Haydee Chronicles Technical Briefing

General Tech

Communications

Long-distance communication has long been one of the pillars that ties the galaxy together and the effective collapse of said during the close of the dawn age is just one factor that helped propagate the dusk age that followed. Most short-range communication - that covering a planet or immediate orbital space - is done via conventional electromagnetic or transpathic methods. It is uncommon to find an inhabited world that is not surrounded by some manner of chattering satellites and downright rare to not find one webbed with telegraph lines, psy-amp routes and gigabit optical cable. Where much of the difficulties lie is in interstellar communications. While courier ships flitting between the stars is simple and allows the secure transmission of massive amounts of data, it lacks delivery speed. To accomplish this, other techniques are used.

Farcasting

The oldest and most powerful method to send messages between stars is the farcast. This pushes a signal through the astra to a distant reciever, arriving (normally) almost instantly. Originally this would have been a wizard, but mechanical means of accomplishing this have been used since the dawn age. Various sizes and power outputs (and thus effective range) have been built, with the largest being giant installations the size and approximate appearance of radio telescopes. These large installations-sized farpulse generators (colloquially, FPGs) are necessary for the bandwidth, range and reliability demanded by interstellar governments, while smaller models such as those carried on warships had to sacrifice for portability.

Despite the utility of farcast communications, it has its own limitations. Firstly, there is only so much available bandwith, more comparable to a single home's internet connection than the massive network backbones used on planets. This can be stretched by using multiple transmitters, but rarely more than two or three can be used before signal interference becomes a significant problem. Secondly, large physical masses (like planets) tend to interfere with farcast transmissions, and consequently they are line-of-sight. Major worlds normally have multiple FPGs, tracking their target until they drip below the horizon and passing off communication duties to a partnered unit on the far side of the planet while they shift to a different target entirely, while less-important worlds generally make do with daily transmission windows. In this fashion, there is a constant but ever-shifting web of farcast links. Furthermore, like all teleportation, the use of FPGs tends to have energetic and often inconvenient side-effects, for this reason FPGs are generally placed away from anything they are likely to inadvertently interfere with. Spectacular clear-sky lightning is a common side-effect of heavy transmission or power loads.

The Vox Aurea

In the Northern Leaf, while almost all governments and even large organizations today have access to astral communication equipment, it has long been associated and dominated by the Vox Aurea (Golden Voice). The Vox Aurea has been the Northern Leaf's main provider of interstellar communication for almost five centuries, having arrived in this position by a slightly roundabout origin. Originally a Rutasan remnant enclave on the planet of Natal, by the time the rolling waystorms and shifting star ways that characterized the dusk age returned to a semblance of stability they had settled into coexistence with the others on their world and had made limited contact with other solar systems. One thing was clear; interstellar communication had been sorely degraded over the Long Night, devolving back to mage-operators relaying telegrams and courier ships for bulk data transfer. This might have remained an irrelevancy to the Natalan remnants while the rest of the accessible Northern Leaf eventually rediscovered old technologies, save for the unexpected request by one of the Santo Ouron merchant houses to purchase the ancient dawn-era farpulse generator on Natal for their own use. While the Rutasans had no interest in selling a relic of their heritage to people who had been enemies a few centuries before, it did spur interest in rediscovering and copying the techniques used in the farpulse generator.

Two decades of careful reverse-engineering saw the first new farpulse generators built in centuries. The Rutasans were unwilling to simply part with their rediscovered technology - indeed, they jealously guarded it - but after suitable concessions would transmit messages using it on behalf of others. Initially used to great profit by the merchant houses of Santo Ouro, within a century almost every inhabited world had a Vox Aurea-operated FPG installed. Within fairly short order the Vox Aurea enclaves began to follow a set pattern, one that remained essentially unchanged for the subsequent four centuries.

A typical Vox Aurean enclave is about 10 km on a side, with the FPG itself set in the center to provide a large exclusion area against unwanted side-emissions. Surrounding the FPG and associated hardware are Vox Aurean living space, offices and workshops, communal spaces, etc. Originally these were individual buildings, albeit ones hardened against astral transmission side-effects, but after the seizure of one enclave during the civil war on Heimar they were progressively fortified. Barracks for large security complements were added and large curtain walls were erected around all important structures, forming an unbroken ring of white ceramite plating around what were already small towns. Eventually, the various living and work spaces were merged with the curtain wall, resulting in the now-familiar conical protected ring of offices and living space. A few of the oldest enclaves still retain the original open concept plan. The concession lands surrounding a Vox Aurean enclave was often left mostly natural, though community gardens providing all manner of fresh fruit and vegetables were quite common. Some even took that to the logical conclusion and turned much of the enclave's concession lands into cultivated land, rendering the enclave reasonably self-sufficient in most necessities.

Some enclaves were built on celestial bodies, typically low-gravity rocky moons with little or no atmosphere. These typically buried as much of the habitation underground, with large recreation and agro-domes for the 'outside' experience. More importantly, as the deep-sky enclaves were more often than not in uninhabited systems and existed due to favorable transmission properties or to cover a particularly inconvenient leg of travel, they tended to soon acquire various services such as astromedical, refueling, spacer leisure and even wildcat mining support. Normally operated by third parties, these are typically be found in nearby craters out of direct line of sight of the enclave, 5-20 km distant and connected by cleared roads.

Ultrawave

While farcasting has many advantages, it unfortunately falls down greatly in terms of bandwidth and efficiency. Bulk communications - video, exoplanetary network updates, consumer messaging - generate vastly more data than any conceivable farcast scheme could manage. Instead, ultrawave is used, which propagates an electromagnetic wave on the boundary between the sidereal and the umbra. The advantages are several; equipment costs are vastly lower, it is much more energy efficient and available bandwidth is orders of magnitude larger. Unfortunately, ultrawave is dependant on the star ways and degrades much faster than farcasting. High-bandwidth ultracasts typically needs to be reboosted every few great leagues and, depending on star way connectedness, may go far out of their way compared to the direct route taken by a farcast.