Spoiler...Technology

ecortez wrote:

bert953 wrote:Blowing up Ganymede was an oopsie? Id hate to see an oowie.

Ganymede would never be suitable as a habitat. And its outer layers are mostly ice, so any mining operations would have to drill down many miles to reach rocky material. Asteroids are better targets for resource extraction. Losing Ganymede, while you wouldn't do it on purpose, isn't exactly a disaster.

Well, blowing up that moon just created a lot of new asteroids to mine more efficiently.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:The question is whether the GH explorer would be curious enough to examine and, if in doing so, it would occur to them that the debris is not a natural occurrence. Astronomic collisions happen all the time and Jupiter, being the largest body outside of the Sun, acts as a vacuum cleaner and pulls everything into it. A collision that big is probably extremely rare in a mature system, but not impossible. And if you don't look for it, you may miss the fact that it's recent at all. The ship might just chalk it up to faulty recording of the earlier expedition (though I doubt it).

The GH already knows that the larger Shongairi warships are capable of doing this to terrestrial planets. A shattered moon around Jupiter, by itself, would be confusing but not cause for alarm.

However they couldn't help but notice the non-Shongairi spacecraft and radio transmissions in the system. They'd quickly realize it was humans out and about, with no Shongairi presence at all. That would be cause for alarm.

Hopefully Earth would spot the scout. In fact, I'm guessing they'd have satellites in distant solar orbit specifically to detect hyperspace emergences in the vicinity. Unscheduled arrivals would be intercepted.

ecortez wrote:Hopefully Earth would spot the scout. In fact, I'm guessing they'd have satellites in distant solar orbit specifically to detect hyperspace emergences in the vicinity. Unscheduled arrivals would be intercepted.

And we've already seen the stealth technology on the human ships is much better than the detection capabilities of the GH, or at least the ships the Shongairi had. So there's a good chance of a successful interception.

The level of industry and traffic should astonish them anyway.

I am interested in the 2 references by the Liatu about Kreptu magic myths. Is this related to the 5th founding member?

JB744 wrote:I am interested in the 2 references by the Liatu about Kreptu magic myths. Is this related to the 5th founding member?

I read it as a Liatu put down of a fellow founder member.

JB744 wrote:I am interested in the 2 references by the Liatu about Kreptu magic myths. Is this related to the 5th founding member?

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:I read it as a Liatu put down of a fellow founder member.

Who are the four known founding members?

Since the Liatu are militant atheists, that's not a deity. They may have had religion in the past, but given how long their civilisation has lasted, it doesn't strike me as likely that they'd have retained an old name like "Kreptu" from their long-lost religions.

Why would they also talk about fairy tales spread by other Hegemony members, founding or not? They take such a pragmatic and transactional view of their fellow members that I don't see their importing culture at all.

The usage seemed like an old demonic story, which would match the distorted view of what the fifth member would have done. But it can't be that easy. It's possible that this old enemy did inspire the stories and current mythology, but it must be several levels removed such it's not an obvious link at all.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

JB744 wrote:I am interested in the 2 references by the Liatu about Kreptu magic myths. Is this related to the 5th founding member?

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:I read it as a Liatu put down of a fellow founder member.

Who are the four known founding members?

"Officially, the Hegemony was founded by four species: the Kreptu, the Liatu, the Hexali, and the Bakal." from _Into the Light_ (section X of "Reconaissance: Sol System: Year 15 of the Terran Empire).

"Officially, the Hegemony was founded by four species: the Kreptu, the Liatu, the Hexali, and the Bakal." from _Into the Light_ (section X of "Reconaissance: Sol System: Year 15 of the Terran Empire).


I remain uncertain, from my reading of the texts, about what happened to the 5th founding member. Were they destroyed by the other 4 who ganged up on them for being too technologically advanced and advancing faster than the others? Did they just drop out of things and go into hiding to await a day when someone could challenge the other four? Is there some older, more nebulous race, which is pulling strings behind the scenes?

Fireflair wrote:I remain uncertain, from my reading of the texts, about what happened to the 5th founding member. Were they destroyed by the other 4 who ganged up on them for being too technologically advanced and advancing faster than the others? Did they just drop out of things and go into hiding to await a day when someone could challenge the other four? Is there some older, more nebulous race, which is pulling strings behind the scenes?

Well, that's what we need to be told in the next novel or two. There's nothing concrete about the fifth member, only some not-completely-scrubbed database references and inferences.

But assuming that's right, the fifth member was probably upsetting the status quo by innovating. That probably went for a couple of centuries before the other four finally had enough, so this fifth may have progressed significantly. The other four probably then ganged up on the fifth and solved the problem with brute force, as they'd have been at technological disadvantage.

Destroying a space-faring civilisation is difficult, so some remnants escaped. Whether they are still out there somewhere plotting revenge or just minding their own business is unknown. Given the length of time that has passed, I doubt it's revenge. I also doubt they're still extant as a space-faring civilisation that continued advancing, because they'd be highly visible to the Hegemony from clear across the Galaxy.

The plot will probably include some of them landing or crash-landing on Earth during their escape from the Hegemony, leaving behind the ship that Vlad fell into. This landing probably happened between 100,000 and 150,000 Earth years ago... so around the time that Homo Sapiens began having supremacy over the other hominids.