The head of DDS Research Dr Forbidden recently took time out from his busy schedule to grant us this interview.
US : Welcome Dr Forbidden! The last few months have been pretty hectic for DDS Research haven't they?
DF : Hello! Yes indeed. When the war against the Utrek began he had to immediately change our focus from long-term projects to shorter-term ones that could have a bearing on the conflict. We worked very hard during the conflict and helped a number of key war winning technologies. After the war we were pretty exhausted however! I gave nearly the entire staff a month off and then we got back to work and go back into our previous research, its taken a few months to get back on track but now everything is as before.
US : And I know one of those long-term projects is wormhole drive. How do you feel about the Dinos now going live with it?
DF : Well we expected it. We are a long way behind, i would say we are at least 10 years from reaching the same level of the Dinos but we did start our wormhole drive development some 22 years after the Dinos did! Now i know that will disappoint a lot of people but its a simple fact. We are hoping to be able to begin field tests early in the next decade. Hopefully we can field wormdrive equipped UCVs by 2115.
US : Doesn't that put us at a disadvantage?
DF : Maybe but the Dinos are not currently our enemies and of our enemies such as the Utrek and Tarbotians our propulsion technologies already exceed theirs. As far as we, or rather our intelligence services know, the Utrek are not working on wormdrive technologies and the Tarbotians are thought to be only just starting.
US : Why is it so difficult to develop wormhole drive? Is it dangerous?
DF : Well there are many formidable technical hurdles to overcome, i know the Dinos suffered over 300 fatal (as in machine) accidents during their development. There was also a physiological effect on organic life aboard a ship in the wormhole that took the Dinos several years to overcome. Because of that UCVs will be first but manned wormhole drive ships will come a few years later. By 2120 i expect it to be standard on all our warships, or at least the front-line.
US : Moving on, as TPM-2 is due to enter service this year what will happen to TPM-1 and are you working on a pure energy TPM-3 as some blogs have mentioned?
DF : TPM-1 has a few years of life left in it. It will take some years to convert the whole fleet over to TPM-2 and of course we have large stockpiles of missiles. Our focus will be on retrofitting existing TPM-1s as production will slow in the rest of the decade. TPM-2 is of course the main focus and will be our major weapon well into the next decade. We are working on pure energy missiles but its too early to say if that will be TPM-3.
US : We know about TPM-2 and the also upcoming Zip cannon but what other weapon technologies are you working on?
DF : Of course we have to keep a lot of things secret but the long range missile, LRM, will be a key weapon in our armoury as will be the MRM. We are also looking at improving our non-lethal weapons. We have read the reports of Bolitic infoweapons with interest and the DDS would like us to explore similar cyberweapons.
US : Thank you for your time, Dr Forbidden.
