**Spoiler** The Key and other Federation Tech

Julia Minor wrote:

PlaysWithBees wrote:HOWEVER, I have wondered if 1 or 2 still exist, powered down and hidden after the tide had turned against the resistance, and waiting to be rediscovered.

I'd be willing to bet the Archangels were highly motivated to find and destroy all the high tech under the Fallen's control. Simply by existing, those fabrication units and tech stashes threatened Langhorne's "hide from the Gbaba" plan.

OTOH, as I recall the original Fallen were largely military, which should mean they had stealth gear available. If one of the Fallen moved fast enough, they might have been able to cloak a cave full of gear before the Archangels tracked its emissions.

They didn't find Nimue, they very well might not have found other things.

Julia Minor wrote:I'd be willing to bet the Archangels were highly motivated to find and destroy all the high tech under the Fallen's control. Simply by existing, those fabrication units and tech stashes threatened Langhorne's "hide from the Gbaba" plan.

OTOH, as I recall the original Fallen were largely military, which should mean they had stealth gear available. If one of the Fallen moved fast enough, they might have been able to cloak a cave full of gear before the Archangels tracked its emissions.

They were described as "Those who looked to Kau Yung before his Fall" - IE, navy and marine personnel he commanded as CO of the military squadron escorting the colony fleet, who became a planetary police force and SAR outfit after their warships were discarded.

They got support from normal Safeholdians, who did things like give them places to hide when not conducting operations. I wonder a bit about their motivations, and what the Fallen told them they were doing. (The Fallen who defeated Kohdy had been mayor of the town he lived in.)

Loren Pechtel wrote:They didn't find Nimue, they very well might not have found other things.

They didn't know Nimue existed to look for.

The Fallen did have some fabrication units that were either diverted from Zion or from Hamilcar itself, and used them to create stuff they used in the War, but could not match the facilities available aboard Hamilcar.

The Fallen were dispersed and carrying out a guerilla campaign. The role of the Seijins like Kohdy was to find them. We have no knowledge of how much of their gear was destroyed, or how well dispersed it was. There was mention of the last of the Fallen retreating to their final fastness in the Desolation Mountains at the end, but we have no certain knowledge of what happened to it. A Rakurai strike is the obvious conclusion, but we have no certain knowledge.

There may be stashes of Federation tech here and there but how would you find them? The Fallen took pains to hide them from Chihiro and company.
______
Dennis

Randomiser wrote:<snip>

@Theemile You have been watching OWL fly the skimmers and airtrucks all by himself through multiple books and you wonder what 'old, decrepit angel took the time' to load and fly multiple craft up to Hamilcar? It would have taken him about ten seconds to give the appropriate orders to the much more capable AI aboard Hamilcar, who would then have done all the work, using cargo handling gear and servitors as necessary. (OWL is only a little tactical AI, remember, who is scared to even get near files encrypted by any of the more capable AI's lest he get irreparably damaged.)

Yeah.... I thought of that after I wrote it. But my point was after all that happened (ie the war against the fallen, the nuke and Armageddon Reef, et al.) How certain could the church be that it cleaned up all the hardware which had been used over the last 200 years? Especially if it was not accomplished until the last angels were dying of natural causes (ie, the actual dispositions of some hardware went to the grave with some angels, Fallen or light.)

DMcCunney wrote:<snip>
There may be stashes of Federation tech here and there but how would you find them? The Fallen took pains to hide them from Chihiro and company.
______
Dennis

Let's not forget that most of the physical scientists on the command staff were killed at Armageddon Reef, and the Military Crews mostly followed Kun-ue to the side of the fallen, necessitating the Church to find Adams (like Seijin Cody) with military experience to reprogram into Seijins, because of the lack of military experience in the remaining Command staff.

So while the church used the military hardware they had remaining in the fight, they used it in basic mode against people who knew the hardware, it's limitations, and how to operate against an enemy with high tech sensors. They also had few people who knew the engineering behind the hardware, and how to adapt it to other uses.

Remember Owl early on? It was intelligent, but had no initiative to go outside its programming. The Church would have had systems running in similiar mode, without experts to push the basic capabilities, and working against those same experts who did know those capabilities.

So depending on how many people fell on each side of the fence and how much time they had to prepare, yes, I can see it being possible to hide high tech manufacturies the church couldn't easily find.

Theemile wrote:

DMcCunney wrote:<snip>
There may be stashes of Federation tech here and there but how would you find them? The Fallen took pains to hide them from Chihiro and company.

Let's not forget that most of the physical scientists on the command staff were killed at Armageddon Reef, and the Military Crews mostly followed Kun-ue to the side of the fallen, necessitating the Church to find Adams (like Seijin Cody) with military experience to reprogram into Seijins, because of the lack of military experience in the remaining Command staff.

We don't really know how many of the physical scientists were killed when the Alexandria Enclave was destroyed. We know Shan Wei (terraforming) and Proctor (cybernetics) were among the victims, but not a lot beyond that.

But the point about the Seijins is one I was thinking of. Chihiro and company put out calls for volunteers to aid in the War Against the Fallen. We know Kohdy had been Sergeant Major Cody Cortazar, an instructor in unarmed combat for 15 years, twice first runner up in the fleet wide unarmed combat championships, and a master swordsman before he was selected for Operation Ark. I think we can assume his background was a reason why he was accepted as a Seijin. I wonder how many of the others had similar backgrounds, and got accepted to be Seijins because the people they would be hunting were ex-military as well?

(And given Kohdy's skill set, I wonder about the Fallen who defeated him, and who/what he was.)

<...>

So depending on how many people fell on each side of the fence and how much time they had to prepare, yes, I can see it being possible to hide high tech manufacturies the church couldn't easily find.

The Fallen certainly did their best to do so.

But whether it still exists is something of a moot point. If the Church couldn't find it (and might well have settled for killing those who could actually use it), how does the IC do so?

I think we can assume that anything that still exists will be somewhere on the mainland, and not the out islands. The Fallen were going after Chihiro's people, and that's where they would be.
______
Dennis

Hamilcar is gone. Gone where? Sent into the star? But was it? Send it past the star and accelerate out of the system with the star between itself and Safehold.

If you were scuttleing several ships, you could send them into the star at the same time Why would you want to dump all that interesting materials into a star you are intending to live next to, might that be a bit counterproductive...but I digress.

Then shut the ship down to a very low-level standby for X years, bring up enough systems to bring it either slowly to a stop and then reverse heading back to where they system is going to be in an appropriate span of time. Say 1,000yrs.

Really tough to have your enemies go collect that if it is heading out-system at speed but then decelerating such that it is only bearly creeping along and it's chase armament is engaged for the 1st 20 years -with low powered sensors searching ONLY the aft before going dormant.

A time capsule that includes a full-up fabber system to create just about anything civilian or military from the Federation at the time it was built. Dam tough to get at that if you don't have anything that can go after it...if you know it went.

Yes, but why would you keep the Hamilcar, if you were Chihiro, that is? Just what is Chihiro thinking by the latter part of the war, when he is clearly going to win? (And, lest we get too one-dimensional about all this, what are his supporters thinking?)

They started off thinking technology was far too dangerous to preserve, with maybe a tinge of far too evil to preserve, and were willing to murder a whole bunch of their fellow command crew to make the point. Then they fought a war with other members of the command crew to enforce the point. Why then are they willing, nay eager, to leave behind a whole Temple cum fortress full of high level technology? Surely it would have been much safer to just destroy it all root and branch and leave nothing on the surface of Safehold that had potential to contradict the Plan? The timetable isn't altogether clear to me, but it looks like the war against the fallen had been finished for at least 100 years before the remaining archangels died off. They had plenty of time to be sure that there were no groups of Fallen left and no need to worry about them any more.

Is it just paranoia? Or a lack of trust in Bedard's social engineering since no-one left had her skill in it? Or what? A Chihiro who bought into Langhorne and Bedard's vision would have been happy to destroy all the tech with the last of the angels, and good riddance to it. What's with all this remaining stuff in the Temple and 1000 year returns? How were they justifying it to themselves?

Randomiser wrote:Yes, but why would you keep the Hamilcar, if you were Chihiro, that is? Just what is Chihiro thinking by the latter part of the war, when he is clearly going to win? (And, lest we get too one-dimensional about all this, what are his supporters thinking?)

There was a post elsewhere from RFC stating that Chihiro had been considering retaining Hamilcar for a while before Kau Yung nuked Langhorne's HQ.

They started off thinking technology was far too dangerous to preserve, with maybe a tinge of far too evil to preserve, and were willing to murder a whole bunch of their fellow command crew to make the point. Then they fought a war with other members of the command crew to enforce the point. Why then are they willing, nay eager, to leave behind a whole Temple cum fortress full of high level technology? Surely it would have been much safer to just destroy it all root and branch and leave nothing on the surface of Safehold that had potential to contradict the Plan? The timetable isn't altogether clear to me, but it looks like the war against the fallen had been finished for at least 100 years before the remaining archangels died off. They had plenty of time to be sure that there were no groups of Fallen left and no need to worry about them any more.

There are two potential drawbacks to retaining Hamilcar.

One is that it might be detected should a Gbaba scout pass through the Safehold system. Powered down and placed in an orbit where it's one more piece of drifting space junk, that possibility is extremely slim. (And if the Gbaba pass through the Safehold system at all, humanity is screwed. A look at habitable planets will reveal a human presence on Safehold, even if it isn't using technology. The original plan of abjuring technology for 300 years was to give the Gbaba time to decide that when they destroyed Earth, they did destroy humanity, and to stop looking and go back to whatever they were doing before.)

The second is that it might be discovered and accessed by folks Chihiro and company didn't like. The chances there are at least as negligible as discovery by the Gbaba. After the death of the last of the command crew, no one on Safehold will be aware it exists to access, and won't have the means to do so in any case.

If making sure no advanced technology exists any more and Hamilcar should be destroyed is a goal, why is there still an enormous repository of Federation tech - the Temple in Zion. That's actually in a place on Safehold where the colonists can get to it.

Is it just paranoia? Or a lack of trust in Bedard's social engineering since no-one left had her skill in it? Or what? A Chihiro who bought into Langhorne and Bedard's vision would have been happy to destroy all the tech with the last of the angels, and good riddance to it. What's with all this remaining stuff in the Temple and 1000 year returns? How were they justifying it to themselves?

A lot of the underlying issues are what Michael Staynair talked about at one point: they knew what the Archangels did, but did not know what they were thinking when they did it.

It's a case of "The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions", and things done with the best of motivations have unforeseen and terrible consequences.

We get the impression Chihiro was significantly modifying Langhorne's plan after he took over on Langhorne's death, but we have no idea what his ultimate goals were.

I can see him retaining Hamilcar for things like the prophesied return of the Archangels. Can a stored personality in a VR unit control a starship? If so, a few Archangel personalities in VR units in control of a still existing Hamilcar can produce a quite convincing return.
______
Dennis

Dennis
Would you be able to point me at the RFC post you reference, I dropped out for a while and may have missed some things.

Of course, you are quite right that the Temple itself is the high tech elephant in the room which doesn't really fit well with an anti-technology bias. I struggle to see the upside of retaining it and Hamilcar - if you think humans shouldn't ever be using technology.

There is a significant difference between the Temple and Hamilcar:

the former is a critical element in the Chihiro Plan while the continued existence of the latter is at best irrelevant to it.

It _appears_ that Chihiro's intent was to use the mystical, superhuman nature of the Temple as the anchor to lock Safehold into technological, and probably cultural, stasis [in which case, as predicted, he had essentially failed before he started]. The Temple is built to be self-perpetuating, while giving the colonists no access to the nuts and bolts that they wouldn't, assuming the plan worked, see as anything but the workings of the Divine Will anyway. And he was at least sufficiently aware of historical precedent to know that without that living proof that the Church was the embodiment of God's will and purpose the lifetime of his plan could be measured in generations, although he wasn't sufficiently conscious of truly deep time to accept that the scheme wouldn't work indefinitely - even assuming that God doesn't exist to object to His name being taken in vain. While Hamilcar was essential to setting up the Temple, it wouldn't be necessary beyond that point as any indispensable maintenance systems could be transferred _to_ the Temple. It would probably be a point of principle to eliminate it, and with it the last vestige of knowledge of interstellar travel in the system.

Randomiser wrote:Dennis
Would you be able to point me at the RFC post you reference, I dropped out for a while and may have missed some things.

Of course, you are quite right that the Temple itself is the high tech elephant in the room which doesn't really fit well with an anti-technology bias. I struggle to see the upside of retaining it and Hamilcar - if you think humans shouldn't ever be using technology.