Westworld – the Phased Array

Published June 12, 2018 · Updated July 6, 2022

When Akecheta encountered the secret Delos
site that he called the Door, at its lowest
level we saw a large array of something that
big d speculated could be cooling towers or
data storage.

I’m writing to remind you that at the end of
Les Ecorches, Strand told one of his men,
“Prep the phased array. The moment we get
the key we’ll transmit our data to the
satellite.” A phased array is a
communications antenna capable of directing
(using constructive and destructive
interference) a radio signal primarily in a
single, tunable direction:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array

Although it’s possible Strand merely meant
portable comm hardware brought by the QA swat
team, I think we can’t rule out the
possibility that he meant to prep the array
we saw at the Door. The array at the Door
could be dry enough to be prepped, because QA
said at the beginning of the Akane No Mai
episode that they’d begun draining the valley.

If the array at the Door is a phased array
antenna, Delos could use it to backup massive
amounts of data to their corporate cloud.
For many years the data should have been
regularly transmitted in encrypted form to
the backup site to protect it against the
possibility of “incidents,” so the only data
that would now remain to be transmitted is
the Peter Abernathy decryption key.
Hollywood writers might not understand the
importance of offsite backups, though, so in
Westworld the data about the guests might
reside only at the Door and the phased array
system would be needed to transmit it.

I can think of one reason why the data would
never have been backed up offsite. Delos
could not risk its existence being revealed
to the public and, even though encrypted, its
massive size might have led people to start
asking unwanted questions about what it was.

–Steve

Subscribe Now