laid out in TEiF including a short sets of mention of how complicated it was to get the clearance for SLN to send a force to Torch etc.
That is not to say that this will provide a miraculous resolution to the bad feeling between the members of the GA, the SL and all sorts of other people but it is a start and is cooperation which has already born fruit- though the details and sources have to stay black for a long, long time.


Lets just say that The Alignment has spent a vast amount of time, money and blood (other peoples, not just several hundred thousand if not millions of their own in things like Houdini and coverups) and are very firmly committed to NOT getting fully exposed as the source of so much death, destruction, corruption and the true source of Genetic Slavery.
They are very very busy trying to reshape very narrative they have ever used to - hopefully and eventually- bury all their machinations, killing under enough bullshit to hide it.
There are a great number of problems of all this spinning. Primary is that what the Alignment wants (demands, must have) is themselves at the absolute control of humanity as the highest and least accessible cast of their Superior Vision of Enhanced humans and maintaining the seeming godlike control (without consequences to themselves) of the many problems and decisions they commit to reach the highest level of control and keep it- being puppet masters who normally rely on just killing what gets in their way or attempts to contradict their vision of themselves.

We have also been shown some disaffection within at least some of the lower star line levels as people are starting to question why they are doing things that don't make sense from tactical positions -like the analyst working on the futile defense of Galton, and knowing that there are things she can not be caught even thinking to herself lest she will just disappear, never to be spoken of again
Really nice people, the Alignment.

The entire MA 'plan' is nuts. But the critical thing is that the MAN has a pretty good idea of how the SLN/RHN/RMN operates and their general tech. They can't necessarily reproduce the tech or fully understand how they work, but they understand the effects.

The MAN has a whole bunch of tech that NOBODY outside the MAN understands and their entire concept of operation is has not even been described in the books. But it clearly not the same as anyone else.

As best as I can determine, the most likely concept of operations is essentially that the MAN wants to play Los Angeles class attack sub to the SLN/RHN/RMN 1945 Task Force 57. And how is even the best admiral of 1945 going to deal with a bunch of super quiet, super deep diving, speedy subs that never need to surface or snorkel and fire missiles that are very difficult to even detect, much less shoot down, that can destroy carriers with one hit from hundreds of miles away?

Even heavily outnumbered the subs are going to be a huge constant threat. And if you show up and anchor off the coast and say 'Nah, you can't touch me' while not making any attempt to detect or counter the subs, well, it's going to be a bad day.

My guess is that they would need to run them out of ammo via taking out their support bases while taking horrific casualties.

If the MAN has only Darius as the place that makes torpedoes, well, that is the place you have to either take or blockade.

And that won't that be fun if you can't even tell if the MAN is around until your vessels start exploding.

So far, the only remaining Alignment base (not to talk about surviving cats paws or things like there RF) is Darius. Or is it?

There are wormholes on that map that shows Darius and the wormholes leading to Torch. There are other wormholes indicated just no information about where they lead. No star names, no light year distances, nothing. Exactly how likely is it that the Alignment HAS NOT sent survey ships out one each of the wormholes indicated........my guess would Zero. They would have been researching the devil out of every one of the ones shown, at the same time they are continuing to explore the systems they do know about for additional wormholes or to see if one or more of them is a junction.

Ok, at the moment where they go has not been critical to the plot line but since RFS has taken the time to produce that nice detailed map with lines leading ....somewhere....perhaps that was intended to give the Alignment . So we have all those 2 interesting pathways and at the same time we have Felix as a junction which is hiding in plains sight (but not yet known to the GA) which becomes a bottleneck for the Alignment as -per the map- they have to go from Darius to Felix before they can use the two "unknown" wormholes, the bridge of the Twinst to Torch or anything not yet put on that map.

Another question is how long is it going to take somebody like Anton or Ruth to figure out that things like Streak Drive and whatever was actually used in Oyster Bay for the G-torps or the standoff Grazers used at Beowulf don't show up being manufactured at Galton?

Different question set: That survey ship that was sent to hang out way outside the star and discovered that what we now known as Galton and the Ghost Rider drones that were sent to do the closer passive scans of the system brought back a lot data. Particularly for the GR drones, what information did they bring back about ships 1) in system, 2) ships entering the system and 3) ships leaving the system? Even if it was just tracking impeller signatures, that would get relativen vectors on departing and arriving ships. Would they all be using alternate vectors rather than least time approaches to where they were going to or coming from in hyperspace?. Moren data to crunch.
We are told that Galtn did not have any anything about the Spider Drive ships. We are not told if the Alignment had one or more Spider Drive ship hanging way outside Galton to observe (and definitely ordered to not engage anybody) what the Alignment presumed was going to happen to Galton. Direct observation and sensor logs would be invaluable- either from a LD or a Ghost and perhaps some Spider Drive recon drones? Darius would know exactly what capabilities Galton had for detection and what large margin of windage should be left to plant some sentinel and drones around Galton. Why wouldn't they do that?

Brigade XO wrote:So far, the only remaining Alignment base (not to talk about surviving cats paws or things like there RF) is Darius. Or is it?

Strictly speaking, each of the RF members is an Alignment redoubt too, though I would be surprised if they had a copy of the secure research data. They probably have even less than Galton did.

There are wormholes on that map that shows Darius and the wormholes leading to Torch. There are other wormholes indicated just no information about where they lead. No star names, no light year distances, nothing. Exactly how likely is it that the Alignment HAS NOT sent survey ships out one each of the wormholes indicated........my guess would Zero. They would have been researching the devil out of every one of the ones shown, at the same time they are continuing to explore the systems they do know about for additional wormholes or to see if one or more of them is a junction.

Ok, at the moment where they go has not been critical to the plot line but since RFS has taken the time to produce that nice detailed map with lines leading ....somewhere....perhaps that was intended to give the Alignment . So we have all those 2 interesting pathways and at the same time we have Felix as a junction which is hiding in plains sight (but not yet known to the GA) which becomes a bottleneck for the Alignment as -per the map- they have to go from Darius to Felix before they can use the two "unknown" wormholes, the bridge of the Twinst to Torch or anything not yet put on that map.

Agreed, we are told Felix has at least 2 more known termini, besides Darius and The Twins, but we have not been told where they lead. We don't know when they were found: it's possible they're recent discoveries. But "recent" is a relative term: Darius has existed for 180 years, so even a tenth of that is sufficient to plant a seed population for the GOTH plan.

And given how common inhabited planets are in the HV and how frequently they're serviced by wormholes, it's unlikely those termini are dead ends. In fact, we don't know of a single, useless wormhole. I suppose they might have simply not come up in the narrative because they're, well, useless, but it might have come up in conversation.

Different question set: That survey ship that was sent to hang out way outside the star and discovered that what we now known as Galton and the Ghost Rider drones that were sent to do the closer passive scans of the system brought back a lot data. Particularly for the GR drones, what information did they bring back about ships 1) in system, 2) ships entering the system and 3) ships leaving the system? Even if it was just tracking impeller signatures, that would get relativen vectors on departing and arriving ships. Would they all be using alternate vectors rather than least time approaches to where they were going to or coming from in hyperspace?. Moren data to crunch.

I don't think Galton had almost any traffic. Any it would have would be to support MAlign secret operations like Hole In the Wall, so it would be a good OpSec practice to randomise departure vectors. And mind you, Galton was colonised with that technique, so it might be "in their bones."

We are told that Galtn did not have any anything about the Spider Drive ships. We are not told if the Alignment had one or more Spider Drive ship hanging way outside Galton to observe (and definitely ordered to not engage anybody) what the Alignment presumed was going to happen to Galton. Direct observation and sensor logs would be invaluable- either from a LD or a Ghost and perhaps some Spider Drive recon drones? Darius would know exactly what capabilities Galton had for detection and what large margin of windage should be left to plant some sentinel and drones around Galton. Why wouldn't they do that?

I think it's highly unlikely because it's risky. They didn't know when the GA would show up: it could be tomorrow or it could be in a decade. So they couldn't station a ship there forever. It would need to be on a rotation basis, which implies three ships: one on-station, one in transit, one in refit. So they run a risk of losing the arriving one if the system has fallen to invaders and no news arrived at the HQ before the orders were cut. They actually run the risk of losing two of those.

Plus, they wouldn't need a spider ship for this. If the job is to observe from a light-day out, all they need is for the Galton Traffic Control to be wilfully ignorant of its presence. A good stealth ship with streak drive would suffice.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I think it's highly unlikely because it's risky. They didn't know when the GA would show up: it could be tomorrow or it could be in a decade. So they couldn't station a ship there forever. It would need to be on a rotation basis, which implies three ships: one on-station, one in transit, one in refit. So they run a risk of losing the arriving one if the system has fallen to invaders and no news arrived at the HQ before the orders were cut. They actually run the risk of losing two of those.

Plus, they wouldn't need a spider ship for this. If the job is to observe from a light-day out, all they need is for the Galton Traffic Control to be wilfully ignorant of its presence. A good stealth ship with streak drive would suffice.

You can't detect a transition with shipboard sensors at a light-day (I think it's actually several light hours max range) At 2 light-days there isn't any chance that you'll have anyone close to you. And a spider is going to have absurdly good passive sensors. So you drop in, check for anyone around, and then spend a week or two cruising in. Hang out for a few months and then quietly move off and transition out far enough that someone hanging out on alpha won't see you.

Or drop highly sensitive sensor buoys that get picked up every few weeks/months.

kzt wrote:You can't detect a transition with shipboard sensors at a light-day (I think it's actually several light hours max range) At 2 light-days there isn't any chance that you'll have anyone close to you. And a spider is going to have absurdly good passive sensors. So you drop in, check for anyone around, and then spend a week or two cruising in. Hang out for a few months and then quietly move off and transition out far enough that someone hanging out on alpha won't see you.

Or drop highly sensitive sensor buoys that get picked up every few weeks/months.

Fair enough.

But in any case, I was going to change my mind on this. We do know that Darius was keeping tabs on Galton, carefully inserting or derailing research into their databases. Lisa's planning for "System Alpha's" defence was another example: one assumes that her and other colleagues' results were fed back into Galton's planning. The fact that she recommended they build more Hastas and that did happen is evidence (circumstantial, but evidence).

So there was a pipeline of information. As the Galton residents were largely unaware of this, it stands to reason this ship either did not reveal itself to them, or passed off as something entirely different. There's probably a freighter or courier making regular runs to bring information to Galton (again, they knew Oyster Bay had succeeded), so it would be easy for this courier to make a rendezvous and load more data. Its crew is probably made of Dariusian agents who also selectively edit what gets to Galton.

Which means this courier can be caught.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

kzt wrote:You can't detect a transition with shipboard sensors at a light-day (I think it's actually several light hours max range) At 2 light-days there isn't any chance that you'll have anyone close to you. And a spider is going to have absurdly good passive sensors. So you drop in, check for anyone around, and then spend a week or two cruising in. Hang out for a few months and then quietly move off and transition out far enough that someone hanging out on alpha won't see you.

Or drop highly sensitive sensor buoys that get picked up every few weeks/months.

Fair enough.

But in any case, I was going to change my mind on this. We do know that Darius was keeping tabs on Galton, carefully inserting or derailing research into their databases. Lisa's planning for "System Alpha's" defence was another example: one assumes that her and other colleagues' results were fed back into Galton's planning. The fact that she recommended they build more Hastas and that did happen is evidence (circumstantial, but evidence).

So there was a pipeline of information. As the Galton residents were largely unaware of this, it stands to reason this ship either did not reveal itself to them, or passed off as something entirely different. There's probably a freighter or courier making regular runs to bring information to Galton (again, they knew Oyster Bay had succeeded), so it would be easy for this courier to make a rendezvous and load more data. Its crew is probably made of Dariusian agents who also selectively edit what gets to Galton.

Which means this courier can be caught.

Only if goes directly to Galton. There could be a monitor ship (which should be exchanged by another ship from Darius very so often) which keeps an eye on Galton (say 20 light-days away) that the courier rendezvous with before going to Galton.

Using a Spider Drive ship and coming out of hyper very far out would cut the potential of it being spotted to almost nil since so far the Alignment has difficulties detecting one and they know what they are looking for. Remember that most system monitoring sensors are primarily looking for both the hyper footprint and then impeller signatures. Sure, they could also be routinely doing very high resolution optical scanning but for a Spider in full stealth with that magic skin and almost no "normal" emissions, it would still be a very tiny chance of being spotted. And the spider is going to probably be maneuvering to a final (but not too close) position to overwatch the system. Anything Galton (or the GA post capture of Galton) would send to check out a sensor ping is going to be spotted by it's impellers alone and the Spider would see that and take appropriate action to avoid. That includes leaving completely using the Spider Drive.

So, how about gravatronic detectors to use the gravitational mass and changes to it's location to the system to detect an otherwise invisible ship. No, we haven't really talked about that but it does sound like it's gravatonce disturbance that is being used for FTL communications which might mean you can track a ship that way. Might, if you have enough sensors, could triangulate and sort out something the size of a Ghost at 2 light hours.

Brigade XO wrote:There are wormholes on that map that shows Darius and the wormholes leading to Torch. There are other wormholes indicated just no information about where they lead. No star names, no light year distances, nothing.

Just for my personal clarity: Which map are you talking about? Is there a map supposed to be in "To End In Fire"?

I've got the Amazon EBook, and there's no map I can find anywhere.