Renovations

[Coliz]

Luc finished his drink and resumed.. "Well, a little historical background: the equivalent of this company for Gallia was the Bouvet Enterprise, first in the hands of Solar and later merged with the IDF. And now we come to the point where we will need this information."
‘I assume,’ he said as he looked at the Director, ‘that you are familiar with what happened in Gallia just before we revealed ourselves the Sirian Houses.
"The rebellion by the Council.
‘Exactly. After the first days of the rebellion, the crews found themselves in considerable difficulty in operating their own operational and friend or foe systems, especially with ships captured or coming from defections or mutinies. The ships simply stopped working and went into safe mode, exactly as is happening now with OS&C operational systems."
‘This was a problem that had to be remedied as quickly as possible, so they set about, with the help of less than recommendable members of civil society, hacking into the ships’ integrated systems, especially the communication programmes between the ship's own systems and the interchangeable Friend or Foe systems.
"Go on"
Eventually, after numerous hacking attempts, they managed to find a flaw in the ships' security systems. With a few thousand lines of code, a couple of connectors and a couple of circuit boards, they managed to restore the ship to ‘factory’ condition. In simple terms, the program bypassed all the inherent safety locks in the ships‘ own operating systems by making them think they were hooked up to the shipyards’ control and diagnostic systems. The latters would allow the ships to be operated without the need for an external operating or Friend or Foe system, to make sure that customers had ships that were actually functioning on a purely technical level. Once this was confirmed, the technicians of the gallic companies, such as. IDF, EFL, GMS and Solar, individually and independently installed their systems in their bases.
"Once the Council's engineers had achieved this, they took the next step. They modified the hacking programme again, so that it bridged the ship's integrated systems with the new interchangeable and Friend or Foe systems of the rebellion."
Hector, who had been listening until now, took the floor.
"Obviously this ingenious stunt was short-lived. As soon as the regular forces captured rebellion ships they realised, upon dissecting them, the flaw. Within months they recalled all active ships for upgrades, solving the problem at its root and rendering the hacking programme useless. But here lies Luc's stroke of genius"
"It's not a stroke of genius, it's simply that an informed Gallic knows these things, a Sirian doesn't"
"Shut up. The genius was to look in the ship's archives for the date of manufacture and the shipyard of origin. What we discovered, somewhat in spite of ourselves, is that the ship was built in your 815 AS, two years before the Marne revolt."
At that point, when we physically checked the code lines of the ship's operational programs, we realized that they still contained that famous flaw I just talked about. This is because, and here we are with the previous excursus, the ship was owned by Solar and was subsequently added into the IDF rooster, which thought it best, given the not exactly rosy conditions for keeping a cruise ship active, to keep it mothballed somewhere, without bothering to install updates."
"After all, who would have needed a cruise ship in the hell they found themselves in?"