Why are there still Satellites?

IIRC somebody in the inner circle during an inner monologue reflected on the fact that OWL had access to nearly a thousand years of weather patterns to bar his weather predictions on.

So if I'm not completely out to lunch, the weather satellites date from the original terraforming effort. Given the sheer longevity of planet based technology that is subject to oxidation, I see no reason to doubt that space based tech, with its access to more easily harnessed solar energy could last that long.

Undercover Fat Kid wrote:IIRC somebody in the inner circle during an inner monologue reflected on the fact that OWL had access to nearly a thousand years of weather patterns to bar his weather predictions on.

So if I'm not completely out to lunch, the weather satellites date from the original terraforming effort. Given the sheer longevity of planet based technology that is subject to oxidation, I see no reason to doubt that space based tech, with its access to more easily harnessed solar energy could last that long.

The real question is how stealthy is that information gathering. If the weather sats are available for anyone to use, could a tech savvy individual in the Temple realize that someone else is accessing them? After all, you don't want the sats to be openly broadcasting in order to minimize emissions that might be picked up at interstellar distances by passing Gbaba ships. You want even the weather satellites to be transmitting tight beam encrypted transmissions hidden in the background radiation and only detectable by those who know what to look for.

Undercover Fat Kid wrote:IIRC somebody in the inner circle during an inner monologue reflected on the fact that OWL had access to nearly a thousand years of weather patterns to bar his weather predictions on.

So if I'm not completely out to lunch, the weather satellites date from the original terraforming effort. Given the sheer longevity of planet based technology that is subject to oxidation, I see no reason to doubt that space based tech, with its access to more easily harnessed solar energy could last that long.

Well... that still leaves the possibility that the 1000 years was from stealthy, ground-based observation from the Mountains of Light out of Nimue's Cave. I'm inclined to put that as much less likely than that it's from the actual weather sats up that whole time, mind you.

evilauthor wrote:

Undercover Fat Kid wrote:IIRC somebody in the inner circle during an inner monologue reflected on the fact that OWL had access to nearly a thousand years of weather patterns to bar his weather predictions on.

So if I'm not completely out to lunch, the weather satellites date from the original terraforming effort. Given the sheer longevity of planet based technology that is subject to oxidation, I see no reason to doubt that space based tech, with its access to more easily harnessed solar energy could last that long.

The real question is how stealthy is that information gathering. If the weather sats are available for anyone to use, could a tech savvy individual in the Temple realize that someone else is accessing them? After all, you don't want the sats to be openly broadcasting in order to minimize emissions that might be picked up at interstellar distances by passing Gbaba ships. You want even the weather satellites to be transmitting tight beam encrypted transmissions hidden in the background radiation and only detectable by those who know what to look for.

There haven't been tech savvy people in the Temple since the last angels died.

The scheme you have in mind there isn't necessary for security against the Gbaba. Transmissions that are so faint that they'd vanish against the background far, far closer than any Gbaba will come if Safehold isn't doomed anyway would do. Alternatively, someone interested in the weather could poke the sat network with a tight, faint-enough beam for a report request and get a tight, faint-enough beam back with it. Encryption would be useful only if you were worried about someone else, someone hostile, getting weather reports, something that would be in place only during the War Against the Fallen, and then only if weather reports were recognized as strategic information - which is possible but not necessary.

And anything encrypted, if it does get picked up, is going to be a red flag that here's something to come kill. Without encryption, there's a little more hope it'd be passed off as random noise.

JeffEngel wrote:There haven't been tech savvy people in the Temple since the last angels died.

The scheme you have in mind there isn't necessary for security against the Gbaba. Transmissions that are so faint that they'd vanish against the background far, far closer than any Gbaba will come if Safehold isn't doomed anyway would do. Alternatively, someone interested in the weather could poke the sat network with a tight, faint-enough beam for a report request and get a tight, faint-enough beam back with it. Encryption would be useful only if you were worried about someone else, someone hostile, getting weather reports, something that would be in place only during the War Against the Fallen, and then only if weather reports were recognized as strategic information - which is possible but not necessary.

And anything encrypted, if it does get picked up, is going to be a red flag that here's something to come kill. Without encryption, there's a little more hope it'd be passed off as random noise.

Well the thing is that Merlin's been worried about his activities getting detected by the Temple. If he's using the same weather sats the Temple uses, then he's upping his detection risk by using them. Because if the weather sats provide data on request, they presumably keep a record of such requests, including where they're sending the data to. And that record will include location info if they have to send tight beam transmissions to certain spots on Safehold's surface.

If and when certain "Angels" wake up (thus providing the requisite tech savvy people), such records could point to a hole in Merlin's security.

If he is tapping the existing satellite net, I'm sure any log would show it, but routing those requests through a handy coms relay before the information is transmitted planetside should be trivially simple.

evilauthor wrote:

JeffEngel wrote:There haven't been tech savvy people in the Temple since the last angels died.

The scheme you have in mind there isn't necessary for security against the Gbaba. Transmissions that are so faint that they'd vanish against the background far, far closer than any Gbaba will come if Safehold isn't doomed anyway would do. Alternatively, someone interested in the weather could poke the sat network with a tight, faint-enough beam for a report request and get a tight, faint-enough beam back with it. Encryption would be useful only if you were worried about someone else, someone hostile, getting weather reports, something that would be in place only during the War Against the Fallen, and then only if weather reports were recognized as strategic information - which is possible but not necessary.

And anything encrypted, if it does get picked up, is going to be a red flag that here's something to come kill. Without encryption, there's a little more hope it'd be passed off as random noise.

Well the thing is that Merlin's been worried about his activities getting detected by the Temple. If he's using the same weather sats the Temple uses, then he's upping his detection risk by using them. Because if the weather sats provide data on request, they presumably keep a record of such requests, including where they're sending the data to. And that record will include location info if they have to send tight beam transmissions to certain spots on Safehold's surface.

If and when certain "Angels" wake up (thus providing the requisite tech savvy people), such records could point to a hole in Merlin's security.

Jeff is right, mostly.

Real weather sats have more important things for their volume and power budgets than the multi-megawatt transmitters needed to be easily detected at interstellar distances. In fact, most of them are rather tricky to listen to from the surface of the planet without relatively large-aperture antennae - go take a look outside your local Weather Channel studio if you want to see what's involved.

If anybody in the War Against the Fallen appreciated the value of accurate forecasting, they were probably among the Fallen. That's where the active-duty, intact-memory military seem to have ended up, and they, not the Angels, would be most likely to remember the effect of the weather on battles from the Teutobergerwald to Operation Overlord. Chihiro seems to have been a fairly smart cookie, but he was also very much the 'breaking omelets to make eggs' sort who probably didn't really care what his troops were slogging through.

Jeff is off on one thing, though: encrypting a signal makes it appear _more_ random, not less. In fact, a perfectly encrypted signal is indistinguishable from white noise - unfortunately, that means there's no way to _de_crypt it again. Even a one-time key system needs enough structure in the signal to permit you to identify the signalling elements. [As well as requiring that you have secure means to pass keys that are the same length as your data. In which case, 9 times out of 10, you might as well use them to transmit the data.]

JeffEngel wrote:

evilauthor wrote:
The real question is how stealthy is that information gathering. If the weather sats are available for anyone to use, could a tech savvy individual in the Temple realize that someone else is accessing them? After all, you don't want the sats to be openly broadcasting in order to minimize emissions that might be picked up at interstellar distances by passing Gbaba ships. You want even the weather satellites to be transmitting tight beam encrypted transmissions hidden in the background radiation and only detectable by those who know what to look for.

There haven't been tech savvy people in the Temple since the last angels died.

The scheme you have in mind there isn't necessary for security against the Gbaba. Transmissions that are so faint that they'd vanish against the background far, far closer than any Gbaba will come if Safehold isn't doomed anyway would do. Alternatively, someone interested in the weather could poke the sat network with a tight, faint-enough beam for a report request and get a tight, faint-enough beam back with it. Encryption would be useful only if you were worried about someone else, someone hostile, getting weather reports, something that would be in place only during the War Against the Fallen, and then only if weather reports were recognized as strategic information - which is possible but not necessary.

And anything encrypted, if it does get picked up, is going to be a red flag that here's something to come kill. Without encryption, there's a little more hope it'd be passed off as random noise.

Louis R wrote:Jeff is right, mostly.

Real weather sats have more important things for their volume and power budgets than the multi-megawatt transmitters needed to be easily detected at interstellar distances. In fact, most of them are rather tricky to listen to from the surface of the planet without relatively large-aperture antennae - go take a look outside your local Weather Channel studio if you want to see what's involved.

Except Merlin's world-spanning SNARC network doesn't appear to use wide aperture antennae anywhere (except for the one connected by hardline to Nimue's Cave) because said giant antennae aren't all that stealthy. Not to mention being much bigger than the remotes being used (which seem to top out at being human sized).

Stealth is the name of the game, and I think the original colony planners wanted to eliminate ANY risk of detection by Gbaba. So I think it's likely that even the weather sats will use the most stealthy communication methods available... like tight beam lasers/masers that are damn near undetectable if you're right next to them, let alone from interstellar distances. And when forced to use radio, they'll use encryption methods that disguises the transmissions' very existence to outsiders.