StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I apologise if this has been mentioned before. I did a search but kept getting too many hits for the terms I searched for. If it's old news perhaps some Admin would be kind enough to delete it

Anyway there have often been comments made about the fact you can easily cripple a ST ship by accessing the main computer as it seems to control of affect the whole ship. Well I was watching an episode of DS9 and it seems you can cripple the planet if you have codes to access the power grid.

I returned the bloody thing before taking note of the episode, but this was an episode where Sisko and Odo were called in as experts after a changeling terrorist attack. A squad of academy recruits were given the code to access the grid and transported into a control room. From there they uploaded a virus that spread to all power stations and cut power to every city in the world and left earth "defenceless"

Talk about an achilles heel! Especially considering the admiral who sent the cadets in wanted to blame the changelings so no one saw them go in, commit the sabotage and leave.

US turboelectric drive warships in the Second World War had a single point of failure power system… the bussbars which control all electrical distribution. However in all the combat these vessels saw the weakness was relevant only in the case of one torpedo hit, which did not result in loss of ship.

That’s also one warship vs. a whole planet.

The episode name was "Paradise Lost". It turns out that the entire planet runs on a single power interconnected power grid which is in turn controlled by interconnected computer systems that are vulnerable to a virus if you upload it at the right place. So yes, it's literally a single point of failure. The whole operation was carried out by a handful of Academy Cadets.

Off to PST.

Question

Is the Earth vulnerability and the matching ship vulnerabilities really design flaws?

Or are they intentionally features that tell us alot about the Federation. One central point that can shut everything down allows all power to be focused in a very small number of people.

Is this about poor design or about a goverment that so fears its own citizens that it whats to be able to take complete control of the planet with little or no effort?

The same can be said for the ships of Starfleet. They can be completely controlled from one location (Battle Bridge, etc) by a very small number of people which means Starfleet has developed a huge fear of its own people. In TOS there was phaser command in a completley different part of the ship with its own crew so the paranoia didnt exist in Kirks time.

Baal wrote:Question
Is the Earth vulnerability and the matching ship vulnerabilities really design flaws?

Err-yes?

Or are they intentionally features that tell us alot about the Federation. One central point that can shut everything down allows all power to be focused in a very small number of people.

Then they should have seen to it that only said people have access to it. As it stands, everybody can access and override all the ship's function from every terminal. That's one hell of a stupid design if you want to limit that option to a select few.
And that still doesn't explain why a torpedo hit to the galleys can short-circuit the weapon systems. We're not talking about a single bridge station or even a set of command codes that can override any other system, we're talking about hits to random parts of the ship damaging components that are neither physically close nor would by necessity be connected to the ones that were actually hit. Why would one do that by intention, unless Starfleet ships were designed by Cardassian agents?

Is this about poor design

Yup.

or about a goverment that so fears its own citizens that it whats to be able to take complete control of the planet with little or no effort?

At best both. See above WRT why this dosn't work for the ship designs, and a single point of failure as a control measure only works when you can control access to it. If EVERYBODY can make use of it it becomes quite counterproductive to your purposes.

The same can be said for the ships of Starfleet. They can be completely controlled from one location (Battle Bridge, etc) by a very small number of people which means Starfleet has developed a huge fear of its own people.

They can also be completely controlled from a random terminal in a corridor somewhere by the Alien Intruder of The Week. Some security measure this is.

It's been a long time Batman, but I think a Federation Admiral gave the cadets the go ahead to do this. I don't think even the Federation is stupid enough to have power disabled to a whole planet from any terminal, and the fact the cadets had to beam into a certain facility to do it probably means it can only be done from there. Now if you want to argue Picard-Delta-One-One isn't enough security then I totally agree. Picard and Riker had to go down to Engineering to activate the self destruct from a special terminal one time.

One of the problems is fictional computer networks are usually not realistic. Like the computers in Independence Day, or nBSG. A computer network doesn't necessarily have to mean extreme vulnerability to viruses, and people like Stark who work in IT can confirm that. But that's what it usually means in science fiction, like the writers take their cues from their own malware infected personal computers running Windows. So it's a valid criticism, but it's hardly a unique criticism of Star Trek. Star Trek is a particularly bad example though, I agree, if you have to pick the worst.

brianeyci wrote:It's been a long time Batman, but I think a Federation Admiral gave the cadets the go ahead to do this. I don't think even the Federation is stupid enough to have power disabled to a whole planet from any terminal, and the fact the cadets had to beam into a certain facility to do it probably means it can only be done from there.

I was mainly commenting on the complete and utter lack of security on shipboard systems, which runs totally contrary to the assumed control freak attitude of the Feds.

Now if you want to argue Picard-Delta-One-One isn't enough security then I totally agree.

Hell if it actually WORKED the command code/voice ID combo might even have merit. Pity it is apparently ludicrously easy to override.

Picard and Riker had to go down to Engineering to activate the self destruct from a special terminal one time.

Yet on other occasions, they did it from the bridge. Continuity? Wazzat?

One of the problems is fictional computer networks are usually not realistic. Like the computers in Independence Day, or nBSG.

I don't know nBSG past the mini and s1 but other then every computer being connected to every other (indeed a common misconception not only in SciFi), the virus approach the toasters took had merit-unlike the stuff that routinely wreaks havoc with Feddie computers, the Colonial systems were SUPPOSED to execute the infected code, as said code was (as far as anybody knew) legit, from a known source, and input via the proper channels. Whereas TNG computers will apparently happily execute code from totally foreign and unverified sources (which shouldn't be able to run to begin with but I digress) without even so much as asking if it's OK to do so. And people think Windows has lousy security...