Honorverse ramblings and musings

darrell wrote:Not quite so fast.

First, only a small proportion of those inside the onion have suicide protocols. Remember simoens? How about aldona asimovna? How about those that had to be escorted to darius during Houdini.

We don't know all the triggers. Lajos had at least 2: failing to receive a periodic signal, and the one that actually killed him when he started talking. And, again, Lavos was barely inside the Onion, yet he got whacked.

As for Simoes, they very specifically said that they have done everything possible to avoid triggering any protocols - for instance, avoiding anything that could be construed as an interrogation.

Lastly, I fail to see how Aldona Anisimovna is in any way relevant to this topic, as she has neither expressed an interest in defecting, nor be in a position to defect.

Remember the Ghosts. They are unarmed scouts. In other words, they have less weapons than a frigate, are probably not much bigger than a courier, and probably have less than 20 crew.

Suicide protocols won't work on a spacecraft that spends months at a time on missions and is away from home base, unless someone onboard knows about it and knows to send the code.

I could see a small, close knit crew defecting. It would be even more likely if they find out about a suicide protocol.

Completely missing the point. You can't defect if you all drop dead from a brain aneurysm before the plan ever gets in motion.

cthia wrote:So no one on the inside of the onion has these protocols?

I think you've got that backwards; EVERYONE inside the Onion should have some level of self-destruct programming.

Weird Harold wrote:

cthia wrote:So no one on the inside of the onion has these protocols?

I think you've got that backwards; EVERYONE inside the Onion should have some level of self-destruct programming.

And even if they don't: You're talking about a group that has had only one successful defection (success being defined here by the defector actually doing things that hinder the Alignment) through its existence. Whether that's due to the conditioning of its members or because they're just that good at internal security is impossible to say (and largely irrelevant).

Duckk wrote:

darrell wrote:Not quite so fast.

First, only a small proportion of those inside the onion have suicide protocols. Remember simoens? How about aldona asimovna? How about those that had to be escorted to darius during Houdini.

We don't know all the triggers. Lajos had at least 2: failing to receive a periodic signal, and the one that actually killed him when he started talking. And, again, Lavos was barely inside the Onion, yet he got whacked.

As for Simoes, they very specifically said that they have done everything possible to avoid triggering any protocols - for instance, avoiding anything that could be construed as an interrogation.

Lastly, I fail to see how Aldona Anisimovna is in any way relevant to this topic, as she has neither expressed an interest in defecting, nor be in a position to defect.

Remember the Ghosts. They are unarmed scouts. In other words, they have less weapons than a frigate, are probably not much bigger than a courier, and probably have less than 20 crew.

Suicide protocols won't work on a spacecraft that spends months at a time on missions and is away from home base, unless someone onboard knows about it and knows to send the code.

I could see a small, close knit crew defecting. It would be even more likely if they find out about a suicide protocol.

Completely missing the point. You can't defect if you all drop dead from a brain aneurysm before the plan ever gets in motion.

sorry, sloppy language should have said suicide protocols that required a regular signal.

First, Lajos was a prisoner being questioned under duress. I am talking about someone, like simons, that voluntarily defects. If not impossible, it would be very, very, very difficult for a suicide protocol to be able to distinguish between voluntarily talking about something to your contemporaries and voluntarily talking about something to someone not authorized to hear it.

From Cauldron of Ghosts: The special med implants in the trackers were good for at least a year. More to the point, if they weren’t pinged periodically the suicide program would automatically be initiated.
“At this stage of the game, I think we should just forget about them,” she said.
“What if they’ve been captured? Get interrogated?”
“By who? The reason we’ve been using long-shot schemes to catch more terrorists is because there are so few of them left. At least, in any position to do anything. But even if they are being interrogated by some unknown and mysterious parties, so what? Stanković and Martinez are in the very outer peel and don’t know anything our enemies—the smartest of them, that is, which excludes any seccy I’ve ever heard of—can’t already figure out. Irvine knows a little more, but . . .”
She shrugged. “That’s exactly why his med implant includes the truth serum safety.”
They’d never seen any reason to notify Lajos of that feature of his implants, either. To what purpose? If he got captured and interrogated with truth drugs, better for him as well as everybody else if he just dropped dead.

So the security protocols kick in if:
1. His implant is not pinged periodically.
2. He is injected with truth serum.
There may or may not have been other triggers against revealing things under duress.
There may or may not have been a way to send an order to suicide.

From Cauldron of Ghosts: Lajos felt an urge to protest against the accusation, but he said nothing. He was pretty sure Cachat was right. And if he was . . .
Then why hadn’t anyone told Lajos himself about an evacuation? The only answer he could think of that made any sense—
And it did make sense. He rose to his feet. “It’s an onion,” he said. “It’s always an onion. And it seems I’m not—”
The sensation was a curious one. Disorienting more than frightening. But he wouldn’t have had more than a few seconds to be frightened anyway.

The fact is we don't know why Lajos died. He was not being questioned under duress, he was about to voluntarily talk about the onion, something that he was not told and didn't know about until a few moments before he died.

It would be highly unlikely that anything lajos did was what caused his death. He was about to VOLUNTARILY talk about the onion, and how does your programing distinguish between the alignment onion vs the onion plant used in cooking? Add in the fact that it was more in the nature of thinking out loud, and that makes it even harder.

IMO it is far more likely that he died because his implant didn't receive it's ping, and it was just a coincidence (or a plot device by RFC) that it happened at a critical time.

There can't be programming or an implant against defecting, otherwise simoens wouldn't have been able to defect, and what stopped mcbride was bardasamo, not any sort of programming or implant.

Only a percentage of implants would have the ping feature. Simoens dosen't, nor does aldona's. I was trying to show that anyone with a mission off of mesa/darius would not have an implant which required a regular ping because of the difficulty in administering that ping.

Theoretically, there is no reason that the small crew of a ghost (10-20?) couldn't voluntarily defect. Like sioens, they would be able to voluntarily defect. Like both simoens and aldona, they won't have an implant that requires a regular ping.

darrell wrote:

Theoretically, there is no reason that the small crew of a ghost (10-20?) couldn't voluntarily defect. Like sioens, they would be able to voluntarily defect. Like both simoens and aldona, they won't have an implant that requires a regular ping.

Unless there is a device on the ship to generate the "ping", so the crew continues to live while performing their duties.

Also, I've been told most hospitals have one....

Theemile wrote:

darrell wrote:

Theoretically, there is no reason that the small crew of a ghost (10-20?) couldn't voluntarily defect. Like sioens, they would be able to voluntarily defect. Like both simoens and aldona, they won't have an implant that requires a regular ping.

Unless there is a device on the ship to generate the "ping", so the crew continues to live while performing their duties.

Also, I've been told most hospitals have one....

It wouldn't be unreasonable to equip the ship with a small beacon that only has enough power to broadcast internally to the ship, it could even be covered as part of the crew's life support functions. Tie it in properly, so it's pulse is covered as say an "O2 level check", and nobody would even have a clue, and also puts a maximum duration on the pings before it automatically assumes the crew is compromised and ceases functioning.


And that's also an ideal way to tie it into the ship, something like the Ghosts were crewed and prowled around Manticore and Grayson for, what approximately 3 months, so you'd give them perhaps 4 to 6 months of maximum life support (just in case), tie in your little beacon pings for the exact same timeframe, because it's hidden inside the life support features (the notional O2 level check) the crew would have no idea if they unplugged X item, they all now have a matter of hours to live. Even if they know to plug that beacon back in every ~23 hours to get a ping, it would only last as long as the life support was designed too, so even if they defected, the Alliance would have a very tight time frame to try to copy the beacon ping (guaranteed to be a very complicated data signal) just to keep the suicide protocol from kicking in.

Somtaaw wrote:

Theemile wrote:Unless there is a device on the ship to generate the "ping", so the crew continues to live while performing their duties.

Also, I've been told most hospitals have one....

It wouldn't be unreasonable to equip the ship with a small beacon that only has enough power to broadcast internally to the ship, it could even be covered as part of the crew's life support functions. Tie it in properly, so it's pulse is covered as say an "O2 level check", and nobody would even have a clue, and also puts a maximum duration on the pings before it automatically assumes the crew is compromised and ceases functioning.


And that's also an ideal way to tie it into the ship, something like the Ghosts were crewed and prowled around Manticore and Grayson for, what approximately 3 months, so you'd give them perhaps 4 to 6 months of maximum life support (just in case), tie in your little beacon pings for the exact same timeframe, because it's hidden inside the life support features (the notional O2 level check) the crew would have no idea if they unplugged X item, they all now have a matter of hours to live. Even if they know to plug that beacon back in every ~23 hours to get a ping, it would only last as long as the life support was designed too, so even if they defected, the Alliance would have a very tight time frame to try to copy the beacon ping (guaranteed to be a very complicated data signal) just to keep the suicide protocol from kicking in.

Why do something weird, just make it part of the wifi beacon signal at preset "randomized" timings. Something totally innoculus, and no one really looks at. It could be built into the prime Mesan version of wifi handshake protocols, then every piece of Mesan network infrastructure is designed to keep their people alive. If the local wifi devices don't get an update after x time ( like a DNS lookup from a master DNS server), the wifi stops generating the special signals.



So if they go rogue, or you Hide them from comm signals (like you would with a prisoner) or put them in an environment with "standard" protocols and poof....

lyonheart wrote:Hi Weird Harold,

I agree with your viewpoint as to the appeal of the glory and results from service with the Salamander, compared to the very selfish NTM narrow personal attitudes of the attempted renegades who eventually got their just desserts.

By the way, the AMC's only had a crew of ~2500, with the the traitors thus being only 1/500-1/400th of Honor's crew; a far more pitiful ratio than one would expect given history's experience with human nature.

L

Weird Harold wrote: quote="cthia"]I didn't like Steilman and his crew. But I fully understand the human side, that aboard Honor's ship, they felt that chances of them making it out alive were slim and none.

Strange that only a small handful of bullies, thugs and sociopaths felt that way. The other three or four thousand crew members didn't seem to exhibit that "human side."

[/quote]


Actually IIRC the Trojan class had a crew of 3000. Admiral Cortez had to get 12,000 men for the first four ships.

Duckk wrote:

darrell wrote:Not quite so fast.

First, only a small proportion of those inside the onion have suicide protocols. Remember simoens? How about aldona asimovna? How about those that had to be escorted to darius during Houdini.

We don't know all the triggers. Lajos had at least 2: failing to receive a periodic signal, and the one that actually killed him when he started talking. And, again, Lavos was barely inside the Onion, yet he got whacked.

As for Simoes, they very specifically said that they have done everything possible to avoid triggering any protocols - for instance, avoiding anything that could be construed as an interrogation.

Lajos was far enough inside to be aware of the existence of the 'onion' structure -- figure at least a couple of layers. And he had a job with a risk of being captured, so it's more likely that he'd be prepped for "suicide" than a lab rat like Simões.

cthia wrote:Thanks Duckk.

So no one on the inside of the onion has these protocols? Then is it possible that a secret cabal inside the onion could defect? And if anyone from this cabal gives orders to officers, then wouldn't they be legitimate orders and not set off the protocols?

Again, just curious.

Duckk wrote:The likelihood of that happening infinitely approaches zero. That's a cabal that:

1. Manages to find one another, in a system which compartmentalizes information and interaction,

2. Evades detection by the ever watchful and motivated internal security forces,

3. Either converts or suborns a sufficient number of said security forces to prevent them from interfering when their activities appear suspicious,

4. Either converts or suborns someone in the naval hierarchy to give orders to the MAN, which are pretty much under the direct supervision of the Detweilers,

5. Either converts or suborns the naval crew into going through with this, instead of remaining loyal

This requires a chain of dependencies so long that it's too brittle to ever work.

Duckk wrote:The likelihood of that happening infinitely approaches zero. That's a cabal that:

Duckk, perhaps you'll find this comparison as humorous as I. Honestly, I am LMFAO at the similarity that rings true.

Cabal: Thomas Theisman, Esther McQueen, Amanda Graveson, Lester Tourville, Shannon Foraker, Admiral Giscard, Eloise Pritchard. It's a long list, forgive me if I miss anyone, it's a long, long list.

Duckk wrote:1. Manages to find one another, in a system which compartmentalizes information and interaction,

Take the preceding long list and apply it to this compartmentalized system...

Oscar-Saint Just, Peoples Republic of Haven, Thomas Theisman, People's Navy, People's Commissioners - Again, a long list.

Duckk wrote:2. Evades detection by the ever watchful and motivated internal security forces,

List beginning with StateSec, ending with Shannon Foraker blowing them up. That's sorta like evading them.

Duckk wrote:3. Either converts or suborns a sufficient number of said security forces to prevent them from interfering when their activities appear suspicious,

Certain People's Commissioners?

Duckk wrote:4. Either converts or suborns someone in the naval hierarchy to give orders to the MAN, which are pretty much under the direct supervision of the Detweilers,

Long list again. Just different ships and another BMOC.

Duckk wrote:5. Either converts or suborns the naval crew into going through with this, instead of remaining loyal

McQueen, Theisman. The RHN - well, key members anyways.

Duckk wrote:This requires a chain of dependencies so long that it's too brittle to ever work.

"Goodbye, Citizen Chairman."

.