We know that the Apple Computer Company and their products existed (as Scotty directly uses one in Star Trek IV - 'hello computer' and all that), therefore it stands to reason that Microsoft (having been founded a year earlier) also existed.
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Theunderbolt
"Prepare for trouble..."
- Location
- USoA
[X] UFS Europa
LunaMoth
Wings of Kynareth is my comfort song...
- Pronouns
- He/They
To be fair I think LCARS weirdness is mostly just a Doylist thing, with the shows not wanting to go too detailed on background props, in universe I hope that the LCARS UI is actually usable.
Now what's really weird from a modern day perspective is using datapads as if they were each single pieces of paper. Though I suppose that might be because a person can just go, "computer replicate me a Datapad".
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- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- She/Her/They/Them
[X] UFS Kea
That is weird. My Watsonian explanation is that it's something to do with encryption and data security, and each Pad is doing something with specialized hardware to ensure that documents are not replaced or altered. It feels like Starfleet would be really invested in making sure nobody could, say, redeploy every ship on the Cardassian border to somewhere else.
Who are we kidding. That's something a child could do with a voice recorder and some gumption.
Mechanis
Confirmed Extremely Screwed
- Location
- Absconding with Alacrity
I suspect it's a memory issue, TBH; datapads are pretty darn thin and seem to be mostly screen. Depending on how efficient whatever LCARS fork they're running is, and how much extra data (such as, say, raw sensor take attached to logs for later analysis purposes) a given file has, I'd imagine that they simply might lack the room for more than a comparitively small number of documents.
- Location
- west
It could also be that the datapads are generally just used for things that benefit from being able to switch between them at will.
If they're on a ship I'd be surprised if they didn't do a lot of cloud computing and storage. Enough baseline capability built into a PADD for normal paperwork and information storage or retrieval but if they needed to do a lot of processing it taps the ship's resources. Cap both at a certain amount depending on role on the ship and make sure the device is secure using subtle biometrics. Treat each pad like a mix between a netbook and a long term net cafe workstation. At the end of the deployment they use isolinear chips and some sort of data vetting to pull off anything bigger than what fits on a PADD and ensure top secret information doesn't walk off.
When on a planet or station have different secured WiFi networks that have their own servers and short/longterm storage. But that's all my guesses, 0 supporting evidence.
When on a planet or station have different secured WiFi networks that have their own servers and short/longterm storage. But that's all my guesses, 0 supporting evidence.
I'd say it's because they likely view PADDs like we view paper, if more readily reconfigured/rewritten. They're cheap to produce*, easy to make do one function/store one or a few more files securely and relatively easy to handle in large quantities.
*A Samsung Galaxy tablet of reasonable competency is about £189, it wouldn't surprise me if (comparatively) the PADD 'cost' less than £0.79 per PADD or the equivalent of a sheet of paper.
*A Samsung Galaxy tablet of reasonable competency is about £189, it wouldn't surprise me if (comparatively) the PADD 'cost' less than £0.79 per PADD or the equivalent of a sheet of paper.
Yep, that's why I mentioned a baseline capacity. When they have access to cloud resources they can do stuff quicker or things that require more storage, when they don't the performance is limited to whatever is built into the unit. Not quite low battery mode or laptop docks with external CPUs and GPUs but similar sort of idea.
Connect it to a shuttle and if you've got the authorizations you could access the sensor feed, environmental controls, and equipment manuals. Connect it to a home and you control the lights, the security system, and media server. Have it handshake with a tricorder and you've got a larger display and some small additional processing power for your scans (when you're fine juggling equipment).
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LunaMoth
Wings of Kynareth is my comfort song...
- Pronouns
- He/They
This is my headcanon now, fun to think about it like this lol.
- Location
- west
If we really wanted to, we could probably find some sort of moon bird in mythology somewhere.
- Location
- USA
My guy. Have you not seen the literal thumbnail sized SD cards with terabyte storage capacity? Or how much data fits on a given smartphone? And the massive quantity of sensors and computation in a tricorder?
They might be limited on purpose for some reason, but I highly doubt they have storage issues for simple text files.
Mechanis
Confirmed Extremely Screwed
- Location
- Absconding with Alacrity
You might note that my postulate specifically includes things that aren't text, which would require significant memory even with very good compression; the specific example I cited was raw take from a ship's sensors attached to a log, so later analysis wouldn't have to go looking for it (and in that scenario, one would probably also include ship telemetry and possibly even outright screencaptures of the ship's controls, so a review team could compare what the ship was seeing, what data was actually being displayed, and what the actual crew involved said about it later).
Another example would be attaching survey data to a file on a planet, so it's easier to call up at a moment's notice, or small simulation apps to a scientific paper to demonstrate the principle in action, or similar things to an engineering manual. EG, I postulate that they're not a raw text format, but a very, very rich text format; probably with loads of built in system apps on top of that.
I think the Doylist reason for using a lot of PADDs is a combination of set designers wanting things to look recognizably like paperwork but sci-fi and not yet knowing just how crazy digital storage density would get IRL.
In a blatant attempt to bring things slightly more on-topic for the thread, this design is going to end up producing a lot of data for research papers to go on those PADDs, eh?
In a blatant attempt to bring things slightly more on-topic for the thread, this design is going to end up producing a lot of data for research papers to go on those PADDs, eh?
0t4n1z3r019
Member of the HAFPTG
- Location
- Philippines
So Starfleet Electronics Design Department?
Probably a bit small for our scale, though something like a Memory Alpha flying repository/backup ship would be cool.
We could even equip it with a souped up replicator so it can convert passing spaceships into replicas of important historical locations and force their crew to act out the events that happened there
WilyMachineKing1
Executive Manager of Limbus Company
- Location
- Reno Nevada
Sounds like a natural step in progress.
