Oops

Theemile wrote:
[snip - htm]

I'm just saying that Shannon sending commands to the reactors (for example), is several magnitudes more difficult and more likely detected than addressing the missiles or other TAC systems [snip]

Festival wrote:From the very first time I read that scene (and you don't even want to know how many times this Shannon fanboi has re-read it...), I thought it looked like she'd caused simultaneous containment bottle failure. The description of the explosions is exactly like the sort RFC employs when describing containment failure in battle.

cthia wrote:
Ashes of Victory - Chapter 48

"Citizen Admiral, I have a com request from Citizen Admiral Heemskerk," Citizen Lieutenant Fraiser announced, and Lester Tourville looked up from the tactical exercise on Shannon Foraker's plot with a sudden chill. His raised hand interrupted his conversation with Foraker and Yuri Bogdanovich, and he turned to his com officer.

"Did the Citizen Admiral say what he wants?" he asked in a voice whose apparent calmness astonished him.

"No, Citizen Admiral," Fraiser said, then cleared his throat. "But a StateSec courier boat did enter the system about forty-five minutes ago," he offered.

"I see. Thank you." Tourville nodded to Fraiser and looked back at Bogdanovich and Foraker. "I'm afraid I'll have to take this call," he said. "We'll get back to this later."

"Of course, Citizen Admiral," Bogdanovich said quietly, and Foraker nodded. But then the tac officer inhaled sharply, and Tourville glanced back at her.

"Alphand's sidewalls just came up, Citizen Admiral," she said. "So did DuChesnois' and Lavalette's. In fact, it looks like Citizen Admiral Heemskerk's entire squadron has just cleared for action."

"I see," Tourville repeated, and managed a smile. "It would seem the Citizen Admiral's message is more urgent than I'd anticipated." He looked across the flag bridge at Everard Honeker, and saw the matching awareness in his people's commissioner's eyes, but Honeker said nothing. There was nothing, after all, that anyone could say.

Foraker was tapping keys at her console, no doubt refining her data, as if it were going to make any difference. Even if Tourville had been tempted to resist the order he knew Heemskerk was about to give, it would have been futile. With Heemskerk's squadron already at full battle readiness, it would have been an act of suicide to even begin bringing up his flagship's own sidewalls or weapon systems.

"I'll take it at my command chair, Harrison," he told the com officer. After all, there was no point trying to conceal the bad news from any of his staff.

"Aye, Citizen Admiral," Fraiser said quietly, and Tourville crossed to the admiral's chair. He settled himself into it, then touched the com stud on its arm. The display before him came alive with the stern, jowly face of Citizen Rear Admiral Alasdair Heemskerk, State Security Naval Forces, and Tourville made himself smile.

"Good afternoon, Citizen Admiral. What can I do for you?" he inquired.

"Citizen Admiral Tourville," Heemskerk replied in a flat, formal voice, "I must request and require you to join me aboard my flagship immediately, pursuant to the orders of Citizen Chairman Saint-Just."

"Are we going somewhere?" Tourville's heart thundered, and he discovered his palms were sweating heavily. Odd. The terror of combat had never hit him this hard.

"We will be returning to Nouveau Paris," Heemskerk told him unflinchingly, "there to consider the degree of your complicity in Citizen Secretary McQ—"

His voice and image cut off, and Tourville blinked. What the—?

"Jesus Christ!" someone yelped, and Tourville spun his chair in the direction of the shout, then froze, staring in disbelief at the main visual display.

Twelve glaring spheres of unendurable brightness spalled the velvety blackness of deep space. They were huge, and so hellishly brilliant it hurt to look at them even with the display's automatic filters. And even as he stared at them, he saw another ripple of glaring light, much further away. It was impossible to make out any details of the second eruption, but it appeared to be on the approximate bearing of Javier Giscard's flagship . . . and the StateSec battle squadron which had been assigned to ride herd on him.

Lester Tourville wrenched his eyes back to the fading balls of plasma which had been the ships of Citizen Rear Admiral Heemskerk's squadron. The silence on his flag bridge was total, like the silence a microphone picked up in hard vacuum, and he swallowed hard.

And then the spell was broken as Shannon Foraker looked up from the console from which she had just sent a perfectly innocent-seeming computer code over the tactical net to one of the countless ops plans she'd downloaded to the units of Twelfth Fleet over the last thirty-two T-months.

"Oops," she said.

It seems Shannon had been infiltrating and setting up these contingency plans over some time. You can't give a scorned, awakened giant of a woman of her means... time.


An aside:
* I'm in burnout mode. I'm scheduled to get married soon. Originally it was supposed to be in May. Then it was moved to June. Then late August. Then back to May. Then back to late August - when most people can get the vacation time. And the cost of this thing is soaring. I pledged to pay for it all myself. And it's approaching a quarter mil in cost - flying everyone to the Canaries, wardrobe, catering. Etc., etc. I don't mind the cost, but are weddings supposed to be this stressful?! Gees!

So, I am a burnout right now. And this time of year in the Civil Engineering business is taxing. Busy, busy busy. Building Projects!

At the end of my days now, I am crawling. Then, I have to help my fiancée with new logistics, a task of which she seems to have endless surges of energy from an unlimited reservoir. So, my apologies for everything.

Any advice from you already married victims other than, bridge - leap?

Greentea wrote:Very interesting. Shannon sent a command to an obscure ops plan (or group of ops plans) she had uploaded months ago. The command caused two explosions. 1st the ships nearest to her own exploded (all 12 nearly simultaneously) and then the ships surrounding Admiral Giscard a short distance away, again in a matter that was simultaneous to the human eye. It is clear that there was a time lag that affected the explosive sequence, but the explosion seemed to occur as soon as Shannon recognized danger and input the code. Any delay was due to transmission lag. My guess would be that she either shut down fusion bottle containment or repeated Harkness's trick of demonstrating what happens when a wedge is activated inside a ship. She would have an advantage over Harkness because she was used to the hardware and knew it inside and out (she could make it do stuff no one expected and compensate for its limitations.)

Theemile wrote:

Fox2! wrote:This question may have already been asked and answered. In which case I'll go back to the more Middie preoccupation with finding this term's back door into the Crusher's database.

What did Shannon Forraker do to cause several squadrons of SS SDs to go boom? Fire on each other? Bring a pinnace's wedge up in the boat bay? Drop containment on a reactor? Set off a warhead in the magazine? Some other devilish misapplication (for which we are thankful) of her TAC witchery? Inquiring minds want to know.

To be honest, it's never been stated by the author, all we have is our speculation.

Personally, I beleive it most likely has something to do with the missiles - seeing that she sent her self-destruct commands embeded in tac updates, it most liekely has something to do with the missiles (warheads going off, wedges forming up in the tubes, capacitors overcharging and exploding, etc)

She could have sent controls to the reactors, any self destruct devices, or found a way to remotely pull a Harkness (who had to apply both a software patch and physically mod hardware) and bring up shuttle wedges. However, those imply code moving from one subsystem to another - not impossible, but if there was any information security, someone should be looking for such, making it far less likely, though not impossible. I would think that info security on ships would be paramount, because communications hacking would be an ideal way to take down subsystems in a battle. Knowing what we use in the corporate world to provent intrusions and control data flow internally, I can't imagine 40th century spaceships being less paranoid, when a simple hack can turn off the o2.

And remember, she is a TAC specialist, and knows the control codes for the missiles and is responsible for sending updates to them. While she may know reactors, shuttles, or about the scuttling charges, it isn't her job, and getting the command codes for 24 other ships may be a little beyond her scope.

Greentea wrote:Very interesting. Shannon sent a command to an obscure ops plan (or group of ops plans) she had uploaded months ago. The command caused two explosions. 1st the ships nearest to her own exploded (all 12 nearly simultaneously) and then the ships surrounding Admiral Giscard a short distance away, again in a matter that was simultaneous to the human eye. It is clear that there was a time lag that affected the explosive sequence, but the explosion seemed to occur as soon as Shannon recognized danger and input the code. Any delay was due to transmission lag. My guess would be that she either shut down fusion bottle containment or repeated Harkness's trick of demonstrating what happens when a wedge is activated inside a ship. She would have an advantage over Harkness because she was used to the hardware and knew it inside and out (she could make it do stuff no one expected and compensate for its limitations.)

saber964 wrote:..snip..
Not quite on the missiles, most things that get launched or dropped that go boom have arming procedures. In todays militaries all weapons have things like accelerometers and runtime mechanisms. In submarines torpedoes have to run about 2-300yds from the sub to arm and ICBM have to accelerate to there designed speed for the warheads to arm. On the Tomahawk cruise missile the booster pack must drop off and the missile pass a certain speed setting for the warhead to arm.

Sharp Claw wrote:Shannon simply sent a routine, slightly modified , fusion reactor maintenance update & executed it.

OOPS

I was supposed to shut down the reactor before I turned off the containment field. Oh well.

If you think automated safety routines should have caught this little error remember this is peep software. Also Shannon probably executed the code at a very low level like the driver level for the hardware, bypassing all higher level code and its builtin safety routines.

lyonheart wrote:The main limit to this solution is the impression that the destruction is due to a single explosion each , so not all fusion power plants may have been triggered.

It's entirely possible that she might have monitored all engine rooms to see which were the worst or the most susceptible to such a ploy.