On 18Jul2023 2345, Phil Pugliese - philpugliese at yahoo.com (via tml
list) wrote:
> However, this does NOT explain how the new fangled transponders spread
> all over Known Space *before* the assassination.
> There simply was NOT enough 'time' 'tween 'Signal GK' & the start of
> 'The Rebellion'.
> No way. No How.
> Too bad the 'poobahs' at GDW couldn't figure that out.
> Guess they were desperate or something.
> They sure were when they concocted 'Virus'.

Looking through /Signal GK/, I see nothing indicating that Rushorin was
the first person to discover the chips. Later TNS articles show he's the
first person to publish anything on them, but that's years later, and
doesn't mean that there wasn't prior, never declassified research.

/Survival Margin/ makes this explicit - it gives the discovery date as
1067. It also tells us that the resulting chips were intentionally not
fully sapient (so the Imperium intentionally took sapient beings and
force-breed their offspring to be sub-sapient).

The new transponders were ready in 1086, and rolled out in 1088, being
added to ships over a 12-year period either during construction or
during annual maintenance.

So, according to canon, by 1100 the SDG transponders were all over the
place, and spread widely outside the Imperium over time. Rushorin et al
were travelling with the very lifeform he was looking for all the time!

So, per canon, the short time between Signal GK (set in 1110) and the
beginning of the Final War (1116) was allowed for by setting the
transponder program's set-point rather earlier.

What I find extremely unlikely is non-Imperials allowing such a system,
that requires being hooked into the ship's central computer system and
to have free access to all of it, and is shipped as a 'black box', to be
installed in any starship aside from some few that would be used solely
for trans-border trade with the 3I. Also that nobody had dug into the
system's use of comm systems to chatter with the transponders on other
ships. There's just no way that wouldn't have been noticed and
investigated by nosy and bored spacers.

--
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>