tlb wrote:However, that does not sound as though the computers were slagged either. Tamper protection sounds as though the computers might be slagged, if an unauthorized access is attempted. If the computers were slagged, then it is unnecessary to talk of tamper protection. So I do not understand from this description what was really done. Was this for both Byng's and Crandall's ships?
Checked the source, I was wrong in two accounts. First, the RMN did take two ships home out of Byng's nineteen (eighteen after Jean Bart was no more). Second, the protection mechanism that Tenth Fleet tripped actually slagged the computers.
Storm from the Shadows, ch. 46 wrote:For that matter, they had some of the actual computers in which those files had been stored, since she'd also chosen to take the battlecruisers Resourceful and Impudent home with her. [...]
but before leaving, Michelle's boarding parties had deliberately triggered those ships internal security charges... which had reduced all of the surviving battlecruisers' central computer nets to so much slagged molecular circuitry, as inert and useless as a solid block of granite. No one would be reprogramming those computers; it was going to take physical replacement if the Sollies ever wanted one of those ships to get underway under her own power again. That wouldn't take them permanently out of service, but it would take months to get a suitably equipped repair fleet all the way out to New Tuscany. In fact, it might actually be cheaper and faster in the long run to send a fleet of tugs and to them to a Solarian shipyard.