Computers.....

[Condottiere]

If you design the ship that you could assert control through a centralized computer.

 

[Reynard]

I am a bit amuse at all the anxiety and anger at Traveller computers when compared to our real world computer 'facts' yet no one NO one seems the least disturbed how Traveller habital worlds are extremely Terran friendly, if not outright Terran compatible ecologies and biologies even Grandfather couldn't explain. So far, real world facts and data shows Earth as the one and only habitable world by any stretch. Maybe we need Traveller rewritten so one in a billion worlds on a map can be colonized under Earth sustainable conditions. Fair is fair.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

Phavoc, none of the computational tasks you are describing warrant a mainframe sized computer; nor do they warrant something that can't be hand-computer sized.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

Somebody, the problem with your line of reasoning is that you are basing it on very old standards that people are reluctant to throw away because of safety concerns. I already addressed multiple redundancy. Accessibility is important too, but when the computers are card-sized in an already over-sized enclosure, that's already covered too.

Copper is laughable. They'd be using multiple redundant Fiber Optics at minimum, and more likely something along the lines of monowire-thin superconductors. The bandwidth would be sufficiently high that individual cables are not exceeded except for the equivalent of server farms on their native worlds; as such, they would gradually filter down to a single line per redundancy tree. Additional cables would be used only for the sake of redundancy.

You only need to look at a modern airliner, fighter jet, or bomber to realize they aren't rack-mounting computers.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

Reynard, I could certainly bemoan Traveller's failure to confine itself to the HabCat database, but there are plenty of merits to having good fiction to fall back on. Few players are so familiar with HabCat and similar databases that they have definitive expectations with valid scientific backing on what types of planets should and shouldn't lie within a system; but familiarity with computers is a completely different thing, common to every-day life, and players should be able to rely on their expectations there; and anything that deviates from that should be thrown out.

 

[Reynard]

The only thing the majority of people know about everyday computers is they can talk and text and send pictures or watch videos on them and this includes gamers. Modern technology is understood by the average person only superficially. As long as it does what they bought it for, they're blissfully ignorant and cry to the tech geeks and mechanics to make it work again if not just throw it away. Very many have no idea what an 'ecology' or 'habitat' is which explains why our own planet is such a fixable mess. Science is not a forte of the masses. Add that all together and only the truly educated and savvy watch a movie or tv show or play a game and grimace or chuckle at the mistakes in all things scientific from gigantic spaceships starting and stopping instantaneously and actually making sounds in space to the never empty firearms to outlandish lifeforms to humongous vehicles that don't sink into the ground. When it become too obvious, some just label it camp and finish watching and are more prone to walk away if the acting is worst than the tech.

Traveller is one of the very few RPGs or board/minis games that let you see and manipulate the technology and Build Your Own. There are other versions of Traveller that get a little more out of the 1970s and earlier for tech but it often just make game more complex without making the gaming any more enjoyable. Mongoose chose classic with all the simplicity to have a fast, fun RPG. That included the off the shelf, snap in component structure of vehicle and ship construction and not getting micro-managing about the innards. I commend them in clarifying some game elements such as the computers without going into hundreds of pages of minutia. In forty years of playing Traveller, I have not wailed that I'll never play again because certain far future technologies are not real enough. The computers fit in the ship; sorry you can't have even more armor and guns because of that but it works and it let player fly and fight in their ships for decades of gaming.

 

[Condottiere]

You can stick a USB sized stick into a television's HDMI port and you have a computer.

Or the bridge crew could all be wearing Oculus Rifts.

Chances are that the interfaces will be touch screens, real and virtual.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

Reynard, I dispute your assertion that “More modern” necessarily means “more complicated”. Wouldn’t computers taking up negligible volume on the ship or even vehicle scale make things less complicated?

 

[Jacqual]

I always chuckled at how Science Fiction games, books, and shows showed computers of the future being huge monsters of machines, when like in reality the size of the computer should be getting smaller. I do believe that a ships computer on traveller should only take up space for the actual screen and whatever the physical interface for the computer is (keyboard, game paddle, whatever). The actual computer on the ship could even just be a microchip in 15,000 years in the future. Look what a modern smartphone can do compared to what a computer from 1955 could do, and anyone thinking that there is no size difference is confused.

I do understand that on a starship there will be redundancy for safety sake, that means the ship could have 5 or 6 or even more actual computers all doing the same thing at the same time, all comparing there answers to each to make sure all computations have been conducted fully. Then the answer is shown on the screen and the ship jumps, or evades, or whatever is going to happen.

I really wonder what a computer designer from the 1960's would think if he was shown a iPhone 6s, what would the programmers think. Now if someone showed us a computer from 15,000 years in the future well we would think it was damn near magical when we compared it to what we have now, I just dont know what version of windows it would have lol.

 

[AndrewW]

I do understand that on a starship there will be redundancy for safety sake, that means the ship could have 5 or 6 or even more actual computers all doing the same thing at the same time, all comparing there answers to each to make sure all computations have been conducted fully. Then the answer is shown on the screen and the ship jumps, or evades, or whatever is going to happen.

They did that with the space shuttle.

Now if someone showed us a computer from 15,000 years in the future well we would think it was damn near magical when we compared it to what we have now, I just dont know what version of windows it would have lol.

It wouldn't they will have finally learned to get rid of that by then.

 

[phavoc]

Phavoc, none of the computational tasks you are describing warrant a mainframe sized computer; nor do they warrant something that can't be hand-computer sized.

I never said mainframe. I also never said it could be done on a tablet either (or 2, or 10).

The ISS has 52 computers operating onboard. It doesn't move, it doesn't have a fusion plant, or anti-grav, or Lidar/Radar to track and target incoming objects. It has no ECM capabilities. It has a crew of 3-6 and it has 52 computers. Some are simple laptops, some are rackmounts. And this doesn't cover any of the electronics built into devices and machinery.

So yeah, no mainframe tonnage required as posited by CT, but ships will still need control systems and computers - and those computers are also going to be bulkier than today's tablets if only to provide protection and security for the computer itself. And a keyboard is a keyboard, is a keyboard. Some people may not like talking to their computers, and some things are best left up to a combination of typing/voice.

 

[Reynard]

That is the scary thing that people think tablets and smartphones actually run the world because they see the advertisements featuring someone playing with a drone or watching their home's security camera. If I remember correctly, drone operators don't sit in a comfy chair guiding the missile or recon drone with an iPhone. So far, nuclear plant operators don't sit in a small lounge running things on a tiny tablet. It might be nice to run a nuclear sub with a Cr400 tablet, a few apps and a wireless connection. Possibly I'm thinking too far back and all those examples don't have dedicated, centralized electronic suites with the main computing assembly part of it.

Oh, has Traveller really extended to 15,000 years? I thought the 'current' time line was still around AD 5630 or so. Maybe the tech has shrunk to nanotech and pure neural interfacing.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

Phavoc, the computers on-board the ISS are a lousy example of a “ship’s computer”. For starters, many of those modules are over a decade old, and are running hardware which, if on the ground where it could be easily maintained, would have long ago been considered obsolete and outright replaced; they’re only still up in space running anything at all because shipping up a replacement is expensive, and would need to be flight tested first anyway; the combination of which is very expensive. And since each module is designed to be self-sufficient, and not dependent on another module for its operation, each new module comes with its own computer. Additionally, because the ISS is an international enterprise, many of the computers onboard are there simply because one country doesn’t trust another with keeping the station safely running, adding a political multiplier to “multiple redundancy”. Finally, more than any other vehicle in the Traveller catalog, the ISS resembles the Lab Ship most, and most of those computers are used for research automation and analysis; as such, in game terms, they would be listed as “research equipment” spread out among the many labs of the Lab Ship, and not a part of the Ship’s Computer.

A much more reasonable estimate on the size of a “Ship’s Computer” is the part of a satellite exclusive to stationkeeping; and as the part of the satellite that makes no money, they are intentionally quite small. Check out CubeSats sometime; toaster sized satellites...

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

O.K., Reynard... you need to stow your snark. And, for the sake of you understanding why, I’ll borrow some of yours to show you what it feels like to be on the other end.

That is the scary thing; that just because people don’t understand a computational problem like the simulation of n-body gravitational dynamics, it necessarily must take a great big honking computer, instead of merely the meager horsepower in a common everyday tablet that can run a simple higher order symplectic integrator well enough to fully simulate the trajectories of both major and minor navigation obstacles well enough for a complete navigation program. To them, it doesn’t matter whether the Big-O notation shows it’s possible, tests confirm that the necessary algorithms run more than fast enough to solve the required navigation problems, whether they are already flight-tested on equivalent hardware, or whether they’re already flying commercially. Because, to them, if the computer doesn’t take up a full rack-mount, or at least a whole gym locker, it simply can’t be a “Ship’s Computer”, because the “Tee Vee” hasn’t told them so yet.

Not very pleasant, is it?

 

[Reynard]

You're probably right and that means Mongoose needs to quickly eliminate the ship's computer as a physical component to ship design as it has no significant displacement and the operating systems have little value that can't be part of the cost of the bridge. In other words, it's transparent to design. When you get a ship, you fly, shoot and look up data without ever knowing where it came from. The majority of scifi games already do that. No one buys and mounts a computer on a Federation ship or an X-wing.

 

[phavoc]

Phavoc, the computers on-board the ISS are a lousy example of a “ship’s computer”. For starters, many of those modules are over a decade old, and are running hardware which, if on the ground where it could be easily maintained, would have long ago been considered obsolete and outright replaced; they’re only still up in space running anything at all because shipping up a replacement is expensive, and would need to be flight tested first anyway; the combination of which is very expensive. And since each module is designed to be self-sufficient, and not dependent on another module for its operation, each new module comes with its own computer. Additionally, because the ISS is an international enterprise, many of the computers onboard are there simply because one country doesn’t trust another with keeping the station safely running, adding a political multiplier to “multiple redundancy”. Finally, more than any other vehicle in the Traveller catalog, the ISS resembles the Lab Ship most, and most of those computers are used for research automation and analysis; as such, in game terms, they would be listed as “research equipment” spread out among the many labs of the Lab Ship, and not a part of the Ship’s Computer.

A much more reasonable estimate on the size of a “Ship’s Computer” is the part of a satellite exclusive to stationkeeping; and as the part of the satellite that makes no money, they are intentionally quite small. Check out CubeSats sometime; toaster sized satellites...

I can't help the age of the station, but at least it's not flying with bubble memory like the Shuttle did until it got it's first overhaul.

But you are off the mark about the stations systems. First off, each module does not not have it's own self-contained life support system. There is a US-module based one and a Russian-module based one. Each can be run independently for redundancy and you could consider them is a primary/primary system. If one fails the other can take up the slack in the short run till it's fixed, and they have other options too. Things like waste water collection and recycling is also redundant. In this sense the ISS is operated exactly like a space ship would - more than one system in case of an emergency.

While parts of the station are run like a lab ship, other parts are not. The primary experiment modules do come with self-contained computer systems, but overall command and monitoring is still a separate issue (as it should be). I'm not 100% sure, but I believe both the Russian and US modules are on their own command sub-nets.

I'm not discounting the automation built into sub-systems at all. But I am discounting the notion that everything runs on it's own and there is no central system that takes all of the data being produced by all of the systems and electronics and doesn't do anything with it. The whole purpose of the ships computer is to synthesize the data and alert human crew members when something needs human attention. OR for the ships computer to go ahead and take care of whatever it's been told to take care of on it's own.

As for the station having more computers because of politics and not necessity, I would say that's not a totally accurate statement. The modules weren't designed in a vacuum without consultation and planning from the other side. The Russians are actually saying that when the agreement expires they plan on removing their modules and starting their own station. That would actually cripple the ISS, making it far less capable because certain key systems are being removed. I don't actually see that happening though, as Russia can't even afford what they contribute now. Plus they are already very delayed in launching their own experiments platform. Not many people realize that the vast majority of all experiments being carried out are US or European/Japan based. The Russian modules are essential for docking, and theirs is the only module that provides thrust (not to mention they are the only way to get there at present, at least until the new US systems are ready).

You're probably right and that means Mongoose needs to quickly eliminate the ship's computer as a physical component to ship design as it has no significant displacement and the operating systems have little value that can't be part of the cost of the bridge. In other words, it's transparent to design. When you get a ship, you fly, shoot and look up data without ever knowing where it came from. The majority of scifi games already do that. No one buys and mounts a computer on a Federation ship or an X-wing.

In a lot of ways you are right. The ships computer (much like basic life support) should just be built into the whole thing. Differentiation would come in via sensors (already there), or say in your offensive/defensive electronics (ECM/CCCM). But Traveller takes away the hardware and makes it all software based. One could argue either side of that, but in the end it serves the same purpose.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

X-Wing, yes, Federation Starship, no; their computers are big bulky retro designs as well, and likely cost a lot... except for the Federation’s whole “we don’t need currency” schtick.

But that’s *fiction*. Traveller has *always* been intended as a much more hard-sci-fi game; see the little black books and the orbital physics equations. As such, its lower bound *has to conform to reality*. When something is achievable *today*, Traveller has to match it at our current TL. That includes the outdated concept of a “Ship’s Computer”, for which modern tech is *already* overkill.

Now, at no point did I say that a ship’s computer should not have a cost. For instance, there’s *always* more envelope to push, which means flight rating programs, which means added cost: “Rated to 95% C!” “Rated for a Black Hole Proximity of 1.1 Event Horizon Radii!” The development programs for improving the safe functioning of such a critical component are going to be *substantial*, even *with* the large potential market share, because they’re chasing after failure modes that are *difficult to test*. Not to mention the associated costs of all the added bureaucracy of governments pushing safety standards too soon, or even *not soon enough*.

Your typical hand-computer *isn’t* rated for these truly weird and largely unnecessary operating conditions, and is probably built to safely reset under those conditions for which its warranty is not out-right voided. The “Ship’s Computer” may not be any bigger, or even all that much more powerful; but it is part of a continuous process of *pushing the limits of safe operation*; and as such, *it’s going to have an associated cost above and beyond an equivalent hand computer*. The extent to which a given hand computer is made of parts that used to go into Ship’s Computers that were outmoded for some reason or another is probably going to be a matter of chance, at best, but you never know with some companies; that’s probably how pirates get *their* computers...

But it’s not going to be any bigger; at least, not without a genuinely justifiable reason.

Another way that Ship’s Computers are probably going to be different than hand computers are with regards to databases of sensor phenomenon, like ship types and modifications, exotic natural phenomenon, space creatures that drift through space, you name it. Once again, where the envelope gets pushed and the need for regular updates arises, we see added cost. Now, it’s not that a hand computer can’t run these things... it would just be really weird to, it not being tied into all the relevant systems. The separation is by market forces; hand computers just don’t need to run them, because the Ship’s Computer already needs to.

So, Ship’s Computer: No Bigger, No Better In Common Practice, More Expensive, But It’s Subscribed to All the “Spacer’s Databases”


P.S.: There’s room in here for a campaign based around a bunch of players tooling around space in a ship that uses a Hand Computer in place of the Ship’s Computer, and they start running into one exotic phenomena after another, causing astrogation screwups to no end, because *their computer isn’t rated to operate in those circumstances for very good reason*.

 

[Condottiere]

It depends on how much you want the computer to dominate.

In Star Trek, the ship's computer is omnipresent yet still very much in the background; in the Honorverse only really significant during space combat, and then overly so. In Star Wars, just an interface, droids being considered characters in their own right.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

Going on a tangent for a bit... In Star Trek TNG cannon, the Ship’s Computer is multi-story, and contained in a space-time bubble which, practically speaking, grants it nearly infinite time to compute each command. In modern terms, it is exceptionally silly.