jimc@haddock.UUCP (05/31/85)
> I was thinking about admiral Kirk's trick of lowering the > Reliant's shields in STTWOK the other day, and suddenly > realised that the Federation will soon be in for a nasty > surprise: it won't be long before some Klingon/Romulan hacker > comes up with the following piece of code for their battle > computer: > > for (prefix_number=00000; prefix_number<100000; prefix_number++) { > shields_lowered = lower_shields(prefix_number); > if (shields_lowered) { > while (!enemy_ship_destroyed) { > lock_phasers(); > fire_phasers(); > } > break; > } > } > > . > . > . > > I realise that the whole trick lies in figuring out what > lower_shields() does, but I wouldn't think that the Federation is > so spy-proof that they can keep it secret for long. Any comments on that? Observant! But there might be more complications than the lower_shields(). There is the question of what frequency to use in the code transmission. Also, it is not clear that a starship has to be that vulnerable all the time; Khan just didn't seem to know enough about the Reliant in order to be aware of this "remote control" property of the starship. Otherwise, he would have disabled it by either setting the equipment accordingly or blowing up the transmission reception to Kingdom Come. Jim Campbell ...!{harvard, ihnp4}!ima!haddock!jimc
kyrimis@tilt.FUN (Kriton Kyrimis) (06/04/85)
In article <16200039@haddock.UUCP> jimc@haddock.UUCP writes: > >Observant! But there might be more complications than the >lower_shields(). There is the question of what frequency to use >in the code transmission. Oh, come on now! What does the startrek universe have to do with *frequencies*? Haven't you noticed that whenever the Enterprise encountered an alien starship, they first thing they did was to try and convey them their peaceful intentions over the radio (or whatever)? Sure, Uhura did open "all hailing frequencies", but what are they? Some frequencies assigned by the federation's equivalent of FCC for hailing purposes? Not likely! Why should the aliens use the same frequencies? What probably happened was that they sent their messages in a continuous band of the spectrum. Now, if they could transmit a greeting message this way, they could probably transmit other information as well. -- Kriton (princeton!tilt!kyrimis)
neutron@hpfclg.UUCP (06/11/85)
>> I refer of course to Kirk's using the Reliant's 4 or 5 digit prefix >> number to lower her shields. Assuming that data transmission and ship >> scanning is almost instantaneous (it seemed so in the movie), then it >> won't take more than a minute or two to figure a ship's prefix number >> and then ... BANG! Ah, but you underestimate the Federation programmers. You see, if a bad prefix code is received, no more prefix codes (valid or not) are accepted for the next hour (and all sorts of alarms go off). -Jack Applin {hplabs,csu-cs,hp-pcd,nwuxd}!hp-dcd!jack