[Spoiler] Who else knew about Nimue? Title is not a spoiler

There appears to be an assumption that the OBS was used to destroy hody's original tomb. This assumes facts not in evidence. It was described as the last Rakurai attack, but that does not mean that it was the OBS that did the job. After all, the destruction of the ship carrying Thirsk's family to Zion could be described as having been destroyed by the Rakurai, although we know it was a 500 lb bomb delivered to the ships magazine.

If the surviving angels had used a skimmer and a 2000 lb bomb, the results would appear the same.

Weird Harold wrote:

DMcCunney wrote:And precisely who would do that hacking?

Whoever built the Stone of Schueler and the Key passed down to Paitr Wylsysn.

Both of those strike me as standard Federation tech available "off the shelf" I don't think anyone on Safehold had to make them. They were already in stock, and simply needed to be customized for the intended use. And embedding the Stone in a staff is a simple task for an industrial module that would require no special skill. Chihiro might even been aware that Schueler had both, but Schueler was a key ally at that point and likely had a plausible reason for wanting them. We have no idea what is in the key, but I don't see Chihiro paying attention to exactly what Schueler downloaded into it. Why should he?

Schueler or somebody working for him had enough computer knowledge to apparently build that system without Chihiro finding and destroying it. I see no reason that level of competency wouldn't extend to mucking up Chihiro's access to the OBS.

See above. What would have made Chihiro care in the first place?

Lots of stuff going on on Safehold, done by a lot of people, and no one can keep track of everything. Consider that the Fallen had industrial units making stuff for them that had been diverted from Zion or Hamilicar itself by someone Chihiro and Schueler trusted. As was commented in another volume, it might have been anyone.
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Dennis

fallsfromtrees wrote:There appears to be an assumption that the OBS was used to destroy hody's original tomb.

Yes.

This assumes facts not in evidence. It was described as the last Rakurai attack, but that does not mean that it was the OBS that did the job. After all, the destruction of the ship carrying Thirsk's family to Zion could be described as having been destroyed by the Rakurai, although we know it was a 500 lb bomb delivered to the ships magazine.

If the surviving angels had used a skimmer and a 2000 lb bomb, the results would appear the same.

We have no TextEv that the Angels had recon skimmers. They certainly used air cars.

But even if it wasn't the OBS (and the last of the lesser angels were still around and could have used it), it the fact that it wasn't significant?

It becomes so if we assume the OBS could not be used because of a systems or communications failure, and bombing rather than dropping a rock was Plan B, but we have no evidence for that, either.
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Dennis

[quote="DMcCunney"][quote="SilverbladeTE"]I don't have a lot to add, but I do like and agree with much of what's been said

[quote]Nor do we know that timeline's Earth history to guess any lingering grudges etc, except China was a single nation with no colonies etc...which is kind of odd. China never really had colonies. They has lots of emigrants who moved elswhere and set up ethnic Chinese enclaves that assimilated just enough with whoever already lived there to get along and do business, but were still firmly Chinese.


Disagree re China having no colonies. History of Vietnam I read seems to indicate that North Vietnam (Dai Viet?) was originally indigenous peoples, that refugees from South China fled there after China took over South China, then China colonized it about 200 AD in order to control the port city at the end of the main river, which was key at the time to trade with the East Indies and India. Around 1000 AD, China was kicked out, but most of the colonizers stayed on.

It might be a simplistic approach but what if someone were to insert a step into the actual command to fire the OBS such that after the whole sequenses of approval and verifications and set up to aquire specific targets(s), assign weapon(s) and confirm that everything was ready to go, an entirely new approval and confirmation of identity/authority to launch the weapon(s). If you put it far enough downstream in the sequencing, the system could confirm that the station was operational, everything was working fine, all the the things that needed to be done for prepping the weapons and hitting the target was ready and being updated as needed except that when you sent the Fire command the system only then asked for a next step.
That would slow things down a lot. All the selfdefence weaponry on the station would still be functioning and responding to external threats as per protocols. It would "only" be that you had to have the next release code to launch the weapon(s). Right up to that point the system would/should confirm that everything was ready---and it is---just your missing the final command release.
Opps.
Particularly if the person who added that was dead and nobody had any way of finding if it the required code was stored somewhere. Also would be really tough to send something up to the OBS if it was already in self-defence mode and would intercept anything that was going to meet it's threat profile.

Just wondering.

wkernochan wrote:Disagree re China having no colonies. History of Vietnam I read seems to indicate that North Vietnam (Dai Viet?) was originally indigenous peoples, that refugees from South China fled there after China took over South China, then China colonized it about 200 AD in order to control the port city at the end of the main river, which was key at the time to trade with the East Indies and India. Around 1000 AD, China was kicked out, but most of the colonizers stayed on.

Fair enough, and it comes down to what you consider a colony. History is filled with peoples migrating from one place to another, and often displacing or conquering the folks who already lived there.

But a migration isn't the same thing as a colony. The migrants usually didn't consider themselves citizens of wherever they came from and loyal to whoever the rulers back home were. (I suspect a fair number of such migrations consisted of getting away from conditions back home.)

And China back then wasn't the unified monolith it is now. There were a variety of independent states that gradually coalesced into a single entity.

From where I sit, a colony is an effort mounted by a nation-state to extend its territory and plant enclaves under its control elsewhere. The European powers redrawing the map of Africa and assuming control of parts of it are pertinent examples. After an early period of exploration, China pulled back and became self-absorbed, and was largely forced into contact with the outside world again by Europeans determined to open it up for trade.

Chinese in later years put out a number of enclaves elsewhere, but for the folks in those enclaves, the ties to the mainland were ethnic ("We are all Chinese") and family - their ancestors came from the mainland, and they had relatives who sill lived there. (The family has always been the primary Chinese social unit. A Chinese might look at our condemnation of nepotism with blank incomprehension. Of course you give preference to family members!)

I doubt those enclaves saw themselves as subjects of whoever ruled where they had come from, required to obey his laws and carry out his commands.
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Dennis

Couple of points:
Much has been made of the 'one other' knowing of Nimue... well it seems to me from the text that that person would be Dr Proctor who hacked the PICA software.....

And am I right in thinking that Nimue Alban would now be the 'senior' Federation military officer in the system..... surely something can be made of that...

Oh, when I refered to China having no colonies, I meant in the SAFEHOLD universe it had no colony worlds!
Which iirc is mentioned in TFT? and is rather odd


The fact that folk wonder why North Harchong was settled is mentioned several times in the books...this maybe foreshadowing

South Harchong had Yu-Kwai (spelling?) Which we know was originally "New York"

If the conflict was triggered by something as minor as petty jealousy, or a mistaken belief of bias or some such, well, that would fit.into Human Nature and the Demon Murphy! :p
Europeans had wars over pathetic scraps of "nothing much" in Africa as example, like 5 year olds over a toy or.blanket

There could also be a darker purpose, such as using Langhorne's reprogramming as means to eventually control for a specific religion, government or whatever.
High risk of fanatic or agent suborning the project, which is another reason why Langhorne's warping things was so stupid and dangerous as it removed more safeguards from criminal/psychotic sabotage

As said every group has its nuts and extremists, so Chihiro may have acted from petty motives blown worse due to stress etc, or he could have planned all this from way back as an agent of government/religion/group or just as singular egotistical drive.


NO ONE EXPECTED THE CHIHIRO INQUISITION!
I'm a bad, bad boy, Abbott... :p

octavian30 wrote:Couple of points:
Much has been made of the 'one other' knowing of Nimue... well it seems to me from the text that that person would be Dr Proctor who hacked the PICA software.....

And am I right in thinking that Nimue Alban would now be the 'senior' Federation military officer in the system..... surely something can be made of that...

Oooooooooh, good point!

SilverbladeTE wrote:

octavian30 wrote:Couple of points:
Much has been made of the 'one other' knowing of Nimue... well it seems to me from the text that that person would be Dr Proctor who hacked the PICA software.....

And am I right in thinking that Nimue Alban would now be the 'senior' Federation military officer in the system..... surely something can be made of that...

Oooooooooh, good point!

Hmm, it is a good point that gives rise to some questions.

For example, it seems most of military personnel was on Shan-Wei's side - did Langhorne and company just "purge" individual credentials or did they do a blanket purge for everyone?

Would civilian systems built after the war recognize ANY military credentials?

All this hinges on that all systems have a standard way of authentication against a distributed catalog of users.