Explaining my hiatus.
For RL reasons, I am spending a month more or less outside of Eve. Not wanting to shunt Pieter off to do paperwork or something similar I've decided to do something a little more dramatic.
I'll be adding to this tale as time passes and releasing other information containing clues as to what happened.
The Deep, Deep Dark
Overspecialisation
Years of education before the first implants, before they trust us with so much as the bare bones Ibis or Impairor and years more of constant learning follow. As Capsuleers we feel our ships far more than any pilot ever has in the long history of flight - but really, how much do we know about the second to second operations within the vessels we crew, we command, we become?
We stretch out in the direction of the gate, we divert power from our weapons to our engines and we set our reactors to full - but all of this is merely a complex method of swimming whilst manipulating sliders in our heads - the real functions, the physics behind all of it, is completely opaque to us. It needs to be or, even in our augmented state, we could never handle the sheer flood of data.
Expert systems pick up some of the slack, the majority of it if the truth is told, computers autonomously handle more of the decisions and data aboard our ships than the majority of us would be happy with if we thought seriously about it. Crewmembers handle some of the abstracted and pre-processed information - highly trained specialists focusing on their little pieces of the puzzle - whilst the summary reports and the most abstracted and interpreted sense data flood into our neural pathways. Information superhighways a hundred lanes wide with a speed limit in quadruple digits and it's always rush hour.
As usual, when the problem occurred, it was an expert system that detected it.
Distributed processing has, time and again, proven to be the most efficient and effective means of handling the computational load onboard a starship. Even if a single computer could be built that would be able to handle all the data and computations required to run a whole ship, it would be both more expensive, less efficient and more prone to damage in combat.
So it is that, onboard the Caldari State Cruiser Dread, the pilot's desires were converted by a nested hierarchy of computer systems to specific commands and then executed by lower level systems and crew. In response data was escalated up the chain where it was converted into reports and sensoria data and fed back into the pilot.
It's at the level of the Expert System that data meets context to produce the first real opinions. Expert Systems lack the flexibility of a human mind, but they can come to conclusions on data much faster than a human being - and they can present those conclusions to the Capsuleer in charge of the vessel far quicker than any mere human.
But their reasonings aren't as nuanced as those of a human crew and so...
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Topic: The Deep, Deep Dark (Read 2405 times)