Broadcast #14 Takeaways

Broadcast #14 Takeaways

Now that the disaster has finished broadcasting, here’s a summary of the important things I said during the broadcast:

The Next Live Broadcast Date is Unknown

Because life and work are conspiring against me, the next date that I know I can do a live broadcast on my regular schedule is December 29th. I think that’s way too long, so I’m going to try to do one after work during the week of December 10th. Unfortunately, two new work trips are preventing my regular schedule from being a thing on November 17th and December 1st. I will be out of town for Thanksgiving weekend, as well, so prerecorded broadcasts will be a thing for those dates. Hopefully they’ll have sound…

This is just the Beginning…

This is just the beginning of the final work. I’m not done with either The First Taste or Another World, and I do intend to draw them to a close. I have a lot of thought that needs to go into this untitled project story, but I wanted to get started on it.

Presidential Override

This is a fictional, as far as I know, ability that can be enacted by a president with Congressional approval to deliberately sink a ship or down an aircraft to prevent rogue actions. If, as was the case in Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October, a submarine commander went rogue to either start a war or defect with the ship, the President could order what’s effectively a self-destruct: send the ship down to crush depth without the ability to quickly override it aboard the vessel. Again, as far as I know, it’s completely fictional and made up for this story.

Q-Comm

The Q-Comm system, as far as I know, is also completely fictional though possibly not for much longer. It is a communications system using quantum entangled particles to communicate with the Pentagon securely, regardless of the submarine’s distance or depth. The world is actively pursuing quantum entanglement based systems for all sorts of purposes including encryption and communications as a signal transmitted via two entangled particles cannot be intercepted, jammed, or even overheard except at the two ends of the communication, which should be very secure. A system such as this would be of utmost importance and tactical advantage to the Navy because a submarine could remain at deep depths and still be in perfect communication with the chain of command. Ordinarily, a submarine must either surface or tow an antenna array behind the sub in order to communicate with the outside world, which can give away its position.

The “Defense Grid”

This is partially fictional; along the Alaskan border and the northern border of Canada, is a series of radar towers used to detect aircraft — particularly Russian fighters and bombers — as an early warning system in case of attack. In this story, I’m presuming that stealth aircraft have become a common threat to the United States, and in addition to traditional radar, infrared and lidar installations have been installed to detect radar invisible or low observable aircraft. Despite the reckless application of “invisible” to stealth aircraft, they are very much visible even if they are hard to observe by design, and they are not immune to the effects of friction, which generates heat across the surface of the airframe as it moves through the air. As recent Russian fighter videos have shown, a stealth fighter can be seen at a distance with infrared cameras; now whether that detection is good enough for a target lock for a missile is beyond my knowledge and I choose not to speculate.

What Are Your Thoughts?

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.