Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Discussion regarding the Outsider webcomic, science, technology and science fiction.

Moderator: Outsider Moderators

Post Reply
User avatar
Gudo
Posts: 158
Joined: Mon Mar 21, 2011 9:54 pm

Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Gudo »

Murica wrote:For those of you that don't get it the writing arm thing was referencing paper work
I was actually wondering about that :) I thought you might have mistyped "make sure it's NOT your writing arm."
I don't particularly like going out to eat when i'm in uniform because no matter where I go I've got people thanking me and trying to pay for my meal.
I know exactly what you mean. "Thank you for your service" has to be my least favorite phrase. Although, you do make an execellent point in favor of any TCA billet being regarded as prestigious by those not in the know.

[Edit]Needing to stop for gas in uniform is just terrible.[/Edit]

User avatar
Charlie
Posts: 257
Joined: Tue Jan 22, 2013 9:04 pm
Location: Somewhere in Middle Lane
Contact:

Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Charlie »

Gudo wrote:
Charlie wrote:
All of the American branches don`t accept any sort of non-citizen, I checked; them all.
All of the services do in fact accept non-citizens. I'm actually serving with a few currently (one from Africa, though I'm not sure which country.) However, they don't accept citizens of certain other countries, i.e. Cuba, Iran, Russia, etc.
Enlistment Standards/Citizenship
Those persons were already in the US and likely on their way to proper citizenship. That or they had been in the US for a certain period as full immigrates. I did speak speak to both the US Army Online Recruiters and the Marines, they said both roughly the same thing. To sum it up, I need a special type of working Visa and papers from the embassy that show my intention to immigrate on a permanent basis. All of that costs quite a bit of Dollars, not to mention flights expenses and living expenses, which in the US is considerable.

Contrasted the British, where all I need is a one year standard working class visa, and I can join as South Africa is still a Common Wealth Country.
Gudo wrote:There is a certain type of person who finds honor in service, but by and large, western society doesn't feel that way. It might be brave and patriotic to join the military, but not particularly honorable. But not more so than most other professions. In the future, I anticipate nationalist trends will continue to fade, particularly as humans escape the earth. By the time we get to the Outsider time frame, I expect nationalism to be largely extinct. Without any concept of a warrior caste and with very little national identity, I would guess that military service in the future wouldn't be any more honorable than say, teaching. Certainly far braver, but not more honorable.
Perhaps a difference in social standards then, I know of many young men my age who like myself would go tomorrow to a recruiting station were it not for racial bias. Not because we are looking for a fight or glory in war but because our fathers did it and we should too. It`s hard to explain, it`s like a calling. We aren`t warmongers, it`s just something that should be done.
Gudo wrote:Ah, I think I might not be using "honor" in the same sense as you. Regardless, simply serving in the TCA wouldn't be particularly prestigious. Cheifly because, unlike the Loroi, Terrans do have enlisted ranks. The vast majority of service members would be enlisted and in support billets. Routing requestion requests are no more prestigious if you do it beyond the solar system or in some corporate office in Colorado. Only the most visible of billets would have any prestige. I'm thinking Scout Corps, Admirals and special warfare billets. And even then, only a few of those billets.
This would be a mistake of mine. I did not mean chivalrous honor, prestigious type of honor. You are correct however, not everyone will be the Captain of a mighty ship. But consider a Janitor at NASA. He isn`t an Astronought, but when asked about his job he'll say he works at NASA. He might not be particularly proud of his own job, but I think he;d be proud to be working at NASA.
Emcha wrote:that's pretty messed up as I've known at least a couple dozen US soldiers who are foreign nationals that enlisted to fast-track their citizenship paperwork. most of them canadians, many from various african countries, and one from germany who enlisted in my NG regiment at 17, and after he came home from a deployment found that the Bundswehr was looking for him due to their mandatory service, lol.
Citizenship and Legal Immigrant are different things, it would difficult and expensive but I would be able to obtain Legal Immigrant Status.
A surprised view of things would be;

Citizen = American
Legal Immigrant = Foreign Person living and working in the USA, perhaps looking to be an American with all the full rights; such as voting.
Anything else = non-American


Also, I just wanted to make it clear that I didn`t want to join any Army with the intention of killing and glory in the style of Call of Honor: Medal of Duty - Erroneous Modernized Combat 2
Although, in saying that I probably just reinforce the Play Station Generation Image.
No sorcery lies beyond my grasp. - Rubick, the Grand Magus

Absalom
Posts: 718
Joined: Sat Sep 24, 2011 4:33 am

Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Absalom »

Arioch wrote:
Jakelope13 wrote:How were the extra-solar planets colonized? Were the survey vessels equipped with an FTL drive, and the following (initial) colony expedition made the trip via sublight speeds (with some form of cryostasis to cut down on lifesupport) or were the colony ships also equipped with an FTL drive?
The colonies were set up by many sorties of ordinary FTL freighters and transports. I don't know why folks seem to imagine some mammoth colony ship that does it in one shot. 4X space games, perhaps?
Presumably. In some ways it makes sense, given the the first actual installation should have enough self-support capacity to last even if a delivery or two fails to arrive for whatever reason. However, I would assume that such a facility would be possible with 100 or less (very possibly ~20) people, whereas for the proper "several thousand colonist" colony ship I think you'll need it to be impractical to do things in small increments, whether because of the time it takes to move around, or because you're setting up so many colonies at once that they can't be resupplied on a regular basis.

Incidentally, I don't recall you speaking against the "big colony ship" idea before, so that might be a contributor. One or two lines in the Insider might be relevant.
Arioch wrote:
Absalom wrote:How large of a strap-on reactor would it take to counter-act this problem?
If you take a destroyer hull and outfit it with cruiser engines, then you haven't really got a destroyer any more... you've got something that's nearly as expensive as a cruiser. That kind of defeats the whole appeal of the Mjolnir-Destroyer idea, which is that you can make more of the things because they're cheaper.
I was thinking less of the thrust units, and instead just the reactors themselves. Of course, if the reactors make up the majority of the drive units then this wouldn't help much. Even then, I was also assuming that the hull would be physically modified (either by raising the forward section, tilting the drives, or both) to maintain proper mass-placement.

Jakelope13 wrote:
Arioch wrote:The colonies were set up by many sorties of ordinary FTL freighters and transports. I don't know why folks seem to imagine some mammoth colony ship that does it in one shot. 4X space games, perhaps?

Sublight starships take centuries to get anywhere. The story is set only 150 years in the future.
It's probably something harking back to the Age of Sail, or the old Viking years, where it took months (sometimes, even years) to get anywhere, fraught with peril and adventure. There's a certain poetry in those kinds of stories. Not to mention which, it's not that much of a stretch to imagine that the very earliest FTL drives weren't exactly reliable. So, when launching a ship with the capability to land a self-sustaining colony on a new world, it probably didn't hurt to send it the one way that was cost-effective/safe.
There's two ways to look at reliability:
1) "You might die": probably you just don't send the colony;
2) "You might end up in a unintended part of the jump zone": the jump zone is going to be far away from the part of the system where you want to setup the colony (as I best recall, Sol-system jump-zones start around Jupiter or Saturn and extend AWAY from the Sun), so this won't mean anything other than a few more days (or hours) of transit time.

Either way, reliability either kills the project outright, or doesn't matter. Besides which, you should be able to build a small manufacturing base with less than a hundred people, at which point you can start iteratively improving and expanding your facilities. If you're on a planetary surface then you shouldn't have much trouble finding core resources, and if you're on an airless Luna-analogue then the worst you'll encounter is a relative lack of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen, all things that can be compensated for by only using robots for EVA, and saving as much volatiles as you can from your mining.

Thousand-plus populations matter, but only for reproductive and sustained technological purposes, they don't matter for the first few years (or decades).
Jakelope13 wrote:
Arioch wrote:The jump drive doesn't draw power unless you're using it. Omitting the jump drive saves you some cost and weight, but then the vessel is limited to defending the system it's built at (Sol).
Extremely true... unless you built some kind of supercarrier to ferry those ships from system to system.

I'm drawing from David Weber's LAC idea (LACs, or Light Attack Craft, were too small to effectively mount an FTL drive, but were perfect for patrolling star systems; in his later novels, however, the LAC went from being a smaller starship to being akin to a very large fighter, the first new flight wrapped around a superheavy laser cannon, designed for puncturing battlecruiser armor, and were ferried in dreadnaught/superdreadnaught carriers)
Notes:
1) Outsider FTL isn't as friendly with subjecting large areas to FTL travel as the Honor Harrington series is, so motherships for "large boat" craft like the Highland, or maybe Hidden Dagger (as compared to "small boat" craft like Loroi fighters, torpedoes, and missiles) aren't as practical in Outsider (aren't kilometer-class vessels the norm in Honor Harrington books? The largest listed Loroi ship looks to be a hair over 4/5 of a kilometer);
2) No need to mention how LACs changed, drop some of the self-sufficiency from most Loroi vessels and I think you'd get something similar in usage to a LAC (though whether there'd be a point in such a change I don't know).
Jakelope13 wrote:Plus, if someone on one on Aldea wanted a starship, but without a jump drive, wouldn't they need a very large freighter (possibly capable of delivering multiple of these single-system vessels) to be able to transport it from Sol?
I assume that they'd buy the drives and reactor, have them shipped to Aldea, and fitted to an Aldea-built hull. The only reason why we "can't" build Titanium ship hulls on Earth is that we don't want to bother with the vacuum chambers that you need to do it right (note: the Russians have bothered for some of their submarines).

Arioch wrote:
Murica wrote:If I remember correctly humans make use of drones for small craft like fighters and bombers. How would these compete with their umiak and lorii counterparts?
The defense drones are armed with lasers, so they have similar basic characteristics to a Loroi fighter, but the human version would be inferior in firepower, acceleration and endurance (as you would expect). The Umiak do not have an equivalent.
I'd think they would carry some on their gunboats to help counter Loroi fighters, is Loroi ECM too good for it to be worth the effort?

Charlie wrote:
Murica wrote:Out of 25000 people 100% aren't going to volenteer actually people who volenteer for military service are a very small minority of the population
I give my left arm to be able to serve in a western Army, all the better if I could do so in an air-force.

I'd wager all most every person of that time would feel the samel;
Join the TCA, see the universe.
Sooo much better than "Join the militia, see your county!" And no, I didn't forget the 'r' ;) .

Jakelope13 wrote:Also, has there been a development in the way of holographic projection technology? It looked like the bridge crew of the Bellarmine were using display panels with a touch-based interface.
Holographic projection is likely to always be more touchy than the equivalent 2d display, which means that in most use cases (there may be exceptions, such as radar displays) the military will probably say "we'll never stop adjusting it, get us 2d displays instead".

Jakelope13 wrote:True, sooner or later, space will become somewhat boring. And, sure, there's going to be a percentage of the population that stops caring about space. Usually, those are the people who are so busy, who have so much going on, that what happens in space doesn't matter to them. That's true of today. Sea-bound vessels have been around for upwards of tens of thousands of years. By now, taking a boat has become a matter of convenience, rather than a matter of adventure.

But the thing that is so wonderful about space, and especially colonizing new worlds, is that there's just so much of it, there's always that sense of discovery, of wonder, when people find something they didn't know about. I mean, take a look at Outsider. There is a massive amount of information, numerous races, political intrigue, the animalistic thrill of war, and the push and pull of territorial disputes... and this is all taking place in just one arm of the Milky Way. No one knows everything within just that region of space, and there's even more just beyond the borders.

So, as you noted, space is exciting right now, in 2013. Imagine that same feeling, except repeated on the other five planets that we inhabit. There is going to be a lot of people lining up who want to find out more about the space we live in, and I can practically guarantee that the TCA, when the Six Worlds of Humanity finally shift from domestic expansion into total war, there'll be a line at every recruiting station in every city.
There seem to be people who get excited at seminars about multi-level-marketing companies, so I feel safe in saying that if you bother to advertise and design correctly, then finding people who'll get excited about joining the TCA won't be a problem.

In the real world, of course, you'll probably not be aiming at the easily excitable portion of the population (seriously, are you telling me that you want to trust them with anything fragile?), but instead the portion of the population that's actually interested in fields that are relevant to the job. I'd like to think that in 100 years, Google will finally have convinced HR that the ability to act like we're applying to our favorite sports team and actually have a chance is a sign of naivete, rather than competence. I'm certain that the TCA has good pay, focuses on (likely extremely time-consuming, since they have an Academy where they can administer them) tests to weed out the incompetent instead of posting the highest requirements that they can, and mostly gets people by pointing out what kind of duties successful applicants will be performing (you only have a SPACE!!! ENSIGN!!! mop the deck for punishment, a good-sized ship will probably have lots of cleaning robots, but only one janitor).

Charlie wrote:
Murica wrote:Really? Course at the point in human history outsider is space will be a lot less exiting right now in 2013 it's awesome but it's pretty much a fact that humans get bored easily and with space becoming less and less exiting soon they will stop getting so many new recruits

And trust me I know from experience western militaries are not something to get exited about also if you give up anything make sure it's your writing arm :lol:
I think it would be more like Pilots today, an incredibly cool job that requires hard work and metal faculties it achieve, it still would be very cool not at all boring.

I have some small understanding of military life, National Service was mandatory here in my fathers day.
My understanding is that military service is less "cool" (unless you get a technology-focused post, I suppose), and more monotonous-to-professional. "Cool" is what lead to the US military forming a lot of "Snake eater" SF units, which in turn resulted in quickly loosing the romance of the whole thing (we're doing reasonably good again, but a whole generation had rather dubious experiences with special forces sometime in the rough vicinity of Vietnam).
Charlie wrote:The French Foreign Legion is only an option really if you have had previous military experience. All of the American branches don`t accept any sort of non-citizen, I checked; them all.
A shame, but it's not as if I don't understand. I realize that it probably doesn't come across from a foreign perspective, but us Americans are actually still very isolationist. This is, as far as I can tell, a good deal of the reason for our immigration policies: at the core, we really want to sort of "turtle up" (personally I think we should have a lot more immigration as a general economic policy, but I don't seem to have a common opinion there). The outcome of WW2 + the Cold War is realistically probably the single biggest reason why we're so active on the world stage, we decided that we needed to for self-defense, and we're still reevaluating on a cultural level, since it's only been about a generation since the Cold War ended.

It's not all bad, though. This innate isolationism is (in my mind, at least) the single biggest reason why e.g. the Philipines and Cuba are independent: they're ultimately foreign lands, so we automatically assume that they're just not going to be part of the US. Were it otherwise, a proper "American Empire" would have been much more likely to emerge than the unofficial hegemony (to the extent that it's even that) which actually exists (this is why Vietnam was never going to be the 51st state).
Charlie wrote:But setting aside my own woes, I would speculate that any position in TCA would be quite a personal honor.
I have no doubt. The TCA will be in the position of having their pick of the cream of the crop, and depending on how the Academy system works might even train a large portion of the cream-of-the-crop that they don't pick as well, so working for them would be rather like getting a big rubber stamp saying that you Know What You're Doing (tm 2107, registered to TCA).

Murica wrote:Why didn't it quote you?
You have to hand-edit quotes if you don't want the entire thing. The leading quote tag isn't inserted if it's missing, which is honestly a feature, not a flaw. This post of mine made heavy use of no such muckery complicating things, for example.

Emcha wrote:and one from germany who enlisted in my NG regiment at 17, and after he came home from a deployment found that the Bundswehr was looking for him due to their mandatory service, lol.
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?
Emcha wrote:a good example to look to might be the german army between the armistice and the buildup to WW2: back then they fully intended to expand their army almost overnight, so they required every soldier to be able to assume the responsibilities of two stations above their own. this meant that when they expanded their ranks like three fold they already had a huge corps of leaders for them.

that might be what the TCA is going for; getting the best in first so they have a solid foundation of experienced personnel so that when they do start expanding they can bring in as many wrench turners and boiler room techs as they want without degrading their leadership.

you build a military from the bottom up, and train it from the top down.
I suspect that the TCA is just in a situation where they get more applicants than openings, so they can afford to be choosy. The real question to me (admittedly, this may have been answered before) is if everyone from the Academy is required to serve at the TCA's discretion, and if not, whether there are tuition/fees that aren't waived if they decline to serve.
Emcha wrote:maybe within the TCA, but the average citizen doesn't know what a soldier's job is. don't know about elsewhere but I don't particularly like going out to eat when i'm in uniform because no matter where I go I've got people thanking me and trying to pay for my meal. I know, first_world_problems.jpg, but i'd imagine just walking through a spaceport in dress uniform would generate a perception of "there he goes, homeboy's gonna fight aelyums" in the onlooking civilians, even if the dressed-up yahoo in question is just a water purification tech who'll never see combat.
I'd say that it has to be better than what happened with Vietnam, except that I can't help suspecting that it feels like being an animal in a zoo...

Charlie wrote:
Gudo wrote:All of the services do in fact accept non-citizens. I'm actually serving with a few currently (one from Africa, though I'm not sure which country.) However, they don't accept citizens of certain other countries, i.e. Cuba, Iran, Russia, etc.
Enlistment Standards/Citizenship
Those persons were already in the US and likely on their way to proper citizenship. That or they had been in the US for a certain period as full immigrates. I did speak speak to both the US Army Online Recruiters and the Marines, they said both roughly the same thing. To sum it up, I need a special type of working Visa and papers from the embassy that show my intention to immigrate on a permanent basis. All of that costs quite a bit of Dollars, not to mention flights expenses and living expenses, which in the US is considerable.
Some areas are better than others (e.g. Oklahoma, where I live), but I'm under the impression that the more expensive places have faster INS results as well (e.g. California, which I understand to be marginally cheaper than places that import basically everything, like Japan...).
Charlie wrote:Contrasted the British, where all I need is a one year standard working class visa, and I can join as South Africa is still a Common Wealth Country.
Yeah, I don't think we have an equivalent of the Commonwealth, and if we do, then the only half-way populous nation in it is the Philippines (or Canada and Mexico), which isn't even the right continental plate for you.
Charlie wrote:
Gudo wrote:There is a certain type of person who finds honor in service, but by and large, western society doesn't feel that way. It might be brave and patriotic to join the military, but not particularly honorable. But not more so than most other professions. In the future, I anticipate nationalist trends will continue to fade, particularly as humans escape the earth. By the time we get to the Outsider time frame, I expect nationalism to be largely extinct. Without any concept of a warrior caste and with very little national identity, I would guess that military service in the future wouldn't be any more honorable than say, teaching. Certainly far braver, but not more honorable.
Perhaps a difference in social standards then, I know of many young men my age who like myself would go tomorrow to a recruiting station were it not for racial bias. Not because we are looking for a fight or glory in war but because our fathers did it and we should too. It`s hard to explain, it`s like a calling. We aren`t warmongers, it`s just something that should be done.
The Vietnam-era anti-war and counter-cultural movements did a real number on us, and indeed, we have much less culture. It would be nice to know how minority status (and non-minority status, for that matter) would have gone if we'd skipped the hippie portions of societal liberalization...
Charlie wrote:
Gudo wrote:Ah, I think I might not be using "honor" in the same sense as you. Regardless, simply serving in the TCA wouldn't be particularly prestigious. Cheifly because, unlike the Loroi, Terrans do have enlisted ranks. The vast majority of service members would be enlisted and in support billets. Routing requestion requests are no more prestigious if you do it beyond the solar system or in some corporate office in Colorado. Only the most visible of billets would have any prestige. I'm thinking Scout Corps, Admirals and special warfare billets. And even then, only a few of those billets.
This would be a mistake of mine. I did not mean chivalrous honor, prestigious type of honor. You are correct however, not everyone will be the Captain of a mighty ship. But consider a Janitor at NASA. He isn`t an Astronought, but when asked about his job he'll say he works at NASA. He might not be particularly proud of his own job, but I think he;d be proud to be working at NASA.
He'd probably also list a degree, I understand that NASA is even strict in weird choices of field like that (sterilization of some workspaces, sure, but the guy that cleans the bathrooms?).

Suederwind
Posts: 772
Joined: Thu Jul 05, 2012 8:55 pm

Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Suederwind »

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.
Forum RP: Cydonia Rising
[RP]Cydonia Rising [IC]

User avatar
Arioch
Site Admin
Posts: 4486
Joined: Sat Mar 05, 2011 4:19 am
Location: San Jose, CA
Contact:

Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Arioch »

Absalom wrote:I'd think they would carry some on their gunboats to help counter Loroi fighters, is Loroi ECM too good for it to be worth the effort?
The gunboats themselves are the Umiak counter to fighters and missiles. The Umiak do not have a fighter equivalent.

User avatar
saint of m
Posts: 137
Joined: Sat Jul 30, 2011 8:10 am

Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by saint of m »

With all the computers on a ship, it would seem like a viable target to introduce a computer virus to wreck havoc. How advance would their protection be from hackers and viruses?

Jakelope13
Posts: 48
Joined: Sat Sep 07, 2013 6:31 am

Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Jakelope13 »

saint of m wrote:With all the computers on a ship, it would seem like a viable target to introduce a computer virus to wreck havoc. How advance would their protection be from hackers and viruses?
My guess is that they'd do it the old-fashioned way - they lock down their communication protocols, using comm lasers to talk to friendly vessels.

Sure, viruses wreak havoc when they infect your system, but by and large, you have to 'allow' it to enter your system in the first place (infected email, infected link, visiting a malware site, plugging in an infected USB, etc.). Thing is, for a virus to be truly dangerous, it has to be tailor-made for the database it's infiltrating. And I'm guessing that, what with the intense amount of variety in either side (the Hierarchy and the Union aren't pure Umiak or Loroi, respectively), there's also a similar variation in the computer systems. You wouldn't want to put the hardware for running a Battlecruiser into a Scout ship, would you? :D

Not to mention which, using viruses is a bit of a desperation measure. By the time you can get a ship close enough to infect another ship, most likely one of the ships involved has been shot to smithereens. They'd be useful using them behind enemy lines, but from what the war looks like, the chances of that happening are slim to none, at best.

discord
Posts: 629
Joined: Thu Mar 24, 2011 7:44 am
Location: Umeå, Sweden

Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by discord »

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.

Murica
Posts: 51
Joined: Fri Sep 20, 2013 1:56 pm

Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Murica »

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 ?

Murica
Posts: 51
Joined: Fri Sep 20, 2013 1:56 pm

Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Murica »

How far is humanity from shields ?

Jakelope13
Posts: 48
Joined: Sat Sep 07, 2013 6:31 am

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.

User avatar
Arioch
Site Admin
Posts: 4486
Joined: Sat Mar 05, 2011 4:19 am
Location: San Jose, CA
Contact:

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.

User avatar
saint of m
Posts: 137
Joined: Sat Jul 30, 2011 8:10 am

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.

User avatar
Arioch
Site Admin
Posts: 4486
Joined: Sat Mar 05, 2011 4:19 am
Location: San Jose, CA
Contact:

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
Posts: 48
Joined: Sat Sep 07, 2013 6:31 am

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.

Absalom
Posts: 718
Joined: Sat Sep 24, 2011 4:33 am

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".

User avatar
cacambo43
Posts: 301
Joined: Wed Oct 31, 2012 11:39 am
Location: The Space Coast
Contact:

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?

CJSF

Murica
Posts: 51
Joined: Fri Sep 20, 2013 1:56 pm

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 ?

discord
Posts: 629
Joined: Thu Mar 24, 2011 7:44 am
Location: Umeå, Sweden

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.

User avatar
Arioch
Site Admin
Posts: 4486
Joined: Sat Mar 05, 2011 4:19 am
Location: San Jose, CA
Contact:

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.

Post Reply