There's an exchange between Nathan and Abby that I keep going in circles with. He's approach her to ask if she'll lead a project to produce jump-enabled warships on Tanna. It proceeds thusly:
"There's something else, something you're not telling me."
[...]
"It's a matter of trust," Nathan began, "or rather, who to trust. You see, we have reason to believe that we have at least one, or more, spies in our ranks."
[...]
"So you're here because..."
"We can't trust anyone else," Nathan explained. "We've only got a handful of scientists with us who know enough about the jump drive to be able to sell us out to the Jung, and we've had to take steps to isolate them. We've even stopped fabricating mini-jump drives, and have sent the technicians involved in their production back to the Pentarus cluster for now. We simply can't take any chances."
"Couldn't the sell their knowledge to the Jung from the Pentarus cluster?" Abby wondered.
"Yes, but nowhere near a easily. We want to isolate the production of jump drives to this world."
"How is that any better?" Abby asked. "There are millions of people on this planet as well. The Jung were here for something like ten to twenty years, I think. Surely they have spies here as well?"
"Possibly, yes," Nathan agreed. "But we weren't planning on building them *on* Tanna. We were going to build them on the asteroid base. There's plenty of room on the old Jung fighter base."
"But there is no orbital assembly platform here," Abby reminded him, "and I doubt there's enough room on the little asteroid to build them there."
"We don't need an OAP," Nathan explained. "We build fast-attack ships here, on the surface."
"And, how do you plan on getting them to orbit?"
"That won't be a problem, thanks to you and your father," Nathan said, grinning. "We build them on dollies, sitting on tracks. Once they're done we roll them out the door and down a hill, letting them pick up just enough speed to get far enough up the incline at the other end, and then jump them to high orbit. Once in orbit, they light their mains and accelerate to maintain orbit."
Abby's mouth was agape. "That's brilliant!" she exclaimed.
As I understand it, what's being said is roughly:
Nathan - We can't build jump-ships on Earth anymore, we're too worried about Jung spies (to the point that we've forcibly deported competent scientists 1000 light-years away just to make sure they stay quiet). We want you to help us build them on Tanna.
Abby - Tanna might have Jung spies too.
Nathan - Yes, that's why we'll be producing the jump-ships in orbit.
Abby - But the orbital base lacks the space needed to build starships.
Nathan - Yes, that's why we'll actually build the jump-ships on the planet, and then jump them into orbit.
Abby - That's brilliant!
Nathan - We'll also give you a personal jump shuttle to use however you want. It's not like that's the sort of thing a Jung spy might try to steal.
What am I missing? If the ship is being jumped into orbit, then it must already have a jump drive. So what's being built in space, and what's the point of building anything in space if they just assemble the final product on the surface, where all the spies are?
Build the Jump drive components in orbit in a controlled environment, and ship them down to be installed into the waiting Jump attack ships when the components (with self destruct in built) are ready for install.
Its logistics, the Jump shuttle should be there to funnel staff to orbit and back, and also ferry components down and materials to build components up.
It could also bring down the rails from the jump ship launch sequence. I imagine they would be re-usable or need to be melted down and fabricated into new rails.
Its segregation of duties, but the thing that annoys me is that once the mini jump drive and emmiter arrays are designed and callabrated all you need to do is feed a set of instructions into a fabricator, and upload a set of software to the nav computers. Abby is surplus to requirements then.
Four Islands pretty much nailed it. Compartmentalization, really. Abby's role is to use the knowledge gained by Lt. Montgomery's mini jump drive v2 and implement it into the newer versions of the Scout Ship aka Fast Attack Ship. Build the jump drive at the old Jung fighter base on the small moon over Tanna where you are isolated and can have much tighter security. Then send each one down as its host vessel becomes ready. Plug it in, roll the ship down the rails, and jump to orbit. Each jump drive would spend only a few days on Tanna.
As far as the plans are concerned, encrypting them and keeping them under the control of someone you trust (like Abby) adds to the layer of security. You can have techs and other science types know each of their areas in the jump drive production, but not let them know everything, thus making it impossible for any one person to provide plans to the Jung.
Eventually, production would become far more secure, and Abby would be taken out of the loop again. They could have just built the infrastructure to make it secure to begin with, but then they would take considerably longer to get the first ship into service, which they need now.
Got it, so they were talking separately about the drives and the ships, with the drives built in space and then brought down for installation.
I think part of what threw me is that so far the Jung (and Takaran, originally) efforts seem to have been focused on capturing a complete ship with a working jump-drive, as opposed to the specs/fabrication tech for building one (though in principle I think they need both; they need the specs/fab tech so that they don't have to spend years reverse-engineering it, and they need the ship so that they can deliver the tech in hours/days instead of the months/years that standard comms would take). That makes having any jump-enabled craft (or jump-drive components) on the surface of any previously-Jung-occupied world feel like a large risk, largely irrespective of where/how the drives themselves are built.
Ya, I don't like how easily we have exposed the Jump drive and the other tech to Jung spies on Tanna & Earth. Its fair to say that the alliance needs the resources, but the fact that we are only just learning about Jung Nanites scares me into wondering what kind of medical screening are alliance volunteers getting?
If you take a blood sample today and run it, you can look at white blood cell counts, you can see platelet density, you can check the oxygen level in the blood, you can run it through tests to check for chemicals and other elements. Surely there have been cases of alliance volunteers with nanites found in them? Witch hunt!!!
