Relax wrote:In radius of 1000LY of earth there are ~4E12 cubic light years. This is roughly extent of the entire Honorverse.
Therefore Honorverse has ~1 million stars.
Your number "4e12" is off by 3 orders of magnitude (it's 4e9), but the number of stars is correct.
Also, for some reason it appears the Honorverse is actually a short cylinder a few tens of light-years tall, not a sphere. That would considerably reduce the volume to a mere 125 million cubic light-years instead of 4.2 billion. Either that or there's a huge and hugely unlikely coincidence in all distances we've been offered in the narrative. It's not the "plane of the Galaxy," even though said plane is very thin, thinner than a CD proportionately. Said plane is about 1000 light-years thick in our neighbourhood (which means a sphere with 1000 light-years of radius at our position would significantly extend beyond it and would need to account for a much reduced stellar density), because one of the stars we know of, Sigma Draconis, has a very high galactic elevation from position compared to the disk.
This of course stems from the fact that the author is working on a flat map and probably uses a ruler to calculate distances and travel times. We'll be glad that he went to all that trouble instead of making up things out of thin air (or, as the case may be, out of interstellar vacuum) and gloss over this. I've seldom seen any author come anywhere close to this, much less surpass -- only Dennis E. Taylor of the Bobiverse series and Alastair Reynolds come to mind.
Subtract every star with a recent survey in last several hundred years and that whittles the number significantly.
This I disagree with, for two reasons. First, that it whittles down the number significantly: with 1 million stars to survey and given the observed state of human technology, I don't expect there to have been much of a dent. The Core of the SL might have been extensively surveyed, but the Fringe definitely hasn't, as we're still finding new habitable planets there. More importantly, the survey for wormholes doesn't appear to be quick at all and can yield a lot of false positives.
Second and most crucially, the surveys can't be trusted. We know that Galton was surveyed and determined to be habitable, but said survey was purposefully lost, replaced with falsified information. The GA intelligence services know this. They can't count on the reliability of the survey databases to exclude anything. For that matter, they can't really exclude even inhabited systems: Mesa shows how hidden installations could be set up in the far reaches, with a little corruption of the traffic control authorities, and this was a well-known system with fairly moderate shipping traffic.
With modern RD's one would think it would require a tiny fraction of a month to survey an entire system out to ~furthest known wormhole from a star distance.
I don't think that's the case.
With that time, they will be able to find a system that has a previously unknown, technological human colony, though, which we know Darius to be. In fact, they can pick up the emissions from Darius from 10 or 20 light-years away. But this relies on facts we are aware of but they aren't: that Darius is a technological civilisation with powerful emissions, large population, and on a previously uninhabited system.
If the Onion were hiding on Mannerheim, for example, such survey would find nothing. Mannerheim is already a technological civilisation, with its own shipbuilding and a great amount of traffic thanks to the Mannerheim-Warner warp bridge.
Similarly, such survey wouldn't find a civilisation with smaller population and strict emissions control, particularly if they hadn't been there for long. It's entirely possible to build shipyards and habitats inside of asteroids: by hollowing them out, you create the space and you get the materials to build ships with. This is actually the example of Yildun, which has significant shipbuilding installations but no inhabited planet. As the GA intel services don't know the size and scope of the MAlign's remaining hideout, they can't exclude that it is a copy of Yildun in a somewhat smaller scale.
In fact,
we can't either. We know Felix has two more termini, besides Darius and The Twins. It's highly unlikely the MAlign hasn't explored them, so there may be surprises there too.