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Why did Beowulf Never Noticed the Wormhole Terminus?

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Why did Beowulf Never Noticed the Wormhole Terminus?
Post by Robert_A_Woodward   » Tue Feb 07, 2023 2:24 am

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Beowulf, the home of great astrophysicists, never noticed that their system (Sigma Draconis) had a wormhole terminus. Axelrod (see epilogue of _A Call to Duty_) had people crunching data, supposedly for all systems with survey reports and they didn't notice it either. What gives? Is it particularly distant? For some reason, it has a very weak resonance zone? Nobody ever bothered doing an updated survey of the Sigma Draconis system c. 1400 with much better equipment to replace the one done centuries earlier?
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Re: Why did Beowulf Never Noticed the Wormhole Terminus?
Post by Jonathan_S   » Tue Feb 07, 2023 12:11 pm

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Robert_A_Woodward wrote:Beowulf, the home of great astrophysicists, never noticed that their system (Sigma Draconis) had a wormhole terminus. Axelrod (see epilogue of _A Call to Duty_) had people crunching data, supposedly for all systems with survey reports and they didn't notice it either. What gives? Is it particularly distant? For some reason, it has a very weak resonance zone? Nobody ever bothered doing an updated survey of the Sigma Draconis system c. 1400 with much better equipment to replace the one done centuries earlier?

I don't think we know for sure.
OTOH a single terminus, such as at Beowulf, is going to have a vastly weaker signature than a Junction -- much less the monster of a Junction at Manticore.

And even Manticore's had been written off as nasty grav eddies for over a century after the discovery of wormholes (despite apparently being rough enough it should have been eating ships trying to arrive in hyper from a given arc of the system periphery!!

From the wiki's timeline, mostly referencing HoS:
1391 PD - Existence of wormhole junctions theorized.
1429 PD - Realized it might be possible to travel safely through them.
1447 PD - The first wormhole "warp bridge" is discovered and first successful manned transit of a wormhole.
1585 PD - The Manticore Wormhole Junction is discovered, and Pathfinder travels through it to Beowulf.

We do have nearly 140 years between the discovery of the first wormhole, and the discovery of the Manticore junction. But if the sensors of the era were barely able to find the more powerful junctions that could explain why Beowulf's terminus wasn't found before Manticore's junction; despite Beowulf being a vastly more advanced and developed system.
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Re: Why did Beowulf Never Noticed the Wormhole Terminus?
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Tue Feb 07, 2023 2:31 pm

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Robert_A_Woodward wrote:Beowulf, the home of great astrophysicists, never noticed that their system (Sigma Draconis) had a wormhole terminus. Axelrod (see epilogue of _A Call to Duty_) had people crunching data, supposedly for all systems with survey reports and they didn't notice it either. What gives? Is it particularly distant? For some reason, it has a very weak resonance zone? Nobody ever bothered doing an updated survey of the Sigma Draconis system c. 1400 with much better equipment to replace the one done centuries earlier?


I was thinking similar thoughts recently, in the other thread about doing an exhaustive search for wormholes leading to Darius. It must've been quite a surprise for the Beowulf scientists when the Manticore hillbillies came out of the wormhole and said "we come in peace, take us to your leader!"

I hope we get to see that in the narrative.

Jonathan_S wrote:I don't think we know for sure.
OTOH a single terminus, such as at Beowulf, is going to have a vastly weaker signature than a Junction -- much less the monster of a Junction at Manticore.

And even Manticore's had been written off as nasty grav eddies for over a century after the discovery of wormholes (despite apparently being rough enough it should have been eating ships trying to arrive in hyper from a given arc of the system periphery!!


ACTI did mention that they had had to take measures to counteract it. But it also mentioned that the RZ was at the moment associated with Manticore-B, which had much less traffic than the main planet. In the Manticore Ascendant series, it had a population of maybe a few hundred thousand and most traffic came sublight from the A component anyway.

Plus, at the time, conventional knowledge said wormholes couldn't be associated with binary star systems, so it was definitely discounted.

Beowulf, on the other hand, would have been extensively surveyed when wormholes were first theorised and detected. Why they failed to find it remains to be seen.

From the wiki's timeline, mostly referencing HoS:
1391 PD - Existence of wormhole junctions theorized.
1429 PD - Realized it might be possible to travel safely through them.
1447 PD - The first wormhole "warp bridge" is discovered and first successful manned transit of a wormhole.
1585 PD - The Manticore Wormhole Junction is discovered, and Pathfinder travels through it to Beowulf.


We also now know the first warp bridge was the Warner-Mannerheim one.

We do have nearly 140 years between the discovery of the first wormhole, and the discovery of the Manticore junction. But if the sensors of the era were barely able to find the more powerful junctions that could explain why Beowulf's terminus wasn't found before Manticore's junction; despite Beowulf being a vastly more advanced and developed system.


Right. That is the most likely explanation.
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Re: Why did Beowulf Never Noticed the Wormhole Terminus?
Post by turol   » Fri Feb 17, 2023 11:26 am

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Because the terminus is tiny and a solar system is huge. The wiki https://honorverse.fandom.com/wiki/Manticore_Wormhole_Junction says the central terminus is one light second across and 412 LM (24720 LS) from Manticore A. By the square-cube law that is 15 trillion times the volume. That is a tiny needle in a huge frakking haystack. Even if you assume it can be directly spotted with sensors a light-minute out that's still a ratio of almost 70 million. For an actual search you could start slightly outside the hyper limit (20-30 LM) but you'd potentially have to go a lot farther out, potentially several light-hours.

So the MWHJ was only spotted because of the resonance zone. The remote termini are significantly weaker and have no resonance zone. Trying to find those would have been effectively impossible and a complete fool's errand.
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Re: Why did Beowulf Never Noticed the Wormhole Terminus?
Post by kzt   » Fri Feb 17, 2023 4:08 pm

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Manticore’s is 12 light hours outside the hyper limit. It’s in empty space, there are no resources nearby. Nobody is going stumble upon that in normal operation. It’s like one anti-ship mine planted 300+ miles off-shore in the pacific, well off the shipping lanes. How long will it take for a commercial airliner to hit it?

Forever. Nobody drops out of hyper 12 hours short of the target any more than 777s land in the open ocean. And there is no reason for a ship to be in real-space that far out with no resources around it.
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Re: Why did Beowulf Never Noticed the Wormhole Terminus?
Post by Jonathan_S   » Fri Feb 17, 2023 6:47 pm

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kzt wrote:Manticore’s is 12 light hours outside the hyper limit. It’s in empty space, there are no resources nearby. Nobody is going stumble upon that in normal operation. It’s like one anti-ship mine planted 300+ miles off-shore in the pacific, well off the shipping lanes. How long will it take for a commercial airliner to hit it?

Forever. Nobody drops out of hyper 12 hours short of the target any more than 777s land in the open ocean. And there is no reason for a ship to be in real-space that far out with no resources around it.

Um - more like 6.5 light hours.
"The wormhole nexus lies 412 light-minutes from Manticore A" [HoS] (6 LH, 52 LM) and the hyper limit of Manticore A is 22 LM from the star.
You may be thinking of Manticore B - "The Junction's position also put it over eleven light-hours from Manticore-B" [AAC]

But your analogy to a single mine is also quite misleading. The Junction is a tiny dot on the scale of the system. Its resonance zone (RZ) however is a ludicrously large minefield against that same scale. (≈1.41×10^5 cubic light minutes for the RZ, calculated using the info in the following quote, compared to just ≈6.08x10^3 cubic light minutes within the hyper limit)
At All Costs wrote:the resonance zone—the volume of space between the Junction and Manticore-A in which it was virtually impossible to translate between normal-space and hyper-space. Any wormhole terminus associated with a star formed a conical volume in hyper, with the wormhole at its apex and a base centered on the star and twice as wide as its hyper limit, in which hyper-space astrogation became less than totally reliable. The bigger the terminus or junction, the stronger the resonance effect . . . and the Manticoran Wormhole Junction, with its multiple termini, was the largest ever discovered. The resonance wave it produced was more of a tsunami, and it didn't just make astrogation "less than reliable." It made it the next best thing to flatly impossible, and any transition within the resonance (assuming someone could have plotted one in the first place) would have been no more than a complicated way to commit suicide.
You can hyper out (and Honor does so) but you can't hyper in (and live)

But weaker wormholes, including the remote termini of the Junction, have correspondingly weaker RZs as so are correspondingly less dangerous to hyper into. (In many cases probably so little extra risk as to be nearly unnoticeable)
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Re: Why did Beowulf Never Noticed the Wormhole Terminus?
Post by Brigade XO   » Wed Feb 22, 2023 6:42 pm

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It is quite possible (but we don't know) that Beowulf did run surveys for a possible wormhole but between the then state-of-the -art wormhole survey equipment and the relatively low signature of the undiscovered terminus, it was missed.
When the Manticore survey ship showed up, it would have created a great stir but once you know something is there- because a ship came though it and spotted Beowulf's star nearby- it became ready knowledge. That initial transit created a path to a new market- for both Systems.
So far we don't know how much trade started between Beowulf and Manticore but once the second terminus was found at what was to become known as The Junction, that would have kicked Manticore's trade into high gear In the Honorverse Wiki, it says the second two terminus discover were Trevor's star (San Martin) and Hennessy.
That would have opened a shorter route (via the Trevor's star terminus) to Republic of Haven -which was a powerhouse before it's becoming the welfare state which became the Peoples Republic. The route via Hennessy is a gateway to another side of the League. All that changed the shipping routes and brought the traffic [and the fees associated with the traffic] mostly to Manticore as owner of the Junction. Clearly we have been shown that they negotiated a reasonable deal with Beowulf for the combined management of the Sigma Draconis end of the terminus but that was just being practical. The treaty would have been Manticore-Beowulf but they left the League out of it. No OFS involvement since Beowulf was already a charter League member and handled it's own diplomacy. Sovereign Star Nation and all that.
Manticore ends up bootstrapping itself into a commercial export location with access in both customers of it's products and sources of goods in the Haven area and now two widely spaced
access points to differnt parts of the League. It also realizes the need to vastly expand it's own navy and further develop it's starship industries to support both it's own merchants and the navy. They had been attacked by Axelrod (though various mercenary campaigns) and we have to guess that now having the major asset of a Junction pushed that drive for self defense even higher.
Ok, it the plot driven background, but Manticore was already a Star Nation with a good SDF and it was able to build commercial and military ships plus goods for export.
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Re: Why did Beowulf Never Noticed the Wormhole Terminus?
Post by Theemile   » Thu Sep 07, 2023 8:48 am

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tonyadams wrote:In my opinion, Beowulf and Axelrod's failure to notice the wormhole terminus in the Sigma Draconis system may be attributed to its distant location, a weak resonance zone, and the possibility of technological limitations during the initial survey. These factors, along with plot convenience, can explain why the terminus remained unnoticed until later in the narrative.
contexto


There must be other, natural sources of random Grav eddies in normal space which disguise the signs of a wormhole, or else:
1) anytime such a disturbance was found, it would have been heavily investigated by scientists - you have a gravity source just outside the 2nd oldest, advanced, most populated star system which is greater than that of a star - with no star at the center - and no one considered looking closer at it... right...
2) every such disturbance (which would have been catalogued and marked on every starchart for navigational purposes) would have been instantly investigated as a possible wormhole once their existence was known.

So in my mind, weird random stuff like this must poke through from Hyper all the time, muddying the surface of normal space sufficiently, or else wormholes should be easy enough to find without multi year surveys, crewed by 6 major universities worth of Hyper Physicists.

IRL, we've mathematically been tracing planetary motion since at least as far back as Kepler and Newton in the 1600s, and we've been trying to trace undiscovered celestial bodies by their gravitational effects on observed planets since at least the early 1800s. Over the last 25 years, we're using the frequency wobble (caused via gravitational disturbances) to determine the makeup of other solar systems via remote observation of the central star. It would be a hard sell to tell me that this same reasoning is not baked into the silicon of every starship's nav system in a distant future where interstellar travel is the norm.
******
RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."
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Re: Why did Beowulf Never Noticed the Wormhole Terminus?
Post by kzt   » Fri Sep 08, 2023 7:56 pm

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It is really how detectible are the indications. A sphere 12 light hours in radius is unimaginably huge and will take a huge focused effort for decades if you have to be within a light second to detect it. If you can reliably detect this at a light month than you”ll find it by lunch and can celebrate you new enormous wealth in the evening.
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Re: Why did Beowulf Never Noticed the Wormhole Terminus?
Post by Joat42   » Sat Sep 09, 2023 12:14 am

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Theemile wrote:
tonyadams wrote:In my opinion, Beowulf and Axelrod's failure to notice the wormhole terminus in the Sigma Draconis system may be attributed to its distant location, a weak resonance zone, and the possibility of technological limitations during the initial survey. These factors, along with plot convenience, can explain why the terminus remained unnoticed until later in the narrative.
contexto


There must be other, natural sources of random Grav eddies in normal space which disguise the signs of a wormhole, or else:
1) anytime such a disturbance was found, it would have been heavily investigated by scientists - you have a gravity source just outside the 2nd oldest, advanced, most populated star system which is greater than that of a star - with no star at the center - and no one considered looking closer at it... right...
2) every such disturbance (which would have been catalogued and marked on every starchart for navigational purposes) would have been instantly investigated as a possible wormhole once their existence was known.
. . .

Plus the fact that the understanding of wormholes and their terminuses wasn't as good at time, relatively speaking. The survey of Sigma Draconis would also be very old at the time and nobody goes out of their way to pay for a new survey unless there are indications that it is needed - especially since everybody have known that "Beowulf doesn't have any wormholes" for a very long time, it's hard to overcome that type of thinking-inertia.

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