Mass of software
- Thread starter posthy
- Start date
Literal straw that broke the camel's back.
How much does a typical installation of ED weigh, btw?
Increase the weight of the card?
That'd be a fix, but not the preferred one
Actually i cant add any module to my cutter, (i guess i'm flying on the edge
) but for modules without mass this error doesn't make sense.Ah - that is indeed odd.
I already ordered a treadmill, but cannot get up from the pilot seat. Have to wait for space legs...
Did you try removing an optional that does have mass to storage, adding the ADC, then putting that other module back on?
No, and seeing this i'm afraid i couldn't put that other module back. And to be honest it's not that of a big deal, i can dock manually just wanted to use the new size 1 slot for something
No, and seeing this i'm afraid i couldn't put that other module back. And to be honest it's not that of a big deal, i can dock manually just wanted to use the new size 1 slot for something
LOL, yah... I would be afraid to try it too in your shoes (thought exactly that as I was typing the question).
It's not like it's a completely massless module. It's a docking COMPUTER, ie. it's a separate hardware component that you insert in some slot, like a GPU.
In core memory, dozens of metric tons.
Whoa. That might be too much for me house floors.
Sure, we're talking about how much? One and a half kilogram? Can't be more. The pilot's weight increases by far more after picking up a couple of raw engineering material, like mercury...
Its all to do with relativity you see. Those bytes of software, as RELSPI said gain weight... well, not quite, but they do gain mass as you approach C. Since in Friendship Drive you often exceed C by quite a margin, a few excess bytes, rather than the few microgrammes they should measure, rapidly approach infinite mass and would cause the whole ship to collapse into an implausibility event. There'd be nothing left from which to suspend your disbelief, and the whole thing would get silly.
I'm not especially well versed on the history of the Elite universe, but I do find it particularly far fetched that publicly available computer technology could be restricted in severe ways due to various problems with AI in the Elite setting, or that certain technologies were lost (say in WWIII) and never rediscovered.
As I mentioned with the reference to core memory, it's quite possible that any computer expansions to our ships do have significant mass, if the tech used is restricted to forms we'd consider archaic or impractical, either due to legislation, or necessity.
Depends on what it is installed on - multiply the weight of the medium by the size of the ED installation divided by the total capacity of the medium.
@posthy : On a more serious note, the "software" is more than likely not just software but hardware too. Some of us may recall the days where software was loaded on the fly from removable media such as tapes and floppy disks or even more substantial kit like Cartridges. In most science fiction, software upgrades often have a physical component associated with them.
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Depends on the method of storage and the nature of the medium.
Using run length techniques, the heaviest would be either alternating bits or random data - depending on the precise methods used.