This account by Silverius was originally posted to to Sergio's longstanding forum in GoKrida, told from the point of view of the people of Red Catastrophe, minor souls who think of major souls as gods. The narrative discusses the environment, culture, and government of this imagined planet, including stories and rules for games. Some of the details were inspired by events and discoveries in GoKrida, while others must have been inspired by Silverius' other interests. The GoKridan planet Red Catastrophe Earth, commonly known as Legendary Red Catastrophe, was named in honor of this tale.
Communication
There are four systems for long range communication used on Red Catastrophe. The first is telepathy. This allows fast and secure communication but is rarely used as communicating telepaths must know eachother, telepaths are rare and a single telepathic communication is so exhausting that the telepath has to take a large nap to recover from it again. The military is the only organization that uses telepaths on a regular basis as for some messages no alternative is fast and secure enough.
Homing pidgeons provide a slower and less secure alternative. As homing pidgeons always try to fly home they can be used as a one-time transportational mechanism for short messages. Periodically the pidgeons are of course taken back to their normal base, away from home, to reuse them. Homing pidgeons are especially used by the military as they can connect smaller bases in less accessible regions with the larger bases.
The flash towers are an often faster alternative for short messages. Flash towers are hexagonal towers with at the top on six sides windows with a blinding mechanism before them. Behind the windows are large mirrors that reflect the sunlight coming in through the roof. The towers are arranged across the land in a triagonal pattern so that each tower can communicate with six others using light signals. To prevent a tower from seeing the light from the wrong window of another tower six large wooden "wings" extent vertically from the tower at window height.
Flash communication is unreliable with regard to the time in which a message arrives due to the influence of clouds but if a message arrives there's little chance of errors being introduced along the way. This is accomplished by using an error-detecting communication system.
The communication system of flash towers is based on the length of flashes, short and long. With the short and long flashes many different codes can be transmitted using multiple encodings. In normal use there are only two encodings: text and code (encrypted messages). The text encoding is based on a system where more common characters have shorter codes. The code encoding uses a fixed length of 8 flashes for each character. The eight flash is not data however but parity, if there is an even number of long flashes the parity is short and if there is an odd number it's long.
Two sequences have been reserved for communication control. These are long-long-long (LLL) and short-short-short (SSS). LLL is used to signal the start of the message, it's followed by a single short for a text message and a long-short combination for code. SSS is the end-of-chunk indicator, after it's send a four flash parity code is transmitted, this parity code is the number of longs in the chunk modulo 16. The other side is expected to react to the parity with either a short for OK, a long-short for repeat previous chunk and a long-long-short for repeat entire message. When the message ends a SSS is send as a chunk of it's own and the sending side waits for a short to signal that it can send again or a long to signal that a message will be send to it (this long is usually the first of the long-long-long start sequence).
Flash communication is less prone to traffic jams than other communication methods due to the routing principle. All operators of a tower sit in one room and know the backlog of other operators. When an operator sees a large backlog and has an open channel (no communication) that goes in approximately the right direction he or she will transmit the message instead. This allows routing around busy channels. In the event that the destination is really busy a message can sometimes be rerouted around the destination until it comes back to an operator that has rerouted it before and who will stop the rerouting loop.
Finally there is the good old postal system. When someone wants to post a letter he or she waits until the mailman comes by and gives the letter to the mailman together with the required fee. The mailman then takes the letter to the local post office. The local office checks if everything is correct with the letters and puts the letters and the fees in a bag (excluding local letters). The bag is picked up once a day by a Rega who takes it to the regional post office. The regional offices split the letters by destination and put them into big bags that are transported to other regional offices by Whita's. The letters then go from regional to local and from local to the recipient.
Comments
Leave a comment.