#inuruk

Taking a cue from BSG and having nothing networked?

We can assume that the drives are not accessible to computers within the control area (or throughout the rest of the base). If they were (and, you know, power were still available), I have little doubt that Jyn and Cassian would have had K-2 transfer the plans to a separate disk (or perhaps internal memory) and gone from there. Instead, they had to physically locate the drive, remove it, and take it with them on their trip to the dish.

I can see how this would be beneficial. A member of the Empire who had sudden sympathies for the Rebellion wouldn’t be able to access any plans from a simple workstation. Droids could not be reprogrammed to look for the plans from a remote socket (as we’ve seen in Rebels with Chopper being reprogrammed and remote controlled).

But I also feel like this would lead to a slightly less-than-efficient workplace. Think about it. If you needed to check on a detail, you’d have to go to the archive, get the plans manually (and you probably had to have sought out someone who has the correct permissions), load it into a console, and go from there. Then reverse the process.

Doesn’t that seem just a bit inefficient to you? No? Just me? Oh.

Encryption? Is that a thing?

No, really. This baffles me.

We see in the movie that Jyn grabs the drive, takes it up to the dish, has a bit of a struggle with Krennic, and then jams the drive in to a receptacle and calls it a day. The plans begin to transmit immediately without so much as a confirmation or request of access.

UH. UH. UHHHHHHH.

HOW DID THIS SYSTEM GET DESIGNED AND APPROVED

I have encryption on my drive and I don’t store nearly as sensitive files as the plans to a superweapon. But after obtaining the drive, there’s no concern about needed a special code or a keycard that would decrypt the drive during that session. Did the Empire really assume that just since they’re on Scarif, they can trust all their systems no matter how they’re accessed? Then why weren’t the drives networked?

I honestly don’t have an answer or solution for this. I just wonder how this could be.

Why were these drives physically so freaking huge?

The easiest reasoning would be that, as with actual real-world technology that is military-grade, there’s a lot of protection on these devices from shock, sand/dust/dirt, water, radiation, and so on. We can easily come to the conclusion that the size of the drive is not the way it is because of the storage requirements of the plans.

(And guess what, my assumptions were right! I hadn’t cracked open the Rogue One Visual Guide until having written this and the following paragraph.)

The Death Star plans are more than likely the most complex set of plans that the Empire had stored in the Citadel Tower. Think about it. You have a 120 kilometer wide space station and plans that detail every room, every floor, every section and subsection. They detail everything from weaponry placements to power couplings to water and sewage pipes. And it’s not just the final plans. The Visual Guide says the data tape has the earliest “exploration” plans (more than likely as seen in Episode II) to the final schematics. We can also assume that any communication about it is stored in there as well.

Sidenote: also in the Visual Guide, it says that the data tape had a capacity of 512 million exanodes. What are exanodes? Who the hell knows! Other than a billion billion nodes if the Star Wars universe uses the same numerical prefixing system that we do, we don’t know what a single node can store. A node could be the equivalent of a single bit (meaning on or off), a single byte (storing a single character), or something more because I would assume Star Wars is beyond traditional computing and is definitely using something equivalent or better than quantum computing.

But what confounds me is why they used such a physically large (and potentially volatile) tape drive inside the enclosures. At the end of Rogue One when Vader is storming through the Rebel Cruisers, the plans are transferred to a super slim data card from the ship’s computer that then carries us into Episode IV. How did the Rebellion get all the data from this giant drive onto this tiny card? We can assume that the Rebellion’s technology limits are not nearly as high as the Empire due to lack of resources so that’s not the answer.

Perhaps the answer as to how the plans moved from a large tape drive to a slim card is as easy as Jyn only transferred the final plans to the Rebellion and didn’t bother with the conversations or earlier plans. And this is probably the answer as further along in the timeline, there are no mentions of other valuable data used from the transfer such as security codes, planet locations, and so on.

How fast is the data transfer?

NOTE: Lots of hypothetical talk here, as everything is. And I can’t really make assumptions so this is mostly me wondering out loud.

Let’s hop back to Scarif’s surface for a moment. The plans couldn’t be transferred through the planetary shield normally. This is why the Rebellion used a Hammerhead corvette to send two Star Destroyers into the shield. The shield wasn’t taken down completely but the amount of energy and force it had to deflect from the impact of those ships made it attenuate enough where the signal from the dish on the planet could breach the shield enough and make a successful transfer to the ships in orbit.

As mentioned above, we’ll assume that only the final plans were transferred. In this scene, it took 33 seconds to transfer completely. We can assume this is in real time because while the scene plays between the surface and the ship, dialog continues at a normal pace. If you were transferring a completely full data tape, the bandwidth would be 15 million exanodes per second. That’s huge. But as mentioned above, I don’t believe that the entire of the tape being transferred.

We don’t know how much space each version of the plan took on the drive as well. Did the engineers have something similar to a git repository system where with each revision, only the parts that changed are uploaded? Or did a full set of plans get uploaded with each revision? With a project as complex as the Death Star, I’d go with the former. That means there could be hundreds of thousands of revisions stored.

So, really, I’ve got nothing on how fast the data transfer from that satellite is. This is just me rambling. Hope you enjoyed it.

A single archive? Really?

No, this is something that annoys me. And I could be completely overthinking this because it’s not mentioned in the movie. But here I go.

Everybody knows you should have a backup of your data and then a backup of your backup. For something as critical the plans to your superweapon battle station, I hope to the maker that you didn’t just have those plans in that one location.

The Empire has essentially unlimited resources. Practically unlimited planets they could create data facilities on. Why they seemingly had the archives limited to just one planet is beyond my comprehension. They destroyed their own data facility that contained thousands of projects without so much as batting an eye. Tarkin gave the order and done. No blowback, no concerns, nothing. So perhaps there is a secondary data facility somewhere in the galaxy and I’m just ranting for no reason.

But I also wouldn’t put it past the Empire to have a single place for their data. After all, Tarkin didn’t give a damn about that small flaw that couldn’t possibly ruin his moment of triumph.

Above ground?

I get that you’re on an ocean planet and basically built on top of the majority of the land mass in that specific area. But you chose to build your facility above ground. The data tower is more than likely in the middle of that spire. That doesn’t worry you? Stop the ignorance of “nothing can get through this shield.”

Wouldn’t you rather take the precaution of building underground and making sure that water couldn’t possibly find its way in than have the risk of some ship crashing into the spire and destroying the entire archive? It wouldn’t even have to be an enemy. It could very well be a freighter that loses control on the approach to land.

I’m not going to attribute these as faults to the writers (though they probably are) but more to the stupidity of the Empire when it comes to making sure that they are secure. They are so large, it hurts and is practically their downfall. When you get large enough, you overlook these sorts of things. They probably have their justifications but for an Empire with practically unlimited resources, well…