[HT] Microfilm libraries?

[DataPacRat]

I'm toying with a TL5+2^ spaceship, in which I'm thinking of installing an advanced form of a Memex (described in 3e's Weird War 2) - a mostly-mechanical version of a personal wiki. (With a few advances from the original Memex design, such as a better metadata system.) The 3e stats for the hardware can be converted easily enough, but I also want this gizmo to have access to microfilms of libraries, in the sense of 4e High Tech p18.

What I can't seem to find are any numbers of how much smaller a microfilm library is compared to a paper one. The Designers' Notes at http://www.sjgames.com/pyramid/sample.html?id=6658 mention that microfilm and microfiche were "left out", which is disappointing; while on Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microform#Advantages mentions that a microfiche page may only be 0.25% the size of the original, while storage requirements are reduced by 95%.

Should I just say that a microform library is 1/20th the weight listed for a paper library in High-Tech, and is, say, double the cost and requires a reader machine? Or does anyone have a better approach?

[YankeeGamer]

A microfilm requires a reader for easy use, but can be read with a good magnifying glass. Microdots are 1920's technology, and can have incredible information density--per Wikipedia, a page of text on .001 sq mm. That's much less convenient than conventional microfilm, more labor intensive to make, and needs a microscope to read.

In short, the smaller, the more expensive and less convenient. I think that, unless there's a standard microfilm library that's semi mass produced, it will be more than twice as expensive. If every ship always carries The Royal Astrogation Society's Guide to Space Flight, so it's mass produced--the price is more reasonable. If it's a government document, it might even be part of the builder's papers, included with any ship that includes an office in place of one cabin. (Spaceships page 18)

You might have some information on microfilm--stuff that's accessed regularly--and things that are unlikely to be accessed as often on microdots.

One big concern with both forms--you can't have the book open in front of you as you try to use the astrogation equipment, or land the ship, or fix the engines, so if the expert is out of action, it's harder to get a bonus on your default by having the book in front of you.

[Celjabba]

This page have a number of collection with the number of books and the number of microfilm spools / microfiche.

https://www.loc.gov/rr/microform/microbks.html

114 microfilm reels - nine hundred titles = 7.9 books/reels
643 microfilm reels - five thousand titles = 7.7 books/reels
1568 microfilm reels - 11,000 titles = 7 books/reels
...
502 microfilm reels - five hundred titles = 1 book / reel
(16 century Russian church book in cyrillic - those are presumably huge ...)

[Anthony]

Given that it's TL 5+2, it doesn't have to match any standard microfilm anyway; you're just limited by the dot size of your film material size and the quality of your magnification.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Given that it's TL 5+2, it doesn't have to match any standard microfilm anyway; you're just limited by the dot size of your film material size and the quality of your magnification.

Microfilm and microfiche are a little thicker than paper, but probably don't need to be, so you are mostly looking at how much you can shrink the surface area of the image of a page. Actual TL7 microfiche uses 98 images per page, and something less than half the size of a typical book page, so that's easily doable at TL 5+2 and in the neighborhood of 1% of the volume for the same material.

In the limit assuming you want to preserve something like the resolution of decent printing (hundreds of dots per inch) and are using actual film (particle sizes in the in the tenths of a micron) you are probably looking a maximum contraction of a couple hundred in each direction, so volumes divided by something on the order of 10,000 is about the physical limit for film. If you are etching on silicon chips, you can go to the limits of photolithography, which are probably pushing the physical limits at around 50 nm these days. That will get you a shrinkage over hundreds of dots per inch of about 2000, or about a 4 million fold surface area reduction. Silicon sheets probably have to be thicker than paper though, so your volume shrinkage is going to be somewhat less than that. And it's probably approaching TL9 technology.

TLDR: a thousand times more information than the same weight or volume of books should be easy, 10,000 times is hard but likely still possible, and a million is definitely too high.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by malloyd

In the limit assuming you want to preserve something like the resolution of decent printing (hundreds of dots per inch) and are using actual film (particle sizes in the in the tenths of a micron)

Optical magnification is limited to wavelength of visible light, so 400-700nm depending on wavelength. Printing at 300 dpi is a dot size of about 85 microns, so about 100x magnification (about 100 pages per square inch) is probably the max limit of text you look at with optical magnification without blurring, though if you don't mind the readability level of dot-matrix printing you can probably get 1,000 pages per square inch.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by DataPacRat

… on Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microform#Advantages mentions that a microfiche page may only be 0.25% the size of the original, while storage requirements are reduced by 95%.

Those numbers are entirely compatible. Microfiche pages are pretty fragile, and needed to be stored in protective sleeves when I used them as a student, 40 years ago. If your memex is sealed to keep its interior very clean, you can do better than reducing storage volume to a twentieth of paper.

Hopefully, you aren't using nitrate film aboard a spaceship? It's rather flammable for that.

[DataPacRat]

Originally Posted by YankeeGamer

I think that, unless there's a standard microfilm library that's semi mass produced, it will be more than twice as expensive. If every ship always carries The Royal Astrogation Society's Guide to Space Flight, so it's mass produced--the price is more reasonable. If it's a government document, it might even be part of the builder's papers, included with any ship that includes an office in place of one cabin. (Spaceships page 18)

I'm afraid that the whole ship is going to be a one-off prototype, full of experimental bits and bobs ("Doc Brown and Marty McFly meet the Addams Family"), so I don't see many cost-savings arising there.

How much more expensive would you say might be in the right ballpark?

Originally Posted by YankeeGamer

One big concern with both forms--you can't have the book open in front of you as you try to use the astrogation equipment, or land the ship, or fix the engines, so if the expert is out of action, it's harder to get a bonus on your default by having the book in front of you.

True enough, but given the tradeoff is that - if I go with the 1/20th of a standard library's weight - a teensy little SM+6 ship can have a basic reference library for 70 skills that only weighs 875 lbs. Sure, it's not likely that a need will come up to read up on, say, Meteorology (Venusian-type planets), but having the reference material handy for just such rare needs seems worth the inconvenience of being tied to the reading machine. :)

Originally Posted by malloyd

If you are etching on silicon chips, you can go to the limits of photolithography

Local physics research took a sharp left turn somewhere around 1896, heading in the direction of weird edge-cases to be found with inertia and energy fields, instead of vacuum tubes and semiconductors; call it halfway between Heinlein and Lensman. Crystal radios and electromechanical relays are about as far in the direction of our own 20th-century computation as I want to get.

Originally Posted by johndallman

Those numbers are entirely compatible. Microfiche pages are pretty fragile, and needed to be stored in protective sleeves when I used them as a student, 40 years ago. If your memex is sealed to keep its interior very clean, you can do better than reducing storage volume to a twentieth of paper.

I expect that a lot of this ship's gear will make use of the 'ruggedized' option from 3e Vehicles (or whatever the 4e equivalent is), because said gear is going to be bumped around and occasionally half-disassembled to get parts to do interesting things to other pieces of gear. A clean-room environment, even inside the memex, would have to be assembled for a particular purpose instead of being assumed to be in place and intact.

Originally Posted by johndallman

Hopefully, you aren't using nitrate film aboard a spaceship? It's rather flammable for that.

I'm still trying to come up with ideas on how the local weird physics offers new options in chemistry, what with it being possible to effectively break relativity over one's knee and paddle it until it cries uncle, which implies all sorts of implications for quantum mechanics, and all. So far, I'm using TL2^ orichalcum armour as a stand-in for whatever weird processes can be applied towards improving simple material strength... next up I plan on looking into the potential explosive properties that might arise, given the existence of power plants with the stats of a TL5+2^ "ether furnace". (I'm also trying to see if the local technobabble could be adapted to describe an orgone-based power plant, though I'll probably setting for a renamed vacuum-energy plant instead.)

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by DataPacRat

I
I expect that a lot of this ship's gear will make use of the 'ruggedized' option from 3e Vehicles (or whatever the 4e equivalent is), )

That would be "Ruggedized". It's in HT and I think maybe UT also.

[RyanW]

To give one number from actual practice (from the National Postal Museum, as quoted by Wikipedia): "V-mail ensured that thousands of tons of shipping space could be reserved for war materials. The 37 mail bags required to carry 150,000 one-page letters could be replaced by a single mail sack. The weight of that same amount of mail was reduced dramatically from 2,575 pounds to a mere 45."

That's about 97.3% reduction in volume and about 98.3% in weight. There's some loss of detail that's fine for handwritten letters but might be unacceptable for images or dense text.