20 replies to this topic

[Warfarer]

[El Bandito]

More like Counter-Invasion mech. That cinematic is happening during operation Bulldog, IS invasion of Clan SJ holdings in the IS.

That said, the Firefly do have potential to be the next IS Light. The FFL-3SLE variant has 7 energy HP and an ECM--basically a slower twin of the Arctic Cheater. That variant was Clan made though...

Edited by El Bandito, 22 March 2015 - 08:36 PM.

[Paigan]

In any SciFi movie/book/game I always wonder: Don't they have KEYS to their super high tech vehicle/starship/whatever?
Or a passcode? Or biometric stuff?

It's not like some McKay-like guy can rush in and crack everything in a couple of hours.
If stuff is properly secured, it WILL take thousands of years to break it with equal technology at hand.
Millions of years if you're technologically behind.

Edited by Paigan, 22 March 2015 - 11:43 PM.

[Joseph Mallan]

Paigan, on 22 March 2015 - 11:41 PM, said:

In any SciFi movie/book/game I always wonder: Don't they have KEYS to their super high tech vehicle/starship/whatever?
Or a passcode? Or biometric stuff?

It's not like some McKay-like guy can rush in and crack everything in a couple of hours.
If stuff is properly secured, it WILL take thousands of years to break it with equal technology at hand.
Millions of years if you're technologically behind.

exaggerate much?

[Karl Streiger]

Paigan, on 22 March 2015 - 11:41 PM, said:

In any SciFi movie/book/game I always wonder: Don't they have KEYS to their super high tech vehicle/starship/whatever?
Or a passcode? Or biometric stuff?

Oh sure they have.... but that stuff is lost together with the ClanPilot when he and his cockpit including Keys and security stuff became one - after the PPC struck the head.

The PPC is the ultimate "lockpick" - Gauss doesn't work so good -there are storys that ChuckNorrisDwarfClones survive a APDS-DU in the Cockpit

Edited by Karl Streiger, 23 March 2015 - 02:29 AM.

[Alek Ituin]

Joseph Mallan, on 23 March 2015 - 02:23 AM, said:

exaggerate much?

He's not joking. A sufficiently advanced encryption algorithm will take millions of years to crack even today.

As the algorithm gets larger and more complex, the time required to crack it becomes exponentially longer.

[Paigan]

Joseph Mallan, on 23 March 2015 - 02:23 AM, said:

exaggerate much?

No. Google topics like encryption. It really takes that long if done properly.

[SethAbercromby]

Alek Ituin, on 23 March 2015 - 02:29 AM, said:

He's not joking. A sufficiently advanced encryption algorithm will take millions of years to crack even today.

As the algorithm gets larger and more complex, the time required to crack it becomes exponentially longer.

I do beleive those numbers are exxagerrated though. As algorytms become more complx, the time it takes to decrypt even with the proper keys will take longer as well. There is a point where efficiency has to outweight security.

And if the british managed to solve the Enigma at its time, any other sufficiently equipped research team in the far-out future could do the same with enough time.

[Tennex]

I think it would be cool if they let us capture clan chassis. But no clan tek on those.

IS only able to equip IS weapons on the clan salvage. Plus they should give it its own default camo spec that is kind of beat up. Instead of shiny like the clan mechs.

Edited by Tennex, 23 March 2015 - 02:37 AM.

[Paigan]

Karl Streiger, on 23 March 2015 - 02:27 AM, said:

Oh sure they have.... but that stuff is lost together with the ClanPilot when he and his cockpit including Keys and security stuff became one - after the PPC struck the head.

The PPC is the ultimate "lockpick" - Gauss doesn't work so good -there are storys that ChuckNorrisDwarfClones survive a APDS-DU in the Cockpit

Note the "properly secured":
If you blast away the cockpit, you also blasted away computer, interfaces, etc.
So the IS engineers (who hardly understand their own lostech) have a piece of mashinery way beyond their level of technology with no or at least impartial "brain" (software etc.).
What should they do with it?
Even if only the key/passcode/whatever is lost, they had no way of "just hacking" the mechs' computer.
If they had enough understanding to replace/rebuild/hack it from scratch, they would build Clan Mechs themselves.
But they do not. So they cannot. Not by a long shot.

[Lynx7725]

Paigan, on 22 March 2015 - 11:41 PM, said:

In any SciFi movie/book/game I always wonder: Don't they have KEYS to their super high tech vehicle/starship/whatever?
Or a passcode? Or biometric stuff?

In Lore they do. Brainwave scanning, passcode, voice print -- at least.

There's always going to be a way to bypass these if you have physical access though. One novel had the heroes yanking circuit boards to steal IIRC a bunch of Daishis.

[Karl Streiger]

IS is not los-tech - not anymore.
Pretty sure they are at the same level as the Clans at the beginn of the golden century - the C ERMLAS Prototype has the same stats as the IS ER-MLAS to come.
There are also Mechs that could be created by the knowledge of salvaged ClanMachines.
Not to mention the "transfer" of SmokeJaguar Machines on Wollcott - they were not "secured" - like the mentioned Enigma - got one piece - and you were able to copy stuff.

[Alek Ituin]

SethAbercromby, on 23 March 2015 - 02:34 AM, said:

I do beleive those numbers are exaggerated though. As algorithms become more complex, the time it takes to decrypt even with the proper keys will take longer as well. There is a point where efficiency has to outweigh security.

And if the British managed to solve the Enigma at its time, any other sufficiently equipped research team in the far-out future could do the same with enough time.

Enigma =/= 256[insert space computer storage unit] space encryption algorithms

It's apples and oranges here.


Meanwhile, modern encryption algorithms can indeed take actual millions of years to crack without the password. With the pass word, it takes a few milliseconds to decrypt the information. I'm seeing the potential for encrpytion algorithms that take trillions of years to crack, and only a second or two to fully decrypt. Where, exactly, should the line be drawn? Because that second or two isn't a bad tradeoff for exponentially thicker encryption.

[Paigan]

SethAbercromby, on 23 March 2015 - 02:34 AM, said:

I do beleive those numbers are exxagerrated though. As algorytms become more complx, the time it takes to decrypt even with the proper keys will take longer as well. There is a point where efficiency has to outweight security.

And if the british managed to solve the Enigma at its time, any other sufficiently equipped research team in the far-out future could do the same with enough time.

I don't want to seem arrogant here, but this is not how encryption works.
There is something called asymmetrical encryption.
I learned about it when studying computer science.

The simple explanation is:
Image two ridiculously huge prime numbers.
Multiply them with each other, the result is an even more ridiculous huge number.
To "crack" the code, you only have the single gigantic number and need to retroactively figure out the two huge prime numbers that were used to create it.
You cannot guess it or divide the problem into faster solvable subproblems or anything. Your only chance is to do it "the hard way". Start at 0, count upwards and test for each (prime) number, if the gigantiv number can be divided by it.

While the "forward way", multiplying the two huge numbers, is a matter of nanoseconds or microseconds maybe, the reverse way takes AGES. Thousands, millions of years, depending on hardware.

Also getting faster hardware won't solve the problem.
You cannot say "in the future there will be hardware a thousand times faster and will crack it in no time", because then you simply have to choose two even huger initial prime numbers that take the thousand times faster hardware microseconds to multiply and comparable hardware will again require thousands or millions of years to crunch the numbers.

In short:
There are (mathematical) ways to make encrypting something almost effortless and decrypting it take "forever".

Or even shorter:
"Properly secure"

[Lynx7725]

One has to remember that while the Inner Sphere blasted itself backwards in technological terms prior to 3039, the Clans actually hadn't moved forward that much in technology; the gap is more due to that the IS blew itself to rags while the actual Clantech advancement is mostly incremental over Star League technology.

Clans as both a society and technologically stagnated to a degree in the time between the Golden Century IIRC and the Clan invasion -- my opinion is that it was because that the Clans were small by population standards and dealt with each other in ritualistic and formalized means. It took the low-down, dirty fighting techniques of the Inner Sphere to stir the Clan technological cycle up again, and even then the Inner Sphere technological catchup was able to narrow the gap significantly in a very narrow time span.

Which is a long winded way of saying the Clans stuck with what worked in the Star League and didn't improved that much. Including Mech security -- they probably had worse security, because the Clan caste and honour system doesn't exactly open Clan mechs up to theft very often.

[kesmai]

.
No encryption is holding for long when the hardware that encrypts is modular and can be exchanged by technicians in a standardized environment. Battlemechs, especially omnimechs aren't pilot owned property, but are part of the clans touman, thus owned by the clan not the pilot. Omnimechs change pilots way more often than pilots change omnimechs. There design of the 'security' systems must be designed quite lax according to this usage. So breaking such a system should viable in a timeframe of a few days or weeks even for IS techs.

[Alistair Winter]

In this thread:

People trying to apply rational arguments using real world examples to explain what would 'realistically' be possible in Battletech.

Someone PM me when you've arrived at a conclusion, so we can start debating whether a Battlemech would defeat an Adeptus Mechanicus Titan, or whether Victor Steiner-Davion would beat Captain Kirk in a klingon deathmatch.

[Oppi]

Paigan, on 22 March 2015 - 11:41 PM, said:

In any SciFi movie/book/game I always wonder: Don't they have KEYS to their super high tech vehicle/starship/whatever?
Or a passcode? Or biometric stuff?

The IS do have all this (because tl;dr : They're much like us) but it can be cracked or computer systems can just be ripped out and replaced given enough time
.
The Clans however are a caste society largely unfamiliar with the concept of thievery (almost everybody works for the greater good of the clan in some way, bandits are hunted down brutally as a training for military units or a way for old warriors to die in battle with honour before being force to retire). They don't use spies / special ops teams (who would sabotage or steal military equipment) because it's not honorable.If they lose equipment to another clan in battle they consider it the winning clan's right to take said equipment as "Isorla". That's why they don't really have any use for passwords / keys or other protection to prevent unauthorized use of their mechs - there's just nobody there who would try to use them unauthorized. Prior to the invasion that is. But the Clans were also pretty slow to adapt to new circumstances.

@ Paigan :

Quote

So the IS engineers (who hardly understand their own lostech) have a piece of mashinery way beyond their level of technology with no or at least impartial "brain" (software etc.).
What should they do with it?

It's not like the IS are monkeys and the Clans are Vulcans. The Clans may build better lasers, but if captured intact, those still do have a power cable and will fire if enough power is transfered to them. It's far easier to use a technology you don't have the ability to build, than to develop and actually build it. I can use a PC but I sure as hell couldn't build one. IS techs did this for centuries before the Clan Invasion, because their own technology also got forgotten in the times of nuclear war.

Edited by Oppi, 23 March 2015 - 03:07 AM.

[Alek Ituin]

Alistair Winter, on 23 March 2015 - 02:50 AM, said:

In this thread:

People trying to apply rational arguments using real world examples to explain what would 'realistically' be possible in Battletech.

Someone PM me when you've arrived at a conclusion, so we can start debating whether a Battlemech would defeat an Adeptus Mechanicus Titan, or whether Victor Steiner-Davion would beat Captain Kirk in a klingon deathmatch.

Answer: Even a Warhound Titan would b*tch slap the shiznit out of everything in BT, barring perhaps a Lance of Super Heavies.

It's a 410 tonne death machine armed with what amounts to a fully automatic Rotary AC/20 (with the range of a Gauss Rifle), and a Plasma Blastgun that would be like 6 Heavy PPC's firing at once, with 20% of the heat. It also happens to be a mere 14m tall, as compared to an Atlas and its ridiculous 16m height. And the weight isn't an issue because Titans are built with Great Crusade era technology, where the Imperium had kick-a** anti grav technology (which would offset the weight of the Titan, allowing it to function properly).

Edited by Alek Ituin, 23 March 2015 - 04:07 AM.

[Escef]

Paigan, on 22 March 2015 - 11:41 PM, said:

In any SciFi movie/book/game I always wonder: Don't they have KEYS to their super high tech vehicle/starship/whatever?
Or a passcode? Or biometric stuff?

Inner Sphere mechs during the Succession Wars had start up procedures that would abort (or even try to kill the pilot with forced feedback) if certain security protocols weren't followed. Raising your right hand and reciting the alphabet backwards, glancing in a certain direction, etc.

Clan mechs have security that rivals that of modern US military motor pools. If you can make it past the gate with a pair of bolt cutters than the HMMWV of your choice is yours.