But if the Samothracians use their moleholes to get their own colonies into position all around the Snakes perimeter, it becomes essentially impossible for the Snakes to expand. Remember, in Stirling's paradigm, having control of a system makes it prohibitively difficult to attack.
You are over estimating how many folks the Samothracians have to work with. There are fewer than 5 million of’em total and space is very large. So surrounding them would be quite difficult. Also remember that the Snakes have been sending out colonies for quite some time, so that makes it even more difficult to do.
A better solution would be automated defenses in each system and this might well have happened. There is nothing that says it wasn’t happened and that there are even any snake colonies left outside of sol.
So you lock the Snakes into a set limited amount of resources, you continue to expand your own, and you kill every ship they have that leaves their systems.
You REALLY under estimate just how vast the resources of an entire star system are. For a good idea of what an entire system can churn out read Peter F. Hamilton’s Pandora’ Star, what the Immotiles were doin. There is a LOT of stuff to use up out there.
As for pickin off the ships as they leave, well ya got a problem with given the FTL that the Samothracians have. 1. It doesn’t impart acceleration/velocity. You just move from point a to b. So your intercept target will go zippin by at relativistic speed. 2. You’ll get some but once the snakes wise up they’ll send’em out and because your mole hole equates to time travel that you skip over, your target could maneuver during that time and end up well out of danger.
The way the moleholes seem to work in the book, it would be literally possible to get your entire fleet to whatever point of conflict there is, effectively instantly, provided you did your prepwork beforehand.
Awhile the Moleholes allows instant point to point travel you still have the time difference. Alpha Centauri is no matter what, 4 years away from Sol.
Since the Samothracians got their molehole exit near to Sol without the Snakes detecting squat, there's no way for the Draka to anticpate where their expeditions are going to be jumped from.
That was before they knew how to make’em or detect’em. But they were obviously catching up, and by the end of the book seemed to have caught up to a large extent. But again we don’t know if they achieved any degree of parity.
Properly done, you can cut off at the knees any Draka effort to establish an installation to make their own moleholes in retaliation.
May be, may be not. There is no proof that you can open a molehole that covers distance rather than side slips inside a system. From the books it seems you can’t but there is nothing really either way.
This is ignoring the lovely possibilities inherent in transiting some of your people to another timeline where Earth is uninhabited, equip them with a planet killer bomb, get them to Earth, have them jump back to their universe of origin, and blow the Snake's primary stronghold to Hell. I thought of that at the age of fifteen or so when I first read the book, why the fuck couldn't the Samothracians?
Cause they want the planet back? Again, who says they haven’t. They failed to do it the way that would preserve Earth (may be). That might be a fall back.
One other thing about the ending…doesn’t it strike anyone as odd that after making contact that the leader of the Domination himself is there in battle armor ready to go into the new world to start conquering and is takin over all this hardware and these troops? That always struck me as the Samothracian’s might not have actually lost but things are on “hold” and the Archon is takin an out while he still has it. But we might not ever know.
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