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Originally Posted by Varyon
To be fair, I think this worldline is meant to be the threat - namely, there's the risk of them developing parachronic technology off-planet, where Infinity will have difficulty reaching them to keep tabs on (and sabotage) their attempts to do so.
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The flaw in that is that it isn't difficult. With all due respect to the entertainment value of traversing laser mazes in spy catsuits the odds are that they'd just be publishing the relevant research. Most of Infinity's monitoring of outworld physics is done in libraries, and this isn't even a setting with a significant paranoid streak to make things difficult. And if they wanted to sabotage experimentation the right way to do it is to plant an inside man, maybe a doppleganger and falsify the results or remotely compromise the computers with a worm. It's no more difficult in space than it would be on the ground. If you are trying to use flashy burglaries against elaborate security to do the job, you've already failed because they've already figured out that they're on to something and they aren't going to stop.
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"Surplus gear" doesn't really jive that well with a "Cold Equations" sort of scenario, wherein you'd expect people to have the absolute minimum gear required. Of course, I haven't read Heinlein's take, only Godwin's, which has been (rightly IMO) criticized as "poor engineering" for having such a low margin for error (some of the criticisms I've seen have claimed there was no margin for error, but if that were the case jettisoning the girl wouldn't have helped, as her presence would have already ruined the mission).
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I just want to know why a vessel designed to such tight tolerances even has a closet. At least one that isn't full of the very cargo he was delivering.