I keep coming up with more questions...

So I'm rereading By Schism Rent Asunder. In September 892, Section V: Army Training Ground and Manchyr Cathedral we learn that:

"The remotes had been designed to be capable of working together with their clones to destroy specifically targeted circuits in enemy installations with their incendiary / shaped-charge "suicide pills," and it wouldn't have been particularly difficult for him to maneuver several of them deep into the Corisandan's ear canal and use their combined charges to eliminate him [Prince Hector] while he slept."

(bold is mine)

So my question is this:

Why hasn't Merlin maneuvered even one of these remotes (remember how small they are? Virtually invisible from the textev) into the powder room aboard Thirsk's ships and then spark them to set off the powder contained therein. There is lots of textev that says that the older style mealed powder was inherently unstable to begin with, and that even handling it roughly would be enough to set it off... Seems to me that if you do this on even a few ships, you could send a fleet to the bottom pretty quickly. Unless Merlin considers this an inappropriate / "unfair" (proscribed??) use of advanced technology capabilities... Merlin could do the same thing pretty much at will to powder barges, conventional artillery trains, or pretty much anywhere the powder is manufactured, stored, transported, or used...

I've wondered this as well, granted if it was me then I would likely do it near their main stockpiles just to cause them to have a severe ammunition shortages at key points.

But the problem is that Merlin hasnt actually used his high tech for much more than intelligence gathering, so this war has been a lot fairer than it could have been.

So it is probably part morals and part he wants Charis and its allies to win via ingenuity and advancing its technological and social prowess rather than looking for miracles.(This is his overall goal for safehold as a whole so it would be very fitting.)

Merlin does not play God. He is willing to involve himself personally when he thinks it's absolutely necessary to intervene. He does not, however, want to start thinking the ends justify the means. At any point in the series he could have just wrecked the absolute shit out of anything the Church has, and no one could stop him. He doesn't because his purpose is to get everyone on Safehold to get into an innovating mindset. Trashing the other side just because they're good at doing exactly that isn't exactly the kind of positive reinforcement he wants to give.

Furthermore, that kind of catastrophic explosion is incredibly rare. Ships and magazines do not just spontaneously combust. A series of incredibly suspicious explosions which just happen to take out the most effective ships on the Church's side would be definitive proof that Charis is a bunch of Shan Wei worshippers, and they would be completely right this time. This war has been about the Church's abuses of power, and such a revelation would change the nature of the war overnight. That is a line no one in the Inner Circle is willing to cross yet.

Merlin's has said that his cause is to get people to start thinking why something happens not just follow this recipe and it will work. Winning the war is a tactical mission, the strategic mission is to introduce people (on both sides) how to think scientifically. That is the only way they will reclaim the stars.

(Edited to add Duckk hit enter before I did)

Do you suppose that causing sudden fires would suffice for removing specific semaphore stations from operation at critical periods for the Great Canal Raid?

In that case, what Merlin did have to do was kill a bunch of people who weren't especially offensive - they were just prepared to do a job that would have made the Raid fail. But fires in the stations would have rendered them inoperable at the time, while letting some or all of those people get away safely.

Sudden fires would, of course, be a bit suspicious, but the sudden slice-y dice-y death of entire station crews was a bit suspicious too.

It looks as though this may have been a point where "fires wherever on command" was a forgotten capability. If they would have done the job, then Merlin would have had less blood on his hands and that was troubling him quite a lot after that particularly.

How do you propose burning the semaphore stations so completely that they would be disabled for the days it took to complete the canal raid? They're not exactly doused in accelerants, and the station crews so oblivious to ignore spontaneous fires as to not undertake firefighting procedures. Merlin taking out the semaphore stations could easily be explained as parties of infiltrators. It's not as if Clyntahn has a monopoly on covert operations.

Duckk wrote:How do you propose burning the semaphore stations so completely that they would be disabled for the days it took to complete the canal raid? They're not exactly doused in accelerants, and the station crews so oblivious to ignore spontaneous fires as to not undertake firefighting procedures. Merlin taking out the semaphore stations could easily be explained as parties of infiltrators. It's not as if Clyntahn has a monopoly on covert operations.

How long would a given semaphore station have to be out of commission for news through it no longer to be useful? No, I haven't got an answer for that either, but I'm not eager to assume it would take so long that that a day or two wouldn't do the trick.

And being completely burned wouldn't necessarily be required, either. If some critical gears got melted, a crucial support burned enough to collapse, it'd suffice to put the station out of operation until repaired.

I don't take the crews to be oblivious, but if one of those SNARC's goes off with enough force to destroy one of those supports outright, or start a fire that's large enough suddenly enough that you've got a choice between fighting it or getting out, firefighting either won't do the trick fast enough or won't have a chance to stop the damage from being serious enough.

Granted, that's going to look a bit funny, but the crews cut to bits practically where they stood - assuming they're no more oblivious to infiltrated assassins than to sparks - is going to be a bit much to swallow too. But if your options are an unlikely occurrence or divine/demonic intervention, you can count on investigators to opt for the former either way.

The chain of coincidences is so massively improbable that no one in the Church, least of all Clyntahn, would buy it. Multiple semaphore stations all on the same day, which just happens to be the time as a strategically critical Charisian operation, have mysterious, spontaneous fires which just so happen to cripple the network? At least Merlin's personal intervention has the benefit of being both plausible and possible, given the Church's lack of response to the incident.

WeberFan wrote:So I'm rereading By Schism Rent Asunder. In September 892, Section V: Army Training Ground and Manchyr Cathedral we learn that:

"The remotes had been designed to be capable of working together with their clones to destroy specifically targeted circuits in enemy installations with their incendiary / shaped-charge "suicide pills," and it wouldn't have been particularly difficult for him to maneuver several of them deep into the Corisandan's ear canal and use their combined charges to eliminate him [Prince Hector] while he slept."

(bold is mine)

So my question is this:

Why hasn't Merlin maneuvered even one of these remotes (remember how small they are? Virtually invisible from the textev) into the powder room aboard Thirsk's ships and then spark them to set off the powder contained therein. There is lots of textev that says that the older style mealed powder was inherently unstable to begin with, and that even handling it roughly would be enough to set it off... Seems to me that if you do this on even a few ships, you could send a fleet to the bottom pretty quickly. Unless Merlin considers this an inappropriate / "unfair" (proscribed??) use of advanced technology capabilities... Merlin could do the same thing pretty much at will to powder barges, conventional artillery trains, or pretty much anywhere the powder is manufactured, stored, transported, or used...

I did suggest this, some two years ago, and in the ensuing debate RFC (IIRC) suggested that this would run contrary to Merlin's concept of "Mass Murder", however tactically advantageous this might be at any given point.

( I quoted the examples of HMS Bulwark(1899) and USS Maine(1895) as examples of "unexplained magazine explosions")

Simply speaking - because one or even a few destroyed ships wouldn't really mean anything for the situation. Dohlar have dozens of galleons in comission, and the pretty capable of losing a few without real damage to their navy fighting force. And if there was too many "smutaneous explosions", it may start to look supernatural - and this is definitely NOT what Merlin want.