Scrith? Well, okay, if you want to economise on the job, but it’s been experimentally demonstrated that you can slam a GP hull into it at 770 miles per second and you’ll leave a bloody great dent in it. So I urge my far-seeing friends to beware of falling into the lowest-bidder trap here.
OK, scrith inside a general products hull, equipped with a threat-activated stasis field.
The hell with the General Products hull material–I’m thinking of machining the disks out of fruitcake.
You need a special fruitcake lathe for that. You can borrow mine if you like.
I think the best bet is to make the disks out of information: Run the whole thing as a computer simulation, and instruct the monks who are going to be making the moves to transfer it to updated hardware every so often. This also has the advantage that the same system which stores the current state can also remind the user what the current move should be, which would save you losing a few æons if your monks forget what peg they’re moving to.
Failing that, I think the best disks would be small molecules, something comparable to a benzene ring (but not actually a benzene ring, as I’ll explain momentarily). You could replace some of the hydrogens with halogens, to label the “size” of the disks. The problem here, of course, is how you make the pegs, since even a single-file chain of atoms would be too large to fit through the hole comfortably. The solution is to use cosmic strings for the pegs. Hence why I said “not benzene”: You want something which has its lowest energy state corresponding to the appropriate deficit angle (so your disks won’t spontaneously fall off the pegs).