On Sun, 20 Oct 2013, Onno Meyer wrote:
Would a hoverbike work with the intended TL?
At TL11? Vectored reactionless thrust. A hovercraft can be done even
earlier.
Then it could be used for gates that lead into buildings or for regular
transport between worlds you own.
A big fighting ship, being able to fight many gate ships. Protects against
an invasion through the gate.
Sublight, to save the cost/weight of the FTL drive and to get even
faster? As a side effect, that gives the scout a chance to disengage
and try again.
A ship just large enough, to outgun and outrun any gate ships. To hunt
scouts.
Coming through a gate defended by the big Gate Defender?
If all gates are blocked by gate defenders, that makes SG style missions
pretty obsolete, so i assume that is not the case. I was assuming the
scout hunter would cover a number of gates and be dispatched once an
intrusion is registered.
Unless you have multiple gates in the same system (which would AFAIK
contradict SG canon, but could be easily the case, with a SG-genericum
campain) that would imply either FTL travel or a carrier that has it.
Alternativly a mission pattern for scouts could be to go through the
nearest gate that is still in neutral territory, so it would not be
blocked by a gate defender, and use its FTL drive to get to the target
world. The scout hunter could be defence against that.
Actually one could argue, that if the software is a mix of ancient alien
and human software, the alien part might be better understood. The alien
software will be intensivly researched and tested and all findings will be
written down immediatly. There will be no last minute bug fixes either,
because regardless if it's a bug or a feature, the software stays as it
is.
Vinge had stories with programmer/archaeologists. They're also mentioned
in Transhuman Space.
But I wonder if complex software CAN be decompiled/reverse-engineered. It
is hard enough to understand other people's code when you have the source
and some sort of project documentation. That's TL8 systems. Add the size
and complexity of TL11 software, and you might need a Manhattan Project
to understand it. Difficult if it is all secret.
Part of technological development in software is to come up with ways to
make software maintance easier.
So suppose you find an ancient alien software library, that has an
algorithm for a mathematical problem, that is way more efficient then what
we have. And we know already enough about alien computer science, that we
can compile it and use the interface.
Running a series of tests, where we compare the output with the output of
our own algorithms with many different input variables, would just mean a
lot of computer power. It does not absolutly proove the correctness of the
alien algorithm, but you might get in the amount of tests, that are
required for self developed projects.
Understanding how the algorithm actually works would be a great effort,
but you will start with the most promising parts of the alien code, you
don't need to understand their whole software library. Like if their
sorting algorithm isn't any better then Quicksort, analyzing their sorting
algorithm becomes a purely academic interest, that likely get's little
funding. But if they sort in O(n) somehow, then the sorting algorithm can
get a high priority.
You'd need to spend much resources on quality management to get the amount
of testing and documentation on ordinary software and the lowest bidder
propably cuts corners.
Does that apply the same way to military software?
I never have done anything with military software. But basically it comes
down to how much emphasis the customer and the management put on software
quality, and how much on low cost and meeting deadlines. The most common
pattern i would expect is, people putting just enough effort into quality,
to meed guidelines and cover their ass on all involved levels.
With military software thoose guidelines likely are stricter.
With software archeology, you might also have competing researchers, who
intend to find errors in the original research, so they get the fame. With
that attitude also avenues, that do not look neccessary at all will
eventually be taken.
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