Holo capacity

     The list has been kind of quiet today, so I thought I'd ask a
quick question:

     What's the data capacity of a holocrystal?  I've taken a
(admittedly superficial) look through all the references I have here
and all I could find was a note in _Traveller's Digest_ 10 that one
holocrystal can hold about 5 hours of holographic video.  That's fine,
as far as it goes, but it doesn't tell me how much raw data the
crystal can hold.  If it'll hold 5 hours of video, I'd assume that the
capacity is fairly large, but *how* large?  500 Mbytes?  1 Gbyte?  1
Terabyte?  More?

     The reason I'm asking is that I'm trying to find out how much
data can be contained in a cubic meter of holocrystals (I'm assuming
one crystal every 2 cm, or 125,000 crystals in a 1 kl lattice).  After
I find *that* out, then I can estimate the capacity of a sphere of
crystals 100 km in diameter.  Yeah, that was *kilometers*.  I'm writing
a scenario about an old (about the end of the Rule of Man) archive
system.  Large capacity, eh?  It fills the center of a gas giant moon.
Doc Smith would have been proud, eh?  ;-)

     Now that I think about it, this could be more generally expressed
as, "What kind of data format is used in Traveller technology?"  Sure,
an 8-bit byte is a _de facto_ standard today, but it doesn't necessarily
*have* to be (at one time, it wasn't).  Also, does one "byte" correspond
to one text character, or are all files stored in a binary form that
includes some user-transparent data compression?  If so, do you express
the capacity of storage media in arbitrary-number-of-bits units (i. e.,
its physical capacity) or the amount of data that can be compressed
onto it (its *practical* capacity).  Heck, with lharc, I can squeeze
1.8 Mbytes of (text) data onto one 880 Kbyte Amiga disk.  Could a TL 15
mass storage system do any less?


- - --
     Brent

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