--- Sally Manton smanton@hotmail.com wrote:
What are the limits of Orac's ability to control spacecraft? I know it showed that it could control Zen and the Liberator's computer systems, but I don't recall it ever doing the same for Slave and the Scorpio, or indeed many other ships (i e the ever-present pursuit ships). I could be wrong about this; my video's gone bust and it's hard to check if something *never* happened on the series, short of sitting down and watching the whole 52 episodes ...
Orac does override Slave. It's a blink and you miss it moment but when Pella has taken over Scorpio Avon observes that Orac has told Slave to accept commands from anyone on the flight deck.
And - if it never happened *except* for the Liberator and the other DSV - can anyone explain it? (If of course it *did* happen, kindly disregard this question :-).
The off screen answer is, of course, that the series would have got very boring, very quickly if Orac could have taken over any spacecraft whenever the crew wanted !
Playing the game, my own guess is that it is something Orac could do but it was a complex operation. Orac has a period of time to hack into Slave on Xenon and spends a large chunk of time in Redemption plugged into the System, which in my interpretation allows it to take over the DSV. IMO having Jenna say "Blake, Zen's picked up 3 pursuit ships on the detectors" would not give Orac sufficient time to take a ship over.
The other possibility is that Orac could only take control of a ship with an AI in it. (Zen 2 in the DSV, Slave in Scorpio). If the computers in the Federation ship didn't exercise this degree of control of the ship Orac couldn't take them over. In Orac however, Orac's take over of the Liberator is described as standard procedure so this explanation is probably wrong. (You would hardly design a standard security system based on a much more advanced ship than normal). Liberator spends a certain amount of time approaching Aristo and sitting in Orbit so this could have given Orac sufficient time.
Stephen.
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