"Even now nearly two thousand years after the TO discoveries of the Saturn 'tear' in 2166 and the FW platforms in their orbiting park beyond Pluto in 2171, certain aspects of both the 'tears' and the Platforms remain a total mystery. I should perhaps say that none of the space faring races that TO knowledge now encompasses have ever answered two fundamental questions: Who created these interfaces between Space and the Nth dimension, which the scientific fraternity have dubbed the dimension within the 'tears'. Secondly, when were they created?
Is it really possible, you may be forgiven for asking, that the combined intelligences of the extinct exoskeleton races that preceeded the extant skeletal races, like ourselves, that these questions remain unanswered after six and a half million years?
I will give you this morning a brief overview of what we do know in the hope that you'll be sufficiently encouraged to expand our knowledge.
The core design of all FW platforms, irrespective of their size, is the height to width to length (volume) ratio of 'n times n squared times n cubed' where n is a constant (within a few metres of) 1.5km. The basic shape of the design is also always the same - consisting of a rectangle, length and cross section, with an arrowhead beginning to emerge at 80% of the total length from the rectangulate end. A few exceptions do exist but they are all of the larger type. The drive compartments are always at the rectangulate end. I say irrespective of their size; but none of those in either TO, Arvrasindahl or Dzunoeskei hands have measurements less than 1.5 x 2.25 x 3.375 kilometres. The largest CCC platform is the truly awesome platform known as The Llama's Joke which is almost 9,000 kei-ems long! This however is dwarfed by Xertius, Ferksei and Dzantzei each of which measure almost 22,000 kei-ems. The vast majority of the platforms are the 1.5 series, the 3 series and the 4.5 series; each of these number in thousands. The 6 through to the 15 series are numbered in hundreds and tens respectively and any platform greater in size seems to have been a one off design model or a small production run, as none of them possess the arrowhead. There is a good reason for this, as I will shortly explain.
The interior design of the platforms basically follows the same guidelines. Irrespective of size there are 200 metre high levels divided into compartments at 300 metre intervals. The propulsion unit invariably occupies between two-fifths and and one-third of the total length. Bulkheads at a uniform 200 metre distance across the width of a platform seem to be designed to give rigidity and strength to the overall design. There is one known exception to this design - the tubular platform known as The Lama's Joke.
The purpose of the arrowhead wasn't understood till the UN Council of Members gave the green light to the races of the Diaspora to go through the Saturn 'tear'. At this point in time it was found that those large and thankfully few in number, larger than the 15 series Platforms that did not possess the arrowheads were unable to enter the 'tear'. While the 'tears' had been detailed in the archives found on the platforms the finer points of entry and egress were a mystery. The position and location of the 'tears' seem to be relatively static. Those that the Flat Worlders had located and mapped were still in position 300 millennia later.
While it transpired fairly quickly that they had not mapped all of them there was a variable that was difficult to foresee. While the 'tears' seem to be fixed to one location the contents of Space are forever on the move. The 'Melniss' tear was located according to the Flat Worlders at a distance of 43,000 km from the planet. It is now so close that it's necessary to enter the 'A' tear in reverse and engage the engines before exiting the 'B' tear near 'Melniss' - otherwise you crash into Melniss' atmosphere with the inevitable results. You may well laugh! I use Melniss as an example with good reason. The first wave of TO colonists on Melniss were stranded there through being ship-wrecked. It is also believed until proven otherwise that the binary star at H-K M had also moved to envelope a previously open space tear. And you all know what happened then!
Entry and egress of the 'tears', in the early decades, was a matter of trial and error. The final conclusion was that a solitary equation, given here in the most simplistic form, governed from which Destination Tear (Dt) egress would occur for four key variable factors.
Dt = D(+/- 1%) x {V(+/- 1%) x app (+/- 1%) x (r/cF}
D is Direction of approach, V is the velocity, app is the angle of approach in degrees off the vertical plane; r is the resistance weighting of the surface area and cF is the nominal value of the coeffieicent of friction for any object passing through a tear.
This was borne out by the discovery that the Arvrasindahl had come to the same conclusion by roughly the same methods. In this introductory lecture I will keep to the basics. All 'tears' are both entry points - Type 'A' and destinations - Type 'B'. All the 'tears' are interlinked. The Alliance know of more than half a million but since there is no discernible pattern to their distribution it is impossible to estimate their precise total. By and large no more than 8% are in regular use. About a third of these are in Akkaidiiz controlled territory and another third are deemed unsafe to use because they're either in the proximity of super-novas or black-holes or the Empty Crescents. The Direction of approach is as important as the angle of approach as these examples will show. The 'tear' in the proximity of The Llama's Joke is linked to 423 safe destination tears. A 3 series of Mass T2 travelling at 70 kei-ems per second entering at angle of 3 degrees off the vertical will come out at Jonti 2. A 4.5 series travelling at the same speed and angle of approach will come out at Saveyerde. If the 3 series enters at 3 degrees off the vertical but its entry speed is reduced to 69 kei-ems per second it comes out at Saveyerde. If the same variables of angle and speed are applied to a 4.5 series of Mass T2, which is just possible if it is not carrying any cargo, the exit points are either Plutarch or Witness. This leads to another of the platforms mysteries -
The Mass Counters.
There has to be a practical theory for the calculation of the mass value of a given body in a weightless environment. The correct mass value is so critical that of all the variables its not permitted to have any upper or lower parameters. Just how critical is it? Let me give you two examples: First. The FW counters show fourteen decimal places. Secondly. We don't know what unit of measurement the FWs used for calculating mass. We do know that the Mass Counter is active all the way through an approach into a tear until the last tenth of a second because the platforms are expending energy through the engine drives. At Entry minus 10.75 seconds the drives automatically disconnect and at minus 3.16 the Mass Counter holds for 3.15 seconds. The mass value at that particular period is what determines your Dt.
Two final points need to be remembered about using the tears.
First, the value of V on the approach remains constant at egress. Entry at 50 kei-ems per second means egress at 50 kei-ems per second. Entry accelerating at 50 kei-ems per second per second means egress at the same speed and acceleration. The same applies to de-acceleration. The distance between a Platform entering a tear being pursued by a faster Platform will be the same at egress irrespective of the duration of the jump. Jump durations do not change. Nevertheless a variable factor does lie between tear 'A' and tear 'B' and provides a perfect example of the strangeness of the Nth dimension.
None of the instrumentation on the Platforms perform accurately if at all in the Nth dimension. It is impossible to calculate speed, velocity or time or distance. Speeds up to 150 kei-ems per second do not have an adverse effect on biological entities at the molecular level. Speeds in excess of 300 kei-ems per sec for durations of longer than a few minutes (the duration is dependent on body weight to mass ratio) is fatal for living biological entities and causes rapid decomposition in dead ones. SFC bars speeds in excess of 120 kei-ems per second for personnel and live-stock Platforms, for safety reasons.
The Flat Worlders located and marked with warning beacons the three known 'tear spheres'. They also recorded every upper limit of the variable factors that are used to calculate your Dt from any of their known tears that enable Platform Navigators to avoid passing through them. Entry into a sphere seems to require egress through the diametrically opposed tear. Why is this so dangerous?
Before SFC was able to copy the Dzuneskei 'barrier-system' that prevent the Navigators or Commanders of biological entity carriers from inadvertantly using parameters that will take them through any one of the three spheres a baker's dozen of known Commanders made fatal errors. I will mention the use of vomit bags later on in this address. I will mention them now should you ever be required to enter a biological entity carrier Platform that has passed through one of the spheres. Gases expand to infite. Everything explodes down to the molecular level. Need I say more? The reason is simple and unavoidable. The three spheres have diameters of 1.9 billion, 2.8 billion and 4.6 billion kei-ems. In order to pass through one of the spheres a Platform must be travelling in excess 190 kei-ems per second or have a mass count of T7 or above. Platforms below either of these parameters do not pass through the spheres. The 9 and 12 series Platforms are perfectly capable of acheiving mass counts of T13 and those fourteen fatal errors that I have just mentioned all involved Platforms from these two series. The Nth dimension adjusts the rate of acceleration or de-acceleration by a factor of 7. The Nth dimension will ratchet up an entry speed of 190 kei-ems per second 1330 kei-ems per second. At this speed the Platform will take sixteen and a half days to pass through the smallest of the spheres. At this speed all the biological entities will be smeared over the compartment surfaces within the initial 15 seconds of their passage through the sphere.
Secondly, and on a less bloody note, it is theoretically possible to use as an exit any one of the fifteen thousand absolutely safe tears. The tables that you all have in your info-cards show all the necessary variables for a selection of twelve tears for a range of platforms across the sizes that can negotiate the tears. The tables are sorted in order of ascendancy for the value of Velocity. You will notice that only about fifty per cent of the destination tears are accessible for a V value of less than 140kei-ems per second. Values above this level are difficult to maintain at a constant in the larger vessels and are impractical in the 9 series and bigger since a distance in excess of fifty-thousand km is necessary to reach the required speed for an approach and the same to slow down on egress.
Fortunately all the relevant equations have been worked out for all the known destination tears. Still none of the space-faring species is sure of the exact measurements of a 'tear' in its normal state. We know only, also from the trial and error method that any thing bigger than the 15 series passes by every tear as if it wasn't there. Also anything larger than a 9 series cannot enter a tear in reverse. Remarkable but true. Based on this knowledge and the observation that the prows of platforms are almost needle-like given their size - none possess a radius greater than 50 metres - its a logical conclusion that the tears, in a pre-entry or pre-exit state possess a radius of no less than 50 metres and no more than between 15,000 meters.
So everyone here has two thoughts. First if this is what we know why do so many platform commanders find it almost impossible to achieve a first attempt transfer? The answer lies in the problem of Direction of approach. It is not a case of being unable to precisely define a course within dead reckoning but a case of not truly understanding the shape of the tears.
If the tears were simple three-dimensional portals there would not be a problem. Nevertheless that was how they were initially theorised, a perception that was made concrete with First Contact when the two fleets collided. Although D was known to be critical at the time, it was accepted that the tears acted as two-way portals but were in their turn subject to solar winds which turned them on their horizontal and vertical axes by minimal but critical degrees. A relatively recent experiment, in 3037, has begun to reveal the nature of a tear's shape. The insistence of a former student of this College, to conduct a research study from the control bridge of a Platform aproaching a safe tear from within the Nth dimension, in The Keck Empty Quarter changed that perception. Ago Nikkinen had persuaded the Captain to allow him to try and record a sonar image of a tear. With entry at minus 126 seconds, the sonar recorder went absolutely crazy with activity at the tear. It was too late to abort entry. With entry at minus 2.3 seconds the sonar went blank. Painstaking analysis of the recording of a subsequently normal egress enabled Nikkinen to conclude that there were between one and two thousand su'do' cavorting around the tear.
What they were doing was only revealed through the continued communication between Manitoba y Fuentes and the su'do' TGR2. The su'do' can do what no other species has ever achieved - changing direction inside the tears.
Su'do' never produce anything less than a score or more splits at any one time and only split after having entered a tear. This is apparently because the splits are, by and large, highly dependent whilst the parent split wants nothing more than a lot of peace for some serious thinking. If the split occurs in open space, the pups will simply follow the parent. Splitting inside the tears allows the parent to exit by one tear having sent the pups to exit by tears as distant and safe as possible! The bark of every split is unique. TGR2 identified the cavorting splits as belonging to one of the most unusual su'do', Darkening Star. This su'do' once lost all its new splits. They are either still within the tears or all exited into black-holes which are the sole entity in space that they do their utmost to avoid. As a result Darkening Star has formed into a huge collective of su'do'. This is not Darkening Star's sole eccentricity. The Darkening Star collective was playing a game of 'su'do' tag' around that tear.
Nikkinen to create a digital image of every second of the recording which when played back produced something that platform Captains consider their worst nightmare should the su'do' ever gain solidty.
Now this hologram depicts the sort of mirrored light globe beneath which most of you will spend Saturday nights socialising. This example has over two hundred facets. But this version, as you can all hopefully see, is encased in pyramidal structures of eight triangles. Nikkinen deduced that this is a safety design feature of the tears. There is afterall no way of knowing when you enter a tear if one or more ships have chosen to exit via the same destination tear from different entry points or as in First Contact whether one or more ships is going to exit as you go in. Extremely fine analysis of entry and exit angles has shown that there is always a difference of degrees (plus or minus .0001%). This means that your exit point is never diametrically opposite your entry point. The odds of two groups using the same angles for exit and entry are, therefore, so remote as to be almost infinite. Yet it happened at First Contact.
I would suggest you all to remember that point. But I will also advise that if it becomes a concern of yours, the Faculty Board asks you please take it to Theology, Philosophy or Alternative Studies? This is the Physics Department!
Your second thought is that if there are so many tears why didn't the Akkaidiiz ensure that we didn't become a threat before we reached a space technology level? The old theory was that our home-planet Earth was simply too distant for them to feel any concern. A V value in excess of 300 kei-ems per second is necessary to enter the Saturn tear to egress anywhere in Akkaidiiz territory and that is not a speed that any species has yet achieved without killing all life forms aboard their platforms. This means that its necessary to make approximately 5 jumps and its the travel time between the jumps that are most dangerous if you are travelling through hostile territory. That was the old theory debunked by the Dzunoeskei. They decided after the problems they had with Akkaidiiz interference in their own process of development that they would seek out and shield other branches of the same 'tree' as theirs. The Dzunoeskei have very definite records of regular attempts by the Akkaidiiz to visit our home-planet; attempts that were discouraged by the Dzunoeskei's usual display of ferocity. I am leaving the matter of the platforms' propulsion fuel to my colleagues in Chemistry who will reveal to you that most us wouldn't have a clue to what's going on without TGR2. But I am going to take a little time to give you a brief explanation of the 'wey-wah' and its effect on time-lines.
"wey-wah" OR "wah-hey!"
OK. Originally the exclamation of newcomers to the experience, usually under the influence of several 'Space Highballs'. The Central Command Council, (ei.kei.ei the Praesidium), later decreed that something that had such an important impact on its activities should have a more serious sounding title that was still recognisable. Pure gobbeldy-gook! Call it what you like, but it's there.
Communication between geostationery platforms, The Llama's Joke for example, and the colonies is real old fashioned snail-mail. When the initial waves of colonists set out on their explorations in the last decade of the 22nd Century there was no way of knowing when any form of message would ever be returned. New America, the first colonised planet was not heard from for 109 years. Jonti holds the record at 183 years. This time-frame is important because it meant that mainstream society and that included the CCC was unaware of the two unnerving aspects of the wey-wah for almost half a millennia.
What lies between the tears is not Space as we know it. Novices to the wey-wah are advised 'it's better under the influence to dream than to stay awake and scream'. The many text-recorded accounts from the early waves of colonists sound like drug induced hallucinations.
The apparitions appear at any minute of any hour. They are so lifelike! A cavalcade of mounted men may traverse your cabin, a figure wearing outlandish attire may walk through you from behind, or a devilish beast all fiercesome teeth and bristles may appear out of a wall charging at you! They are mostly fleeting, these visions. But occasionally you may awake and find a cloaked figure watching you intently through the porthole! The portals are digitalised virtual realities, for God's sake! The scariest part is that they all behave as if they can see you too! The people and the beasts.
Text recordings are difficult to substantiate except that very few of the colonists did not experience the visions. Jump forwards to the middle of the 25th Century. The Council is experimenting with motion activated cameras in Navy vessels. The images captured are so startling that image recording equipment has since been fitted to all Allaince platforms. If you're interested you should visit the Llas' collection where they have categorised and collated some three hundred thousand recordings.
The largest category in the Llas collection consists of images that can be directly linked to geographical features of a planet in a historical context. Since some of these features are shown before they ceased to exist, the island of Santorini before the 1650 BCE volcanic eruption is a prime example, theorists have suggested that some of the unrecognisable images may be from the future. Your professors in the History and Archelology departments assure me there are many indicators of historical dates. They use fashion, technology and architecture where they can. Most of the visions, in the order of 95%, are fleeting - lasting between three and five seconds. There are two of quite extraordinary in length and detail that seem to have a link. One is recognised to be the 5th Century BCE TO battle of Thermopylae. Although this recording was made with just one camera, there are in the 1536 hours of recording sixteen different versions from different viewpoints. If you chose to view any part of it you are advised to accept the offer of a vomit bag as this is most definitely not a staged re-enactment. Just be grateful that none of the wey-wah visions are accompanied by sound. The other is exactly half as long but seen, this time is recorded on twelve cameras. The action appears to be pre-battle preparations of two sizeable armies from a Bronze Age culture. The location is unrecognisable. There are similarities between the fashions and weaponry visible in the two sequences. These similarities are covered in the Species Commonalities v Anomalies course given by a conjunction between Archelogy and Anthropolgy. The link that you shall be investigating in Week 19 of this course is that both visions were recorded between the Marchmont and Segudo tears. (There is a TO convention to refer to tears in alphabetical sequence - to M from S, from M to S.)
Thermopylae was recorded in 2580 on a jump Marchmont --> Segudo and what has become known as Battle Rites was recorded on a jump Marchmont --> Segudo in 2584. There is
no mention of either being seen before in the Texts archives and neither event has been seen or recorded in full since those two dates. And no. There aren't any plausible explanations. Though you may wish to draw your own conclusions after listening to the next section about the effect of the wey-wah on time-lines.
Concerns over the snail pace of communications across the vast emptiness of Space caused the Central Communications Council to investigate the best possible use of the tears as a communication channel. They could simply have asked either of our Allies since the conclusions they came to mirror both the Arvrasindahl's and the Dzunoeskei's. Each species uses, for non-military communication, fleets of unmanned 3 series as the modern equivalent of a carrier-pigeon.
Please note the following! The Dzunoeskei realtime simultaneous data transfer communication system - codenamed Tandreš - adapted for Alliance High Command use remains on the secret list. Ergo you will not receive any instruction in Tandreš until you reach Flag Rank in the Armed Forces.
So. Back to the carrier-pigeons. The platforms can and do achieve speeds in excess of 400kms but this is only when carrying non-biological materiel. We, just as the Arvrasindahl and the Dzunoeskei, discovered the continuous use of a 'carrier-pigeon' revealed something very odd about the wey-wah which was directly related to the synchronicity of time. As everyone knows there is a clear relationship between down-time and the longevity of productivity for
life and machines.
Make a mental jump please back to home-world Earth. The difference between production-time and down-time was the natural sequence of day and night. It is from Earth that we have kept the 365/52/12/7/24/60/60 sequence. That sequence was maintained as a universal standard until 2336 when the first message returned from New America to CCC revealed that the colony was living under a different time schedule. Their sequence of 450/50/10/9/32/60/60 was governed just as Earth's was by the rotation of the planet around the sun and the rotation of the planet. Direct synchronicity was simply not practical. This is why every colonised world possesses two calendars - one for Government which maintains the UTS and the other for their own colonial local time standard (LTS). There are now 48 TO worlds. Each has its own LTS. We shall not, at this moment, involve the Time Standards of the Arvrasindahl or the Dzunoeskei as they immeasurably complicate matters. So we have two basic Time Standards - Universal and Local Colonial. The wey-wah added a factor of influence that did not behave in a progressive manner and ultimately led to the Wey-Wah Statute being approved and adopted in 2368.
It would be natural to surmise that if you sent a carrier-pigeon on an outward journey of 4 UTS days, a down-time of 2 days and a return journey of 4 days that the carrier-pigeon would return on the ninth day after it departed. These are the scheduled journey times between Jokers and Llas. So if it was sent out on the 1st day of March it would return on the 10th day. What actually happens defies the logics of the maths involved.
This university has been sending the same three 3 series carrier-pigeons to Llama's Joke on the first day of each month (LTS) since the year 2354. In addition to the dated information each carrier is supposed to carry, there is an array of chronometers ranging from the spring-wound and the battery powered to the atomic powered. The chronometers are all synchronised to our LTS. These three carrier-pigeons have been named Faith, Hope and Charity for identification purposes. They are sent out at eight-zero (eighty) hour intervals so they should arrive at either end at eight-zero hour intervals since only one jump is required. 4 days is the average time it takes a carrier pigeon to make the journey. There have however been remarkable differences.
It takes approximately 18 hours for a carrier pigeon to reach the tear at either end of the journey so we should be able to account for at least 36 hours on a single mail-shot. There have been numerous occasions when any one of the three has returned either ahead of schedule or behind schedule by a matter of hours and minutes. On those occasions the differences between the chronometers stated time and the arrival time was arguably acceptable because the wey-wah affects all the chronomters in different ways. It was the accidental inclusion of a CCC internal Tier-to-Tier time-stamped message in 2266 that attracted everyone's attention.
This was a one-way mail-shot for those of you rapidly computing the expected time schedule.
The printed time of the stamp, that is when the envelope was received put into the cargo container showed J2366.11.6.13.56.UTS.
The chronometers all indicated a journey time of between sixteen and eighteen hours.
CCC confirmed that this particular carrier-pigeon, Hope, had departed Jokers at J2366.11.6.18.35UTS.
Hope's absolute best time between The Lama's Joke and Jokers' tear was when not carrying any cargo at maximum thrust. On that occasion Hope managed a time of 18 hours, 7 minutes and 32 seconds.
The subsequent investigation revealed a programming error in the repetition Dt parameter values. Hope had entered Joker's tear at a V value of 407 kei-ems per second which had taken the Platform through one of the tear spheres.
The next part is difficult for me to understand let alone explain. The irrevocable fact is that Hope arrived back at Llas's orbital station before she was due to enter Joker's tear.
The inference was quite clear. Living organisms, not for example mechanical ones, could have their life-times either lengthened or shortened by the wey-wah. While all of you should have heard of the time-whorls I doubt that anyone has ever given you a satisfactory explanation. Well .... you won't be getting one from me. The Dzunoeskei announced their existence based on their research that was in turn based on Ferranti archives.
When we finish today go and get a mug of kovii. stir it and pour some cream in. The cream will swirl. A time-related swirl is called a whorl. It will begin to lengthen, then expand and finally dissipate. The Dzunoeskei believe that time behaves the same as the cream.
The concept might explain why the wey-wah's effect isn't constant for any given space between tears. Gain time, lose time. But the records for the Llas' three carrier-pigeons irrefutably define an overall loss which in biological terms equates to a lengthening of the life-span. And that my frinds is all you are ever going to get from me!
Once the urgent necessity to find colonies for TOs stranded in space after the Diaspora had ended, most of the FW platforms were commandeered by the Government for use as either military vehicles in the conflict against the Akkaidiiz or for trade and communications. All TOs who spend their lives in Space according to the Wey-wah Statute live in UTS. The Wey-wah Statute of 2368 applied to all TOs whose lives were intricately entwined in the wey-wah. These included the roving space clans who live permanently aboard their platforms, the crews of merchant and military platforms and the personnel of the Armed Forces. If anyone doubts the potential tragic consequences of the wey-wah effect on TO life-lines you only need to read "The Tragedy of Prenter Challis the Fourteenth". That is biographical, not fiction. The wey-wah effect caused that family to alter the line of descent from the eldest child to any child born where one parent had never ventured onto the wey-wah in a permanent capacity.
You all came here on the way-wah so let me set your minds at rest. Exemptions from the Wey-wah Statute include anyone who spends at least 47 UTS weeks on planet after 'tear' journeys of less than 10 days. This probably explains the length of the annual Llas study period to you. This also seems to be the case for the rather disturbing affect on TO reproduction. The detrimental effect will, I assure you, dissipate over time.
That's it for the day.
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