The Head of Technology at New Sparta yesterday spoke at a weapon system technology conference on Solaris. Dr Forbidden revealed a number of interesting things in his speech on NS weapon developments. The TPM-3 is to receive an update this year. TPM-3B will have a new cluster warhead with optional kinetic elements to help defeat the Tarbotian "cellular" shield technology that has negated some of the destructive power of the TPM.
He also spoke about cloaked TPMs and said that NS would not field all of its TPMs this way, largely due to cost and waste. He also said that enemies would quickly negate the advantage by leaving their shields up all the time anyway.
Finally he discussed the "next big thing" in NS weapon development. This is called Integrated System Approach (ISA - the NS love their acronyms!) Dr Forbidden said this was inspired by the Bolitic and from analysing telemetry from the ABBO-Bolitic War. He said that the Bolitic treat everything as part of their weapon system especially sensors and info-weapons. He said that the Bolitic constantly monitor an enemy ship's shields and status and their weapons automatically adapt to the input from the sensors.
"We saw from our analysis of a battle between a Bolitic and an NS ship. When the NS ship's shields weakened on a certain frequency band the Bolitic cannons automatically adjusted to further exploit this weakness. It happened in less than a second so must be done automatically." he said. Cyber-warfare is also part of all weapon systems not a separate system Dr Forbidden said. "The Bolitic use their info-attacks to weaken opponents to help other weapon effectiveness."
ISA will begin to integrate NS weapon systems, sensor systems and info-warfare systems with artificial intelligence to optimise NS attack potential from this year Dr Forbidden said. ISA would not be a separate roll-out but a gradual enhancement to existing systems.
