I don't think Cam would be the one.... If I were to hazard a guess today, I would have to put my money on Josh & Loki. They would be in a "final battle" type of situation at or near the end of the war and are on the attack in the Falcon. They get some battle damage and on an escape jump close to a Jung held systems sun they "slingshot" backward in time into the direction of the Pentaurus Cluster. Flash forward [or backward :-)] we see two old men sitting in a yard with their families telling stories to their grandchildren... With Josh's knowledge after reading several history books given to him from Nathan, and Loki's attention to detail, the legend of Na-Tan will be told and written.... In a cave in a very remote region on Takara, some young people who are enjoying a camping/hiking trip with their new found freedom after the death of "Caius the Terrible" make a startling find behind a 1000 year old rock fall... Fade to black.... 😉
Okay.. I just finished the 10th episode. Before starting I told myself to take my time. I tried not finish it too quickly but I couldn't put it down! It's the most action packed episode yet. Of course now I want more so here I am reading posts in the forum! Great posts by the way. A couple of details I think we should look out for... Nathan asks Navashee to note the location, course and speed of the frigate he took out near Jupiter. I'm thinking there may be some salvage operations in the future. Perhaps parts that can be retrofitted for the Celestia?
I think Telles will play a larger role perhaps taking over for Waddel? He sure doesn't mind telling Nathan what's on his mind. Kind of like Cameron and Jessica...and the Cheng.
I bet there will be a lot of character development time on the next episode now that everyone can have shore leave. Abby going to find her family for instance.
I don't foresee much action in the next book. Perhaps an exciting recon flight for the Falcon on Alpha Centauri. I see the next episode to concentrate on repairing the Aurora, finishing construction on the Celestia and somehow get the Battle Ship running AND Jessica recovering. Maybe Aurora will finally get shields! 🙂
The Celestia is going to be bad ass.. double the range with half the charge time. I wonder what the drawbacks are where the Aurora would excel. Abby mentioned something about her father favoring a conservative approach with his design. Perhaps the Celestia's jump drive won't be as reliable. that's one thing the Aurora has had with their Jump Drive. It has never failed them. It could make for some exciting unexpected twist during a critical event the Celestia is currently engaged in.
How about employing the alternate design of the jump drive to the jump shuttle with a ZPED? will it mean it will be able to travel to PC at half the time? What would that cut travel time down to? A week?
... I can't wait to read the next episode! Last note.. Josh is the man!!!! 🙂
I swear the Jung never had energy shields before this ep.
I believe the general direction of the story to be fairly predictable but even so I love it. 3 months wait and book is over in a single night. Sooooo bad!
The alliance will come with some more jump ships to help protect earth - I mean, tug and the PC owe the aurora and Nathan pretty bad. Probably the next book will involve the arse kicking of the alpha Centauri forces with celestia, aurora and a couple of ships from PC. I wouldn't be surprised if the PC guys have all their fighters jump capable and mini ZPED powered and the big ships will have virtually invincible shields running on ZPED power. Perhaps it will just be three jump ships.
Then after that it will take a little while but it will be the systematic wiping of the Jung from the universe.
The earth will unite under president Scott.
More gatazahk action will be great. I love those guys!
Travel time in the ZPED jump shuttle is only supposed to take a couple of days.
Thanks, Blitz. I had forgotten about the cut-in-half frigate that they marked for follow up. That may prove interesting. Maybe parts to refit the Jung Battleship back to operational status?
They need to try out the KKV missile. I suggest the Battle Platform in Alpha Centauri. After that, it would be relatively easy to liberate that system, and provide a buffer to help protect Earth. I'd still like them to send a ship around to map out Jung forces and destroy all the Battle Platforms. Tedious but glorious work, there.
There is a fleet of reinforcements coming at old-style FTL from AC to Earth right now. There have been two incidents where jump ships have caused FTL vehicles to come out of lightspeed (Tug with Falcon and Ep 10 by the Aurora). Even if they didn't kill the entire reinforcement fleet, but merely caused them to stagger their approach, that would save the Earth. It is a lot easier fighting a single Cruiser, followed a week later by a Frigate, followed by a Battleship another week later. As opposed to fighting all of them at once, the battle is much easier. This would seem to be top priority, although they have some time to make the mini attacks.
Thanks David... If it takes days to travel to PC with a ZPED powered Aurora model jump drive what do you think it would be for a ZPED powered Celestia model jump drive?
Another thing to note is that the Jung have a much better FTL Drive. They are pin point accurate with it. I wonder how that will factor in to the story.
I didn't even think about the other 2 missing ships. It would be cool if they can join the fight though I could easily see Mr. Brown saving them for a segway to the next story arc.
Regarding the FTL cancelling effect of the ZPED, I think in order for this to work Nathan would need to know the exact course the enemy ships are using. This way he can park the Aurora or Celestia near their path. This means intel gatthering. Maybe via capture of the Bucca's ship or somehow gleaned off the computers the Jung used in their command center on Earth (Geneva). However would you use this strategy? Sure it would slow them down for a bit but wouldn't it also alert the Jung in those ships that there is resistance at their destination and clue them in that their role is no longer to reinforce but to recapture Earth.
Blitz, you are correct, that Nathan would need course and trajectory info to knock those Jung ships out of FTL. The answer is clear, he'll need that squadron of jump-equipped Falcons, of course! [see previous discussions 😉 ]
I wonder how bad the PC political situation will become? Will Nathan have to retreat in order to shore up his supply lines?
What defenses can Earth build quickly, in time for the Jung re-invasion fleet? Can they rebuild the Moon rock-launcher?
FTL defense: If FTL requires passing through every possible molecule between the source and destination, then the aperature thru which all ships would pass would be pretty small. Picture the Alpha Centauri to Earth run. picture all the possible points through which you might pass. You have a roughly cylinder shape about 4.3 light years long and about 2 AU (Astronomical Units) wide. Any ship expecting to travel between the two points would pass through that cylinder. In fact, you could expect any random trajectory to cross a very narrow circle right in the middle of the cylinder, with likelihood of intercepting a traveller increasing as you cover a larger & larger circle.
How much mass is required to mess up an FTL-travelling (or jump-travelling) ship? Apparently planetary atmosphere is not enough mass to destroy a ship, but a solid body such as a moon would. What if you gathered up a bunch of asteroids and dropped them across the middle of the cylinder described above? As you added to the number and/or mass of the asteroids dumped there you build an increasingly useful shield against any incoming ships.
I realize the usefulness of this disappears as soon as the enemy knows not to follow straight lines (or comes in from a different star), but for the current threat this stationary defense might prove VERY useful.
Hmm... You're gonna need a lot of asteriods. 2AU is the diameter of the EArth's orbit. That will take way too long to set up. The logistics would be a nightmare.
I like the KKV Approach to stopping the Battle Platform. Though to make it count they should retro fit the FTL drive on the KKVs with Jung FTL since they are far more accurate. Or heck just use the jung com drones from the Battleship. Im sure it has some.
In fact, you could expect any random trajectory to cross a very narrow circle right in the middle of the cylinder, with likelihood of intercepting a traveller increasing as you cover a larger & larger circle.
Yes, 2AU is large, but that circle in the middle is not as large. If you took Josh and Loki's old harvester, equipped it with a jump drive and a ZPED, it could ferry quite a few rocks out there in a few weeks. Enough to take out a ship or two, I bet.
You wouldn't need a lot of asteroids. Just enough to run a line across the 2AU "tube" and you could space them out by about 1km apart... Also, the asteroids would not have to be very big. Anything from the size of a car to larger.
Using the old harvester would be difficult due to all the damage it took during the rescue from Haven.
I like the idea of retrofitting the Jung comm drones for use as weapons...
You could even use the Jung drones to feed bad info to other Jung worlds. Jump them in close with the Falcon to sow confusion to the enemy.
still seems too much space to cover. I'm not sure how big the circle in the pinch point but for argument's sake lets say it's 1% of the 2AU diameter. That circle would still be almost 3 Million km in diameter. That's an area of aprox 7 trillion square kilometers! If you intend to place an asteriod every 1 km... like i said that's a lot of asteroids :).
Regarding the comm drones, I wonder if early on the encounter with Jung after the Aurora made it back to Earth, the Jung already sent a comm drone to AC to notify them the Aurora lives. Sometimes important information like this is not revealed to the reader until later on where it would provide more shock. It's a pretty important piece of information worthy of sending a comm drone, I would think. Also controlling comm drones were a big deal back when the Aurora was still fighting Takaran ships. They didn't play as much role with Jung... or maybe they did we just don't know about it yet 😉
Ok, I'll make one last comment on the rocks idea and then I'll shut up on it. In book 10 they experimented with tracking FTL ships. If they can do so again, they could either try Tug's trick to shoot down the ship in FTL, or they can put rocks in its path. I vote for rocks.
Do you think any other forces will make an appearance in the last five books? Any other little or big star empires, Federations, or Mining Guilds? Or is this it for civilizations in the nearest 200 light years?
Also, how did the PC get settled? Was it just a sleeper ship in 100 years of FTL, or was it a time travelling jump ship? I tend to think it was a jump ship that did some time travelling, so that the PC civilization could have more than the 900 years to develop.
After reading the comments on here here's my two cents.
One I don't think it's as easy as you think it is to stop a ship in ftl. The fact the Aurora was able to hit a ship is amazing. And really it would be hard to mine an area of space for ftl ships is the fact that space is 3D so it's feasibly impossible to know exactly where the ship will exit even if you know it's route. Best bet is to jump behind it and see where it's coming from and lay and wait with a small jump fleet to destroy what comes out as soon as you can track it.
Also the PC was most likely colonized by more than one colony ship during the great migration bc of the bio-digital plague. As far as the legend of origins was started I would bet it was an old folk tale about a local hero that some how got mixed up with the history of man kind. I really would like not to see time travel. To me that has been played to death by so many SF writers and shows. i.e. Babylon 5, Star Trek, Stargate... to name a few shows.
Now as far as jump freighters I think it would be cool to get some more falcon types. Also I don't think there will be much help coming from Earth. I don't know what type of help they will get from the PC I would like it to be a mystery to save.
Also to me that short little part with the data ark dude and tug felt a little ominous with how short and quick Mr. Brown wrote it. But that's just me.
Ok that was more like two and half cents. 🙂
Ok didn't mean to double posts oops. Love the books though can't wait for the next episode!!!
After reading the comments on here here’s my two cents.
One I don’t think it’s as easy as you think it is to stop a ship in ftl. The fact the Aurora was able to hit a ship is amazing. And really it would be hard to mine an area of space for ftl ships is the fact that space is 3D so it’s feasibly impossible to know exactly where the ship will exit even if you know it’s route. Best bet is to jump behind it and see where it’s coming from and lay and wait with a small jump fleet to destroy what comes out as soon as you can track it.
That is the best bet. However, in order to do that you need to first know that a ship is coming. The best solution there would be to leave a few sensors (ideally each jump capable, but they could just send an alert to a near by jump capable craft) in between the route. Ideally, they would be placed very close to the starting star system and each would be jump capable. Although it would be acceptable for a jump capable ship to be relatively close.
If I recall right, it was mentioned that the jump fighter had a sensor range of around a light day. Since Pluto's orbit is a fraction of that, in most cases a single jump fighter carefully placed near the starting star system (Jung held in this case) would be enough to spot it. However, that assumes that a line drawn from the starting point of the jump to the end point of the jump passes inside of each system (to within a light day radius of each star).The issue is that the radius of the solar system out to the edge of the Oort cloud is about 1200 light days, requiring a sensor check in millions of positions within a day in order to obtain full coverage, which requires very fast jump rates or large numbers of jump capable sensors or millions of sensors. The downside is that it still only fully covers the path between two star systems.
