Crossing uncharted tributaries
by Mingus Casey
Crossing uncharted tributaries
How the ansible would work
"Everyone thought it was just a crazy idea, would never be possible.
That was before they made the first worm-holes, just minute little dents in space time big enough to be percievable in real time a million million miles away. Just little rips in the fabric, only sustainable for a split second.
That was before the warp-gates, before we had enough energy to sustain the worm holes, back when the colony ships still relied on sub-light speed propulsion. It worked like morse-code, a brief blip-blap and an almost undetectable spark would happen so far away...
It took them a long time to be able to quickly recharge the capacitors, to repeat the process, even longer to be able to pick up the blips and respond.
This was far before we were sending whole ships through.
Like the flashing of a mirror to signal a ship at sea, but light wasn't fast enough to carry the flash anymore.
They saw the potential, even from Terra to Nix was over 5 hours by standard light speed, with the ansible you could send the information instantly.
The only bottle neck was the recharge time, while you could send tens of gigabytes of information to Nix with a five hour delay, you could only send a few words to Nix in real time. It wasn't practical for exploring our own solar system, but it became essential when we started with the real deep-spacers.
It's all ancient history now anyways..."