What if Safehold wasn't the Federations only forlorn effort?

n7axw wrote:Only about 3 weeks until AtSoT and even less until SoV... I am rereading HFQ to avoid political season and terminal boredom...

Don

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If you're interested, SoV is already out as an eArc.

http://www.baen.com/catalog/category/view/s/advance-reader-copies/id/2000

ferlazkj wrote:

C. O. Thompson wrote:
Kevin...

The size of the fabber is a non-issue! Build them in space with raw materials recovered from asteroids so, all one would need is an adequate supply of raw materials and time. "Ask me for anything but time!"

Oh by the way, I think I'll sip the drink
Keep the ideas flowing

Charlie

Sorry, I wasn't clear in my last post. The size of the fabbers would probably decide the size of the ship since they would have been the biggest thing involved. No way to figure out from the textev I remember from OAR how big that would have been. Could it have been big enough to require an effort similar to the suicide mission that was used to allow the Safehold group of ships to escape the Gdaba? Yep, if the Boss says so.

Kevin

Kevin,
Two things... first the old quandary of needing the tools to make the tools... if a ship had (say 25) PICA's and five of the most basic tools required to start the building process, it could be smaller and faster than any of the ships that were involved in OAR. There would be no need for life support, water or air supply or purification. I am trying to think of the bisexual 'robot' that was found on the moon in one of the last Isaac Asimov robot books but I digress.

Second thought, what if Jasper Clinton is a PICA who woke up in the room under the temple and found the key for his AI and SNARC's missing and decided he had no choice but to improvise and take over the Order of Shuler.... that lovely thought came to me as I reflected on your last comment of yesterday. THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!

ferlazkj wrote:

C. O. Thompson wrote:
Kevin...

The size of the fabber is a non-issue! Build them in space with raw materials recovered from asteroids so, all one would need is an adequate supply of raw materials and time. "Ask me for anything but time!"

Oh by the way, I think I'll sip the drink
Keep the ideas flowing

Charlie

Sorry, I wasn't clear in my last post. The size of the fabbers would probably decide the size of the ship since they would have been the biggest thing involved. No way to figure out from the textev I remember from OAR how big that would have been. Could it have been big enough to require an effort similar to the suicide mission that was used to allow the Safehold group of ships to escape the Gdaba? Yep, if the Boss says so.

Kevin

SIZE of the fabber is irrelevant. What a Von Neumann colony REALLY needs are fabbers that have the capability to make MORE (preferably larger) fabbers. Once you have that, there's no real limit on your growth. Without it, you will forever be limited by the bottleneck of whatever fabbers you have on hand.

The thing about the Safehold Fabbers is that AFAICT, everything they've made so far has been SIMPLER than the nanotech the fabbers used to make them. Communication devices, robots, converted shuttle craft, etc. The most complicated thing produced so far is a second PICA, which NEEDS nanotechnology to function, but doesn't have "can fabricate anything" ability.

If anything, everything we've learned about the War of the Fallen suggests fabbers (or at least the Fallen's fabbers) can't make more fabbers. Not directly at least.

C. O. Thompson wrote:

Kevin,
Two things... first the old quandary of needing the tools to make the tools... if a ship had (say 25) PICA's and five of the most basic tools required to start the building process, it could be smaller and faster than any of the ships that were involved in OAR. There would be no need for life support, water or air supply or purification. I am trying to think of the bisexual 'robot' that was found on the moon in one of the last Isaac Asimov robot books but I digress.

Second thought, what if Jasper Clinton is a PICA who woke up in the room under the temple and found the key for his AI and SNARC's missing and decided he had no choice but to improvise and take over the Order of Shuler.... that lovely thought came to me as I reflected on your last comment of yesterday. THANK YOU VERY MUCH!![/quote]

Charlie,

The only problem with having very few tools along on the ship is that the amount of time required goes to centuries in order to build the extra tools needed to build the necessary tools needed to build the essential tools. I'm thinking even if the PICA's aren't in hibernation, but just working on building up infrastructure while the ship flies between stars it's going to take so long that they will go insane. Years, decades, centuries, I wouldn't be surprised.

As for Clyntahn being a PICA... Wow that's a dark thought. I doubt it though, given the personality we've been witness to he would have been much more hands on with the torture if he knew he was invulnerable. And he would have claimed seijen status years before our story opens on Safehold. So... don't blame me.

Waiting for Amazon to deliver my Kindle edition, any week now. Yep, <checks tablet> just waiting... <checks tablet again> Sheesh, isn't it November yet?

Kevin

evilauthor wrote:<Snip>
If anything, everything we've learned about the War of the Fallen suggests fabbers (or at least the Fallen's fabbers) can't make more fabbers. Not directly at least.

In point of fact we DON'T know that.

The Fallen's fabbers (like Merlin's) have a major handicap... a lack of a resource base.

Owl could only manufacture one PICA because he didn't have the resources to make more. The Fallen would have had this problem also, as well as the problem of staying off the OBS' radar (literally) and larger fabbers might have put out too large an energy signature to hide from it.

evilauthor wrote:
SIZE of the fabber is irrelevant. What a Von Neumann colony REALLY needs are fabbers that have the capability to make MORE (preferably larger) fabbers. Once you have that, there's no real limit on your growth. Without it, you will forever be limited by the bottleneck of whatever fabbers you have on hand.

The thing about the Safehold Fabbers is that AFAICT, everything they've made so far has been SIMPLER than the nanotech the fabbers used to make them. Communication devices, robots, converted shuttle craft, etc. The most complicated thing produced so far is a second PICA, which NEEDS nanotechnology to function, but doesn't have "can fabricate anything" ability.

If anything, everything we've learned about the War of the Fallen suggests fabbers (or at least the Fallen's fabbers) can't make more fabbers. Not directly at least.

Hi evilauthor!

I agree with just about everything you say. When I mentioned the size of the fabber, I meant that this would determine the size of the ship carrying it, which would probably determine how easily they would be able to stealthily make their way past the Gdaba blockade of the Terran Federation in OAR.

And, if nothing else, we've learned over the last 8 or 9 books that Owl's fabbers can make a lot of SNARC's.

Kevin

ferlazkj wrote:
And, if nothing else, we've learned over the last 8 or 9 books that Owl's fabbers can make a lot of SNARC's.

Kevin

Yeah, but SNARCs aren't fabbers. Nothing a SNARC does is as sophisticated as what a fabber does. Heck, none of the SNARC's known functions actually require any kind of active nanotechnology!

PICAs require nanotechnology, but that nanotech is only for maintenance and repair of the PICA body and scavenging of material from consumed materials (aka food) to provide the raw materials for that maintenance.

That in my mind at least is an order of magnitude less sophisticated than a fabber's ability to make ANYTHING... or at least any kind of macroscopic object. And I can easily see different models of fabbers having different manufacturing limits with the only the very highest quality fabbers able to make more fabbers.

shayvaan wrote:

evilauthor wrote:<Snip>
If anything, everything we've learned about the War of the Fallen suggests fabbers (or at least the Fallen's fabbers) can't make more fabbers. Not directly at least.

In point of fact we DON'T know that.

The Fallen's fabbers (like Merlin's) have a major handicap... a lack of a resource base.

Owl could only manufacture one PICA because he didn't have the resources to make more. The Fallen would have had this problem also, as well as the problem of staying off the OBS' radar (literally) and larger fabbers might have put out too large an energy signature to hide from it.

There's something which has been hanging around in the back of my mind since more was disclosed about the War against the Fallen. I wonder what the chances are of there being one of the Fallen's fabrication sites left anywhere? The chances must be very low, but if the site was as well hidden as Merlin's hide-out (and a bit more accessible!), it's something that RFC could introduce if needs be. All it would need would be for those who knew about it to have been wiped out in a pogrom &/or a raid gone wrong.
.

evilauthor wrote:
Yeah, but SNARCs aren't fabbers. Nothing a SNARC does is as sophisticated as what a fabber does. Heck, none of the SNARC's known functions actually require any kind of active nanotechnology!

Very true. But SNARC's have some kind of manipulators, and lift capability. So... could a workforce of SNARC's under Owl's direction build a better and/or bigger fabber? And since we never really got a good feel for what the materials were that Owl ran out of when he made Nimue 2's PICA, could the SNARC's gather that material?

Gotta wonder...

Kevin

You must have missed that thread. Or threads? Anyway:

Some have speculated that there are one or more such installations, in the care of a group that was at least as good at going underground as the SSK, possibly with even less idea of what the legacy is that they're guarding. Not implausible - where there are two successful underground organisations there's obviously room for 3. Particularly if they're effectively completely passive, since that would mean no waves to rock the Inquisition's boat and get them noticed. If so, they may eventually surface.

Other than that though, while I would say that it's entirely possible that there are one or more abandoned Fallen facilities, they would be and will probably forever be irrelevant. If they escaped detection and destruction in the immediate aftermath of the War, when Chihiro would have been using all his resources to find them - and probably had a pretty shrewd idea of where to look for them - they aren't findable from the outside. Not until someone builds a Planetary Proctoscope that can look right through Federation shielding, at any rate. By which time any such installation will be a museum piece to be placed alongside the remains of OWL, Nahrmahn and the Alban sisters.

Peter2 wrote:
There's something which has been hanging around in the back of my mind since more was disclosed about the War against the Fallen. I wonder what the chances are of there being one of the Fallen's fabrication sites left anywhere? The chances must be very low, but if the site was as well hidden as Merlin's hide-out (and a bit more accessible!), it's something that RFC could introduce if needs be. All it would need would be for those who knew about it to have been wiped out in a pogrom &/or a raid gone wrong.
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