They want to make big enough to seem a real National Park.
Certainly impact the hunters that use the property behind the base.
May increase the hunting on base (more things coming up out of the swamp).
You only need to deal with EBCDIC if you have an IBM mainframe. And need to transfer to a normal computer.
Gray Code (or is it Grey Code) is for sensor data, where you want values to change only one bit at a time to avoid spurious values (such as a wind vane).