The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

It interested me - what would the Kohr-Ah do if the Captain wouldn't ever translate the self-destruction code to the Slylandro Probes, but fails to destroy the Sa-Matra. After the Kohr-Ah completing their death march, they'd be literally swarmed with the Probes.
The Kohr-Ah may treat Probes as a threat because they keep attacking them. In the other hand, Probes aren't sentient so the Eternal Doctrine doesn't quite work for them, thus the Kohr-Ah wouldn't "cleanse" them and destroy them purely for defensive purposes.
What's more efficient - the Kohr-Ah immense fleet combined with Sa-Matra, or the Slylandro Probe incredible replication rate? If such a bizarre "war" would occur, the Kohr-Ah would seem to have stuck in the sector forever - because they can't just leave a threat behind, while unable to completely destroy it. They may find, accidentally or not, the Slylandro homeworld, but I doubt they would converse with Slylandro for so long to find out anything about Probes before "cleansing" them.
What do you think? :)

This has been discussed in a previous thread. I’m just too lazy to find it.

Heh, I'm sorry then :) There's so much information on the forums, even the Search isn't of much help because it's really TOO much and it takes a lot of time to read everything you find :D

Ha, yeah, I think it's somewhere between pages... forty and sixty-five.  I know because I just finished skimming the topics and bookmarking the really interesting-looking, but long, ones.

ETA:  Yep, page 58 (http://"http://uqm.stack.nl/forum/index.php?topic=1415.0").

So you're going through the records of this place as well wayward? You must really like to keep busy :)

Also OP, don't feel bad. Sometimes I think every discussion possible about UQM and the SC universe has been done twice here and once over at SCDB.

Yep!  Although obviously I'm not reading every single one of the topics. :P That would be silly.

Not to mention that the old thread is nearly three years old, so really you might as well start a new one.

Another thing - what's the strength of the "missile battery" that Slylandro claim the Probes to have? If the Kohr-Ah would attack the Probes straight away, they'd probably fight back with those batteries rather than just try to break the Marauders into component compounds...

That would be the response, until it would be overridden by the self-replication program.

This is an interesting topic. A few comments to add:

The Slylandro would not use their batteries, for the same reason that if Captain Zelnick just says Fight to a probe without discussion, you do not see batteries, so you would assume the same would happen to the Kohr-Ah.

Second of all, wouldn't the Kohr-Ah already know the location of the Slylandro homeworld?

If I remember correctly from asking the Slylandro who has previously visited them, they said that the Ur-Quan and other Milieu races frequently visited them during the Milieu's existence, although the Ur-Quan were brown back then.

I wonder if the Kohr-Ah would still remember from back then, or even the Kzertz-Ah.

Either way, I do not think cleansing the Slylandro would be possible, since bombardments from space on a gas giant, I would think would be hard since there is no surface, they have no buildings or technology whatsoever. Plus it would be like the Kohr-Ah coming to Earth, cannot land, and try to take out the bird population from space, would be quite harder than hitting ground targets.

So in the end not sure, what would happen, or if they would be patient enough to get the destruct code. If the Kohr-Ah do not know/remember the location of the Slylandro world, you would assume they would never find it, due to the Kohr-Ah find sentient beings by looking for their sphere of influcence/hyperwave transmissions, and since the Slylandro do not have one, they would never be found.

I say the Kzertz-Ah as the scientists would have a much better chance of remembering/finding the solution to the probe problem.

Also it wouldn't just be the Kohr-Ah which would be killed by the probes it would be every living sentient space race which would be eliminated! So the probes would do the Kohr-Ah's job for them.

Except I am not sure if the Probes would eliminate sentient beings on a planet, just ships, but you could not travel with ships without being annoyed by those damn probes.

Yes.  They apparently talked frequently for "almost half a Drahn", so the knowledge would probably be fairly entrenched... still, it's possible they forgot/lost it, since it was a non-vital thing and we don't know how much of their history they lost when the Dnyarri took them over.


What if they poisoned the atmosphere, or the inhabitable layer of it?  Or developed some kind of virus that was effective against the Slylandro?  Or used nukes to irradiate the entire planet?

I agree that the Kzer-Za would have a much better chance of getting the destruct sequence, though, because they actually talk to other species (besides "DIE NOW," I mean.).  I think it hinges on whether the Kohr-Ah would realize they were malfunctioning, since they might not bother to talk to them after the first one.

Another way of "cleansing" the Slylandro may be detonating something very powerful in the upper layers of Source's atmosphere, thus creating massive shockwaves that would push the Slylandro gas bags into the Depths.
And what if someone (like Melnorme, for instance) reprogrammed the Probes to attack the Kohr-Ah ships with missiles when one is in sight, and replicate if there's no enemy in the vicinity? How would that combination do? :)

I'm not sure the Khor-Ah would be able to erradicate the Slylandro or the Probes in time.

If I remember correctly, Hayes mentions that the Probes are increasing at a geometric rate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_progression (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_progression)

If you take an AI Probe against an AI Marauder, the Probe actually does a pretty nice job against it. And by the time the Khor-Ah snuff out all non-Ur-Quan life in the sector, there may simply be too many Probes to handle.

Right, and of course that's only logical (if you assume that, on average, the probes reproduce at a steady rate and are rarely destroyed).  This does bring up certain questions, though, since even if the probes weren't attacking everything in sight, it seems like they'd still eventually be a problem (despite the vastness of space) and that there should have been some kind of check in place besides just returning after a certain time--especially since it sounded more like it returns when it has a certain amount of data, not after a certain amount of time.

(Edited to add punctuation and hopefully clarity.)

I find it highly unlikely that the Ur-Quan would manage to solve the Slylandro plague.  Not only do the probe fight very well...but there are a few facts to consider.

The Ur-Quan may well remember who the Slylandro are (Kzer-Za of course), but...they are most likely (as everyone) clueless about the fact that the Probes come from the Slylandro in the first place...and that a self-destruction behavior can be activated.

The Probes are a cheap Melnorme technology, not Slylandro made so while we see the name "Slylandro Probe"in mêlee mode, it is entirely possible that there is no clue about this in the "real" world. I see it more to be consistent with all other ships (who have race name at the top) as well as giving the player some hint that there is such a race. The only ones who could hint the Ur-Quan are the Melnorme (who will logically be wiped out by that time) .

Lastly, wiping the Slylandro would do nothing about the probes, except making certain that the self-destruction code is lost forever. Keep in mind that until the fact that the Slylandro have probes is known, the Kzer-Za would probably not destroy them: they are unable to travel in space and are technically even less threatening than the Spathi.

Out of topic, it seems very possible to create extraordinary cataclysm on gas giants, as the shoemaker-levy comet has shown by crashing down on Jupiter. It's certainly not above the abilities of the Sa-Matra. The slylandro could be wiped out by a change in the atmospheric climate, even if slight and temporary.

The Probe clearly gives away that it comes from Slylandro when it mentions Drahnasa in its mission description:
"ESTIMATED REPLICATIONS SINCE DEPARTURE FROM POINT OF ORIGIN
583 REPLICATIONS.
ESTIMATED REPLICATIONS PROJECTED ONE DRAHNASA FROM THIS DATE
14,784 REPLICATIONS.
ESTIMATED REPLICATIONS PROJECTED FIVE DRAHNASAS FROM THIS DATE
45,786,412 REPLICATIONS"

The Ur-Quan may remember this Slylandro word... or may not :D
Another and more interesting Probe quite is this:

"THIS PROBE IS PROGRAMMED TO DEFEND AGAINST HOSTILE BEHAVIOR.

SURVIVAL SUB-SYSTEM ACTIVATED. WEAPONS ENGAGED.

ENACTING THIRD LAW.

DEFENSE SYSTEM HAS BEEN ENGAGED. HOSTILITIES COMMENCE."

The Probe does actually activate its weapon systems, but then the defence is probably gets overridden with replication, as meep-eep already mentioned.

Though the program that's mentioned by the Slylandro themselves doesn't include any hostilities at all:
"Communicate (5).
Record Data (4).
Analyze Data (3).
Seek Replication Materials (999).
Move to Current Target (1)".

And then the Slylandro say that "the probe will only fire its weapons if it has been attacked
and cannot communicate with the attacker", which may most probably occur when the Kohr-Ah understand that there's no sense in telling the Probes that they're to be "cleansed". Again, if the defensive behaviour, which isn't mentioned explicitly anywhere in the Probe program, isn't overridden by replication.
It gets complicated :D

What I don't understand is why killing the Sylandro would help. I mean, it's not like the probes would magically shut down once their masters were destroyed...

But yeah, probes win because of sheer numbers. Unless the Kzer-Za are smart enough to capture one and figure out where it came from/how they work, which I doubt.

While the probe plauge would be a huge pain, I think the Korh-ah might be up to it. After all, they tend to travel
in groups, while he probes (as far as I know) always fly solo.

Logically, the probes would not only fly solo, but also stay as far away from each other as possible, so as to avoid duplicating observations (as well as avoiding competing with each other for resources).

So, wandering packs of Marauders wouldn't be in any great danger from the probes, since they'd tend to meet them one at a time.  However, I don't think they'd ever be able to wipe them out--not with geometric progression and a solid head start.  They'd probably only be able to destroy the probes at a constant rate, and I'm betting that by that point the probes would outnumber the Kohr-Ah's ships rather severely.  Also, remember that they would have to get EVERY probe, or else it starts all over again.  Some of them probably got quite far.

The solution of the destruct code only works--or at least, presumably works--because the number of "fixed" probes going around transmitting the sequence to other codes should be growing at about the same rate as their reproduction, only with a time lag.  They'll be coming back to report in droves, and the Slylandro will probably keep reprogramming them to seek out other probes and transmit the sequence.

I'd like to note that the probe's own projections seem to show a decrease in the increase in rate* of population growth, though: if it thinks there are 583 probes currently and there will be 14,784 one Drahnasa from now, that would mean it expects them to increase by a factor of about 25 per Drahnasa.  But if you look at the next four Drahnasa, its estimate of probe population is only 45,786,412, not the expected 14,784*25*25*25*25, which would be 5,775,000,000.  It could be taking into account diminishing resources, but it doesn't seem like that should matter at that point (after all, they're probably going off in different directions) so I think that means that there's some kind of limiting factor built into them--that an individual probe will stop replicating after 100, or something (and maybe a second-generation probe would stop replicating after 95, and a third-generation one after 90...).

That's STILL a lot of probes, but maybe at some point they do stop replicating (or the increase in population is approximately linear--that might come first), and then it's possible to eliminate all of them.

*I think.  The rate of growth is still increasing, because in the first Drahnasa you've got an increase of tens of thousands and over the next four there's an increase of tens of millions.  It seems like it's possible the actual decrease, at this point, could be after you take a few more derivatives, though.  Who's looked at this in more detail?

Another thing is what should be the replication rate to make exactly 583 probes at any point? 583 is 53*11, and those two numbers are its only divisors. So maybe the "projections" the Probe makes are just some random numbers?

I think there's two ways you can go with this.
Either the projection is sophisticated and takes into account 1)probes being destroyed, sucked into black holes or whatever and 2)uneven rates of replication: a probe doesn't replicate "every n days, no matter what," but instead replicates when it has enough materials.  So it might be something like (making up numbers without trying to make them fit here) "1 in 8 probes will have an average lifespan of 324 days; 1/5 of probes will manage to replicate once every 11 days; 1/3 will replicate once every 9.5 days; blah blah blah".

OR, to go the other direction, it could just be a very crude estimate.  If it knows that the population should double every time period t, and that it's been 9.18735 t since the start of the mission, it might just go, 2^9.18735 is about 583, so there should be about 583 probes by now.  Since the probes aren't replicating at a fixed rate, but as they gather material, you aren't going to have some kind of "0:01:59 - 32 probes.  0:02:00 - 64 probes, as the previous 32 all finish replicating at once" situation, so it's probably a reasonable estimate (assuming they got the "population doubles every time period t" part right in the first place).

But the key here is that it's behaving a lot like the population of a biological species (a biological species with an unlimited food supply at this point, and few predators, and that reproduces asexually and one "child" at a time), and you can definitely end up with messy numbers of them.
Or you could say it's behaving like radioactive decay (...if it happened in reverse).  You don't go right from 2 kg to 1 kg as soon as the half-life is up.  It's decaying the whole time, in bits, and you can calculate how much there will be after 1.2545 of its half-life.

By the way, about "going solo and far away from each other"... I once met TWO probes orbiting Groombridge I, the Rainbow World. Another thing is that they were separate from each other rather than combined in a group :D

Ha, neat!  So--whatever method they use to try to avoid each other/avoid doing the same areas isn't perfect.  Or, it was interesting enough that one of them called another over somehow so there would be more data on that particular interesting thing.

That supports the "not attacking together" idea, though--even when they're in the same system, you encounter them separately.  (And, in fact, it's impossible to encounter more than one probe at a time, not just very improbable.)

Another possibility is that the Probe had just recently replicated, and the second one just didn't leave yet. Though we never see the Probes actually replicating in the game, at least as far as I know :)

Note that the probes are programmed to return home after 10 replications.

And I'd suspect that it would often happen that after a successful replication, one probe would try to break down the other again for components.

Another Probe isn't an "unknown" ship, so this might be a rare case.
Hm... if a Probe would actually return home after ten replications, then there should be a whole mess of Probes in a Slylandro system around 2157-2158, unless the Slylandro would reload the exploration program for each Probe. I don't think the Slylandro get probes self-destructed upon return :D
Maybe, it's possible to implement it in the game in some way - like, if you go to Slylandro for the first time at 2155-early 2156, there won't be any probes in Beta Corvi system, in later 2156 there'd be two or three, and after 2156 the number would gradually increase, ending up with a completely swarmed system in 2158-2159, so to at least get to Slylandro homeworld and get the destruction code, you'd have to kill several Probes?

There is also the possibility that the Korh-ah could figure out the
self-destruct code for the probes. They may be single-minded, but
I don't think they're stupid. They'd probably change tatics for something
like this.

It's a shame you can't buy a probe from the Traders. Imagine having a
probe of your own. It's shiny, it's easy to program, what more
could you want?

Oh, the probes return home after a while? That changes things. All the Kohr-Ah have to do is bide their time until most of the probes return home, and then nuke Beta Corvi from orbit...

Barring that, the Sylandro would probably figure out their probes are running wild eventully, and tranmit the self-destruct code themselves.

So if most Probes would gather back at Beta Corvi, one good Sa-Matra shot would wipe out the majority of their population :D

Well, we already knew the probes return home eventually, although it's useful to know it's after "ten replications" instead of the more vague "when its data banks are full" or whatever.

I'm guessing the Melnorme would have programmed in a specific behavior for a probe encountering another probe, and there's two (to me) logical choices: 1)ignore 2)contact it and arrange to go in different directions to avoid going over the same area and recording the same data, which is a waste.  Otherwise (in the non-glitch situation, anyway), you end up with one of these situations--probably the first time a probe replicates and then catches sight of its "child": 1)They try to break each other down for materials, 2)They treat each other as alien ships, possibly ending up talking to each other forever (since the behavior continues until interrupted, I don't think either one would break off communications), 3)They end up recording data about each other.  3) is the least undesirable, but it's still pretty useless.
Since we don't see anything about this in the program (if it exists, it would have to be like the defensive capability--somewhere else, and separate from the bit we do see), we don't know whether it would be overridden by the 999 replication priority.  I suspect it's not overridden, since otherwise it seems like nearly every time a probe replicated, they'd try to break each other down.  They're constantly rotating, so they'd probably sense each other immediately.

It could also be that a new probe has to get a certain distance from its parent probe before it starts behaving "normally" and looking for objects to study/communicate with/break down and that the parent probe ignores everything for a certain amount of time after replicating.  This would, in most cases, make sure they didn't encounter each other immediately.

I also made an Excel spreadsheet to show what happens if the probes stop after ten replications vs. what happens if they replicated forever, and the difference isn't enough to account for the severely reduced rate we see in the projections (it shows 512 at time 9, 16,336 at time 14, 66,519,728 at time 26, and 16,962,383,680 at time 34(which I'm taking as the closest thing to five years/Drahnasa away)).  It's downloadable here (http://"http://download.yousendit.com/CD5B11E82F661752") as a .xls.  Also available as a tab-delineated text file with numbers (http://"http://download.yousendit.com/87E6EC0438BE3507") and a tab-delineated text file with formulas (http://"http://download.yousendit.com/4E5EE44613780C09").