OOPS

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.

ThinksMarkedly wrote: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.

Note that on the Tepes the pinnacle had to be physically damaged in order to bypass the interlock that should have prevented the wedge from coming up in that situation. There ought to be similar interlocks on anything with a wedge.

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

What happened was:

“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.”

I think all the reactors lost containment simultaneously. The description is similar to the descriptions of a ship blowing up because of one reactor losing containment.

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:What happened was:

“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.”

I think all the reactors lost containment simultaneously. The description is similar to the descriptions of a ship blowing up because of one reactor losing containment.

No question about it, she took all their reactors out simultaneously. The how is unclear, but I favour the scenario where she hijacked their energy batteries and had them target each other's reactors.

The furthest two superdreadnoughts in a squadron are no more than 5,000km away from each other. They're probably no further than 500km from the closest one.

It's difficult to imagine and convey how devastatingly powerful and accurate superdreadnought grasers must be at that range. Fourth Yeltsin comes close, but these were forces passing at speed, not in perfect formation at rest.

As for any interposed sidewalls - Shannon would have been able to time things so that her hijacked grasers were firing through each other's opened gunports.

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:What happened was:

“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.”

I think all the reactors lost containment simultaneously. The description is similar to the descriptions of a ship blowing up because of one reactor losing containment.

munroburton wrote:No question about it, she took all their reactors out simultaneously. The how is unclear, but I favour the scenario where she hijacked their energy batteries and had them target each other's reactors.

The furthest two superdreadnoughts in a squadron are no more than 5,000km away from each other. They're probably no further than 500km from the closest one.

It's difficult to imagine and convey how devastatingly powerful and accurate superdreadnought grasers must be at that range. Fourth Yeltsin comes close, but these were forces passing at speed, not in perfect formation at rest.

As for any interposed sidewalls - Shannon would have been able to time things so that her hijacked grasers were firing through each other's opened gunports.

Or just "drop sidewalls and fire"?

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:

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

What happened was:

“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.”

I think all the reactors lost containment simultaneously. The description is similar to the descriptions of a ship blowing up because of one reactor losing containment.

I like your logic, but it brings us right back to the suddenness of the explosions. Containment failure is usually an inexorable march towards destrucion, not a sudden jump. But the nature of the explosions does denote reactor involvement.

Would a scuttle command involve the reactor, or charges placed strategically about the ship? It doesn't seem like charges would accomplish the same effect. We've seen ships scuttled, haven't we?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

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.

True. Harkness destroyed Tepes. But he did it in a round-about fashion, using a pinnace's wedge. IOW, he hacked the pinnace's systems? And not the ship's systems, per se. Correct?

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

I was unclear, I meant ships which survived (partially or in total) whatever mechanism she used. Most destructive acts will not destroy an SD entirely, or quickly - The ships are designed to contain such damage, and soldier on despite it. Every destruction was complete, virtually instantaneous, and had many levels of overkill.

cthia wrote:I like your logic, but it brings us right back to the suddenness of the explosions. Containment failure is usually an inexorable march towards destrucion, not a sudden jump. But the nature of the explosions does denote reactor involvement.

Would a scuttle command involve the reactor, or charges placed strategically about the ship? It doesn't seem like charges would accomplish the same effect. We've seen ships scuttled, haven't we?

Well, sort of. We've had "ships were abandoned and scuttled" type events in the story, but no real description of how said scuttling occurred. The one time non-operation ships were scuttled en masse - Grendelsbane - it was accomplished by outside fire rather than internal systems, even the ships that were complete but down for repairs. This to me indicates that the reactors are the primary component of the scuttling system because those ships didn't have functional reactors yet or had been shut down while in yard hands.

And why shouldn't the scuttling system be based primarily if not solely on the reactors? They are by far the most energetic system on board and the most destructive when they blow. To get anywhere near the same destructive power from the ship's warheads you'd have to gang fire dozens of them at precisely the same instant, since they're all jammed in the magazines as densely as possible, meaning only a couple meters between warheads. The speed of light from the high energy photons released from a nuclear bomb indicates you'd have to time each explosion within a few nanoseconds of each other to prevent non-detonation fratricide between the warheads. Possible with the tech in universe, but tricky to pull off and unnecessary when you have something much better on hand.

On the scale of reactors blowing or warheads detonating inside the ship, conventional charges aren't worth considering as a possibility. There's just not enough energy available to wreck the ship thoroughly enough to keep the enemy from being able to collect debris to study. Even reactor explosions can't sufficiently wreck all of the ship's systems for that, but they come a lot closer than other methods.

Most likely the scuttling system uses the reactors as the main charge or as the secondary charge set off by a system designed to cause containment to fail. To mix universes for a second, the self destruct systems in Star Trek ships were designed to create antimatter containment failures first and only afterward trigger other systems as a backup. The self destruct wasn't containment failing on its own but a specific charge designed to induce containment failure. We may be looking at something similar here.

cthia wrote:True. Harkness destroyed Tepes. But he did it in a round-about fashion, using a pinnace's wedge. IOW, he hacked the pinnace's systems? And not the ship's systems, per se. Correct?

yes, the Pinnance wedge was a physical and software hack directly on the Pinnance. The ship's network was only used as a pathway to the pinnance.

Galactic Sapper wrote:

cthia wrote:I like your logic, but it brings us right back to the suddenness of the explosions. Containment failure is usually an inexorable march towards destrucion, not a sudden jump. But the nature of the explosions does denote reactor involvement.

Would a scuttle command involve the reactor, or charges placed strategically about the ship? It doesn't seem like charges would accomplish the same effect. We've seen ships scuttled, haven't we?

Well, sort of. We've had "ships were abandoned and scuttled" type events in the story, but no real description of how said scuttling occurred. The one time non-operation ships were scuttled en masse - Grendelsbane - it was accomplished by outside fire rather than internal systems, even the ships that were complete but down for repairs. This to me indicates that the reactors are the primary component of the scuttling system because those ships didn't have functional reactors yet or had been shut down while in yard hands.

And why shouldn't the scuttling system be based primarily if not solely on the reactors? They are by far the most energetic system on board and the most destructive when they blow. To get anywhere near the same destructive power from the ship's warheads you'd have to gang fire dozens of them at precisely the same instant, since they're all jammed in the magazines as densely as possible, meaning only a couple meters between warheads. The speed of light from the high energy photons released from a nuclear bomb indicates you'd have to time each explosion within a few nanoseconds of each other to prevent non-detonation fratricide between the warheads. Possible with the tech in universe, but tricky to pull off and unnecessary when you have something much better on hand.

On the scale of reactors blowing or warheads detonating inside the ship, conventional charges aren't worth considering as a possibility. There's just not enough energy available to wreck the ship thoroughly enough to keep the enemy from being able to collect debris to study. Even reactor explosions can't sufficiently wreck all of the ship's systems for that, but they come a lot closer than other methods.

Most likely the scuttling system uses the reactors as the main charge or as the secondary charge set off by a system designed to cause containment to fail. To mix universes for a second, the self destruct systems in Star Trek ships were designed to create antimatter containment failures first and only afterward trigger other systems as a backup. The self destruct wasn't containment failing on its own but a specific charge designed to induce containment failure. We may be looking at something similar here.

But, externally, you would see much the same from the missile wedges firing up. If all the missiles in the tubes suddenly fired up their wedges, all the ship's reactors would lose containment instaneously.

Besides, Shannon already saw this happen once. Her mind probably worked on a way to do it remotely for the intervening years. And she has access to the TAC updates going to the Missiles.