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[Xantalos]

Yeaaah...  I think the vast majority of the people who would be getting ships named after them, would not be happy if their notable accomplishments are what got them into history books.  "Oh, this man will be remembered forever as the first person to lose a fight over the remote control so badly, that his head ended up a smear on the ground."

"This man will be forever known as the defining example of what you shouldn't do with a manipulator.  His reckless actions managed to kill millions of innocents, and a significant portion of his team."

"This man isn't really notable, aside from being an idiot who got himself killed."

That sounds like the best possible way to get a ship named after you!

[Devastator]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure all ships not intended to act as stationary defences (by stationary defences I meant the ones in the Hephaestus system) are crewed. Even those protecting Hephaestus should have some sods to repair and defend them.

Nope.  Matinence is done by Steve-ran robots and automated systems exclusively.  When the giant fleshorror was dealt with on the surface, there was special mention because an oversight in refitting the ship that did the atmospheric engagement with it required it to be temporarily crewed, with the promise that this would be corrected in the future.  Also, hijacking the ships in orbit consisted only of plugging Steve into them.

Basically, the only crewed ships are the prisoner transports.

[AoshimaMichio]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure all ships not intended to act as stationary defences (by stationary defences I meant the ones in the Hephaestus system) are crewed. Even those protecting Hephaestus should have some sods to repair and defend them.

Nope.  Matinence is done by Steve-ran robots and automated systems exclusively.  When the giant fleshorror was dealt with on the surface, there was special mention because an oversight in refitting the ship that did the atmospheric engagement with it required it to be temporarily crewed, with the promise that this would be corrected in the future.  Also, hijacking the ships in orbit consisted only of plugging Steve into them.

Basically, the only crewed ships are the prisoner transports.

Those UWM battleships did had a crew in them. Skeleton crew maybe, but still living people of flesh and blood. Hijacking those ships could be done without Steve, but nobody wanted to command a ship and thought Steve could do it better.

[Radio Controlled]

Id say they'd probably be controlled by their own independent AI, albeit a subservient one, just like Hephaestus.

Well, of course they'd have on-board computer assist, but would that thing really 'pilot' the ship, or just do the menial calculations? Like, if there's several ships together, do these AI communicate to coordinate fleet actions, or does Steve just tell them where to go, after which the computers calculate how and when to burn?


By the way, Sean, perhaps you try to build at least one 'siege ship' or something? Basically a smaller ship with much less powerful weaponry, but much better variability in power (eg a laser that can take down a whole building, but also another one/the same one that can shoot down a single battlesuit with extreme accuracy). Mostly so that Sword missions would have access to better aerial support that's not always big overkill (though we might want to check with PW if he'd allow that) and are capable of covering more of a planet's surface (for when missions are far apart).


For ship names, maybe we could use a different 'naming scheme' for each batch of ships/each individual battlegroup? Eg. the Q'Baja ships get names that are associated to their religion.
Or maybe a naming scheme associated with individual classes of ships, eg all FEl ships of cruiser class are named after flowers (random example), all troop ships are named after predatory insects, and so forth. Dead ARM peeps can then be used for a certain ship type.

[Sean Mirrsen]

I think all ships will be designed with crew in mind. Basic onboard AI is pretty much a given, but it will only know to follow basic commands. Move, orbit, attack. It can't do tactical. We can provide for the option to have a dedicated "ship controller" brain, however. (Unbound warships. Wonderful.)

Steve or any other offboard operator could control the ships remotely if needed, but I think the ships should still include a "skeleton crew" by default, a robotic Sod Commander with a minimal complement of roboSod crewmembers, kept in stasis until needed. Regardless of maintenance issues, a crew can do more than a disembodied remote controller can, especially in an emergency.

Even if losing Steve in any capacity will mean the end of ARM anyways, I'd like it to not be because we suddenly lose all of our ships. Every ship has to have a crew. Or at least a captain.


For siege ships, I don't quite know what you mean. The FEL ships can do precision quite well, and the laser power output is scalable, even if atmosphere interferes during space-to-surface work. If you want smaller ships, all new ship designs are supposed to have several "turret fighters" - small "ships built around a gun" that act as more-powerful-than-PD mobile weapon emplacements, built somewhat akin to the Black Death. They should be atmosphere-capable, and depending on how weapon research goes, may have either Plasma Cannons used before, some kind of lasers, or the variable-destructive-capacity PEWs.

And I have no ideas about ship naming. I have exactly one idea for a ship name, and it's special, and secret. Not to mention very highly improbable.

[Parisbre56]

Why give them actual sods?  All of the ships have QECs (I think), so we just need to staff them with bodies, and the bodies can be remotely puppeted by sods stationed on Heph or whatever.  That's probably way less expensive than designing them with stasis pods and nutrient supplies.

Redundancy and versatility. What happens if you have to fly them to a different system and they get in danger of running out of QEC fuel? Nutrients can last for years(more if you have a device that can create them) while QEC fuel can run out fairly quickly with heavy use and requires a supply run from Hephaestus to replenish. QECs also rely on their fuel, so if the fuel on either side degrades or gets damaged (either by accident or by sabotage or by combat) then you can loose your ability to communicate and control the ship. Sods on the other hand can be trained to act even when the QEC or ship AI gets destroyed or is too busy with other things. And sods are more versatile and give more options. You can just dump them on an allied planet if you want or have them protect/retrieve something important, without having to worry about tiring Aresteve or any onboard AI. They can simply act as mission control instead, giving sods simple commands and allowing the sod's "software" to take care of the rest. Same reason I think ships not meant for pure defence should have some human crew to supervise them or even take over if they loose contact with fleet command. If we're worried about them dying, we could put them in a hidden command ship, similar to the black ops ship I designed.

Ninja'd by Sean.

[Radio Controlled]

Send Xan message. Again, it'd be nice if we could handle this as IC'ly as possible. Xan the character already got a second chance for OOC reasons, let's try to do it IC this time.

For siege ships, I don't quite know what you mean. The FEL ships can do precision quite well, and the laser power output is scalable, even if atmosphere interferes during space-to-surface work. If you want smaller ships, all new ship designs are supposed to have several "turret fighters" - small "ships built around a gun" that act as more-powerful-than-PD mobile weapon emplacements, built somewhat akin to the Black Death. They should be atmosphere-capable, and depending on how weapon research goes, may have either Plasma Cannons used before, some kind of lasers, or the variable-destructive-capacity PEWs.

Well, do the FEL ships have all the required imaging equipment to pierce heavy cloud cover and deliver a laser strike with 0.5m accuracy? And next to their laser component, do they have a more powerful (kinetic or nuclear) option for when rapid large scale destruction is needed? And room for specialized warheads (eg bunker busters)?

[Nikitian]

Well, as Dev mentioned, there is no crew affected by morale.  Unless we have AI, but I don't think that's terribly likely.

Well, as others have mentioned, the human crew might still be there, if only because the in the end it's cheaper that way than making an army of auto-repair bots, guardian bots, etc. etc. Especially since quite a few of those tasks require "human ingenuity", so either human crew, or AI control - and it might be too complicated and expensive to get everything controlled by AI.
Plus, even if we end up having all ships crewed by sods (and AI/Steve for higher maneuvers), I strongly believe that there has to be a postion of a "political/security officer" aboard the ship. He might have to do as little as nothing, and watch for suspicious events, and regularly screen sods for tampering/anomalies, but there should be that dude whose job is to be slightly paranoid, and he or she has to be a different person to the one flying the ship. He'd work in concert with Steve/local AI, of course, but, as history books show, it's always better to have two competing intelligence agencies rather than one - no one has the monopoly on truth, much harder to get the whole system compromised, etc.etc.

Especially since those 'names' sound really like call signs.

I'm not really sure what you mean by this.  They are, mostly, actual names... 'Neil' or 'Adrian' doesn't really sound like a callsign to me.

Oh, no, I was mostly speaking about "Grazer-1, Grazer-2, ..." They'd work fine as call signs, but really not nearly so as parade names - and military parades, even if the ships end uncrewed, even if they never enter atmosphere and won't be observed by practically anyone - "military parades" in the sense of proudly praising the military's might and honor are very important, both to the military itself and to the civilian population

[Devastator]

Nah, there aren't any crews on them.  The crews of those battleships are mostly dead, and the remainder are sitting in prison.  The orbital salvage was entirely automated.  The defence ships are automated.  The freighter is automated.  The converted smaller combat ships were entirely automated.  That they could transport people is no doubt, but the existing ships, and proposed ships, are all entirely unmanned.

If you want someone on board as independant C&C, maybe it should be brought up IC.

[syvarris]

@Xan question

I'm not really sure what to do here.  Should I act like we're still using the old administration, despite Pyro being AWOL?  Or should I act under the new administration method, under which Nik should technically have authority?

In any case, Miya doesn't leave much room for decision making; Most of what he wrote reads like an executive order.  Beyond saying that I'll try to comply, and that such a detection method would probably be very difficult to create, there's not much to say.  Maybe I could joke about his authorization code being incorrect; it needs a dash rather than an underscore?

@Siege Ships

I thought that me and Radio had agreed, back when we argued about discussed the composition of our sod forces, that we should just make the troop transports dual-purpose planetary strike ships.  Effectively, they would have a bunch of lasers/gauss cannons specialized for orbital bombardment, along with specialized fire control systems.

Spoiler: @Human intelligence needed on ships (click to show/hide)

I disagree with this.  If we have living people on our ship, then we need to feed them, have stasis facilities, and in the case of actual humans we need a lot of extra infrastructure to make their lives livable.  We could use all that space for extra QEC fuel, or anything else that's valuable.

Sean said that we should have sod commanders on board.  I don't think this would work, because we don't have any sod commanders, and even if we did they would probably have the same issues as humans (or wouldn't have the benefit of ingenuity).

Sean also said that an actual crew can do more than remotely puppeted bodies.  I disagree again, and point out that Saint hasn't left his room for in-game years, yet is one of the most productive staff members.  Furthermore, multiple people can work together on a single project, and those people can be more valuable than those we shoved on a ship; We could have three of our most skilled engineers collaborating on how some unique problem should be fixed, and giving orders to a fourth who's actually doing the fix via QEC.  And those engineers can work on every problem, for every ship, since they're connected via QEC.

Paris brought up that QEC fuel is limited, and runs out fast.  I counter that we can replace all the space used up by stasis tanks with QEC fuel, and that fuel can be used to increase the deployment time of the entire ship, not just the crew.  I also say that we have no proof that QEC fuel runs out quickly.  IIRC, PW said that it wouldn't be impractical to have all our sod armies run on QEC communicators, and it wouldn't run out super quickly.

Paris also said that sods can be trained to act when a QEC breaks down.  I counter that sods disconnected from command can be extremely harmful to enemies and allies; They might decide to overload the reactor, or just guard some random hallway.

Paris said that ship crews can be deployed separately from the ship, meaning they're more versatile.  I think that this isn't incorrect, but also think that deploying the ship's crew complement as ground soldiers is a very bad idea.

Nik said that we should have a "political/security officer" onboard... to verify security?  To act as a competing intelligence to make it harder to compromise the ship?  That's... okay, it's a decent idea if we actually have sapient life onboard a ship, but I'm arguing that we should just have Steve fly all our ships, and have no life onboard.  What's there to be compromised?  If you mean the 'ship AI' suggested by U_P, I never really thought that was a great idea, and don't think it's going to happen.  As Sean pointed out, Unbound Warships aren't a good idea ^{_{(they're a Wonderful idea)}}.


New idea: Why have human-sized bots at all?  We don't need to do that, it just absorbs more space, and makes it easier for human enemies to compromise our ships.  We could just have access tunnels no more than a foot wide, and remote-controllable repair spiders that can travel around and fix things.  If people really want, we can have them be controlled by onboard brains, although I still think that's a bad idea.

Oh, no, I was mostly speaking about "Grazer-1, Grazer-2, ..." They'd work fine as call signs, but really not nearly so as parade names - and military parades, even if the ships end uncrewed, even if they never enter atmosphere and won't be observed by practically anyone - "military parades" in the sense of proudly praising the military's might and honor are very important, both to the military itself and to the civilian population

Nyeeh, one of the reasons I dislike naming every ship is because we're probably gonna have a lot of ships.  Seems like pointless busywork to actually name everything, and keep track of it.  Much simpler to say "Grazers 12-17 are deployed to Q'baja, along with FEL cruisers 45-62".  Better yet, "Q'baja defense force: 5 Grazers, 17 FEL cruisers." and ignore the numbers entirely.

Military parades are a decent point, but why couldn't we just shift the named ships over to planets that need parades?  They would each be accompanied by an announcement of their notable deeds, which seems like a nice advantage.  If we can't shift any named ships, just name one on the spot explicitly for the parade.

^{Also, heh, 'might and honor'.}

[Sean Mirrsen]

Sean also said that an actual crew can do more than remotely puppeted bodies.  I disagree again, and point out that Saint hasn't left his room for in-game years, yet is one of the most productive staff members.

You... do realize that Saint is exactly the kind of "crew" I am proposing for the ships, right? Central controller with autonomous robot bodies? Just one per ship, not one for all of them.


Also, no, we do have to allow for crews. Remember that we're not going to be making ships just for ourselves. Even if we don't need to necessarily provide life-support as standard equipment since the skeleton crew is robotic, and maintenance tunnels can be tiny to only accommodate repair drones, allowing for a human crew is still not a bad idea. Any one method of remote control can be eventually found out and overridden, or blocked - it may pay off in the long run to have a way to control the ships manually when the remote controls are offline.

[Nikitian]

Okay, let's sum it up:
At this point, the question is directly "life-support facilities and supplies vs. QEC fuel" efficiency calculations - and I agree if the latter turns out easily better, cheaper and more efficient, then maybe it's better to have our ships unmanned. Thus we should probably hear Piecewise's final word on that.
As for AIs, I think there might be some use out of them (and yes, with QEC they can just as well be hidden elsewhere, just like Steve), but I'll have to look closer at the question.
I still think that having a human observer on board, "just in case", would be a good idea - but if it turns out that inefficient - well, a lot of good ideas die that way.

So just one point on that:
We're trusting more and more things over to QEC. I'm not saying they'll fail. But they'll definitely fail.
It's just a very convenient single point of failure; so, between the UWM (with slowly but surely restarting tech advancement process), the slowly unravelling reality and the ERverse as it already is, with anomalies and other weird shit, I find it possible that at some point we will encounter QEC failure - and then, without absolutely anyone on board to take control of the ship, we'll just lose it. It's one thing if a single unlucky scout vessel gets trapped in a xenos anomaly and is lost; and completely another thing if the whole Hephaestus gets enveloped in another "Samsonite abyss" - or, hell, is just blown to bits by a last ditch effort of the UWM! - and all, all combined might of our fleets turns to nought in one instant.
Yeah, I am fully aware that this is but a scary fairytale, but I am scared of it. And at the very least we should consider it, and look ourselves into how QEC could be disrupted - to assess the risks with greater understanding and sense.

EDIT: Oh look, Sean said something close. Guess I am not too mad. 

[syvarris]

@Sean

Hmm.  No, I misunderstood what you were arguing for.  I thought you wanted actual people on the ship, controlling bodies that they are inside.

The only benefit brains inside the ship have over brains connected by QEC, is that they don't draw QEC fuel supply, and they don't get disconnected if a QEC jammer gets developed.

I think the former reason is counter-productive, and see my response to Nik for the latter.

As for needing normal crews to operate ships... Why does it matter that we have allies?  Must they be able to fly their own warships, even if it renders them less effective?  Even if they need to, do we need to build that weakness into our own ships?

The only important method of remote control is QEC, used for the ship itself.  The robotic repair crew would probably be controlled via radio or something, which would be... difficult to block, especially at the distances fight at.  Even moreso since all our ships will be coated in hexsand armor, which is remarkably stealthy.

@Nik

If a QEC jammer were developed on a large enough scale to threaten us, that would disable so much of our infrastructure that it's practically pointless to worry about.  We'd just lose, regardless of how our ships are designed.

Despite that, I'll offer a different methods to circumvent that: We could use a robotic AI, like what Arbiters have, and give it basic fighting capability and an order to return home if it ever loses contact.  Since it doesn't need to be extremely skilled or smart, it doesn't need to be wetware.  It could even be a normal computer, which just flies home if it loses contact.

Now, is doing anything more than the above worth it?  Sure, we could build our ships with human crews.  They would be less effective, require more maintenance and supplies, require a more vulnerable design, require more infrastructure, be easier to subvert, harder to recruit... all just so that if the UWM develops a QEC jammer tech which is powerful enough to disable large portions of our navy, but too weak to disable much of our infrastructure, we will have a somewhat better chance of surviving.

Mind you, QEC tech should be pretty hard to break.  There's no connection or transmission between the two points; IIRC the two points are actually just one atom that exists in two places.  To break it, you'd need a method to manipulate ALL the atoms that are QEC fuel, through the hexsand armor.  I.E. very accurate, precise, long ranged space magic, which means very very expensive and difficult to use automanips.  Or a godlike intelligence that would be capable of gutting the ships anyway.

At best, I could see building a few ships with human crews, much like our growing of fleshsods, 'just in case'.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Actually, to break the QEC system you just need an area-effect that prevents quantum fluctuations in a given area. Make the area large enough to engulf a fleet, and that fleet is cut off from all quantum communication.

Do recall that we have amps that can enforce temperature stasis - essentially the same thing on a molecular level - already. This is just one or two levels down, and the UWM has entire ships built around space magic, so they have the raw power to pull it off as well, while we don't.

Our ships need to have at least some autonomy. The best way to do it is make them Unbound.
Human crews are not strictly necessary, but, again, more than just sheer military efficiency to consider here. We have to provide the option for human crews to run these ships. Politics, traditions, etc. Remember for instance that the Q'baja people were very confident in their own men, and said that they only lack the hardware to be protected from an attack from space - do we know they won't object to strictly remote-controlled ships?

[syvarris]

Welp, you know more about quantum mechanics than I do.  I'd still argue that automanips with an area of effect that massive would be pretty massive themselves, and very expensive.  It's not something they could deploy in force.

As for why ships need autonomy: why?

As for allies needing ships that they can pilot themselves: Maybe.  But why would we limit our own ships?  Modify the designs to accomodate a small human crew, and let them have a few of those.  Our ships will just be different from theirs.  In fact, this way, their ships could be 'just in case' variants that I mentioned.