HFQ Official Snippet #12

Duckk wrote:

IIRC, they pumped in nitrogen since it's mostly inert.

I assumed so. I further assumed that it would kill rats, who would otherwise build nests in the intake manifolds, and dirt dobbers who do similar nasty things. I remain curious about rain incursion into the entryway.

~Tonto

Tonto Silerheels wrote:Duckk wrote:

IIRC, they pumped in nitrogen since it's mostly inert.

I assumed so. I further assumed that it would kill rats, who would otherwise build nests in the intake manifolds, and dirt dobbers who do similar nasty things. I remain curious about rain incursion into the entryway.

~Tonto

Low-tech version: A big honking door.
Hi-tech version: A big honking force-field.
Somewhere-in-between-tech version: Extreme positive air-pressure, which kind of FUBAR's the nitrogen thingy.

Tanstaafl wrote:

runsforcelery wrote: “‘Nimue’s Cave,’?” she repeated with a quirked eyebrow. “That’s an odd name, even for a seijins’ training camp.

She is in for a shock. This training camp does not look much like a camp.
And the training facilitys are also not what she expects.

Merlin is playing a joke on her. And RFC is very good at painting this scene.
Can't wait for the next snippet.

Interesting assumption here. We haven't been to the South March yet and BGV could reappear, or any number of interesting things could happen. Nahrman's done wonders with OWL. I wonder if he might be tempted to play matchmaker with OWL and Sanderia

Tonto
A certain amount of handwavium is acceptable about the cave since it is mostly setting up the parameters for the story. However Merlin does say at one point that his nanites could pretty much rebuild him from scratch provided his memory core was intact. I suspect that they were very busy while Merlin was powered down, the first task being to ensure there were enough of themselves. It's not clear whether OWL was dormant or (semi)awake during that time either. I suspect her hardware has it's own nanites too. In fact it may be they come as standard with all TF tech. After all, the Temple is still working too and it sure isn't the Inquisition that's maintaining it. Otherwise it seems reasonable that OWL came online a while before Merlin with instructions to create nanites to fettle everything else in the cave.

Of course there is then the question of how you prevent the equivalent of mutation in nanites. But let's not go there!

anwi wrote:

Duckk wrote:
Well, I know of one PICA who would disagree...

Seriously though, Nimue's Cave was environmentally controlled, precisely so Nimue could wake up. I doubt a nuke just sitting on a shelf somewhere would be up to the same task.

Well, it would be interesting to get an explanation by RFC how e.g. the internal plant of Merlin survived that period. Actually, the nanites available to OWL (and within Merlin) were probably responsible for that particular feat.

As to the nukes: If these are really nukes (i.e. fission bombs), simple radioactive decay will render them inoperable. So far as I understand it, they might produce a ... fizzle, but not widespread destruction any more. And that's without looking at the chemical and material parts. So it's back to some handwavium. How about a small black hole on the same shelf?

Sorry folks, the half-life of U238, the heart of a Fission Nuclear Device is 703.8 million years, so a 1,000 years by ir=tself is unlikely to be detrimental to its explosive effect. Logically, the mechanism, being exposed to that effect of massive radiation, would be a more likely 'failure point' for a fizzle. All of this assumes no advancement in ability by the Terran Federation which is a very unlikely situation.

Charybdis wrote:Sorry folks, the half-life of U238, the heart of a Fission Nuclear Device is 703.8 million years, so a 1,000 years by ir=tself is unlikely to be detrimental to its explosive effect. Logically, the mechanism, being exposed to that effect of massive radiation, would be a more likely 'failure point' for a fizzle. All of this assumes no advancement in ability by the Terran Federation which is a very unlikely situation.

U235... and that's harder to produce than Pu239 which might be more likely to be used (half life 24,100 years) but yeah it's not the degradation of the fissile material itself that's the issue on this timescale. It's the effect that has on everything around it in the device.

Could nanites constantly be repairing the damage? Probably. Would anyone with the capability to do so have specifically set up a situation where a nanite swarm was carefully babysitting a pocket nuke for centuries so it could eventually be used by someone when they would have absolutely zero control over how it would eventually be employed? I have a hard time seeing anyone doing that, on either side of the war between the 'Archangels'. No motivation for it. Langhorne's side already has WMD capability enforcing their dictates that they did have a degree of control over the deployment of (The rakurai platform) and the Shan-Wei side simply has no purpose in burying nukes for some random person in the future to maybe decide to set off when they got upset at someone. That doesn't really advance their agenda.

Thank you RFC for the snippett. I wonder if Merlin has informed Caleb and Sharleyan of his decision to take Aviah and Sandaria to Nimue's cave?

bunyipbelle wrote:Thank you RFC for the snippett. I wonder if Merlin has informed Caleb and Sharleyan of his decision to take Aviah and Sandaria to Nimue's cave?

Why should he/she? After all it is their cave....

dan92677 wrote:

bunyipbelle wrote:Thank you RFC for the snippett. I wonder if Merlin has informed Caleb and Sharleyan of his decision to take Aviah and Sandaria to Nimue's cave?

Why should he/she? After all it is their cave....

Yeah, it is their cave. But there is such a thing as teamwork and Merlin is not the only one with a stake in the matter. Except in situations of extreme circumstances which don't apply here, Merlin hasn't been making these decisions alone.

Don

Charybdis wrote:Sorry folks, the half-life of U238, the heart of a Fission Nuclear Device is 703.8 million years, so a 1,000 years by itself is unlikely to be detrimental to its explosive effect. Logically, the mechanism, being exposed to that effect of massive radiation, would be a more likely 'failure point' for a fizzle. All of this assumes no advancement in ability by the Terran Federation which is a very unlikely situation.

If it's vest-pocket in some relatively literal sense -- you can carry it in one hand -- it's probably not primarily dependent on U-anything. The W54 -- the warhead for Davy Crockett, with a yield around 20 tons (not kilotons, tons) weighed about fifty pounds and used plutonium. Most of that mass is things like fissionables and neutron reflectors that are tough to make lighter.

I can easily believe the Federation can do antimatter catalyzed fission-fusion devices, or some sort of tritium-boosted Neptunium-236 bomb (the hard part there is getting the 236 away from the 237...) but anything like that runs into exciting things like "antimatter containment" or "tritium half-life" long before it's a thousand years old.

So, can Owl build a bomb? Sure. (Though I'd worry about the bombardment platform counting neutrinos.) Are there any such devices lying around unmaintained and in working condition after a thousand years? I seriously doubt it.

Does the Temple have any stashed in the basement, subject to automatic maintenance? I really hope not; that's the sort of thing that has really dreadful failure modes.