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.