You stated that 1, 2 & 3 are indisputable. I'm disputing them. Ergo, your statement is disproven. That Himself also disputes 1) is simply icing on the cake
You also seem to have rather seriously misunderstood much of what I wrote. It isn't clear who 'they' is, but if, as it appears, you mean the command crew, I most emphatically am not assuming that they don't have access to the full panoply of Federation tech. Quite the opposite, in fact: they demonstrably had the ability to _create_ technology that wasn't even on the expedition's equipment list. OBSes, for example. That is a pretty clear indication that they had access to whatever they wanted to access. OK, within some, unknown, but probably pretty wide, limits. I'm not arguing that they had the ability to build more starships with their off-the-shelf equipment. They most certainly would have been able to build the machines to build the machines, however.
It is also unnecessary to _assume_ that the Nimues do not have that access. They clearly, for example, have no access to a starship's sensor suite,
because they have no access to a starship That the capabilities of such a system exceed the capabilities of the equipment they do have is, indeed, an assumption, but one that is trivially easy to defend: one unchanging characteristic of technology over the 10,000 or so years whose history I have reasonably detailed knowledge of is that portable systems are significantly less capable than fixed-mount systems. Compare the jerry can to the aqueduct, for a farcical example. BTW, Merlin has always _had_ the ability to eavesdrop on the Temple even with the kit list on hand. He has not done so out of concern for the potential consequences of the attempt being detected - again, a case of fixed sensors vs portable stealth systems.
Your belief that the search would be constrained by fear of detection at interstellar distances is, I fear, unfounded. I can think of ways of doing it, using Hamilcar's resources, that would probably succeed in finding the Cave within a decade or so. And one of the most effective, seismic tomography, could probably be conducted without even disturbing the colonists, never mind being detectable outside Safehold's atmosphere. Sound just doesn't carry over the gaps between stars.
OTOH, it turns out that we don't know that Langhorne's colony lists were hacked. That _was_ a result of a mistaken assumption about the timing of the reeducation and movement of the sleepers on my part.
Thurgrak wrote:Louis R wrote:Your 1) is highly disputable: Jerry Knowles learned of Nimue by accident, he wasn't _given_ the information. There's no reason to think that any others among those who were shifted out of Alexandria knew about her. We don't know that none of them did, of course, but there's reason to think they weren't supposed to.
It doesn't say he learned by accident, only mostly by accident which would imply some information was actually given to him deliberately but less than he had in total. It does say Shan-wei didn't want them to know but we know so little about this time period. Commodore Pei could have told them after Shan-wei's death for all we know.
And that isn't the only possible route for the information to have reached Schuler. I can think of at least a couple of others.
Louis R wrote:3), I fear, is laden with assumptions. The most egregious of them is that the Cave could be hidden from anyone with access to the full TF tech base and the certainty that there was something to find. Remember the saying 'half of a secret is the fact that it exists'.
Agreed - there are assumptions. However there are assumptions in your answer which are equally problematic. first that there is no way they have effective access to the complete federation tech base (nothing that would potentially give away their position to the Gbaba like active scanners would be even considered IMO) and second that there is precisely no evidence of any scanner tech capable of doing it being deployed or even mentioned even when its use would be obvious like peering inside the temple.
Unless there is a complete technological avenue that would be of massive use to Merlin that he's completely ignoring I can't see this one being wrong. I'm basing what I'm saying on the displayed scanner tech (SNARCs are line of sight
and are presumably latest stealth scanning tech for the Federation). If there's any suggestion anywhere that there is something that can be built that can scan through a mile of rock on passives please point out my mistake.
Can anyone else who wants to handwave federation technology as a reason this is impossible actually check what tech we've seen and give me some idea of what they are expecting this tech to actually do. It's pretty hard to discuss about "some highly superior tech that no-one has seen or referred to" being able to do anything.
Louis R wrote:One of your starting assumptions is also debatable. We know that Langhorn's records were hacked to insert the colonists moved out of Alexandria. Removing all traces of a _dead_ TFN officer would have been no more difficult. Editing her personal baggage list would have been even simpler. And a fairly obvious precaution, come to think of it.
Hey that's fun. You've just dismissed the whole premise for Nimue needing to die in the first place since if that's right Nimue could simply have had the PICA removed from the list. Where does it say his computers were hacked? His list differs from Shan-wei's but that doesn't mean his list was hacked, it just means the two lists were different and I can think of a bunch of reasons for that.
The point of this is IF Schuler did know what could he do?
Is there anything in the text somewhere which suggests he could have found the cave even if he did know about it that I've missed?
Could he have left a message? Who would he leave it for and what would it say?