lyonheart wrote:Hi MunroBurton,
Haven is only 677 LY from Sol, or less than 3 month's in hyper, not 6 or 18 month's [from FoD] which RFC admitted was an egregious typo in one of the pearls, which are still not working.
Torch is around 15 days from Torch in a db via the hyper bridges, technically closer but the time/distance objections still hold.
The textev states Torch's population was only around 14 million IIRC, despite ~15,000 immigrants a week, so Mesa's outnumbers it by 200-1?
So that's 2 strikes, but RFC may be holding out on us.
L
munroburton wrote:**quote="Weird Harold"**[quote="SYED"]...WAnt to really mess with mesa and the alignment, put forward a plan that has mesa asking to join the kingdom of torch. This is a newly freed planet of slaves, who better to join with. **quote**
I don't think that would be feasible due to the communications lag. Even if the Torch Wormhole was useable, I don't believe that would reduce the communications lag to make a single polity workable.
Mesa has been in existence for a long, long time. It's been nearly 500 years since Leonard Detweiler established the colony there. It's a planetary population in the billions, with entrenched cultural traditions and political classes.
Torch is essentially a brand new colony, with an enormous (currently) classless immigrant population, but I doubt they've passed more than a few hundred million.
The time lag involved means those billions would be governed by Torch's tiny government, all those hundreds of light years away. To shorten the communication loop, they would have to rely on using wormhole bridges requiring long term permission from Erewhon, Manticore, Beowulf and Visigoth. Or another more ideal connection may run elsewhere through the League.
Without access to those, it's a thousand light year voyage between Congo and Mesa, according to the prettier maps out there. Didn't Haven need six months to make a round trip to Sol once cut off from the wormhole network? In less than six months(Feb 1922 to June 1922), the Solarian League lost five hundred wallers and pretty much all its wormholes.
Heck, even Manticore(AKA Wormhole Xtreme) isn't silly enough to govern Silesia or Talbott directly and it's got guaranteed control of these links until someone works out a way to drop out of hyperspace totally undetected.
Yes, given the GA's friendly status with Torch, they
could attempt it. However, I doubt Prime Minister Du Havel would endorse the attempt, unless the Darius wormhole chain leads somewhere very near Mesa.
Then, only if Torch asserted control of all those systems would it stand a chance of being such an extended interstellar polity.
Think of it as the USA of 1800 trying to incorporate China. That's a toughie, even if 50-70% of China fully supported the movement.
