I can think of a way that would fairly plausibly circumvent "our navigational precision is "only" one in a million" off the top of my head. Also note that our precision in navigation for automatic systems is potentially one in ten million today- we could easily build, say, an automatic airplane that takes off from an airport in the US and lands on an airport runway in China, with no real danger of it crashing en route or missing the runway.Formless wrote:I did read it. There is no place to hide. The setting is space, and there is no frontier in any sane setting with such FTL. There are always other limits, Simmo. Pournell and Niven assume that this is a possible scenario. I don't see that as a justifiable expectation, because in practice there are so many ways in which this can be thwarted by limitations outside the scope of the drive itself. If you can't navigate accurately enough to arrive on target within a million miles you lose the element of surprise.
Since most fictional hyperspace drives are at least one-in-a-million precise (because they are "magic button that makes you go where you want" plot devices), I don't see a problem with discussing the implications of such a drive.
How much mileage the defender gets out of losing surprise varies. If you get thirty minutes' advance notice, that may only be enough time to call your loved ones and say goodbye, depending on how fast reinforcements can reach you and how prepared your own defenses are to meet an attack.If you can't form a jump point instantaneously without it being seen, you lose the element of surprise.
Also, there are quite a few FTL systems in fiction which offer literally no, or very little, warning to a defender that they are about to be randomly attacked. This is hardly unprecedented.
That's strategic surprise, not tactical surprise; there's a difference. By analogy, everyone in Russia knew the US had nuclear bombs after 1945. That does not mean the US would not have had "the element of surprise" had it unexpectedly launched an unprovoked nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Knowing the enemy has a weapon does not entail knowing the day it will be used.If the economics prevent you from making such a drive in secret, you lose the element of surprise because people will know you are coming before you even have a ship.
So, in conclusion, my problem here is that you are trying to quash discussion of the starting assumptions, by implying that they are so improbable that they could never arise.You are making false assumptions, and that's why you (and yes, Niven and Pournell) fail. The point of the thread was to open the question up for debate, shithead. Questioning assumptions is part of that discussion. Learn to debate without acting like an infantile moron.
Since there are several fictional systems where exactly those conditions arise, this is unreasonable.
Take for example Star Wars, which was roughly contemporary with the time at which Niven and Pournelle roughed out the CoDominium setting. Hyperspace travel is fast. Long range detection seems iffy (i.e. the Imperials at Endor are assumed to be jamming the Rebels because they know they're coming because Palpatine said so, not because they detected the Rebels coming out of hyperspace two days before they arrived). Navigation is not easy (requires computer support and minutes of computing time to plan a given jump), but it IS accurate. FTL drives are cheap enough that random individual smugglers and criminals own them, and that teenagers can ramble about selling their flying car to make a down payment on a starship.
So to review, navigation is precise, FTL drives are cheap, and long range detection is mediocre at best and actively nonexistent at worst. All this is contra your claims that these conditions are unmeetable and not worth discussing. Oops.
But then to be honest I must go on: "And yet, there is a galactic interstellar polity in Star Wars. How did that happen, in light of Niven and Pournelle's expectations?"
On the one hand, you can (rightly) point out that the Empire endures for a generation because very fast FTL travel means reinforcements can get to a threatened planet before it's too late to stop a raider. This subverts one of the basic assumptions that Niven and Pournelle made themselves, which was that Imperial punitive expeditions would take so long to get to a given place, that that place could not be rescued from a threat.
On the other hand, I can (equally rightly) point out that the entire story of Episodes IV through VI is the story of exactly the sort of events Niven and Pournelle predict. A large, centralized empire is brought to ruin by decentralized, poorly equipped "raiders" like the ones discussed. The Rebels ultimately win because they can strike wherever in the Empire they please (Endor in particular) because of their great mobility. The Rebels in turn protect themselves from attack by concealing the location of their own base(s).
Although as some others mentioned, they ultimately have to stop even using fixed bases; at the end of The Empire Strikes Back the Rebels appear to have abandoned their planetary basing system and resorted to basing out of a hidden fleet complete with medical frigate for installing prosthetics.
[blinks]You realize how low a blow this is to someone who has actual medical problems that need medicating, right? You know what the side effects of some of my stuff supposedly do? Look up Keppra and the side effects list. You are a real fucking shit, Simmo.Please stop, take a breath, and come back when you're not in chemical-imbalance mode, so that you can be your usual intelligent-commentator self again.
To be quite honest, I had no idea you had an actual problem that made you require psychiatric meds, and if I'd thought you did I'd have never brought it up. "Chemical imbalance Formless," on the occasions I've mentioned it, was intended as a humorous/rhetorical reference to the way that your posts are usually calm and fairly reasoned, but occasionally you fly off the handle and denounce people for being stupid/lying/dishonest despite no obvious change in behavior on their part.
If this veers close to an actual medical problem of yours, I apologize and will not raise the subject again.
[I don't know if you've ever mentioned it anywhere on SDN, but if you did, I either didn't read it or forgot about it.]