Assuming a character had the correct physical access, how difficult would you make the astrogation, computers and mechanics checks to introduce a flaw into a navicomputer's astrogation data such that it would fly into a black hole, sun, or other large mass? What about the central computer on a mliitary network from which all ships would receive their updated astrogation charts?

Contextually, in a campaign I'm playing in, we have a major opposition group that is building capital ships by the hundreds from literally dozens of shipyards. Rather than trying to capture those shipyards or otherwise disrupt/disable the supply, I was thinking of introducing a flaw in their navigation data such that they would have a (low) chance to run into planets or somesuch. This way we wouldn't have to worry so much about the supply. Just force them to jump around the galaxy and eventually they'll run into something.

So... Thoughts on the difficulty of such a plan?

I recall from one novel (Wraith Squadron, maybe) that ships automatically drop out of hyperspace when a gravity well or "mass shadow" is detected in their path. Plotting from system to system basically amounted to pointing at a star and letting the gravity well of the star, or an orbiting body, to get the ship to drop out of hyperspace.

This, of course, flies in the face of the hazards of astrogation as described in the movies, but the idea that a ship's sensors can detect astronomically terrible hazards does sort of make sense. However! Designating hazardous systems, where a ship should really never go, as being perfectly safe for travel and stopovers could be interesting. Say, convincing ships that it's safe to stop and course correct in a system that's actually home to a black hole. Alternatively, how about a fault that gets ships lost in deep space, perhaps by erasing or moving plotted destinations from the charts.

I guess the big challenge comes from making the changes 1) significant enough to do some damage and 2) difficult to detect and correct.

WEG did it!

Unfortunately that won't help much because in the module they did it in they used a puzzle rather then rolling. Short story about how it was done was the player hacked a nav computer, then had to write a program that would rejigger the jump coords in a way that wouldn't trip the multiple redundant safeties a capital ship has.

In the case of you major military... thing... you're probably talking about writing this malware, then traveling from shipyard to shipyard infiltrating each, and uploading the malware into an air-gapped central computer at each location. Oh, and ya gotta do it fast enough that by the time the first infected ship rolls off the assembly line, the last shipyard is already infected. Otherwise you're looking at a ticking clock before they find out their nav core images are bad, and taking measures to prevent it from happening at other shipyards..

WEG did it!

Unfortunately that won't help much because in the module they did it in they used a puzzle rather then rolling. Short story about how it was done was the player hacked a nav computer, then had to write a program that would rejigger the jump coords in a way that wouldn't trip the multiple redundant safeties a capital ship has.

In the case of you major military... thing... you're probably talking about writing this malware, then traveling from shipyard to shipyard infiltrating each, and uploading the malware into an air-gapped central computer at each location. Oh, and ya gotta do it fast enough that by the time the first infected ship rolls off the assembly line, the last shipyard is already infected. Otherwise you're looking at a ticking clock before they find out their nav core images are bad, and taking measures to prevent it from happening at other shipyards..

That's more or less what I was thinking, except hoping that they might handle the distribution for me if I could get into their 'pristine gold source' system. However, in order to prevent them from looking at the problem too closely, I wanted a randomizer to basically give it a 10% or so chance of failure on a given jump. Enough that it would happen eventually, not enough that they'd figure it out before there were catastrophic losses and/or the fleet were immobilized due to untrustworthy computers.

Ideally this would be a flaw in the actual physical navcomputers they were building and installing. That way, even if they flashed in new navcom data, the issue would still be there.

I'm thinking you probably don't own enough purple dice to reflect exactly how difficult this would be.

In my version of the Star Wars world, physical computer cores like that are triple-checked and verified, watched over by droid-level AI programs after installation, that are probably (by droid standards) very prissy, paranoid, and rude. Changing the programming involves changing manufacturing-level equipment, as well as all the hard-coded core databases that sit on them.

Getting away with this for one ship would be titanic. Doing an entire shipyard would be inconceivable. Doing multiple shipyards would mean perverting the entire navigation programming and manufacturing means for an Empire-sized area... for decades so it would propagate through the system.

Simply erasing the data for a black hole (example) would be easier, but that would be corrected on the next update I'm sure.

Edit : Whenever I have an idea like this pop up, I think to myself: "If *I* was in charge of security, how would I prevent this?" Then I make that the default implementation, possibly with an added dollop of paranoia. Next time your players want to rob a bank or something similar, ask them to first design the security for their personal base. If they complain about any security measures in your bank, I'm sure you could point at their base and say "Well, YOU'VE got it, why wouldn't a bank?"

Players (in my experience) always want the bad guys to be stupid.

Couldn't you have your virus disable the proximity sensors and auto drop out when a ship nears a gravity well?

sounds like your wanting to infiltrate their R&D lab and change finalised plans before they are rolled out to the production lines. changing the nav system, the safety system, and the droid brain watching over it.

sure that would be possible, it's just a good adventure away from happening, with some tricky rolls along the way.

IMHO it sounds like a fun story and if its fun for everyone at the table then i hope your gm runs the adventure for you.

Write a firmware virus... flashing a computer requires the cooperation of the current bios. If the current bios is infected with an appropriate virus it could infect the incoming bios before the old bios is deleted. And rather than a 10% chance put a 6 month or maybe a year time delay on it, and what the virus should do is redirect the ship to one of several places in deep space (whenever it would be passing within a few hundred parsecs of it) where you've got a space mine waiting and delete the entire database while there just in case the mine doesn't kill it.

Write a firmware virus... flashing a computer requires the cooperation of the current bios. If the current bios is infected with an appropriate virus it could infect the incoming bios before the old bios is deleted. And rather than a 10% chance put a 6 month or maybe a year time delay on it, and what the virus should do is redirect the ship to one of several places in deep space (whenever it would be passing within a few hundred parsecs of it) where you've got a space mine waiting and delete the entire database while there just in case the mine doesn't kill it.

Just ask Iran about Stuxnet...