Brigade XO wrote:If you have some provision for humans to bring materials to the Temple which will be used by the Temple systems to repair and replace the equipment in the secret parts of the Temple, that implys that there is some way to 1) shift the material into the secret part of the Temple that will not be noticed or discovered by humans and 2) there is fabrication equipment in the Temple that can convert almost raw materials (or just ore) into highly sophistocated equipment including electronics.
The tec left and available to the humans on Safehold for their use withing the guidelines of the Writs and Church is far below the levels needed to produce the alloys and hardware of even 19th Century Earth tech for electronics, and certainly such 20th Century things like computers.
Not so minor nits show up in what do you do with all the heat generated by converting ores (like the bauxite mentioned to usable alumnium) to 1st the needed metal/mineral and then the process to create the alloy needed and form it to the required items. Also what to do with the sludge and tailing from the process? Could there be some place known as the Anus of the Church where the shows up post processing and needs to be carted away? In a thousand years you would create a rather large pile. Even with being able to reclaim and prefabricate everything that broke or failed, you would still would need a place for what was no longer usable. Of course you "might" have some kind of fusion refuse system that also produced the power for the Temple though you probably would still need to have some system and requirement for suitable materials to be sent "inside" as fuel.
Yes you probably need raw materials, but if they are transported out of the public Gift/Supply areas by nanobots at night when the sensors show that no-one is around you don't necessarily get any passageway between the public and secret parts of the Temple of a size that anyone else can use. Nimue's Cave has a Fab unit so the Temple certainly has one, probably a stonking big one. The Hamilcar built the OBS, after all.
Thermodynamics won't be denied, but something has to be keeping the Temple cosy all winter. The waste heat from industrial processes could be used for that and other things. NTM that Lake Pei is one huge heat sink, if the builders so chose. Given how easily they seem to have been able to carve through rock they could even have just gone down and used the mountain itself as a heat sink. As for trash, that layer of gray dust that keeps being found at the bottom of all the Temple trash cans every morning would be veeery interesting to analyse if they had any real grasp of chemistry - but the human servants keep emptying it out. Alternatively, it may be getting dumped in Lake Pei through a sewer system, again as very fine dust, and washed out to sea. (Not maybe very environmentally friendly, I know, but perhaps they have managed to find ways of making most of it into fairly inert compounds) Depending on what kind of fuel they need for their fusion reactors, (Never mentioned in relation to Merlin although he has been running for several years now) maybe they can extract that from Lake Pei or even just from the air.
None of it looks insuperable. Just my tuppence worth ("2c", y'all)