Ballistic Internet Interconnect

The internet is a tricky thing to consider in its entirety. On a basic level, you might have a GHz microwave WiFi connection to a local access point, that's connected by copper ethernet cable through a few switches and routers to a fiber optic connection. At some point, this goes through to the fiber optic backbone that spreads through major population centers. Because data moves through shared connections, it travels as packets with address information like some electronic equivalent of mail. The internet is discontinuous, unlike the traditional telephone system for example.

The discontinuity offers opportunities; a data packet can move by various means with diverse speed and bandwidth characteristics. Fiber optics are zippy, my ping time to NY is only ~4ms, even better is internet over HF, you can span the US at practically light speed. Sadly, reliability and bandwidth are dreadful. Currently, high-bandwidth internet requires costly and vulnerable fiber optics that must be laid underground.

One way to increase bandwidth is to increase the size of the data packet. More data for the same amount of routing/checking information. As illustrated by the quote, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway". Now, station wagons require drivers, oil changes and a highway/bathroom infrastructure. They also move at the speed of mail, and that idea has already been had <link>.

So, let's use artillery. A 155mm shell can fit a couple of petabytes using modern SSD densities. They average about 1mile/sec with a node to node rage of about 15miles, which is just fine for well-populated regions. The shells care not about roads, and artillery doctrine is so mature at this point, that all the creases caused by temperature, weather, etc. were ironed out decades ago. Artillery, if not automated can be controlled by labor of negligible quality.

The tricky part would be catching the shell, but with a little optimization, I reckon a shell could be aimed at a cone-shaped hole with some clever magnetic guidance/braking and read or re-packaged onward transmission. As an example, with a 20s write/read time I could get my 458gigs of imaging data to NY in <5 minutes. A vast improvement.

The military will love the system: they can build an ad-hoc network anywhere in the world with minimal infrastructure. Better yet, artillery shells in flight are very difficult to intercept by foreign nose-pokerinners. Especially if they want to look at the data without detection, with a little work, military engineers could build a layered system, perhaps using ICBMs with MIRV data heads as a high capacity backbone, or .50 cal rounds with USB-c plugs on the back for tactical comms.