Can the Mercury send data to other ships with a similar or bigger size of computer? And can those ships, maybe the Carrack, decrypt the data like the Mercury can?asked by Boris
TL;DRJohn Crewe says any ship can send data to another, but big data-focused ships do it far better, encryption needs matching hardware on both ends, and whether the Carrack has it is too early to say.
Okay, so essentially any ship can send data to another ship. It might be at a very basic level, and you can send all the data that you have to another ship. You can share coordinates, share discoveries, whatever, but it's going to take a while if you're sending it between an Argo and a... They're not designed for that sort of communication. These ships, the Herald, the Mercury, any of the big cap ships that focus on data, they're designed for... it's like bandwidth: rather than having a 56k modem sending stuff, you've got fiber. So they can send it a lot better. Encryption is sort of locked to specific hardware in the ship, so if your ship has it, you can encrypt it. The ship at the other end will need the equivalent hardware to do that. Not all of them have it. Whether the Carrack has it, too early to say.