Reviewing Heretics of Dune I find that there is an 'old Harkonnen no-room' that provides shelter to the characters on Gammu (Geidi Prime). Looking ONLY at the canon books (excluding BH and KJ), with which faction and when in time does no-technology come into play? I had thought that the technology was Ixian and was driven by the need to hide from Leto II.

I think you misunderstood. 'Keep a secret' in this case means to avoid someone dropping your 'eaves (to paraphrase good old Samwise). That thread is in reference to the use of a prescient to block the eavesdropping of another prescient (in the canon example, a = a Navigator and b = the Atreides).



I don't see any evidence of that, can you provide a reference?

Let me put this simply, since people seem to be missing my gist:

-Harkonnen occupation of Dune, and harvesting of Dune spice is pre-prescience, pre-prescient Paul, and fully within our timeline.
-In later canon, we find that no rooms existed on GP, hiding a space hoard.
-If Paul arrives shortly to tear apart HH, and to rule the universe ever-after from Arrakis, there is no other opportunity to build/fill such No-Rooms than now.

I'm pretty sure my OP was sparked by another line of thought from the DE, but it escapes me now. Still the timeline is simple enough. Either No-Rooms exist now or we have to suppose that in some missing chapter of the future timeline the rulers of Geidi Prime assemble the power to build the rooms and to spirit away the spice from Leto's carefully controlled rationing system.

The problem I have with "No-rooms" in our period is how would you go about designing, building and testing them?

As the Ixian Confederacy I have toyed with the idea of No-rooms and in RPs suggested that prototypes of such things may exist but more in the context as a safe room, shielded to prevent conventional listening devices. As far as I am aware though, in the canon the Guild guards how its Highliners work extremely strictly and that the majority of the Landstraad and factions do not know how foldspace and pre-science work. If this is the case, why would anyone build a defence to a mechanism they don't know exists?

If this is the case, outside of the Bene Gesserit and the Guild themselves, who would have the knowledge to build them or even really require the need for such a No-rooms? Even as the most technologically advance faction in canon, Ixians wouldn't understand pre-science and even then, if they knew it existed and understood how it worked how would they go about testing a deterrent, short of kidnapping a navigator? The BG might build them in order to shield themselves from the Guild, but why would the Guild need them?

I'm no Dune Academic, but the concept of No-rooms as a means of hiding from prescience in our timeline doesn't seem feasible, unless done by the BG or Guild themselves.

Could not the Harkonnens have maintained secret stockpiles of spice on Giedi Prime to begin with, subsequently moving those stockpiles into no-room(s) once the technology had been developed and the rooms built? I don't see that a lack of a no-room somehow implies lack of a stockpile.

- GC -

ok so according to the Dune Encyclopedia, the Ixians developed their no-rooms around 13500 (p.351). Not that this explains much. Though there's nothing saying that the Harkonnen didn't make little places for themselves after they were developed. It became shameful and dangerous to be a Harkonnen. I don't recall anything saying the family died out.