The Authorized Ender Companion (63 page)

Every concentric track has a single shuttle car (subway car) mounted to it. The wheels of the car are more like roller-coaster wheels—in that they grab onto the track top and bottom—than they are like actual subway or rail cars. When one of these cars is at rest, it is aligned with a default doorway on the side of the stationary core, and does not move on the track. Being stored on the tracks on the stationary core, there is no centripetal force (artificial gravity) to maintain the car’s position on the tracks or keep it from floating off, hence the wraparound wheels and the captured track.

When one of the call buttons is pressed on the Access Deck side, it activates a sequence of events to bring a shuttle car to that doorway:

1) The shot pins holding the shuttle car locked against the platform on the stationary side release.

2) The shuttle car’s electric linear motor is activated, and the car is accelerated up to the speed of the rotating platform (in this case, 18 m/s). Typical acceleration does not exceed 10 percent G, and it therefore takes approximately twenty seconds for the car to come up to speed.

3) The shuttle car aligns (synchronizes) its door system with the door system adjacent to the call button.

4) The shot pins on the moving platform engage the shuttle car. This makes sure that the car remains aligned to the doorway even in the event of power loss. The car, now synchronized with the ring, experiences the same centripetal gravity appropriate to that deck.

5) The corridor doors and then the shuttle’s doors open, allowing access. Passengers enter (or exit) the car.

6) Doors close, and the pattern is reversed.

7) As the car decelerates to match the speed of the stationary central core, it slowly loses the effect of centripetal gravity. Electro-synthetic
planar gravity generators built into the floor of the car activate and carefully blend the gravity of the Access Deck to that of the central core (typically kept at 100 percent Earth-normal gravity).

The shuttle cars, whether full or empty, represent a large rotating eccentric mass which might otherwise cause an imbalance on the fixed central core. The Battle School’s central computer uses the other cars in a given concentric group as moving counterweights to overcome this dynamic imbalance on the core.

FABRICATION OF THE BATTLE SCHOOL

Due to the sheer size of the Battle School—28 billion kilograms, or roughly 100,000 times the mass of the original International Space Station—it was by necessity constructed entirely in orbit. The volume of material required mandated that mining and smelting operations be established on the surface
of Earth’s moon. Due to the practical difficulties of manufacturing components in a zero-G (or micro-G) environment, much of the manufacturing for the elements of the Battle School and the ships of the International Fleet was also relegated to these lunar facilities. The amount of material required to build not only the Battle School, but the ships of the International Fleet, would have depleted Earth’s resources to the point of worldwide economic collapse. Further economic analyses showed that the cost of launching this material from Earth to orbit was on the order of ten times the cost to set up this lunar mining and manufacturing infrastructure. These lunar manufacturing stations were later employed in the fabrication of the large colony ships, intersystem commercial, corporate, satellites and exploratory vehicles, and similar space-based assets, leading to further amortization of the initial costs.

The facilities established on Earth’s moon were used to manufacture more than 92 percent of the structural components required for the Battle School, and a large percentage of the infrastructure and incidentals. After the discovery of copper deposits over 300 feet below the surface regolith, fully 97 percent of all ships’ electrical wiring was produced at these plants. The regolith itself was used to create the over 600 miles of optical fiber, used for signal transmission throughout the Battle School, as well as the thousands of miles of optical fiber used in the I.F.’s ships.

Linear accelerators constructed on the moon were used to throw these prefabricated components to the low-Earth orbit assembly site for the Battle School, where they saw final assembly. Due to the low gravity on the moon—and therefore the low escape velocity—items as large as 50 meters on a side (if properly supported) could be launched from the surface of the moon to low Earth orbit for final assembly.

FLASH SUITS

The term “flash suit” describes the collection of gear worn by a student at the Battle School when he or she is to be involved in a training session in one of the Battle Rooms. The flash suit consists of a helmet, a gauntlet-style flash gun, and the suit proper (the garment).

The flash suits—the garments worn by the students during their training in the Battle Rooms—are composed of interwoven fabric and third generation “Shape Memory Alloy” wires. These Nickel-Titanium-Tungsten wires—derived from a material known as “Nitonol” first developed in the 1960s—are able to remain highly flexible under normal conditions, but stiffen and hold whatever position they were in when a high-frequency voltage is applied across
them. This feature enables the flash suits to be “Frozen,” preventing further movement of the student wearing the suit when he suffers a simulated laser “hit.” The suits are divided into zones, so that a student may be partially frozen (legs only, arms only, one arm only, etc.) prior to becoming fully immobilized.

The suits are padded to protect the students against injury.

Long-range RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chips are also woven into the suit material at multiple locations. These chips allow the suits’ position and orientation to be tracked while it is within the confines of the Battle Room, as part of the overall tracking and targeting program used to identify which suit has been hit by which flash gun’s simulated laser burst. These RFID chips are also secreted in other items of clothing, and all may be tracked by sensors scattered around the Battle School itself.

The insignia of the various armies are permanently imprinted onto the fabric of the suits. These insignia and related decorative treatments wrap fully around the suits on the front, back, and sides. Typical use places the insignia centered on the student’s back, but other approaches have relied upon elaborate designs distributed across the overall suit, gauntlet, and helmet.

A lightweight helmet and visor are included in the flash suit configuration. The helmet provides for simple protection against collision with the walls of the Battle Room and with other students. A visor, described below, provides a controlled amount of tactical feedback deemed necessary to perform a particular training exercise. A small microphone and speaker are also provided in the helmet for two-way radio communication. Two small, high-powered speakers flanking the student’s mouth utilize destructive audio interference methods to block or muffle the speech of a student as penalty for being frozen. This is coupled with the temporary disabling of the student’s intercom system, thereby knocking a frozen student out of the communication loop with his army.

Each suit is equipped with a gauntlet-style flash gun that wraps around the student’s wrist, and provides a means to identify a target and simulate a shot fired against that target. The gauntlets are provided with multiple RFID chips to allow the sensor arrays built into the Battle Rooms to track position and orientation of the gauntlets accurately during gaming sessions. This motion-capture information is fed into the Battle Room’s control computers, cross-referenced with position and orientation information of the other students’ flash suits, and appropriate hits are logged when a simulated shot is fired. Secondary infrared LEDs built into the gauntlet allow the room computer to verify the strike through the use of infrared cameras mounted throughout the rooms.

The flash guns are also provided with a tightly focused, full-color Light Emitting Diode (LED), which allows a student to see what target he or she has “painted” prior to taking a simulated shot. The beams of these bright LEDs are not normally visible by the students in Battle Room sessions. This minimal information is supplemented by the virtual tactical display presented in the visors. The color of the LED is controlled by the room computer at the onset of a given game to provide different targeting colors for opposing teams. The four lights surrounding an army’s entrance gate are also coordinated with these colors.

The Gauntlets house the electronics required to communicate with the Battle Room control computer, to feed the visor display, and to freeze the suit itself. It also contains the rechargeable batteries needed for pistol, suit, and helmet operation. A palm switch attached to the gauntlet controls the firing trigger.

Each flash gun Gauntlet is a dedicated right- or left-handed unit, custom fit to the student through the use of simple low-temperature thermoforming methods.

When a flash suit is “struck” by a virtual laser shot, the Battle Room control computer logs the hit, and also responds by broadcasting a coded command to that suit’s specific unit address to freeze the struck portion of the suit. As more portions of the suit are stuck, additional commands are broadcast. The Hook may be used to initiate a “thaw” command to all flash suits, to flash suits from a particular army, or to individual suits. The Battle Room control computer can also be programmed at the administrator level to automatically thaw suits after a predetermined period of time, or follow some other programmed thawing protocol.

The helmet visors are made from a clear polycarbonate plastic embedded with transparent organic LED material to provide a stereoscopic heads-up display. Minimal tactical info (primarily simulated laser paths and hits) is provided to the soldiers within an army. Platoon leaders are provided with more tactical detail, and the commander of an army is provided with the greatest amount of tactical display data.

The displays embedded in the visors provide simulated “laser beans” to permit proper targeting by the students. However, the translucency of these virtual beams can be modified, and the beam images and their target images can also be disabled at the will of the observing officers or game administrator, based on the training needs of a particular session.

ANSIBLE

The ansible is the means of communication used by the International Fleet (I.F.) to communicate with its interplanetary and interstellar ships, the Command School, planetary colonies, and other space assets. It allows for instantaneous communication between transmitter and receiver, regardless of the distance between them. As such, it is considered to be a “faster-than-light” communication tool.

The ansible works by imposing a stream of digital information into a stream of “entangled photons.” The photons on the ansible transmitter are “entangled” (in a quantum sense) with a sister stream of photons housed within the receiver. A change in the spin-state of a photon in the first stream is indirectly read as a change in the spin-state of the entangled photon in the second stream.

The rate of transfer is the frequency, or “bandwidth” of the transmission. Low-bandwidth transmissions are suitable for simple texts. Higher bandwidths can provide radio and still-image communication. Transmission frequencies in the megahertz and greater ranges are capable of carrying both audio and video signals, or simply greater amounts of lower bandwidth data.

Two references to faster-than light communications that bear on the science of the ansible. The first reference, by John G. Cramer, was published in the December 1995 issue of
Analog Science Fiction & Fact Magazine
, and was titled “Tunneling through the Lightspeed Barrier.” In that article, Cramer describes tests performed in 1993 through 1994, where quantum tunneling of microwave radiation across an insulating gap led to calculated propagation speeds in excess of the speed of light. According to Cramer, a number of scientists took advantage of the quantum effect called “tunneling” to have a microwave signal jump across an insulator, which normally (assuming Newtonian mechanics) would have blocked the signal. When they measured the distance across the gap, and divided that distance by the time it took for the signal to jump the gap, they came up with speeds almost five times the speed of light.

The second article comes a lot closer to the functioning of the ansible. The article is from
The New York Times
, Tuesday, December 16, 1997, and is by Malcolm W. Browne. Titled “Physicists Report the ‘Impossible’: Tele-porting a Particle’s Properties,” it is about a phenomenon first described in the mid-1930s by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen. This phenomenon is called the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen correlation, and is more commonly known as “photon entanglement.” It is possible to create a pair of photons from a single
action (such as firing a pulse of ultraviolet light at a nonlinear crystal, as was done in 1997 in Innsbruck), and the pair of photons thus created are “entangled.”

When that one high-energy photon of ultraviolet light bombards the “nonlinear” crystal, two lower energy photons are emitted from the crystal. Because of the nature of the crystal, one of the emitted photons will be polarized in one direction (let’s say “vertically,” just to continue the discussion), and the second photon will be polarized in the other direction (horizontally, for instance). Because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, if you were to measure the state of one of the photons, you would lose other information about that photon.