stewart wrote:The "cat" is out of the bag now on several points
(1) mode of arrival and translation fingerprints are recognized
(2) mode of data communication recognized
(3) The alliance now has Simoles who has let them know the drive mode is possible (half the R&D battle)
Point (3) is not correct. Simoes knows how the streak drive works. He did not work on the spider drive, and there is no evidence that he knows anything useful about it.
Point (1) is also sort of incorrect. Spider drive ships do not have an unusual translation footprint; it was a perfectly normal translation footprint. The only thing unsual about it was that it was extremely faint, similar in strength to ghost signals that crop up when you are pushing your sensitivity down into the noise. I will grant that this incident will cause Manticore to pay more attention to these weak signals. But it is not really accurate to say that they have figured out a particular fingerprint for spider drive ships. A spider drive ship could also come in with a perfectly normal translation signal.