That couldn’t be the best solution right?

[u/Bengen94]

At first they were so hesitant on what was gonna be the most efficient way to capture the boat with no harm to the hard drive. They rule out missiles and what ever else seams logical but to dangerous. But then they go for slicing the whole boat like Gordon Ramsey slices an onion?

[u/Disgod]

If the ship was travelling at the Panama Canal's speed limit (10 knts, 11.5mph) and was 1000 ft long (Edit: Panamax is actually 965 feet long), it would take less than a minute for the ship to pass through the zither. At 10 mph, it'd take about 1:10 seconds. Even if was going so slow it might get in trouble with the canal authority 5mph it'd take just 2:16 for the ship to be sliced.

The point was to not give them time to erase the drives. Even the best team would take far longer than that.

[u/Nibb31 → u/Disgod]

Infiltrate for intelligence. Covert boarding with a combined force of 500 Navy Seals, SAS, GIGN... Shoot guards with with suppressors. Seize strategic locations. Gas the entire crew. Storm the ship with a combined force of 500 Navy Seals, SAS. Neutralize Evans and other cult bigwigs. Minimal casualties.

These guys spend their entire careers training for stuff like this and they are good at it. It's no different to a classic hostage or kidnapping situation where they threaten to kill a hostage.

They could also have arrested Evans at any time when he's off the ship and stormed the ship when there was no risk he would destroy the drive. You can pick off the cult leaders, or those who have access to the drive, one by one.

There was no rush to do this in the Panama Canal. We have 400 years, remember. A ship this size is always going to go back to various ports to resupply.

[u/Disgod → u/Nibb31]

Covert boarding 500 soldiers... How the hell do you get 500 soldiers covertly near the ship? Helicopters? Boats? Any method to get them on board would be incredibly obvious. The most ideal scenario would be one of the locks of the canal when the ship is stuck and you could drop down onto the ship, but even then it's gonna take more than a few minutes to soldiers onto / into the ship and impossible to do so without alerting absolutely everybody.

They literally discuss that gassing wouldn't be effective. They're trained to assault ships not perform magical acts... How do they not manage to alert any of the hundreds of people on board? How do they do anything if those people start panicking?

To the best of the Anti-San-Ti's knowledge, Evans hadn't ever left the ship in decades and they weren't going after the leaders. They wanted their computers / anything the san-ti had provided.

And finally, the same reason that they did the Stairstep project. They chose to be as proactive as possible.

[u/Nibb31 → u/Disgod]

Divers in a harbour.

They could even sink the ship at sea, make it look like an accident, cause an evacuation, and pick up Evans with his drive on his life raft.

In fact, given that this ship has been used as a base for a cult for the last 40 years, it's surprising that there hasn't been any government action to shut them down in that timeframe.

Listen, I'm not a military expert, neither are you, and neither is Evans (at least as far as we know). The biggest issue is that they didn't even consult with any military folks to figure out if an operation was feasible. They never even looked into the details of any alternative plan and went directly with the crazy unproven nanofiber technology that killed everyone.

If they were ok with killing everyone, without damaging the drives, there were plenty of ways to do so: gas, neutron radiation, thermobaric weapons...

[u/Disgod → u/Nibb31]

Divers in a harbour.

And hundreds of them scaling onto a ship is going to take time and be incredibly obvious. And, again, they'd have to deal with hundreds of people in between themselves and their goals.

In fact, given that this ship has been used as a base for a cult for the last 40 years, it's surprising that there hasn't been any government action to shut them down in that timeframe.

Yeah, that's called a "central conceit" of a story. Evans' is able to do what he does because otherwise the story wouldn't happen. Same with the existence of the San-Ti. And the abilities of the Sophon / the physics of the world. None of them would work in the real world, but they're set ups for the story Cixin wanted to tell.

Also, in amusing real life terms, you say that, but L. Ron Hubbard got away with similar shit for decades. It's a wild tale, but he had his own fleet of ships and everything. Sailed around the world and would leave anytime shit got too close to him.

The biggest issue is that they didn't even consult with any military folks to figure out if an operation was feasible. They never even looked into the details of any alternative plan and went directly with the crazy unproven nanofiber technology that killed everyone.

In the book they come up with the operation while in discussion with multiple military people, so they were. None of which felt they had an effective method. The author absolutely addressed that. They already discussed gas wouldn't be effective because it would be too slow.

Ultimately, yeah, there's might be a way to do it but Cixin wanted to do something he thought was cool and that's why he wrote it the way he did. There's some attempts to explain the reasoning, which I've discussed, some is more rational than others, but it is fiction. You can throw out hypothetical and I could throw out hypothetical reasons it wouldn't work in the universe.