Starwalker

Eye for an eye

Ship's log, 17:01, 5 January 2214
Location: Corvus FTL Corridor
Status: FTL transit (tethered)

21 Responses to “Eye for an eye”

1. mjkj Says:
   March 10th, 2011 at 12:11 am

   *comforts Starry*

   Oh, I guess Tyler is also in league with the pirates?

   …and Starry and Eliott should see into disabling the collars – as they should have by now.

   I guess they are activated by radio waves – and Starry should be able to record them – the on and the off sequence (and if not Elliot should be able to).

   …or they could design personal anti-gravity devices that everyone of the crew gets and everytime a collar is activated the gravity of the ship is set to maximum until they switch the collars of again or they are crushed – and the crew is safe because of the personal devices … (*sigh* that might only work once or twice until the others get such devices also…)

   mjkj

2. Um the Muse Says:
   March 10th, 2011 at 9:38 am

   And it would make sense if Starry has some actual weapons with which to defend herself, what with the importance of her cargo and the high risk of piracy.

   That doesn’t help her take on the pirate ships, though. She can’t even outrun them normally.

   It’s a good thing that the sponsoring company didn’t install a self-destruct mechanism in the case of capture, though. At least she has that going for her.

3. brightlilim Says:
   March 10th, 2011 at 10:48 am

   Tyler’s not in league with the pirates; if he was, he would either have announced himself before this – to gain his freedom from babysitting the crew – or stayed on-board in order to foil any future escape by the crew. There’s little point in him leaving now.

   There’s got to be some way for Starry to fight back, and I would imagine that infiltration of the other ships, infecting their AIs in order to render them incapable of harming Starry or her crew might be a start. Even if she is isolated from those ships, she could still use an infection vector, like Morra. Of course, that’s getting into cyberpunk territory rather than traditional space adventure, though in reality there’s no reason why that wouldn’t occur in normal space sci-fi (and indeed should!)

   I like the idea of personal anti-gravity devices, but if they were easy to create and maintain, the pirates would probably carry them around as precaution in case Starry tried it again.

   (Woah, another long comment. Must learn the art of brevity.)

4. Melanie Says:
   March 10th, 2011 at 12:11 pm

   Lots of comments! Awesome to see. 🙂

   mjkj – lots of great ideas there! But Brightlilim is right: Tyler isn’t in league with the pirates. He was just the one most likely to be able to get through incarceration on a pirate ship in one piece.

   Um the Muse – welcome! Great to hear from you. 🙂 I think if Starry had a self-destruct protocol anywhere, she’s no doubt stepped on it by now. Like a cockroach.

   Brightlilim – fighting back is going to be rising on Starry’s agenda from now on. She has been trying to honour the agreement she made when she surrendered, but, well.

   As for personal gravity devices, there was one built into Hunt’s suit (in the description in the previous post). It just never came up this time around (I rewrote this section about four times, but the gravity trick never made it in!). I’m running on the theory that these kinds of units are expensive and therefore not available to your average minion-merc, but those who are smart and can afford them will have them.

   Also, pfff to brevity. Long comments are awesome! 🙂

5. daymon34 Says:
   March 11th, 2011 at 7:13 am

   Ah yes the lesson of not having computer protection was taken to heart after Tripi. To bad for Morra that she is probably using the same hardware. And Starry probably kept part of the attack codes on file for use later.

   Hunt will learn that changing the agreement is going to bite him back. All Starry has to do is get a hack signal into the other ships and she can make them all suck vacum.

6. Melanie Says:
   March 11th, 2011 at 12:12 pm

   Very true, Daymon! I think Starry is getting more and more paranoid as time goes on.

7. eduardo Says:
   March 12th, 2011 at 12:33 am

   Hey, you are not paranoid if they are really after you !

8. brightlilim Says:
   March 12th, 2011 at 9:40 am

   That is so true. Starry isn’t paranoid, she’s just having to deal with stuff happening that she didn’t spot, and being an awesome AI with a Real Personality matrix and a huge case of “Protect and Serve” complex, she’ll recover from being on the back foot so much of the time.

   All she has to deal with after that is some unfinished business with the Captain and Elliot, a little box and some trust issues…

9. Melanie Says:
   March 14th, 2011 at 12:11 pm

   Hee hee. Okay, you got me. Not paranoid – vigilant! How’s that?

10. Belial666 Says:
    March 14th, 2011 at 11:20 pm

    One other thing about space opera I found strange ever since I started reading Star Trek; there are a half-dozen ways to make a ship resistant to boarding. No ship in a space opera I’ve read so far actually uses them. Here are a few examples;

    1) Fiber optics traps in all floors of all compartments, built into the hull and powered directly by the ship’s central power. If enemies board, allow them. And then send a laser pulses through the fiber optics shooting directly up with just low enough power not to pierce the hull – but enough to fillet any human stepping on them. Selective firing to exclude the crew, fiber optics have no EM or other energy signature to detect while not directly in use, built into the hull so they cannot be removed and jacked into the central power so they can’t be cut off.

    2) Bioengineer a new lethal virus unique to the ship. Innoculate the crew. Boarders can’t be innoculated cause the virus would be unique to the ship. Enjoy a nice War of the World ending.

    3) Nanite disassemblers/saboteurs. Enemy boarders coming up? Send a cloud of invisible nanites into their gear to detonate the power cores or ammunition. Or into their noses and ears to use microlasers on their brains.

    4) Magshield the entirety of the ship’s systems. Then add an EMP system not strong enough to pierce said heavy shielding but more than enough to fry the light shielding on any man-portable systems. Let boarders on. Fry their weapons and gear. Then open the shielded compartments where you stored your own portable weapons prior to combat.

    5) Use SGAB. The smallest atomic bomb in 1970s was 10 inches across. Advance the tech by a few centuries and you’re bound to get considerably smaller. Add a slow guidance system, use optical circuitry and optical light propulsion to prevent any EM detection, use carbon composite for the chassis to prevent radar and ladar scan return and use a purely mechanical lauch system. You now got a self-guided atomic bomb that can move just a little, is all but undetectable and can be launched by a mechanical catapult all but undetectable. Wait for the enemy ship to get close to board you. Let them board while your SGAB attaches to their hull. When they enter FTL, the SGAB blows them up and they are lost to FTL transit. Feign ignorance long enough to kill the boarders.

11. brightlilim Says:
    March 15th, 2011 at 6:53 am

    @Melanie
    Starry is definitely vigilant and proactive in defending herself. Paranoid is what she’ll be AFTER she deals with the captain and Elliot!

    @belial666
    I like those ideas! I can see an issue with most of them though if they become common currency:

    1) Fibre optic laser traps – boarding actions would either make use of breaching pods to enter, or the first thing the attackers would do would be to slice an angle into the ends of the optical fibres to change the beam exit direction, leaving a safe (and quite large) hole to pass through.

    2) and 3) They’re very similar in the design, and would be very similar in countermeasures. Small breaching pods to release massive amounts of nanites to overwhelm the resident virii/nanites. They might go wrong and disassemble the crew instead, in which case the attackers lose, but so do the defenders, but them’s the breaks when you start using these types of weapons.

    4) The attackers would start using combination energy/slug-thrower weapons and switch between them. They might even prefer slugthrowers, to breach internal armouring and use their own EMP grenades to overwhelm the circuitry. (Of course, the ships probably use optical rather than electrical wiring by this point, so that would be a moot point.)

    5) Any countermeasure to this would get to the point where boarding actions would get seriously overwhelming, to the point of probably damaging the target ship beyond feasible repair. (I’m assuming they don’t have accurate small-mass detectors and the SGAB doesn’t leak any radiation at all, which isn’t that likely.

    Of these, 5) is the most likely to succeed, though there are always the consequences to deal with. The attackers can never be totally sure of 2) or 3) either; they might send expendables (e.g. prisoners from a previous boarding action) in ahead of time to test the atmosphere.

    That is assuming that the counter-boarding features are not rare in ships (or the attackers know about the defences – which they would in this instance); if they’re extremely rare features, the attacker may not have the countermeasures available…

    Of course, the real reasons why there aren’t more anti-boarding defences is that a) ships don’t get boarded enough for it to be a regular feature (c.f. anti-boarding features in merchant ships that don’t regularly ply the East African route) and b) it interferes with the storyline, and boarding actions are cool!

12. Belial666 Says:
    March 16th, 2011 at 4:17 am

    It should be possible to create radiation-free fusion bombs using optical circuitry; just concentrate a strong enough laser pulse on a tiny piece of frozen deuterium to heat it to fusion temperatures.

    It might also be possible to acheive fusion with artificial gravity, replicating the gravitic collapse of stars in a much smaller scale (say, a piece of frozen deuterium)

    Finally, there’s always the old relativity cannon; a mass driver that shoots a tiny antimatter pellet at 1/4 lightspeed instead of the usual ferrous slug. When the half-inch pellet hits the enemy vessel it reacts with the ship’s hull, annihilating itself and a mass of normal matter equal to its own, producing energy equal to E=2mcc.

    Of the above, the first is borderline acheivable with currect technology levels, though nowhere near small enough for mini-nukes.
    The second is a weapons sustem far superior to missiles since the antimatter pellet is too fast to dodge, too small to detect and a hit is usually sufficiently nasty to pierce a quarter-mile of medium-hardness alloy.

13. brightlilim Says:
    March 16th, 2011 at 5:50 am

    The anti-matter pellet is the nastiest way of dealing damage and if available, would probably be used as common point-defence weapons amongst military or quasi-military ships. Finding one on a civilian ship would be a very nasty surprise to a would-be boarder!

    Of course, in a high-speed pursuit, there’s always the millions of cones defence; where the ship being pursued scatters millions of tiny foil cones that the pursuer runs into at high speeds causing significant damage to their hull once the pursuit speeds reach significant fractions of the speed of light. (The reason for cones is that the relativistic radiation pressure slows them rapidly, and 100 gramme cone impacting at 10% of the speed of light is equivalent to about 21 kilotonnes of TNT, assuming complete annihilation of the cone).

    But perhaps we’ve wandered too far off topic here…

14. Melanie Says:
    March 16th, 2011 at 9:11 am

    Wow, look at you guys go! Interesting discussion, I like it.

    I haven’t delved into the whole matter/anti-matter/dark matter debacle yet. I might at some point, you never know!

    The pirates make their living capturing other ships (among other things, but that’s a big feature), so they’d be prepared for standard countermeasures. Starry only got them with the artificial gravity trick because AIs aren’t supposed to do that kind of thing.

    Ideas for non-standard countermeasures noted, though. Always good to have lots of pieces to juggle until I know what shape I need them to make….

15. Belial666 Says:
    March 16th, 2011 at 11:56 am

    The point is that a reasonably paranoid ship construction is going to leave about 1% of the ship’s mass (the most important commodity in spaceships) for internal defenses. The average human raider isn’t going to be carrying more than 100 pounds worth of ship-capturing equipment. So, even for a group of 20 raiders against a relatively small hull of 10.000 tons (comparable to a modern small freighter), the internal defenses outmass them by 10 to 1. Most commercial ships might not be built with internal defenses but significant investments and military craft might.

    Somewhat less relevant to the discussion, if I were to design a ship to be relatively safe in a paranoid way, I’d do the following;

    1) Super-high-reflection coating inside and out. Blocking 99,9% of most radiation and heat helps prevent nasty stuff like blowtorches, lasers and the very hot nearby presence of stars.
    2) Point-defense gamma ray lasers. They tend to fry electronics (and people) even through most armor. Good vs missiles which usually lack the mass for sufficiently dense armor.
    3) Very high density metal armor (i.e. tungsten and iridium are twice as dense as lead), fortified with carbon composites. Absorbs various radiations that fry electronics and people through lighter alloys. Doubles as heavy duty faraday cage.
    4) Paragravity walls; artificial gravity generators/inertial dampeners inside the armor, projecting a very thin, very strong repelling band just outside the armor. The inertia dampeners negate inertia from oncoming projectiles while the antigravity repels. A must vs meteors, railguns and antimatter slugs.
    5) Ion thrusters; not only provide course change but ionized byproducts are partially trapped in the paragravity walls, producing electromagnetic noise and heat, frying nanites and unshielded electronics.
    6) Redundant, concealed sealing doors in all passages. Useful in stopping atmosphere loss during hull breaches. Also useful in smashing unsuspecting raiders that pass beneath them.
    7) Various automated traps and autoguns in all corridors (described in other posts).
    8) Rapid “decontamination” system; 1 inch thick plates on the ceiling are actually detachable, each corresponding to every artificial gravity generator on the floor. In case of raider contamination, the system gives a momentary high-gravity pulse while releasing the plates to fall at 20 or so times their usual weight. Additional mops added to janitor’s closet.
    9) Main computer systems hardwired in printed optical circuitry; no chance of “accidental” system rewrite/subversion. Secondary systems bult on self-organizing optical circuitry – reprogramming available only through authorized input in main system.
    10) Nanobionic synthesizer; produces nanites based on organic electronics. Good for repairs, polishing bulkheads and recycling organic waste. Also good for nanite warfare and engineered plagues.
    11) Supply of security droids and personal weaponry in case other defenses fail.
    12) Main battery of high-power gamma ray lasers for ship to ship combat.

    This is for a dreadnaught-class vessel (>1 million tons) which is roughly 50% power generation and drives, 40% defense systems and 10% usable space for everything else, mass-wise. It is meant for large-scale combat where ships exchange multimegaton warheads and multi-TJ beam weapons until one of them breaks through the other’s defenses. And despite its very small usable payload, a dreadnaught can be more fun than any trader – traders can’t perform “scorched earth” on entire planetary surfaces after all.

    PS: Despite its diplomatic mission, USS Enterprise is supposed to be a dreadnaught. It still lacks internal defences, something that caused problems in 30% of the series episodes.

16. mjkj Says:
    March 17th, 2011 at 12:36 am

    Wow, great ideas…

17. brightlilim Says:
    March 17th, 2011 at 8:22 am

    Idea 5 might not work so well; the paragravity walls would diminish the effectiveness of the thrusters as they would hold back some of the thrust.

    Other than that, I’m quite impressed. I have to admit I’ve not really thought much about the subject before (much more on the offensive side of things, where there are interesting armaments that can be wielded at most technology levels), but I guess defence, especially point and internal defence, tends to be more about ingenuity than brute force.

    I have noticed that the Enterprise is particularly badly designed for its primary missions…other than its impressive set of armaments, it seems to be a particularly weak design.

18. Melanie Says:
    March 17th, 2011 at 9:32 am

    You guys are awesome. 😀

    Of the options Belial listed:

    1. Got it!
    2. Have a small-scale version (partly because she’s a small-scale ship).
    4. Feasible for Starwalker, given the technology level and equipment at hand. That’s one I’ve pondered somewhat but haven’t really had room to work in (you should see all the stuff I’ve left out to avoid clogging up the story, or have marked ‘research more’).
    11. The notion of Waldo and Casper with weapons terrifies me. I just had a mental image of Casper the Ninja Drone.

19. Targetdrone Says:
    March 18th, 2011 at 10:52 pm

    hmm.. the whole time i am wondering… couldnt Starry actually infiltrate the systems of the bountyful? or any other pirate vessel near her?

    or did she just not play with that thought?… i mean, yeah , so they are on her ship, but she got enviromentals under control on both or something like that 😛

20. Targetdrone Says:
    March 18th, 2011 at 10:55 pm

    oops, posted that on the wrong page, meant to post that comment under “brain walk” 😉

21. Melanie Says:
    March 22nd, 2011 at 9:34 am

    Hi Targetdrone! Welcome to the blog. 🙂

    I think your questions will be answered in this week’s post. Or, at least some of them…