Virus

[mad13142000]

Originally posted by Sigg Oddra:
Back to Virus.
...Psionic Virus versus technological Virus ...(IMHO) ..."it's psionic" are cop out answers in Traveller.
Then consider the Empress wave. Nearly everyone has agreed it must be psionic. So we are to accept a psionic virus entity and the psionic Empress wave?

hmmm...Maybe we could kill off half of Nilsen's Folly by saying a Psionic Virus is wiped out or altered by a Psionic Empress Wave...
Then we are back to CT with little to no psionics, and a setting not dominated by one huge Empire. One filled with evil bad guys (Virus and Vamps) without them 'breeding' out of control, because the Wave takes away the psionic aspect of Virus, thus limiting them to a straight physical existance...that would be cool...
Anything to contian it so we can travel in the OTU without constantly having our ship kill us because a Virus takes it over...Or constantly killing off everything so all planets are X777000-0...

-MADDog

 

[Erik Boielle]

But TNE was only that dangerous if you made it like that.

Its like in Star Wars, with Rebel Operatives being hunted by Evil Imperial Officers, it is the officers that should be quaking in their boots.

In a confrontation bettween the RC and Solee, you really, really want to be on the RC's side because this is the RC show and not the Solee show.

Even the people in the wilds don't have to get gang raped by mutant horses as soon as you turn your back on them.

They might even be, like, Friendly, and maybe even Want Your Help.

 

[Elliot]

Or they might be happy with the fact that a downed droyne ship with a mother virus is providing them with hi tech assistance for no cost and the little bat like aliens are helping you rebuild your world after the Imperial nobility decided to invoke arbitrary destruction over an argument concerning how an 11,000 world empire was run - in which case you might think that the RC were a bunch of new imperial racist arses who just cut off your ticket to a rather ok life in the name of some damn grand heroic principle that later liberal would sit on the sofa and complain about and all because those dodgy starfish handed slugs told them to do it.

 

[Elliot]

By the way ...

Erik keep up the posts - it all good stuff.

 

[Erik Boielle]

Well, at least the morals are debatable*, which is probably as good as its going to get when one is looking for an excuse to get the cannons out and start carving a stellar empire.

Can’t always be on the simulated defensive from attacks by those simulated evil men eh?

I mean did you read the Zhunastu School of Contact thing in T4? I mean, really, that was just how to be scum in 4 easy steps, at least two of which involve starting wars!

Or Hammers Slammers, with its killing people for profit; hold the fun, motif.

It might have been an excuse to tool around the wilds bullying people, but it was a Damn Good excuse to tool around the wilds bullying people.

*And you can do nice earnest speeches. Who can resist the chance to say:-

So I said

I tell you son – I was a trader before I was a Viking.

Used to run a route through Blight and Pasdaruu.

And Every Damn Time we completed that circle things got worse.

First the prophet took hold of Kutch and started trying to get us to take people as payment, then a Vampire glassed what was left of the boat people on Umbecki. Then civil war on Lam, the dome collapse on Trench and some kinda wasting disease on the four planets around Svedbeth.

Even the damn Guild aren’t what they were.

So I’ll tell you this. Things may be all right for you now, but they aren’t all right for a lot of other people, and they won’t stay that way for you.

I got tired of just watching everything turn to shit in front of me.

So I’m going to try for a little stability.

But I think I’m going to need that ship to get it.

Man could kill a lot of vampires with a ship like that.

And I’ll bet that old bastard who sent you here didn’t tell you what we offered for it either. Or what he wanted for it.

But if I take it then I can ride it back and throw the Prophet off his own ceremonial cliff, let those kids out of that warlords harem, hand out pills while the priesthood watch and get my damn ship back.

If it stay here things will go on as they are, and slowly get worse.

So are you going to put down that gun and come with me, or are we going to do this?

Course, the intel was wrong and after I burned the guy all we got was a gutted ship with a virus wrecked core.

But we’ll do better next time.

And one less zipper won’t make no difference in the long run.

 

[Badbru]

Hi to everyone, my first post, First off to Erik, man I wish I could play in your games. To everyone else, maybe I'm just in a bad mood tonight but give the TNE setting a break, my players love it cause here they can actually make a difference not just move freight around! Second
Virus and Vamps are what the GM makes them. My group played for nearly four months befor they saw a vampire ship and prior to that had only dealt with one other virus! Other humans, (sophonts if you must!) are allways the worst enemy.

 

[aramis]

In response to the &*^&*^%^ who feels that the RSB destroying the officially promised preserve was a GOOD move forward, and that voicing my rationanle was whining, that's the least civilized response I've seen from a TNE proponent since I quite the TML. 'Nuff said on that.

TNE's FF&S gives us a lot of good stuff, but also the Dean Drive, HEPlaR (which is putting out relatavistic speed exhaust), etc. And also, 90% of it is just stuff that originally appeared for MT; very little of FF&S 1 core technologies are not in MT: HEPlaR, Weapon Design Sequnces, and changing the nature of gravitics.technology without forethught of the changes to how the universe as a whiole operated.

As for Field Programmable gate arrays: that is a valid tech that could be used to bridge a major part of the gap for virus. However, why would 11000 worlds *all* or *Nearly all* use that as the primary basis for all their technologies, and NOT put in a safeguard against remore reconfiguring of the primary components of the most dangerous hardware in existance? (to wit, any starship with thruster plates...) Why would they all be running compatable OS's and/or processors? Why would they even connect the main ops computers to comm gear? How is sensor data being used to rewrite the FPGA's?

There are a lot of problems there.

As for computer sizes, I've always assumed that ships computers, due to the much higher likelyhoods of EMP's, were soviet-naval-style micro-tube computers. (Yeah, they are big, hot, and slow, but they start up again after surving the EMP from that nuke.... and make a great back-up for a much faster microchip system. Rub your shoes really well on the carpet and touch your Pentium, and it might not start up again ever...)

Micro Tube Technolog is Something which Doc Smith also predicted, BTW... and so since I read Doc Smith while playing MT, I had the PERFECT explanation right to hand, as Doc Smith is quoted as a source for Traveller inspiration.

 

[TheEngineer]

Hi again !

Originally posted by Aramis:
In response to the &*^&*^%^ who feels that the RSB destroying the officially promised preserve was a GOOD move forward, and that oicing my rationanle was whining, that's the least civilized response I've seen from a TNE proponent since I quite the TML. 'Nuff said on that.

???
Who is &*^&*^%^ ?
What is RSB ?

...
As for Field Programmable gate arrays: that is a valid tech that could be used to bridge a
major part of the gap for virus. However, why would 11000 worlds *all* or *Nearly all* use
that as the primary basis for all their technologies, and NOT put in a safeguard against
remore reconfiguring of the primary components of the most dangerous hardware in existance? (to wit, any starship with thruster plates...)
Why would they all be running compatable OS's and/or processors?

O.k., to put IT forward another 1000 years.
If we extrapolate IT to the future we might discover a - perhaps frightening -
independence of functionality from the technologic levels below. Its like a working kind
of a actual hype MDA (Model Driven Architecture).
We might have damnd complex adaptable software / hardware, which a already trained in running on a diversity of rapidly changing "plattforms", even on "alien" technology if information about this is somehow "mineable".
Think of programs writing their own emulation software in order to "run" on a alien system.
That isnt a matter of AI, its just heavy algo-rithming.
As functionality is the primary force and requirements on functionality will be quite similar for starfaring races, their engineers and scientists there might be a certain level of common abilities/concepts.
So, OSses and processors, whatever are not compliant, but the software is able to adapt
itself and reconfigurable hardware.
Regarding the "safeguards": I strongly believe there are safeguards, but these simply are not sophisticated enough or they do not shield from a very special kind of attack.
At least the ultimate safeguard against Virus are hardwired computers....

Why would they even connect the main ops computers to comm gear?

This damnd computer is connected to nearly every item in ship, vehicle, whatever in order to control function, to update firmware, to allow a centralized maintainance.
Just take a look to newer models of BMW or Mercedes. You need a special laptop to connect
yourself to the vehicles bus-system in order to find out the cause of any problem.
Over 50% of the problems with these vehicles are software related, already.

How is sensor data being used to rewrite the FPGA's?

Hmmm, really hard to find anything reasonable...
Perhaps special sensor data is able to move the sensor computer into another mode of operation, such as restart or re-calibration, resulting in an additional mode of communication, which again could be engaged by Virus ?
At least, that would be a real major design flaw.
I prefer the idea, that Virus systems are capable of simulating friendly systems quite perfectly, in order to build up communication links and proceed in getting contact to further systems.....


Regards,

Mert

 

[Malenfant]

Originally posted by Aramis:
[QB] In response to the &*^&*^%^ who feels that the RSB destroying the officially promised preserve was a GOOD move forward, and that voicing my rationanle was whining, that's the least civilized response I've seen from a TNE proponent since I quite the TML. 'Nuff said on that.

You were whining, and your post was far more 'uncivilised' than my response to yours was. You were the one who was harping on about how Dave was being 'spiteful' and 'breaking player trust' because it 'broke your precious Imperium'.

I merely pointed out that you'd have to be really really slow to not realise this change was coming, and you'd have to make up some REALLY ludicrous explanation to keep a part of the Imperium completely unchanged from how it was in that background. If you like playing things the old CT way, then by all means play it - but what you seem to expect from TNE is just downright unreasonable.

TNE's FF&S gives us a lot of good stuff, but also the Dean Drive, HEPlaR (which is putting out relatavistic speed exhaust), etc. And also, 90% of it is just stuff that originally appeared for MT; very little of FF&S 1 core technologies are not in MT: HEPlaR, Weapon Design Sequnces, and changing the nature of gravitics.technology without forethught of the changes to how the universe as a whiole operated.

A lot of FF&S was optional too - including the Dean Drive and psionic jumpdrives, and Bussard Rams.

 

[kaladorn]

Originally posted by Aramis:
As for Field Programmable gate arrays: that is a valid tech that could be used to bridge a major part of the gap for virus. However, why would 11000 worlds *all* or *Nearly all* use that as the primary basis for all their technologies, and NOT put in a safeguard against remore reconfiguring of the primary components of the most dangerous hardware in existance? (to wit, any starship with thruster plates...) Why would they all be running compatable OS's and/or processors? Why would they even connect the main ops computers to comm gear? How is sensor data being used to rewrite the FPGA's?

I feel an odd urge to leap up and yell "ImperiSoft! Where Do You Want To Go Today?".

Imperial Standardization and the commercial benefits would tend to drive this trend in computing. Already, interoperability, common standards, and all these flash-reprogrammable and wireless-aware devices are out there. It's coming more and more, and few people or companies adquately protect themselves, despite frequent warnings! Yes, it is dumb, but we humans seem to have that down pat.

Yes, I realize it stretches the imagination to apply this Imperium wide, but it only really has to apply to starships, military hardware, and a few other select sectors to engineer the core of the collapse. And these sectors one can argue for standardization in.

Yes, one can say "dear god, didn't they have any concept of security/integrity?". Maybe they relied on a particular 'unsinkable' method (we'll call it Titanic Encryption for now) that had worked for many years and theorists said was unbreakable. Maybe you needed some sort of special key to access the reprogrammable functions. And maybe somebody getting cutesy somewhere in the Imperial design system put in a backdoor. There are a number of ways the virus could be giving them whatfor due to negligence, laziness, backdoors, or faith in a system that failed utterly at the key moment (But this ship is Unsinkable!).

Yes, it doesn't speak well of their ability to critique and repair flaws in their system, but I suspect this is a flaw of the Imperial way of doing things (ref: Rebellion).

 

[DaveChase]

And comparing the Traveller tech todays standards.
A lot of our cell phones will do an automated update. If not for government regs that say you have to let your user know we would never know.
What you say there are no regs. (I knew I forgot to vote on something

And computers
You have microsoft, then you have auto updates.
You allow cookies on your computer when visiting other websites, then you are allowing those websites to add to your system and take some basic information from your system.

Radios
The U.S. military uses singears, a FM Freq hopping system that if you are not in scyn with you can not communicate. If you got a hold of one and was able to keep it in scyn with the net you could always know what we were doing.

What has all of this to do with the Future of Traveller? Sci Fi is always based off what we know, some small fact and expanded upon.
And it seems that we as humans always repeat some big mistake we have done in the past.

Just my opinions.

Dave