On 18Jan2023 1624, Greg Nokes - greg at nokes.name (via tml list) wrote: > Yeah, it was a little flippant, but here is more fleshed out reasoning: > > With systems designed to be operated for weeks, months, or even years with out updates there must be much different underlying architectural considerations. Could you imagine how valuable a remote zero day would be if discovered by an aggressor state? Could you imagine a starship’s computer blue screening just as it jumped? Oof. > > Quite honestly, IMHO that’s what lead to Virus - a fully AI, self modifying (program? Being? Something else?) crushed the Imperium. It had to be a dooozy to overcome the design and safely protocols, and IMHO may not even be physically possible. > > I would expect systems to operate in far different modes than we are accustomed to. Given that the smartest folks in the Terran, 2I and 3I have had a long time to think about this, I cannot really imagine what those safeguards would look like. Given what we know now, I would expect things like > > * Air gaps between sensor, commo, and control systems That and having biologicals in the circuit are measures adopted in the New Era. Imperial era ships had throughly networked or fully integrated systems. Ooops... The way I see it, by using the Cybeline chips as a basis, Lucan's researchers got themselves a full AI (normally TL17) two full tech levels early, and then trained it in hacking using cutting edge TL15 military hacking tech. As even a lot of the 3I's military was TL14 before the 'Rebellion', the X-boat net was TL13, and most of the rest wasn't even that, Virus unsurprisingly was able to get in, especially as it had an easy entry via the IFF systems, and the more generations down the track a given Virus was, the better it got. Good enough for gaming purposes, I reckon. I also have trouble believing that it could've wrought the devastation that it canonically did. However, the Third Imperium was experiencing a lot of other stressors as well at the time, and as with many of the mass extinctions on Earth, the cumulative and synergistic effects could've done it (though this doesn't really explain the Aslan, etc.). Again, good enough for gaming purposes. -- Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>
