(12-09-2020, 08:04 AM)Hadron Wrote: Hi, I've been reading through various articles in the EA for months and I thought I should finally join the forums.
I do have one question. What is the prevalence of communication wormholes and how close can they get to planet surfaces? Are they common enough to be added to most large ships and habitats?
Second, I have low vision. Do any of the diagrams or charts have text descriptions somewhere?
Hi There - Welcome to OA!
Please feel free to join in on any ongoing conversations that grab your interest or start new ones if you wish.
And of course, if you have any questions about any aspect of the setting, please feel free to ask.
Speaking of which:
Communication wormholes are much more common than transport wormholes. They are found in many more developed systems, in systems or locations containing large scale or important installations of the archai, and linking the different nodes that make up portions of the brains of the archai. However, they are still comparatively rare in comparison to the total number of star systems or locations in the setting. The vast majority of star systems do not have a wormhole of any kind.
Spacecraft and habitats are almost never equipped with wormholes, although there are occasional exceptions, usually due to the ship or habitat being of some particular importance to the archai or the ruling archailect.
Communication wormholes are very massive for their size - see
HERE - but have vastly smaller 'flat space' requirements than a transport wormhole. Where a transport gate requires a region of 'asymptotically flat space-time' at least 327 Astronomical Units across (regardless of the size of the Throat and the size of the objects it can transport), a comm-gate only requires a region equal to 10,000 times its own radius. Because comm-gates are so small this means that their flat space requirements are generally measured in meters or less.
Because they mass about as much as a medium to large asteroid, comm-gates can get as close to a planet as a medium or large asteroid. So you could put one in orbit around a planet fairly easily and without significant side effects. However, you cannot put one on a planetary surface without fairly massive effort - and this would be a very dangerous thing to do since if the wormhole containment ever failed the hole would fall into the planet and quickly violate its flat space requirements leading to implosion. Although some archai do place wormholes inside their large main nodes in something like this situation. But presumably they have very good and redundant safety systems.
Regarding your question re diagrams and charts on the website. We don't currently have such descriptions, but could certainly create them. Please feel free to ask about any specific diagrams or charts you would like to have descriptions created for and we can make that happen with a bit of time. Since we haven't done that kind of thing before, we would probably also want to talk to you a bit about what such a description should look like so as to be most useful and effective.
Hope this helps and once again - Welcome to OA!
Todd
Just to echo Todd please do point out any charts you have difficulty with, we can certainly explain them and look to add captions.