Deep Space Surveillance System Five

# 666

Name	Deep Space Surveillance System Five
Synonyms	D 3S 5; D-5
About	The D S3 5 or D-5 monitors everything that reaches the antennas. If it's not encoded it immediately translates it into standard English. D 3S 5 every day receives and analyses hundreds of millions of words, millions of conversations in Kilrathi in dialects and coded, hundreds of hours of video, thousands of holo images. The D S3 5 quote: "That's the key job, looking for the little nugget of gold inside the tons of gravel and mud." (Vance Richards) The D-5 can monitor any signal within its 600 light year reach and pinpoint its origin. It has to be programmed to know what to look at between the billions of messages it picks up. It may then pass on anything interesting to a human for analysis. D 3S 5 is both detection equipment and analysis software which sorts through millions of Kilrathi signals, cracks codes, picks the interesting things and hands a hard copy to intelligence for review. Design work was started in 2648 and the antenna nets were 20 miles across. 500 people were required to run it, and a ship larger than a carrier. For those reasons, the early models were kept inside Confed territory, 500 or more light years and 10 or more jumps from the front. Only a couple generations back, they were lucky to get good reads from 10 light years away, but in 2668 they have one that can be deployed inside flight deck of a light escort carrier, with an 50 meter antenna array mounted outside. D 3S 5 was being worked on by signal intelligence for years, they were getting ready to deploy it when the armistice happened. It was a black project being worked on on a base deep in one of Neptune's moons. Only the Chiefs of Staff and several hundred design and research crew knew about it. They were allowed to bring their spouse and children to the base and were then listed as killed in a transport accident. It was strictly a military project. Chances were not even president Rodham or anyone in the civilian government knew about it. The money for the project has been buried. D 3S 5 cost roughly over 80 billion credits, which is more than the entire TCS Concordia. The D-5 still requires a lot of people to operate: Vance says he has 103 analysts with him, each with 8 or more years of training. 40 programmers to "feed in the requests" and 20 people to troubleshoot any glitches in the D 3S 5.