Ship security measures

[GrandpaTrout]

I sometimes write little stories to get down how I want a game feature to “feel”, as a guideline for coding it.

One story idea contained a captain who has turned to the opposing side. As part of this deal he uses his security clearance to get in an assassination strike on his prior admiralty.

I set it up that his ship is in port for supply. There was only a single watch officer, who he orders off the deck. He then uses the Gunnery console to power up the ships missiles, and launch a rem strike against the station command center.

After that he uses the Navigation console to run. But what about the crew? I figured he could use his command codes to keep the crew locked out. But would that really be true? But I started to wonder about just what kind of command overrides a captain really has on the bridge of a warship.

I toured a real light cruiser, and noticed that the bridge did not actually control the engines. They just send commands to the engine room, where the commands were carried out. Would a high tech warship use a similar system? Or would it be more like an aircraft, where the pilot has direct control?

What about mutiny? Would a ship have locked controls? Or would they assume battle damage could make anyone the pilot, and leave all controls unlocked? How about repelling borders? I noticed that there were no locked doors on the light cruiser. (Except to keep the crew out of the rum stores.) But turrets or hatchways could be opened by anyone.

Ok, so what do you guys think? How would ship security be constructed?

[Hot4Darmat]

Interesting questions. There was a special report on CBS in the 80's I think, about how the commanders of nuclear (that's NU-CLE-AR, not nucular) submarines had the ability to wage total nuclear war without any direct orders or contact from the commander-in-chief. That's a lot of responsibility to put onto a handful of submarine commanders (military men). What if one of them decompensated, or went a little…unstable. Unlikely, yes, but it could happen. See the film: "Dr. Strangelove, or How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb" for a treatment of this scenario. The same question would apply even more so with a military vessel of the future, where more things would be automated, and the job of running the whole show would be more concentrated in the hands of fewer people. There would be fewer checks and balances in the Human side of the equation. Perhaps the whole thing would be automated (that's a topic for a different discussion, one we had some time ago, now lost forever from these forums, but I digress).

My guess is that ship security, both internal (section to section) and external (getting aboard) would be much tighter in a futuristic combat vessel. Kind of like a combination of a naval submarine, an aircraft, and a military base all rolled into one. Navy ships are very hierarchical in command structure, but the actual work of making it go is highly distributed. The brain tells all the different parts what to do, and those people do them. Futuristic vessel would likely have more automation of everything, such that the ship would handle much of the actual working stuff, and the captain would be telling it what to do. The crew would be there to make sure the ship kept working as it was supposed to, and to keep it secure. But the actual turning of wheels, pulling of levers, looking at indicators, reporting to watchmen, etc. would all be more or less automated.

Military bases and ports control access to seagoing naval vessels from the outside world, and once they're out to sea, they're self-contained and everyone's supposed to fall in with the command structure, so I'm not surprised there are so few locks on the ships' access hatches. The military invests huge amounts into the training and indoctrination of people to respect that command structure, and from their perspective, it works, so I can see why they trust it for the most part. Perhaps future military space-faring vessels would enjoy the same secure ports, but maybe not. It would depend a lot on the structure of that space-faring society, where the people are, where the threats are, and what the military missions are. Maybe a big part of what they would do would be boarding actions, security checks, and such. Lock-to-lock dockings might be common, but they'd be a bad idea from a security standpoint. I'd rather send a launch or a gig over with a few very well armed personnel instead, if I were a captain. Keep the main ship standing off at a safe distance, weapons hot and locked on target.

Futuristic security measures would likely be more high tech and biometrics-based than relying on a bunch of brutes with guns (though they're always pretty effective, too). Security measures would likely be foiled more on the REM hacking, computer viral or cloned-eyeballs (for retinal scans or DNA sampling) front than breaking through locked doors.

And overall shipboard threats: How would you deal with that? You are about to lose the whole shebang and all you have is your gang on the bridge and pounding at the door. As dramatic as it was to watch during a tense scene on TV, I somehow doubt you'd ever see the bridge crew of a futuristic combat vessel standing around yelling their personal self-destruct sequence codes in turn to the ship's computer. It just doesn't make sense.

Maybe there would always be some reason to keep a locked cabinet with small arms somewhere on the bridge for that final standoff scenario.

My guess is that the ship itself would handle much of the task of keeping itself secure, much like an organism has an immune system to fight off disease. It might be able to make a whole pile of little nasty security thingies on short notice to deal with any intruders, or simply lock down a section until more is known. Again, it depends on the tech, and so many other things.

It sure is fun to think about, though.

[MichaelShane]

I think even a hundred years is too short a time for the Commonwealth Navy to forget the loss of their fleets in the Independence War. How many ships were captured or went over to the Indies of their own free will? You can bet, the Navy felt it was far too many.

I agree with Hot4Darmat. Automation is heavily relied upon to run a ship. The brain of that automation? The CPU. Wipe the CPU and you kill the ship. Astrogation, life support, weapons, power generation, etc.; all this relies upon the CPU.

I would imagine some uber-security codes would exist embedded into the CPU of every military ship... deep enough to make extraction near impossible for even the best hacker. No mere captain would possess those codes. When a ship goes renegade, all the military has to do is get close enough to appear upon the rogue ship's scan. The codes are picked up by the passive sensors and the CPU shuts down (or wipes) the core memory.

Ship disabled... ready for tow. :D

[arrrse]

Umm CPU ?
It would be a very silly military designer who built a Central processor in a ship rather than a distributed processing network where the loss of any several processors or links between would have little effect.

More modern ships now have direct engine control especially with gas turbines & diesel power.

[Cougaris]

But I started to wonder about just what kind of command overrides a captain really has on the bridge of a warship

I'd imagine that the ships in I-War could be run from any terminal on the ship with varying degrees of efficiency, but of course the ideal place would be the bridge or (classically) engineering. Having a centralised control node would be inviting disaster against an informed adversary (surgical strike on comsec, for example). Besides, section decompression and battle damage would neccessitate such a layout.

RE: locking out the crew - I can't really see a problem with this. Suitably strong encryption of data lines throughout the ship to stop potential cryptanalysis/decryption as well as terminal lock out except to the captains console/bridge.

The problem with a locked out crew who want to regain control is the fact that they can start causing all sorts of mishaps throughout the ship. Engine sabotage, weapons disablement, crticial decompression and general "spanner in the works" scenarios would present themselves to a well versed crew. I'd imagine that I-war ships have a decentralised "C"PU, considering the importance of that system.


I would imagine some uber-security codes would exist embedded into the CPU of every military ship

Of course, being armed with such information, you could just disable the ships comm gear, preventing the possibility of the navy getting their ship back in an easy manner. Heh :D

Its obvious though that EoC ships can be run entirely from the bridge, ala Cal Johnston and his one-in-a-million Supa comsec.

[GrandpaTrout]

for the Commonwealth Navy to forget the loss of their fleets You have a really good point. I expect they would take steps.

I do think self destruct is too severe. Not many captains would choose to do it. Most would be trying to save the crew. (I am thinking of instances where american code books fell into opposing hands because the crew were too busy trying to survive to worry about protocol).

And giving the captain the ability to control the whole ship, while locking out the crew, just opens the danger of some renegade taking control of a vessel. (And they are all armed with nuclear weapons).

What about this idea: The captain (or senior staff) can issue commands to the computer that locks up the ship. They don't have the codes to unlock the ship (to prevent torture from being effective). The ship can only be unlocked by a navy salvage team. The idea being that the captain can reduce the ship to deadweight, but cannot take the ship without fighting the crew. It makes a check and balance system.

For the indies to use the ship they would have to gut the computer systems and restore them. If the computer was really a wide distributed system, this would be expensive and time consuming. (like hunting down a short in a motocycle wiring harness...shudder...)

And perhaps on security then - the ship would have tough security measures for getting inside and perhaps automated defenses. But once inside, it would be fairly soft, so damage control parties could move at will around a broken non-functioning ship.

Hmmm. Do you think the crew would all have implanted personal trackers? So the ship would know who was where all the time? It could even adjust security levels - so if that low cook was the only survivor, he might be cleared for bridge access?

Would you need such a tracker to be present on a navy warship? No, visiting politicians would squelch that idea right away.

It would be an interesting story if a ship was "over automated" and then took battle damage in such a way that it refused to let the crew near the damage (seeing them as hostile).

[MichaelShane]

Originally posted by Cougaris
Of course, being armed with such information, you could just disable the ships comm gear, preventing the possibility of the navy getting their ship back in an easy manner. Heh Nope. As I mentioned, the codes are embedded in a low-level transmission picked up by the passive sensors.

You wouldn't want to shut down your sensors after you steal a ship. :D You wouldn't be able to navigate.What about this idea: The captain (or senior staff) can issue commands to the computer that locks up the ship. They don't have the codes to unlock the ship (to prevent torture from being effective). Interesting idea... the Naval equlivent of "Employee cannot open safe". :D Banks use this strategy also... the time-delay lock. Some car stereos too.

[Stephen Robertson]

Here's an interesting detail from I-War / Defiance you might not have noticed.

On the CMD console in I-War is a cartridge slot on the right hand side.

On the CMD console in Defiance is the same slot, but this one has a cartridge in it, with a hand-written label saying 'Command Override'.

The idea behind this detail was that when the indies stole a ship they'd often be locked out of the computers and controls, not knowing the access codes.

So they had these special 'mod chip' cartridges they'd plug into the command consoles to override the command security codes, and get control of the ship.

[arrrse]

I was just about to mention that :sour: :up:
It also blocks recieved REM commands I expect.

So, what is the reason the navy put the cartridge slot there?
Loading secret mission data taken directly from 'the boss' is my guess.

[Stephen Robertson]

I presume the cartridge slot was - as you say - designed to take mission specific cartridges, perhaps even to download the mission briefings and orders.

Also it could be used to upgrade the computer systems on the ship to reconfigure it for different roles.

[Nanoprobe]

Roles - heh... like a toaster? :)