It has a lot of non-volatile memory in an extremely compact form factor Doug invented -- the same memory design he pulls out of storage for IDEC once he's on their payroll, and which he earlier fabricated at Ganbare. (Back home he's been making some nice money on the royalties from that I'll tell you.) A lot of the remaining computer technology is merely bleeding-edge Warriors' World tech -- stepped down a little in order to make it fit into the helmet.
The database on the UN isn't all that large -- maybe 10 Mb at most. It's really a copy of the UN charter, the Warriors charter, relevant international law, and a rather broadly-painted history.
There's no software development environment in there. Although that might be a good idea.
The voice recognition is rather simpleminded. It's optimized for about two dozen commands and all the words in his songbase. When searching the songbase it's basically using a Google-like engine.
Tactical display is a little vague; I always had an image of the kind of targeting we see in the Terminator movies, but there's really no need for it.
It's got a starlight scope in the goggles, and some flare compensation.
Power supply... Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Seriously... Fully explaining the power supply would mean I would have to describe to the world at large one of the sillier aspects of the game circa the late 80s, but in short, it's running off a power cell that itself uses a substance that Doug refers to as 'drillium (that's not an unbalanced quote, but an apostrophe indicating that that's a shortened version of the real word). He makes mention of 'drillium in one of the early chapters when he mentions power cells for his motorcycle. His cycle "back home" may be based on a 1936 Harley Davidson chassis, but it doesn't run on gasoline. Anyway, 'drillium is, um, well, we never did exactly quantify it; it's a vaguely radioactive element we got from a culture in a parallel universe with whom we have some regular contact. (That's we=The Warriors, not the UN or anyone else.) It does have a measurable lifespan -- Doug's cycle at home goes through its power cells on a regular basis -- but in something as low-drain as the helmet, a cell will last for decades if not longer.
As for a need to recharge the helmet, well... my prereader list had a long, long discussion about whether I should need it, and how to handle it if I did -- you should have seen the technical discussions about how Doug could build a primitive dynamo in Valdemar in order to charge the battery, etc. etc. But I decided that getting into that level of detail was getting far more complex than the story needed.
For the most part, the helmet really is nothing more than a fancy MP3 player built with electronics technology about 10 or 20 years in advance of where we are now (even more than that for the memory/storage).
Oh, and one other thing it is, is armored. There's a layer of polykev underneath its outer finish.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
The database on the UN isn't all that large -- maybe 10 Mb at most. It's really a copy of the UN charter, the Warriors charter, relevant international law, and a rather broadly-painted history.
There's no software development environment in there. Although that might be a good idea.
The voice recognition is rather simpleminded. It's optimized for about two dozen commands and all the words in his songbase. When searching the songbase it's basically using a Google-like engine.
Tactical display is a little vague; I always had an image of the kind of targeting we see in the Terminator movies, but there's really no need for it.
It's got a starlight scope in the goggles, and some flare compensation.
Power supply... Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Seriously... Fully explaining the power supply would mean I would have to describe to the world at large one of the sillier aspects of the game circa the late 80s, but in short, it's running off a power cell that itself uses a substance that Doug refers to as 'drillium (that's not an unbalanced quote, but an apostrophe indicating that that's a shortened version of the real word). He makes mention of 'drillium in one of the early chapters when he mentions power cells for his motorcycle. His cycle "back home" may be based on a 1936 Harley Davidson chassis, but it doesn't run on gasoline. Anyway, 'drillium is, um, well, we never did exactly quantify it; it's a vaguely radioactive element we got from a culture in a parallel universe with whom we have some regular contact. (That's we=The Warriors, not the UN or anyone else.) It does have a measurable lifespan -- Doug's cycle at home goes through its power cells on a regular basis -- but in something as low-drain as the helmet, a cell will last for decades if not longer.
As for a need to recharge the helmet, well... my prereader list had a long, long discussion about whether I should need it, and how to handle it if I did -- you should have seen the technical discussions about how Doug could build a primitive dynamo in Valdemar in order to charge the battery, etc. etc. But I decided that getting into that level of detail was getting far more complex than the story needed.
For the most part, the helmet really is nothing more than a fancy MP3 player built with electronics technology about 10 or 20 years in advance of where we are now (even more than that for the memory/storage).
Oh, and one other thing it is, is armored. There's a layer of polykev underneath its outer finish.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.