Earth Bond Chapter 14 Discussion (spoilers!)

[Greymist]

You have to think though, that they'd need hundreds of kilometres of cables, which now that they're locked away in their cave wouldn't be easy to get.

[Fel]

"Hey they cut us of...." "Hey we have a water dragon on staff right? Could we get to her go down and route her into ANOTHER cable...like we did in the first place?" "I don't see why not...."

It wasn't Sella that initially spliced into the major trans-Pacific fiber-optic trunk that runs through Hawaii, it was Kell, using a very powerful bit of magic that gave him the ability to breathe water for a short time (so powerful that it can't be done except in favorable circumstances). But he did have a water dragon helping him, keeping the water out of the cable housing while he did his work

That kind of major operation would require a specialist, and Sella wouldn't have the technical skill to pull it off. Splicing optic cables is not for an amateur.

[artreus]

about the special weapons one would need to kill an ED,
tho they are immune to all natural materials (iron, steel, etc, maybe even to radiation),
the can still be killed with normal rock, as long as it is accellerated at 9m/s³ over a sufficiant distance .( 1 - 2 km at minimum ? )

Havent we been seeing 'rail guns' in any of fell's stories before ?

[SYED]

I thought that the whole earth traveling thing from DRACONIAN MEASURES was epic. SO I wonder with the altered diet and living underground, would Earth Dragons gain that ability to travel through the soil really quickly. If it is only traveling, it would explain why it takes time to build proper tunnels?

Water dragons can travel unhindered at sea , air dragons can reach higher than all, so why shouldnt the ED get supper tunneling.

[ANTIcarrot]

about the special weapons one would need to kill an ED

Even regular .50 cal rounds will affect them, kinda like a really weak tazar. As you scale up at some point inconvenience presumably becomes injury. Earth Dragons themselves have expressed no desire to be shot at by tanks. So with conventional materials, something like a heavy automatic cannon, antitank missile, or anything in the 'Royal Ordnance L7 or bigger' range. BAE's experimental naval railgun would certainly count, though it's not really intended for the direct fire mode.

First's research has also confirmed that Earth Dragons (apparently) only have immunity to Earth material. A rock from the moon can brain them just as easily as it could you or I. So meteoric iron melted into bullet form would be a serious health hazard for them. As would (presumably) the KT impact line, which is composed largely of meteoric iridium. It's unclear how long material takes to become 'of the earth' since origonally none of it was.

Without suport from the other dragons, they are vaulnerable to other 'elemental' attacks. Nerve gas or blast waves, as air attacks, may work on them. Shaped charges can be made (partially) from water, and they can easily drown if they're careless or injured. America may have some experimental battlefield lasers lying around. We definately have wire tazers, and benchtop 'lightening' weapons. Napalm might at least make them sweat.

Aside from that, how do they fare against basic chemestry? Something like FOOFor chlorinetrifluride? Incidentally, both those entries are worth a read. You'll learn some things about chemestry they never showed you in school!

PS: Yes Pantom, we know. Which is why cutting the hardlines was mentioned on the first page!

[dellstart]

Anti good points as usual. the sum of the parts and all that.

[Spec8472]

"Hey they cut us of...." "Hey we have a water dragon on staff right? Could we get to her go down and route her into ANOTHER cable...like we did in the first place?" "I don't see why not...."

It wasn't Sella that initially spliced into the major trans-Pacific fiber-optic trunk that runs through Hawaii, it was Kell, using a very powerful bit of magic that gave him the ability to breathe water for a short time (so powerful that it can't be done except in favorable circumstances). But he did have a water dragon helping him, keeping the water out of the cable housing while he did his work

That kind of major operation would require a specialist, and Sella wouldn't have the technical skill to pull it off. Splicing optic cables is not for an amateur.

Splicing the cable is a major job. It requires hours, and a bunch of equipment. You can't just hack into it while it's submerged, because water ingress will destroy the cable.
The cables contain many pairs of fibre optic cable. This is because most of the cost of building the system is in laying the cable itself -- it's a small incremental cost to just lay in a few more pairs, which gives you the ability to run more traffic, and/or to add in junction points.

There's two ways you could 'tap' into the network.

The first, and simplest is to just install a junction - i.e you take one of the fibre pairs that are not in use, cut it, and join up to your own cable (which would need at least four pairs).
Unfortunately this is very noticeable - you need equipment in the landing stations on both ends of the cable. In addition, hiding the existence of this is probably not very feasable, it requires a lot of human eyes and hands to connect up a bit of equipment there. It's also not cheap to simply rent out a whole fibre pair.

The second, and what I imagine many are thinking is to simply intercept the communications on an active pair, and inject your own data. I'll assume for a moment that Earth Dragon computers are two or three generations ahead of current technology. I'll also assume that they have some way of processing the 300Gigabit (~10 year old cable system) to several Tbit (modern cable systgem) of data streaming through that cable. Physics, however, undoes you here.

In several ways:
1) The fibre pairs are designed to channel light, not let it leak out the sides. Some small amount does, but not nearly enough to be useful.
2) Cutting into the pair, even minutely, will alter the performance of the pair and probably bringing down or raising huge alarms.
3) Cutting the pair completely will be immediately noticed, and the distance to the break traced very quickly (they can reflect light off the break)
4) Even if they could break and splice in their own cable without notice, they'd need some way of decoding all that data, and injecting their own. That'll immediately add milliseconds to the round-trip times (you need to decode the signal, process it on some sort of CPU, and then send it back out again... all of which takes time).
Having one pair suddenly add 5ms to a round-trip would be cause for concern.
This assumes you're doing all that decoding/encoding right at the cable itself. You also need to do exactly the same encoding/decoding on the OTHER half of the cable system - that's probably a few hundred KM away. If you only do it on one side of the fibre ring... once again, alarms, noise, people wondering what the hell went wrong.

So, all in all... this just needs to be one of Fel's hand-wavey things.


Side note: Yes, I know there's been talk of being able to intercept undersea communications... that's mostly outdated and irrelevent now. All voice calls are sent overseas on the same fibre as your internet access... it's cheaper and easier to do it that way.

[Greymist]

Random thought Spec, what about hooking into the repeater on one of the cables with an electronic, instead of optical repeater. Then some of your work is done for you.

You'd still add delay though, because you'd have to buffer incoming data while you injected your own, and then hope for a cable which isn't fully utilized so you could catch up.

Of course I don't work with fibre, apart from FC/FCoE in our server estate, so I'm probably talking crap

[Fel]

about the special weapons one would need to kill an ED

Even regular .50 cal rounds will affect them, kinda like a really weak tazar. As you scale up at some point inconvenience presumably becomes injury. Earth Dragons themselves have expressed no desire to be shot at by tanks. So with conventional materials, something like a heavy automatic cannon, antitank missile, or anything in the 'Royal Ordnance L7 or bigger' range. BAE's experimental naval railgun would certainly count, though it's not really intended for the direct fire mode.

Exactly right. That was why Kell was so worried about getting hosed down by the aircraft carrier's Phalanx system. It would be death by a thousand cuts...or in that case, death from one massive hemotoma made up of a couple of thousand small bruises. Once you get up into .50 caliber territory, the sheer impact behind the round starts doing real harm. And the introduction of depleted uranium rounds ups this, because they have even more kinetic energy due to the mass of the slug.

First's research has also confirmed that Earth Dragons (apparently) only have immunity to Earth material. A rock from the moon can brain them just as easily as it could you or I. So meteoric iron melted into bullet form would be a serious health hazard for them. As would (presumably) the KT impact line, which is composed largely of meteoric iridium. It's unclear how long material takes to become 'of the earth' since origonally none of it was.

Correct again. It was using meteoric iron weapons that threatened the earth dragons who befriended Arthur.

Without suport from the other dragons, they are vaulnerable to other 'elemental' attacks. Nerve gas or blast waves, as air attacks, may work on them. Shaped charges can be made (partially) from water, and they can easily drown if they're careless or injured. America may have some experimental battlefield lasers lying around. We definately have wire tazers, and benchtop 'lightening' weapons. Napalm might at least make them sweat.

Some of those weapons would be effective, but some wouldn't. Earth dragons are very resistant to radical pressure changes in addition to sustained pressure, which reduces the injury they take from ballistic weapons and blast waves. Shaped charge weapons, on the other hand, concentrate all that force into one point, and that WOULD be effective. Earth dragon hides are partially resistant to electricity (they're somewhat grounded when they're standing on earth, shunting some of the current to ground without passing by the hide), so they'd have some protection against taser style weapons, but military grade lasers...oh yeah. Those would work nicely. Napalm would be effective too, if it stayed stuck to them and burned long enough to get past their tough hides.

[Spec8472]

Random thought Spec, what about hooking into the repeater on one of the cables with an electronic, instead of optical repeater. Then some of your work is done for you.

You'd still add delay though, because you'd have to buffer incoming data while you injected your own, and then hope for a cable which isn't fully utilized so you could catch up.

Of course I don't work with fibre, apart from FC/FCoE in our server estate, so I'm probably talking crap

The way I understand it, the ring based systems send signal across both sides concurrently, and re-integrate it on the far side. Any difference in signal propagation delay is detected as a fault.
So, you could replace the optical repeater... but you'd be detected in just the act of swapping out a repeater (cable goes dead for some time), plus the ongoing delay would raise alarms.

[ANTIcarrot]

So, you could replace the optical repeater... but you'd be detected in just the act of swapping out a repeater (cable goes dead for some time), plus the ongoing delay would raise alarms.

Then again, if the system mysteriously goes down, and then mysteriously comes back up again, with only a slight delay - most companies woudl count their lucky stars and keep going. Field agents may have been on hand to either cover it up or schedual downtime for some reason, or insert code that would hide the delay.