There is no "uplink", eg transmission of data from the client back to the satellite.
stom
Not a bad book, he even managed to resist inserting a weird sexual-side-plot into this one!
Curious to see what style they've gone with for the spider aliens, and how they'll handle the large chunks of narrator exposition which explain what the hell is going on without just having him talk to himself all the time
trust the lighting would work in a life-like manner
Ah we've had raytracing for a long time already, and you can download something like Blender and play around with it yourself. You'll quickly discover that just because it conforms to some real-world principles (and works in a reliable manner) doesn't mean it's a magic tool that Just Works and immediately makes anything look good.
You still have to setup your world lighting (point/sun lights, skyboxes, emissive materials, whatever), adjust it to get the look you want, and your hardware requirement for testing this are now increased.
Raytracing is nice because it can make things look even better, not because it replaces parts of the workflow.
There is absolutely nothing about raytracing which makes it "easier" for devs compared to a traditional render pipeline.
The extra performance rquirements alone mean you're going to be doing more work elsewhere to make up for it, and that's ignoring the current bugs/quirks with RT in whatever engine you're using.
You're inferring a tone where there isn't one.
I was asking if this is a common misconception as I had assumed the userbase here was generally pretty tech savvy, and confusing GPS with internet seemed particularly strange.