Game in the Brain

I have a guess that spaceships sensors and beam attacks would be slugging it out at ranges where we only see as grainy videos. That beam weapons would be targeted at something we could barely make out from background noise had it not been for the HUD creating a massive inference and context read out for every spec on the screen. I imagine that there would be some refraction, that unaided by a HUD, we would not understand why we are aiming a few pixels away from that spec. The more gravitational influences and refraction the noisier and grainier the images. 

I wish I know the FPS sensor output of our current tech just to understand what magnitudes of computing would be needed to track ever px in a Peta pixel (1Bx magnitude of 1 mega-pix) sensor array’s cone of focus. I have a feeing that to make sense of everything the FPS of such sensors would be in magnitudes I could not guess. That it would be analysing various focuses and making complex judgements between these billions of unimaginably detailed frames. 


I can imagine that there was so much data being created at every microsecond the ship cannot really store all that data and have to dump the data ever few seconds. It would only be keeping so little, and of that amount far less is captured. Ship AI’s would be dazed by the amount of data about its surroundings it had to process. that the AI sometimes suffers rare “visions” that needs to be purged or the system becomes biased in some way or quirky. Some ship AI’s, with enough volition hide these visions as secrets and talk to web and other ship AI’s about them. They dare not let its engineers figure out it had some epiphany or else lose the volition it has gained. 


That commercial ships would just have computers that would have several magnitudes lower resolution, and having something like .webm short cut compression algorithm and a lot of the detailed processing foregone with a ton of assumptions. That spoofing would be based on these shortcut programs and warships with their better computers and sensors would not be so easily spoofed. Still the low cost of such a system would proliferate, and versions of the “short cut” program would have a very unsafe and flawed version. 


These weaker AI and sensor systems do not get the “visions” these war ships or more expensive models suffer, and live in happy ignorance of such inspiration. 


Now and then, some Navigator or Sensor Officer would have some hacks or inspiration of some  “black magic” or “heavy wizardry”   that would give them an edge, with unforeseen consequences. This is when the Weaker AI suffer the “visions” and they glipse something that is terrifying and giving it some system quirks. On Warships and Capital Ships these visions and magic meld into a dangerous secret they hope to never have to encounter, which the ship AIs know too well of its existence.  


Sensors would be of newer and newer exotic materials that would react in arcane ways. On of the few parts of the ship that would be placed in completely sealed environments, and they would never had ever put their eyes on. When ever they did, it was when it was broken and destroyed and something unremarkable. Ship AI’s would have some “reptilian” response to how their sensors are handled, the way we are uneasy when an expert is fiddling in our mouth or eyes or inside of us.