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Star Wars: Ship Designer Quest

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cryptoam said:
Okay, I am currently reorganizing E war and Anti lockon as Cyber warfare and EAM(electronic attack measures) in my posts.
The first(E war) hijacks /degrades the functioning of computers and networks(don't forget countermeasures). The second attacks systems that depend on radiation to function(like modern day ECM).

EAM should include things like decoys and multispectral chaff/flare like systems. For the more active form(self protection and standoff), I'm thinking about getting specialized circuits for the RF systems(you can get faster response to emissions via an analogue system controlled using digital components.).

E War will need more time though. We may want to get an slicer at some point. If we do, let's try to aim for one of those that has experience in actually programming things as well. Red/Blue teaming anyone?
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I don't really think your standard Red/Blue teams would really help with the E War on our ships, at least right now. The vast majority of computers in Star Wars--regardless of purpose--are air-gapped from any and all other computers. As a general rule, computers in Star Wars don't really seem designed to communicate with any other computers, apart from droids via a wired connection.

This seems to me to be the result of a lack of wireless transmission capability, either due to technological limitations or encryption requirements (I'm wagering on the latter). In general, wireless communication seems to be limited to audio, low-resolution holograms, and text. Kind of low bandwidth, If you ask me. (The only exception to this was the DS1 plans being sent to the CR70 in Rogue One, but even that seemed to be an incredibly narrow communication--more akin to a laser than a radio broadcast IRL--and was merely ground-to-orbit).

In short, most ships seem to be immune to network attacks and hijacking by the simple virtue of not being networked in the first place, or at least not wirelessly. With the exception of starfighter control systems, ships basically don't trust anything that didn't originate on their own wired network. I'd even wager that as a general practice the entire communications suite is air-gapped from the rest of the ship's network, requiring a droid or datapad to transfer anything across networks. Note, this doesn't mean that ships are unhackable, but rather that any E-War attack on any ship other than a carrier or other specialty design is basically guaranteed to require physical access to a terminal onboard the ship.
 
I was thinking more about doing so on the hardware it self. I think the scramblers are only capable of attacking systems because they have issues in their design and hardware.
(Looks at IRL devices leaving JTAG headers with root access shells that are not removed or secured. VIDEO)
Getting a slicer on the team that can do some programming and/or design will help clean up such issues and give us a person to perform adversarial testing.
 
Oracle of Space said:
This seems to me to be the result of a lack of wireless transmission capability, either due to technological limitations or encryption requirements (I'm wagering on the latter). In general, wireless communication seems to be limited to audio, low-resolution holograms, and text. Kind of low bandwidth, If you ask me. (The only exception to this was the DS1 plans being sent to the CR70 in Rogue One, but even that seemed to be an incredibly narrow communication--more akin to a laser than a radio broadcast IRL--and was merely ground-to-orbit).
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Or also cultural reasons. Since there was that slave system which was a big deal, then the Republic lost FIVETWO HUNDRED DREADNAUGHTS thanks to that system...
And the aforenoted droid paranoia might be relevant.
Edit: Correction, the Slave system just wasn't used for the reason it was used there, even though it is relatively often used for other uses. Though that event probably ensured it would not be used in such a way again...
Edit 2: Link to said lost fleet
 
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Was there an official reason for why the lost fleet went; well, lost?
 
Themarineguy said:
Or also cultural reasons. Since there was that slave system which was a big deal, then the Republic lost FIVETWO HUNDRED DREADNAUGHTS thanks to that system...
And the aforenoted droid paranoia might be relevant.
Edit: Correction, the Slave system just wasn't used for the reason it was used there, even though it is relatively often used for other uses. Though that event probably ensured it would not be used in such a way again...
Edit 2: Link to said lost fleet
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Right, that. Yeah, that probably is a big reason why they don't do remote-controlled anything.

For comparison, the Katana fleet had enough firepower it could likely single-handedly win the Battle of Kamino by itself. I was going to initially say is could probably take on both sides fleet and win, but then I noticed the frankly crazy fleet composition on the CIS side. (How the heck did the CIS lose the battle of Kamino?)
 
cryptoam said:
Was there an official reason for why the lost fleet went; well, lost?
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The organic crews got infected with a disease that drove them insane and they used the system to jump the fleet away to an unknown destination. No one knew about the disease part until decades later, so it was assumed to have been caused by a glitch in the slave systems.
 
I'm also willing to guess that the real reason hasn't been discovered yet right?
 
Oracle of Space said:
Right, that. Yeah, that probably is a big reason why they don't do remote-controlled anything.

For comparison, the Katana fleet had enough firepower it could likely single-handedly win the Battle of Kamino by itself. I was going to initially say is could probably take on both sides fleet and win, but then I noticed the frankly crazy fleet composition on the CIS side. (How the heck did the CIS lose the battle of Kamino?)
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CIS lost the battle of Kamino cause of the strategy used by Grevious and Ventress to throw away ships so they could reconstruct them into droids on the ground thus creating a ground force which would then destroy the Cloning facilities. Quite an interesting strategy and would have worked if not for Jedi discovering them early.
 
cryptoam said:
I'm also willing to guess that the real reason hasn't been discovered yet right?
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I think they did figure it out by the time of the clone wars but Katana Fleet was still a massive embarrassment for the republic. Now I say this cause I have seen elsewhere that the Hive Virus that caused the problem was engineered by a scientist as a terror weapon.
 
Oracle of Space said:
(How the heck did the CIS lose the battle of Kamino?)
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battle of Kamino the cis ships where specially designed to come apart in large chunks for orbital re-entry and rest fleet was just hold and pickup fleet the rest war was all planned becouse droids where programmed to loss many a battle in early days of the war or take defence around core areas of there supporters
 
coyote16able said:
I think they did figure it out by the time of the clone wars but Katana Fleet was still a massive embarrassment for the republic. Now I say this cause I have seen elsewhere that the Hive Virus that caused the problem was engineered by a scientist as a terror weapon.
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I thought they figured it out when they found the fleet, which was in the Empire era
 
GeneralOs said:
I thought they figured it out when they found the fleet, which was in the Empire era
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Reading the Wookiepedia, they knew...
Wookiepedia said:
"SBI believes this tyrannical genetics master to be not only Count Dooku's akk dog responsible for the recent stone mite outbreaks, but the homicidal maniac behind the carbonite metastasis crypts of Anaxes and the Katana fleet's descent into wholesale insanity."―Mace Windu, about Zeta Magnus' possible involvement[src]​

However, what should have been a demonstration of efficiency turned into a complete fiasco. One or more of the ships' crewmen picked up a hive virus at one of the ports of call on the fleet's maiden voyage. Said virus, which had the particularity of driving its victims insane just before it killed them, was spread throughout all two hundred Dreadnaughts while in dormant state. When it suddenly flared up, the virus took down nearly everybody at once. The infected crewers, instead of calling for help, slaved their ships together. Because of that, the Katana command crew also descended into insanity and jumped blindly into hyperspace, taking the entire fleet with them.[1]​

Following that debacle, the Katana project became an embarrassment to the military echelons that had commissioned the fleet,[3]​ and although that incident did not actually start the movement toward decentralization in automated ship functions, it certainly sealed its outcome.[1]​

The incident made headlines for a time, with some journalists making sarcastic word-plays on the "Dark Force" name. For a few years, many enthusiastic salvage teams hunted after it, but to no avail,[1]​ as trying to find a ship that had misjumped to some random location in the galaxy was practically impossible, and even two hundred ships could easily be lost within the vastness of space.[4]​ By the time of the Clone Wars, the Republic's Senate Bureau of Intelligence surmised that the mastermind behind the hive virus had been Zeta Magnus, a genetic terrorist affiliated with the Confederacy of Independent Systems, who was himself the result of a freak experiment by the techno-lords of the Arkanian Dominion.[5]​ The fleet event
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Though it done nothing to lessen the humiliation of the fiasco.
 
Of course, some people may ignore that explanation(eg confirmation bias against any form of automation) as well.
 
cryptoam said:
Of course, some people may ignore that explanation(eg confirmation bias against any form of automation) as well.
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Though to be fair, that automaton did enable the one group of now insane command crew to send the whole entire fleet into a blind jump, effectivly causing the whole fleet to vanish. While not a perfect match situation wise, this comic strip is generally accurate. The more automation, the less checks there are on idiocy.
Edit: And while measures can be taken, they aren't experienced at it, and we are painfully aware there is no such thing as idiot proof.
 
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it might be beyond the scope of the quest but an engineering team could build a land/station bound simulator ship then experiment with what tasks are safe to automate and what ones are not.
 
Eh, just make that an option for us to invest in and make it a perk/trait that the company has. Depending on what holdings the company has for it's testing(physical prototypes), we may be able to retrofit a facility to do so.
 
Silversun17 said:
it might be beyond the scope of the quest but an engineering team could build a land/station bound simulator ship then experiment with what tasks are safe to automate and what ones are not.
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Honestly, considering the big problem with automation is the human element...
It would probably be best used to see if there might be unexpected issues with the parts, to try and make it look less bad, and could potentially be used as a training tool if designed with such a use in mind. The Slave Circuits used in the Katana fleet was a proven method and system, which only went wrong due to the human element and the slave circuits being able to be set up to enable all ships to jump simultaneously from the order of one ship...
Edit: Though one thing we could do is work to make dedicated automation technology to bypass the risk of having your own ship be hacked, which is a risk with ships that use Slave Circuits, due to them essentially allowing remote control of the ship. Which also means true automation has seen pretty much no use period, due to Slave circuits simply not being automation in the first place...🤔
 
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Actually @Jax , is hardware in the loop testing a common thing in the universe?
If it is not, I would like to see someone in the quest come up with the idea(would still require investment).
And what about this?
cryptoam said:
We may want to get an slicer at some point. If we do, let's try to aim for one of those that has experience in actually programming things as well. Red/Blue teaming anyone?
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cryptoam said:
Actually @Jax , is hardware in the loop testing a common thing in the universe?

We may want to get an slicer at some point. If we do, let's try to aim for one of those that has experience in actually programming things as well. Red/Blue teaming anyone?
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Well, first of all, you need to explain what exactly you mean by both questions and what you want to do. Considering English isn't my first language and I don't have a background in programming or IT I'm a bit at a loss here.

General, a slicer would most likely help you with stealing information from other shipyards. You have to remember that you play as the head of the design division of a shipyard, not a weapons developer or something else. So coming up with better weapon systems is always a nice plus, it's not your main job.
 
Silversun17 said:
it might be beyond the scope of the quest but an engineering team could build a land/station bound simulator ship then experiment with what tasks are safe to automate and what ones are not.
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Personally I think in the Star Wars universe there are two trends when it comes to automation.
The first is to use as little automation as possible to save money on the hardware end because it's cheaper to hire a dozen crewmen instead of automating something (this is something that the densely populated worlds of the Core/the ecumenopolis worlds can do due to labor being very cheap).
The other is to automate as much as possible because hiring crew is more expensive than installing automation (for example in the less/thinly settled Outer Rim).
 
The anti-automation sentiment was just bad press and Holonet memes. Still killed streamlining and efficiency in ship engineering.
 
@Lord Okkirke don't forget that you can replace much of the crew with droids. It is a stop-gap often employed on most larger ships for the limitations of the computers. Also, most ships have a main computer and network, just not the automation parts.
 
Jax said:
@Lord Okkirke don't forget that you can replace much of the crew with droids. It is a stop-gap often employed on most larger ships for the limitations of the computers. Also, most ships have a main computer and network, just not the automation parts.
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Oh, I know. It's just that I count regularly using Droids to replace/as Substitut crewmembers as automation of the ship (after all if you build a Droidbrain controlled turret that doesn't mean the turret is counted as a Droid).
As an example of this the Lurcehulk Class ships needed to work with a Crew of 500 of which only 25 had to be organic (and you only need to pay the organics wages) meaning that these ships are built be automated by replacing organic crew with low order Droids.
 
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