They still need to have the option of autonomy - especially if they're flown by normal pilots. It's one thing to be the captain of a ship on the bridge - there's lots of things to do. It yet another thing to remotely fly a simple drone - even if a mission lasts hours, you can probably comfortably sit around for that long. But a typical space patrol mission lasts months, where nothing is happening. It takes a long time to accelerate to jump velocity, a time also not measured in anything less than days. A regular pilot would not be able to sit around for that long.
Perhaps I was unclear? I didn't mean every ship should be completely stripped of all autonomy. I meant that they should be stripped of all living control methods. Having a computer that can fly the ship where it needs to go, and probably aim the weapons, seems like a good idea. This is really another reason to have QEC pilots; If you had pilots
in the ship, they'd have way too much downtime, and can't go do something else (unless you have bulky VR machines for them).
I do think that ships should have a limited AI, much like inorganic arbiters. Nik convinced me of that much. I just don't think the AI should be an expensive wetware or human pilot. It should be able to take care of all small, day-to-day problems, and alert a human pilot if anything comes up.
Also, even beyond supernatural means of severing the QEC link to a ship, it still leaves combat damage. If the ship is entirely QEC-controlled, the QEC relay becomes its sole weakpoint, more vital than its main weapon or its powerplant. Do recall how the diplomatic mission beheaded that military base. With the QEC relay and an onboard intelligence both being present, there is no single point of failure. A ship with an onboard intelligence can receive relayed commands via simple radio link from any other ships in the fleet, just interpreting orders and acting as it is trained to do, without the need for direct control.
If you have both a QEC control infrastructure, AND an organic on-board controller, you get the worst of both worlds. It's very inefficient to supply the ship enough that you always use the QEC for important piloting, because you have the burn the organic's supplies as well. If you only use the QEC pilot in emergencies, the ship is less effective because it has a less skilled and experienced pilot. Not to mention, either way you have all the space taking junk for the organic still around.
Wouldn't it be simpler just to use two QECs, and split the fuel supply between them?
Also do recall, the QEC is not a radio net, or a telephone net. A quantum entanglement communicator is two devices paired together. Ships are going to need a whole array of quantum comms each, to be controllable both by us, by Steve, and by whatever local force we're sending them to.
It's foolish to add all the different connections to a single ship. You should just add a connection to whichever particular hub will need to control it most often, like Hephaestus, and if you need some other hub to control it, like Steve, he can just relay his orders through Hephaestus. That way, you save on ship space. It's also more efficient, because to take a maximum length voyage, a ship with connections to everyone would need to take commands from everyone at some point.
Also, I thought allied planets were going to physically crew their own ships? If they use QEC-controlled ones, I suggest we route their commands through our own bases anyway, just so that they can't betray us. We don't need to tell them that that's what we're doing.
@ships: well, we could do what (Paris?) said: for each fleet of decent size (so not for a lone scout somewhere) you add 1 cloaked ship carrying humans/wetware who can take over in case of trouble. They'd have their own QEC to Steve, but in case Steve can't remote pilot for whatever reason (he's distracted elsewhere, QEC jammers, QEC array damaged on some of the ships) they can take over. Since each ship would probably still have basic computers to calculate menial things (eg. burn times) they should be able to still control a fleet with decent efficiency.
Yeah, Paris was the one who said that. I actually searched for the statement, to see if I'd already responded to it, but apparently I didn't because it was one lone sentence.
First issue I have with this is that it's a ship controlling other ships via Radio. Not only would that involve lag, it's probably quite possible to reverse engineer. Also, it would make the stealth ship very easy to detect.
Second issue I have with it is: why must we have a specialty ship with organics for this? You could just have nearby ships radio commands to it, recieved via their own QECs. That would allow for more redundancy, more ships to be controlled, and probably less lag (since the nearest ship would be the one controlling the wounded ship). Also, Steve being distracted isn't an issue, because we could just train pilots who sit on Hephaestus and pilot ships via QEC.
The only role for this is commanding ships that've been affected by a QEC jammer. I think it would be a good idea to build a few such ships, just in case, but not send them out with every fleet. If something fishy happens, we can start sending the specialty ships to check it out.
I just thought of another problem of having ships be very far away, although I'm not sure if piecewise will ever bother with that. Depending on gravity and relative velocity, time dilation may make things harder to control in real time. It's one thing using a QEC to transmit simple messages like general move/attack orders and news reports and it's another thing to control something fully in real time through it. Because if the time difference is big enough then the system might not be capable of synchronizing properly for real time control (if there is a max transmit rate) or the controller (whether human or AI) might not be able to respond to the data quickly enough.
This is... huh. Interesting idea. Could be a problem, I guess, so it should be asked of PW with the other questions.
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Topic: Hephaestus OOC (Read 167892 times)