Re: starship-design: Hi, from a newbie

["L. Parker" <lparker@cacaphony.net>]

Peter et. al.

The U.S. Army developed and procured a bunch of laptops some years ago that
were manufactured by a company named Grid I believe. They were actually more
of a portable computer, because I wouldn't call anything weighing 17 pounds
a laptop. Anyway, they were designed for "rough use" with all metal cases,
durable plasma displays rather than the more colorful but ultimately fragile
LCDs and waterproof membrane keyboards. They were also Tempest hardened.

They weren't designed for vacuum or space, but I suspect they would have
survived exposure to such conditions while they were not operating.

All that said, the biggest problem is that CPU hardening for radiation
environments lags anywhere from two to three generations behind what is
sitting on most people's desks. For personal computers designed for use
inside a ship or space colony where they are not critical systems and aren't
likely to be exposed to conditions that wouldn't prove fatal to their users
as well it probably wouldn't matter if they were radiation hardened or not.

But for the critical computer systems that actually run the ship,
navigation, engineering, environmental, etc., you would want the most
durable, reliable cpu you could get that also had enough processing power to
do what needed to be done. This could be tough trade off. It may even be
necessary to use distributed processing to get it all done.

Which of course brings us to the ship/colonies other need: a 100 percent
uptime network. No failures, no shutdowns, no restarts, no lost packets, no
bottlenecks -- zero. Can't have the ship not firing thrusters because the
server's network card burped and restarted the network...

Probably you would actually want several networks, some less critical than
others, but with access nodes between them that were software routable. Kind
of like the Internet, but better.

Lee