El Magico Shipyards

[Aramanthus]

How about a shell that can change for whatever requirments it's crew needs. This could be a good ship for a covert ops team too. Something that wouldn't be traced back to their respective governments.

[Aramanthus]

Because if someone can get a silhouette off of your ship you might be in trouble. If you can alter the shapes people percieve it makes it that much tougher for them to find you.

[taalismn]

Inflatable balloon outer-hull to disguise your true configuration...

[glitterboy2098]

stealth is impossible in space without some major fictional "pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain" advanced technology.

space is cold. no really. it's 3 kelvin. as in "3 degrees above absolute zero"

guess what. your starship is going to be several hundred degrees warmer than that. even if we assume room-temp, thats ~285 kelvin. that signature will stand out like a flashlight in the dark.

but it gets worse. your ship will not be room-temp. it will be much, much higher. this is because your powerplant generate heat. your main drive makes heat. heck, even your air conditioner you use to keep the living spaces at a comfortable room-temp makes heat. and lets not forget your crew, who are metabolizing their last meal of protien paste #3, generating, you guessed it, heat. all that heat builds up fast. without a way to get rid of it, it'll quickly broil the crew, then proceed to melt the ship. you need a radiator*.

now remember what i said about space being very cold? guess what? you'd never know if you were out in it. vacuum is a near perfect insulator. there is no air or water to carry heat away. so you have to settle for radiated heat. meaning your radiator has to get so hot it glows, and all that heat energy is lost as photons in that light. which as you might guess, makes your ship brighter in IR.

all this means your ship will stand out like a spotlight on thermal. using fairly simple signal strength recognition systems, your ship can be detected across an entire solar system.

"but wait, won't it get lost against all the stars? they're bright!" a neat thought, but no. the brightness of an object, even in IR(thermal), drops considerably over distance. stars are dim because they are so far away. while those stars might be thousands of kelvin, they're only going to show up as a handful of degrees above the background. not hardly as bright as your ship. plus your ship, being closer, will move. Parallax is not your friend. stars are so far away that a slight change in viewing angle will not effect their visible positions. (slight defined here as "orbit around a planet up to passage from Sol to Alpha-Centauri") unfortunately your ship, being closer, will change it's apparent position if it moves in its orbit, or if the viewing ship moves in its orbit. which makes it hard to "hide against the background".

"i'll just paint my ship black!" again, no. black is a great absorber of heat, so you'll just soak up more heat, makin your life support and radiator issues worse. which means you are now more visible, not less. and it won't even help you visually. thermal can pick up a ship Billions of kilometers away. visual only about a few hundred without a powerful telescope. and that telescope would need to know where to aim, so it's not going to be used unless the IR/thermal system picks up something.

"i'll just turn off my drive and disguise myself as an asteroid!" a bit more inventive. but still no. asteroids have a temp based on the amount of thermal energy they get from the sun and how fast it can radiate it out. i'm sorry to say this is only a bit above background temp. far too low to make a successful deception using a disguised ship, which even with out a drive and at minimum power, will still be substantially warmer than an asteroid.

"i'll just store my heat!". heat sinks could work. but not well. build a block of ice or rock in the center of the ship, and put your radiator inside it, and let the rock absorb the heat. great in theory, but all that heat just stays there and builds up. eventually it gets so hot you can't add any more, and your ship goes back to the whole "broil-then-melt" thing. depending on how much mass you used for the sink, you could go hours or days. but it takes more time than that to drift through a solar system. and if you turn on your drive, your giving your location away. heat sinks are generally only a good idea for temporary heat storage, like say while in combat when you don't want to risk having your radiators blown away (no such thing as an armored radiator..)

i'll just radiate in one direction". another idea that sounds good, but is not workable. even if you can pull off the "hotter on one side than another" thing (even without a radiator, the hull itself is gonna be fairly warm, since it is part of the ship and holds some of the heat, plus it gives off a bit of radiative cooling itself..), using a massive refrigerator system and shadow shield, for instance (placing a large cooled surface along one side), you still have the problem of having to know which direction it is safe to radiate in. you have to put that shield between you and anyone who might see you. and the other side just sees a brighter version of you. now here is a problem. sensor platforms are fairly simple to build and operate. so any system worth fighting over is going to have dozens if not hundreds scattered all across it in orbits of it's planets, moons, and so on. and hiding from one means giving a few others a better look at you. and you have the problem of if stealth methods like your employing are viable, the sensor platforms can be stealthed. making it next to impossible to know where all of them are. thus making it highly unlikely your stealth will work.

"i'll send out a counter waelength to cancel it out". sounds good, and if this was radio, might work. but heat is random in wavelength, and many many wavelengths at a time. a very complex pattern to cancel out. and even then, if you cancel out the heat your radiating, it means your not getting rid of it, and it builds up until your ship melts...

and so on..... check out the site i linked to above, it'll explain all of he above in more detail, plus much more.


*i generally assume the big "rocket exhusts" on phase world ships are a type of radiator. on a reactionless drive ship (contra-grav), there is no need for an exhust port or rocket nozzle. but if they were radiators using the plasma generated by the Antimatter reactor to carry the heat of the powerplant and drive away from the ship, and use small radiators conformal with the hull to deal with the lower intensity heat from the crew, electronics, and so on, it makes somewhat more sense. as for why they look like rocket nozzles? why, aesthetics of course...

[Aramanthus]

Point taken GB! Thank you for the link! Just some thoughts that were just a little impossible. I think that El Magico might be going the right direction on the thought pattern. Make your ship appear to be a ship that is not the one being hunted. Also having a really really great sensor suite. Probably as good as you can get anywhere in the Three Galaxies.

[glitterboy2098]

actually, there's a few big flaws there as I understand it: ambient radiation varies greatly from locale to locale, depending on how far you are from a stellar body, particularly a sun. That means that how things reflect and absorb heat, and how well they'll show varies greatly. Your ship's heat signature near Mercury is going to be a far cry from its signature in the darkness between stars.

and yet your ship is still going to many times hotter than the background in IR. because as you move closer to a sun, you heat up to the same proportion as the other objects. but you still have all the heat from the engine, from the crew, from the powerplant, from the electronics, ect. and that is in addition to anything you pick up from solar radiation on the hull.

Also having a low albedo is actually possible without the absorption of heat, or with the ability to shunt that heat underneath a cooler surface.

except that shunting heat isn't a solution, it's just moving the problem around.

and Albedo deals with reflected light. a low albedo means little light is reflected. anything not reflected is absorbed, it's energy entering the matter. this becomes heat. this heat then has to radiate away as the object cools to thermal equilibrium.

the only way to get low albedo 'without absorbtion' is to use a perfect Blackbody. which only can say it has no absorbtion because it radiates an equal amount of energy as it takes in. so while the object is uneffected by the energy hitting it, it actually shows up brighter than a normal object because it is radiating so much extra energy...

What's more, space is big......really big....and the simplest way to be stealthy in space is to reuce your signature and travel off the ecliptic. Most detection technology that we know of gets nixed both by size and by the fact that the vacuum is a medium that eliminates numerous types of planetary sensors.

and you can use few automated IR telescopes to cover nearly all the sky in a few hours, with stereoscopic comparisons for all of it. even off the ecliptic. and remeber this can pick you up light-hours away. when most ships still have days if not months of travel left to do.

That limits us, currently, to mainly visual and radar. Visual is easily defeated by distance and space being huge. Radar we've already defeated.

radar, being limited ot the speed of light, has a limited effective distance depending on how inaccurate you want your return. the farther away the target, the more the delay and thus the less certainty of it's current position. for reasonably up to date tracking, your limited to light seconds. one light second is ~300,000km. pretty tiny distance spatially speaking. only really good for targeting...

And stealth is also very possible via deception. Just like stealth tech can reduce a radar signature, it can increase one...and an item can be made to generate heat.
You can send someone on a looooong wild goose chase by popping off a hot satellite with the EM signature of a cruiser at extreme range.

sorry, decoys don't work. in order for that decoy to have a drive signature, accelleration rate, and thermal signature to look like a cruiser, it pretty much has to be a cruiser. anything lighter will have a smaller drive signature, and thus obviously a drone. if your ship runs the drive at a lower rate, the drones will out accellerate the ship and make it blatently obvious they're drones.

now, detection is different from targeting. while they may be able to detect you from across the soalr system, they're going to have to use other methods to refine the solution enough to shoot you. this is why things like radar spoofing hulls, or decoys come in. you can make it harder for the enemy to shoot at you. but you can't avoid being picked up in the first place...

[Aramanthus]

No FTL yet and maybe never if that article over on Atomic Rocket is correct. I suppose we'll just have to be more inventive with out ideas on how to get to other systems faster. We just have to survive to the future as a race to see where we can go and how we get there!

[glitterboy2098]

But you can control where, and what rate, that energy is siphoned off. Keep your cool side toward the enemy...or even radiate it along a tether of extreme length, and you are again, stealthed

but you run into the problem of what you can do with a ship the enemy can do with a small sensor platform, at a fraction of the cost and effort. thus you can never know which direction is a safe direction to point your hot side, because there is a very good chance a 'stealthed' sensor platform is sitting within that arc.

the only time you can be sure the enemy will not have a hidden sensor platform is in systems with nothing an enemy wants to defend. which means it isn't worth fighting over in the first place.

Picking up a ship, which is perhaps a light nanosecond in length, against the background of space is very hard. We still estimate there are a bunch of stellar bodies the size of Pluto in the Kyper Belt, and we can't find them.

those bodies are in thermal equilibrium and are mostly being searched for using visible light.

a starship in infrared is like a spotlight in a pitchblack cave. you'd have to be blind to miss it. it will be brighter in IR than virtually anything except a sun or a planet. and because of orbital mechanics it is next to impossible to keep yourself occluded by such objects for long except in very distinct, and frankly strategically useless, situations.

and like most of the directional stealth 'solutions' so many have presented, it requires you to know the location of everything looking for you. which even ignoring normal fog of war issues, is going to be impossible if the kind of stealth your trying to use exists!

Drive signatures detection would be based on energy output and thermal. That assumes a perfectly efficient system for the drone, which is kind of nutty. There's nothing saying you can't design a drone that can waste energy, thus being detectable and still moving at the correct speed.
So yes, you can avoid being picked up with a drone.

at which poin you need to put a larger powerplant onto the drone, which makes its thermal signature all wonky compared to what it is supposed to look like, and your back to drones are useless. in addition, you can figure efficency from the observations of the drive, which means that well before

Additionally, I hope for God's sake if you're a spacefaring species then you realize how to use inertia to coast.

sure....if you don't mind taking months of years to get anywhere. coasting at too high a velocity makes you stand out from all the other objects in a system, especially given the heat issue, and moving at a velocity similar to the rest of the systems bodies has your crew dying of old age and boredom well before you reach your target.

plus, if you use an orbit that places you heading towards your target, the targets skywatch is likely to send a ship to investigate and/or lob an asteroid killer to protect itself. orbits that don't intersect with anything important are safe from that risk, but useless strategically or tactically..

and then there is the fact that to get into those orbits you have to run your drive, before coasting. and on a low-tech ship that means your going to be visible to just about everyone during that point. which lets them plot your course. and course changes you make later have to be done with drives of some sort, making them visible...


in 'high tech' ships like phase world's with their reactionless drives things are a bit better. no big plume of superhot gas exhiting the drive. but if you can manipulate gravity for reactionless drives, you can make a field that traps and stores heat without a physical heat sink, letting you hide your IR emissions better. or use some sort of hyperdimensional doohicky to send it to anotherp lane of existance. or so on...and these 'low tech stealth' issues are not needed anyway..

as i said. stealth in space in impossible unless you have some extrmely advanced handwave technology.

[glitterboy2098]

FTl is left ot GM discretion as far as how it works, beyond the "surrounds the ship with a contragravity field to go faster than light."

myself, if you remember my techmanual (i really need to restart that some day...maybe once Braden's work get's published...), i defined it as using dark energy ('counter-gravity') to create a Alcubierre metric, which seperates a region of space from the rest of space time by intense gravitic distorsions, which then zips along at superluminal speeds reletive to the originating points. all while the space within the metric, and anything in it, remains completely stationary.

now, i suppose if you used that set up, you could use a version of the metric that doesn't move, but still seperates you from the rest of spacetime using distorsions. the problems would be that anything inside would be unable to see out (not even using probes), and while no one outside could see into the isolated space, the distorsions used to make the metric would still show up on the gravity detectors used to sense FTL ships.


might be useful against lower tech races without contra-grav technologies (like those sensors), but of limited utility against a ship of similar tech levels. though there may be a few uses for such a technique. would make a wonderful defensive tactic. the target literally vanishes from space as long as the drive is set to do this. though you'd have the same power needs and start-up time as a CG FTL drive... and to hit the enemy all you need is missiles with CG FTL drives of their own...fired from outside and merging fields to get to the target, or fired blindly by the target and passing through the field before dropping out of FTL and going active to hit stuff outside...(better be some fairly smart missiles either way...)

[glitterboy2098]

when someone manages to build one i'll let you know...


but for game purposes, i'll make an educated guess. i'd say that if you were to look out a window you'd see...nothing. just a black void. no stars, just dark. and there would be no visible sign of movement. (because technically nothing is moving). perhaps just the steady thrum of the powerplant and drives as they consume make and consume power..

[taalismn]

"Thank god we jumped to FTL! I thought those TGE ships had us!"
"Actually, we HAVEN'T jumped to FTL...the TGE ships just swallowed us up..."

[glitterboy2098]

one of the things i'm going to try to work on this summer, when not working on my RIFTS project, is an idea i had of Teamsters for the 3 galaxies. pilots who fly 'tractors', small crew space craft tha are basically the crew spaces of a Shuttle attached to the drive and powerplant of a cruiser. they attach themselves ot assemblies of cargopods, extend their CG drive field around it, and haul it around the stars, even at FTL.

"when people think of the backbone of interstellar commerce, they think of frieghters hauling goods, or runner ships sneaking in luxury items. but if you ask some one who works at a port, or in a shipping company, and they'll tell you its teamsters. if you need fourteen kilotons of septotriticali grain moved from Koabane to Parlotti prime, your not going to hire some runner in a dinky ship. your going to go to the guys who have the hardware and skills to haul that kind of mass. it's just good business. now where is that drink you offered me?"


a tractor would be able to extend it's CG field into a massive bubble, even though it was fairly small. thus it could be used for other things than just towing cargopods. you could fit several squadrons of fighters into the bubble, for instance, letting you haul strike forces around while looking like a single civilian ship. same for groups of loaded troop shuttles, or even small warships. militaries would invest in militarized tractors to move disable starships, even the massive battleships (would need several tractors with overlapping fields). salvage groups would want a tractor to haul anything big they find back to a port they can sell it from. and smugglers and racers would love it since you could override the safety features to give your ship unbeleivable STL and FTL speeds when not hauling anything.

[taalismn]

Oh yeah...'Virtual hulls' made up of the ship's tractor-magnetic forcefields or simply its FTL drive envelope...depending on what system you use, assembling all that mass and keeping it together while Transiting can be either milk-run boring or teethrattlingly- and career-questioningly tense...

[taalismn]

sounds familiar... don't I have several of those?....

Yep...your two bulk cargo carriers...

[glitterboy2098]

Actually Carl Sagan postulated that what you would see at FTL is all the stars crowding to the rim of your viewscreen in a tight ring with blue toward the middle and red toward the edges as their light redshifted. Your target star would be a lone blue dot in the center.
They detailed it on Cosmos once.

was he talking about using an Alcubierre metric? because that doesn't sound like the kind of result the distinct way it has to warp space to isolate itself would create.

As for the stealth thing, I think we're debating in a circle, because, as with stealth in real life, it's a game of cat-and-mouse regarding how much effort you want to make being stealthy vs. how much effort your enemy makes in detecting anything.

The US has stealth because it spends thousands of times more money on making things stealthy than other governments spend on detecting things, and as a result you have stealth tech that is essentially three generations of technology higher than most radar in use.

Same goes for space faring civilizations. The CCW can spend a LOT more on stealth technology than the Tarlok can on detection technology.
If your enemy can keep up, you can't have workable stealth for long even in the real world.

this is a straw man. i am not discussing the red queens race of technology vs. it's counter. i'm talking about the straight physics of it. ships will be hotter than every thing else in local space short of a sun. period. there is no way to reduce or hide this heat without frying your ship or generating more heat in the process.

directing your heat into specific arcs is a trade off, so long as you are willing to accept that the process will generate more heat for you to get rid of (heat pumps are never 100% efficent, and so always turn a portion of the energy used to move the heat around into more heat..), and that you are willing to accept that any target worth attacking will be protected by sensor platforms placed in such a way that make it rather unlikely you will go undetected no matter which direction you redirect your heat to.

[Aramanthus]

Interesting ideas! I'm looking forward to seeing more new ships from you El Magico!

[glitterboy2098]

the handwavium is half the fun of phase world.

myself, i have revised my description of the 'cloak' i put in my techmanual. i've decided that using gravity, it should be within the realm of handwavium to frequency shift the photons of the radiated heat into a range most opponents would not be looking for. most enemies would be looking for IR signatures, not X-rays...for example. when combined with the use of gravity fields to direct the radiated photons into a specific direction, it should make it very hard to pick up using normal sensors.

i still like how i described robotechs shadow cloak though. venting most of the radiated heat into the multi-dimensional hyperspace so it doesn't show in realspace, and frequency shifting the rest of the stuff that gets out...

[Aramanthus]

That is an interesting idea GB. I've used some similiar ideas for some vessles in my own Phase World game. Maybe that is the way to express it, the way you just did. Makes a lot of sense!

Good seeing you Phalanx!

[Aramanthus]

WOW!!! That is some nice upgrades! I read the article El Magico. It was an excellent read. Thank you for sharing it. Any other new ships for Phase World!

[Aramanthus]

Interesting to hear that DM. I can't wait to see new pics and stats!

[glitterboy2098]

The problem I have with Project Rho, is that all his scenario assumptions result in the detectors knowing EVERYTHING they need to know, and the stealth guys knowing NOTHING they need to know. This is a common problem with people who want to prove something, esp. on the internet.
His protagonists know everything, right down to the drive and energy signature of specific enemy vessels. His antagonists know nothing, not even where the sensor platforms are located.

because if stealth is physically possible, it is simple to put a bunch of constellations of stealthed sensor sattilites into orbit around the star to make it impossible to radiate your heat perpendicular to the ecliptic (or any other direction for that matter) without being seen.

and since radio and laser communications travel at the speed of light, and the ships being detected are much much slower, their positions can be ascertained within hours. a few days later, you can tell their course.

all while the ship in question coasts along in its multi-month mission.

as told by Dr. John Schilling,

Besides, redirecting the emissions merely relocates the problem. The energy's got to go somewhere, and for a fairly modest investment in picket ships or sensor drones, the enemy can pretty much block you from safely radiating to any significant portion of the sky.

And if you try to focus the emissions into some very narrow cone you know to be safe, you run into the problem that the radiator area for a given power is inversely proportional to the fraction of the sky illuminated. With proportionate increase in both the heat leakage through the back surfaces, and the signature to active or semi-active (reflected sunlight) sensors.

Plus, there's the problem of how you know what a safe direction to radiate is in the first place. You seem to be simultaneously arguing for stealthy spaceships and complete knowledge of the position of enemy sensor platforms. If stealth works, you can't expect to know where the enemy has all of his sensors, so you can't know what is a safe direction to radiate. Which means you can't expect to achieve practical stealth using that mechanism in the first place.

Sixty degrees has been suggested here as a reasonably "narrow" cone to hide one's emissions in. As a sixty-degree cone is roughly one-tenth of a full sphere, a couple dozen pickets or drones are enough to cover the full sky so that there is no safe direction to radiate even if you know where they all are. The possiblility of hidden sensor platforms, and especially hidden, moving sensor platforms, is just icing on the cake.

Note, in particular, that a moving sensor platform doesn't have to be within your emission cone at any specific time to detect you, it just has to pass through that cone at some time during the course of the pre-battle maneuvering. Which rather substantially increases the probability of detection even for very narrow emission cones.

What's more, he freely uses handwavium to create sensors that transmit data FTL because he read it in a science fiction novel. But his antagonists can use none.

actually he doesn't. he merely remebers that communications travel at the speed of light, and the ships being detected don't. it might take a day for a sensor sat to pick up the ship, and send the message saying where it is. and this is while the ship in question continues on it's multi month long trip.

And then, there's this:

-snip-

That was written by Dr. David G. Stephenson, one of the NASA scientists who worked on the Stardust project, among others.

a proposal that ignores the fact one can orbit similarly stealthed sensor platforms around the sun to pick all that radiated heat your trying to hide from the sensors in the ecliptic.

any objective worth fighting over will be protected with such platforms. making stealth only feasible in targets not worth fighting over...at which point you have to ask why your politicians sent you on such a worthless mission...

[Aramanthus]

LOL That is a good analogy GB! I suppose stealth becomes something less and misdirection will replace it in the universe. Using ships with altered IFF and other things. Sort of like the German aux. cruisers of WW2 like the Pengiun.

[Aramanthus]

That is a good question. We'll just have to wait and see what the others opinion is. Then I'll make my own judgment for my game.

[Aramanthus]

That is true. But we are having this discussion about an an aspect of a game where it is common everyday occurance.

[Aramanthus]

You really can't use real life when we don't even have the technology. So you have to go to a place where the physics work....alla game world.

[Aramanthus]

Comes right back to the game or a game. And since we are in Palladium's forum it's best to use their systems. I'll use Phase World as my illustrations!

[Aramanthus]

Very nice. Just two things I thought I should mention. No marines. It's a very valuable target, I'd still put at least 100 of them on board in body armor. And I'd rate the over all weight of the ships at around 150,000 tons.

[Aramanthus]

Hmmmm it's an interesting thought.


It would make a very tempting target. And if you could board her quick enough she'd be in trouble. What if there is a leak of her floor plan and someone with serious muscle move on her after she is finished with her missiles. Her escorts get targetted by the main strike force to capture one. Then they strike with boarders and specialized assualt shuttles. Each assualt shuttle can burn thru where they need too. Have ones strike at strategic points and they could take here before the captain can activate self defense.

Sorry, I'm just creating a scenario. Which could lead to the capture of one of these vessels.

[KLM]

Plus 10 Silverhawks plus 2 Battlerams (which might or migh not have their onboard troops).

Adios
KLM

[Aramanthus]

It's all good. I like the ship. It does fill the bill in my version of Phase World too. I did tweak it just a small amount for my game. I actually went with the weight I suggested above. And I did add two platoons of marines. I hope you don't mind.

[KLM]

Plus 10 Silverhawks plus 2 Battlerams (which might or migh not have their onboard troops).

Adios
KLM

I'm pretty sure the Battlerams can't do anything inside the Warshield, but point taken on the Silverhawks. That's part of the reason I listed its lack of power armor as a weakness in the write-up. I always write-in weaknesses to my ships.

As for Battlerams: well, one of battlerams' standard, listed troop compliment is a squad
of 4 silverhawks.

As for built in weaknesses: the ship already lacks staying power, main guns, middle and
short ranged missiles... And as it was said before, for loading the magazines or removing
jammed missiles, a PA or two always comes handy.
Just my two cents.

Adios
KLM

[Aramanthus]

I'm looking forward to seeing what is coming next from your shipyard El Magico!

[Aramanthus]

Unless you have a system in place for removing jams. In something like your ships might have that system. Of course if the system fails at the wrong time you'd still need the power armor to clear the jam.

[KLM]

A squad or two will be sufficient. I would say, 6 Silverhawks and 6 to 12 "heavy combat/utility" PA's along
the lines of the Mauler in DMB11 (space capable nonetheless, with heavy enviromental protection and less
weapons or speed. And of course, the Mauler is like a century behind technologically from the 3Galaxies.).

Adios
KLM

[Aramanthus]

Too bring it up to the 3Gs tech level add heavier radiation shielding and maybe increase it's overall strength due to more advanced and compact tech of 3g's.

[KLM]

And replace jets with CG system (maybe even use CG for heavy lifting), with some
eqipment for EVA repairs and maybe a long tentacle or two for disarming a warhead
from behind a corner.

Adios
KLM

ps.: Don't forget the minibar...

[Aramanthus]

They could always have special CG packs they could throw around jammed rounds to move it out of the way even more quickly.

[taalismn]

They could always have special CG packs they could throw around jammed rounds to move it out of the way even more quickly.

Yeah? Who you gonna get to go into the gun action to clear the jam?

[Aramanthus]

Robots are the best and most economical method for those sort of jobs. I agree using that one table from sourcebook one would be the way to go to create them. You'd just have to reduce the overall cost for the robots, since there would be a large number of them in the Phase World setting.

[KLM]

How much robot use is there in the CCW or Phaseworld overall?

I wonder if there are a lot of "droids." I can definitely see some specialized automation on ships for tasks like that, run by an overall ship AI.

I agree at the first part.

However... There is a strong tendency NOT to use too much of computers,
be they desktops, droids or shipboard computerised system, even AI.

Most designers know about the Machine People, probably those
experiments leading to the two soda machines in the GRG's parliament,
the nanite-infested CCW planet, etc.

It is probably a widely (thought certainly not universally) supported
theory, that the Forge will give consciousness to whatever vessel
it can give, be it organic or mechanical.

So, AI research and technology is NOT as advanced as it would
be in a similar ultra-tech enviroment.

I've frequently used the robot creation rules in Sourcebook One to populate phaseworld with various types of robot assistants, similar to what you see in star wars or the old Buck Rodgers series.

This said, I agree, what is more, it is canon, that robots, with AI
on par with the Triax designs in 103PA are rather widespread.

Adios
KLM

[Aramanthus]

I've got some AI's in my game. I'm planning on running differently than canon.

[KLM]

Of course, AIs are a must in the 3Galaxies. However, civilian "talking hoovers" are never MDC and designed
to be slow and weak. "True" AIs have the software, maybe hardware equivalent of a shotgun duct-taped
to their head and shipboard computer LANs have large, easily reachable "disconnect" switches.

They are around, but precautions are taken.

Adios
KLM

[Aramanthus]

That does make sense to have those sort of back up way to keep an AI under control.

[KLM]

And we all read Gibson's trilogy about an AI...
(Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive)

Adios
KLM

[taalismn]

Of course, the smart AIs figure out on their own that there's gotta be something that will turn them off...
Now THAT'S a coming of age moment for an AI...

[KLM]

And that's why manufacturers pay - IMO - nice sums for backups... After all, an AI which
have learned a bit and is still an obedient pet worth much on the market.

Adios
KLM

[KLM]

That wouldn't make it an automatic victory for the aggressor, but can be a decisive
factor - like a +1 or +2 to initiative.

Just my two cents.

Adios
KLM

[Aramanthus]

Sounds like a very interesting conversation. I still think that some AI's and a layered defense might be able to stop some fairly heavy concentrated attacks on planets.

[KLM]

Well, it's also a matter of knowing what forces are going to be situated where, as well as response times.

And overall combat value, yes.

Knowing these (and maybe arranging some delays or even outright confusion / disruption in
enemy information network) is way more important, than knowing what whould they do in
a given situation.

But I have to confess, I do not beleive in such intricate battle plans, since too many thing
WILL go wrong. Period.

So, for my part, have well trained units, have a general plan, but more emphasis on
backup units and logistics than on actual tactical solutions - after all, there are
hopefully capable officers THEN and THERE for those details.

Adios
KLM

[KLM]

I agree. But I always view alien species, like humans, as having some variables in logic and sense of security.

Actually - history, especially (technological warfare) being my hobby - I found it in our own
reality too...

Just pick an era, and compare the different solutions for one problem by different
powers, be it the tank, the battlecruiser, long range fighters, whatever...

Adios
KLM