If(and only if) the stars are right and the fragmentation gods deign to smile on you the higher areal density of newer drives can give you better numbers for equivalent rotational speeds on nice linear reads or writes; but it is true that the mostly-just-a-measure-of-how-fast-you-can-exhaust-the-RAM-cache bus speeds haven’t budged much; and the moment you ask an HDD for something that isn’t right where its read head wants to be you get a nasty smack and a reminder of just how nonrandom-access the medium really is.
Especially with 15k RPM disks getting a bit squeezed by flash on the performance side and 7200 or slower on the bulk storage side, HDDs seem to be getting a bit more ‘tape-like’ of late. Not as extreme, an HDD can seek a lot faster than a tape can rewind and try again; but sheer magnetic media density plus lousy physics limits make for pretty snappy read or write under optimal conditions; with radical degradation if you deviate from pure linear access and feed it a random workload.
Of course, but you can then come up with an explanation for it.
Presumably Kessel has a very high gravitational field, so if a ship gets too close between the start and end points, it risks being unable to escape. The more powerful the ship, the closer it can get, the closer the path is to a straight line and so the shorter it becomes. A fast ship can do it with a path under 10 parsecs; a slow one has to go round in a big loop. Why not specify time? Varying time dilation for different observers.
A google search for this did not turn up anything interesting. Apparently there is an official Star Wars app that has some emoji in it, but I haven’t installed it to determine if there are any Gungans.
I remember crying out “It serves no useful purpose to have a bunch of choppy crushy things in the middle of a ship!” in the theater whilst watching Rogue One, but I can’t remember what triggered it.
I apologize to the other people who were present, but I just couldn’t help myself.
The “master switch” and the idea that data would be stored on a “tape” accessed by a fairly stereotypical late 20th century robotic tape transport made me snort loudly, too.
Everything about the whole “get the plans out of the tower” scene was so inutterably ridiculous and inconsistent with every other movie that it probably fell in there somewhere. I don’t remember.
I remember Darth Vader’s final combat sequence there at the end, though! “I’ll just board the enemy ship by myself, troopers, I’m immune to vacuum and unstoppable in combat so you incompetent kids would only get in the way and probably shoot the princess or something.”
I thought he was measuring the speed as part of an ongoing competition.
Well done Biggs, you’ve broken Wedges base to space record. Porkins, you are last again. Seriously, if you don’t stop flying like my granddad you are going to get shot down.
I can buy that transmitting the complete schematic took up a lot of bandwidth, the part that bothered me story-wise is that Galen Erso was able to smuggle out a drive bearing the holo-message telling them where to find the plans but couldn’t have just said “shoot a torpedo in the exhaust port at the end of the perimeter trench” instead of sending the rebels on a nigh-impossible recon mission so they could figure that out for themselves.
A minor rewrite would have gone a long way toward making the story more believable. As it was, the cave where Jyn Erso was watching the holo-message collapsed just as the message was wrapping up so everyone else had to take her word that her father had built a weakness into the Death Star. So take that same scene, but interrupt the holo-message so she hears the part about the Death Star having a weakness but loses the recording before she has time to hear what the weakness is. That way you have an actual REASON for the rebels to need the entire schematic so they can figure out the weakness for themselves.
But Erso did not put the exhaust port there. He might not even know where the exhaust port is, if not at very high level. What he did was to build a weakness in the reactor itself.
It’s like: you are the lead engineer for a car power train, in 1970, and you’re spying for the Soviets. You design an engine that performs spectacularly well, but will blow up under a certain condition; you don’t necessarily control how that condition could be reached, someone else is dealing with chassis and exhausts - your job only allows you to say “we need exhausts capable of dealing with X volume of gases”. Where and how those gases get out, it’s not for you to decide - this is a flagship sports car, lots of managers and engineers want their name on it. Hell, it took ages just to make them agree that only one big engine was required, that guy from Manufacturing kept insisting that we should get two smaller ones, “for reliability”! When your Moscow handlers come around, you can only say “well, the engine will blow up under this and that condition, and it will take the car with it”; it’s up to them to find a way to create those conditions, you can’t say “the chassis has a hole on the left under the flap”, you don’t even know what the car looks like - just that it will be fast as fuck.
What I found more incoherent is that he spends most of his precious message talking about his lovely daughter rather than “This weapon I’m forced to work on is the real shit, fuckers! But I’ve given you a chance - go blow it up rite naoooo!!!”. He might have hoped his daughter was still with Saw after all those years; regardless, you don’t start your message to an armed clandestine group with 20 minutes of personal matters. The way Jyn has to run from Saw’s hideout, it’s not even clear from what part of the dialogue she picked up what Erso actually did, only why - because he loves her and blablabla. That’s just confused.
Except that he was the one who hid a complete copy of the schematic in that tower so he clearly did have access to whatever knowledge would have been needed to blow the thing up.
That’s a good point; but he might have “pulled a Chelsea”, i.e. he just downloaded everything he could get on the internal intranet and stored it under the Stardust folder, knowing it was important, without actually looking at it.
Well, that’s a fresh market then! There is an entire planet dying to get their saggy aquatic palms on an emoji device… Zuck and Cook will be on the case very shortly. “Meesa think bigga money dere!”
An even simpler answer to ‘why is the Empire datacentre running on tape drives?’: Pork. If you’re a legendarily corrupt galaxy-spanning empire, of course someone’s idiot cousin has been taken to a fleshpot planet and wheedled into allowing some asshole the datacentre contract even though their hardware is shonky, and their airgap can be defeated by a Roomba with an attitude problem (just look at that BB story the other week about the welfare fraud-detecting software that wasn’t for a Life Imitates Art example)
