OOPS

How exactly did Shannon pull it off?

We know she entered some commands into her console. But what did those commands do, exactly? I imagine some sort of cascade failure and the fusion bottles blew. But how did the engineers on every single ship not catch the levels rising dangerously?

Of course, I'm simply speculating that it was a containment failure in the reactor room. I suppose she just as easily could have brought up a small wedge in the big big boat bay. LOL

Shannon is a tactical officer by training, so it’s likely that anything she did is directly related to that. She wouldn’t have remote access to any systems on the State Sec ships. The text also clearly states that Shannon sent a command over the tac net regarding one of the ops plans that was already uploaded to the rest of the fleet. Thus, she probably sent a command to the other ships in the fleet to open fire.

cthia wrote:How exactly did Shannon pull it off?

We know she entered some commands into her console. But what did those commands do, exactly? I imagine some sort of cascade failure and the fusion bottles blew. But how did the engineers on every single ship not catch the levels rising dangerously?

Of course, I'm simply speculating that it was a containment failure in the reactor room. I suppose she just as easily could have brought up a small wedge in the big big boat bay. LOL

this has been argued ad nauseaum, and there are no additional details past what was in print.

Personally, I have always been on the missile side. Shannon had access to the Tac systems of the fleet and was sending Tac updates to the ships. One would assume there were system firewalls - even in the crappy Peep software. Either she exploded missiles in the tubes or brought up the wedges. Somehow, she circumvented the safeties via software to allowed whichever to happen,

I knew this had to be a dying horse! But, as usual, I didn't get the memo.

I know she circumvented some things. But engineers are trained to not always count on instruments. A runaway reactor would have sounded differently. Felt differently. Yatta yatta yatta. That makes me question death by runaway reactor, that, plus the fact that whatever it was, it was quick. Like bringing up a wedge in the boat bay.

Duckk wrote:Shannon is a tactical officer by training, so it’s likely that anything she did is directly related to that. She wouldn’t have remote access to any systems on the State Sec ships. The text also clearly states that Shannon sent a command over the tac net regarding one of the ops plans that was already uploaded to the rest of the fleet. Thus, she probably sent a command to the other ships in the fleet to open fire.

The operative fact was that the State Sec ships were cleared for action and the regular navy ships weren't. It would have been awfully unlikely that enough regular navy ships would have had clear firing arcs at 24 separate super dreadnoughts to get instant kills like that.

It seems more likely that she'd tapped a scuttling command that was based on certain systems being active or not. Something that was ignored for ships under normal operation but blew the reactor if the sidewalls were up, maybe.

Reactor meltdowns usually happen slowly only because the system is trying to fight the meltdown. But if you disable all the safeties and drop containment, the hot plasma will simply go outside the reactor and destroy engineering. The armour will deflect it inside the ship, channelling instead of venting.

Disable the battery backups and any other generators, those ships are either destroyed or sitting ducks. They may be cleared for action, but they can't get the missiles out and there's no power for a laser pointer.

Though as Duckk says, this was not in her area of expertise. But she could have got help from engineers who did know this.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Reactor meltdowns usually happen slowly only because the system is trying to fight the meltdown. But if you disable all the safeties and drop containment, the hot plasma will simply go outside the reactor and destroy engineering. The armour will deflect it inside the ship, channelling instead of venting.

Disable the battery backups and any other generators, those ships are either destroyed or sitting ducks. They may be cleared for action, but they can't get the missiles out and there's no power for a laser pointer.

Though as Duckk says, this was not in her area of expertise. But she could have got help from engineers who did know this.

let's look at the facts:

Shannon set up her surprise in a series of routine fleet TAC updates.

Shannon triggered her surprise via a TAC command from her console.

The SS Squadrons did not trust the navy and were there specifically to watch/deal with the Naval commands.

All the SS ships were cleared for action, with their wedges up, sidewalls up, and weapons systems alive and focused on the nearest Naval squadron, either Giscard's or Tourville's.

All the SS ships in each 12 ship squadron exploded simultaneously, with only a few seconds warning.

the Squadrons exploded only a few seconds apart (if that)

no outside factors were mentioned.

Shannon did it.

So, whatever happened, happened fast, destroyed all the ships in 1 blow, at the same time, and had no external trace.

And, of course, these were SDs - huge Armored beasts, designed to absorb 100s of enemy hits and survive. And whatever killed them, did it in 1 blow, with 100% success, and left 0 survivors.

We don't know there were no survivors. But otherwise, yes, exactly.

Duckk wrote:Shannon is a tactical officer by training, so it’s likely that anything she did is directly related to that. She wouldn’t have remote access to any systems on the State Sec ships. The text also clearly states that Shannon sent a command over the tac net regarding one of the ops plans that was already uploaded to the rest of the fleet. Thus, she probably sent a command to the other ships in the fleet to open fire.

Sorry I missed your post, Duckk.

Indeed, she was a tac officer by training. Although she wasn't just a run-of-the-mill tac officer. But I always found that fact rather amusing, after the fact. Obviously she was immensely qualified well beyond tac officer even then. She has gone from tac officer to the head of R&D at Bolthole. There's a huuuge gap in acquired expertise there, somewhere.

Hacking systems had to be a cakewalk for Shannon. But what bothers me is the ease of which it was to accomplish. It doesn't seem like it would have been so easy to destroy her own ship, let alone so many others.

cthia wrote:Hacking systems had to be a cakewalk for Shannon. But what bothers me is the ease of which it was to accomplish. It doesn't seem like it would have been so easy to destroy her own ship, let alone so many others.

Harkness did the same aboard PNS Tepes. The SS crews were woefully inadequately skilled for the jobs they had. They didn't know what they were doing and computer security appeared to be very lacking.

We don't know what Shannon did and whether she was alone.

What we can safely say is that:

a) it involved some hacking, since she sent commands and it all happened very quickly after that

b) the cause was internal to the ships (or at least to the sidewalls). As you said, those were SDs, designed to absorb blows, and they had their sidewalls up.

Shannon could have parked an RD on the hull of each ship. If it's just magnetically attached, no one is going to know it's there -- and any EVA crews would assume it's meant to be there. When it powers up its wedge, the ship has no defence, armour or no. And RDs are in her area of expertise.

She could also have taken command of the RDs in each of the SDs launch tubes.

But wedges don't come up that fast, unless the nodes are already warm. That would have been noticeable, unless again it was standard procedure to have a ready-to-go RD in the launch tube.