The Nightstar Zoo

And him carrying it there gave it time to power up without then having to traverse the distance from stores to the target on its own. Nothing says it was at full power, either. Also, all it had to do then was let its neutronium evaporate uncontrollably, not manipulate gravity while keeping its own power stable.

Getting it propulsion-ready and to the target takes charge up + travel time. Carrying it there while it charges up then simply releases its energy like a blown capacitor takes only travel time, and he was making pretty good time for it being such a big ship and what looked to be about a one meter breached warhead.

Still the whole broken wind charlie foxtrot came from not trusting the AI enough to give internally gravy manipulation. It easily had the gravy to crush all the invaders but because of TAG they did not allow this ability. So ultimately Tagon and Co's fault

Actually, every ship they'd properly LOST except the Kitesfear was because of AI, many of them some level of insane.

Petey was subourned, crazy, and subourned again before self destructing.

The Serial Peacemaker was stolen by Ennesby and promptly lost in battle.

The Touch-and-Go wasn't actually lost until Tagii went crazy and took it over, but it's AI did suffer what amounted to a nervous breakdown and refused to boot back up, effectively crippling the ship until it was repaired and refit.

Bristlecone was effectively lost at Eina-Afa directly because of a currently insane ancient AI.

Even the Scrapyard of Insufferable Arrogance was destroyed by direct action of a 'friendly' AI - once again, Petey.

At what point do YOU think 'we should probably have safeguards against the AI going crazy and killing us all' enter the picture?

(I have the distinct feeling I'm missing a ship in there somewhere....they had the refit Athens during the Scrapyard, but that was more Breya's ship than theirs...)

You can always come up with a reason why it occurred as it did, and narrativly speaking one of those explanations is correct. It just strains the suspension of disbelief.


None. You have an AI because you need somebody faster, smarter, more precise and more powerful than you to run the ship. If you cannot trust your AI, you need a new, trustworthy AI. Because, as was so clearly demonstrated, crippling your AIs ability to protect you makes having an AI completely worthless. You might as well hand-pilot the damn ship. It's also completely pointless as the AI still has a million ways to kill you, because it's tied into other systems like the Terraport.

*nods* You can trust your AI, or you can gut your AI. There is no viable third alternative.

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I used to be Junius Gallio, until I messed up retyping my password in the Great Password Reset. Nice to be back.

" I gotta stop doing mathematics while sober."

To quote Howard,

Kitesfear was the 6TT explosion, probably supplied by the Gatekeepers, designed to both kill the Toughs and probably sterilize a good portion of human civilization. When a troublesome primitive civilization arises, the best solution is probably to knock it back to the stone age, in their opinion.

PDCL was an insane AI to begin with. I don't see how Tagon ever expected to keep the ship, and HE was crazy to turn the AI -on- and start trusting it. "Just flip this switch and it'll be loyal only to you forever, Captain. Honest."

Scrapyard was lost during enemy action, directly traceable to the enemies Tagon had made with PDCL.

Serial Peacemaker, Petey again. I honestly wouldn't put it past Petey to hack Ennesby and let Ennesby think it was all his idea to begin with.

TAG, that was Credomar, the station with the massively oversized annie plants that Tagon simply ignored until they started shooting his tanks down.

TAGII, also Tagon's fault. If he hadn't taken the suicidal contract on Oisri to begin with, he probably would have been in more survivable circumstances when his officers figured out that their new robot-assist was a plant.

Bristlecone, also Tagon's fault. He just really enjoys flying into situations blind where it turns out that he's massively, horribly outgunned. To be fair, at this point he was being manipulated by all and sundry, and he was a "captain" without a ship. So he commandeered the first one he came across and got it blown up like the true strategic pioneer that he is.

I'm actually pulling a blank for Broken Wind. That was the boarding action, right? Where Tagon was actually carrying the munition that gutted the ship?

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May or may not run a Reaver-powered Perpetual Internal Combustion Engine of War And Shrapnel Fabber

Dire, I gotta say that many of those were impossible to see coming.
Serial Peacemaker WAS the best use of their ship. Tagon was irritated that he didn't get PAID for it, but it was a saving-the-galaxy situation.

Credomar was analyzed by Thurl, not Tagon. The extent of Credomar's dysfunction couldn't have been widely known, either, or else Thurl wouldn't have recommended it. The Station annies shouldn't have been an issue either - they were never used against TAG by any of the actual factions, just when the station's "Don't fly warships inside the can" defenses were tripped. Even then, TAG could resist their attack. The end problem was that people had been stockpiling antimatter for ages. Who expects a mission consisting of "Distribute food" to end up with "city about to be annihilated with an absurd AM blast?"

Oisri wasn't suicidal. The Tough's plan would have worked fine except for the slight problem with their AI being compromised and Thurl's reaction to it.

Bristlecone, there was no intelligence on just how absurdly outsized the can full of sky was, and flying into potentially dangerous situations is literally a mercenary's job.


Broken Wind was an enemy boarding action through terraport cages. Canonically that one was 100% Tagon's fault as he apparently disabled the AI's internal defenses. Which he had recently praised.


So yeah, I see this as Protagonist Syndrome more than anything else. Lots of decisions that should be perfectly mundane and reasonable end up becoming a death-defying series of barely (or not) survived adventures, because people need to have interesting events to read about.

Sure there is. You can develop mechanisms (drug-based, probably) that permit people to accurately assess the behavior of specific things, combined with human intuition, and large numbers of these people (each focused on a small section) communicating to make a network of processing with human intuition to decipher the important from the unimportant.

No runaway AI to give you trouble. Just people in charge of things.

What could possibly go wrong?

(... what was that book title again?)

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I hope Para never plays with Tenzy. The result would be terrifying.
Para and Petey need to have some dialog together. Just because.

They had two options for the PDCL; not turn on the AI, which meant their newly no refundable purchase was completely unflyable unless they hired about ten thousand more crew members, at a time they could barely afford a ship that would let them work again, or turn on the AI, find out what was wrong, and hopefully fix it. Which they did, as well as was even possible.

The scrapyard was lost DURING an enemy action, yes, but the missile that killed it came directly from Petey.

The serial peacemaker, even if Petey DID hack Ennesby to make it sound like his idea, it was still AN AI THAT CAUSED IT.

TAG on Credomar was a mess that nobody could have predicted, and the fact Tagon was able to get out of it while only losing Brad, despite literally EVERYBODY IN THE STATION being against him in some manner, and having a rather sizable supply of antimatter in the mix (and there being a fire, set by people entirely put of his control, which set the antimatter off in the first place) is remarkable. The Annie plants on the stationwaist SHOULD have been okay and ignorable, but the no-fly defenses were automatic.

TAGII on Oisri was yet another time when he couldn't POSSIBLY have known what was arrayed against him, in the form of internal spies, almost the entirety of the Gavcorps being subourned, a BATTLEPLATE arriving to clean things up, a friggin' PAA'NURI hatching from the station, and the AI going murderous because of something a subordinate did that Tagon wasn't told about until he thought he had an out-of-the-blue mutiny.

Bristlecone, as noted, was yet another 'couldn't possibly have known what the hell was actually going on' scenario. No amount of research beforehand could have clued them in to the fact there was an insane, ten-million-year-old AI in that can, that it would be defended by said AI fervently trying to keep the DMEs from finding the station, etc.

The only time having an AI on their ship HASN'T turned out terribly was with TAG, who they caused to have a nervous breakdown because they cranked his loyalty up so high he couldn't make a decision on his own without breaking.

EDIT: Also, the Toughs had, even with restoring Petey to function, only BARELY beat their deadline to LEAVE THE SYSTEM OR BE ARRESTED OR DESTROYED. There was no time to do anything BUT turn Petey back on and hope they could in-crazy him.

I missed this reply, so it's a bit old now but each of those other ways to kill the crew would also cause the AI to kill *itself*, too. The Teraport has safeguards to keep it from eating people's mass, and likely has ever since before those first jumps, life support isn't strictly necessary with everyone having self-contained life support units in their clothes, trying to irradiate or burn out the crew would be difficult because of their armor as well, and would take long enough they'd be able to stop the AI, the ships inertiics would most likely be under the 'gravy lockouts', you might have an issue if you had fabber bots like Petey did when he was subourned, but from the look of things, they've moved away from those on board ship - possibly for that precise reason.

Also, Iafa was a KNOWN TO ONCE BE INSANE AI. Exactly the thing certain people are saying Tagon should have never trusted in the first place in the form of Petey.

Make up your minds, folks; either give the AI full control over everything, even if you know it was once angry, murderous, and insane, or don't trust it at all because you know it was once angry, murderous, and insane.

No sentient entity known to exist knew the systems of the Broken Wind better than Iafa, it was the only real choice. Especially since they still don't trust their AI engineer, and Kevyn's programming of TAG is what made him break. And even IT had forgotten what Cindercone actually was. Cindy, integrated with every part of the freighter, didn't know what the most major system of the entire ship was. Or that it even *existed*. So they needed something that knew the tech. But they still didn't trust it fully because mere months prior, it had gone to considerable effort to kill them.

The little old stupid bus was able to eat its own mass for a terraport. TAG was able to force a terraport against TAD. Either of those could be used as a weapon. Or you could just leave the fleshy human behind - their life-support will run out eventually. Or take their suit with you to speed it up. Or terraport just them (and yes, one of your terraport-devices) into a star. Or run one of your torpedoes up and down the halls turning people into roadkill. Remote control a tank. Fake the refueling of their suit-annies so they run out of power in combat. Crank the N2 content and drop the O2 content in their air. Cause a gravy halo effect nearby that irradiates the ship. The NUSPI wasn't "Only with suits" irradiated, after all. Chop things up with fabber bots, sure. Fab killer machines. Steal the medical equipment and make killer viruses. Chop people's heads off with doors. Be creative! Note that none of these have to harm the AI.

If you DON'T trust your AI, you do. not. leave. it. running. You cannot, can NOT secure yourself against the AI without making it completely useless.

Forced, nothing. TAG was ordered to do something suicidal, and the systems in charge of killing them showed mercy.

By "Force" I of course mean, "override the safeties that notice there's a TAD up."

Which, if i recall correctly, Would've left nothing more then the energetic force of a fart in a bag

_________________
If you need to use a squeegee, they're probably at least Laz-4

I followed what he's saying.
The safeties are software, and they CAN be overridden.
TAG WAS ABLE TO override the lockout that prevented jumping out when Terraport Interdiction was active.
The Buranabots WERE ABLE TO override any lockouts that prevented using the bus's mass to drive a terraport, and zero the relative velocity of the people sent.
So, by extension, it WOULD BE POSSIBLE TO terraport someone in a way that they couldn't survive, as an improvised weapon.

Probably one of the easiest would be to terraport them 'away', while your OWN terraport interdiction was running.

Thank you Sean. Or even terraport away a small amount of nearby mass and use the energy-conversion to kill the person you don't like. "Fart in a bag" referred to the effect on the planet, after all.


It's not that any one of these can or would work. My point is that if I can think up half a dozen ways to murder somebody in thirty seconds, a motivated AI in charge of the ships systems will be able to find a way to murder people eventually.

No need to be so complex. Just scramble the targeting data slightly. Or not-slightly. Re-assembling someone's brain with all the pieces shuffled a millimetre in random directions is all it takes. Sending two halves of a person to opposite sides of the galaxy would work too.

It's a precision piece of equipment. All you have to do is get it slightly wrong. I'm shocked it hasn't happened yet.

Kevyn's a good engineer and there are all kinds of likely hard wired safeties to prevent this.

Also, and I cent believe this has to be said again, but teraports aren't transporters. You can't remotely Teraport somebody, or Teraport only PART of them.

Thus, these would logically fall under the 'the AI would kill itself, too' clause of AI versus crew.

Right, which is why torpedo warheads in storage have no fuel. Which is why they need to be warbucked.

Re: hardwired safeties. That's why I gave so many examples. It's the classic "friendly AI" problem. You only have to miss one opportunity and you're dead. The AI only has to win once. All the "hardwired safeties" also progressively make your AI more useless. What if you WANT to prevent borders? Or reprogram your torpedoes to do something unusual, like the Very Dangerous Array, or the "terrapedo with a squirt gun?"

And I can't believe I have to say this again, the limitations of terreports is that a 'shell' has to go, not that you can't terraport only parts of things. If you can eat everything-but-the-people on a bus for power, or terraport all the people AND BUILDINGS out of credomar... It's pretty bloody obvious that each terraport 'shell' can move anything within a certain distance of itself, and do some pretty precise decision-making in what ends up coming along, staying behind, or is converted to energy. I mean hell, I even SAID that in my post, just so I wouldn't have to have this argument again.



Sorry, what? If we assume that the warhead is an annie, and that it exploded, it had to be on and fueled. Which means it COULD have flown on its own. I don't understand what you're trying to get at. The torpedoes can cover ship-to-ship distances easily, so the flight time should be completely negligible compared to the foot-delivery time.

The 'hard wired safeties' I was referring to we're in the Teraport drive itself. He's made it as safe as possible.

Yes, Teraports operate with a 'shell' around them, but they're installed around a ship so that no point is left uncovered, probably at least half a dozen times. The drives are small and can easily be installed just about anywhere.

The first units were said in one strip to have used 'random atoms' as mass for power, but that's completely assanine, and would result in terrible metal fatigue at BEST. Early installment weirdness or just a gag that Howard's forgotten about, who knows. It hasn't been brought up since and it's much, much more likely they get their power directly from the Annie plants.

Warbucking the Annie can be done on the move, but it can't move ITSELF until its warbucked and at sufficient power. What you CAN do is move it to the target YOURSELF while it's warming up, and (this is the important part) *it doesn't have to be fully powered to detonate*. It just has to have enough power to make a sufficient BOOM.

And in this case, any BOOM sufficient enough would have killed Tagon no matter where he was, because there wasn't enough time. Better to go out throwing the bomb than running from it.

Sure terraports normally work by pulling standard grid power. I think that was actually mentioned in-strip. But obviously they still retain the ability to convert mass to power - that was a not-so-long-ago plot point. The bus. Remember?

Saying that an annie can't fly but can detonate stretches my suspension of disbelief. To fly it needs one or two g. To annihilate in needs hundreds of thousands or more.

The bus was also going at an EXTREMELY high fraction of C, and E=mc^2. The bus APPEARA to have *exploded* in that strip, rather than simple being consumed as in a teraport. All of the energy-mass of their acelleration was converted to energy, causing the bus to come to a rather explosive halt, and powering the Teraport and providing the counter-inertia to cancel out their relative velocity.

As for the warhead, it just needs enough neutronium to convert into energy to explode. And a simple one or two gees would most certainly not make the same time as an in-motion Tagon. He navigated kilometers of corridor in the minutes he had.

Pick one for a cold Annie: getting someplace quickly by carefully modulating what little power you currently have, or focus on getting hot enough to blow with enough energy to do the job.

Annie plants can't generate their full power instantly; they need fuel, they need time to convert that fuel into energy, and they need a certain amount of energy to start the reaction in the first place.

Like most energetic reactions, once you get it going, it's self sustaining given sufficient fuel (or at least that's the goal) but if you pull too much energy out of it too quickly, it'll go cold.

The plant can't keep up with the drain, and it burns it's fuel faster than it can make more.

http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2010-11-02

Using the mass of the bus. And since the comic never actually showed the bus terraporting I'm going to say "you don't get to argue with me about this anymore."


As for the warhead, no. A warhead accelerating at 1g wouldn't be 'as fast' as tagon. It would be a hell of a lot FASTER. As for your 'no, it can be warbucked on the fly,' look. Howard can give it any rules he wants. But the idea that you can somehow generate the very steep gravity well in it while it's being hauled all over creation... but NOT kill the borders? That's absurd. The idea that it can maintain hundreds of thousands or millions of g's internally, but 1g externally is too much of a power drain? That's absurd. The idea that it has the energy potential to gut the Broken Wind, but not enough energy to fly on its own? Pretty absurd.


As I've said before, what's in the comic is in the comic, so is 'justified' by something. But whatever the reason is, it's going to be one of those narrative jumps that tells you a plothole was hastily repaired.

It could be a question of energy build rates . . . the missile could fly itself to target, or it could build up the energy to explode, but because of the short range and high energy requirements, it couldn't do both.

A high-maneuver course like flying inside of a ship will consume more energy than a reasonably straight course between ships.

--FreeFlier

Huh. Okay, you're right about the bus, I remembered there being a debris cloud with the bus.

We see it takes time to start the Annie plants when TAG warbucks the forward Annie. It even takes time to restore ships gravity. And that plant is a hell of a lot bigger than the one in a warhead, and ISN'T going to explode in minutes.

.....and come to that, since I decided to look back at the strips in question, that doesn't look at all like an Annie plant warhead. There's no telltale sphere. It just looks like the warhead of a missile. Its not even referred to as a breacher. It's just 'an STS warhead'.

And it isn't a two meter missile like the one we see at Credomar, which DOES have the Annie plants, but was loaded with antimatter. It's a two meter *warhead*.

There is nothing here that suggests it runs on neutronium at all. Iafa says he wants to warbuck the Annie ON A PROPULSION UNIT. Which would ALSO be the thing that would breach the shields with a gravy pulse.

It's a conventional warhead, not a conversion bomb. For suitable values of 'conventional'. It could be a nuke, but theres no radiation threats me tioned. It could 'just' be hundreds of pounds of Pi's special blend. It seems a touch too big (and not devastating enough) to be doped with antimatter though. So it's probably some kind of fusion warhead.

Excellent point. And that made me realize, Annie plants are incredibly heavy, I doubt Tagon was lugging a warhead sized one around the decks of a ship. Any warhead that could be hand carried could not be an annie plant.

That depends on the size. Remember, there are tiny annie-plants built into the Tough's uniforms, and some of the people who wear those are not boosted (e.g., the Reverend and the Doctor).

Tagon is quite boosted. The warhead he was carrying around was large enough to be an implausible load for an unboosted man without any neutronium at all.

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Weapon: Meal, Ready to Explode.

there is a reference that an annie-plant the size of a pool ball (3cm, on the AP-103 handgun?) ways 2kg. e have seen enough torpedos to know they have about 30cm annie-plants 10 times the diameter, 1000 times the volume, assuming the same density 2000kg in the annie-plant alone. Tagon is boosted well beyond legal and wearing a powered uniform. so running with a 2.5 tone missile doesn't sound unreasonable.

Wait, are you arguing now that the STS warhead HAD to be a conversion bomb so that we can keep arguing that it was nonsensical that the bomb couldn't have gotten there on its own?

Because that's really, really dumb.

I mean, you're welcome to do it, but let me know first so I can have no part of it.