The vessel that destroyed Bellarmine

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GeoModder
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Re: The vessel that destroyed Bellarmine

Post by GeoModder »

If machine-hosted intelligences can't be detected by Loroi Farseers, then the Historian emissaries should be un-detectable as well.
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javcs
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Re: The vessel that destroyed Bellarmine

Post by javcs »

GeoModder wrote:If machine-hosted intelligences can't be detected by Loroi Farseers, then the Historian emissaries should be un-detectable as well.
Not necessarily. Also ... are Historian Emissaries invisible? Do we know?
If one could generate an entirely synthetic intelligence, it ought to be invisible. However, if one could generate a biotransference based intelligence, either through copying a mind or outright transferring it, it might or might not be.

Also, depending on how you read what's been said, it wouldn't need to be outright invisible to Loroi Farseers, but it would only need to be blurry, or have a weaker signature than the crew it replaces would have, to have the apparent effects (assuming that the Farsight-jammer doesn't relate to Alex's apparent invisibility.

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junk
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Re: The vessel that destroyed Bellarmine

Post by junk »

GeoModder wrote:If machine-hosted intelligences can't be detected by Loroi Farseers, then the Historian emissaries should be un-detectable as well.
We actually don't know that do we? Considering the historial is on a barsaam ship with a live crew, his ship can currently be detected.

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GeoModder
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Re: The vessel that destroyed Bellarmine

Post by GeoModder »

No, we don't. I was only comparing the possibility of invisible cybernized Umiak to the Historian constructs. For completedness sake.
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Mjolnir
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Re: The vessel that destroyed Bellarmine

Post by Mjolnir »

javcs wrote:Not necessarily. Also ... are Historian Emissaries invisible? Do we know?
Whether they are or aren't doesn't say anything about Umiak AI...some machine intelligences may be detectable and others undetectable, just like biological intelligences.

javcs wrote:If one could generate an entirely synthetic intelligence, it ought to be invisible.
Why? We don't know how telepathy works. It could even be something inherent to anything truly intelligent and self aware.

(What about humans, you ask? We're just the most weak-minded borderline-sentient-at-best species so far encountered that has managed to somehow get into space.)

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Re: The vessel that destroyed Bellarmine

Post by Solemn »

Insider's Telepathy Article wrote:Sig Detect: Is it limited to intelligent, thinking things or all living creatures? If all, then how does one (in this case) define living? For example, if i grow/create an AI, will a Loroi detect it?

The signature is created by minds, not necessarily intelligent ones. The more complex the mind, the stronger the signal; very primitive organisms do generate signatures, but for the average Loroi trying to detect the signatures of every microorganism around them would be like trying to see stars in the daytime. In general, a mind needs to be more sophisticated than a frog or primitive reptile to be detectable. Computers (electronic, photonic, quantum or otherwise) operate in a manner that's completely inconsistent with a Loroi mind, and so don't generate a signature that a Loroi would recognize (regardless of whether the computer could "think" or not). An artificial organism or brain (a "replicant" or "bioroid") that operated in a manner similar to an organic brain might generate a signature that a Loroi could detect, but thus far the Loroi have never encountered such an artificial mind.
I'd bet that an artificial container for an Umiak mind upload would have to preserve the pattern of interaction inherent in the original and would thus preserve the detectable telepathic signal, since the Loroi can sense minds of organic aliens already despite enormous differences in biochemistry and presumably in brain structure and neurotransmitters and all that (suggesting to me that it is the pattern they detect, not the specific chemicals or brain waves or anything like that), so if the pattern of the consciousness were preserved so would its detectability, but it seems pretty open to debate.

Mjolnir wrote:(What about humans, you ask? We're just the most weak-minded borderline-sentient-at-best species so far encountered that has managed to somehow get into space.)
Futurama, The Day The Earth Stood Stupid wrote: LEELA: Why would Fry be immune to the flying brains? Because he doesn't shower?

FIONA: The Brain Spawn suppress intelligence by attacking the delta brain wave. Every animal and robot in the universe generates this wave, as do certain trees.

NIBBLER: Fry, however, does not.

FIONA: Somehow he has cobbled together a random assortment of other brainwaves into a working mind.

LEELA: Like a prom dress made from carpet remnants.

NIBBLER: Yes, like your prom dress.

KEN: The Brain Spawn are commanded by a giant evil brain with a gooey centre of pure hate.

FIONA: Only Fry, with is superior yet inferior mind, can approach him. You must tell him to disable it. We will do the rest.

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Re: The vessel that destroyed Bellarmine

Post by Karst45 »

javcs wrote:
Mjolnir wrote:
junk wrote:To be honest I wouldn't be surprised if current Umiak farseeing jamming (if any) isn't them just having figured out how to transfer consciousness from flesh to machine.

We know they are fairly happy on cybernetics, so one could assume that they would take the next logical step and completely throw out the wetware.

This would make them undetectable by loroi farseeing for all intents and purposes.
Assuming a machine-hosted intelligence inherently lacks whatever it is telepathy works with. And if they were anywhere near being able to copy a living brain into a working machine substrate, they should have had a variety of sophisticated AIs for quite a while now, so why has the Loroi farsensing ability been such a problem for them up to now?
Well, under that theory, it probably wouldn't have been something they themselves came up with, but more likely something they recently derived from some Soia-era relic that they haven't had real long.

On a slightly more likely possibility in the same vein, it could be a development of cybernetic and the requisite neural interfaces, incorporating vastly increased automation tech and literally plugging a handful of crew into shipboard systems.

It more simple than that. The Soia are back and their presence is disrupting the loroi ability to detect other.

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Re: The vessel that destroyed Bellarmine

Post by Absalom »

Mjolnir wrote:And if they were anywhere near being able to copy a living brain into a working machine substrate, they should have had a variety of sophisticated AIs for quite a while now, so why has the Loroi farsensing ability been such a problem for them up to now?
Possibility != fact. Just because you have the hardware for something doesn't mean you have the software. Similarly, just because you have the software, doesn't mean it's useful. I expect that our first AIs will probably be built to be fast-only, but my understanding is that the human mind doesn't work like this (it has multiple speeds, as well as multiple signalling styles), so any such AI would likely have behavioral barriers to it's socialization. But I don't think this is a case of AI, so whatever.
javcs wrote:On a slightly more likely possibility in the same vein, it could be a development of cybernetic and the requisite neural interfaces, incorporating vastly increased automation tech and literally plugging a handful of crew into shipboard systems.
I suspect that something like this is probably the case (though with good enough software, the wetware interface might not be necessary). If the Umiak commander really is the famous one, then it might not even need to be usable for general purposes. That commander presumably couldn't lead an entire offensive, but by sufficiently weakening the Loroi at a specific point, a beachhead for more conventional commanders could be pushed through.
Solemn wrote:
Insider's Telepathy Article wrote:Sig Detect: Is it limited to intelligent, thinking things or all living creatures? If all, then how does one (in this case) define living? For example, if i grow/create an AI, will a Loroi detect it?

The signature is created by minds, not necessarily intelligent ones. The more complex the mind, the stronger the signal; very primitive organisms do generate signatures, but for the average Loroi trying to detect the signatures of every microorganism around them would be like trying to see stars in the daytime. In general, a mind needs to be more sophisticated than a frog or primitive reptile to be detectable. Computers (electronic, photonic, quantum or otherwise) operate in a manner that's completely inconsistent with a Loroi mind, and so don't generate a signature that a Loroi would recognize (regardless of whether the computer could "think" or not). An artificial organism or brain (a "replicant" or "bioroid") that operated in a manner similar to an organic brain might generate a signature that a Loroi could detect, but thus far the Loroi have never encountered such an artificial mind.
I'd bet that an artificial container for an Umiak mind upload would have to preserve the pattern of interaction inherent in the original and would thus preserve the detectable telepathic signal, since the Loroi can sense minds of organic aliens already despite enormous differences in biochemistry and presumably in brain structure and neurotransmitters and all that (suggesting to me that it is the pattern they detect, not the specific chemicals or brain waves or anything like that), so if the pattern of the consciousness were preserved so would its detectability, but it seems pretty open to debate.
Actually, there's no real reason for the detectability of an uploaded mind to be related to the detectability of it's organic source. The upload needs to behaviorally reproduce the interaction patterns of the original, but reproducing the LOGICAL equivalent is sufficient for this, whereas the signature is presumably partially tied to the biological implementation. This does, admittedly, allow for the possibility of Human uploads being more detectable than biological humans.

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Cy83r
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Re: The vessel that destroyed Bellarmine

Post by Cy83r »

No idea if anyone made this assumption yet, but I'm getting the feeling that the Historians are playing both sides of this conflict.

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Re: The vessel that destroyed Bellarmine

Post by Trantor »

Cy83r wrote:No idea if anyone made this assumption yet, but I'm getting the feeling that the Historians are playing both sides of this conflict.
I was speculating about that, too.
If this is true, and the motivation for this is to not let the Loroi get too powerful, then this could come in handy to us humans.
sapere aude.

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Re: The vessel that destroyed Bellarmine

Post by Karst45 »

Always had, my guess at the time (until provent wrong) is that the historian are using this war to weaken both side. They helped the loroi because the war had not weaken the Umiak enough.

Both side had "normal" relation prior to the war, now they dont even know why it started (Historian!)

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Re: The vessel that destroyed Bellarmine

Post by fredgiblet »

Karst45 wrote:Both side had "normal" relation prior to the war
That's...a bit of a stretch. Neither side liked the other, and to me it's pretty clear that the Umiak were planning on a war when whatever happened happened.

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Re: The vessel that destroyed Bellarmine

Post by GeoModder »

One can't blame the Historians if they happened to play both sides.
What do you expect? It's a small power wedged between two superpowers. Besides, the Morat and Tithric nations were in somewhat the same situation, but had quite a different outcome for their spiel.
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Re: The vessel that destroyed Bellarmine

Post by Mjolnir »

Solemn wrote:I'd bet that an artificial container for an Umiak mind upload would have to preserve the pattern of interaction inherent in the original and would thus preserve the detectable telepathic signal, since the Loroi can sense minds of organic aliens already despite enormous differences in biochemistry and presumably in brain structure and neurotransmitters and all that (suggesting to me that it is the pattern they detect, not the specific chemicals or brain waves or anything like that), so if the pattern of the consciousness were preserved so would its detectability, but it seems pretty open to debate.
Wasn't aware of that bit of the Insider...more has been said on the subject than I thought (or since last I checked).

Anyway, a conventional computer simulating a brain would be an extremely inefficient approach. The memory storing the simulation will be vastly more complex than the simulated brain itself, and you'd need an enormous number of of serial processors crawling through the dataset and coordinating with each other, requiring vast amounts of communications bandwidth to memory and between each other...trillions of interconnections that have to be updated at least on the order of thousands of times a second to produce a realtime simulation, huge amounts of computational power just being wasted in overhead.

Honestly, I'm doubtful that this approach could even reach realtime, it could easily run up against lightspeed limits in transferring data around. I'm convinced anyone actually trying to transfer a biological mind into machine form would use a massively parallel system that closely follows the structure and function of an actual biological brain. Such a piece of hardware would be a brain, not just a computer system running a program, and might well be similar enough to have a signature. (And to relate it to present day technology, memristors are looking like they might be an effective approach to such systems.)

However, detectable or not, being able to create a hardware substrate and copy a biological mind into it still implies a long history of working with AI hardware and software. That sort of thing doesn't come out of nowhere.

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Re: The vessel that destroyed Bellarmine

Post by Guntank17 »

(Sorry for resurrecting a 5-year-old post, but this seems to be the only thread that actually talks about this particular topic, so I kind of want to share my thoughts here.)

Interesting responses! The responses I read here seem for the most part to a on the assumption that

a) A third alien race is behind this and
b) Wanted to prevent Humanity from making contact in order to further exploit the Loroi-Umiak War in some way.

But this got me thinking. There were already many other races that seemingly had either successfully joined either the Loroi Union or the Umiak Hierarchy in some capacity or another, or were wiped out or driven from their homes for their refusal to do exactly that; Humanity were themselves latecomers to the ongoing war for the most part and were quite aware that they were already well behind the curve when the Scout Corps started to look for an appropriate decision. Furthermore, given Humanity's immensely small industrial and military strength (compared to the two sides), Humanity would be a big help, but it's highly unlikely that Humanity alone would be the one determinant that would completely turn the tide and lead either the Loroi or Umiak to victory, regardless of what they could offer the Loroi (aside, IMO, from the ability to open a second or even third front against the Umiak from any direction while their industrial home bases lay a comfortably safe distance away from the main frontlines --- hey, fighting on two fronts was what eventually caused Germany to fail in both World Wars!).

So (discounting that we simply might not have had heard of any other such incidents off-screen as yet) my question is this: Then why would Humanity alone be singled out such that they and they *alone* had to be prevented from joining the Loroi-Umiak War at all costs, while almost every other race is allowed to either take their sides or be wiped out/driven away without consequence?

This is where I'd like to present an alternate (albeit admittedly probably dead wrong) theory in this regard. If the intent of attacking the Bellarmine was to prevent Humanity from making contact with either the Loroi or Umiak and joining either side, only one race would have anything to really gain from that, and since (while we know a lot about the TCA's military and industrial layout from side material already) we don't really know anything as yet about their overall political situation, we also don't know what the general consensus back on Earth would be or what the divide is among which side to join or whether or not to actually join the war in the first place. Furthermore, the Terran Capship specs list the Victory-class Battlecruiser as having Mjolnir Particle Beams, but are they public knowledge among the TCA's own military? (Mjolnir Particle Beams might fit the MO as well if the Scout Corps doesn't know anything about their existence or never saw one being fired that they can be mistaken for Plasma Spikes, as the attackers who shot the Bellarmine had to do so up close, and the Mjolnir Particle Beam had the least range out of all other Particle Beam weapons in existence.)

So what if the attackers that lay waste to the Bellarmine (and likely the other Scout Ships in a similar vein) were actually other Humans, either using a prototype ship equipped with the Mjolnir Beam or unknown alien technology that they had acquired (or bought from the Historians?) on their own? Depending on the TCA's unknown true political situation and the identity of these Human attackers, the motives behind the attack could be anything, really, but other radical Humans would still have more of a reason to prevent Humanity from just being another insignificant side in the ongoing conflict. Perhaps in these attackers' point of view, they're truly protecting Mankind by preventing alien contact (as joining the Loroi or Umiak who were in every way superior to Earth would nonetheless be selling out Humanity's freedom for their survival)? Or perhaps this is a radical faction (a self-styled political or cultural elite) that has delusions that Humanity can stand on its own as a third superpower given time and isolation, becoming a new Space Roman Empire that can eventually fight and even conquer the Loroi and Umiak under their elite leadership? Who knows?
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Re: The vessel that destroyed Bellarmine

Post by dragoongfa »

Humans are the least possible culprits for several reasons:

1) The Loroi have confirmed that the weapons used in the destruction of Bellarmine were plasma based, a technology that is a whole tech level beyond the human one. In fact plasma weapon tech was beyond the Loroi as well until the Historians gave them a scaled down copy; how the Umiak got their hands on plasma weapons is something unknown for now.

http://well-of-souls.com/outsider/outsider063.html

2) A non TCA human warship would never be out there for the simple reason that the TCA is the only human actor that is allowed to field FTL warships. It's impossible for a hidden 'cabal' to somehow get their hands on several FTL capable warships without starting a war at the process. Also FTL capable ships are expensive, FTL capable warships armed with state of the art weapons should be described as monstrously so.

3) Even if aliens gave humans the tech and ships necessary then they forgot to tell them how many thousands of warships both the Loroi and the Umiak have.

I think that you are reading too much into it for something that is pretty much nailed down: Bellarmine wasn't attacked because they were humans, they were attacked because they run into something that they shouldn't. Akin to a pedestrian running into a back alley mafia assassination and getting their throat sliced to keep their mouth shut.

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Re: The vessel that destroyed Bellarmine

Post by cacambo43 »

I've thought about that, too. Somehow, in an improbable coincidence, the Umiak have found a way to shield themselves from sanzai, just like Alex (a human) is shielded. What if there are other Humans, more advanced (maybe Soia, maybe not) that either left Earth long ago or seeded Earth or whatever. Humanity getting "forced" into the larger conflict by the Orgus, forced their hand in supplying the Umiak with a shield capability and had to eliminate the "primitive" humans from fouling up the plans. Alex's improbable (there's that word again) survival being the proverbial fly in the ointment? It's a stretch and has a lot of holes.

CJSF

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Re: The vessel that destroyed Bellarmine

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Hey. I like this web comic. I just want to ask one thing. In the prologue page 6 panel 1 (?), we see in the upper right hand corner an image of a ship. I would speculate that this is the unidentified contact the Terran ship encountered.

You can see glare of two aft thrusters. I suppose we could enlarge that image and see if it resembles any hull types listed hereabouts.

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Re: The vessel that destroyed Bellarmine

Post by CF2 »

DavalKatro wrote:Hey. I like this web comic. I just want to ask one thing. In the prologue page 6 panel 1 (?), we see in the upper right hand corner an image of a ship. I would speculate that this is the unidentified contact the Terran ship encountered.

You can see glare of two aft thrusters. I suppose we could enlarge that image and see if it resembles any hull types listed hereabouts.
Looks like an Umiak ship to me, given that the strike group's ships are more wedge shaped in silhouette, their thrusters are more rectangular, and the skirmish demonstrated the signature green lasers of the Umiak ships.

Since it was so far from the initial battle that the Bellarmine encountered, it seems likely to me that it was attempting to slip past the Loroi interception force when it happened upon the human vessel. It's captain decided to destroy the Bellarmine in order to leave no witnesses of their passing, and it is heading deeper into Loroi territory even now. If the Loroi are lucky it is a lone, heavy-warship, however it could just as easily be a part of a very spread group.

Perhaps we'll see it again, and Alex will have his revenge.
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Re: The vessel that destroyed Bellarmine

Post by Zarya »

DavalKatro wrote:Hey. I like this web comic. I just want to ask one thing. In the prologue page 6 panel 1 (?), we see in the upper right hand corner an image of a ship. I would speculate that this is the unidentified contact the Terran ship encountered.

You can see glare of two aft thrusters. I suppose we could enlarge that image and see if it resembles any hull types listed hereabouts.
Welcome - and you're right.
You can find fleet reference charts via the Insider page and try to identify the vessel:
http://www.well-of-souls.com/forums/pos ... =4&p=27737

There are too many question marks for the vessel types belonging to the Umiak fleet for a positive ID. But most of them carry heavy or medium plasma focus weapons:
http://www.well-of-souls.com/outsider/fleet_umiak.html

Some Loroi vessels might qualify when looking at their shape. Most can be rulled out when you check their roles and the weapons they carry:
http://www.well-of-souls.com/outsider/fleet_loroi.html

Could a heavy or medium type blaster have crippled Bellarmine from 850km? (I dunno, but a blaster aint a plasma focus weapon!) And Beryl also rules that out on panel #63. She specifically refers to a plasma focus weapon, not to blasters.

(Added: I am ignoring what the Mizol states about the specific signature, but we could consider that the Umiak work with so many types of vessels built in different places throughout their empire that may have a signature that is still unknown to the Loroi)

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