A good analysis, bringing up a few points I hadn’t explicitly considered. (Which is, after all, why I started this thread, even though I expected a karma hit for it.) I had been thinking of the AI’s focus on the one particular ship to be primarily based on limited interplanetary bandwidth, but I’ll probably end up adopting your 2, 3, or 4.
As a relatively minor aside; at this point in the plot, Our Heroes don’t really have any idea who the AI’s creators actually are. Even limiting the candidates to those with means, motive, and opportunity still leaves a fairly lengthy list—and as Our Heroes’ home base is an asteroid colony with a population of a mere few thousand, it would be rather impractical to simply go after every group on that list all at once… which, at least, leaves room for the next subplot to be written.
A good analysis, bringing up a few points I hadn’t explicitly considered. (Which is, after all, why I started this thread, even though I expected a karma hit for it.) I had been thinking of the AI’s focus on the one particular ship to be primarily based on limited interplanetary bandwidth, but I’ll probably end up adopting your 2, 3, or 4.
As a relatively minor aside; at this point in the plot, Our Heroes don’t really have any idea who the AI’s creators actually are. Even limiting the candidates to those with means, motive, and opportunity still leaves a fairly lengthy list—and as Our Heroes’ home base is an asteroid colony with a population of a mere few thousand, it would be rather impractical to simply go after every group on that list all at once… which, at least, leaves room for the next subplot to be written.