Brigade XO wrote:So far, the only remaining Alignment base (not to talk about surviving cats paws or things like there RF) is Darius. Or is it?
Strictly speaking, each of the RF members is an Alignment redoubt too, though I would be surprised if they had a copy of the secure research data. They probably have even less than Galton did.
There are wormholes on that map that shows Darius and the wormholes leading to Torch. There are other wormholes indicated just no information about where they lead. No star names, no light year distances, nothing. Exactly how likely is it that the Alignment HAS NOT sent survey ships out one each of the wormholes indicated........my guess would Zero. They would have been researching the devil out of every one of the ones shown, at the same time they are continuing to explore the systems they do know about for additional wormholes or to see if one or more of them is a junction.
Ok, at the moment where they go has not been critical to the plot line but since RFS has taken the time to produce that nice detailed map with lines leading ....somewhere....perhaps that was intended to give the Alignment . So we have all those 2 interesting pathways and at the same time we have Felix as a junction which is hiding in plains sight (but not yet known to the GA) which becomes a bottleneck for the Alignment as -per the map- they have to go from Darius to Felix before they can use the two "unknown" wormholes, the bridge of the Twinst to Torch or anything not yet put on that map.
Agreed, we are told Felix has at least 2 more known termini, besides Darius and The Twins, but we have not been told where they lead. We don't know when they were found: it's possible they're recent discoveries. But "recent" is a relative term: Darius has existed for 180 years, so even a tenth of that is sufficient to plant a seed population for the GOTH plan.
And given how common inhabited planets are in the HV and how frequently they're serviced by wormholes, it's unlikely those termini are dead ends. In fact, we don't know of a single, useless wormhole. I suppose they might have simply not come up in the narrative because they're, well, useless, but it might have come up in conversation.
Different question set: That survey ship that was sent to hang out way outside the star and discovered that what we now known as Galton and the Ghost Rider drones that were sent to do the closer passive scans of the system brought back a lot data. Particularly for the GR drones, what information did they bring back about ships 1) in system, 2) ships entering the system and 3) ships leaving the system? Even if it was just tracking impeller signatures, that would get relativen vectors on departing and arriving ships. Would they all be using alternate vectors rather than least time approaches to where they were going to or coming from in hyperspace?. Moren data to crunch.
I don't think Galton had almost any traffic. Any it would have would be to support MAlign secret operations like Hole In the Wall, so it would be a good OpSec practice to randomise departure vectors. And mind you, Galton was colonised with that technique, so it might be "in their bones."
We are told that Galtn did not have any anything about the Spider Drive ships. We are not told if the Alignment had one or more Spider Drive ship hanging way outside Galton to observe (and definitely ordered to not engage anybody) what the Alignment presumed was going to happen to Galton. Direct observation and sensor logs would be invaluable- either from a LD or a Ghost and perhaps some Spider Drive recon drones? Darius would know exactly what capabilities Galton had for detection and what large margin of windage should be left to plant some sentinel and drones around Galton. Why wouldn't they do that?
I think it's highly unlikely because it's risky. They didn't know when the GA would show up: it could be tomorrow or it could be in a decade. So they couldn't station a ship there forever. It would need to be on a rotation basis, which implies three ships: one on-station, one in transit, one in refit. So they run a risk of losing the arriving one if the system has fallen to invaders and no news arrived at the HQ before the orders were cut. They actually run the risk of losing two of those.
Plus, they wouldn't need a spider ship for this. If the job is to observe from a light-day out, all they need is for the Galton Traffic Control to be wilfully ignorant of its presence. A good stealth ship with streak drive would suffice.