Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

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Jakelope13
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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Jakelope13 »

discord wrote:introducing a virus into a ship during combat is actually possible and no, you do not need to have it 'tailor made' as long as you got a similar enough operating system and basic hardware(CPU family.).
Since the Umiak and the Loroi are not only completely separate species, but also mortal enemies, I believe the chance of them having systems capable of interfacing with eachother is going to be very remote. Although both sides would no doubt scour battlefields to pick up working examples of the others' technology, the first thing they'd ensure is that there's no way a Umiak virus would be able to penetrate the security systems of Loroi vessels.
discord wrote:infection through buffer overflow in sensors could be possible, if proper safety precautions has not been taken.
I could imagine that this kind of infection would be best useful in 'spoofing' enemy sensors, but trying to do more than that would be akin to expecting the single, solitary missile you fired at the enemy ship would be able to completely obliterate it. Sure, there's a teeny, tiny chance that'd happen, but you're more likely to be destroyed by return fire.
discord wrote:nanobot cloud intercepting externally available cable and injecting....some handwavium here, but actually possible.
This would be an interesting tactic, but falls under the same category as minefields. Sure, they can be pretty dangerous, but unless you're willing to spend an incredibly large amount of time, and resources, to build a proper, three-dimensional grid, it could only be effectively use in defensive situations (surrounding a planet in one, perhaps?). However, the very nature of the nanobot cloud means that your own ships are as susceptible to damage from the nanobots as the enemy vessels are.
discord wrote:man in the middle attack, intercepting laser(or radio) coms and injecting, damn difficult at most times, but possible.
If you could manage to stealth a ship well enough to slip it into an enemy formation without being spotted (or, more likely, appearing as something it most assuredly is not), this could work. However, I'd imagine that, aboard such a vessel, I'd be less worried about intercepting and injecting things into the enemy transmissions and more prone to use their weapons to obliterate enemy warships.
[quoteall of these are very circumstantial though, not something you can rely upon.
discord wrote:and on tailor made, all it really needs to do is copy itself to random memory address, search for open communication channels, copy/paste. that WILL crash most systems, even if antivirals copes with it the battle will eat CPU cycles and crash running programs making the vessel sub-optimal.
That's all well and good, especially since a virus will often find itself in many, many, many different places than its target. However, by 'tailor-made,' I was referring to the fact that, in order to really do the kind of damage you're aiming for, the targetting parameters, the security systems, the communication protocols, everything about the system you're trying to invade must be known down to the last bit of code. Aboard a civilian vessel, with civilian security systems and precautions, sure, you can cause all kinds of havoc. And, the only way to know the vessels intimately enough is to be aboard the ship itself for long enough to become familiar in its systems. And, most likely, the Umiak who's onboard a Loroi vessel is a prisoner of war, and no competent security detail would allow an enemy combatant close enough, much less enough time, to access the kind of details the Umiak would need to be able to create a virus to severely damage the vessel.
discord wrote:all of these are very circumstantial though, not something you can rely upon
Exactly my point. If it was a case of one Hierarchy ship verses one Union ship, (or, worst case, a Hierarchy warship verses a Union civilian ship) for a prolonged period of time, they might be able to use viral weapons to disable the enemy vessel for capture. But, the time of one-on-one encounters with enemy vessels is usual at the very early stages of a war. The Hierarchy and the Union have been at war too long now to rely on viruses and covert operations to win battles. By this point, it's invading fleets, and coordinating the fleet, from defense to offense, is complicated enough without worrying about accidentally infecting an allied ship with a virus intended for the enemy.

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Arioch
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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Arioch »

Unless a military operating system was written by incompetent morons, it would be very difficult to hack into without intimate knowledge of the system and its vulnerabilities. The idea that someone could just hack into an alien system without knowing anything about it (a la Independence Day) is absurd. Especially when the target is supposedly much more advanced than the attacker.

Computer security is more of a concern when the technology roles are reversed, however. There's a reason the Loroi do not allow Historian software on their systems.
Murica wrote:Would the TCA recruit out of member nations military's? In other word would a US marine be able to join the TCA colonial marines ?
I don't think there would be any rules against it, but it has been my observation that military people are not wild about "free agents." I think it's because in their line of work, loyalty is among the most important qualities in an employee.
Murica wrote:How far is humanity from shields ?
Not close.

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saint of m
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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by saint of m »

What the the likelihood of say a boarding party option? I know this is largely a throwback to when ships were largely sail powered, and we've been very happy to blow each other up since then, but what are the chances?

Say, for example, there is a damaged Umiak ship who's defenses are down, and the rest of the fleet has been reduced to space junk. A captain might want to go take prisoners for interrogation or try and loot some tech to figure out where an enemy base is.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Arioch »

saint of m wrote:What the the likelihood of say a boarding party option? I know this is largely a throwback to when ships were largely sail powered, and we've been very happy to blow each other up since then, but what are the chances?

Say, for example, there is a damaged Umiak ship who's defenses are down, and the rest of the fleet has been reduced to space junk. A captain might want to go take prisoners for interrogation or try and loot some tech to figure out where an enemy base is.
Boarding actions do happen in unusual circumstances, but they are rare. A Loroi or Umiak vessel which is disabled and in danger of being boarded will usually self-destruct rather than be taken.

Jakelope13
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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Jakelope13 »

Cool, Freeman-class fire support destroyers. Possibly used to coordinate huge missile launches, or serve as an anti-frigate/gunship platform?

Also, how much mass do these ships have? There's notation available for them, but there's nothing listed.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Absalom »

Suederwind wrote:
I didn't even realize that Germany had mandatory service. Is it strictly military, or do they have a less short-sighted and tunnel-visioned form of the draft?
Well, Germany had a mandatory military/civilian service for male citizen till 2011. They now try to keep the Bundeswehr running with volunteers only and have suspended conscription, but serving with the armed forces is not very popular here and they have problems to find enough new soldiers. I am however not sure what you meant with the later part.
I've heard that some of the European nations allow draftees to chose a civil service instead of military service. Personally, I think that sort of thing would in general be useful, especially if someone was both willing to institute it, and had some idea of how it could be made useful (e.g., here in the US we could use the massive resulting labor pool to replant mangrove swamps, and other global-warming remediation strategies; on the military end it could also be useful if we decided to begin another draw-down, by pre-training people to be drone operators, so that we could gear-up with "cheap disposables" if something too big popped up, just stick them into a "sub-military" system so that they didn't have to be given benefits, beyond maybe some college).

discord wrote:introducing a virus into a ship during combat is actually possible and no, you do not need to have it 'tailor made' as long as you got a similar enough operating system and basic hardware(CPU family.).

infection through buffer overflow in sensors could be possible, if proper safety precautions has not been taken.
nanobot cloud intercepting externally available cable and injecting....some handwavium here, but actually possible.
man in the middle attack, intercepting laser(or radio) coms and injecting, damn difficult at most times, but possible.
all of these are very circumstantial though, not something you can rely upon.

and on tailor made, all it really needs to do is copy itself to random memory address, search for open communication channels, copy/paste. that WILL crash most systems, even if antivirals copes with it the battle will eat CPU cycles and crash running programs making the vessel sub-optimal.
Arioch's right, it isn't quite so simple.

First, your buffer overflow: if it happens, then it'll get noticed fairly soon, at which point either the hardware will be isolated, or the entire ship class will be retired from combat service. Either of those will tend to have pretty bad effects on a supplier's future deals, so the suppliers of the sensors will tend to keep that sort of thing from happening. To be frank, it's not all that likely anyways. Buffer overflows happen when there's too much data for a buffer. In hardware, this results in old data getting replaced with new data, which can cause a completely different issue. In software, this requires a way to trick the code into writing more data than it should, and certain data containment mechanisms (e.g. file FIFOs) are inherently immune to this, period. Any attempt to write more data to those will simply fail. The only way that I can think of to trick the software into writing too much data into a buffer is to present too many targets for radar, but this is rather dubious, since it's likely enough that the data in question will be streamed to a handler, instead of dealt with directly in the driver. That means that you're passing it through a FIFO or other containment/packaging mechanism, which in turn means that it will be dealt with in a bunch of chunks instead of one piece. By the time that it gets anywhere that might combine several pieces of information it's already been heavily massaged and analyzed, and will basically be inserted into a system that that's intended to track a star-system's worth of contacts: overwhelming the software is not going to be realistic, because it doubtlessly will have been written to deal with orbital rings (like Saturn's), and thus will be capable of dealing with far more objects than you're capable of causing it to detect. Besides which, by that point it isn't a buffer overflow attack, it's a DOS attack.

Second, in this context, "tailor made" means "made for this CPU family and OS family". Those buffer overflows that you've heard about? Those worked because they were aimed at specific programs (stereotypically internet browsers) that didn't check the size of an input string against the buffer that it was stored in. The functions responsible have been deprecated, and eventually will be removed, functions with proper safeguards have been inserted into their place, and "guard pages" have been created to prevent these attacks from ever succeeding (it's actually pretty simple: buffer overflows involve writing so much data that you replace some of the executable code, or a return address stored in a data area, and the attacking program CANNOT choose where the data gets written to until after the attack has actually succeeded, so by introducing a "guard page" that prevents writes from going any further, you prevent the attack from working).

Third, nanobot attack requires sufficiently low delta-v that the nanobots aren't destroyed by the ionizing radiation that is their target starship (ordinary light from the nearby star may pose a problem as well). You might be able to get it to work, but surrounding your starship in a thin magnetically retained cloud of plasma should eliminate any realistic chance of success. After you successfully land your nanobots, you also require them to have the capability of eating through whatever amount of shielding (both electrical, and chemical: space is mostly empty, but there is some stuff out there, as demonstrated by the proplyd, and there's vacuum losses, and there's skimming close to a planetary atmosphere as a shortcut, and there's glancing hits, and there's accidents in the construction and maintenance of the vessel: every data or power line is going to have some shielding, and likely be inside the hull, even on non-combat-zone cargo vessels, because doing otherwise promotes "OSHA compliance" problems, such as bad fried-technician/successful-repair ratios, an ever important statistic). It is only after dealing with all of those obstacles that your nanobots can hope to actually be of use. They're a lot better for low-acceleration deep-space settings than for Outsider, though they might still work. Also, I'm not certain how I feel about hacking "with an axe" (or acid, or base, or cutting torch, as the case may be) being interpreted in the "computer hacking" sense, but whatever.

Fourth (there was a relevant typo), "man in the middle" for laser comms basically requires some sort of stealth in space, because all that you need to label a communication as "discard" is to know that there's a realistic chance that it was spoofed out there by the enemy... and knowing that the enemy was in the correct line of view to do such a spoof at the right time should be quite detectable if you have sensors up. This can, however, lead to a less orthodox DOS attack, so it isn't like it's impossible (almost impossible due to encryption, but not completely), and even if it can't succeed you can at least introduce more noise and latency into the enemy communications.

The only other big hack (at least that I recall) is the social-engineering "hack", wherein you trick an insider into giving you access (a common method of this attack is calling tech support on an account so you can trick a low-level tech-support person into giving you a password), or convince an insider into doing your work for you: neither is exactly impossible in Outsider, but it's highly unlikely (and if Stillstorm knows much about cyber security, which she probably does for the sake of containing Historian AIs, then she probably has thought about this in regards to Jardin).

So, mostly what you can do in the hacking sphere is Denial-Of-Service attacks, not take-over attacks. Anything else is either too unlikely, or requires direct hardware access.

Jakelope13 wrote:Cool, Freeman-class fire support destroyers. Possibly used to coordinate huge missile launches, or serve as an anti-frigate/gunship platform?

Also, how much mass do these ships have? There's notation available for them, but there's nothing listed.
I'm going to guess that the width is anything from 150 to 50 meters, depending on design team; the mass presumably varies similarly. Judging from some US military design projects, when it says "few details are known", it actually means "every primary contractor is suggesting something completely unrelated to what every other primary contractor has suggested, and it's all classified".

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by cacambo43 »

I was looking at the concept artwork for the Terran spacecraft and was puzzled. Given our level of digital displays today it seems odd that Terran ships would not also have protected "bridges" well inside the ship with a super-definition display. Or can we just not ever resist a window seat, even in 2160?

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Murica »

You said there are multiple nations on most if not all worlds right? Are border war common? If so how often ?

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by discord »

absalom: just wanted to point it was not impossible, just damn unlikely.
and on sensors, it would require two 'faults', one being the sensor system itself, allowing external signal to eff up the signal to the computers, second being a weakness in...drivers or sensor interpretation software to allow the hijacking, again, unlikely but plausible, especially since either of those faults without the other is not exploitable means that they can sail through testing and be tried and true separately but together they have a serious flaw.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Arioch »

Jakelope13 wrote:Also, how much mass do these ships have? There's notation available for them, but there's nothing listed.
Deadweight Mass is listed for about half of the Loroi ships, but not yet for the Terrans or all but one of the Umiak ships.
cacambo43 wrote:I was looking at the concept artwork for the Terran spacecraft and was puzzled. Given our level of digital displays today it seems odd that Terran ships would not also have protected "bridges" well inside the ship with a super-definition display. Or can we just not ever resist a window seat, even in 2160?
A military vessel would have a protected internal CIC in addition to the windowed bridge, like real naval warships do today. The reason the Terran vessels don't have elaborate projected displays like the Loroi is to emphasize both the relative difference in technology between them and the Spartan accommodations of the Terran vessels.
Murica wrote:You said there are multiple nations on most if not all worlds right? Are border war common? If so how often ?
Territorial disputes and border tensions are common, but full-scale "wars" are very rare, both because most colonies have limited resources for such activity, and because a genuine war would generate a lot of pressure from the international community (including possible boycotts which could be devastating to a colony dependent on foreign trade and supply). What's more common is small-scale clashes between local settlers or security forces, like you might see in Kashmir or the West Bank. There has been a long history of skirmishes between Yinghuo and the Tharsis independents along the length of Mariner Valley on Mars, and there was a stretch of incidents both on the ground and in space during the early colonization of Aldea.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Jakelope13 »

Arioch wrote:A military vessel would have a protected internal CIC in addition to the windowed bridge, like real naval warships do today. The reason the Terran vessels don't have elaborate projected displays like the Loroi is to emphasize both the relative difference in technology between them and the Spartan accommodations of the Terran vessels.
Since the TCA is commissioning a new Battlecruiser-type vessel, would it come equipped with a Flag deck for an admiral? Or do other ships have a flag deck?

Actually, how many admirals are there in the Terran Colonial Fleet that started within it? Or are the majority of admirals in the Fleet drawn from the navies of the TCA's member nations?

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Arioch »

Jakelope13 wrote:Since the TCA is commissioning a new Battlecruiser-type vessel, would it come equipped with a Flag deck for an admiral? Or do other ships have a flag deck?
All of the heavy cruisers have flag facilities, but whether this would be a separate bridge or deck is not clear.
Jakelope13 wrote:Actually, how many admirals are there in the Terran Colonial Fleet that started within it? Or are the majority of admirals in the Fleet drawn from the navies of the TCA's member nations?
It's probably a significant number. I'm always suprised how many admirals the US Navy has; it's almost as many admirals as it has active-duty vessels (one count says 216 admirals to 285 vessels).

The TCA members nations don't have military space fleets to draw admirals from. As I mentioned above, I don't think there would be rules against hiring free agents from other services, but I think in most cases the military prefers to promote its own people.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Gudo »

Arioch wrote:
Jakelope13 wrote:Actually, how many admirals are there in the Terran Colonial Fleet that started within it? Or are the majority of admirals in the Fleet drawn from the navies of the TCA's member nations?
It's probably a significant number. I'm always suprised how many admirals the US Navy has; it's almost as many admirals as it has active-duty vessels (one count says 216 admirals to 285 vessels).
That's because the Navy has alot more than just ships. There are admirals for Navy Air Forces, submarines, Navy installations, special forces, intel services, etc. The Chief of Chaplains is a two-star. Then there's the strategic, over-all pentagon staff admirals too. But when you look at actual "surface" admrials, there's something closer to 6 or so ships per admiral.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Arioch »

It makes sense logically when you consider the size of the organization; it's just one of those perception things that seems surprising.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

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How large are the UAV fighters that the TCA use? Are they deployed from a ship's shuttle bays, or are there UAV hardpoints on the hull of the ship, so when the drones launch, they detach themselves from the hull? Or are the UAVs used more akin to a reconnaissance drone, sneaking into enemy formations and gathering data for its mothership to use?

For that matter, what kind of weapons would the drones use in combat? Lasers, missiles, mass-drivers? I'd imagine that they'd have to refuel a few number of times during combat, even more so when using mass-driver cannons.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Arioch »

Jakelope13 wrote:How large are the UAV fighters that the TCA use? Are they deployed from a ship's shuttle bays, or are there UAV hardpoints on the hull of the ship, so when the drones launch, they detach themselves from the hull? Or are the UAVs used more akin to a reconnaissance drone, sneaking into enemy formations and gathering data for its mothership to use?

For that matter, what kind of weapons would the drones use in combat? Lasers, missiles, mass-drivers? I'd imagine that they'd have to refuel a few number of times during combat, even more so when using mass-driver cannons.
The defense drones are deployed aboard a few large space stations for emergency defense against small craft and missiles. They are typically launched from hangar bays. They are not deployed aboard any ships, though there's no reason they couldn't be if it was decided that they would be useful. They are armed with laser cannon, and there are options to arm them with missiles.

I don't think such drones would be useful for recon, as in space you can usually see the enemy just as well from half a million kilometers away as you can from ten thousand kilometers away. Unless the enemy hides out of line-of-sight, but then your drone has to go out of line-of-sight too, and you won't be able to communicate with it. Unless you have a relay, in which case you'd be using the relay for recon instead of sending a drone...

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

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Arioch wrote:I don't think such drones would be useful for recon, as in space you can usually see the enemy just as well from half a million kilometers away as you can from ten thousand kilometers away. Unless the enemy hides out of line-of-sight, but then your drone has to go out of line-of-sight too, and you won't be able to communicate with it. Unless you have a relay, in which case you'd be using the relay for recon instead of sending a drone...
True, but what about enemy ships using ECM or using ships to physically hide their forces from line-of-sight sensors? In that case, a stealthed recon drone could be useful, as it could easily position itself 'above' the enemy formation, relaying back a more accurate count of enemy vessels. Or, possibly as some sort of mobile jamming system, confusing enemy targetting systems and rendering them useless as they start shooting at targets that aren't there.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Arioch »

Jakelope13 wrote:True, but what about enemy ships using ECM or using ships to physically hide their forces from line-of-sight sensors? In that case, a stealthed recon drone could be useful, as it could easily position itself 'above' the enemy formation, relaying back a more accurate count of enemy vessels. Or, possibly as some sort of mobile jamming system, confusing enemy targetting systems and rendering them useless as they start shooting at targets that aren't there.
Recon and intelligence satellites and probes will have many uses, but when I said "such drones" I was talking about unmanned fighter craft. Such things are a bit expensive for the job of information gathering. There are cases in which "reconnaissance in force" will have practical application, but I don't think this is one of them.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by junk »

Murica wrote:So in other words humanity is inexperienced outgunned and outnumber do we have anything going for us?
Do remember that humanity does have at least some experience in more or less constant warfare in some parts of the world up to today. And most likely for a fair bit beyond. I'd not be surprised if we were one of the more aggressive and warlike species out there. Which makes us more similar to both the Krayak and Loroi in many ways. As far as I can see from the codex, many of the client species of both were not.

While much of that warfare is fairly small scale it does create massive changes in tactics, doctrine and many other things. On top of that we learn fairly quickly.

Just compare british authorities on the civilian front between ww1 and ww2 and how much much better were things like food, nutrition, population preparedness organised.

Of course on the current tech level humanity is in, it would probably more less be wiped out by any middle sized player in the surrounding space, without actually us actually seeing them. The only benefit we seem to have is fairly frenetic expansion which is not all that dissimilar from the colonial era of - uh suitable rock, let's put a flag on that.

So I'd wager, as a species we'd be very resilient to an attempt to eradicate us. As a civilisation though, we'd be boned.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by saint of m »

How long could one of these ships stay out for? Say they have to be out longer, or are caught in a cosmic storm, or have to be extra stealthy to avoid being blasted into stardust, or quarantine due to an alien infection?

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