Sci-Fi Tech Transmission Complete - Sending Digital Data through the Cosmos or Stuck in Analog

[LTR]

There was a discussion recently pointing out how in Stargate Atlantis the Atlantis Expedition through the genius of Dr. McKay was able to send hundreds of hours of video through a Stargate wormhole in less then a third of a second.

Meanwhile you have a very recent example in Star Wars: Rogue One where it took minutes to transmit the Death Star Plans from the facility on Scarif to the orbiting Mon Calamari Cruiser in the midst of a space battle.

Was the change showing a lack of compression technology in Star Wars? Was there interference in regards to the orbiting space battle in Rogue One? Were the Death Star Plans potentially that much larger then the comparable transmission referenced in Stargate Atlantis?

And the bigger issue, which might rise out of all of this is in regards to Star Wars technology specifically. It has impressive droids to the point that slave kids on Tatooine can build them outta spare parts, obviously impressive power generation, industrial capacity and other things, but are their computers still stuck in some Science Fiction equivalent of the Analog Age?

 

[Urabrask Revealed]

Well, I just want to point out that the map for the Death Star 1 was a 3D map, just projected on a 2D screen.


Which would increase the data volume of the plans.

As for the last question, I think their computers are much more advanced than ours, but the computers we see are usually military ones. I got the impression that military equipment has usually simpler designs for ease of use and repair. But I'm not in any army or navy or whatever, so feel free to correct me.

 

[Laskar]

A computer small enough to fit in C-3P0's head is powerful enough to simulate a sapient individual, while still having enough data storage capacity for six million forms of communication, so I would say that Star Wars computer technology is unthinkably beyond what we have today.

Also, you're comparing hundreds of hours of video to the technical data package for a battle station the size of a moon? There's no comparison to be had. 3D plans take up a lot of room. Blueprints for the reactors, the power distribution, the artificial gravity systems, the climate control systems, the lighting, the automatic doors, the TIE fighter hangers, the shuttle hangers, the fuel systems, the shields, the turbolasers, the hyperdrive, the engines, and the big freaking laser weapon on the upper hemisphere are going to be complex, interconnected, and memory-heavy. And it's not as if the characters in Rogue One could search through a file library for "Blueprints: Weak Points and Blindspots". They had to grab everything and get it off the planet.

A five minute transmission time doesn't just build suspense during the climax, it makes sense from a technical perspective.

Signed: A former MechE student who used to debug other students' Solidworks homework for pizza.

 

[40thousandninjas]

The trouble is, we don't see powerful computers elsewhere.

"The plans you refer to will soon be back in our hands."

What, can no one make a copy?

The trench run should have really been from a missile fired several LY away, yet the Rebel Alliance felt the need to send highly trained pilots on a risky mission, despite having the precise galactic coordinates of the weakness.

The plans were shuttled around by courier, despite the fact that they had encrypted interstellar communication.

Rogue One was using a dedicated transmitter sending data to what amounts to right next door, yet we see real time holograms being sent from far, far smaller transmitters sent across the galaxy.

While difficult, there's nothing that prevents the Death Star plans from being constructed without more detailed plans. A big laser isn't that complicated to construct, assuming you have enough power generation even including amenities, shield generators, hyperdrive etc.. It's just harder.

We have direct images of the plans, such as the below.

It's entirely without color support and absolutely minimalist. There's nothing to indicate the plans have detail comparable to the degree of a modern architectural rendering.

Imperial architecture lends it credence. The death star design is big, blocky and precisely angular, which suggests it was built to match the spec of something like the above.

Rogue One had to physically move mechanical hardware around to extract the plans from the data vault. Even if the plans were on the order of hundreds of terabytes, it should have been a matter of telling the computer to transmit the information with a few keyboard taps, in much the same way of sending the file. Needing to physically extract the plans, when there is a transmitter right there hints at an extremely limited understanding or capability of digital technologies.

The Death Star itself has it's total yield determined by the number of reactors it uses.

This pattern continues, we don't see smart phones, combat takes place in visual range, devices are single purpose etc..



Ask yourself, why isn't there more information on such a major display? It's UI is crude, primitive even and while you might say that is the imperial aesthetic, we see it everywhere including by the rebellion.

We don't see touch-screens, but we do see physical buttons that seem to do very specific tasks.

Even the scene with the cell-block in Episode 4. They use push button communications wired almost like an analog telephone. If they knew how to leverage computers, the imperials on the other line would simply pull up the video feed and not bother calling Han.

It's the theme, 1940s combat in SPAAACE but it does mean things don't make any sense such as the infamous the bombing sequence in the last jedi.

All of this is ignoring Droids of course...

 

[Urabrask Revealed]

The plans were shuttled around by courier, despite the fact that they had encrypted interstellar communication.

Not that surprising. In real life, NASA had to physically transport the data of the black hole picture to a specialized facility to progress that. Then there's the story about how pigeons are faster at transporting data than most internet connections:

Putting these numbers together, if you were to load up a carrier pigeon to its maximum capacity of 75 grams with 1 TB microSD cards weighing 250 mg each, the pigeon would be carrying a total of 300 TB of data. Flying at its top sprinting speed, if that pigeon were to make its way from San Francisco to New York (4,130 km), it would achieve a data rate of 12 TB per hour, or 28 Gbps, which is several orders of magnitude faster than most Internet connections—here in the United States, the fastest average upload speeds can be found in Kansas City (through Google Fiber), at a paltry 127.0 Mbps. At that upload speed, it would take you more than 240 days to transfer 300 TB of data, in which time our pigeon could circle the entire globe 25 times.

Pigeon-Based 'Feathernet' Still Wings-Down Fastest Way to Transfer Massive Amounts of Data

A carrier pigeon with a cargo of microSD cards can transfer large amounts of data faster, and more cheaply, than just about any other method

spectrum.ieee.org

We have direct images of the plans, such as the below.

Yes, and this 2d image we see? That was a 3d image projected on a 2d screen.

 

[40thousandninjas]

Not that surprising. In real life, NASA had to physically transport the data of the black hole picture to a specialized facility to progress that. Then there's the story about how pigeons are faster at transporting data than most internet connections:

Yet, Rogue One just proved they could send the plans in a signal in the middle of a battle.

It had already been established that the galaxy has transmitters capable of sending complex 3 dimensional images across galactic distances in real time (Attack of the clones).

Even if the bandwidth is lower because of the distances involved, it couldn't be that much lower otherwise galactic factions would have ridiculous communication problems.

Yes, and this 2d image we see? That was a 3d image projected on a 2d screen.

Even in a third dimension, this sort of rendering shouldn't take much space.

Full 3d models of the Death Star can be downloaded off the internet are far more memory than this. If the plans were as memory expensive as some in the thread suggest, we would expect it to be as detailed as our own renderings or more, yet we never see that.

 

[AspblastUSA]

Except it's a blueprint the rebels stole, not a model. How many of those Death Star models you can download are accurate down to the individual screws holding down the countertop in the 312th level mess hall?

They didn't steal a general overview, they stole the master schematic that the thing was built off of.

 

[Laskar]

The trench run should have really been from a missile fired several LY away, yet the Rebel Alliance felt the need to send highly trained pilots on a risky mission, despite having the precise galactic coordinates of the weakness.

It would have failed, because Palpatine would have used his Sith sorcerer powers to foresee the destruction of the Death Star and Force-choke Luke from his palace in Coruscant. He's a powerful Force user and there's been no observed lightspeed lag in the Force, so it should be possible, right?

But seriously, the Rebellion didn't have the precise galactic coordinates because the Death Star is on the move, and aside from the maneuver we saw in TFA, hyperspace travel isn't that precise. You'll notice that the Death Star arrived on the wrong side of Yavin. In the Thrawn Trilogy, Republic forces assaulted by the Imperials thought they were using some new wunderwaffen precise hyperdrive because Imperial Star Destroyers were dropping out of lightspeed right over a target. Then they spotted an Interdictor and realized that the Imperials were using the interdiction field to yank ships out of lightspeed right where they needed them.

So launching an FTL missile and having it drop out of lightspeed under the Death Star's shields where it will hit the reactor vent is beyond Star Wars technology. It's not a computer problem, it's a physics problem.

Rogue One was using a dedicated transmitter sending data to what amounts to right next door, yet we see real time holograms being sent from far, far smaller transmitters sent across the galaxy.

Then it stands to reason that the Death Star plans contain far more data than a simple 3D model.

It's entirely without color support and absolutely minimalist. There's nothing to indicate the plans have detail comparable to the degree of a modern architectural rendering.

Color support ain't what makes engineering files so massive.
You'll notice that as the presentation goes on, more detail is added to the model. A chain of subsystems leading from the exhaust port to the main reactor appears toward the end, when it is relevant to what General Dodanna is saying. It's very likely that more details are included with the model, they're just hidden because they're irrelevant to the plan. You can do that with engineering and architectural drawings.

And we know that detail is there because the Rebel planners used that document to plan the attack.

Even the scene with the cell-block in Episode 4. They use push button communications wired almost like an analog telephone. If they knew how to leverage computers, the imperials on the other line would simply pull up the video feed and not bother calling Han.

Han and Chewie shot out the cameras when they took the cell block. The Imperials on the other line called because they didn't have video feed.


Right there.

Imperial architecture lends it credence. The death star design is big, blocky and precisely angular, which suggests it was built to match the spec of something like the above.

It's big, blocky, and precisely angular on a macro scale because you only get one first impression, and the Emperor wanted it to be an intimidating one. On a smaller scale, the Death Star is honeycombed with rooms, corridors and machinery. The exterior is actually rough and complicated, as seen in the Trench Run.

While difficult, there's nothing that prevents the Death Star plans from being constructed without more detailed plans. A big laser isn't that complicated to construct, assuming you have enough power generation even including amenities, shield generators, hyperdrive etc.. It's just harder.

No. The laser isn't just big, it's complicated. Same goes for all the other systems. It's not a handheld laser scaled up, it's world-shattering laser built from large components and small components. Same presumably goes for the engines, the hyperdrive, and literally everything else you need to support life on a station that big. Those plans also contain the different subsystems, like lighting, gravity generation, atmosphere recycling, and the power distribution required to power it all.

Those plans had to be more complicated than shown in the presentation, because the designers used them to find a small exhaust port on the surface, and then check every system between the exhaust port and the core to make sure that the damage would be carried over. Remember what General Dodanna said, the proton torpedo detonating in the exhaust port would start a chain reaction that would breach the main reactor. The Rebel planners couldn't have known that chain reaction would happen if they didn't have detailed plans.

Same goes for everything else they needed to plan the attack, like the distribution of the turbolasers and the way the energy shields overlapped, as well as how fast the Death Star could maneuver so they could plan an intercept course for the strike craft. You can't make those plans unless the plans you have to work with contain the information you need.

 

[Flintsteel]

Rogue One had to physically move mechanical hardware around to extract the plans from the data vault. Even if the plans were on the order of hundreds of terabytes, it should have been a matter of telling the computer to transmit the information with a few keyboard taps, in much the same way of sending the file. Needing to physically extract the plans, when there is a transmitter right there hints at an extremely limited understanding or capability of digital technologies.

It's a secure data archive facility. Air-gapping is a feature, not a bug. Also, the Rogue 1 crew did not have direct access to the main facility controls - they could use the stuff they had physical access to, but likely lacked the necessary credentials to queue up a high-capacity data transmission. But it's a lot easier to bypass that with physical access.