The Virus

[Endie]

I was always interested if people would take the same message from the strip if you replace the word Sea Lion with say Nazi or Negro. Then you might see the Sea Lion as either a champion of good holding racists to account or alternatively a hateful apologist trying to justify their own views. I suppose we are expected to view the Sea Lion as a Troll, but as the opinionated woman is unwilling to engage we never find out if he is willing to entertain her argument in his journey not be one of "those" Sea Lions or will simply attack everything she says for the sake of argument.

I have more sympathy for the Sea Lion than for her

Swapping the meaning entirely changes the meaning entirely, yes. You could also swap out “sea lion” for racist and the situation is the opposite of what you suggest.

Some people like to argue to win, not to find out if they will convince or learn depending on what they hear. I’ve met enough online since Eternal September began to have a nice, long blocklist here and elsewhere. Sea lions are intolerable.

 

[swordtart]

Some people like to argue to win, not to find out if they will convince or learn depending on what they hear. I’ve met enough online since Eternal September began to have a nice, long blocklist here and elsewhere. Sea lions are intolerable.

And some people (I am not accusing you here) seem to throw in a "You're wrong" and then don't bother to provide any sensible argument as to why that may be the case or add anything useful to the conversation. They are arguably equally intolerable. I see these as being represented by the woman in that strip.

I am not particularly interested in anyone's opinion of any specific matter in these forums, as unless they are one of my players their opinion is entirely irrelevant to my game. I am however interested in the reasons they hold that opinion as that reason might well be the same as one of my players, or it might identify something I have never considered. One of my players has an expandable shield and as yet it hasn't been used in anything other than ranged combat. In the next session however it will be used in melee and the conversation in the other thread has been very useful in marshalling my thoughts and reinforcing my recollection of the wording of the rules. Until that conversation it was just another paragraph lost in the thousands that make up the equipment rules.

I won't pester people for their reasoning (I'll ask once) but if they don't give it I cannot consider their opinion as anything other than uninformed. If their reasoning is spurious, or simple prejudice then I'll probably reject the reasoning anyway. I also won't accept the reason "because I am an expert in X so I know" or "I have been playing since Marc Miller was in short trousers" because that also doesn't give me anything to work with. I am an expert in several areas but you don't know me from Adam so why should you trust that assertion. I am such an expert in some areas that I am fully aware of how little I actually do know about them.

I also hate it when people either misquote or misrepresent rules and don't cite them. A reference is the bare minimum but frankly we can usually paste the exact wording cut from the books themselves as long as we don't publish entire pages. There are far to many supplements and versions to airily say it is "In TNE but you'll have to look it up". That is lazy and disrespectful. Too often I have trawled the books to find a supposed quote, vaguely hinted at by a aggressive poster, found it was wholly misrepresented and then the aggressive poster rather than admit they may have misremembered (which is fine we all do that) instead then just drops the thread and goes off to troll somewhere else to waste someone else's time.

I hope I have shown that where I got something wrong or have changed my opinion I fess up. Not so that the other person knows they "won", but to show that the discussion had a purpose and to encourage them to continue to provide reasoned arguments for their position on other subjects.

 

[rinku]

I would again remind the discussion that Virus as such is a deliberately weaponised version, made by Imperials. I'm good with it, by default, already knowing all about the common alien systems and how to attack them.

Systems that the developers did NOT have access to (including secret ones, whether Imperial or not) are probably a bit more secure. K'Kree, maybe; certainly the Hivers would have an advantage there... I could see ALL of their public systems, even the secure ones, being a front for their ACTUAL secure systems. And there would be so many of them. So Virus would be starting from scratch there.

Zhodani are probably helped by distance and difficulty of access to their tech. On the other hand, it would be of INTENSE interest to Imperial black technologists, and active wars do tend to provide windfalls. The Psionic angle may help them a bit; they have a special way of having an Air Gap, in a system that is only communicated via Telepathy or Telekinesis. Hackable by those with psi powers, but otherwise.

Droyne are too alien. They'd be hard.

I'd expect the Solomani, Aslan and moreso the Vargr are pretty much wide open to pre-release Virus. The black ops team would almost certainly be all over them.

And... the PARTICULAR vulnerability was the transponders. Any bordering aliens who cross into Imperial space are probably required to have those.

 

[swordtart]

It is also worth remembering that Virus is a plot device to create the setting for New Era, it is not the plot of New Era (Survival Margin p92).

My understanding was that Virus could not affect a ship that did not have the Cymberline transponder chips. The tensions following from Megatraveller Rebellion mean that such a ship would be shot on detection allowing the conceit that very few ships escaped. Once a Virus infested ship became sentient however it would be quite capable of releasing conventional computer viruses (or even biological ones) to disable or wreck any non-Cyberline Transponder equipped ships.

It would need physical access to hardware to infest it (but again that might not be that difficult for a nanobot).

 

[Condottiere]

In theory, revisioned Galactica dealt with that issue, by primitivizing their electronics, and installing firewalls.

 

[rinku]

And also don't forget that, as designed, Virus was meant to kill itself after a short period of time. THAT was the (quite reasonable) early mutation that caused all the trouble...

 

[MasterGwydion]

Seems to me that Ion Weapons would be especially dangerous to the Virus, but I am aware of nowhere that says so.

 

[rinku]

Well, anything that affects the ship's computer affects them, I guess. It's not terribly hard to add shielding vs EMPs, and really there's enough radiation and stuff that any spacecraft needs to deal with that some degree of protection can be assumed in the base rules (that is... like a cheaper hull without grav plates or an airliner without lighting strike gear, I guess you could have a cheap hull that's MORE vulnerable to Ion).

Strictly speaking by the Ion Weapon rules, they just disrupt power systems. Hardened systems can have power allocated to them before Ion damage to the available power is applied. At worst, a chip in an unhardened ship would seem to maybe lose power for a turn (or D3 turns at most), and obviously would get priority for any remaining power over every other system. I'd expect it would be like losing consciousness for an organic, or a crash reboot of a normal computer, assuming the Virus/Chip isn't 100% in volatile memory (no real reason it should be). Maybe impose an extra turn for it to get back online than the meatbags need?

Capital ships with huge power plants are particularly hard to completely disrupt - too many power points. But those almost always have fib computers anyway. Ion weapons aren't in the spinal list, either.

Having said all that... the HG rules do assume regularly crewed ships. There may be something in Robot Handbook about Ion or Stun weapons on robots you could apply.

It also occurs to me that if the defending ship is able to control which systems lose power, they may have a small window to perform emergency shut downs to help with a clean reboot, even if the Ion damage is total. That's getting into granularity that just isn't there for a six minute space combat turn, but might be important if scope shifts to 6 second character combat. PCs making heroic skill rolls is pretty much the point of Traveller, right?

 

[MasterGwydion]

Well, anything that affects the ship's computer affects them, I guess. It's not terribly hard to add shielding vs EMPs, and really there's enough radiation and stuff that any spacecraft needs to deal with that some degree of protection can be assumed in the base rules (that is... like a cheaper hull without grav plates or an airliner without lighting strike gear, I guess you could have a cheap hull that's MORE vulnerable to Ion).

I was thinking more the rules of how Ion Weapons/Electromagnetic Stunners effect Robots.

 

[rinku]

I was thinking more the rules of how Ion Weapons/Electromagnetic Stunners effect Robots.

Yeah. But as I mentioned, the computer on a ship in space is going to be designed to deal with the regular space environment, even if that protection is mostly provided by the hull and bulkheads. A Taser vs a cargo bot may not be a perfect analogue to an Ion Cannon vs a ship.

Singularity might be the correct sourcebook for this, I guess.

 

[MasterGwydion]

Yeah. But as I mentioned, the computer on a ship in space is going to be designed to deal with the regular space environment, even if that protection is mostly provided by the hull and bulkheads. A Taser vs a cargo bot may not be a perfect analogue to an Ion Cannon vs a ship.

Singularity might be the correct sourcebook for this, I guess.

I don't have that one. I was looking at the rules in the Robot Handbook since that is the closest analog to an AI-controlled machine that I could find. By the ship combat rules all I have to do is keep doing more damage than the enemy ship has power points per round and the ship has no power. Board the ship and disable the power plant until the Virus can be removed or the equipment replaced with non-infected equipment. Does this track or am I missing something important?

 

[Terry Mixon]

I don't have that one. I was looking at the rules in the Robot Handbook since that is the closest analog to an AI-controlled machine that I could find. By the ship combat rules all I have to do is keep doing more damage than the enemy ship has power points per round and the ship has no power. Board the ship and disable the power plant until the Virus can be removed or the equipment replaced with non-infected equipment. Does this track or am I missing something important?

If the robot brain is hardened, that stops that.

 

[rinku]

Yeah, I don't have Singularity either. But none of CRB, HG and RHB actually deal with something that can infect a ship's electronics in the way Virus is meant to.

Under normal circumstances, Ion Weapons don't directly target ship systems as such. Even the power plant itself recovers within minutes.

As I mentioned before, that makes sense if you assume that even an unhardened ship has at least some measures to deal with space weather hazards and such. Power can be disrupted, but then backup systems kick in, UPS batteries do their job and so forth. The crew are clearly Doing Stuff to make sure the systems they want to keep going can get enough juice. At least, in regards to danger from space.

If a character walks up to the computer server and blasts it with an electric weapon, I think we are very much out of danger from space territory (High Guard) and squarely in the danger from people zone (Robot Handbook). I don't see any real problem, any more than having different rules for space combat and people combat.

 

[rinku]

If the robot brain is hardened, that stops that.

High Guard allows it to remain powered, which is great. Robot Handbook allows a hardened brain to ignore electric stun criticals to it, but not to other systems, nor to ignore damage in general. If you tase a crew bot that has a hardened brain, it may well be thinking about how unfair it all is as its batteries catch fire and its actuators seize up, trapping it in a burning coffin...

Terry, I could be wrong, but in HG terms you still need a ship's computer, and robot brains are technically crew, right? That's important for critical hit allocation.

 

[Terry Mixon]

High Guard allows it to remain powered, which is great. Robot Handbook allows a hardened brain to ignore electric stun criticals to it, but not to other systems, nor to ignore damage in general. If you tase a crew bot that has a hardened brain, it may well be thinking about how unfair it all is as its batteries catch fire and its actuators seize up, trapping it in a burning coffin...

The CSC has rules on ruggedizing equipment to prevent the effects for an additional +25% cost, and that should be useable on robot bodies as well.

 

[rinku]

Yeah, that's specifically referred to in RHB for cybernetic implants. It doesn't appear to extend to regular robot bodies, although those benefit from protection due to environmental protection and radiation shielding - as well as half of their normal protection. Armoured bots are far less vulnerable, even without other measures.

 

[swordtart]

I suspect that a ships computer is also less vulnerable to that sort of damage because it is likely distributed (and a Virus infested one absolutely is). To reliably remove Virus you would need to physically destroy every component in the ship that has electronics (which is likely all of them). In doing that you will have completely destroyed the ship beyond repair or even salvage.

If you consider the mechanics of that, all the time you are doing that you are giving Virus time to make eggs that it is able to fire off into space in the hope of finding a suitable electronic system to infest. That system could be the comm systems of the operators or the ion weapons themselves. The reason Virus was so powerful was the ubiquity of computers, by turning up to deal with it, you were providing it a means to spread further.

EMPs fry delicate electronics, but not all electronics are delicate. Valves for example are largely immune. All it needs is for Virus to survive an EMP type weapon is for it to have elements that are hardened. My read is that is exactly what the hibernation/egg is.

The rules in RHB do not take into account an ability to distribute the brain throughout the Robot and for that brain to be able to make hardened backups of itself in other non-brain circuitry. As Rinku say's that won't help if the robot is entirely destroyed* (unless it can fire off a physical backup before it is completely destroyed), but at the scale of ships computer infested with Virus, that is a big ask.

I think nanobots are maybe the closest analogue in the Robot Handbook. They need not be AI themselves, merely programmed to build an AI (or at least an AI bootstrap). Clusters of bots with specialist functions would form the nodes of the proto-AI that might have enough intelligence to build the next stage.

Imagine trying to destroy a ship that is a distributed hive queen. It would be like destroying an ant's nest by killing each individual ant with a hammer. Definitely possible, not even complex but a hell of a lot of work when there are easier ways to go about it.

*Just removing the Robots last hit is enough, destruction would need to be to the point that it could not be repaired (possible until it has received twice the damage it has hits) or salvaged (possible until some unspecified point beyond twice hits). To ensure no element of Virus remains viable you would need to melt the robot to slag.

 

[Sigtrygg]

Seems to me that Ion Weapons would be especially dangerous to the Virus, but I am aware of nowhere that says so.

That's because Mongoose introduced ion weapons from Star Wars to the Third Imperium setting. That may have to change thanks to a certain Singularity scenario...