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Could the inner circle push the old Terran fed tech along?

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Re: Could the inner circle push the old Terran fed tech alon
Post by noblehunter   » Thu Jun 21, 2018 5:14 pm

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n7axw wrote:
The elbow room you have so far is that along with updating industry to steam, you can educate. The royal college is a start. Multiply the number of colleges to educate in the scientific method There is a danger that once this sort of knowledge gets out, someone will carry things to the point where the OBS does react and deal the whole thing a real setback. Imagine the religious and political firestorm that a rakurai strike would cause.

Don

It is good that electricity is well-defined and apparently the bright line for activating the OBS. It seems unlikely someone would cross that line by accident.

Which means RFC will likely have someone cross it on purpose.
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Re: Could the inner circle push the old Terran fed tech alon
Post by elaineofshalott   » Thu Jun 21, 2018 5:46 pm

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runsforcelery wrote:The Fallen were able to last as long as they did because (for reasons which Will Become Clear) they had a lot of relatively small, dispersed industrial modes hidden away (none of which, admittedly, were hidden under Mount Olympus) even before open combat between them and the Archangels began.


But was one of them hidden in Glacierheart in a unrecorded mine through which one Zhasyn Cahnyr made his escape centuries later?
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Re: Could the inner circle push the old Terran fed tech alon
Post by n7axw   » Thu Jun 21, 2018 11:09 pm

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noblehunter wrote:
n7axw wrote:
The elbow room you have so far is that along with updating industry to steam, you can educate. The royal college is a start. Multiply the number of colleges to educate in the scientific method There is a danger that once this sort of knowledge gets out, someone will carry things to the point where the OBS does react and deal the whole thing a real setback. Imagine the religious and political firestorm that a rakurai strike would cause.

Don

It is good that electricity is well-defined and apparently the bright line for activating the OBS. It seems unlikely someone would cross that line by accident.

Which means RFC will likely have someone cross it on purpose.


I think that the next logical step is for Nimue, Merlin and Owl to work through how to deal with the OBS... with Nahrman as the cheering section, of course.

Or, as I suggested in a previous post, train someone whose mission would be to infiltrate the basement and come up with info on how to shut down the OBS... Any professional hackers out there?

Don

-
When any group seeks political power in God's name, both religion and politics are instantly corrupted.
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Re: Could the inner circle push the old Terran fed tech alon
Post by Dilandu   » Fri Jun 22, 2018 1:21 am

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n7axw wrote:
I think that the next logical step is for Nimue, Merlin and Owl to work through how to deal with the OBS... with Nahrman as the cheering section, of course.

Or, as I suggested in a previous post, train someone whose mission would be to infiltrate the basement and come up with info on how to shut down the OBS... Any professional hackers out there?

Don

-


The next logical step would be to place someone from Inner Circle into the higher ranks of the COGA & Inquizition. So he may have access to "special secrets", and maybe found some clues about what exactly is going on Safehold since the death of Langhorne and doctor Pei. The main mystery is exactly that period: what happened during the War Against the Fallen, who fought whom and with what agenda, and who won.

Without such data, any pre-planning would be dangerously close to useless.
------------------------------

Oh well, if shortening the front is what the Germans crave,
Let's shorten it to very end - the length of Fuhrer's grave.

(Red Army lyrics from 1945)
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Re: Could the inner circle push the old Terran fed tech alon
Post by Randomiser   » Fri Jun 22, 2018 8:47 am

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Don, to hack anything you need access to some kind of interface to it. I'm just not convinced anything like that is available because the Temple builders didn't need one to be available, at least until the Return and maybe not then. If the returner can use a one way switch from 'his' current location to access hidden cameras and speakers and maybe holo projectors he has everything he needs to get the GoGA to demolish a couple of walls to let him out.(If he is indeed more than a virtual presence) Or he blows the explosive bolts on his concealed, again behind a couple of walls, doorway and out he pops. No way anyone can spot that kind of setup without TF equipment and active scanning.

The one possible interface we know about is in the 'Chapel of the Key,' for want of a better name, and is probably about as easy to hack as the Key itself - except that its in the Temple and has room for whatever paranoid anti-hacking stuff Scheuler thought of.

Dilandu, you are right, of course, some highly placed human intelligence source could be extremely useful. Unfortunately Helm Cleaver chose to use up their former high(ish) level source within the Inquisition in the last book. It could take a long time to work somebody in close enough. Might be faster to try turning one of the newly promoted people after the reorganisation within the CoGA. I did say before AtSfT that one of the absolutely non-negotiable terms of the peace treaty ought to be free access to the Temple for COC pilgrims and Clergy, ostensibly for religious reasons and actually for just these purposes, but I don't think that happened.

The big assumption you are making is that there are any useful 'special secrets' in the Temple that are still accessible. That's not a given. There might not have been anything in the first place. Even if there were, if only the top 2 or 3 members of the Inquisition knew about it the access may well have perished with them.
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Re: Could the inner circle push the old Terran fed tech alon
Post by runsforcelery   » Fri Jun 22, 2018 10:58 am

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Joat42 wrote:I think there is some textev that the platforms have automated drones supplying them with fuel and resources for maintenance.



If there isn't, there should be! :lol:


"Oh, bother!" said Pooh, as Piglet came back from the dead.
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Re: Could the inner circle push the old Terran fed tech alon
Post by runsforcelery   » Fri Jun 22, 2018 11:01 am

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Alistair wrote:It's a good question how many people could the cave hold?

10 a 100 or even a 1000? Without the Bombardment AI noticing?

Would give idea of constraints Merlin is dealing with.



Yes, it would, wouldn't it? :twisted: :twisted:


"Oh, bother!" said Pooh, as Piglet came back from the dead.
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Re: Could the inner circle push the old Terran fed tech alon
Post by runsforcelery   » Fri Jun 22, 2018 11:21 am

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Since the question of relative capabilities --- and whether or not one might wish to risk pissing off The Thing Beneath the Temple, I thought I'd post this little out-of-order snippet. It would appear that Merlin actually manages to get himself or a remote (I say not which at this point and there has been some modest editing to acoid hints) inside the Temple, and discovered the following:

out of order TFT snippet wrote:
The Temple was riddled with even more — far more — power sources than they'd been able to detect and track from outside its walls. They'd blazed up the instant his passives had crossed the Plaza of Martyrs.

He'd always thought Chihro's decision to plate the Temple's silver dome in eight centimeters of armorplast had been ridiculous, even for a lunatic like him. There'd been far less . . . exorbitant ways to keep that dome mystically mirror bright for centuries on end. It certainly hadn't been required for any conceivable structural reason! Indeed, when Nimue Alban first observed the Temple, she'd thought she'd seen flimsier planetary-defense command bunkers.

It hadn't occurred to her — and it damned well should have — that the reason she'd thought that was that she had seen flimsier PDC bunkers. Because even though the people living and working in the Temple and its "Archangel-built" Annex didn't know it, a planetary-defense bunker was precisely what Chihro and the surviving "archangels" had set out to build.

The Temple's exterior walls might look as if they faced with seventy-five centimeters of fine de Castro marble, but that "marble" was actually solid ceramacrete, carefully disguised to look like marble, and it was sandwiched around battle steel bulkheads that were themselves twenty centimeters thick. The central dome was a hemisphere of "marble-faced" battle steel almost as thick as the walls' bulkheads, and the skylights which pierced it were ten-centimeter slabs of armorplast, all of that under the eight-centimeters of the exterior armorplast. The "stained glass" of its spectacular windows was equally formidable, and while its interior walls were rather less impenetrable, even they would have sneered at any conceivable muscle-powered — or, for that matter, gunpowder-powered — assault. They were also riddled with molecular circuitry controlling power, light, air conditioning and heat, powered doors, fire suppression systems, information terminals, surveillance systems which obviously reported to something, and the smart walls in the endless offices and living quarters. He'd detected over two dozen separate wireless nets, spreading beyond even the walls' mollycircs, tying together literally hundreds or even thousands of high-tech devices and artifacts the Church and its servants either never knew were there or else took totally for granted as part of the all encompassing proof of the Temple's divine nature.

He had no idea, even now, how deep the complex went, but he'd come to the conclusion that it must go deeper than they'd believed. Nimue's Cave was actually a complex of artificial caverns, each bigger than most of the Terran Federation Navy's shuttle hangers, hollowed out to house and conceal the tech base Pei Shan-wei and her terraforming crews had left for her. It was big enough to provide a formidable support base and fabrication facilities which could easily have springboarded modern technology on a planetary scale, if only they'd been able to operate openly. But it couldn't have supported and maintained anything on this scale, and he'd already detected a half dozen concealed doors — concealed from the current Church hierarchy, not just interlopers such as himself, he suspected. Two of them, including one which opened directly into the Plaza of Martyrs, were big enough full-scale assault shuttles could have passed through them with ease when they were open. There were clearly ramps behind those concealed doors, diving deep into the earth, and he found himself wondering just how big a hole Chihiro had dug when he built the place . . . and what hose ramps might lead to. Since there was no other high-tech presence on the planet, they'd always known any support base for the Temple had to be under it, but they'd never suspected how big it must be or how deep it might go.


"Oh, bother!" said Pooh, as Piglet came back from the dead.
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Re: Could the inner circle push the old Terran fed tech alon
Post by ywing14   » Fri Jun 22, 2018 11:30 am

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runsforcelery wrote:Since the question of relative capabilities --- and whether or not one might wish to risk pissing off The Thing Beneath the Temple, I thought I'd post this little out-of-order snippet. It would appear that Merlin actually manages to get himself or a remote (I say not which at this point and there has been some modest editing to acoid hints) inside the Temple, and discovered the following:

out of order TFT snippet wrote:
The Temple was riddled with even more — far more — power sources than they'd been able to detect and track from outside its walls. They'd blazed up the instant his passives had crossed the Plaza of Martyrs.

He'd always thought Chihro's decision to plate the Temple's silver dome in eight centimeters of armorplast had been ridiculous, even for a lunatic like him. There'd been far less . . . exorbitant ways to keep that dome mystically mirror bright for centuries on end. It certainly hadn't been required for any conceivable structural reason! Indeed, when Nimue Alban first observed the Temple, she'd thought she'd seen flimsier planetary-defense command bunkers.

It hadn't occurred to her — and it damned well should have — that the reason she'd thought that was that she had seen flimsier PDC bunkers. Because even though the people living and working in the Temple and its "Archangel-built" Annex didn't know it, a planetary-defense bunker was precisely what Chihro and the surviving "archangels" had set out to build.

The Temple's exterior walls might look as if they faced with seventy-five centimeters of fine de Castro marble, but that "marble" was actually solid ceramacrete, carefully disguised to look like marble, and it was sandwiched around battle steel bulkheads that were themselves twenty centimeters thick. The central dome was a hemisphere of "marble-faced" battle steel almost as thick as the walls' bulkheads, and the skylights which pierced it were ten-centimeter slabs of armorplast, all of that under the eight-centimeters of the exterior armorplast. The "stained glass" of its spectacular windows was equally formidable, and while its interior walls were rather less impenetrable, even they would have sneered at any conceivable muscle-powered — or, for that matter, gunpowder-powered — assault. They were also riddled with molecular circuitry controlling power, light, air conditioning and heat, powered doors, fire suppression systems, information terminals, surveillance systems which obviously reported to something, and the smart walls in the endless offices and living quarters. He'd detected over two dozen separate wireless nets, spreading beyond even the walls' mollycircs, tying together literally hundreds or even thousands of high-tech devices and artifacts the Church and its servants either never knew were there or else took totally for granted as part of the all encompassing proof of the Temple's divine nature.

He had no idea, even now, how deep the complex went, but he'd come to the conclusion that it must go deeper than they'd believed. Nimue's Cave was actually a complex of artificial caverns, each bigger than most of the Terran Federation Navy's shuttle hangers, hollowed out to house and conceal the tech base Pei Shan-wei and her terraforming crews had left for her. It was big enough to provide a formidable support base and fabrication facilities which could easily have springboarded modern technology on a planetary scale, if only they'd been able to operate openly. But it couldn't have supported and maintained anything on this scale, and he'd already detected a half dozen concealed doors — concealed from the current Church hierarchy, not just interlopers such as himself, he suspected. Two of them, including one which opened directly into the Plaza of Martyrs, were big enough full-scale assault shuttles could have passed through them with ease when they were open. There were clearly ramps behind those concealed doors, diving deep into the earth, and he found himself wondering just how big a hole Chihiro had dug when he built the place . . . and what hose ramps might lead to. Since there was no other high-tech presence on the planet, they'd always known any support base for the Temple had to be under it, but they'd never suspected how big it must be or how deep it might go.



Wwwwwwooooowwww. Can’t wait!
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Re: Could the inner circle push the old Terran fed tech alon
Post by Dilandu   » Fri Jun 22, 2018 11:34 am

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Thank you, runsforcelery!

Well, at least we now knew something about the Things Under The Temple (TUTT for short). The complex is REALLY big, and actually made as military-grade fortress.

This led to some... interesting speculations. Since the underground citadel was commissioned after the War Against The Fallen (it was mentioned that "Dawn Star", i.e. the "Hamilcar" was still around during the latest stages of war), the question is "against whom" it was actually build? Probability of some surviving "demons" rebuilding the powerbase? Or anticipation of some Post-Return conflict?

VERY interesting!
------------------------------

Oh well, if shortening the front is what the Germans crave,
Let's shorten it to very end - the length of Fuhrer's grave.

(Red Army lyrics from 1945)
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