</font>[/QUOTE]That's so painfully outmoded. Moore's Law, et cetera, et cetera...Originally posted by Supplement Four:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Andrew Boulton:
Xmail: Messages sent by xboat. Xmail carries information only; material objects may not be sent. The message is digitally coded; xmail costs CrlO per 20 kilobits per parsec. The message may be sent using a standard Anglic character set (about CrlO for a 500 word message) or a picture may be reproduced in facsimile (Cr20 for a 200 x 200 bit matrix). The message is printed out at its destination and delivered by a world's local mail system.
A Type X carries 17 dtons worth of "data banks". A terabyte hard drive here at early TL8 is the size of your lunchbox. Thousands of them will fit into a single dton. Ramp the tech up to TL14 (needed for Jump-4), and a single Xboat is probably carrying an exobyte of data or more.
And the kicker: the computer was going to be booted up and making the trip anyway, the actual carriage cost is zero Credits.
IMTU, I figure a modest Cr1 per gigabyte-parsec is reasonable-enough to foster and encourage interstellar communication, yet still produce a breathtaking revenue stream for the noble families. Maybe a Cr1 per terabyte-parsec rate could be considered for non-government use, to further promote private use.
The problem comes on the uplink/downlink end of the Xboat operations. Trasmission of an exabyte of data in the few minutes it takes and Xboat to hurriedly refuel and replot for the next Jump takes a spectacular amount of bandwidth. We're talking spinal-mount-weapon energy levels here. Even if an Xboat could generate that kind of power, the antenna's backscatter radiation alone would produce a freshly-grilled Scout in moments. ("Crew-1" on the radiation damage table, as it were.)
Plain ol' Mail on the other hand is a true cash cow; forget landing the Mail Contract to defray operating costs on your Subbie -- what you want is to land the Post Office Contract for a busy-but-low-government world. Charge an exhorbitant (but pro-rated) Cr100 per kilogram-parsec for small parcels (including, ironically enough, digital media), and you will make enough money to own your own fleet of Mail Packets in no time.
Then you can laugh at all the chumps hauling freight and passengers for peanuts... and even at the losers who think they've lucked out because they get a whole Cr25000 (and that's not even per parsec) every time they haul Cr500000+ worth of small packages for you...
No wonder some governments don't mind operating their Subbies at a loss, eh?