What's The Deal With Their Computer Access?

[The Wormhole]

Throughout the series, the crew of Voyager always have computer access to virtually anything. Some fine examples are in Flashback, Janeway is able to access Sulu's official captain's logs, and Harry is able to access the Excelsior's sensor data regarding the nebula in Tuvok's memories. Also, there's Scorpion where Janeway is once again reviewing Picard's logs and some other Starfleet captain's. There's also Prime Factors where the crew offer the complete collection of the Federation's fictional literature. Just to name a few.

How is this possible? There is no way Starfleet fills the computer banks of every starship with everything known in the entire Federation? Not every story ever written, not every log every captain has ever made, not every nebula or planet or star every starship has ever discovered, charted and explored.

Logically, all this information would likely be stored in central databases in the Alpha Quadrant which anyone could access via some galactic internet style connection, the same way one might access Wikipedia or Memory Alpha. This option is obviously unavailable to the Voyager crew, so how do they have access to everything known to the Federation?

 

[F. King Daniel]

I'm pretty sure somewhere in TOS it was said that Spock's library computer contained all the knowledge of the Federation.

Even if that's some fanon or something I picked up in a novel, considering the insane amount of computer memory available today, I don't see why ships 300 years away can't he pre-loaded with the text of everyone's Starfleet logs and reports. Not to mention endless far more memory intensive stuff like holograms of famous people.

 

[froot]

I think this might be the same reason they use the term "quads" instead of "bytes" (in the post-TNG era) when referring to how much hard drive space the ships' computers contain.

They wanted a fictional term that had no real world reference so we couldn't really guess how much junk they could jam on their onboard computers.

I can definitely buy that their computer holds mountains and mountains of data and holograms of famous fellows and the like. My only wonder is why they would need stuff like, say, a picture of Janeway's ancestor like we saw in 11:59. I'm surprised they'd carry around so much superfluous data.

Anyway, I doubt it would be difficult to pre-load ships' computers with the data. I'm sure the transfer rates are nice and fast.

 

[henbane]

froot - didn't they find that pic in a Ferengi database, or am I confusing it with another episode?

I think it's quite possible that "insane" amounts of information can be stored 300 years plus. It was only 30-40 years ago that the hard drive of a moderate computer used to take up an entire room of a building.

 

[propita]

It was only 30-40 years ago that the hard drive of a moderate computer used to take up an entire room of a building.

And it was only 14 years ago that Hubby's new IBM thinkpad had a whole 750 megabytes of memory--enough to hold windows and office and all the files the user created!!

 

[henbane]

It was only 30-40 years ago that the hard drive of a moderate computer used to take up an entire room of a building.

And it was only 14 years ago that Hubby's new IBM thinkpad had a whole 750 megabytes of memory--enough to hold windows and office and all the files the user created!!

hehe - and I remember buying a PC with 1 meg RAM and being told I'd never use it all in a million years!

 

[BlobVanDam]

It makes sense to store at least a chunk of this information on a starship. Unlike being on Earth, accessing data over the vast distances of space could become unreliable, with spacial distortions, anomalies etc.
While internet style access would be possible, I'd expect the bigger, more important Starfleet ships would necessitate a lot of information stored locally for speed and reliability (and perhaps security of transferring it through space).

And with how much storage space they'd have, it would be no trouble to store whatever the heck they wanted on there.

Think about this. Look at the current rate of hard drive size leaps in home computers. Right now we have an average of about 1TB hard drives. What was the average back in 2000? 20GB? What about 1990? Maybe about 50-100MB.
We could average that out to a factor of 100 per decade. Heck, be conservative and make it only a factor of 10, doesn't matter. Now extrapolate for a few hundred years.

Even by the the Enterprise era their claim of having 50,000 movies on their ship's database looks like a mere blip on their storage space (and that's even accounting for larger movie files by that time), and this is only working from personal computer storage sizes.

A lot of the information they have stored is only personnel files, which are only text, and a few pictures. With their future transfer speeds and storage space, they could probably store information on every person on Earth for the last few hundred years very quickly with minimal storage usage. So why not? 20 years ago it would have seemed excessive to be storing thousands of songs and movies on personal computers, yet now this is extremely common, just because we have the space to easily spare.

And of course I still have no idea wtf a quad is.

 

[froot]

And of course I still have no idea wtf a quad is.

I think that was the intent. They didn't want us to draw real-world comparisons.

I named my new 2TB hard drive "Thirty Gigaquads of Data"

 

[starfox]

I think this might be the same reason they use the term "quads" instead of "bytes" (in the post-TNG era) when referring to how much hard drive space the ships' computers contain.

I know of only three instances where TNG used conventional units for memory:

11001001: Riker says that every last byte of memory was filled.
The Measure of a Man: Data claims to have 800 quadrillion bits of memory.
Evolution: Wesley says the nanites have gigabytes of memory.

 

[Captrek]

I think this might be the same reason they use the term "quads" instead of "bytes" (in the post-TNG era) when referring to how much hard drive space the ships' computers contain.

They wanted a fictional term that had no real world reference so we couldn't really guess how much junk they could jam on their onboard computers.

That may have been the intent, but a quad isn’t a fictional term. It’s four words, or eight bytes.

 

[BlobVanDam]

And of course I still have no idea wtf a quad is.

I think that was the intent. They didn't want us to draw real-world comparisons.

I figured, but I was also referring to the fact that my calculations are a useless comparison without some kind of reference for what a quad is in the Trek universe.
I assume that because it's a fictional unit used by people from Earth, that it's intended to be a unit of measurement well beyond our current units, rather than anything close to what we currently have.
Remember Johnny 5? He had 500MB of memory! I'm sure that seemed impressive back in the '80s when that movie was released, but now it's a joke.

 

[F. King Daniel]

And of course I still have no idea wtf a quad is.

I think that was the intent. They didn't want us to draw real-world comparisons.

I named my new 2TB hard drive "Thirty Gigaquads of Data"

^

IIRC, Star Trek: Enterprise measured their computer memory in "XB". Xtreme Bytes!

 

[Finn]

Throughout the series, the crew of Voyager always have computer access to virtually anything. Some fine examples are in Flashback, Janeway is able to access Sulu's official captain's logs, and Harry is able to access the Excelsior's sensor data regarding the nebula in Tuvok's memories. Also, there's Scorpion where Janeway is once again reviewing Picard's logs and some other Starfleet captain's. There's also Prime Factors where the crew offer the complete collection of the Federation's fictional literature. Just to name a few.

How is this possible? There is no way Starfleet fills the computer banks of every starship with everything known in the entire Federation? Not every story ever written, not every log every captain has ever made, not every nebula or planet or star every starship has ever discovered, charted and explored.

Logically, all this information would likely be stored in central databases in the Alpha Quadrant which anyone could access via some galactic internet style connection, the same way one might access Wikipedia or Memory Alpha. This option is obviously unavailable to the Voyager crew, so how do they have access to everything known to the Federation?

These Captiain's log entries and the sensor reading logs were probably included because of their role in history (events surrounding the Praxis explosion....), and about engaging the borg. Janeway probably wouldn't be able to find anything on Picard's trip to Risa.

 

[The Wormhole]

Throughout the series, the crew of Voyager always have computer access to virtually anything. Some fine examples are in Flashback, Janeway is able to access Sulu's official captain's logs, and Harry is able to access the Excelsior's sensor data regarding the nebula in Tuvok's memories. Also, there's Scorpion where Janeway is once again reviewing Picard's logs and some other Starfleet captain's. There's also Prime Factors where the crew offer the complete collection of the Federation's fictional literature. Just to name a few.

How is this possible? There is no way Starfleet fills the computer banks of every starship with everything known in the entire Federation? Not every story ever written, not every log every captain has ever made, not every nebula or planet or star every starship has ever discovered, charted and explored.

Logically, all this information would likely be stored in central databases in the Alpha Quadrant which anyone could access via some galactic internet style connection, the same way one might access Wikipedia or Memory Alpha. This option is obviously unavailable to the Voyager crew, so how do they have access to everything known to the Federation?

These Captiain's log entries and the sensor reading logs were probably included because of their role in history (events surrounding the Praxis explosion....), and about engaging the borg. Janeway probably wouldn't be able to find anything on Picard's trip to Risa.

I doubt some random nebula the Excelsior was in a few days after the Praxis explosion would be considered relevant to the Praxis event. Likewise Sulu's log only made referance to anomalies charted on that day with a vague mention to the ship undergoing "minor repairs." Such a mundane report surely wouldn't be considered of great historical relevance to the Praxis event, would it?

Also, take into account that in False Profits they did have detailed records of the Enterprise D's involvement with the Barzan Wormhole, and the Ferengi's invlovement with these events. That's a pretty random mission with no real historical relevance or anything of that nature, so why would it have to be included on any starship's database?

Even if we accept that 24th century computers are advanced enough to store this much data, one has to wonder why they do? Is it really necessary for a starship heading into the Badlands ot retrieve a Maquis ship to know that Ferengi manipulated a Federation hosted event several years earlier, or know about a random nebula another ship charted nearly 80 years prior? I do concede that some things like detailed reports on the Borg or Q might be considered necessary info which every ship would have access to.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Considering Starfleet's mission is to seek out new worlds and explore, it'd be rather stupid of them to do so without taking along knowledge of prior missions, or space anomalies, or nebulae or whatever. You never know what's gonna come next or gonna be relavent to the mission at hand - so take it all along.

 

[Finn]

Throughout the series, the crew of Voyager always have computer access to virtually anything. Some fine examples are in Flashback, Janeway is able to access Sulu's official captain's logs, and Harry is able to access the Excelsior's sensor data regarding the nebula in Tuvok's memories. Also, there's Scorpion where Janeway is once again reviewing Picard's logs and some other Starfleet captain's. There's also Prime Factors where the crew offer the complete collection of the Federation's fictional literature. Just to name a few.

How is this possible? There is no way Starfleet fills the computer banks of every starship with everything known in the entire Federation? Not every story ever written, not every log every captain has ever made, not every nebula or planet or star every starship has ever discovered, charted and explored.

Logically, all this information would likely be stored in central databases in the Alpha Quadrant which anyone could access via some galactic internet style connection, the same way one might access Wikipedia or Memory Alpha. This option is obviously unavailable to the Voyager crew, so how do they have access to everything known to the Federation?

These Captiain's log entries and the sensor reading logs were probably included because of their role in history (events surrounding the Praxis explosion....), and about engaging the borg. Janeway probably wouldn't be able to find anything on Picard's trip to Risa.

I doubt some random nebula the Excelsior was in a few days after the Praxis explosion would be considered relevant to the Praxis event. Likewise Sulu's log only made referance to anomalies charted on that day with a vague mention to the ship undergoing "minor repairs." Such a mundane report surely wouldn't be considered of great historical relevance to the Praxis event, would it?

Also, take into account that in False Profits they did have detailed records of the Enterprise D's involvement with the Barzan Wormhole, and the Ferengi's invlovement with these events. That's a pretty random mission with no real historical relevance or anything of that nature, so why would it have to be included on any starship's database?

Even if we accept that 24th century computers are advanced enough to store this much data, one has to wonder why they do? Is it really necessary for a starship heading into the Badlands ot retrieve a Maquis ship to know that Ferengi manipulated a Federation hosted event several years earlier, or know about a random nebula another ship charted nearly 80 years prior? I do concede that some things like detailed reports on the Borg or Q might be considered necessary info which every ship would have access to.

You might be right about the nebula missions, but the Barzan Mission was significant. It was going to be a huge opporunity for the Federation both trade-wise and exploration-wise. I'd be surprised if there's nothing about it in the databases.

 

[The Borg Queen]

Considering Starfleet's mission is to seek out new worlds and explore, it'd be rather stupid of them to do so without taking along knowledge of prior missions, or space anomalies, or nebulae or whatever. You never know what's gonna come next or gonna be relavent to the mission at hand - so take it all along.

Have you ever watched the show?

How many "technology of the week" events from previous episodes could have resolved the plot of a future episode in one minute flat?

The Federation obviously has some sort of taboo about keeping records of their adventures.

 

[Agony_Boothb]

The ability to access massive amounts of information never bothered me. I have always been concerned by the amount of times Ensign Kim got locked out of a vital system by a random alien or crewmember having a psychotic episode who was trying to escape the ship

 

[F. King Daniel]

^When Naomi did it in "Bliss" I LOL'd.

 

[G2309]

hink how many text documents we can stire in one usb stick today?