Laser weapons

[Border Reiver]

I hate to say this but Veltyen is right. Computers may have shrunk in component size and processing power/speed but in some respects reliabilty/stabilty even in simple operations may be questionable. I certainly wouldn't trust my life on anything running Microshite software or using hardware that used an illeteration as a marketing slogan.

 

[womble]

"...Look carefully at your desktop supporting 32 users and ask yourself 'am I willing to trust my life on this'..."

Not relevant. I wouldn't have trusted my life to the old Series/1, either; certainly no more than a current *NIX machine running a database, but it's still a tenth the size.

I administrated the same systems, back at the beginning of my career. Those PC-based systems wouldn't handle word processing for 32; they were usable running a PICK database. A similar sized (physical size) box could run Citrix for 32 these days. Which is only the same system in that it presents information on a screen and uses a keyboard interface. If you ported the app that ran on one 286 core, it could support a lot more than 64.

 

[womble]

Border Riever, I don't think we have much choice in whether we trust Intel processors, or Seattle Software, and while I don't agree very much with your mistrust of the hardware, I certainly do about using Micro$haft in safety-critical systems. Even they caution against it. Hasn't stopped some defense contractor deciding that W2k will be used in the CIC suite of our Trident subs... :-z

 

[SlightlyLyons]

Well I think the point is that any aircraft that uses flight control computers uses triple redundancey. The F16 for example has 3 onbord computers when the pilot enters a command the computers do there calculations and then compare them ageanst each other, if they all mach all is well, if they don't the computer in the minority is cut out of the loop. Sorta like "The Minority Report" ...all in a fraction of a second, that means they have to be powerfull enough to do the computations Quickly. I would asume on a Starship things are similer. Triple redundant Avionics, Triple redundant Jump computation, Triple redundant sensors computation, Triple redundant coms... You get the picture...

 

[womble]

I can see I'm not convincing anyone. [shrug] How about trying it the other way round:

If Traveller's assumptions about laser tech are as accurate as their assumptions about slugthrowers, then IRL, we'll have functional laser weaponry sooner than Traveller TL indicates. Mostly I'm talking about ammo capacity, but there are a bunch of assumptions that have already been surpassed.

 

[veltyen]

.... and the cycle completes.

Check the start of the thread for a response to the above question.

I understand your point womble. Computers far exceed what traveller (especially CT) had targetted at. effectively the modern day is a spraying of TL7-10, with some of the leading edge biological tech coming in close to the TL11 mark, while other technology is essentially unchanged from the WWII era equivalents. I was quoting the E25K and the X1 as TL9 systems (what I consider current day for computer systems - mainly to get access to parallel class CPU's under T20) for example.

Think of a computer as the machine and the environment required for it to run, rather then just as a notebook or desktop. Part of the computer is the environmental gear, distributed data storage, long term data storage, redundant buses and so on which is not found in smaller classes of machine. In terms of starship computers the size of the computer also includes all communications and sensor gear, with the actual "computer" taking up very little space on its own.

I think we are arguing somewhat different points of view. I was saying that the sizes of traveller computer systems were not completely inaccurate, a system running a large starship being several dTons is perfectly well in line with what currently exists. Especially when the systems generally don't have any dedicated personelle to look after them, and still rarely break. The other point I was making was that the usefulness of current computer systems is roughly equivalent today to what it was 20 years ago. This we might disagree on, but isn't terribly related to travller as such.

Thank you for the discussion.