Re: starship-design: Hi, from a newbie

[KellySt@aol.com]

In a message dated 1/16/02 12:58:45 AM, toxicroach@swbell.net writes:

>That's precisly my point.  If and when we finally build a long term
>spaceship, the computers are going to be so intergal to the ship as to
>be indistinguishable.  They will not have autonomous computers like PC's...
>the whole thing will be intergrated as to be a mash of small computers.  I'm
>not a design experyt, but I think it would be wise to design the system to
>have a flaw-tolerant system, by which I mean that there won't be a single
>computer processor, or even a bank of them, that handles the mission
>critical stuff.  All the processors, even the ones for the coffee maker,
>would be able to pitch in and help. If some proccesors were to drop out (by
>being flawed, damaged, sabotaged, or whatever) then the other chips could
>pick up the slack. After all, one chip weighs about the same as another---
>why not put as powerful a chip as possible in each position, and then make
>an almost failsafe system.   After all, a dispersed system is far more
>hard to seriously damage, and the computing power needed by the crew for 
consumer
>needs is likely going to be neglible compared to the processing power of
>top of the line mil spec chips that would be used in a spacecraft like that,
>even for resource hogging stuff like games and audio-visual things.


Actually the Mil gear isn't nearly as good as the top consumer/comercial 
gear.  They don't buy enough to be forst in line for new toys.

;)

Other then that though your idea of a massivly redundant, massivlt paralel 
data network is a god idea.  Though some things need to be kept close 
together in a tiny spot for speed.