StealthSeeker wrote:Kizarvexis wrote:There is also the wormhole connection between Mesa (on the map) and Visigoth (not on the map). Visigoth is 60 light years from Beowulf, so is right next door to Beowulf on the scale of the map.
There are a few other wormholes listed in Shadow of Freedom that are not on the map either. Hopefully we will get an update map in the next book.
Yes, I noted the Visigoth wormhole on the map and I could not remember a time where I read about it being revealed or used. If it's other terminus is so close to Beowulf that might explain, at least in part, why those who choose to leave Beowulf settled on Mesa. That is, if they knew about the wormhole before hand. Other wise it just so much odd luck.
So what is the story on this Visigoth wormhole? If it's existence is well known then it would be of tremendous help in coordinating RMN forces in Beowulf and Mesa.
Mesa was not settled by Leonard Detweiller and his genetic superiority followers until the Visigoth wormhole was discovered and the survey found that one of its secondary termini lead to the Mesa system. The fact of where the Visigoth termini lead to (barring any undiscovered termini) is well known to the known galaxy, as Visigoth is a full Solarian League member:
Storm From the Shadows, Chapter wrote:It would no doubt have helped, in some ways, at least, if Leonard Detweiler had fully worked out his grand concept before establishing Manpower. No one could think of everything, unfortunately, and one thing Mesa's geneticists still hadn't been able to produce was prescience. Besides, he'd been provoked. His Detweiler Consortium had first settled Mesa in 1460 PD, migrating to its new home from Beowulf following the discovery of the Visigoth System's wormhole junction six T-years earlier. The Mesa System itself had first been surveyed in 1398, but until the astrogators discovered that it was home to one of the two secondary termini of the Visigoth Wormhole, it had been too far out in the back of beyond to attract development.
That changed when the Visigoth Wormhole survey was completed, and Detweiler had acquired the development rights from the system's original surveyors. The fact that the planet Mesa, despite having quite a nice climate, also possessed a biosystem poorly suited to terrestrial physiology helped lower the price, given the expenses involved in terraforming. But Detweiler hadn't intended to terraform Mesa. Instead, he'd opted to "mesaform" the colonists through genetic engineering. That decision had been inevitable in light of Detweiler's condemnation of the "illogical, ignorant, unthinking, hysterical, Frankenstein fear" of the genetic modification of human beings which had hardened into almost instinctual repugnance over the five hundred T-years between Old Earth's Final War and his departure for Mesa. Still, however inevitable it might have been, it had not been popular with the Beowulf medical establishment of the time. Worse, the fact that Visigoth was barely sixty light-years from Beowulf had guaranteed that Mesa and Beowulf would remain close enough together (despite the hundreds of light-years between them through normal-space) to be a continuous irritant to one another, and Beowulf's unceasing condemnation of Detweiler's faith in the genetic perfectability of humanity had infuriated him. It was, after all, the entire reason he and those members of the Beowulf genetic establishment who shared his views had left Beowulf in the first place.
Italics are the author's, boldface and underlined text is my emphasis.
The current Post Diaspora date in the Honorverse is given as October 1922 Post Diaspora as of the heading just before Chapter 55 of Cauldron of Ghosts. So the Visigoth wormhole has been known for a long time.
