Brainships?

[pwilcox]

I recently read a short story by someone or other, called something like 'The Ship who Sings'. It features a small ship with a crew of one. Its main feature is that instead of a standard ship computer, the ship is controlled by a human brain removed from a 'defective' newborn. The brain is enclosed in an armored, nutrient-rich, environmentally-controlled habitat in bridge.

The main benefits of this design are that the ship can operate on its own, with no crew whatsoever. While it can't perform any repairs, as long as everything runs ok it can at least get back to its base.

Anybody else think this would be a neat scout ship?

 

[mike wightman]

Apologies for the obscure reference in advance but I remember a story in a 2000AD(?) special or annual in which condemned criminals had their brains (and spinal cords?) removed and installed in ships as the CPU. Sounds like a similar idea.
Then there is the computer game Homeworld where a young woman has herself cybernetically connected to the hyperdrive of the mothership in order to operate it.

 

[Morte]

Dang, you just reminded me of an old SF radio play called "Earth Search II". I'll have to get an MP3 of it now.

 

[pwilcox]

I don't know about the rest of you, but there is just no way in hell I'd ever step foot on a ship run by the extracted brain of a convicted felon.

That gives me a neat idea... The players are just given a brand new, sparkling clean brainship, full bill of health, fully stocked and ready to go. They go into their first jump and realize everything isn't quite normal with the brain they got...

 

[Richard Saunders]

Hello.
Yes the "Ship who sang" - Anne McCaffrey - is part of about eight books all based on the same premiss.
Children who for one reason or another are removed from their defective bodies and placed inside a shell, the shell supplies all life support and sensors to keep them sane while they grow up (they either become shell people or die to their injuries or ilnesses).
Once they are trained they are indentured to a specific job (starship pilot, space station control, what ever) when they have payed of their indenture they can do whatever they like.
And yes they can do limited self repair, they have servos and drones.
Bye.

 

[Tanuki]

Originally posted by Jered Farstrider:
I don't know about the rest of you, but there is just no way in hell I'd ever step foot on a ship run by the extracted brain of a convicted felon.

That gives me a neat idea... The players are just given a brand new, sparkling clean brainship, full bill of health, fully stocked and ready to go. They go into their first jump and realize everything isn't quite normal with the brain they got...

"Would you mind telling me ... who's brain ... I did put in?"
"And you won't be angry?"
"I will NOT .. be .. angry."
"Abby someone."
"Abby someone. Abby who?"
"Abby ... Normal."
"Abby NORMAL."
"I'm almost sure that was the name."

 

[Andrew Boulton]

Dang, you just reminded me of an old SF radio play called "Earth Search II". I'll have to get an MP3 of it now.

Worth getting.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0563394013/qid=1068988514/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_3_1/026-5749178-7902835

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0563558660/qid=1068988514/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3_3/026-5749178-7902835

 

[marginaleye]

Frank Herbert also wrote about "brainships," in a novel entitled Destination: Void. The premise was basically identical to McCaffery's: the brains are those of infants with crippling birth defects. In Herbert's novel, however, the brains (euphemistically dubbed "Organic Mental Cores") are unable to fully adapt to the far higher level of sensory input they receive, and eventually break under the pressure and go insane and/or catatonic (a process which the ships' designers are aware of, and secretly exploit for their own rather sinister reasons, but there's no need to go into all the specifics here).

This sort of thing ought to be within the technological capabilities of the Imperium, becoming available somewhere around Tech Level 14 or perhaps 15. On the other hand, Imperial society has a strong irrational squeamishness about cyborgs, so its absence from Canon is completely understandable. It's easier to imagine the more technophilic Solomani fiddling around with "brainship" technology.

There are rules for using those "chips" from Cymbeline to enhance an existing ship's computer bu providing intelligent internal supervision. Quoting p. 48 of Adventure 13: Signal GK: "It can enhance the performance of a computer (advancing it one level: Model/1 functions as Model/2), but more importantly it can provide intelligent monitoring of sensors to provide information to the [ship's crew]. For example, because the chip has access to all the sensor functions of a ship, it can usually (throw 6+) predict the fault some minutes or hours before it occurs." I'd let a brain do likewise, but a brain should be allowed skills, too (up to the normal limits of Intelligence and Education), and thus may be able to replace one or more members of the crew (thus, the ship's brain could certainly function as its pilot and navigator).

Installing a brain ought to be expensive. I envision a "flat" price (of several million credits) for the brain's life-support equipment itself, with an additional charge based on the size of the ship.

 

[kafka47]

I think that you are getting dangerously close to the organic versus silicon brain debate of early Traveller. Essentially, it was postualtated that the positronic brain of Asimov fame could never work in Traveller nor could you get a single entity running a starship autonomously therefore you would need an organic brain and hence also the major damage radiation did to Computer cores in High Guard.

On the other side, it was figured no organic brain could handle the thousands of computations needed just for a routine jump and it would take an organic brain to begin those calculations.

Interestingly, enough canon makes two mentions, other than the cybrelene chip to this debate. One, being the advent of truly psionic computers at around TL H or so. The other being the Zhodani Brain adventure in a TNE fanzine put out by Sword of the Knight.

 

[marginaleye]

I'm not saying that the "Organic Mental Core" replaces the ship's electronic and/or fiber-optic computer -- I'm envisioning it supervising the computer "from within." There would have to be a really extensive "interpretation" system in between the computer and the organic brain.

 

[kafka47]

Why I beginning to see a Brain of Morbius scenario in the not too distant future with what you propose...

 

[marginaleye]

I would say, by the way, that an adult brain can't be installed as an "organic mental core." Infant brains have a lot more neurological flexibility than adult ones, and probably have a much better chance of successfully adapting to receiving large amounts of (from an ordinary human perspective) very strange sensory input. They would probably be vat-grown (how many times does the combination of a perfectly healthy brain and a lethally crippled body really turn up?), and (if the technology is well-established) might even be "optimized" for the job, through some combination of genetic engineering and pre- and/or perinatal bio- and/or nano-technological fiddling.

 

[TheDS]

That's more along the lines of Dune, or really any number of stories that have genetic tailoring of humans to whatever jobs they are needed for. (Heck, even Moties could be thrown into the discussion.)

That is something Traveller really doesn't get into, because it's one of those things that are revolting to most people, or is otherwise undesired. Tailoring person's genes, vat-growing brains, and stuff like that is just too dark for most people. Too many avenues for abuse and too many complications.

As a one-time plot, it might make for something interesting, but I don't really want to play in a world like that.

 

[Anton]

Originally posted by Sigg Oddra:
Apologies for the obscure reference in advance but I remember a story in a 2000AD(?) special or annual in which condemned criminals had their brains (and spinal cords?) removed and installed in ships as the CPU. Sounds like a similar idea.

Yep, it was in a 2000AD annual from the early to mid 80's. The story was a young-pirate-couple-in-love get caught and their punishment is as mentioned above. The guy's brain is put into a navy/police starship. If the 'brain' didn't behave, the captain could administer a painful electric shock. The twist in the tail to the story was that his ship later intercepted a smuggler's ship. He was instructed to take out the smuggler's pilot, which he did with a well-placed laser shot - and discovered that he'd just shot his former girlfriend.

Cheers,

Anton

 

[marginaleye]

Is there any reason why this concept has to be given dystopian spin? Perhaps I shouldn't have gotten the avalanche of pessimism started by describing the unfortunate "Organic Mental Cores" of Herbert's Destination: Void. Seriously, though, why not give the idea a positive trans-humanist spin, instead?

Suppose the brains are independently wealthy and own the ships they operate. Perhaps they have a strange, semi-nomadic deep-space culture of their own, and propagate their own kind through some combination of gene-splicing and cloning. They could be handled as a gloriously alien "race", instead of just as objects of pity and/or horror.

 

[marginaleye]

Is there any reason why this concept has to be given dystopian spin? Perhaps I shouldn't have gotten the avalanche of pessimism started by describing the unfortunate "Organic Mental Cores" of Herbert's Destination: Void. Seriously, though, why not give the idea a positive trans-humanist spin, instead?

Suppose the brains are independently wealthy and own the ships they operate. Perhaps they have a strange, semi-nomadic deep-space culture of their own, and propagate their own kind through some combination of gene-splicing and cloning. They could be handled as a gloriously alien "race", instead of just as objects of pity and/or horror.

 

[LordVince]

Actually, in the series of books based on Anne McCaffrey's "The Ship Who Sang", that IS the case. See, in those stories, when a YOUNG child is diagnosed with some severe PHYSICAL deformity -- but MENTALLY is fine -- then the "shelling" proceedure is done. As someone mentioned, the YOUNGER that this is done, the better the chance of survival/adaptation. The cost for this proceedure is SUPER expensive. Millions of dollars, at the least. So, in order to "pay back" these costs, the "shell person" is indentured for a number of years to a variety of SUPERVISORY jobs. Some run the computers that keep a city running, others just monitor a single factory.
The lucky ones get put in starship and space stations. And the TRULY lucky ones get put in SCOUT starships. They are "paid" wages and, after many, many years of service, they pay off their debt. Then, they can start using their wages for whatever they want -- a shell person who was operating a starport for 60 years could buy himself a starship to be installed in. Shell people already in ships usually buy upgrades.
And yes, in the series, these shell people HAVE established a culture of their own -- they have radios, after all, and can communicate with any of the other shell people. Many of these shell people even have computer generated "images" -- which they put up on video screens -- so that people can talk "to" them.

 

[Theophilus]

The Concept of the "brainship" has been around in Sci-Fi for a long time. In David Drakes "The Fleet" series Brainships and their "Brawns"(human crew) are used as a recurring story. The most famous is Minerva, Her physically deformed and vying body is repalced with a ship, what a wake-up call that was.

Also in Stephen Ames Berry's AI War Series. Brainships, called "symbiotechnic" dreadnaughts dominate a regions of space where no ship returns from, Kind of like the "black curtain" in TNE. Imagine, Lucan lives on in the Body of a BI-15 Titan class dreadnaught. That would explain why virus keeps returning to the core to destroy Lucan, the war goes on.

The Travellers digest article on advanced medicine established that "brain transplant" was possible at TL16, well within the technology available before the collapse. Or possibly left over from the ancients war. Imagine that, a TL25 "symbitechnic" dreadnaught with an insane Droyne brain, players beware.

 

[marginaleye]

Why go to the trouble of invoking the Ancients?

Consider:
(1) The Hivers routinely build robots with Tech Level 16 brains, and probably have the most advanced computers and other electronics in Charted Space. (2) There is also at least one (perhaps several) rarely-discussed minor branches of Humaniti in Hiver-controlled space.

Given enough Manipulation, convincing isolated human beings to enthusiastically accept radical cybernetic modification (up to, and including, becoming the "Organic Mental Cores" of "brainships") wouldn't be that difficult (the Hivers, after all, got K'kree to isolate themselves for fun and to put meat-based sauces on their food ).

It's very easy to envision some combination of (a) curiosity, (b) cowardice, and (c) technophilia leading the Hivers to dabble in this kind of technology. The Hivers are famous for having armies of warbots. I wonder if there are any cyborgs, hidden in among them.

And the Hivers are right on the Solomani border.

The Solomani may not be the sharpest set of knives in the proverbial kitchen drawer, but (like the Soviets) they're undoubtedly adept at stealing the inventions they need from others and making do. There's something essentially well-meaning and good-natured about the Hivers that makes it difficult to see their creations as entirely perverse and dystopian. The same, however, cannot be said about the Solomani.