Cataphract development history

If the Streak Drive ships were built at Galton then there is going to be a lot more chance that some parts of the information is going to come to light when the GA starts doing what ever investigation and retrieval of interesting equipment from the system not that it has been captured.

Was it initially developed there....possibly....but the prudent thing for the Alignment to do would have been do the actual manufacturing at Darius after having pulled any and all prototype equipment out of Galton along with all the records from the segregated R&D department that did the work.

Herlander Simões and a team may have been working on the improvement program for it in the Gamma Center but that would clearly have been one of the operations destined to move to Darius under Houdini---and any information and materials not already forwarded to Darius before Jack McBride triggered the self-destruct device in the Gamma Center would have been thoroughly destroyed (unless there were off-site auto backups that didn't later also get vaporized in the Final Flourish.

It is even possible that a great deal of the equipment (other than the Streak Drive itself and relevant controls specifically needed for the StreakDrive) for building Streak Drive sips could have being produced at Galton and shipped to Darius if they were still "just" copies of current production SL level (or Technodyne proprietary stuff) to allow the fabrication industries at Darius to concentrate on manufacturing the new tech parts. You build the actual ships at Darius but you are subbing out a lot of components from your captive supplier. Of course, once Galton is captured, that flow stops but in the interim -and that could be for years- you have freed up your manufacturing plants and workforce to do other things. The harder question is how they would have handled the shipping by the freighter load from Galton to Darius without attracting attention. That would be a lot more and heavier ships using the wormhole bridge (in both directions) by Mannerheim and so also a lot more traffic out where that wormhole sits near Felix.

I can agree with the actual Alignment Navy being truly formed once the Streak and Spider Drives were put into production as the Mannerheim SDF appears to be SL level tech being used as the guard force on the inside of the other termini of the Felx Junction - like the squadron that murderd the Harvest Joy coming thought the Torch wormhole. They seem to have been using people from Mesa SDFs for other things like organizing the attack on Torch but didn't have much in identifiable ships from Mesa involved. They had to get people trained in all aspects of actually running a modern Navy but the Alignment has been using mostly 3rd parties for centuries to the fighting and black ops with the commitment to building a true (and secret) Alignment Navy has been pending the ability to have the ships and weapons sufficiently far advanced that they can still be "off stage" and doing things like the Oyster Bay strikes.
They still are depending on the whole 3rd party operation since they have been spinning up the RF to subvert systems in the overall plan to subsume the SL and the rest of normal Humanity into the control of the Alignment

Brigade XO wrote:If the Streak Drive ships were built at Galton then there is going to be a lot more chance that some parts of the information is going to come to light when the GA starts doing what ever investigation and retrieval of interesting equipment from the system not that it has been captured.

Was it initially developed there....possibly....but the prudent thing for the Alignment to do would have been do the actual manufacturing at Darius after having pulled any and all prototype equipment out of Galton along with all the records from the segregated R&D department that did the work.

Yes; the information and examples would come to light, but the GA and Galton know that the streak drive exists. Therefore Galton has to have complete manufacturing facilities for it, because there is a far more important secret that MUST be kept. Something that is only known to the most select few on Galton, who all HAVE to die rather than being captured. That secret is the existence of Darius. The existence of Darius cannot be hidden if there is technology, which all know exists, but which cannot be completely constructed on Galton.

tlb wrote:Yes; the information and examples would come to light, but the GA and Galton know that the streak drive exists. Therefore Galton has to have complete manufacturing facilities for it, because there is a far more important secret that MUST be kept. Something that is only known to the most select few on Galton, who all HAVE to die rather than being captured. That secret is the existence of Darius. The existence of Darius cannot be hidden if there is technology, which all know exists, but which cannot be completely constructed on Galton.

I doubt that the Alignment would have not built the manufacturing capacity for Streak Drive ships at Darius as the tech is a critical piece with tactical and strategic importance. I believe we have already seen a Streak Drive ship be scuttled by blowing it's fusion plant when in danger of getting captured (and probably they hoped before anybody in the system could do a military level deep scan of the ship). Tough on the crew of course but at least the commander (or the secret Political Officer) on board knows there is that interesting software crawling around in the computer systems and that he/she and probably several critical members of the crew have those special nanites onboard. So it's a secret that the Alignment believes is adequately protected from seizure by anybody.
Clearly, between Firebrand's observations, the reali
zation by Manticore etc that "the other guys" have something that lets them work inside the normal ship based communications loop of travel by hyperspace and wormhole, etc, that the Alignment is doing it is now known. Exactly how isn't known but there is Simões who was deep in the details "working on improving it" so there is information that should be helpful.

Heck, if the GA gets enough sensor information to be able to differentiate a Streak Drive from a normal drive ship, they could start cutting off Alignment communications and materials transfer advantages by catching them inside the hyper limit of systems and just forcing a scuttling......if you can't capture them, destroy them. As an added benefit, you start backtracking the ships travels and start looking to roll up other parts of the Alignment operations.

Brigade XO wrote:I doubt that the Alignment would have not built the manufacturing capacity for Streak Drive ships at Darius as the tech is a critical piece with tactical and strategic importance. I believe we have already seen a Streak Drive ship be scuttled by blowing it's fusion plant when in danger of getting captured (and probably they hoped before anybody in the system could do a military level deep scan of the ship).

I agree that Darius has to have construction yards that can build streak drive ships and obviously the spider drive ships also. The drive itself would not be the only reason to blow up a streak drive ship, the ship's log and other contents would certainly contain information that must be kept out of the Grand Alliance's hands.

I expect that you need to do an interior inspection to discover that a ship has a streak drive, because the main difference is the greater size of the hyper-generator.

tlb wrote:I agree that Darius has to have construction yards that can build streak drive ships and obviously the spider drive ships also. The drive itself would not be the only reason to blow up a streak drive ship, the ship's log and other contents would certainly contain information that must be kept out of the Grand Alliance's hands.

I expect that you need to do an interior inspection to discover that a ship has a streak drive, because the main difference is the greater size of the hyper-generator.

Though hyper generators are apparently large enough that the streak drive's IIRC 50% larger unit actually pushes up the size and displacement of a streak equipped dispatch/courier boat. They need a bigger hull to contain their bigger generator.

So, while I agree that on a freighter or warship you'd probably need to do an interior inspection to detect a streak drive, on the smallest ships you'd get a good hint that it might be present due to the ship being oversized for its purported role.

Jonathan_S wrote:

tlb wrote:I agree that Darius has to have construction yards that can build streak drive ships and obviously the spider drive ships also. The drive itself would not be the only reason to blow up a streak drive ship, the ship's log and other contents would certainly contain information that must be kept out of the Grand Alliance's hands.

I expect that you need to do an interior inspection to discover that a ship has a streak drive, because the main difference is the greater size of the hyper-generator.

Though hyper generators are apparently large enough that the streak drive's IIRC 50% larger unit actually pushes up the size and displacement of a streak equipped dispatch/courier boat. They need a bigger hull to contain their bigger generator.

So, while I agree that on a freighter or warship you'd probably need to do an interior inspection to detect a streak drive, on the smallest ships you'd get a good hint that it might be present due to the ship being oversized for its purported role.

But can you really? We know a Fracteur dispatch boat is 37K tons, and Honor's Star Falcon is ~48K tons - in reality another modified Dispatch Boat design intended for use as a luxury yacht/fast parcel ship, though it is more then 25% larger than the Fracteur. But take the Star Falcon, rip out the luxury accommodations and install the rest of the streak drive, and can you tell the difference from afar? You just register the ship as a fast packet courier, and no one will question it from afar -

as long as you drop off some Amazon bags at someone's doorstep.

Theemile wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Though hyper generators are apparently large enough that the streak drive's IIRC 50% larger unit actually pushes up the size and displacement of a streak equipped dispatch/courier boat. They need a bigger hull to contain their bigger generator.

So, while I agree that on a freighter or warship you'd probably need to do an interior inspection to detect a streak drive, on the smallest ships you'd get a good hint that it might be present due to the ship being oversized for its purported role.

But can you really? We know a Fracteur dispatch boat is 37K tons, and Honor's Star Falcon is ~48K tons - in reality another modified Dispatch Boat design intended for use as a luxury yacht/fast parcel ship, though it is more then 25% larger than the Fracteur. But take the Star Falcon, rip out the luxury accommodations and install the rest of the streak drive, and can you tell the difference from afar? You just register the ship as a fast packet courier, and no one will question it from afar -

as long as you drop off some Amazon bags at someone's doorstep.

It's certainly not definitive. And IIRC the text even talks about them being sized like fast luxury yachts.

But once you understand that sizing limitation you can dismiss all the smaller dispatch boats clearly incapable of carrying one. And since the majority would be those minimum sized boats you quickly focus in on the relative few that could physically fit a streak drive.

Then you'd have to apply other intelligence to the remaining "oversized" ones. Basically, do we know this particular ship? Is there a plausible reason for a luxury yacht to showing up here? Or for a luxury yacht to be repeatedly cycling between these system? (And can we come up with an adequate reason for a "fishing expedition" inspection of it anyway? )


If nothing else the size issue limits the cover stories the MAlign can use for their streak boats -- a government, naval, commercial, or news courier isn't going to be bloated to luxury yacht size; so your streak boat can't claim to be one without raising suspicion.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I've speculated before that the Mesan Alignment Navy based at Darius was only created after the Spider Drive breakthrough happened, because that breakthrough happened. There's a slight discrepancy here that Herlander Simões was still in the development project of the Streak Drive and this doesn't fit with the Galton Retcon.

tlb wrote:There cannot be any causal relationship between the creation of the streak drive and the founding of Darius, because Darius was found after the discovery of the wormhole leading to it. Given the thinking of the Malign, there would have been a navy created as part of that founding.

To be clear, I said the Mesan Alignment Navy (MAN) was created after the spider drive's breakthrough, not that Darius was founded after that. My speculation is that the MAlign was populating both systems and had industry in both, but the bulk of it was in Galton, especially the military industrial complex. They didn't have a reason to have a second navy hidden from the first if it was going to be no different. That's why the MAN only had a few cruisers and destroyers up until recently.

As I posted in the "Why are you still alive?" thread:

Torch of Freedom, Ch. 44 wrote:Captain Gowan Maddock of the Mesan Alignment Navy looked down at the ornate rings of braid around the cuffs of his Mesa System Navy uniform with remarkably scant favor. [...] And so, the Mesan Alignment Navy, which until very recently had boasted no more than a handful of carefully hidden destroyers and light cruisers, had been created as a completely separate organization. Unlike the comic opera pretensions and strutting of the "navy" everyone knew about, the MAN was deadly serious, highly motivated, intensely professional service, and its austere uniforms were in deliberate contrast to those of the MSN.

It appears this captain wasn't even aware of the Galton System Navy in the first place, something we can believe because Gail Weiss wasn't told about Galton's existence when she was asked to strategise its defence, only a "System Alpha" codename. It's possible the MAN had bigger ships he wasn't aware of, but given that he was a Captain it's not likely the organisation could have been much bigger than what he was aware of, not if the MAN was "deadly serious, highly motivated, intensely professional service."

Therefore, I am concluding that the MAN was indeed tiny until recently. And the one thing we know has changed recently is the Spider Drive.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Therefore, I am concluding that the MAN was indeed tiny until recently. And the one thing we know has changed recently is the Spider Drive.

I will agree with you, if you are talking about the point when the navy went from small to large. However I believe that the founding of the (small) navy would coincide with the founding of Darius; if for no other reason that it needed a force to guard their end of the wormhole.

tlb wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Therefore, I am concluding that the MAN was indeed tiny until recently. And the one thing we know has changed recently is the Spider Drive.

I will agree with you, if you are talking about the point when the navy went from small to large. However I believe that the founding of the (small) navy would coincide with the founding of Darius; if for no other reason that it needed a force to guard their end of the wormhole.

Agreed, that makes sense. They didn't want Galtonians to know Darius existed (and vice-versa, usually) so those couldn't very well have been defending Darius.