When Merlin leads the Charge into Zion....

Pretty much anywhere on the planet is vulnerable to the OBS.

If you are applying that term to the CoGA's Katusha-analogue, I'm pretty sure Caleb would rant and rave about being kept out of range but it would be from the bottom of that pile of protectors. [/quote]

No, the OBS. There is a broadly adopted assumption that only technology will trigger the OBS. I suspect that other things will trigger that system. An Army or fleet invading Zion might well exceed the threshold for firing a Rakurai blast at said army.[/quote]

I think we're all getting caught up on the OBS a bit too much. If there's one thing that would derail the storyline, it's a new round of Rakurai strikes on Safehold. It'd be such strong "evidence" in support of Langhorne's religion that nothing the Inner Circle could do would be able to overcome it. Merlin, Charis, and everything they've accomplished would be so tainted by the experience that his entire plan would be destroyed. It'd be absolute, undeniable proof that Charis was in league with Shan-wei. And once that's happened, I can't see how Weber could manage to write his way out of it.


I respectfully disagree with the thought that we could be too caught up with the OBS.

It alone has the ability to hit anywhere on the planet with devastating effect.

Take it out and anything else can be dealt with.

Leave it alone and there is too much possibility that the entire armies and navies could be knocked out.

PeterZ wrote:Yes, a Rskurai strike would be absolute proof Charis is against the archangels. So why risk a strike unless either there is no other choice or until more information is collected?

No reason I can think of.

The Inner Circle, at least, doesn't take seriously the idea that the OBS is controlled by something savvy enough to monitor and consider Safehold's politics and side with Zion already. If it did, Tellesberg would already be a crater, long since.

If it's not that savvy, it's probably not savvy enough to be trusted to make careful strikes around the Temple, much less tell the difference between an invasion and a triumphal parade. (Assuming the programmers for it aren't much less competent and/or rational than we give them credit for being - but then, the IC isn't apparently taking seriously either the possibility that the OBS programmers were wrong in the head in a sloppy sort of way.)

Ya know, the Temple may be built like a planetary defense bunker just so the OBS can be used on even that chunk of Safehold without holding back - and leave the Temple itself still standing, purged with fire of the Shan-wei taint that crept even upon it.

But if the OBS cannot be risked, and an invasion of Zion would risk it, the Charisian leadership is playing a hobbled sort of game. They've shown no indication that they're afraid to put ships on that shore or boots on that ground. Cayleb's looking forward to it. So I'm pretty sure they're not worried about the OBS striking back then, and that, if there are OBS behaviors that do not so much as merit an apparent consideration by Owl, Merlin, Nahrmahn et al, they're probably so unlikely that we don't have to take them seriously and we're better employed figuring out what reason they have for writing off those possibilities - unless their behavior in the books really is, despite first appearances, perfectly consistent with taking those concerns seriously.

Also - dang, this thread didn't stay on track long at all!

I believe Temple Bay is located a good distance outside of Zion and Merlin has walked within the streets Zion before. That isn't a problem. Yet the question of how the OBS would distinguish between an invading army and the Temple's own troops is a valid one. Could it's optical sensors distinguish uniforms for example? I doubt it - Particularly given that uniforms do evolve over time to reflect changes in textile manufacturing and the personal quirks of their home countries. Would they be able to tell the said troops' malign intentions toward the temple? Yes - provided that they used those SNARCs they had 900 years before and catch conversations about the Temple. Does the Temple have a button that reads "Press in Case of Invading Army"? Actually it does have the Key - but Charis is holding on to that for the moment.

But there is another possibility - Charis and Siddarmark don't need to physically occupy Zion at all. They could simply cut it off entirely from all sides and reach political accommodations with the secular realms. After all, Desnair has already bailed out of the Jihad in HFQ and if Clyntahn decides to punish Dohlar for the fiasco of the Fern Narrows, Dohlar is likely to bail as well. Obviously Charis needs to beat 2.5 million Harchongians first, but as HFQ makes quite clear, the Church is practically broke and will not be able to sustain that army's logistics for more than a year. If Charis decides to wait it out if a stalemate is reached, they still win. The only question is whether or not they need to win on points (waiting for the Church to collapse financially) or with a knockout blow (outright military victory)?

This is farfetched and would require a lot of money, computing power, and covert contacts.

One day, hundreds of midlevel Harchongese bureaucrats get a mysterious delivery of a purse of silver with a note in beautiful calligraphy announcing the birth of yet another graft-sucking organization and telling them they can get more silver from the profiteers who will gain if they stall or redirect shipments.

There are no profiteers, though, only OWL doing network-centric warfare and finding the precise critical points where "for want of a nail" great damage will be done.

I have to side against the notion of the basement of the Temple reacting to an invading army. As has been posted upstream in this thread, the basement really wouldn't know the difference between friend and foe.

Also, when those defenses were designed, it was in the aftermath of the War Against the Fallen which probably means that they are designed against TF tech used by a fallen angel they missed or even against one or more of the Adams and Eves who may have had access to forbidden tech. In short they wanted to avoid a repeat of Kau-yung's vest pocket nuke.

There is no reason to conjecture that the Temple would react to primatively armed armies. In fact, Cayleb is looking forward to the Haarahlds escorting transports with troops into Temple Bay. More recently they have expressed concern about shore batteries producing plunging fire from those rockets Brother Fulton demonstrated to Maigwair, but no concern about the defenses themselves and Merlin has been in on the discussion all the way. If there had been valid reason for concern, Merlin would have brought it up.

Plotwise it would make no sense either. Let's put the allied armies on hold, say 75 miles from the Temple and try for some sort of an Ashes of Victory scenario... Does anyone seriously believe that's going to happen? I don't. Or let's set up some sort of long distance blockade and starve the suckers out. Can you see Cayleb and Merlin agreeing to deliberately starving over a million people most of whom would be only guilty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time? Again, I don't see that.

There is really only one exception that I can see that we have textev for and that is if Father Paityr's key gets plugged into the slot in the computer in the Temple basement and those exes start going off. The result of that would be completely unpredictable and could be dangerous. To add another layer of complexity to this, we also are not sure that there are not other keys.

It has been suggested that there should be more information gathered. True. I'm all for that. But how is it done? Merlin and Nimue are the only individuals with any background with computers and they don't don't dare get their power supplies near the Temple defenses. And even without that limitation, they certainly don't claim to be in Dr Proctor's league. So we end up with catch 22.

To conclude, as long as what happens upstairs don't trigure a reponse by violating the proscriptions., I strongly doubt that the basement even cares who the occupants upstairs are or if the place changes hands.

Don

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Desnair is out, Dohlar will be soon, just depends on they do it from a position of strength or if the KH's smash their navy and Gorath flat. As for Harchong, I think the church will pull the rug from under the Mighty Host and you have all those Harchongese prisoners from AMF that probably have little loyalty. They may be loyal to the church but proper treatment should shatter that and then you have an Ace.
Unless you take out the OBS, you should just cut Zion off. Special forces are different but no landings, because who knows if Wylson has the only know. The inquisition has to have something

Alcatraz wrote:Desnair is out, Dohlar will be soon, just depends on they do it from a position of strength or if the KH's smash their navy and Gorath flat. As for Harchong, I think the church will pull the rug from under the Mighty Host and you have all those Harchongese prisoners from AMF that probably have little loyalty. They may be loyal to the church but proper treatment should shatter that and then you have an Ace.
Unless you take out the OBS, you should just cut Zion off. Special forces are different but no landings, because who knows if Wylson has the only know. The inquisition has to have something

As I noted in my previous post, there could be other keys. The basic argument against that is that if the powers that be had access to another key, one would think they would have used it long ago. However, I am well aware that this is not completely an air tight arguement. But, on the other hand, there are no air tight arguements. All of us are calculating probabilities.

Don

Ps.Welcome to the forums, by the way.

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What if Maigwair has a Key, passed down through generations of Temple Guard for last-resort defense of the Temple? Sheer speculation without a trace of textev but it would make sense.

n7axw wrote:It has been suggested that there should be more information gathered. True. I'm all for that. But how is it done? Merlin and Nimue are the only individuals with any background with computers and they don't don't dare get their power supplies near the Temple defenses.

The bold text is not quite true. OWL and Nahrmann are both quite capable of teaching Pater Wylsynn everything he might need to know about computers and providing him with a super-huge-capacity thumb-drive to download whatever OWL and Nahrmann might need to crack the Key files and/or hack into the Temple Basement Computer as necessary.

The only fly in the ointment is getting Pater Wylsynn into and back out of the Temple with the necessary Intel.

I would want someone who had grown up with computers doing that job.