A Scalable Open-Source Digital Video System for Launch Range Operations

Raging incrementalism [1] is a systems engineering methodology designed to capitalize on the force of hyperexponential change, the ongoing acceleration of overall technical progress. Numerous pivotal technologies are not only improving at an exponential pace, but the pace itself is accelerating [2], yielding hyperexponential improvement overall. In the large, the rate of technical progress is doubling every decade. Taking the 1990s as a nominal benchmark decade of technical progress then the first 25 years of the 21st century shall see the equivalent of 100 years of 1990s-like progress. By 2100 we will have experienced a period of change comparable to 20,000 years of unending 1990s technical progress. Change of this pace, sweep, and magnitude calls into question all of the accepted canons of system engineering and development. In response, raging incrementalism leverages commodity hardware, open-source software, stateless, protocol-centric transactions drawn from the design principles underlying the web [3], and peer-to-peer architectures to create scalable infrastructure that can easily absorb massive, ongoing change. It is one thing to propose or discuss a “style” or methodology of system engineering and quite another to put it to practice.1 To better understand the utility and consequences of raging incrementalism we are constructing a variety of complex applications, including two launch range services, a countdown and timing infrastructure (RACE, the RAnge Countdown Experiment) and a wide-area digital video system (RAVE, the RAnge Video Experiment). This paper offers a review of the development, architecture, and construction of RAVE.