Then let me be clearer, as well:
There are two more of these things in operation, and they need to be shut down now. But it’s unclear if anyone outside of the Empire knows how to shut them down. You’re worried about a Seyllin incident, and that’s totally valid and legitimate, and I don’t fault you for that. But let me remind you:
Personally, I’m worried about far worse than Seyllin. This is the map of the three stellar harvesters:
The regions directly ‘north’ of the triangle they form are, well, the State. The Citadel and Forge are just as close as Essence and Everyshore. And Seyllin was ‘just’ a radiation burst, then a mass ejection (though obviously, a large one). As I said in the thread about maintenance, we still don’t know that these things failing can’t trigger full-on supernovae, which would threaten life in systems many light-years from the exploding stars.
And again, not the worst-case scenario. The farthest separation between these stars is less than 4.25 LY. If this is going to be some kind of Isogen-fueled explosion, then we have to look at our other example: Caroline’s Star.
No, Caroline’s Star didn’t have any major impact on us… but it was instantly visible all over New Eden. Simultaneously. Which means that the normal ‘ok, well, it’s light-years away, even the radiation will take months to get to the nearest system’? It’s not a safe assumption. If we get an Isogen event, the effects could be felt immediately… including the effects on the other two harvesters. Or on the harvesters in Poch. For all of the ‘oh, they’re in the Abyss’, BlOps’ing out of Poch demonstrates those systems are physically exactly where they were. Which means they can be impacted.
Am I saying we need to expect the worst-case doomsday scenario of a cascade-effect where one by one, all of the stars with Stellar Harvesters become Isogen bombs that wipe out all life across multiple constellations and shut down every stargate in New Eden? No. We shouldn’t expect that. But we should damned well be taking steps to minimize the chance of it, and the first (and, at this point, only) step we can take is: shut these three harvesters down, immediately.
And again, you’re right, we need the Republic, and CONCORD, to be monitoring this closely and getting what data we can about what’s going on. And we should absolutely be evacuating the 4 stations in Turnur, and I cannot imagine the Parliament, RSS, Boundless Creation, and Freedom Extension aren’t scrambling to do that. But we also need to shut these things down, in Turnur and in the other two systems.
Seyllin was downright benevolent in the scope of ‘What could go wrong when you screw with a star?’