ThinksMarkedly wrote:How the GA finds out about Felix is actually pretty much irrelevant. I don't think it'll be via data correlation at all, but via leak from human intelligence. And specifically I think her name is Jessica Milliken.
Absolutely irrelevant. Interesting for certain, but still irrelevant. Whatever the gossip that leads to 'the argument in the restaurant' is irrelevant. What is relevant is when the argument moves outside into the parking lot and turns to fisticuffs. Felix is the parking lot. All of the bickering and niggling little details culminates at Felix. I am an Alpha too. So I see it coming. As indeed Darius' Alphas see it coming. Eventually. And a contingency plan is set in place.
Thinksmarkedly wrote:But as I said, how they come about it is irrelevant, because the first thing they're going to do is confirm it. Whether they do it covertly because they believe this is used by criminals or the MAlign, or overtly because they think it's just a great economic find, is again irrelevant. If it's covert, then the scout ship that is sent may have a chance of observing a transit and reporting back. But if the ship is discovered and destroyed, that is also information.
So if the GA's survey ship or scout got destroyed, they send a stealth scout with even more care. Felix may already be infested with spider drive ships, but it doesn't have fixed installation gravitic arrays that can detect and track wedges a light-hour out. Worse, they can't track Ghost Rider drones that well, so this scout will have launched a handful of drones to observe the Junction, then translate back up to the alpha band. It comes back 12 hours later at an RV point, collects the drone data and translates back out in less than 5 minutes. Rinse and repeat.
And scouts are cheap. The GA must have at least a thousand of them. So even if one scouting expedition fails, they can keep sending them.
Meanwhile, Felix can't be used for secret transits any more. More importantly, spider drive ships can't use it because you can't hide the 200-km wide bright, shining Warshawski sails after the transit. So those drones that are now observing the Junction will get very good readings on the nature of the spider drive and the capabilities of the ships using them.
The next step up from this is the denial as I described before: launch missiles at the ships that have just transited, to force them to defend themselves, expend munitions, and possibly take damage to their stealth screens.
We are dealing with Alphas. If Felix is the front door to the secret lair, it will only be used sparingly. And there will never be a spider drive sent through Felix from Darius. Never. Until the opening phases of war! After Galton was discovered - indeed after the MA got wind of a leak - the MAN ordered their own version of a lockdown! At that point, there will only be one way transits from Felix to Darius. Upward translations are not visible.
Question: Can a drone burn through the collective wedges of the MSDF hiding any incoming arrivals? I seem to recall that is exactly what the RMN did at Beowulf with Tsang.