Let's talk aliens.

[sovereign]

are you missing hybrids?...

Or the fact that human knowledge isn't well hidden (rather the opposite), and that the Nomads gain the knowledge of anyone they infest?

Basically, Strom, you have no idea what you're talking about. There's no reason to suggest that Nomad telepathy is based on easy-to-reproduce electromagnetic waves, nor any reason to suggest that acting spontaneously and spazzing out will make them react in any manner other than "wow, this guy's crazy, should be easy to kill him".

Also, a patrol could be made up of only one controlling consciousness, but it could also be four or five. For example, 5 keepers go on patrol. They are not one mind with five ships, they are five minds with five ships with perfect communication, and there's no difference in the efficiency of their communications if they were in one patrol or all out alone in entirely different systems.

I'm going to quote myself since nobody seems to have noticed me.

Biological weapons would be able to, at most, destroy a single ship and possibly other ships in very close physical proximity (anything in range of its "feelers"). The piece of the consciousness controlling that ship would be hit by it, but not killed- death of a controlled ship does affect the Nomads, but not a whole lot. Such weapons, regardless of origin, would do the same thing as shooting the ships with guns would do- kill the vessel.

To target the collective, you'd need to either A) target their power supply like opening the hypergate did, or B) target the telepathic network itself. The latter option would require humans with telepathic abilities or machines duplicating that- as well as intimate knowledge of how the Nomads talk to each other. If you could build machines that "talked" the same way Nomads did, you could theoretically DDoS the Mindshare, keeping them from communicating and either driving the minds insane or at least immobilizing the physical manifestations (meaning that a group of strike teams could clean house fairly effectively). Theoretically. If you didn't keep it secretive enough, they might find a way to resist it or do something similar to modulating a comm frequency- "dodging" your interference. You'd need to catch them by surprise, and with enough machines to knock out the network in one fell swoop. That's the sort of thing you should be looking at for this.

It's entirely possible that the Nomads have already foreseen such a "weakness" and have already set up protocols to deal with it and thus avoid another disaster like the Battle of Omicron Major. But if you wanted to "capture" a Nomad ship, this would be where you should start looking- using telepathic abilities similar to the Nomads to "blot out" a small area from the network as well as keeping the mental imprint running the ship occupied instead of self-destructing. I have a theory on how you might "assassinate" a given personality, but that's not for display until I've thought about it more- and there's no way humans could figure it out with their current level of understanding.

I just handed you a mechanism for what you want to do. Not exactly a practical one, but if there was a practical method to exterminate the Nomads then that wouldn't be very fun, would it?



I'd also like to point out to Strom and Jeffrey T that you are ignoring the points brought up by Treewyrm, who is basically responsible for the modern, Discovery implementation of the Nomads. His word, while not technically law, is damned well informed. Listen to him.
Oh, and go read the Nomad Lore. Link to the older version without downloading it is here, link to download the newest version is here.

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