Civilian Transponders

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

At the moment all civilian ships have a transponder that displays their position and it is always active. With the addition of NPRs this presents the player with a dilemma. NPR scouts and survey ships will spot those freighters, colony ships, etc. if they are in the same system and either attack or summon assistance. On the other hand, if civilian ships didn't have transponders, you would only be able to detect them when they were in sensor range and you wouldn't know if a thermal contact was a civilian ship or an alien invader. I am interested in opinions on how to handle this.

Do I:

1) Leave things as they are and accept that players will have to provide warships to protect civilian shipping against alien raiders.
2) Remove the transponders for civilians and let players start worrying about every thermal contact and presumably start building local patrol ships to check them out.
3) Give the player a general Empire wide command for civilians to start/stop using transponders (with a delay of perhaps 5 days to avoid this being switched on and off at will)
4) Add some type of intelligence to civilians to disengage transponders if an unknown contact is detected in the same system. If a transponder is off, a civilian would then check each new system it entered and if no contacts where known, it would switch the transponder back on.
5) Add a command for the player to tell all civilians not to use transponders in certain systems.

Any opinions or alternative suggestions welcome.

Steve

[Erik L]

At the moment all civilian ships have a transponder that displays their position and it is always active. With the addition of NPRs this presents the player with a dilemma. NPR scouts and survey ships will spot those freighters, colony ships, etc. if they are in the same system and either attack or summon assistance. On the other hand, if civilian ships didn't have transponders, you would only be able to detect them when they were in sensor range and you wouldn't know if a thermal contact was a civilian ship or an alien invader. I am interested in opinions on how to handle this.

Do I:

1) Leave things as they are and accept that players will have to provide warships to protect civilian shipping against alien raiders.
2) Remove the transponders for civilians and let players start worrying about every thermal contact and presumably start building local patrol ships to check them out.
3) Give the player a general Empire wide command for civilians to start/stop using transponders (with a delay of perhaps 5 days to avoid this being switched on and off at will)
4) Add some type of intelligence to civilians to disengage transponders if an unknown contact is detected in the same system. If a transponder is off, a civilian would then check each new system it entered and if no contacts where known, it would switch the transponder back on.
5) Add a command for the player to tell all civilians not to use transponders in certain systems.

Any opinions or alternative suggestions welcome.

Steve

My order of preference would be: 4, 5, 3, 1, 2

[Charlie Beeler]

That is an interesting delema.  I'd like to be able to flag specific systems indicating required transponder setting.  Preferably the civilians set transponders prior to transit.  Of course if the systems status is changed the civilian ships adjust accordingly.

[Cassaralla]

I like 3.  Kinda simulating the Kingdom/Empire/Nation issuing a 'silent running' order in times of War.  Or 5 for specific instances of that order.

[sloanjh]

My order of preference would be: 4, 5, 3, 1, 2

ditto, with the addition that I think 4, 5, and 3 make sense together.  With 4, I assume transponders would shutdown for hostile contacts as well

[Brian Neumann]

My order of preference would be: 4, 5, 3, 1, 2

ditto, with the addition that I think 4, 5, and 3 make sense together.  With 4, I assume transponders would shutdown for hostile contacts as well

Same for me as well

Brian

[Erik L]

Additionally, with option 4, I'd like to see the civs turn the transponders back on if conditions merit.

[welchbloke]

I agree with 4,5,3 and I also agree that allowing for all options would be the ideal.  
As an alternative you could use modern military aircraft IFF as a model. Military IFF can be encrypted and only responds if interrogated by a signal with the appropriate crypto; this would, of course, be a big change.  Also details like maximum distance for interrogation etc would need to be determined.

[Erik L]

I agree with 4,5,3 and I also agree that allowing for all options would be the ideal.  
As an alternative you could use modern military aircraft IFF as a model. Military IFF can be encrypted and only responds if interrogated by a signal with the appropriate crypto; this would, of course, be a big change.  Also details like maximum distance for interrogation etc would need to be determined.

That would be an idea for military/government ships. But what about civilian shipping? Those would tend to be not encrypted.

Maybe change the way IFF works. Have IFF respond to an active sensor ping. If the ship is pinged by an active sensor, the IFF flashes the identity instead of having an always on situation.

[welchbloke]

I agree with 4,5,3 and I also agree that allowing for all options would be the ideal.  
As an alternative you could use modern military aircraft IFF as a model. Military IFF can be encrypted and only responds if interrogated by a signal with the appropriate crypto; this would, of course, be a big change.  Also details like maximum distance for interrogation etc would need to be determined.

That would be an idea for military/government ships. But what about civilian shipping? Those would tend to be not encrypted.

Maybe change the way IFF works. Have IFF respond to an active sensor ping. If the ship is pinged by an active sensor, the IFF flashes the identity instead of having an always on situation.

True about the lack of encryption for civilian ships; however, it's not beyond the realms of possibility for them to have a lower level of encryption than the military grade.  The response to a sensor ping would be a more 'realistic' method.

[Erik L]

One thing that would be interesting, is if you could set your IFF to a false reading. I.E. have that 9000 ton cruiser broadcast IFF as a freighter.

It'd be quite fun to suck a NPR into thinking he's going to hit a freighter when it's not. Of course, the reverse would be available to the NPRs also.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

One thing that would be interesting, is if you could set your IFF to a false reading. I.E. have that 9000 ton cruiser broadcast IFF as a freighter.

It'd be quite fun to suck a NPR into thinking he's going to hit a freighter when it's not. Of course, the reverse would be available to the NPRs also.

You can do that already. Check out the dropdown for the transponder on the Misc tab of the ship window.

Steve

[IanD]

Erik Luken wrote:
welchbloke wrote:
I agree with 4,5,3 and I also agree that allowing for all options would be the ideal.
As an alternative you could use modern military aircraft IFF as a model. Military IFF can be encrypted and only responds if interrogated by a signal with the appropriate crypto; this would, of course, be a big change. Also details like maximum distance for interrogation etc would need to be determined.

I like this, but would also like to see welchbloke's idea of

Have IFF respond to an active sensor ping. If the ship is pinged by an active sensor, the IFF flashes the identity instead of having an always on situation.

This enables a defender to make sure the contact approaching him is not a colony ship but a hostile contact.

Under 4 would a civilian ship recognise another civilian ship as an unknown contact? If it would there would have to be some way of allowing all your Nation's civilian ships to recognise each others transponder signals.

Regards
Ian

[jfelten]

As an alternative you could use modern military aircraft IFF as a model. Military IFF can be encrypted and only responds if interrogated by a signal with the appropriate crypto; this would, of course, be a big change.  Also details like maximum distance for interrogation etc would need to be determined.

This would be my preference.  You can read a summary of modern IFF on the ever useful Wikipedia.:  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identifica ... end_or_Foe

And by the time we can build ships such as those in Aurora, you can bet we'll have more more advanced and secure systems.  While one can postulate pretty much anything in a science fiction setting involving alien races etc., it is hard to envision that such a future system could be spoofed by an enemy (outside of bad fiction that is).

[welchbloke]

As an alternative you could use modern military aircraft IFF as a model. Military IFF can be encrypted and only responds if interrogated by a signal with the appropriate crypto; this would, of course, be a big change.  Also details like maximum distance for interrogation etc would need to be determined.

This would be my preference.  You can read a summary of modern IFF on the ever useful Wikipedia.:  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identifica ... end_or_Foe

And by the time we can build ships such as those in Aurora, you can bet we'll have more more advanced and secure systems.  While one can postulate pretty much anything in a science fiction setting involving alien races etc., it is hard to envision that such a future system could be spoofed by an enemy (outside of bad fiction that is).

The issue would not be the technology, rather how 'realistic' you would want things to get.  The management of the encryption loads would be a real world problem in this scenario.  If every civilian ship had an encrypted IFF transponder all it would take is the loss of a single ship to enemy action to cause the change of crypto for every ship in the empire (unless you can confirm the ship was lost and the enemy definately did not get the crypto).  In this case the time delay for a large empire is significant and could lead to ships being misidentified as hostile.