Boffo97 wrote: ↑Wed Jun 26, 2019 4:28 pm
On the topic of Star Wars, specifically "A New Hope"...
Other than "Then there wouldn't be a movie", why didn't the Rebel ship get the Death Star plans and then just broadcast them to the entire galaxy? The Yavin IV base, along with everyone else, gets the plans and the Empire still has no idea where they are. Luke, Obi Wan, Han and Chewie basically don't even get into the story. Leia's lost, but she probably expected as much anyway.
And of course, our hero lives. Our hero... Jektono Porkins.
You might argue that the equivalent of subspace radio doesn't exist in Star Wars, except we do see one instance in The Empire Strikes Back of Vader talking to the Emperor over what must be FTL communications. Not to mention, Boba Fett had to tell Darth Vader that the Millenium Falcon was going to Bespin somehow.
The Death Star, as you noted, is the size of a small moon and has 1.2 million people aboard. Its hundreds of thousands of miles of corridors and
billions of linear miles of wiring and conduits and so forth appear to be rendered in low-texture 3D... but still 3D. And these are technical schematics, not just general cut-and-paste blueprints. So the filesize is going to be large. Let's be extremely generous and suggest that the Death Star Plans are 100 GB total, although, frankly, if you told me they were in the petabyte range, I wouldn't bat an eyelash at you.
FTL communication is one thing, but (based on the quality of the FTL communications we see) they only appear to only have bandwidth of maybe... 1 Megabit per second? And those aren't broadcasts: they're point-to-point transmissions between dedicated (military-grade) arrays. So even beaming the Death Star Plans to another recipient is going to take you (does some math) a minimum of
nine days. Broadcasting? Yikes. If the technology exists at all -- and there's no evidence it does, and no reason to suspect it's possible; there's no such thing as broadcasting a telegram outside the telegraph network--it's very likely to be even slower, with dismayingly short range.
This leads us to the better question, though, which is: why didn't the Rebels just make a gazillion copies and send out runners as quick as you can to as many places as you can, using shuttles and whatever else they could lay hands on, to ensure at least one copy got back home? Why put all the plans inside a single Astromech and hope for the best?
There is no G-canon evidence that file copying exists in the
Star Wars universe. Reading a file out of a system for data transfer appears to destroy it in the source system. There can therefore always be only one copy of a file.
This makes sense, insofar as
Star Wars is (among other things) a pastiche of World War II movies, where spies and special forces stole physical documents and photocopiers didn't exist. It also explains other nagging plot issues, like why Jocasta Nu didn't just go check the Jedi Archive Offsite Backup Tapes for evidence of tampering when Kamino went missing, or know what a checksum is. There's no backup tapes because backups are impossible, because file copy isn't a technology available to the Old Republic.
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