In the Chief's defense, he was not exactly at the very top of his game right then. :)

>the other change is her mindreading goggles ... it is obvious from the
>series that hard core tech is pushed and not always in Good
>Directions, her goggles represent the equivalent of an 'aliens crashed
>in the desert and we learned how to do Cool Things from the wreckage'
>event.

Well... not really. There are three factors that argue against that conclusion.

The first is that it isn't obvious that they're as advanced as they are to anyone who isn't wearing them. It's not as if she turned up with, say, a Vindicator (wo)man-portable multibarrel rotary particle beam cannon. They would be significantly easier to keep on the QT than any overtly unearthly object.

The second is that, by that point in her career, Mio has lived through the Warlock incident and is soon to experience a modified version of the I Know, Let's Neuroi Up the Yamato incident. She knows all too well that a) the brass hungers for new toys and b) they never, ever use them right. If it absolutely came down to it, she'd dispose of them before she let those morons play with the underlying technology.

And the third is that, even if she didn't, they wouldn't get anywhere with it anyway, because the technology embodied in those goggles is both extremely subtle and, if you took it apart and started screwing around with it, quite delicate. They're ruggedized for field use and basically maintenance-free, but there are bits inside them that would be ruined very easily if they were removed, so all a 1940s military R&D laboratory could conceivably accomplish would be to break them. They wouldn't learn anything in the process. It'd be like giving Civil War-era gunsmiths a microchip. Even if they somehow figured out what it did, they'd destroy it in the process.

However, it's interesting that you should bring this problem up, because on a different scale, Gryphon and the 501st already had to deal with a similar problem during his first visit to their reality. There are a couple of allusions to it in New Tricks, but it wasn't really the place or time to go into it in detail. Suffice to say that there were certain elements in the Allied military structure who were very interested in the rumors they were hearing about some kind of "rocket man" who had informally joined the 501st. A significant percentage of G's spare time during his stay in 1943 was spent keeping those clowns from acquiring any solid evidence that he and his jetpack actually existed, and when that ultimately failed, preventing them from keeping said evidence long enough to act on it. (Hence Mio's remark about "what you and Sanya did to Allied G-2," that is to say, Military Intelligence.)

This is a topic that will come up again when he returns to 332/S, which - because I am the UF universe's King Canute, helpless before the tides - I'm already designing...

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.