Expert snuggler wrote:Here's something Merlin could do differently, still risky without an OBS, risks partially but only partially controllable.
In situations where he was willing to take no prisoners and leave no survivors, he'd be free to use energy weapons.
There could be some strategic value in making isolated ships on critical missions vanish without a trace.
Giving Clyntahn too many mysteries to think about is dangerous, but imagine diverting his attention by starting a rumor that the secret underground seijin army also has a navy.
How much current can an OWL remote control? Merlin wants everyone thinking scientifically ASAP, so he'd probably want to send out announcements that it's just a natural phenomenon that lightning keeps hitting CoG installations. The superstitious people could be educated later, and in the meantime they'd switch sides.
Duckk, I'd always bow to your far greater wisdom on this, but IIRC RFC just mentioned that Merlin is becoming a bit more hands-on with the TF tech lately, which is why he created a couple of new characters in LaMA, one a spy and one an assassin, and he also used the skimmer and the lorry extensively to reach DE and Gen. Symkyn, and had some fun doing skullduggery with Harless and the other clueless Desnairans and Dohlarans by convincing them that DE was starving and Shiloh was rebelling. (I wonder what the horse and donkeys thought of the lorry?) And he used OWL's remotes extensively in creating the campsite and the background setting for Mab. Since this is a "What if" thread, I don't have a problem with thinking out of the box, although Merlin using the remotes to miraculously blow up ships, assassinate enemies, etc. is something I disagree with because it makes for a boring story when the hero outclasses the bad guys so badly.
Still, there occasionally
is a moment for the universe's biggest nerd to say "Oops!"
All right, I'll tackle this as two separate items: 1) Use of TF tech to destroy isolated CoGA ships on "critical missions," and 2) Using TF tech to cause or direct lightning to strike
where such strikes would be most advantageous to the allies - say right in the middle of Kaitswyrth or Wyrshym's powder magazines, or the magazine of any of Thirsk's ships.
The answer to #1 is easy - in the entire series, there's only been
one enemy ship that absolutely
had to succeed in a solo mission, and that one carried Daivyn and Irys to Delferahk. Think of what we'd have missed if RFC had decided that a teenage girl and her younger brother should die by TF weapons because of who their father was... Fortunately for us readers, neither RFC or Merlin believe in the sins of the fathers being the sins of the kids, and you've gotta admit that the use of TF weapons to sink their ship would have eliminated a twist in the plot that turned out to be just a
wee bit useful and soooooo
romantic! Plus Merlin got to do a bunch of derring-do when he rescued them, and we all know how much he enjoys that sort of thing!
I sat down and researched the opportunities to attack enemy ships that are on high priority missions with TF tech, and there aren't very many of them in the series. In OAR the the galley
Sprite was on picket duty north of Black Water's combined fleet. Removing it would allow the Cayleb's fleet of galleons to slip past and attack the combined fleets led by Black Water the next morning.
Unfortunately Merlin
couldn't attack the galley with the skimmer, since he was concerned that cannon fire would be too visible, so clearly TF weapons would have been as well. Cayleb solved the problem by "guiding" a schooner loaded with ICMs to surprise and capture the galley without firing a shot.
Had Merlin been able (and willing) to use TF weapons on the galley, the
Charisians would have wondered what had sunk the galley if it exploded, so we have to keep in mind that there can't be any ICN ships in the vicinity of a TF attack either.
The
only situation that truly matches your criteria in OAR for the use of TF to sink a solo enemy ship on a critical mission is the Corisandian spy who hired a smuggler to take him to Emerald so he could report that Cayleb and the entire Charisian galleon fleet had sailed in October, which caused Black Water to realize that Cayleb must have gone after the combined fleets of Dohlar and Tarot near Armageddon Reef.
Unfortunately, no
other Corisandian spies knew that their fellow spy existed, which enabled him to escape Tellesberg and reach Emerald with the news that Cayleb and the galleons were gone, so Merlin had no chance to detect him. The man never associated with any known Corisandian spies, and acted as a Charisian chandler for 12 years to establish his cover. So the
one chance to use TF weapons in OAR didn't work out because Merlin isn't omnipotent.
While Charis was sweeping the seas bare of enemy shipping except near Thirsk's fleet in Gorath Bay from BSRA until AMF, there were undoubtedly
many opportunities where the recon skimmer could have been used at night to destroy enemy ships without leaving any surviving sailors who would see the skimmer's attack, which would have been blamed on the Charisians if anyone ever found the debris.
Unfortunately, those attacks would have been almost entirely made on
merchant ships, since no enemy fleet commander, especially Thirsk, ever let any of his fleet's ships sail alone - including the schooners he used as scouts. The Harchongese were pretty inept sailors, and I don't recall them ever fighting Gwylym Manthyr and his fleet in the Gulf of Dohlar, although he certainly cleaned
their clocks a time or two!
Merlin was ready to use the skimmer to destroy any ship(s) used to transport Gwylym Manthyr and his fellow POWs to Zion. Unfortunately, Manthyr and his men were taken by
land, so there wasn't a chance to have them "disappear at sea." (Which is the
only time that Merlin and Cayleb have ever strongly considered using the TF weapons in the skimmer for
any reason.) The only active use of TF tech the inner circle uses is for information, communication, the sharp edges on Excalibur and Merlin's and Nimue's blades, and the lasers in Merlin's old pistols that ignited the powder so he never had a misfire. They use passive TF tech all the time in the form of their armor and anti-ballistic undies of course!
Moving to the second point, which I'd guess would entail having one of OWL's remotes install a microscopically thin electrical wire on one or more of an enemy ship's masts that could "attract" and conduct lightning down the masts and lead it to lets say... the ship's powder magazine. (Whether the lightning is attracted by a wire or artificially generated, the point is for it to be
seen just before the ship blows up.) Generating a few extra lightning bolts during a storm probably wouldn't wake up the OBS, especially if those bolts had very low amperage. (If the purpose were simply to blow up an enemy ship, then detonating a SNARC observational remote in the powder magazine would do the job just fine and the final battle in AMF would have been boooring...)
The object of using TF tech this way is to show the sailors that lightning, which the archangels created to remind mankind that its power is reserved to use only by the archangels, is suddenly blowing up NoG ships, or AoG supply depots, etc. The Allies goal in using TF tech would be to "Always plant the seed of doubt." Make the enemy soldiers and sailors ask questions like "If we fight for God, why are we losing all the time?" "If Merlin is a demon, where is the angel who the Writ says will appear to oppose him?" "Why is lightning blowing up all of us good guys?"
As for what TF tech could do to make a mast a more likely target for lightning without generating an electrical signal that the OBS would recognize as artificial, I'll leave that to the electrical engineers here on the forum. I'm sure OWL could come up with a purely passive way of attracting an ordinary lightning bolt so that it hits a mast which has a microscopic wire made of some TF handwavium attached to it that conducts the electricity directly to the ship's powder magazine, and the result will be either very bad or extremely entertaining, depending on which side you're on!
Thirsk's fleet would likely become extremely fearful of storms after seeing a few of their fellow ships hit by lightning and blown to splinters as a result. Should that sort of thing keep happening on a regular basis, they might start wondering why it is that even though they're fighting on the side of God and the Archangels, lightning, which is His reminder that the power of electricity is reserved for the use of the Archangels, keeps blowing up their ships on a regular basis...
Pretty soon I doubt Thirsk could get his surviving crews to sail out of Gorath Bay on a clear day! At least not with a grain of gunpowder on board, which would
slightly affect the fleet's ability to fight!
Since Merlin decided way back in OAR never to lie to anyone so they'd trust him, he simply won't have anything to say about the phenomenon. If God wants to blow up CoGA powder magazines on a regular basis, what business is it of a far off seijin?
I
really like this idea, since it would cause even the most fanatic TLs among Thirsk's sailors to question why God was killing off the good guys who are fighting to defend Mother Church. As for the sailors who paid a bit less attention during Wednesday school in their youth, they'd think Shan-Wei had it in for the entire fleet. (Which of course she literally
would, since she put OWL together from scavenged parts and his remotes would be wiring their ships to explode!)
Kudos for thinking outside of the box. Of course the arrival of the Haarahld VIIs in a few months are going to make this sort of skullduggery unnecessary, but it would have been highly entertaining if it had been used. Unfortunately, Merlin is the sort who would rather accept a ship's surrender than blow it up. He's such a spoilsport!
