Liner Notes for Piloting Unfamiliar Space
Liner Notes for my story Piloting Unfamiliar Space
It’s time to break some canon! Instantaneous communication across interstellar distances has not been a capability in this setting until now. It would, in fact, break the Deep Patrol as portrayed. The idea of the Patroller on the spot having the responsibility, and therefore the authority to act. A ship on its own, being on its own. The concept of the important thing being to get the information out, one which Gunn breaks all the time, if they can talk from star system to star system in real time, all that, the whole 19th century time and distance delay I’ve built this on, it all falls apart.
This though is the universe in the wake of the Wavefront. Anything can happen. Anything might have happened. We had dimensional gateways and portals. There are oracles, who can foresee the future, information breaking in from outside the local light cones. Action at a distance, spooky or otherwise.
I always thought Star Trek’s subspace communication across interstellar distances was a fix. It’s a short cut to get information from distant locations in time to resolve problems in one episode. Radio on ships exploring unknown seas, it breaks the analogy. We’re not age of sail explorers, we’re not twentieth century mariners. I guess that makes it interesting, a mix of transport and communication logistics almost unprecedented in history.
Which suggests a way forward. Not the fairly arbitrary limitations on subspace, interference or out of range (the analogy with radio again) that Star Trek uses when it needs to. Some interesting limits. Station to station, or rather across a network of fixed points. Off the network, we’re reduced to our usual speed of communication the courier ship. Also intermittent, information only travels at particular times. And in that case, let’s make it a burst, the data coming in one packet, then being decoded and sent to the destinations.
So you can send a message, but not get a response until the next time the network is online. Hence the situation we have here. Gunn and Naomi sent out the characteristics of the goddata to sell. Interested parties in other parts of the network composed their responses. And when it opened again, messages were sent and people acted. This is an interesting facility to play with for story purposes.
The introductory paragraph I intended to use more often; the titles of the segments so far are named to sound like manuals or instruction documents. And I might have written bits of those manuals. Mostly it didn’t seem to cast any light on events. This one did though.
The rest is short, self-explanatory I hope. Gunn and Naomi have hold of something, something valuable and dangerous. What next for them? What next for this story?
Maybe see what another character is up to.
Comments