The Strategic Assault System is the targeting and control system fitted to Pulsar cruisers to enable them to act as ground attack bombers. Along with the Z5g it is part of the DDS' new suite of ground support weapons but whereas the Z5g was developed over some months (work began last year) the SAS came out of nowhere.
Dr Forbidden of DDS Research has revealed that SAS took just 2 weeks from the order to develop an attack system to installation aboard a Pulsar! "This system was desperately needed to enable an attack on Zoneland." Dr Forbidden said, "We had to totally knock them out so we could concentrate 100% on the Utrek and thus the decision was given to use nuclear weapons, but we had no way of targeting surface targets and controlling the missiles once launched."
Dr Forbidden's elite team bought in 3 systems, 2 civilian and 1 military and managed to get them to work together. "We used 3 systems, and only 1 was military. For example the surface radar scan is a civilian system used by civilian mapping companies. We managed to hack middleware to get these things talking to each other and then to the missiles. There were quite a few all-nighters!"
SAS worked even though it was a horrible hack, it almost didn't work in fact Dr Forbidden has revealed. "We had a couple of software engineers on each Pulsar just in case and they were needed! We found a show stopping bug mere minutes before the attack. Those guys managed to fix it just in time!"
The subsequent SAS2 now fitted is less of a hack though still used different systems working together. The forthcoming SAS-Q for the Quasar and SAS-P for the Pulsar will be fully written from the ground up systems for attack and will be much more accurate and powerful including being able to accept data from other ships.
"SAS showed what we could do in an emergency, though it is nicer to have a little more time to do things!" Dr Forbidden laughed.
