<snip>
>> There is, of course, a persistent rumor both OOC and most likely IC
>> that the "various scientific reasons" involved DEEPLY classified
>> ("burn BEFORE reading") observations that /something/ strange was
>> going on at Barnard's.  Consider how good we've gotten at remote
>> imaging, and project that forward another half century...
>
> A few decent sized ore freighters jumping into and out of system every
> month or so would probably be detectable as a gravity wave, if nothing
> else. As the Vilani had been at Barnard mining stuff for some time,
> there'd be a nice long record of little gravity waves and possibly of
> visible jump flashes.
>
> Something just occurred to me - it's been written that the Vilani held
> onto jump-2 tech pretty tightly, so as to retain an mobility advantage
> over client races and barbarians. However, Terra must've gotten jump-2
> very quickly, because there's no other sane way to move around the
> area of space that they did. Either that or they used deep space
> jumping routinely and nobody ever thought to mention this (and if they
> did, it changes a lot of strategic considerations that are considered
> major in canon).
>
You mean classified top secret and in at least three compartments? As in
"shred, burn and compost ashes before reading".

<80s SatAM cartoon story moral>
And knowing is half the battle!
</80s SatAM cartoon story moral>

Knowing that J-2 was possible, the Terrans pulled out all the stops and
blew the lid off the Vilani J-2 monopoly in 2124 AD (p26, GT:IW).  The
original Terran J-0 landed in 2088 (p22), with the "fuel-hog" J-1
landing 4 years later - so 36 years from a running start to equalling
SOTA.  Deep-space jumps, probably not so much, given how critically
dependent they were on rumbling something big enough out beyond the back
of downtown woop woop.

For a rough OTL analogy, compare how long did it take for the USA to
develop nuclear weapons (1945), as against either the USSR (1949) or the
Old Dart (1952).  Likewise, compare fusion-weapon development - 7 years
for the US from first fission-device test to first fusion-device test, 4
years for the USSR and 5 years for the Old Dart.  China (with USSR aid)
compressed (to pardon the pun) the fission-to-fusion timeline further,
taking less than 3 years.