Somtaaw wrote:I'd disagree on any bio's being only text, and short. I again point to how during her command of the Wayfarer, Honor picked up exactly how Giscard was operating in Silesia for commerce raiding. [previously I had called him Tourville, but it was Giscard who was the expert] That means that over and above the "bare bones" bio on him (which iirc, was pretty tiny because before the Committee of Public Safety, he was barely a commander, and thus a 'small fish' not worth bioing) it included the article he wrote about "How to Commerce Raid a hostile nation" [not the real article name, we were never really given that] and picked up exactly how he advocated deploying. That requires more than a precis, but the full up actual document... which again leads to the question of how large was the article?
Let's also examine how during Honor's command on Hell, Honor discovered that she literally could not use the data from a smaller ship (with its corresponding smaller databanks) to properly operate a larger ship that had its computers lobotomized. Which would give the general indication that the majority of a ships molycirc storage space is actually devoted to running the ship, and her weapons.
That means to just operate your ship, beyond the actual operating system of the ship, you're using a lot of space to store all codes for your encrypted military data, codes for your missiles command and control + self-destruct commands, codes for your Ghost Rider (or equivalent RDs), and the million and one other needs for military encryption over and above the bare bone Operating System to make the ship even 'turn on'.
Of course, you also need to be handling information on known planets (and their orbital patterns) because you wanna drop out of hyper on least-times, not clear across the system right?
Orbital data on the stars themselves, cause they move too.... data on hyper waves (think this data's a little more important than bio's on commanders you probably wont ever encounter... such as your enemies home fleet CO, while you're a dinky CO of a picket in the backend of nowhere)
Then there's the data on your mechies, which would require not just size/displacement and thrust, but their trade routes, their identification signatures, etc. In a related manner, we have directly seen captains also get deployed (to Silesia) with allied & non-friendly merchy data. Honor receieved all the information regarding Silly and Andy merchy stuff, not just when she deployed with the Wayfarer, but as Admiral Harrington commanding Task Group Sidemore.
Could a modern warship in the USN carry every piece of data that the Pentagon has stored that might be useful, in addition to all the data it needs simply to operate it's own systems and weapons? I rather doubt it, it gets loaded with the data it needs, plus some of the data it might, and that's with real-time access to HQ for updates as necessary.
Every bit of data no. But with even DDs being larger than a Supercarrier, and knowing there's no real-time access to HQ, I'd think you could find the cubage for a couple spare racks of storage space to store information on, at minimum, ship captains and above for the navy you're currently at war with.
That should be less than 10,000 entries. So you could easily dedicates 10-20,000 pages to each. (And many of them won't have that much information known about them).
Let's put it another way. The entirety of the English text of Wikipedia (uncompressed) could fit 10 times over onto a single 512 GB SD card, the size of a couple postage stamps. You don't think they can find space for a spare SD card with a couple Wikipedias worth of information dedicated to the commanding officers of their entire opponent's navy?
Either Molycircs have way lower storage density than 2015 AD cameras or this is a fairly artificial limitation.
