I think I finally see where you are going Quarto. They can open the rift from the far side without having the gateway here. They have to open it somewhat for the gateway to begin to come through in the first place. You are proposing they made a samller opening, just large enough to get a scout ship through (which might even put out less of a signature than the big opening did.) They agree to reopen it after, say, 24 hours. Possible...
The reports form SO that I read, seem to suggest small craft missing, not really big engagemnt with the bugs. My thinking goes something like this. The bugs opened theri gateway in our space at Kilrah because of some unique property. The reason there aren't gateways popping up everywhere is because the right conditions need to be met. The bugs realize that one point is not a good way, so they do send out scouting parties, looking for other places to develop the gates. These are not huge fleets, but maybe cruisers or light carriers that van carry a small complement of fighters to help defend the ships, but their primary mission is not to fight. However, they may come across ships, or stations that detect them and they move quickly to neutralize these targets to try to keep that info from being spread. Yes, by destroying ships they raise suspicion, but if they had already been deteced, it is the lesser of two evils to destroy the ship and make some folks ssupicious instead of letting a ship escape and report what it saw. It's a little vague how much traffic passes through certain areas. Remember that Confed isn't at war so it may not make frequent patrols of certain areas. As I've said 15 times before I need to get around to playing SO. I'll also want to take a look at my map from Prophecy. I do seem to recall ne confed report saying they were getting similar readings from multiple locations. I'll see if I can find it.
Quarto, if you have time to kill and hadn't seen this before, it is supposedly an early script of WC Prophecy. Has nothing to do with this argument (since it was scrapped, it wouldn't matter anyhow) and you can see they went off on a different path, but it was kinda cool to skim through. It definitely needed more refinement though. I was looking for the answer to the End of War question and stumbled on this by accident. I liked some of what they did with Blair, and it follows some of my thinking, if you saw it months ago, where I was wishing they had moved him into some kind of diplomatic position with the Kilrathi. You'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader
http://acenet.simplenet.com/wcpss/script.pdf
[This message has been edited by Shane (edited August 03, 2000).]
