[spoilers]What happens when Shannon Foraker meets...

Thirdbase wrote:
Just what we need, Foraker and Harkness getting into a contest to see who can blow up a warship in the most unusual way.

Cheopis wrote:I do not recall for certain, but I do not believe that anyone actually physically touched that pinnace? If that is the case, then Shannon would most certainly want to know how the sensors were fooled or made nonfunctional remotely.

But those safeguards, while as near to infallible as they can be made, are designed to prevent accidents, and what happened in PNS Tepes' Boat Bay Four was no accident. The only vessel left in it was the pinnace upon which Scotty Tremaine had labored, and now Horace Harkness' last program brought its systems on-line. But Scotty had made one small alteration: he had physically cut the links between the pinnace's sensors and its autopilot. The flight computers could no longer "see" the boat bay about them. As far as they could tell, they could have been in deepest, darkest interstellar space, and so they felt no concern at all when they were commanded to bring the pinnace's wedge up while it still lay in its docking buffers.

john964 wrote:

Cheopis wrote:I was thinking about it, and I believe that getting Foraker together with people like our favorite master chief Horace Harkness would get us the best results. My impression of Foraker is that she's a nuts and bolts type of person, not theoretical. Pair her with a few more nuts and bolts people near her caliber who are familiar with how Manticore equipment actually works, then have the nuts and bolts group work closely with the theoretical group.

Getting those two together might actually finally give DW a reason to clearly explain what happened during the "Oops" incident.

Foraker would almost certainly be very interested in finding out how Harkness managed to light a pinnace wedge while it was in a boat bay, and Horace would almost certainly have heard something about the "Oops" moment and ask for an explanation of that as "payment".

Explaining "Oops" should not be a worry, because one of the very first things that Foraker would have certainly done when the PRH became a sane nation again would have been to fix the exploits she used to blow up those ships.

For Foraker to NOT seek out Harkness and try to get information out of him would be completely out of character when she discovers he engineered that little malfunction. She would certainly want to be very, very certain to patch up that security/safety issue by being certain that she understands what happened and how it was accomplished.

IIRC in HH8 the disconnected some kind of proximity sensor that allowed them to bring up the wedge. And my gues on the 'Oops' inceident Shannon hacked into the ships reactor containment control system much like what Harkness did to PNS Tepes's systems. IIRC Harkness hacked into Sensors, Comms both internal and external, Fueling systems in the boat bays, Transport tubes, Suit morge and Weapons.

jthoma8318 wrote:I still say she hacked the fire control and had them shoot Grazers at each other at essentially point blank range. Not even sidewalls and armor would help at that close range. Only other possibility is shooting missiles with contact nukes and all safeties off and missile doors shut. I don't think she could have hacked into the engineering systems through the tach net to make the reactors lose containment. I know our navies computers are compartmentalized on ship and I can't believe theirs would be less advanced than ours.

--SNIP--

Tenshinai wrote:

Thirdbase wrote:
Just what we need, Foraker and Harkness getting into a contest to see who can blow up a warship in the most unusual way.

Lol, now that could get REALLY entertaining!

Michael Everett wrote:

jthoma8318 wrote:I still say she hacked the fire control and had them shoot Grazers at each other at essentially point blank range. Not even sidewalls and armor would help at that close range. Only other possibility is shooting missiles with contact nukes and all safeties off and missile doors shut. I don't think she could have hacked into the engineering systems through the tach net to make the reactors lose containment. I know our navies computers are compartmentalized on ship and I can't believe theirs would be less advanced than ours.

--SNIP--

Horace Harkness proved that the computers on StateSec ships are not hardware compartmentalised, but split by software. This is shown by how his infiltration programs pretty much destroyed or disabled every system in the ship except for life-support. And he was able to do so because his two "guards" only thought he was hacking the gaming computers, not realising that the gaming systems were integrated with all the other computer systems.

To be fair, the software-compartmentalisation routine makes sense (sort of) in that it allows one to shift programmes to other regions of the net as large parts get destroyed in combat. The navy probably does things very differently, but we have evidence from the books that StateSec's normal skills were significantly below their naval equivalents. Plus, StateSec were complacent. This probably applies to active security on computers as well to a significant degree.

Awaiting comments.

NervousEnergy wrote:If Foraker meets Harkness (or Hemphill) it would likely have to happen somewhere in the Manticore system or Grayson, since she's due to be adopted by a 'cat. Perhaps she'll be brought in by Eloise to assist in the rebuilding of Manticore's primary shipyards.