Home / Pete's stuff / Not computer games / Pete's Draka page / Pete's problems with "The Stone Dogs"

Been Framed?

If this page is displayed in a frame, which should happen only when the Geocities/Yahoo server puts them there and not because some other site is displaying my content, please reload this page to bust out of them.


 

LEO Battlestations in The Stone Dogs

While thinking about a fanfic set in "The Stone Dogs" (TSD) era of the Domination of the Draka, I came up with an "oops" similar to those on Ian Montgomerie's web page about the technology problems in TSD (in Analyses). This one is satellites. As far as I understand orbits, there are only two ways you can guarantee never flying over enemy territory (who could call your satellite an act of war and/or try to shoot it down). The first is to use geosynchronous (geosync) orbits so the satellite stays in the same apparent location above the Earth. The second is to own a band of territory on both sides of the equator around the entire world (which doesn't occur in this timeline during this period). But as the Draka have a "no peace beyond Luna" strategy, the converse is that somehow there is peace around Earth. Why? I'm sure an Alliance low-earth-orbit (LEO) battlestation wouldn't fly over Archona for very long… I think "beyond Luna" is there only because, as seen below, by the Final War there is too much stuff closer in to dare start shooting without escalating. In other words, no prohibition against the militarization of space either severely limits what can be put up there, or makes constant communication and forgiveness of minor mistakes necessary. Neither is sufficiently described in TSD. All we see is LEO battlestations and transport hubs further out. But I'll explain in more detail why I think there's a problem.

The "pure" geosync orbit is about 35,786 kilometers up, can only be over the equator, and has the advantage that the satellite effectively stays in place as seen from Earth; anything else will move at some speed when projected down to Earth. These orbits work for any world, even that of the Alliance and Domination, and are one of two ways to take a look over the border from space. If the satellite is at the geosynchronous altitude, but not over the equator, it moves on a north-south line every day. All that is based on what NASA says here. In the world of the Domination and Alliance, this is also feasible if you're very careful about how far north or south you go. From this far out, given good antennas and/or optics (a known specialty of the Alliance), you can effectively target or sense almost 1/2 of the Earth, depending on how far you can "see" through layers of atmosphere.

Objects in the LEO (>75 miles up to avoid re-entry heating, so let's say 200–500 miles or 320 to 800 kilometers) zone usually move very fast, about 27,000 kilometers per hour, and end up circling the globe every 90 minutes or so. Even a small bolt hitting the US Space Shuttle in such an orbit could have the impact of a hand grenade. All that is based on Lockheed–Martin information found here. Given the precocious development of extremely high-speed and high-altitude missiles and aircraft in the Domination/Alliance timeline, I wouldn't expect a battlestation in LEO to stay up very long once it started flying over hostile territory, especially if it can fire lasers or lob "sunbombs" down at the ground. But somehow the LEO battlestations arrived, yet weren't immediately used or shot down, and eventually both sides had unspecified but apparently large numbers of them. The events would have to be that both the Domination and the Alliance arrive at the first military capability in space nearly simultaneously. Otherwise, given parity below on Earth in nuclear missiles and "conventional" delivery systems (bombers, submarines), the first side with a clear advantage is almost compelled to use it before the enemy can counter or match it. Since the Final War didn't happen when the "sunbomb" was first invented, or when the first orbital battlestation became operational, we end up with an escalation that culminates in two "secret weapons" (3 if you count the New America itself) controlling the outcome of the Final War. Deterrence, or moral cowardice, somehow prevents war until accident and chance provoke a panic "use it or lose it" reaction. While I'm no expert on deterrence or the militarization of space, there's a digest of almost 50 years of OTL US positions on this in the article "The Weaponization of Space: It Doesn't Happen in a Vacuum" found in the Spring 2000 Aerospace Power Journal. Electronic copies of the article (and the entire issue) are found here.

Another option is elliptical orbits, where you go down to low altitude only over friendly territory. But those mean you travel farther out the rest of the time, reducing your useful time near Earth to the times when you're moving the fastest, and possibly putting you over hostile territory when moving the slowest (and farthest from Earth). This type of orbit has limited usefulness for "battlestations", and certainly wouldn't be considered LEO, as most of the time the satellite is much further out. While I think it's possible Stirling didn't realize what LEO implies in this setting, his habit of research is probably such that he meant "LEO" when he said it, instead of geosync or elliptical.

There is one way something could stay "fixed" at any given location no matter the altitude, but NASA basically blows it off as impractical. That's by constantly changing the orbit, i.e. by expending fuel. Given that we're talking a lower global population, lots of nuclear reactors, and an extremely early heavy lift capacity to orbit, this is the ONLY way I could see the multiple LEO battlestations; if they are constantly burning fuel to keep from flying over hostile territory. In which case, a computer crash or engine malfunction could cause war in less than 45 minutes (half an orbit) if the other side is always looking to enforce their space boundaries with extreme prejudice, and faking an accident could be a prelude to war. So, while this is a reasonable way to both heavily populate LEO and have an energy crisis, I don't think it's what Stirling intended. There are indications that it's effectively what he did though; the "Mournblade's sector" comment in TSD also raises the disturbing possibility that The Author erroneously assumed that objects in "normal" LEO don't move as seen from Earth. He implies elsewhere that they do, so I'm still confused.

So, given a timeline that allows military hardware in earth orbit, the lower orbits become a tense armed zone with hundreds or even thousands of constantly moving objects all wary of each other. Any maneuver has to be announced in advance with effects on other objects calculated. Any accident that causes an orbital change could be a pretext for getting close to another satellite for intelligence gathering or just a first strike. Either the rules of engagement are that only the two objects involved "shoot it out", or the first incident turns into an orbital free-for-all. In the first case, one heavily armed and defended station could then be an unstoppable bully, and wipe out the other side single-handed, one at a time. Breaking the rules then invites a free-for-all. So, I believe declaring "no peace beyond Luna", thus implying "peace within Luna's orbit", inherently conflicts with the existence of any LEO battlestations. But not claiming airspace out to at least geosynchronous orbit would invite being bombed by the other side, if only one side controls the space. Therefore, both sides have to have armed satellites, and only deterrence on a global scale prevents incidents from escalating. I'm somehow beginning to believe, though, that The Author didn't realize the complexity of arriving at this situation, or how it's maintained on a daily basis.

Other nice things that would quickly become unworkable unless the two sides cooperate or place them out at geosync would be microwave powersats, weather and/or communications satellites, any kind of GPS or Glonass, worldwide (or even Alliance/Domination-wide) satellite telephones, etc. Unless placed so far out that they inherently don't move as seen from Earth, or are closer in but burn fuel to also appear not to move into hostile territory, you can't put a satellite up there without the other side worrying that it's a weapon. Given that a secret like high-temperature superconductors was quickly stolen, you think a weapon could be slipped onto a satellite without the other side not noticing until it starts firing? Do you allow the enemy to inspect your non-military satellites before launch? In space?

OK, apparently The Author thinks you can militarize Earth orbit for almost 40 years without any noticeable shooting, and still allow massive non-military development (although microwave powersats do have a military application…). Somehow, both the Alliance and Domination manage to trust each other enough in 1961–2, when the first permanent space stations are put up, that neither will use them to drop bombs on the other side. This when Mach 8 suborbital missiles have been available since 1955, and unmanned flights to orbit preceded the manned ones, so a surface-to-orbit missile is a known quantity. The laser has been around since 1953 too, and I'm sure most of the research in the interim has been on increasing power to make it a workable no-warning long-range weapon. So, unless there is a major thaw in Domination–Alliance relations that isn't made explicit in the book, why was there no shooting?

I don't have any good answers to this. At the very least, there must be protocols guaranteeing peace within Lunar orbit, and massive amounts of daily communication preventing misunderstandings. The best illustration that I can find of this situation, although multi-sided and involving unknowns as well, is in Turtledove's latest WorldWar book, Colonization. Unfortunately, this is a blind spot in TSD. We are told there are LEO battlestations, get some idea of their weaponry, and are then told they don't fire at each other until the Final War.

Update: Ian Montgomerie commented on a previous version of this item. His thesis is that — similar to OTL — when the first satellite got into orbit, it couldn't yet be shot down. Only because the problem of just getting something into LEO is initially easier than sending up an interceptor to destroy something already in orbit. That became a precedent for the next one, and so on. So while the Earth orbits are militarized, nobody shoots first inside Lunar orbit. A dangerous equilibrium evolves, necessarily with some protocols that aren't mentioned in the book to deal with accidental orbit changes, release of debris, etc.

 


The Comp-Plague

Let's beg the question though, and say that what we see at the time of the Final War somehow happened. We have hordes of LEO battlestations, geosynchronous stuff, and stations at the various Lagrange points (L-5, etc.), transport vehicles between all these, and even large chunks of metal or ice being mined in orbit after being sent in from elsewhere. What a mess! Either there are literally millions of warning messages being broadcast each day as stealthy military vehicles and stations inadvertently approach each other or overfly enemy territory, or the entire situation is beyond control. There are some examples of what that's like in Turtledove's latest WorldWar book, Colonization.

[Warning: Now I'm going to rant about the DSC Mournblade incident of 0900 November 4, 1998 in TSD. And argue with myself! No you aren't! Yes, I am! :)] Of course the IFF function is very important in this environment, and I'd expect that flipping the switch to "war mode" would be one of the things tested before deploying a new version of the software. It wasn't. Then how do you know anything will happen when you want to shoot? I'd say "computer attempts to self-destruct station when put in war mode" is a show-stopper on the operational test. Oh, the virus is smart enough to not activate during an operational test, it will only go wacky when physically connected to real weapons. But how does it know? It's just a computer hooked to an interface. You had better have a system test facility somewhere with the compatible interfaces to make it think it's on a real battlestation in orbit, or the military won't know what it does in action — no way to test target handling capacity or any specifications. Well, I guess it can tell the difference somehow, some minor difference in testing vs. real life, no matter what the testers try to do. Bad test then. Or you've got a computer that second-guesses its own inputs. Last time one of those was put in charge of a nuclear warhead, the last words were "Let there be light!" (reference to the old Dark Star movie) But this is just an upgrade… Without regression testing to make sure something wasn't inadvertently messed up when something else was "improved"? Yep! They've been in a hurry for decades, you know. They don't have time for rigorous testing before they deploy something new. Then how do they know they need something new? By waiting for units with the latest release to complain of new problems? It certainly defeats the purpose of read-only cores to constantly change them to fix minor problems. You definitely want a thorough testing process if it requires another production run and a complicated (and dangerous) hardware installation process to patch a bug. You're saying the Domination and the Alliance waste the only advantage of read-only programs by releasing inadequately tested versions anywhere near as often than we do with software in OTL? Well, that's how the virus got in. There must be some spare space in there for future patches, and the virus hides in it. And the development compinstruction sets have to be infected as well, then, or they'd notice stuff that wasn't supposed to be there. Or was every agent that installed the comp-plague trained in both covert operations and compinstruction set operations? The Domination used only one "language", the Alliance must know it inside and out. And Marya was overqualified for her mission. The usual insertion of the comp-plague must have been by somebody already employed in the manufacturing center. And the stuff that came from the Alliance is designed to fit in seamlessly to whatever it's designed for. You mean a tailored virus then! Not something like an OTL PC virus that runs on anything with an 8086-compatible processor — from a 1985 PC at 4.77 MHz to a 2000 AMD Athlon at 900 MHz. This comp-plague only works on the orbital battlestation. Only interferes with the launch sequence when it uses IFF. Probably only a specific revision of the entire system too. This isn't a comp-plague, it's a bunch of malicious patches! The only way it reproduces is by getting into the manufacturing process so it can be handed out as part of a specific product. Like a virus in a commercial CD-ROM here in OTL, and not even able to spread from there afterward. That's the paradigm the Alliance and Domination have gotten into though. In that milieu, the comp-plague is indeed effective, because it violates the assumption that compinstruction sets fresh from the factory are untouched by the enemy. Anyone who believes that is obviously trusting security more than testing. In that case, I certainly don't want to be anywhere but a fully stocked bomb shelter when Y2K hits the Domination and Alliance. Who knows what could happen! Too late. The Final War happened by then. Point taken. But the virus didn't have that much penetration. Lefarge himself said on April 7, 1998 (this date may be wrong, it occurs earlier in the book than several March sections) they might have 10% by now if they were lucky, "two years to critical mass" (whatever that means). Well, he was talking to a dying old man, and Lefarge changed the rules to go for multiple insertions on 3/31/98 (later?). At that meeting, de Ribeiro said they had "unleashed it perhaps a year ago" as of 3/31/98, and it spread from manufacturing centers as improved instruction sets were released. The ACI suit said in the 4/07/98 section that they estimated as much as 80% of the space-based systems could be disabled. That 80% was the most optimistic projection, less on Earth, primarily defensive systems too. And the speech continued that even after 3 years (from when?), backup cores would still be uninfected. Those backups must be old versions; they wouldn't work as well as the latest release. I'd expect they would be missing more and more important features and capabilities as you went back too. But at least if they blew up, it would be from a Draka's programming bug that was fixed in a later version, not the comp-plague. Either way, they die, ha ha!

Well, let's consider how Mournblade goes boom. All we see is "Detonation sequence activated" and a 10-second countdown. Obviously some kind of self-destruct function, because a single on-board weapon detonation should be immediate — like on the stingfighter. These people have never seen "Star Trek", but shouldn't self-destruct be a function separate from other computer controls? It isn't, they got some goofy space operas instead, and it's a virus designed to do things like that to any system it can reach. Yuck! A self-destruct control interfaced to the weapons release computer? In an architecture that emphasizes lots of little processors hooked together? With no way to manually countermand it from the self-destruct console? Well, it's a super virus. And it took control of the central comp, and advanced the countdown past the point where it can be countermanded. You know, I liked you better when you laughed crazy. At least I could accept that…

Now let's consider what happens after Mournblade goes boom. The time references say 8 hours have passed, from 0900 to 1700, when Capetown is killed by a submarine-launched hypervelocity sea-skimmer or four. The dialogue is "that's Mournblade's sector." Is their command and control so rigid that they can't reorganize remaining assets in 8 hours? There are some strange time jumps here. It says EvS gives the order at 0500, but Mournblade gets it at 0900. Similarly, Marya tells Fred about the Stone Dogs sometime after 0300, but the news gets to New York City on Earth in "the early hours of the morning", and to an Alliance submarine off Angola at 1005. I wouldn't count on being able to make sense out of the times listed. So now time is unreliable. How about re-configuring their battlestation sectors? It has got to have been more than a few minutes since Mournblade was destroyed, probably at least an hour given that Gayner's incident near Angola is given as 1035. Maybe they use half-hour time zones and this all happens in 5 minutes? And Mournblade was the best and newest, probably equivalent to the Alliance's Orbital One. It was in charge, so the Draka haven't yet adjusted to it being gone. Piss-poor planning and battle management then. You know it's the newest and best, so does the enemy. Makes it a prime target. Relying on it being there is dumb. Especially when it's in LEO, so it orbits every 90 minutes or less. As soon as anything flies within range of Los Alamos, I bet a big antimatter-powered particle beam will just rip the shit out of it. I'd expect the LEO portion of the war to be over in several orbits. Guess they're burning lots of fuel to change orbits then, now that the shooting has started. No sense staying where the enemy expects you. So how can there be a "Mournblade's sector"? Even in 5 minutes, sectors of responsibility can change wildly as stuff is destroyed or maneuvers. Or are we just stuck with trying to explain away the fallacious belief that a LEO battlestation can cover a fixed sector of Earth while it has to orbit every 90 minutes or so? In that case, there are 4 choices: The Author doesn't understand LEO (unlikely), the Draka are too stupid to react when anything in orbit gets destroyed in a war they started, there's a missing "currently" in the quote, or The Author goofed and wrote a bizarre piece of dialogue that can best be explained away as a mistake under combat stress. You got me. Ask The Author. Maybe the technician blurted out something stupid. I think I got you this time…

Here's another bizarre thought: how does the Alliance ensure they don't get infected by their own virus? After all, the Archon himself says "they're more automated than we are, but they still haven't cut humans out of their action loops, not at the initiation stage." You'd think that the comp-plague would have even worse effects than it did on the Draka! Given the extremely secret nature of the comp-plague, but the constant espionage going on, how easy would it be to grab the comp-plague accidentally from a Domination comp, and bring it back to a portion of Alliance comp development uninvolved with "The Project"? You'd have to have anti-virus filters, certainly with input from "The Project", before you'd allow any possibly infected cores to even be analyzed by people or organizations not cleared into "The Project." Wouldn't that look suspicious? The compartmentalization and secrecy required before an Alliance compinstruction set designer could get a look at sanitized Domination code would be a giveaway. Unless it was there all along, as long as there have been captured enemy cores. Which means the Draka would be fools not to have something similar going on themselves. Which, finally, means that the Domination should have almost as good a chance of detecting the comp-plague as the Alliance (outside "The Project") does. The best protection that the Alliance has is that they use at least 3 compinstructionset languages, presumably all different from the Domination's. And that anyone who runs a translator/converter to see what Domination code looks like in Alliance terms will either be highly cleared or have no way to directly put Domination code in an Alliance comp. Pretty iffy though… Even with the comp-plague really being a bunch of specific malicious patches rather than a self-reproducing program, who's to say some lazy idiot didn't copy a neat idea from the latest Domination orbital battlestation launch sequence/IFF routines, smuggled out at great risk in a classified operation known only to the Alliance Space Force, into their own work? And accidentally bring over a bit more than they intended… nah?

And, while we're on the subject of accidental infection, how does the Domination make sure none of their people have the Stone Dogs virus in them? While it should be easily possible to test for it, the sheer number of people that have to be checked would start to erode the secrecy. Given the proclivity of Draka to have sex with prisoners and hostages, do they institute mandatory blood testing every so often? How do you treat Stone Dogs once you get it? Do you dose somebody with tranquilizers, lock them in a shielded room, turn on the special RF signal that only affects homing pigeons, and wait for the symptoms to subside? Any chance of keeping that experience a secret for long unless you're "given a pill" afterward? I wouldn't be surprised if, even after all the precautions, some Draka suffered from Stone Dogs.

There's also obvious missed opportunities in the 4/07/98 meeting between Lefarge, the new OSS head, and the ACI guy. The stingfighter incident is discussed, and possibilities for discovering both secret weapons are raised but obviously not pursued. First, the ACI guy says the Draka will "go over that stingfighter's core, but their standard search models won't find a thing." OK, but since this is a read-only core, can't they just plug a copy into another stingfighter or the ground-based stingfighter testing facility, replicate the engagement, and see what happens? At the very least, they'll find a strange software bug, and it will be fixed in the next release of stingfighter weapons control. And since the comp-plague is just a family of such malicious patches, there is little harm to the Project as a whole. But does any of this happen? We don't know — Virunga gets all of this stuff and apparently throws away the core that led to the deaths of at least 14 Citizens.

The three "intelligence" people also make a swift and flippant dismissal of Stone Dogs. Just because the Alliance is behind in biological research, the implied "most secret weapon" of the Domination is handled with "I say, bad show. Well, not our problem, what?"

There's a possibility that there are really two different kinds of comp-plague. First is the tailored malicious patch, the type installed by Marya Lefarge. Initially the size of 5 "dataplaques", yet only about 0.27% of the one battlestation compinstruction set she altered. This is only able to affect the orbital launch and IFF of the battlestation. Yet there were other possibilities in the list she was given, and the 5 plaques could have only been providing a large set of malicious patches that the "merge" function used to install a matching subset in the one target that was available. However, there is apparently another one as well. That is the "master" comp-plague (or infovirus), which doesn't seem to care what it runs on, as long as it is at least the size of a shipcomp core (does a stingfighter qualify?). That one makes manufacturing systems pass along the infovirus, and end-user cores perform some self-destructive action when a general war is detected. This is the one that's tough to believe, but I believe Ian has beaten it up enough already.

Finally, there's the question of "demonstrating" the comp-plague. The ACI agent says that, instead of taking advantage of the comp-plague in a pre-emptive strike, the Alliance will "demonstrate it." How? By asking the Draka to start shooting first? By declaring a "limited" general war (because the comp-plague isn't supposed to do anything under lesser circumstances)? By providing some details on the infected systems, which proves only that they got copies of older cores? I'm not sure how you can demonstrate something that's only supposed to appear in a full-up war; if you could, the Domination would have detected it during testing or wargames.

Another way of approaching the comp-plague is to consider it in the context of contemporary Information Warfare. The covert and overt struggles between the Domination and Alliance must have resulted in very robust Command & Control systems for military and especially space-based weapons systems and platforms. If it hadn't, the espionage necessary to keep the two sides at rough parity, or — more to the point — allow the Alliance's "virus" to be developed and then deployed, would have probably resulted in a very different Final War than shown in TSD. For instance, if you can insert "trapdoor" code in a Domination LEO battlestation that essentially causes it to self-destruct when war is declared, you can just as easily destroy and or all such stations simply by broadcasting a message. To use the same IFF function as shown in the book, let's say a "reserved" or otherwise illegal IFF code is set for an Alliance ship or satellite. Practically the same software modifications as shown in the book then cause any affected Domination platform to self-destruct as soon as the Alliance "carrier" comes into IFF interrogation range. Net effect is the same as in the book, but much easier to "demonstrate" short of global war. Of course, such a "trapdoor" is in the same class of malicious code modifications as the "virus," and only requires a change in activation parameters to be much more useful. Given that the Alliance is sure the original virus can't be detected by the Domination's software testing, my proposal for an improved one is just as feasible, although I think it should be much easier to detect.
Now, why does Command & Control have to be robust enough to practically prevent both of these types of software changes from working as planned? First, early space systems won't contain sufficient on-board computational ability to check or second-guess orders from the ground. Therefore, a fatal "dirty trick" to play is to send up commands that will cause enemy systems to leave their "safe" orbits or maneuver corridors, thus being lost through de-orbit, collision, or entering a "free fire zone" so your side can legally destroy it without escalating. To avoid this, you have to put either human decision-makers or sufficient computerized smarts aboard to reject or at least delay until confirmation the implementation of suspect orders. Both require massive investment, either to support more manning or develop processors with more intelligence and autonomy. The Alliance and Domination apparently did these as time went on, with differences only in emphasis in one area or the other.
However, the "secret weapons" used in TSD then appear to have been built for attacking the wrong side! The Alliance is good at computers, and so is best at developing a computer virus, yet is more vulnerable to one because it has fewer people operating the systems. Remember, the Alliance has a smaller population than the Domination, and has to have an even smaller proportion in the military so it can concentrate on economic and technological development. The Domination is good at biology, and so is best at developing a biological virus, yet is more vulnerable to one because is has a "monoculture" in charge of the military. The precautions taken by both sides to avoid self-infection are, by nature, difficult to conceal and are also relatively easy for the opponent to steal and at least partially implement. It takes endemic stupidity similar to that shown by the ACI wonk, i.e. "we can't counter that because the enemy's good at it," to not have the Final War just fizzle, because neither secret weapon works better on the enemy than it does on your own side.

 


Another Secret Weapon

Let's now consider why the Alliance doesn't just drop a few rocks from the asteroid belt onto Mars or another Draka base. First, because the Draka have long-range missile and beam weapons, this would have to be a major operation. The simplest way for the Alliance to pull it off would be to start the rock off in another direction, and gravity slingshot it back to the target; this increases velocity and reduces enemy reaction time. They also need to protect the rock with a "cloud" of protective missile-killers and self-defense weapons. Might as well make the rock a guided weapon then, with an antimatter warhead — easier to change course and smaller size. So what we have now is a stealthy (might as well while we're at it) antimatter missile targeted on an enemy-held asteroid, moon or planet. Build a bunch of those, and I'd say you have a much more likely secret weapon than either of those used in the book. But using these is likely to trigger the Final War, so you'd store them somewhere and launch at say, Defcon 5 (two steps short of war), with a recall or remote disarm sequence. But while there's mention of autonomous ore carrier spaceships and hypervelocity sea-skimmer missiles in TSD, I saw nothing like OTL cruise missiles or UAVs. Somehow, the idea of relatively low speed but stealthy and maneuverable just got left behind in the rush to be bigger and faster. (Actually, the phrase "cruise missile" is used in 1945 for the first American nuclear attack on Japanese forces, but never again after that. And there's a mention of a reconnaissance drone crashed in Korea before November 1972, but nothing more in that vein either.)

Another possibility, at the extreme opposite end of the scale, is to use nano-technology. Here's the only quote about it in TSD: "Security had gotten even more paranoid of late, now that Alliance nanosabotage capabilities were approaching the size of Draka gene-engineering skills." (The rest of the paragraph has interesting implications for the comp-plague, but isn't relevant here.) So why isn't the Alliance pitting nanotechnology against the Domination? Or is Security able to have every Citizen and visiting Alliance citizen put through a quarantine of their persons and property? A bit invasive, and still relatively easy to circumvent: plant them on Citizens in the Alliance, the "bugs" are told to bury into something internal like bone marrow and hide for several months, then come out. Or put them in the lifting gas of the dirigibles that transit between the Domination and Alliance, and just vent a little gas in Domination territory. Neal Stephenson had a sample of nano-war in "The Diamond Age"; you have to seal yourself off from the outside world with some kind of shield to stay safe. Since the Domination (and Alliance) aren't doing that, they're both wide open on Earth, and possibly anywhere else with a shirtsleeve environment. I'm thinking the only reason the Alliance secret weapon wasn't done using nanotechnology is that it would be too hard to control without tagging everyone in the Alliance first, or perhaps The Author was already too far along with the comp-plague when the concept arose. Personally, I don't think it would be too tough to figure out something common to a lot of Citizens, especially New Race, and build a nanotech killer for that signature only. If there's nanotech available in the Alliance, but it isn't used as a weapon, in favor of a difficult comp-plague, that's just plain baffling to me.

 


Travelling to Alpha Centauri
or just around the Solar System

I did some calculations on the New America travelling to the Alpha Centauri system. TSD gives us some data: 4.5 light years distance, 40 years travel time, 25 years (5 years times 5 active-duty crews working in rotation) on-board elapsed time (or maybe I misread what's said on October 1, 2000 and it's really 5 years on-board). Physics gives us that the speed of light (c) is 3*108 meter/second, 1 year is 60*60*24*365.25 = 3.16*107 seconds, and 1 Earth gravity (g) is 9.8 meters/second2.

Let's assume the New America goes at a constant acceleration for half the distance, then turns around and decelerates for the rest of the way. Anything else would be a waste of fuel and time. The formula d=1/2*a*t2 is classical physics, but we need one for special relativity instead because we expect to go at some significant fraction of c. Stirling apparently did too, as he has 25 years on board vs. 40 years for those left near Earth. So we now use t (outside observer) = square root of ((d/c)2 + 2d/a ), as found at the Relativistic Rocket article for the Usenet Relativity FAQ. We now set d=2.25 light years=2.13*1016 meters, so "t" is now 1/2 the time needed for the whole trip.

First, if we solve for "a" given t=20 years, I came up with a=0.108 meter/sec2, or about 0.011 g! That's a seemingly rather low acceleration, but the book seems to be stuck on a 40 "outside" year trip duration, and it means the drive runs continuously for many "onboard" years (except for maybe a brief turnover period). We'll get to how many "onboard" years later. Raise the acceleration, run the drive for less time, and we get there sooner. By the way, that seemingly low acceleration produces a velocity at turnover of about 23% of c! Shows the power of compound interest in yet another setting… Note that near the end of Turtledove's Colonization, the Americans launch a ship that accelerates at about 0.01 g, with no other clues in the book about where it's going. So it seems this is actually a feasible value, if you wait long enough. But accelerating a large (above several hundred thousand tons) mass at even this value may not be practical. It certainly isn't with current technology; what's in TSD is quite a bit beyond OTL, in practice if not in theory.

That 0.108 m/sec2 for 20 years as seen by an outside observer, is experienced on board as about 19.85 years, so the whole trip takes an apparent 39.7 years — not the 25 years stated in the book. If you don't turn around and start decelerating (at 0.108 m/sec2) after 20 years (outside observer), you can get to Alpha Centauri in 28.0 years (on board, it's almost 28.5 years outside), but you'll have to figure out how to stop!

Dave Slaven claims to have done the math for several trips to distant stars and galaxies at http://www.svsu.edu/~slaven/relativity10.html. There, a trip to Alpha Centauri (only 4.3 light years though) at 0.1 g (0.98 m/sec2) takes 13.6 years as seen from outside, 12.7 on board. This source also reports that at 1.0 g (9.8 m/sec2) it would take 5.9 years "outside" and 3.6 years "onboard" time. The next source confirms it.

Another item of interest from the Relativistic Rocket article in the Usenet Relativity FAQ was the "fuel fraction" equation. So "M" (fuel) = (eaT/c-1)m (where "m" is payload). Even if we assume 100% efficient matter-to-energy conversion using antimatter, the fractional amount of antimatter fuel carried from the start to accelerate for an "on board" time of only 25 years at 0.108 m/sec2 comes out to almost 1/3 of the payload! For instance, to accelerate 100,000 tonnes (probably a low number for 100,000 people plus animals, equipment, and 12 shuttles) at .108 m/sec2 for an on-board time of 25 years, you need over 32,800 tonnes of antimatter. Just how do you generate and safely store that much antimatter? And wouldn't somebody be tempted to use even just 1 tonne (that's a metric ton, 1000 kilograms or ~2200 lbs.) of it in a bomb or three? I think Ian's abused that deceased equine quadruped already, though.

So what was the point of all that?

By the way, if the DASCS Lionheart can get to Pluto in 2 months, but Sacajewa can cross the solar system and back in 40 days without refueling, I'd say the Alliance has not only a fuel (antimatter) advantage, but a drive/engine technology one as well. And they should have been using it elsewhere before the Final War. Ian Montgomerie points out that the New America's drive would itself be a potent weapon. And the Domination admittedly can't defeat it (Yolande tried and lost a cruiser).

 


Second Guessing The Author

So what are the most plausible explanations for the problems raised here and on Ian's page? One piece of privileged information that I have is a confirmation of one of Ian's assertions. Somehow, a precocious technological development timeline was grafted onto the Domination/Alliance timeline, and some of the rough edges smoothed over by the persuasive prose of S.M. Stirling.

I think the justification for the pell-mell technological race and rush into space is to get the story to a point where Erik von Shrakenberg is in charge of the Domination, and his relatives placed in good vantage points for a Final War. The only way to have feasible sequels, long-term, is for the Alliance to lose yet escape. That requires dragging out a balance of terror until a starship can be built. Even with technophile-driven timelines, that's over 50 years from the end of the Eurasian War. Much longer, and EvS will be too old to stay Archon. Anyone else in charge of the Domination, and the moral dilemma just isn't there, unless you make the entire book about that person. Yolande isn't that way, unless you rewrite her life story to make her more like EvS, and stretch the timeline another 5–15 years so she's in the big chair… nah!

As for "LEO battlestations", maybe what we're seeing is the incorrect assumption that you can just "hang" a satellite at any altitude over any point on the Earth. You can, but only at a ruinous cost in fuel if you're not over the equator at geosynchronous altitude. Without knowing what The Author understands, it's hard to tell. I don't think this is the case though, because there are enough references to orbiting things moving around as seen from Earth. It could happen realistically if the Domination and Alliance, both with much lower populations than OTL, waste vast amounts of energy on station-keeping, because the alternative is letting Mournblade fly over New York City and Orbital One overfly Archona.

The comp-plague and the alternate evolution of computers turn out to conflict, but only once you understand something about both computers and computer virii. Perhaps the research wasn't done? The technophiles again handed over two divergences from OTL, without understanding how they would oppose each other? I don't know, and only The Author could tell us.

The Stone Dogs virus, appropriately the approximate parallel in biological terms of the Alliance's secret weapon, has its own set of problems according to Ian. Maybe the activation factor, and how widespread it could be, was misunderstood or is a "gimmie." There are already a few of those in the Draka books, some more obvious than others. So what's one more? Certainly "coded microwave" in the "planetary magnetism range" getting through rock and other shielding to affect buried command centers, orbital battlestations, and even submerged submarines is ludicrous if you know anything about a Faraday cage. Again, Ian beat this up pretty thoroughly, and The Author is the best source of a rebuttal.

 

Well, I thought I was going to be nicer to The Author when I added all this stuff. But maybe I wasn't… I hope he doesn't get mad at me!

 


[to Home Page]
[top of this page]
[up: Pete's Draka Page]

Counter says: [a number only available as graphics] hits on this page since initialization.
The Draka characters and situations are copyright © S.M. Stirling and may not be used or reproduced commercially without permission. No profit is being made from the stories/documents/files found on this website.
By Peter Karsanow.
The Home page has overall site and copyright information.


Hosted by www.Geocities.ws

1