Reduced Crew, Focused Mines, other things

[alex_brunius]

Because that is the way game works?  I don't know why Steve did what he did.

Exactly my point when it comes to HPM damaging electrical systems like AI, because its the way the game works 

[Shipright]

Do you know how far into metal a microwave penetrates?  Look up skin depth and tell me that a ship with half a meter thick hull armour is going to be worrying about microwaves anytime soon.  The AI and any other electronics are safe from the mircowaves until long after the crew is cooked.  Also there is electronics in every other system on the ship but the microwave weapons only affect those which are basically exterior to the hull (sensors and fire controls).

Why are you assuming that the armor is metal? Or that you have any idea of the properties of any transnewtonian material.

In reality metals are extremely poor armor against lasers for many reasons and weapons like particle beams which will cause the deadly affects I linked to. Solid metal armor is entirely useless against kinetic weapons like rail or Gauss guns at the energy level used in the game where thin spaced layers and whipple shields are required.

Most importantly metals are heavy, and thus will be used sparingly and definitely not to blanket the entire hull.

[Narmio]

Yes but remember what we are comparing it to here. Which task do you think is harder to develop an AI to do, repairing a unknown and random failure, or normal operation of an engine/missile launcher?

My point was not that It couldn't be done, but that replacing the human engineering/maintenance is one of the last areas the AI and Automation would find itself into. After all someone needs to be left repairing the robots too, right?

Control, maintenance and diagnostics of complex automated systems actually exists in the real world right now.  This paper: http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/m/pub-archive/1057/1057%20maxent04.pdf is just the first of thousands of results for "neuroadaptive control", which is applied AI researcher lingo for "intelligent system which monitors and diagnoses a complex factory or other facility".  Sure, that's a long way off controlling an entire spaceship's systems, but we can't regulate a tokamak's plasma field right now either. I'm not trying to argue that it isn't hard, it's just that what's possible and what's not possible for intelligent systems can be a highly unintuitive thing.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Just take a look at modern combat naval ships. They all reduce crew requirement and increase the efficiency of the ships by quite a margin. I think that the new US carrier will reduce the crew compliment by nearly 20% because of new and automated systems.

I's only reasonable to think that this will be even more common in the future. I also think that it is just as easy to render a crew useless than it is with an AI system, if perhaps not even more so.

But this is a Sci-Fi discussion so you can pretty much conjure up any techno babble to justify pretty much anything... 

[Antsan]

Yes but remember what we are comparing it to here. Which task do you think is harder to develop an AI to do, repairing a unknown and random failure, or normal operation of an engine/missile launcher?

Actually I think that deciding what and when to shoot was one of the harder problems in AI. Not targeting, of course.
The thing is that you cannot do these things from a remote location when assuming that communication still happens at light speed.

[Sematary]

I think mesons are far more unrealistic tbh, how can any weapon go right through all kinds of shielding, armor, do no damage to crew but specifically hit internal systems that are made from the same kind of material that the armor is?

As I understand mesons in most sci fi sense its a mass of quarks and anti-quarks (as real mesons are a pairing of the two) that phase in and out of existence as they travel. So it would be timed so when going through the shields and armor of a ship its phasing but when it is going through the interior component it is in a phase that is the same as the reality we live in and therefore able to interact with it. My very limited understanding of actual mesons says this explanation is not, strictly speaking, impossible just out of our current grasp. But that is off topic.

On topic, I totally agree with your point, Alex. A ship with AI should have the AI components be more susceptible to HPM, if for no other reason than balance and it fits the in game logic even if we don't fully understand what that logic is.

[sloanjh]

As I understand mesons in most sci fi sense its a mass of quarks and anti-quarks (as real mesons are a pairing of the two) that phase in and out of existence as they travel. So it would be timed so when going through the shields and armor of a ship its phasing but when it is going through the interior component it is in a phase that is the same as the reality we live in and therefore able to interact with it. My very limited understanding of actual mesons says this explanation is not, strictly speaking, impossible just out of our current grasp. But that is off topic.

Not quite.  In the real world, as you say, a meson is an unstable particle composed of a quark and an anti-quark.  Because it's unstable, it has a finite life-time (very similar to a radioactive half-life) which indicates the time it takes to undergo total matter-anti-matter annihilation (I love saying "total matter-anti-matter annihilation") and turns into other particles like photons.  The technobabble is that you speed the mesons up to close to the speed of light so that the relativistic time dilation factor keeps them alive long enough to travel into the other ship, where they decay.  If they're neutral mesons like pi0 they'll only interact with the armor using the strong force (not electro-magnetism) so they'll slide right through and decay inside the other ship.  IIRC this is the technobabble from Traveler, which I think is where Steve lifted borrowed them from.  No phasing in and out of reality - just time dilation.  In reality there are a bunch of problems with the idea, like the fact that the lifetime is more like a half-life (so they'd be decaying all the way to the target), their lifetimes are very short so you'd need a REALLY high time dilation factor, the difficulty of making mesons without banging a particle beam into a target on your own ship (and vaporizing it) and the difficulty of steering/accelerating uncharged particles.  Buy hey, that's why it's called technobabble

John

[Steve Walmsley]

IIRC this is the technobabble from Traveler, which I think is where Steve lifted borrowed them from. 

Guilty as charged