Yeah, was thinking along the same lines , not as eloquent , more like "unknown fourth party (ghosts) has tampered with the complete Tech-infrastructure of the third party (alliance) so they remain non the wiser than the second party (humanity) and thus first party (the readers)

If someone can do that to your systems over , say hundreds of years , and remain undiscovered you do not need a second handicap

Oh, good idea, I'll add it to my list before:

- discovering by chance that your allies' computer systems have been compromised by a fourth-party

Else, I don't think that the Ghosts are intelligence beyond the Raharr, they have just managed to cleverly install backdoors so deep within the Alliance's systems that they cannot discover them themselves because they are too confident in their systems.

But Ahshu, Hekaht and Quantum were able to detect traces of the Ghosts on the human network? Yes, but there, it was the Ghosts who were too confident. They concealed their traces to be undetectable... from humans. But they did not conceal their traces enough to be invisible to a civilization more technologically advanced, nor did they leave adequate payloads to hide them from the Alliance, because they hadn't considered the possibility that a third party might show up.

As another possibility, humans' networks might not allow the kind of camouflage the ghosts use with Alliance installations. With several conceivable "subtypes" - plain incompatible (and not enough time/resources to develop an adapted version on the spot), not enough resources to operate your camouflage ("They don't have functional AIs!? But we need to subvert one to control our ops!"), A+H+Q getting tipped off by humans' observations+comments (who rely less on robotic agents that the ghosts can subvert than the average Alliance folks), ...

And maybe to add Insult to injury : "No I did not spot the Ghosts pattern...Coco did!"

(Chimps pattern recognition beats humans by a mile )

... there are only three humans - as far as we can even tell from a distance, of course - in the room in panel 2 ...

(Ms #NoFilter looks legit, though.)

The human on the right in the top right panel doesn't know how to sit on a chair properly...

Oh, damn, good catch, I forgot to make a mask for the background there ^^"

To be fair, using a chair "properly" in zero-g is nontrivial.

(Fun fact: There are no chairs aboard the ISS, except for the toilet, and that "chair" requires you to buckle up.)

"But Ahshu, Hekaht and Quantum were able to detect traces of the Ghosts on the human network? Yes, but there, it was the Ghosts who were too confident. They concealed their traces to be undetectable... from humans. But they did not conceal their traces enough to be invisible to a civilization more technologically advanced, nor did they leave adequate payloads to hide them from the Alliance, because they hadn't considered the possibility that a third party might show up."

Also depends whether the ones who established the human monitoring system, have been in contact with the ones who have been playing around with the Aliance systems.

Especially if they are also a non-FTL civilization, then chances are good, that the ones plying the parts around the Solar System, and ones doing the same with the Alliance space might not have enough contact to give detailed info on Alliance capabilities. Or the info is a couple of decades to centuries outdated...

"I figure either there's semi-nefarious intent from this Earth crew member to get raw data samples because it somehow gives them a better indication of Raharran tech at the base level... or this Earther has forgone using filters because they have training to look for the anomalies first and then apply filters that could explain falst positives."

While there would be an intent to gather intel on your new "allies" that way, I'd think it's more of option two. Proper training of your profession must include training on how the instruments work, and how they could fail, or give false information. This would include filters, so you should try to check the data in multiple ways to rule out anomalies.

Its possible there are floors between the windowed ones with no windows. Or from this distance, multiple window lights merge a bit.

Page 10 shows a floor with windows and Page 11, Panel 1 shows it to be a similar vessel The lights appear a bit closer together there, so it could be an indication of them merging at distance. For safety, they might also consist primarily of narrow passageways for oberservation rather than windows to whole rooms.

You have to remember that not only Alliance's rooms need to be decently spacious for members that can range from 1 to 3 m in height, but also that the decks are not directly stacked ontop of each other - there's machinery, piping and other systems in-between, so the distance from the floor of one deck to the floor of another is ~4 meters.

This ship is ~230 meters in height.

[summons screen ruler app]

Then the lit bands are ~5m apart (still could be rows of windows, but that's ultimately besides the point) and the decks measure between 20m (one "side wing" on its own) and 55m (edge to edge). The observation room looks ~10m long ...

... how afraid are the Alliance crews of getting caught in an explosive decompression? From the Dawn's huge, un-subsectioned main habitat, I would've guessed "not really at all" ...

"Distance between the windows is 5m, therefore the height of a deck is between 20 and 55m"

I do not understand how you're calculating this, honestly.

Counting pixels (admittedly strictly horizontally and vertically, can't put the screen ruler at an angle) while looking at a magnified panel 1.

Ship: 820 px = 230 m.

Distance of light bands: 18 px -> 5 m.

Max width of one "side wing": 90 px -> 25 m.

Total width: 195 px -> 54.7 m.

Ah, there's the misunderstanding: I'm calculating the width of the ship (horizontal/across in panel 1) to get the length of a deck, not its height, and compare that to the length of the room shown in panel 2, arriving at the conclusion that it covers only a small-ish part of the deck.

Then I don't exactly understand your question about decompression.

You don't think that a deck is just a single big room, right?

It can be if you're not worried about decompression (including by enemy fire, of course), and as I said, the Dawn - cylinder interior as well as the open multilevel bridge we've seen - gave me the impression that "wide open spaces" is the Alliance's preference ...

If you're talking about CNC, it's in a building inside of Dawn's cylinder.

... if that's true, I would expect today's miltech to routinely offer false color representation of (now digital) aerial photos so as to allow normal-sighted people to see it clearly, too. Not to mention that the makers of camouflage nets would have improved their products to counter that ...

(If I'm remembering correctly, actual living plants can be told from fakes in infrared, because camouflage doesn't have the cooling effect of evaporating water like actual leaves do, but that ought to be out of the range of even the most severe case of color "blindness".)

In addition in 1949 , they had technology to make a B-17 disappear in broad day light. I have seen the film. wasn't used at the time due to radar. now that we can spoof radar, I believe the tech has been pulled from the file cabinet and been implemented on some new aircraft , gen 5 and up .

Yehudi Lights, iirc. brightness controllable lamps mounted along the leading edge of the wings and fuselage. they lit up the plane in the daytime to make it blend into the brightness of the sky, making it harder tor the eye to spot. sadly by the time they were developed inc 1943, Radar had become common for ground and surface naval AA sites so they were of limited use. though the Navy fit them to a lot of subhunters since submarines couldn't mount radar at the time, and the lights allowed the subhunter aircraft to get in very close to an enemy sub on the surface before the sub's spotters could notice and direct AA fire towards the plane.

A black monolith you say? One proportioned exactly to 1:4:9 side lengths? Yeah those are nothing special, they exist on or near all planets with sentient life on them. You can safely ignore those...

1:4:9 ?... That´s confidential information!

It is? Because, I've known about it ever since Apollo 20 came back.