Official Safehold Speculation Thread

Expert snuggler wrote:With enough advanced artifacts floating around, sooner or later they would come into the possession of inquisitive nerds who would take them apart to see how they work. If the advancement is carefully kept to 1900-1950 levels, those curious people would have a chance to learn by experiment.

If people were willing to do that, it would be a sign that Merlin has already won. The problem is that people do not experiment, in general. And certainly not on holy artifacts! But innovation is starting to get a foothold. On the other hand, there is no need to be so indirect about it--there are already enough innovations coming out of Charis for people to experiment with. Merlin doesn't need sneak stuff out like that. Those innovations are already spreading across Safehold, and people are starting to try new things with it.

I think religious artifacts would actually stunt the innovation that is already beginning.

Yes. Inquisitive nerds who take things apart are something Merlin has created the first favorable ground for. It's a new thing for Safehold. You're quite right.

The first day someone takes apart a "holy relic" to see how it works, Merlin will have scored a huge victory.

Y'know what that planet needs? A science fiction genre. Someone I heard from at a conference called sf the "secret religion" of scientists and technologists. The ground will be set for the Reveal when many well-placed people have all internalized Clarke's Law.

Down to 43 days and counting...


Don

Random Speculations:

1) TL assault on the palace in Corisonde, featuring the talents of Nimue's former Guardsman punching bag.

2) Alvahrez and Thirsk try to coordinate their resistance to the Alliance, the king and the majority of the Inquisition flip over an assumed "coup attempt" and try to take them out, fail, and die, and Thirsk, Alvahrez, and Co. wind up in charge of Dohlar, and the Inquisition declares the nation persona-non-grata. The nation remains loyal to the CoGA however, and winds up in a three-way fight against the Alliance and Harchong, Desnair and the Temple Lands.

3) With the AoG mostly destroyed, Harchong, the Host, and possibly Denair decide to step in and take over "protecting" Zion and the Temple Lands. Duchairn, anyone pesonally loyal to him or of his stripe of CoGA true beliver, and possibly many of the survivors of the AoG and Zion's poor, are forced to make a "long march" to try and find refuge with the only CoGA loyalists that will have them, Thirsk and Ahlvarez in Dohlar.

4) In a case of sheer irony, the Alliance is forced to engage the Host to cover Duchairn's refugee column out of sheer humanitarian concern, and possible strategic advantages from civil war between Church Loyalists.

5) Irys has twins or triplets

6) Ahlvarez or one of the CoGA's elite nerds fall in love with one of Ninian's agents

7) Steampunk tanks and/or airships

8) Windshare becomes the ICA's Patton

9) The millenial return not coming from under the Temple

10) The Gbaba make the classic blunders. The first of course is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this, never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line! Hahahaha! The Gbaba overrunning the Terran Federation makes me think of a book I found at the library where the humans were fighting aliens for centuries by continually building fortified cities and fallbacks, and when they were discovered, they pulled fighting reteats and blew the places up when the alins occupied them.

tourist wrote:Random Speculations:

1) TL assault on the palace in Corisonde, featuring the talents of Nimue's former Guardsman punching bag.

2) Alvahrez and Thirsk try to coordinate their resistance to the Alliance, the king and the majority of the Inquisition flip over an assumed "coup attempt" and try to take them out, fail, and die, and Thirsk, Alvahrez, and Co. wind up in charge of Dohlar, and the Inquisition declares the nation persona-non-grata. The nation remains loyal to the CoGA however, and winds up in a three-way fight against the Alliance and Harchong, Desnair and the Temple Lands.

3) With the AoG mostly destroyed, Harchong, the Host, and possibly Denair decide to step in and take over "protecting" Zion and the Temple Lands. Duchairn, anyone pesonally loyal to him or of his stripe of CoGA true beliver, and possibly many of the survivors of the AoG and Zion's poor, are forced to make a "long march" to try and find refuge with the only CoGA loyalists that will have them, Thirsk and Ahlvarez in Dohlar.

4) In a case of sheer irony, the Alliance is forced to engage the Host to cover Duchairn's refugee column out of sheer humanitarian concern, and possible strategic advantages from civil war between Church Loyalists.

5) Irys has twins or triplets

6) Ahlvarez or one of the CoGA's elite nerds fall in love with one of Ninian's agents

7) Steampunk tanks and/or airships

8) Windshare becomes the ICA's Patton

9) The millenial return not coming from under the Temple

10) The Gbaba make the classic blunders. The first of course is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this, never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line! Hahahaha! The Gbaba overrunning the Terran Federation makes me think of a book I found at the library where the humans were fighting aliens for centuries by continually building fortified cities and fallbacks, and when they were discovered, they pulled fighting reteats and blew the places up when the alins occupied them.

1-9 I agree with but 10 only happens one of two ways: Ghaba either, 1) glassed earth or 2) were stalled in their tech because they only replicate the most advanced level that they come across in their borgish quest to genocide all that isn't them because they are replicators not true intelligence and coming across the TF AI being the only thing worth absorbing from humanity has caused them to evolve and they are no longer genocidal (but earth is gone lol).... that or in the 1000 years of safeholdian hiding they came up against a bigger baddie and are already gone from existence - so Weber wraps it up nicely in 200 years when Safeholdians reach interstellar tech levels again they are welcomed by a galactic Republic with a prime directive to not interfere with the development of non space faring races whose archaeologists are surprised to learn that a large group of there populations ancestors have been hiding out in a devolved form for all this time......

Halo
Firefly
Star Trek
Star Wars
Battlestar Galactica
Stargate

Oh shoot I forgot farscape

Oh and because David has said we will meet the Ghaba again there is some scene of overtly political ceremonial showmanship of a Ghaba politician making an official apology on behalf of the Republic for the treatment and attempted genocide of the Terran Indigenous peoples.

(Groan...) I think we need the book...42 days and counting...

Don

Double groan.....

I agree!!!

Dan

Here's a weird one.

There are at least three reasons Merlin hasn't gone around making appearances as a returned archangel.

1. If the TF Space Navy is anything like the USN, an officer believes her most precious possession is her honor, and defrauding civilians would be anathema.

2. The strategic goal is to bring about an Enlightenment and having divine revelations cluttering up the landscape would hold back that progress.

3. It would make the story too fast and dull to hold the author's interest or ours.

The ghost of Nimue Alban should reconsider #1. If she can commit a fraud and save millions of lives, maybe it's time to sacrifice her honor.

#2 is decisive at first, but there's also such a thing as triage. Harchong is not going to have an Enlightenment in the foreseeable future. If they're already a lost cause, why not take advantage and have someone who looks just like Langhorne appear in the private chambers of Harchong nobles, surrounded by a nimbus of heavenly fire, saying that the Go4 has betrayed his goals, but since he's no longer of this world he relies on mortals to do His holy work. Oh, and he'll have seijins contact the Harchongese to help if they take arms against the Temple.

The result would be a spectacular mess, slow to resolve, thus addressing #3.

Oops, but I forgot the fourth point, which has come up here at least once.

4. The war will be over someday, the Reveal will happen, and it will undercut the moral authority of the good guys if they were as blasphemous as Langhorne was. (Pretending to be divine is blasphemy).

That pitches my whole line of thought into the garbage. Sigh.

C. O. Thompson wrote:Merlin (and Owl) ought to be able to replenish the raw materials needed to build a few more PICA's and Owl ought to be able to use the medical center to install NEET's in members of Calyb's inner circle

Just my two cents worth

In regards to the gathering of new raw materials to build additional PICAs, that is plausible, but RFC hasn't gone into great detail as to what a PICA is made of, beside stuff like molyciric material and battlesteel. Some of that production might require a large production facility, and even though Nimue's Cave is described as large, and having a fabrication unit, these factors are likely limiting factors.

The use of NEATs, though, could be far more likely in the near term. Merlin would want to use NEATs cautiously though, because as he's said, he wants the native Safeholdians to come up with stuff on their own, to break Langhorne and Bedard's anti-tech mindset