ThinksMarkedly wrote:True, but not relevant. Joat's point is that all the wormhole scanning in the Sigma Draconis system had been done a long time before. It was probably one of the first systems where any scanning was done, if not the first one. Wormholes were theorised in 1391 PD by Dr. Shigematsu Radhakrishnan, who was a citizen of Earth but we don't know where he was doing his theoretical work. And we don't know who first put them into practice.
Either way, the Core Worlds were likely the first ones scanned because that's where the equipment and personnel would first be located. And it turned up nothing, or was inconclusive / insufficient. Joat's point is that no one would pay to thoroughly scan it again.
Though I'm sure scientists and students kept on going over the data because that's what they do. All of whom would re-do it all over again with a fine tooth comb once the first Manticore ship hailed over with "we come in peace! And did you know there's a wormhole in your backyard?"
And it took a while from then until the first successful transit.
"Although the existence of wormholes had been theorized as early as 1391 PD, the possibility that they might be used as a means of effectively instantaneous faster-than-light (FTL) travel had not been realized until 1429 and the first successful manned transit had not occurred until 1447" [HoS]
So serious surveying seems not have happened until after 1447 - for example we're told in HoS that "The Axelrod Corporation had been one of the very first Solarian transtellers to recognize the true significance of warp bridges after their discovery in 1447 PD, and its Astro Survey Division had gone back and systematically recrunched the numbers on every surveyed star, looking for the gravitic markers no one had previously known to watch for."
Still, that left over a century where Beowulf could, in theory, have found their terminus before the first transit from Manticore to Beowulf in 1585.
Though we are also told that early theory thought multi-terminus junctions would be extremely rare. And reading between the lines a little it seems like after the Visigoth junction (with it's 2 remote termini) was discovered in 1454 that only wormhole bridges (2 total termini) were found until the MWJ over a century later. So it's possible that whatever readings were detected during a survey of Beowulf could have been at odds with the predictions of expected terminus emissions from the then current theories on wormholes. Something which could have led to it being dismissed as a possible wormhole terminus.
Discovery of the MWJ would have refuted parts of that theory, and caused a group rethink. But until the data from it was available to be incorporated into an updated theory; everybody would have been working from apparently flawed predictions. That could have interfered with attempts to identify areas worth closer surveys.