[wilf leek]

Jamo - you are not thinking this through, you must have a luddite streak in you.

Instead of fiddling with a laptop whilst aquiring data and trying to drive at the same time, sending it up a satellite link to log it on a home PC via the internet would be much safer.
It is much the same thing as driving and using a mobile phone at the same time, obviously a very bad idea.

I reckon there is some mileage in this remote data-logging aspect.
Probably better mileage than I get, anyway.

Turk - I think you may find the RS232 interface has insufficient bandwith for these purposes, maybe USB2 might be the answer.
And we might have to go mil-spec on the on-board server, that might be sufficiently hardened against vibration and stray magnetic fields from the ICE.

Lets see where we go with this.