StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I was watching a Voyager episode today and something struck me as odd. It was the one where Torres wants to trade the ship's data library for some treknobabble doodad. A line popped up, to the effect that the library of the entire Federation was on the whatever-data-storage-unit they used. My issue is this: Why the nuts would they have such a massive amount of almost certainly superfluous information clogging up their data banks? I mean, in the Millenium Gate episode, they're able to examine newspaper clippings from the 20th century!

Did you know that you could store the entire line of games from the original NES on a single CD?

I don't recall them ever complaining that they were running low on computer storage space. Consider how many star systems Voyager had visited and gathered sensor data on. Consider the holodeck, which probably sucks up an ungodly amount of space. Consider the replicators, which reproduce an entire item at the molecular level.

I don't think carting around most of the Federation's knowledge is really any great feat for them. Yeah, you could say "it's worthless, it's not of any value to a military starship", but then again so is a holodeck... we've done this song and dance before, Starfleet has bad policy. At least having that information is less obtrusive than, say, the holodecks; a crewman could peruse the database on a little PADD on his off-hours.

SPOOFE wrote:Did you know that you could store the entire line of games from the original NES on a single CD?

You sure? Keep in mind there were like 1000-1500 games.

Spanky The Dolphin wrote:

SPOOFE wrote:Did you know that you could store the entire line of games from the original NES on a single CD?

You sure? Keep in mind there were like 1000-1500 games.

Keep in mind that an NES game is less than 200kb in size, meaning less than 300Mb would be used.

Considering what their information storage capabilities have to be, they may very well be able to store the entire body of human knowledge and still have room for molecule-by-molecule patterns for Earl Grey tea (with cup and saucer) and the Dr. Chaotica program, plus the petabytes of information their scanners pick up routinely. As long as their computers are fast enough to search through this information in a reasonable length of time, I don't see the problem.

info storage is something I thought they had a nearly infinite capacity for, but that may go back to reading the Bantam Trek novels when I was younger. David Gerrold's novel mentioned that Kirk had a hobby of finding and storing all information in the universe, so the E comp had a record of pretty much everything ever recorded.

At the time, I probably just assumed that was something the author knew as an unmentioned part of the original show, though in retrospect I'm sure that was just Gerrold's own invention.

I'm kinda amazed that VOYAGER's writers would include a neat feature like that ... based on the shows i've seen and the others I've failed to get through, I saw very few clever or well-reasoned bits, and it seemed motivated more by a 'make it cool' factor that worked against credibility for me. Plus I didn't care whether they made it or not, which is many magnitudes worse.