Charybdis wrote:We find Merlin making good use of observation/weather satellites in orbit around Safehold from OAR on. The query is are these left from the Langhorne Archangels or were they put into place by the Alexandrian faction?
(OAR pg 600) Of course, he didn’t know Cayleb, courtesy of Lieutenant Merlin Athrawes, had the benefit of satellite reconnaissance.
An argument for the former is that Commodore Pei Kau-yung did not know of the OBS/Rakurai until it was used against the Alexandria Enclave. Logically it would indicate that the presence of the Rakurai was "blanked out" OR ELSE these observation/weather satellites are in lower orbit than the Rakurai.
I imagine the Rakurai could be outside weather satellite observation by being above them (weather sats needn't stargaze, after all) or by being the sort of thing that weather satellites do not report on. Effectively, satellite sighting would just be edited out from weather sat reports before they ever reach a human or smart AI because, for weather purposes, they are uninformative. So either or both of those possibilities would be pretty much what you'd expect.
We know that the Rakurai System was emplaced by Langhorne et.al. and then enhanced with a bodyguard of "area-defense weapons and sensors" thousands of kilometers in diameter after the Lake Pei strike. Logically this would mean that the observation/weather satellites are an accepted system to the Rakurai since they still exist after 9+ centuries. Otherwise, like the stealth passive probe launched by O.W.L. in OAR that was destroyed thousands of kilometers from the actual platforms, they would have been destroyed for mere intrusion into protected space.
(OAR pg 173) Another SNARC had attempted to penetrate the defended perimeter under maximum stealth, only to be detected and destroyed while it was still thousands of kilometers from the platforms.
For that matter, the Rakurai could tap into the weather sats and use them for surveillance - if the weather sats are going to be there anyway, and collecting data the OBS can use, may as well use them. It'd make the system that much lower profile to escape detection by either Pei and their people beforehand. That goes for the original OBS, of course, but the second and current OBS could make use of the same system for the sake of simplicity.
The contra-argument to this would be why do they still exist and function without the Archangels? Like the rest of the high-tech, it would have been logical for the last active member of Langhorne's survivors to either destroy or put into hibernate mode. An argument here might be that they serve a supplementary function to the Rakurai or Temple and its Servitors. In this case would not a monitor and lock function also be present that would then betray Merlin's use?
There would have been no need for that for the original weather sat system when Safehold and its command crew were supposed to be one big happy family, and the only people able to tap the weather sats for information. There may have been some point in that during the War Against the Fallen. Maybe that generation of weather sats were lost in the war: if they served either side at all better than they did the other, the less advantaged side wouldn't have any reason to let them live if they could bring them down. If the current satellites are a post-War set, then again there wouldn't've been a worry by Chihiro and friends about someone else tapping them so security for them would be unnecessary.
For that matter, it's possible that
no one thought of weather satellites as a military tool at all. They'd've had them for hundreds of years. They help you tell what weather is. It's like worrying about the military applications of dandelions. And when it comes to security in conflict, their experience prior to the Alexandria Strike was the Gbaba, who probably were not hacking weather sats for surveillance. If that's the case, maybe the way to defeat the Rakurai is to launch something dangerous that fits a weather sat profile, to re-program weather sats to collide with the OBS, and/or to piggyback a cyberattack on them through the weather sat neighbors.
An argument for the Alexandrian Faction is that Merlin & O.W.L. obviously has the protocols to use their output without any apparent problem. This indicates that these observation/weather satellites are downloading their data to Nimue's Cave site. This also argues that their orbit clears that large sphere surrounding the Rakurai and its solar-power sats. However how did the Alexandrians manage to keep it going even AFTER the addition of the 'protection' that appears to be actively sweeping when the emplacement had to be PRIOR to the Langhorne/Alexandrian split?
Whatever is keeping them going - assuming they aren't so long endurance that they simply haven't yet run down - is likely the same sort of automated maintenance/repair/replenishment keeping the OBS and Temple going. If the weather sats are integrated into the OBS, it could be the very same systems. Otherwise, it could be the very same sorts of systems, as innocuous as far as the OBS is concerned as the weather sats themselves.
I think we can be sure they weren't something identified with the Alexandrians, else they'd've been smacked. And we can be pretty confident that they were not built in an era when they were thought of as a strategic asset
and when there were multiple known high-tech factions on Safehold: they would have been secure or been destroyed in that case.
Another possibility - unless there's something I don't remember to contradict it, I'm only using the Mark I (at best) human brain here - is that they were placed recently by OWL or Merlin, and that they aren't smacked by the OBS because they are that stealthy. It's the combination of stealth, payload and range that have defeated attacks on the OBS so far. If the weather sats are of a size that could not possibly have armaments with the range and destructiveness to threaten the OBS, they may be stealthy enough to share Safehold orbit with it safely.
