The other kind of piracy

dzanis said:
But that's installed software. From what I gather, if the PCs actual get their hands on "Installer" software (for example - stealing it from dealer) then they can put it on many ships, right?

Of the identical type and model. Perhaps. But not different ship types.
 
Myself I have always used the basis that the expensive "software" for starships always came with an actual hardware circuit board. I also cover the wieght of the board as being included in the computer weight. The hardware circuit board is what actually installs the software, and works with the computer to solve the program when it is used. Which basically means the board has to stay in the computer to allow operation of the software.

During the initial installation of the software, it reads the ships parameters in the computer and actually burns that into the hardware board so the software will not work on another ship unless the ship specs are identical.
 
I think one reason I avoid digging too far into this, is that ship's could also be hacked, or get a virus; which isn't always that fun, and I don't want to load the game up with a million standard checks which would slow everything to a crawl. IMTU, ship's are semi-sentient at least, so that the software at some level is self-writing, and intrusion attempts would be actively resisted.
 
To reiterate, commercial ships would have to have certified software, if only for insurance and occupational safety concerns.

Private vessels (and pirate ships) can get away with DIY programmes.

Ship design templates and specifications are standardized, I would bet that script kiddies could do it; it gets trickier with custom made ships.
 
Aerospace software (which would include anything that runs on a ship's computer) is very expensive to build because it requires very heavyweight quality control processes - and flight testing to ensure that it works and everything integrates correctly together. It's not like pirating a game.

In practice, avionics, fire control and other similar systems are more like embedded systems than a PC or server. While there is (theoretically) a general purpose computer (or many) built into the system the software is going to be relatively static and not shipped as an end-user installer. In practice, doing these updates might require a specially equipped computer and an image downloading/diagnostic tool from the system's vendor.

I would imagine aviation certification authorities would be quite horrified by the notion of end-users installing random software onto the flight control computers of an aircraft (or spacecraft, for that matter).

Any software application for such a platform (fire control, navigation, jump control etc.) will require extensive system, integration and flight testing before it can get certified (or even trusted not to screw up catastrophically). It is also likely to require significant customisation work in order to convert it to run on any new ship or configuration, which would require access to the source code.

Generally, we can assume that installing new software into an avionics system would require skilled technicians, and actually developing the software or porting it to a new configuration would require significant testing work including flight tests. Note that traveller doesn't really specify this kind of canned configuration, but it's pretty much how it works in reality. The hardware is largely shipped as a black box, with software updates being released occasionally by the vendor, and typically only in response to serious bugs or major feature releases of the system.

The exception to this would be modules that are available as optional extras for a given avionics package. In this case, the software might be possible to pirate, or even just unlock with the right activation code. However, you would have to find someone that had a firmware image in the right configuration. There might well be a grey market for such things.
 
Nobby-W said:
Aerospace software (which would include anything that runs on a ship's computer) is very expensive to build because it requires very heavyweight quality control processes - and flight testing to ensure that it works and everything integrates correctly together. It's not like pirating a game.

<Much cutting and snippage>

The exception to this would be modules that are available as optional extras for a given avionics package. In this case, the software might be possible to pirate, or even just unlock with the right activation code. However, you would have to find someone that had a firmware image in the right configuration. There might well be a grey market for such things.

DUDE! Consider this added to the Black Hole of Quality!
 
You've had three millenia of programming, the hardware components are mostly modular.

The chances are, most programming languages are as well, having accumulated shortcuts and libraries.

Military grade has an incentive for being cutting to bleeding edge on one hand, to being extremely reliable and conservative on the other.
 
Condottiere said:
You've had three millenia of programming, the hardware components are mostly modular.

The chances are, most programming languages are as well, having accumulated shortcuts and libraries.

Military grade has an incentive for being cutting to bleeding edge on one hand, to being extremely reliable and conservative on the other.

You can see this happening today - for example quite a lot of NumPy is based on a library of computation routines largely coded in FORTRAN. However, integration into an unsupported platform still requires integration and testing. In aerospace this involves flight tests and certification, which is time consuming and expensive.
 
Nobby-W said:
Condottiere said:
You've had three millenia of programming, the hardware components are mostly modular.

The chances are, most programming languages are as well, having accumulated shortcuts and libraries.

Military grade has an incentive for being cutting to bleeding edge on one hand, to being extremely reliable and conservative on the other.

You can see this happening today - for example quite a lot of NumPy is based on a library of computation routines largely coded in FORTRAN and (in some cases) dating back several decades. However, integration into an unsupported platform still requires integration and testing. In aerospace this involves flight tests and certification, which is time consuming and expensive.
 
Unless you're a scout aboard your own scout ship so might not have this problem...

As I understand it, Scouts tend to be lent their ships by the service for occasional missions in return

Would this be part of the maintenance cost for a ship if it was already legally owned?
 
Certified updates; though hard to believe that everything hasn't been covered or discovered anyway, even zero day exploits.

Astrogation charts and programmes, on the other hand ...
 
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