By ChaosEternus
Thanks to LONA of the BSGWS for Beta'ing this fic for me.
And thanks to all the reviewers, I really appreciate the feedback and ego-enhancement... sorry, praise! grins
as always, please read and review
Now, only one of the computers we had on Tempest was what you might call Top of the Range and that was naturally the PC we chose to show off first.
I'm the closest thing to a PC expert we had in the crew and that just meant I knew how to put the damn things together and some basic diagnostics, but even I knew this thing was hot. I should do, it was mine after all.
Yeah, my PC from home was onboard the Tempest… What? You really think a government agency would fork out for a top-of-the-range model like this unless they, the bean-counters, were going to be using it? Not likely, no this one I had built myself just to replace one of the shuttle's standard workstations and as such it was a BEAST.
256mb ram on the graphics card (scary thing is, I can remember when 256mb meant you had a top of the range hard disk. Boy have times changed since then!) that card had video in/out and a TV tuner, a pair of 400GB hard disks with passive cooling arrays, DVD-rewriter… well, I could go on for hours, but let ' s just say it was a HOT PC, and did I mention it had a 64-bit processor?
Now that I just had to show Baltar, not that I would show off or anything, oh no…
All that, and in the end it was the graphics that shocked them the most, not the hard disk capacity, not the processor…
Should have expected it, I suppose. I mean the graphics card, or rather the work it did, was the most visible part of any PC, you just turned the PC on and there it was, usually.
I really did get a kick out of showing them the NVIDIA demos though, they couldn't believe they were actually real time rendered, it seems they needed a supercomputer to do that and as for doing it in real-time? Forget it!
But, four hours later, they got the picture. Earth had far better computer technology. At this point, they assumed lesson ended and started to leave.
It wasn't.
I had the Complete Britannica on DVD and that includes Star Charts.
Fifteen seconds after those flicked onto the PC's screens, Adama was screaming for guards to be posted 24/7, or the colonial equivalent (it actually sounded like 26/8 to me) and for their own star charts to be brought down.
Physical charts, on transparencies. That was a shocker to me. Okay, I knew they went for the low tech? Look, we had been told that. But Geez, no one on Earth uses physical charts anymore? Even most water vessels use GPS systems and GPS Navigators now or the older inertial systems. Physical charts were moving towards being niche market items.
But they used physical charts… which when I thought about it, made sense. After all, if you are fighting a race that can infiltrate your computers how do you know if your charts on the computers haven't been messed with?
But converting our standard charts to colonial or vice versa so a course could be worked out just went from difficult to straight to bloody horrible. I mean, I could have scanned their charts into my computer but without a program to convert or even figure out their charts formatting nor the skills to create such a program, it wouldn't have done any good.
So it meant printing out the Britannica's charts and giving them to Adama and Tigh, who seemed to be the ships navigators as well as commanding officers, which seemed to be a bit odd to me, and letting them go and get on with the task.
Meanwhile, we had to figure out how to get Roslin and Baltar, who were still hanging around, away from Tempest so we could get some sleep. After all, they weren't techs, who knew what they would touch?
In the end, we didn't. Roslin mentioned that there was still a Cylon saboteur aboard Galactica and we decided it might be a good idea for one of us to stay with the bird all the time as well. Now people were beginning to get the idea that something really valuable was on her (the guards were after all a big give away) well, then it was time to start taking more precautions.
Naturally, the precautions didn't work as planned.