Regarding the last question “To quote William K. Harvey, am I asking the wrong questions?” and multi layered ciphers I agree with that. Keeping in mind that K1 and K2 don’t use 26 x 26 alphabets, they use 10x (palimpsest) and 8x (abscissa) and each letter is only ever substituted for a maximum of 4 other letters it makes the math a simpler task with multi cipher where K1,2,3,4 plaintext or ciphertext can be used twice when the possibilities are smaller. As soon as you add the extra letter and change it to LAYERTWO the plaintext substitutes to more than 4 possible letters on the IDBYROWS letters. I know its not major thing but if it was all done by hand keeping possibilities manageable is very important. So using IDBYROWS instead of LAYERTWO could take a lot of the work out of whatever has been done. I have stayed with IDBYROWS all along. Clues have been provided all the way in K1 and K2 even if they were not apparant at the time, LAYERTWO gives no clue other than using a new system, IDBYROWS says to me (as well as reminding me on databases) it’s the rows and not the letters you need to look at.
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