This will be a very rambling sort of post about the 'Avon should have been able to find Vila - there's nowhere to hide in a stripped down shuttle' idea.
I was thinking about this the other day while I was down the castle hitty-fighty training with the reenactors. (I'd been watching Orbit earlier in the day.) We were playing a training game - 'Combat Hide and Seek' (Much like normal hide and seek but you have to find then kill the people hiding. Then become seekers as well.) and I was the last one left hiding.
Now it takes about 20 minutes to sweep the castle for hiding places (and that's if you're doing it very slowly and carefully) but it took them over an hour to find me. (Um, the reason I was still hiding for an hour after I was the last person left and had won the game was because I didn't belive the seeker when he was wandering round calling 'Leia you're the last one left, you can come out, you've won. Call me paranoid ;-))
So I was curled up quite comfy, thinking about hiding and searching and the way people approach it and I was coming to the conclusion that it's not whether *you* think it's a good hiding place but whether the seeker thinks so. People will look first in the places they'd hide themselves. And people have different strategies. The people I've played combat hide and seek all use one of three strategies...
1) 'The annoying git'. Doesn't bother to hide properly at all. Lurks just around corners and splats the seeker as they come round. Then legs it to another ambush point. This only works if you're confident that you are better than the seeker - if you can't beat them even with the element of suprise then there's no point using this strategy.
2) 'The tactical one'. Finds a good defensible spot (prefereably with a few mates) and waits. Doesn't matter if it's not a great hiding place the important thing is that you can hold off the enemy for a long time. For preference you find somewhere you can retreat from as well.
3) 'The coward'. Find a really good hiding palce where you won't be found for ages. Doesn't matter if it's defensible or not beacuse you're trying to avoid the fight rather than win it. My favourite tactic when I've feeling lazy and the one that had me waiting for an hour to be found. There's a half filled in alcove that used to be an arrow loop before the ground level changed. You can still get in by laying down on you cabk and wriggling in head first, standing up as you go. Once you're in you have to sit on the ledge and tuck your feet up so you can't be seen from the outside. Once they figure out where you are, you're stuffed but people rarely bother to look there.
I am coming to a point...
Avon would almost certainly go for strategy 1. He''s not the sort to wait around ro be attacked. And if you look at the tactics he uses when he's searching for Vila, the way he carefully approaches corners in case Vila's the other side of them, it would work very well against someone who was also using the same strategy.
Fortunately for Vila he's gone for option 3 and found himself a hidey-hole. If Avon found him he'd have no chance but then the whole point is that he doesn't want to be found. I should think he realises he stands even less chance if he confronted Avon openly.
It would never occur to Avon to hide in such a place, where there's no way to defend yourself and no way to retreat if the defence should fail. His mind works very differently from Vila's and I don't think he understands Vila as well as he thinks he does. If he sat calmly and thought about it maybe he'd realise that Vila's tactic would be very different from his own. But he's not exactly thinking very clearly.
Heres ends my long ramble on the Psychology of Hiding.
Leia