SDN Starship Design Commentaries

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Simon_Jester
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Re: SDN Starship Design Commentaries

Post by Simon_Jester »

Prometheus Unbound wrote:
Crazedwraith wrote: Plus it was a daydream. He was dreaming he was a heroic captain and saving the day against the borg. Perhaps slightly immature but that sounds like pretty standard daydream material to me not evidence of psychosis or whatever.
:D Yes it is hyperbolic.

But is it not telling that among the first things he starts dreaming of, is killing people (bad or good guys)?
He's spent his entire life aboard Voyager which has gotten into numerous battles during that time. What's the problem? If I were fantasizing about being a spaceship

I mean, I'd get it if you were exaggerating something that was at least fair, but with so many examples of the EMH being violent or crazy actually in the show, why would you pick on him for daydreaming about heroically blowing up Borg? I mean hell, if that's the kind of violence the EMH defaults to, I say bring it on!
What about Data and his dreams? Starts stabbing people.
Again, designed by a crazy person. Also, dealing with a weird alien stimulus that he doesn't know how to cope with.
AI in Trek is Dangerous.
Numerous AIs in Star Trek have been perfectly stable and functional over long periods of time and in the face of a variety of problems. Like the normal operations of the obviously-sentient ship's computers, the ones Majel Barrett voices.

It's bleeding edge prototype AIs that are operated outside their normal design parameters, designed by lunatics, or willfully exposed to random hazards and metaphorical pollutants without proper maintenance that become hazardous.
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Re: SDN Starship Design Commentaries

Post by Prometheus Unbound »

Simon_Jester wrote:
AI in Trek is Dangerous.
Numerous AIs in Star Trek have been perfectly stable and functional over long periods of time and in the face of a variety of problems. Like the normal operations of the obviously-sentient ship's computers, the ones Majel Barrett voices.
... until you leave it going for 7 years without a restart, it gains self awareness, takes over all ship functions and tries to exterminate the crew...

and then ... merrily hops off on its way like nothing happened :)
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Re: SDN Starship Design Commentaries

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Simon_Jester wrote:
Elheru Aran wrote:The holodeck is worth a whole book in its various violations of security. There is absolutely no reason why a.) programs should be permitted to become sentient,
Many of the legitimate uses of the holodeck involve creating characters that can convincingly impersonate being human, which requires that they be at or near human levels of intelligence.
Impersonating humanity is one thing; a chatbot can do that with enough practice.

Being actually sentient even though created out of whole cloth is quite another. It opens up a massive ethical issue.

A holodeck character doesn't NEED to be capable of holding a complex conversation, frankly, unless that's its specific purpose (social interaction). A holodeck character in a Wild West scenario doesn't need to be able to discuss warp physics at length. Holodeck NPC's don't need to be capable of more than a few lines and appropriate reactions.

On a military starship (and let's face it, that's what the Enterprise et al. are), there is no place for spontaneously creating sentient holographic characters, *especially* ones that could very well endanger the ship!
b.) programs should be capable of controlling the ship via the holodeck's connection to the computers...
While the connection certainly needs to exist, I agree that there shouldn't be a way to upload executables or send commands from the holodeck. It's hard to imagine a sensible reason for doing this.

The closest I can come up with that MIGHT act as a rational explanation... Hm. Maybe at some point in the Galaxy's design process, someone considered giving the holodeck a useful role during combat, as a "Central Information Control" facility or other dedicated node for information processing and command functions by the crew. That could actually be pretty useful under some conditions. Say, during a fleet battle, when keeping track of what's going on in the battle as a whole is too complicated to be done from the bridge and requires a dedicated CIC.

As a result, the programmers put backdoors into the ship's network allowing tactical data and commands to flow two-way from the holodeck to the rest of the ship, and vice versa. However, this feature was either abandoned or never used during normal operations (say, because the Enterprise-D never really participated in a fleet battle), so it just wound up being a security backdoor in the ship's systems that was, for whatever reason, never removed. Oops.
Frankly 'oops' isn't an excuse. The first time such a vulnerability was found, Picard should have ordered it rooted out and closed after the first damn episode where it was found out that holodeck characters were capable of controlling the ship.
c.) the holodeck should be capable of outright killing people.
They're not, normally. But apparently they decided that the safety features which make that "cannot kill" guarantee possible should be things that the user can switch on and off, which opens up some serious vulnerabilities.

The level of danger we see from holodecks in Star Trek episodes cannot be the normal level of danger for the Federation as a whole, or they would have put better safeguards in play. Honestly, I feel like it makes more sense to blame the specific weirdness we see on the fact that we're seeing weird ships. The Enterprise-D had its computers monkeyed with by various alien hackers and viruses early in the series and may well never have been fully 'normal' again.* And Voyager went several years without dockside maintenance or technical support, and with an active emergency hologram personality (one that was of necessity sentient), operating far, far longer than anyone ever intended.
I understand specific ships being particularly weird. But the safety protocols should be something that's hard-coded into the holodeck and cannot be turned off without very specific authorization. Even less should the holodeck be capable of turning them off by itself!

As to the Enterprise's computers, see below...
*You can argue that if this hypothesis is true, then they should have brought the ship in for a refit in which they physically ripped out all the computers and replaced them with brand new models reset to factory default...
This is precisely what should have been done. Expensive? Difficult? Yep. But the fact of the matter is that if the computers are so vital to the ships-- second only perhaps to the warp drive system-- compromised systems are unacceptable. An upgrade is one thing; myriad viruses, hacks, and what not aren't. Sentience is even less acceptable. You cannot have a computer that makes decisions for itself (emergency situations notwithstanding).

An interesting fic was written in one of the Strange New Worlds collections where somehow the Enterprise-D finds itself empty of crew; the computer has to decide what to do by itself, with the aid of a few recordings Picard made for exactly that situation. It's been a long time since I read that book though...
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Re: SDN Starship Design Commentaries

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Elheru Aran wrote:The Sulaco... mm.

The Aliens universe seems to largely require cold-sleep during FTL travel, and for some reason androids are included (Prometheus throws this into doubt though). Perhaps there's some... radiation or... something, during their version of FTL that is hazardous to humans, and cold-sleep is one way to keep them safe during transit. Weyland-Yutani, being cheap fuckers, would rather automate the ship during FTL, which may be a pretty cursory procedure (cold-sleep aside), and the crew aboard can take care of business in realspace. The Sulaco has rather less of an excuse.

Speculation: Weyland-Yutani put pressure on the USCM to take a minimum force on a fully automated ship in order to prevent leaks after bringing xenomorph forms back?

Skimmer, gotcha. I knew it wasn't the bridge on top that they used for fighting, I just wasn't 100% sure where the CIC was but I knew it was somewhere around the hull for protection. Definitely far better than either Wars or Trek.

Not read the replies yet but I always figured it was because the trips were of great length - 2, 3, 5 years there and then back. If you have the tech to freeze people then do it - that's thousands, tens of thousands of tons of resources not spent.
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Re: SDN Starship Design Commentaries

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Where'd you get several years travel times from? The Marines in Aliens explicitly said they expected a rescue mission to arrive within 17 days of them being declared overdue.
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Re: SDN Starship Design Commentaries

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I can't seem to recall enough from the Colonial Marines Technical Guide to say one way or another if the "negative mass shunt" thing they used for FTL actually made FTL travel take longer than the real space time frame. Made-up science-y stuff: it doesn't need to make sense. [Edit: negative time dilation!]

Ripley and the Nostromo were on a run to the outer reaches and back in time for her daughter's next birthday, so it would be months at most.
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Re: SDN Starship Design Commentaries

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Found it!
Aliens Colonial Marines Technical Manual wrote:"The problem with the tachyon shunt is the way it screws around with conventional physics. Given that your mass and gravitational constant at supralight fluctuate with speed, so does the relative flow of time. Instead of the time dilation experienced at high sublight velocities, the occupants of vessels in hyperdrive flight suffer the effects of time expansion, a phenomenon which is directly proportional to the square of the speed. This places a practical limit on the maximum speed you can travel at before subjective journey times become untenable; it also makes starships ever more reliant on hypersleep freezers to prevent excessive crew aging." - General Michele Kurama, USASF
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Re: SDN Starship Design Commentaries

Post by Elheru Aran »

Huh, so if there were live crews maintaining the ship while the rest of the crew was in hypersleep, the crew would wake up to find the maintenance crew all old and shit? That's... different. That would also explain why they put even Bishop into hypersleep; he may not have been as well-built as the Michael Fassbender android from Prometheus (but Prometheus is a weird case anyway).
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Re: SDN Starship Design Commentaries

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'Instead of the time dilation experienced at high sublight velocities, the occupants of vessels in hyperdrive flight suffer the effects of time expansion, a phenomena which is directly proportional to the square of the speed. That places a practical limit to the maximum speed you can travel at before subjective journey time becomes untenable; it also makes starships ever more reliant on hypersleep freezers to prevent excessive crew aging.'
-General Kurama, USASF
(Aliens Colonial Marines Technical Manual, p118)

Can't recall any of that ever being mentioned in the movies though.

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Re: SDN Starship Design Commentaries

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Elheru Aran wrote:
Simon_Jester wrote:
Elheru Aran wrote:The holodeck is worth a whole book in its various violations of security. There is absolutely no reason why a.) programs should be permitted to become sentient,
Many of the legitimate uses of the holodeck involve creating characters that can convincingly impersonate being human, which requires that they be at or near human levels of intelligence.
Impersonating humanity is one thing; a chatbot can do that with enough practice.
Impersonating humanity convincingly, I said. A 'dumb' chatbot will rapidly become obvious as a chatbot. Meanwhile, the problem isn't that literally every character needs to be sentient; when Tasha Yar programs a simulated martial artist to fight, there is no need for the martial artist to be sentient. If they walk into a Sherlock Holmes mystery, the random people on the street don't need to be sentient.

The problem is that SOME applications may require sentience. For instance, La Forge creates a holographic simulation of one of the people who designed the Enterprise's warp drive to escape a certain crisis. And the holo-version of Leah Brahms actually helped. The holodeck's ability to generate an artificial personality smart enough to convincingly impersonate a warp physicist literally saved the ship in that case.
Being actually sentient even though created out of whole cloth is quite another. It opens up a massive ethical issue.
I actually agree with you, but it is an issue that the Federation has chosen to ignore by the way they use holodeck technology, which includes routine interaction with simulated holographic persons for their personal entertainment.
A holodeck character doesn't NEED to be capable of holding a complex conversation, frankly, unless that's its specific purpose (social interaction). A holodeck character in a Wild West scenario doesn't need to be able to discuss warp physics at length. Holodeck NPC's don't need to be capable of more than a few lines and appropriate reactions.

On a military starship (and let's face it, that's what the Enterprise et al. are), there is no place for spontaneously creating sentient holographic characters, *especially* ones that could very well endanger the ship!
It wouldn't be a problem so long as holographic characters couldn't endanger the ship by leaving the holodeck and its computers. The problem, really, is that there is a persistent flaw which enables them to do so. Which, as you say, Picard really, really should have eliminated somehow.
Frankly 'oops' isn't an excuse. The first time such a vulnerability was found, Picard should have ordered it rooted out and closed after the first damn episode where it was found out that holodeck characters were capable of controlling the ship.
I fully agree with you. As I understand it, the first time that happened was with Moriarty. And Moriarty duplicated the feat four years later. Aside from trouble with Moriarty, did this ever happen again on the Enterprise-D?
c.) the holodeck should be capable of outright killing people.
They're not, normally. But apparently they decided that the safety features which make that "cannot kill" guarantee possible should be things that the user can switch on and off, which opens up some serious vulnerabilities.

The level of danger we see from holodecks in Star Trek episodes cannot be the normal level of danger for the Federation as a whole, or they would have put better safeguards in play. Honestly, I feel like it makes more sense to blame the specific weirdness we see on the fact that we're seeing weird ships. The Enterprise-D had its computers monkeyed with by various alien hackers and viruses early in the series and may well never have been fully 'normal' again.* And Voyager went several years without dockside maintenance or technical support, and with an active emergency hologram personality (one that was of necessity sentient), operating far, far longer than anyone ever intended.
I understand specific ships being particularly weird. But the safety protocols should be something that's hard-coded into the holodeck and cannot be turned off without very specific authorization. Even less should the holodeck be capable of turning them off by itself!
I agree with you fully on this point. The safety protocols should not be a thing that can be disabled on the holodeck except by the permission of very senior officers. Say, the ship's captain, first officer, chief engineer, operations officer, and security officer.

Of course, on Next Generation, those people are Picard, Riker, LaForge, Data, and Worf, respectively- five of the main characters out of a recurring cast of no more than ten or so. On Voyager, likewise, that's Janeway, Chakotay, Torres, Kim, and Tuvok. Same problem.

We routinely see the actions of the handful of people on the ship who, by the nature of their jobs, need extremely high level access to the ship's computers. This may result in them sometimes bypassing security measures which a prudent and better-trained person would respect. And if anyone objects that it's unrealistic for senior officers to ignore computer security or disable it for reasons they find temporarily convenient... Well, just look at the kerfluffle over Hillary Clinton's emails for an example of that happening in real life. It's a scandal and a lot of people are upset about it- but the fact remains that it happened, just as people given root access to networks routinely abuse it.
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Re: SDN Starship Design Commentaries

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Elheru Aran wrote:Huh, so if there were live crews maintaining the ship while the rest of the crew was in hypersleep, the crew would wake up to find the maintenance crew all old and shit? That's... different. That would also explain why they put even Bishop into hypersleep; he may not have been as well-built as the Michael Fassbender android from Prometheus (but Prometheus is a weird case anyway).
Alien gave us a) FTL in the franchise, b) some reference points and travel time: "Where are we?" "Just short of Zeta II Reticuli." [39 light years from Earth] Later, "How far to earth?" "Based on time getting to and from the planet, ten months."
(Barbie says, "math is hard!": ~46.8c?)

Ash was in hypersleep with the crew, and it was a surprise to them that he was a robot. Fifty-seven years later, Bishop was an integrated member of the squad (he drove the APC, did their science/tech stuff, was rated to remote pilot the dropship); it makes sense that they would try to have him "fit in" by doing everything the Marines did. "We always have a synthetic... artificial person on board. It's standard procedure." The Marines certainly accepted him: "Bishop, do the thing with the knife!"

"How long 'til we can expect a rescue?" "Seventeen days." Let's assume there's a couple of days for a missed check-in or two before someone send back up. LV-426 is somewhere around 39 light years out from Earth. If rescue had to come from Earth, they'd be hitting 949c? It's also reasonable that rescue could come from another system (they only launched this mission from Earth because of Burke.)
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Re: SDN Starship Design Commentaries

Post by Elheru Aran »

Well Ash was visually a middle-aged adult, perhaps he was towards the end of his 'service life' and hypersleep was one way to extend that? More likely though it was just camouflage to blend in with the rest of the crew all the better.

Perhaps the android is the first one woken in case of an in-flight emergency later on, hence 'standard procedure'?

It's all speculation, of course. Doesn't really give us a good reason for the Sulaco not having a live crew besides the Marines aboard.
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Re: SDN Starship Design Commentaries

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Simon_Jester wrote:
Frankly 'oops' isn't an excuse. The first time such a vulnerability was found, Picard should have ordered it rooted out and closed after the first damn episode where it was found out that holodeck characters were capable of controlling the ship.
I fully agree with you. As I understand it, the first time that happened was with Moriarty. And Moriarty duplicated the feat four years later. Aside from trouble with Moriarty, did this ever happen again on the Enterprise-D?
We seem to be largely in agreement, though I still think the safety settings thing is kinda dumb, *nobody* should be turning them off on a regular basis as seems to happen. And I'm not sure that an one-off Leah Brahms holo-program helping Geordi solve an emergency situation is a good argument for permitting holodeck programs to have a deep level of intelligence and sentience, it helped in that specific situation but I'm not sure it's necessarily a good thing otherwise. But that would be an extended discussion about the utility of highly intelligent and sentient computer programs, which I don't have time for right now. So the only point that needs addressing is the above:

In season 7 there's that episode I brought up a page or two ago. Damned if I can remember what it was called, but it's the one where the Enterprise basically... gets possessed... or gives birth... something like that. The holodeck was acting as a sort of 'brain' and was definitely influencing the entire operation of the ship, to the point where the ship was being piloted and otherwise directed almost entirely by whatever messed-up programming was going on in there.

I'm fairly certain there have been at least one or two other episodes besides the Moriarty episodes, but obviously I haven't watched every episode of TNG/DS9/VOY and I'm not going to bother, so I will permit a stipulation that holodeck programs, or the holodeck itself, being able to actively control the ship is a highly unusual and uncommon occurrence, that shouldn't damn well happen if they had a bit of systems security sense...
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Re: SDN Starship Design Commentaries

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I certainly agree that there should be, and are NOT, adequate measures to prevent holodeck programs from influencing the operations of the rest of the ship.

That said, and recognizing we can't turn this into a full-up debate...

There are a lot of potential application for fully intelligent simulated people, honestly. Especially once you stop worrying about the ethics of repeatedly making and unmaking intelligent beings (which the Federation has apparently chosen not to consider). Using glorified chatbots gives you a lot of options, but greatly restricts your options in other ways. With full sentience, you can simulate experts on virtually any subject. The computer already has the knowledge, but you need a human-level intelligence.

So this is simply a case of taking already-sentient computers and running a sentient subroutine dedicated to the task of duplicating the knowledge of a specific expert. Say, to deal with an unknown technical problem, or an exotic medical issue, or some intricacy of strategy or diplomacy.

Moreover, a sentient program can convincingly play the role of a sentient antagonist for training purposes. That doesn't matter so much for ground combat or some kinds of entertainment, but it's helpful if, say, you are trying to train people in negotiation or diplomatic skills.

And there's no obvious reason any of this should be more dangerous than what the ship already has- a sentient main computer. And we know the ship's computer can already operate at this level in certain areas, because the computer can do things like extrapolate from incomplete information in surprising ways. It's not just carrying out programming mechanically, it's thinking, and there's no evidence that it is any less intelligent than, for example, Commander Data.

The thing that makes the holodeck dangerous isn't that it uses sentient personalities. It's that it creates and destroys large numbers of personalities, and once in a while you get a bad apple.
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Re: SDN Starship Design Commentaries

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Simon_Jester wrote:
Elheru Aran wrote:The holodeck is worth a whole book in its various violations of security. There is absolutely no reason why a.) programs should be permitted to become sentient,
Many of the legitimate uses of the holodeck involve creating characters that can convincingly impersonate being human, which requires that they be at or near human levels of intelligence.
b.) programs should be capable of controlling the ship via the holodeck's connection to the computers...
While the connection certainly needs to exist, I agree that there shouldn't be a way to upload executables or send commands from the holodeck. It's hard to imagine a sensible reason for doing this.

The closest I can come up with that MIGHT act as a rational explanation... Hm. Maybe at some point in the Galaxy's design process, someone considered giving the holodeck a useful role during combat, as a "Central Information Control" facility or other dedicated node for information processing and command functions by the crew. That could actually be pretty useful under some conditions. Say, during a fleet battle, when keeping track of what's going on in the battle as a whole is too complicated to be done from the bridge and requires a dedicated CIC.

As a result, the programmers put backdoors into the ship's network allowing tactical data and commands to flow two-way from the holodeck to the rest of the ship, and vice versa. However, this feature was either abandoned or never used during normal operations (say, because the Enterprise-D never really participated in a fleet battle), so it just wound up being a security backdoor in the ship's systems that was, for whatever reason, never removed. Oops.
c.) the holodeck should be capable of outright killing people.
They're not, normally. But apparently they decided that the safety features which make that "cannot kill" guarantee possible should be things that the user can switch on and off, which opens up some serious vulnerabilities.

The level of danger we see from holodecks in Star Trek episodes cannot be the normal level of danger for the Federation as a whole, or they would have put better safeguards in play. Honestly, I feel like it makes more sense to blame the specific weirdness we see on the fact that we're seeing weird ships. The Enterprise-D had its computers monkeyed with by various alien hackers and viruses early in the series and may well never have been fully 'normal' again.* And Voyager went several years without dockside maintenance or technical support, and with an active emergency hologram personality (one that was of necessity sentient), operating far, far longer than anyone ever intended.
_______________

*You can argue that if this hypothesis is true, then they should have brought the ship in for a refit in which they physically ripped out all the computers and replaced them with brand new models reset to factory default...
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Re: SDN Starship Design Commentaries

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The holodeck couldn't function the way it does with out some risk of killing people. It makes physical barriers, and it can apparently simulate temperature extremes without direct mind-injection of information. So barring true perfect software some kind of risk has to exist. On E-D the risk of death sure seemed high, but controlling the near 100% probability loss of ships crew from the ship blowing up from everything else wrong with itwas probably the higher priority for bugfixes. It certainly does make you question the role of the holodeck for some types of pure amusement as opposed to training and simulation though.

I'd figure 1 death per 100 million operating hours would be totally acceptable, if not even a fair bit higher number, all the more so if some relation exists between how dangerous the simulated activity is vs the real activity. Say if people die rock climbing in the holodeck at 1/10th the rate of real rock climbing, you could call that a design failure, but you could also call it a huge success.
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Re: SDN Starship Design Commentaries

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The straightforward solution would be to give the holodecks a completely separate computer. The holodecks only take up a certain proportion of the computers power, since it handles all of the ships functions. Building a smaller computer to handle the holodecks would be possible, especially in cases where there is plenty of extra space available (going by the TNG TM the E-D launched with ~20% of the ship empty). IMO there is no reason why a starship's holodecks have to be tied into the same computer that runs the weapons systems, life support and warp core.
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Re: SDN Starship Design Commentaries

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Maybe then you get 2 AIs struggling for control ò the ship?
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Re: SDN Starship Design Commentaries

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madd0ct0r wrote:Maybe then you get 2 AIs struggling for control ò the ship?
If the holodeck computer is physically isolated from the rest of the ship's systems I don't see how this would be the case. Voyager has shown that even the holodeck's power systems can be separate (and for some bizarre reason) incompatible with the rest of the ship.
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Re: SDN Starship Design Commentaries

Post by Sea Skimmer »

Tribble wrote:The straightforward solution would be to give the holodecks a completely separate computer.
Unless you destroy the functionality of being able to add and remove programs that doesn't solve anything, just reduces the problem. Air gaps are not security solutions in that situation, a virus generated by the holodeck can still cross the gap on the thumb drive everyone must now use to program it. I'd worry more about removing safety critical systems from the general network then unplugging the holodeck from a computer network that controls literally everything else. You could just keep the holodeck on the network and install a custom router to limit it's access, if the holodeck had no way to access that router's software or hardware it could never do anything about it.

Also since the holodeck is a considerable volume of the ship employing high power draws and possibly containing a large number of people it's going to need to integrate with a lot of safety critical systems anyway. Like the ships fire alarm system needs to know the different between a holodeck fire, that apparently can emit real thermal energy, and a real fire that hazards the ship. At least, it needs to do this if our ship is to be non deathtrap rated.
Tribble wrote: If the holodeck computer is physically isolated from the rest of the ship's systems I don't see how this would be the case. Voyager has shown that even the holodeck's power systems can be separate (and for some bizarre reason) incompatible with the rest of the ship.
A lot of real ships have and sometimes still do have non integrated power systems. Integrated power is very hard to manage and engineer when you have extremely diverse power demands, it's far easier to just have rotary converters as needed to make custom voltages and waveforms for what you actually want. This is still the best way to power things, it's just the cost and weight make it unfavorable if you can get away from it. Warships WW2 had rotary converters for almost every single different system, USS Lexington for example was blown up because her rotary converter for internal communications phones was left spinning away in a compartment with gasoline fumes leaking into it. They could have turned it off before they secured the compartment...but that would have left no phones in half the ship and no way to replace that power.

With unknown super tech like the holodeck it may just be impossible to power the sucker off a grid that also produces useful efficiency for lighting. We have no basis to assume it must be compatible. Given the way E-D ducts plasma all over the ship directly from the main reactor, the idea of distributed power generation and varying power form factors is hardly unreasonable. The shit is insane already.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
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Re: SDN Starship Design Commentaries

Post by Simon_Jester »

Good point about needing the holodeck to be plugged into other ship's systems in order to function.
Sea Skimmer wrote:The holodeck couldn't function the way it does with out some risk of killing people. It makes physical barriers, and it can apparently simulate temperature extremes without direct mind-injection of information. So barring true perfect software some kind of risk has to exist.
Well, if nothing else you could trip and fall and break your neck if the holodeck didn't somehow catch you. Other, similar problems would arise in other contexts. Worf's idea of a relaxing time in the holodeck appears to involve programming it to generate berserk alien monsters with swords to attack him, for example.
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Re: SDN Starship Design Commentaries

Post by Parallax »

Meanwhile, you have Time Lord tech where even their antique travel capsules have rooms which, for example, are entire mountain ranges you can either sit and calmly observe or even go and climb if you wish. >_>

Holodecks are a great idea for really long space voyages. Though I'm surprised at the rather PC way they're used by the crew. Let's assume you're on a five year mission and your girlfriend has stayed back on Earth because ... reasons. It would seem well within human nature to program a hologram of said girl into the holodeck and ... get frisky. Why stop at just one hologram?
And suddenly this starts getting very Westworld-y.

Are holodeck sessions recorded? Are they kept private? Are the routines/programs available to every crew member? Can anyone just walk into someone elses holodeck session?
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Re: SDN Starship Design Commentaries

Post by Sea Skimmer »

I'd also wonder how they actually allot time to people. 1000 crew and only 2 of the things means each person could get just slightly over 1 hour of use per 21 days. But that allows no time for anything else like maintenance or training so 1 hour per 30 days is probably a more realistic ration. Competition would be might high at that point.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
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Re: SDN Starship Design Commentaries

Post by Starglider »

Sea Skimmer wrote:I'd also wonder how they actually allot time to people. 1000 crew and only 2 of the things means each person could get just slightly over 1 hour of use per 21 days. But that allows no time for anything else like maintenance or training so 1 hour per 30 days is probably a more realistic ration. Competition would be might high at that point.
Galaxy class (Enterprise) has at least seven holodecks in canon, and sixteen according to the TNG tech manual;
PICARD: Not now, Data.
DATA: But sir, Chancellor Alrik is waiting to receive you in holodeck seven.
PICARD: Acknowledged. You can't go through with the ceremony.
Intrepid class (Voyager) only had two, but then it was only supposed to have a crew of 141.
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Re: SDN Starship Design Commentaries

Post by Prometheus Unbound »

madd0ct0r wrote:Maybe then you get 2 AIs struggling for control ò the ship?

Star Trek Voyager: Season 2 : Dreadnaught


This happens. They start having an audio conversation with each other / itself.
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Also, shorten your signature a couple of lines please.
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