I know I need to attempt to research my question but I am at a loss. I don't know where to begin without taking a computer course when all I need is two or three lines of dialog
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I'm not a true nerd, but when my computer locks up, usually it will tell me something about "insufficient memory available" or "insufficient RAM available" (RAM meaning random access memory, whatever that means).
Unless your giant ship is frying the little ship's physical electrical system with its greeting, something like taking up all available memory would seem likely. But, as I said, I'm not a certified nerd.
So your huge ship tried to contact the small ship, and the small ship wasn't able to deal with the data and freaked out.
No matter what the reason -- short of an attack using a previously unknown weakness in the small ship's computers -- this means that the small ship's computer systems are badly designed. Overwhelming the communications system shouldn't shut down the entire ship; at the worst, it should shut down the communications.
But if this is space opera, you may be willing to be more flexible. There's a long, hallowed tradition of badly designed technology in space opera. :)
Would this be gigabite talk?There are two reasons why not
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Disclaimer: I am not a huge technogeek, so this may be only marginally useful input... but considering that the focus isn't the computers, unless you want to play the line for laughs, you might want to be careful about being *too* technobabbly, because (presumably), you'll want all readers to be able to grasp what's going on, technogeeks and technophobes alike
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I thought it was stupid that an Earth computer virus could attack an obviously superoir computer system that was not-Earth at all (and much more) as in "Independence Day." I do think however that as fast as science is moving, that hundreds of years in the future there could be a system that might be able to communicate with very different systems. Think of it as the flashing lights in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," that that is how the communication would happen...
When a computer receives more data than it's expecting, it can lead to a condition called a "buffer overflow". In some programs that can be very bad, since the data that wouldn't fit in the buffer (think of water slopping over the sides of an overfilled cup) ends up somewhere else in the computer memory, most likely with the computer trying to execute it as a program. If you want a small scale crisis, it would be a "communications buffer overflow," or similar. If big crisis is more what you want, then something more like a "buffer overflow leading to a cascade failure through the ship's systems." Hope it helps.
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Unless your giant ship is frying the little ship's physical electrical system with its greeting, something like taking up all available memory would seem likely. But, as I said, I'm not a certified nerd.
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No matter what the reason -- short of an attack using a previously unknown weakness in the small ship's computers -- this means that the small ship's computer systems are badly designed. Overwhelming the communications system shouldn't shut down the entire ship; at the worst, it should shut down the communications.
But if this is space opera, you may be willing to be more flexible. There's a long, hallowed tradition of badly designed technology in space opera. :)
Would this be gigabite talk?There are two reasons why not ( ... )
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This, really, is the best way to go, if you must have computers from different civilizations (I assume?) interacting at all.
This is actually as unlikely as an abacus talking to your toaster.
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I'm also reminded of the computer of the Heart of Gold making tea, but that's just me.
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