Flight Recorder

Skyphoforms were initially designed with scientific pursuits in mind. The data storage devices they used to store information for later perusal were known as 'flight recorders,' as most of them were capable of either gliding through the air or skillfully navigating the interiors of the spacecraft of their arcopel masters.

Mechanics & Inner Workings

A flight recorder can store sensor reading and reports just as any other digital storage media might. What makes skyphoform flight recorders different is that they can also store the complete sensoriate of the skyphofrom over a defined period of time. This sensory data takes up a lot of space and doesn't include the thoughts or 'inner monologue' of the skyphoform, but it can be annotated for later analysis. Though the storage space within a given flight recorder is limited, it is vast in comparison to similar devices found in the employ of other species - even the Cobalt Protectorate with their advanced human-like artificial intelligences and the Vbyifabid Family-Flock with their artificial immortality have difficulty achieving such a level of data density in their devices.
Flight recorders are sometimes left behind when skyphoforms perish or need some way of letting allies who might come after them know about some greater threat in an area. In these cases, the sheer volume of data contained and the alien nature of arcopel-derived technologies provide all the data security the skyphoforms require; cracking into a flight recorder requires a skyphoform or arcopel interface and the data would take similarly advanced technology to sift and interpret over a reasonable amount of time. Even so, the lack of serious encryption on flight recorders has proven a problem before in clashes between arcopel or, after their effective extinction in the galaxy, between orthodox skyphoforms and The Defected. For this reason, whenever physical skyphoforms are required to act as agents of The Substrate, any flight recorders they might use sacrifice some density in exchange for hard active encryption and self-destruct functionality.

Significance

A flight recorder is a solid, spherical object made of the dark, translucent blue composite material that characterized much of arcopel hardware from that era. These were typically either embedded in folds of the skyphoform host's body or, more often connected to the host via jellyfish-like wiring harnesses comprised of the same cloth-like material as the host's body. To the extent that the skyphoforms were allowed to have their own culture in the misty eras before the creation of the Matrioshka, flight recorders in their carriers and harnesses were often incorporated into one's individual aesthetic in a manner that suggested the otherwise biological pursuit of 'fashion.'

Item type

Electronic / Cybernetic

Rarity

Flight recorders were common devices across the late stellar empire of the arcopel, as skyphoform servants and the technology to produce them in-situ were present in every corner of that haughty species' domain. Though the arcopel are now functionally extinct, the skyphoforms still manufacture the devices for their own ends.

Dimensions

2"