The Authorized Ender Companion

by Black, Jake

  If not carefully controlled in this manner, a weaponized C/O sphere may still behave as if it is a star-drive and accelerate away from its target without warning, and with an unpredictable acceleration vector. While this error typically still results in the destruction of the intended target, the collateral damage created by such an uncontrolled runaway is often equally devastating.

  ECSTATIC SHIELDS

  Modifications to the strength and field orientation of the Cleaver/Obousy sphere (its ability to shift the disassociated particles on its surface rapidly to a “trailing edge”) allow it to be used as a protective shield, without the creation of movement for itself and the ship that contains its generator and—more importantly—without the runaway energy conversion, storage, and feedback that makes it an aggressively destructive offensive weapon. This defensive application is typically referred to as an “Ecstatic Shield,” which is believed to be a colloquial derivative of the etymologically more correct “Static Shield.” Paralleling the development life cycle of the Molecular Detachment Device, the Ecstatic Shields were originally generated in a purely symmetrical sphere about a central generator. Eventual improvements in technology allowed them to be projected asymmetrically from their generators. Current state of the art still requires the generators to be within the Ecstatic field, though they are no longer required to be at the geometric center of the sphere. Some experiments have been able to project the field away from the generator, but critical issues regarding field stability cause the fields to collapse rapidly.

  BATTLE ROOMS

  After the first invasion of Earth by the Formics, and before the establishment of the International Fleet, the political and military minds of the Earth’s leading nations realized that they needed a way to train a new type of military mind. They realized that all of their Earth-centric training regimens were, in one way or another, simply two-dimensional strategic games. Even aircraft and submarine battles at most extended into “2-1/2” dimensional strategies. There would be a primarily flat playing field, with the slight addition of limited vertical motion. They realized that in deep space battles—even in battles surrounding planetary systems—a new way of thinking and fighting would be required. A true three-dimensional approach was required.

  This need led to the development of the Battle Rooms—large, zero-gravity environments that were free of the up/down “vertical” orientations imposed by operations on or near the surface of the Earth. The first Battle Rooms were freestanding buildings built on the surface of the Earth. They relied on the use of the recently improved planar gravity generators to locally nullify Earth’s constant gravity. Due to what was considered the entrenched 2D mind-set of the current military at the time, the decision was made to train students who were of pre-secondary-school age.

  These first Battle Rooms were built as fully functioning prototypes. They allowed a trial-and-error approach to the development of three-dimensional strategies for use in large-scale planetary and deep-space military operations, as well as the design and implementation of the practical aspects necessary to achieve those training goals.

  The initial designs of the Battle Rooms modeled the wall dimensions at 100 meters (m) to a side (roughly 330 feet). Due to Earth-bound construction limitations at the time, these early Battle Rooms were instead built with their interior walls at 75m on a side (just under 250 feet). After extensive use, it was determined that 75m cubes provided more than sufficient room for the proper training of the young strategists. The larger design had almost twice the airflow requirement and would have required huge structural trusses to support the longer spans of the walls. Once the 75m walls “proved themselves” (in essence, were “battle tested”), the design settled in.

  The “Stars” were first developed with these land-based systems. The early models were approximately 1/4m to 1m per side, and were built in various geometric shapes such as spheres, tetrahedra, etc. As the realization that the best way to utilize the Battle Rooms grew from hand-to-hand training to the larger planetary and deep-space theaters, the Stars changed from their original, “personal” sized units to the large, gravity-suspended, padded cubes currently used. The majority of the Stars are approximately 3m on a side, and all possess recessed handholds on all six of their faces. These handholds allow soldiers to hold on to, push off from, and reorient themselves as they pass by or lock on to a Star.

  The Stars are held in position by local volumetric modifications to the electronically generated gravity fields. Because the positions of the Stars are maintained by these pseudogravitational forces (as opposed to rigid structural connections), the force of a student/soldier landing on or bouncing off a Star—if unopposed—could cause it to change position within the Battle Room. Radio-linked position sensors within the Stars report their positions back to the room control computers fifty times/second, and the projected gravity field adjusts itself though servo-control electronics to maintain each Star’s position and orientation to within a highly accurate 5 millimeters (<0.1°). The Star’s large mass (nominally 500 to 1,000 kilograms) allows sufficient resistive forces to be generated by the electro-synthetic gravity to keep the Stars in position against the impact loads of multiple students.

  Stars are stored within the walls of the Battle Rooms. Large padded panels unlock and swing into the Battle Room to provide access to sizeable storage regions behind.

  The “Hook” was developed as a means of modifying the generated gravity fields to allow for safe, controlled movement of the players within the volume of the Battle Rooms. Typically, a Hook is provided to the captain of each army during a skirmish, and “enabled” only at the close of the battle. It permits the captains to retrieve soldiers from free-floating positions at the center of the volume, and direct them with a controlled force vector toward a nearby wall, gate, or handhold.

  The Hook does not manipulate the generated gravity fields directly. It sends commands to the room control computer, which controls the generator/focus system, which in turn relaxes or increases volumetric gravity gradients. This modification of the gravity gradients causes tightly controlled force vectors to accelerate the target masses in the desired directions. A laser-targeting system built into the Hook allows the user to “paint” his target, and the control computer for the room’s gravity generator system calculates the location in space of the targeted origin and destination points, and directs the field modifications to those volumetric regions. Programmed buttons on the Hook’s control screen permit large-scale behaviors to be easily triggered (such as moving all players to an adjacent wall, all players to adjacent gates, etc.).

  The Hook also controls the thawing of the flash suits in a similar manner. It broadcasts a request to the room control computer, which in turn drops the active broadcast of the suit immobilization signals. This is detailed further in the flash suit section.

  The Stars are also moved through the use of focused gravity gradients, controlled by the Hooks or similar administrator-level tools.

  The material of the interior walls of the Battle Rooms also advanced from hard plastic and metal in the original designs to softer padding. As the technology became available, interior lighting progressed from harsh, recessed, intermittently placed strip lighting to a flexible, self-luminescent skin over the entire inner padded surface of the Battle Rooms.

  The reliance on planar gravity generation for the prototypical Earth-based Battle Rooms also permitted early experimentation with the orientation of the entry corridors to the Rooms. After a few weeks of experimentation, however, this variation was rejected and the entry corridors were left with a uniform “up” direction, aligned with Earth’s natural gravity vector. The logistics of handling the variations in corridor orientation turned out to be highly complicated, and the small benefits of obscuring the Earth’s gravity “bias” was deemed to be unnecessary. This “up” bias in the access hallways to the Battle Rooms is still represented in the final designs of the Battle School.

  The locations of the Gates, th
e Student’s Gates, and the Teacher’s Gate were also established during this initial design phase. The Gates, the entry points for the competing armies during strategy training sessions (games), are located at the center of the faces of opposing walls. The Student’s Gates, critical for the students’ initial introduction to the Battle Rooms and used for early training exercises, are located at the “bottom” edge of those walls (the same walls as the Battle Gates). The Teacher’s Gate is located at the center of the “south” face of the Battle Room to provide an isolated entrance point for the officers in charge of training. It is unclear why no additional Battle Gates were placed in the east and west walls; it is thought that perhaps the typical two-team elimination approach common to many sports and military training methods at the time prejudiced the original designers toward this implementation.

  Orientations within the Battle Room environment are very important, and need to be mentioned. Andrew (Ender) Wiggin illustrated how important understanding one’s orientation within the Room environment could be toward winning a battle, and established what are now considered to be the standard references for orientation within the Battle Rooms. In the Wiggin nomenclature, the Battle Gate used to enter the Battle Room is considered to be the “up” gate. The far Battle Gate (the “Enemy’s Gate”) is down. To the left is east; to the right, west. Above is north, and below is south. Though any one of the four surrounding walls could be considered “north,” and the remaining walls being assigned the remaining directions, typical use has been to consider the Teacher’s Gate as being located on the south wall, with the other orientations falling into place. This also places the Student’s Gates, previously mentioned, along the southern edges of the “up” and “down” walls.

  As discussed, there are five doorways for each Battle Room. The doors to the Student’s Gates and the Teacher’s Gate are designed as “sloats”—they pull slightly away from the center of the Battle Room, and then slide sideways into a recessed slot (pocket) in the adjacent wall. The action of these three doors is not speed-critical, and therefore this simple, robust approach is warranted. The two doors of the Battle Gates, however, must move out of position far too quickly at the onset of the “Victory Ritual” (when four remaining soldiers from a given team each press the large, lit panels at the corners of their “Enemy’s Gate”) for the slower sloat doors to be practical. Therefore, the Battle Gates are one of the few applications of “force field” technology on the Battle School.

  These are not the force fields used by the Formic-derived star drives, or the Ecstatic shields derived from the Molecular Detachment Device. The force fields used to block the Battle Gates represent a purely Earth-based development for repulsive force fields. They function much as a solid wall would: strike the surface of the force field, and one feels an equal and opposite reaction. These force fields can be adjusted to provide anything from a purely elastic reaction (an object will bounce off the field with fully conserved, though reversed, momentum) to a purely inelastic reaction (an object will dump all of its momentum into the field, striking it like a dead blow hammer). These fields are not self-sustaining and in fact require a large expenditure of energy to maintain. Therefore, the Battle Gate openings are provided with mechanically sloated doors for general use, and force fields for use during training sessions. The force fields are translucent (transmit light but not images), but can be made nearly—but never fully—opaque. They do not emit any light of their own.

  The construction of the Earth-based Battle Rooms filled a very important need in the early development of zero-G strategic training. Unfortunately, prototype testing is not without its failures. For example, the initial implementation of the Battle Rooms incorporated hard-surfaced handholds on the interior faces of the Battle Rooms, extending out from the walls into the playing volume. This design caused numerous injuries during practice and gaming sessions, including broken fingers, wrists, and ankles, as well as sprained lower backs from striking or snagging these extended handrails during newly developing zero-G maneuvers (such as “sliding the walls”). This led to a rapid redesign and reimplementation of the handholds as recessed elements with a slightly compliant surface material. Handholds for climbing (movement) are placed at the standard 0.3m (1 foot) apart; handholds for reorientation and related wall maneuvers are spaced nominally at 1m.

  The most notable failure of all, however, occurred well after the initial test-and-adjust period and the two-month-long Site Acceptance Test for the Earth-based Battle Rooms. Five months into the initial trials of these Battle Rooms, a full bank of artificially generated planar gravity fields failed and the affected Battle Room was thrown, without warning, into its natural full-Earth-Gravity condition during a fully attended training session. Eighty children—two armies of forty children each—were either killed or badly injured when they fell from heights as far up as 75 meters. The horror of losing the zero-G field with young students suspended 75 meters in the air has been impossible to forget. This disaster led to a near-immediate acceptance of the existing proposal to create an orbiting Battle School—a low Earth-orbiting space station designed to provide a series of nine Battle Rooms (with “natural” zero-G), plus living quarters, classrooms, support logistics, and a permanent outwardly-facing military presence in space.

  THE BATTLE SCHOOL

  The Battle School is a special purpose space station, built with the cooperation of the Earth’s major political and economic powers, and larger international corporations, designed to provide a unique training environment for the next generation of military minds.

  The School is approximately 550 meters long and 500 meters wide. It consists of a nonrotating central core, and two 350-meter diameter rotating habitation rings. The volume is approximately 26 million cubic meters, and the mass is roughly 30 million metric tons (30 billion kg).

  The stable orbital attitude (orientation) of the Battle School in orbit is maintained through the use of large magnetic torque bars built into the stationary core, as well as Hydrazine-II fired attitude control thrusters.

  The nonrotating central core houses the nine Battle Rooms, the main docking bays, fighter bays and other weapon emplacements. The majority of the station’s infrastructure is also located in the central core—power generation, heating/ventilation/air-conditioning systems (HVAC), air purification systems, water purification systems, recycling systems, refrigeration, cryogenics, oxygen generation, storage, etc. Quarters for the International Fleet’s military defense crew are also located in the central core, as are many of the administrative offices, the larger lecture halls, and many of the regular classrooms.

  The central core is also home to many of the station’s scientific laboratories and micro-G fabrication facilities, ranging from pharmaceuticals to structural and electrical materials fabrication.

  The electro-synthetic planar gravity generators are distributed throughout the stationary central core to create an even gravity field. Typically, they are placed in the structures below and supporting the floors, where they require the least amount of focusing to create a uniform field. They are placed in the curved corridors that provide access to the various levels of the Battle Rooms, where their short effective range can be used to advantage.

  The Battle School was designed and assembled under an accelerated schedule. The finished state of the Battle School reflects this fast-tracked approach. Overhead piping and wiring runs remain exposed in some sections of the station. Manual overrides for valves were placed, late in the design process, where space allowed (sometimes tens of meters away from the equipment rooms they control). Critical areas such as the Battle Rooms, where the designs began and sufficient time was available to refine the designs, show a high degree of finish. Other areas such as barracks, classrooms, and the command and control center show the rough edges: last-minute piping runs, hand-run power and data lines, excessive splices and joints, and other evidence of insufficient time to review and clean up the designs.

  Regardless of its use as a s
pecialized training facility, the Battle School shares a lot in common with naval battleships and aircraft carriers from Earth’s own wars. The four corners of the stationary central core are fitted out with energy weapons on the top and bottom surfaces for a total of eight emplacements. The sides of the central region are also populated with launching tubes for short-range fighters, considered primarily for emergency defense of the Battle School.

  Within the Battle School, a series of airtight bulkhead doors are provided to allow the isolation of sections of the ship in the event of a breach in the hull or a loss of internal air pressure.

  The heart of the Battle School is, without question, the Battle Rooms. The Battle Rooms are divided up into three groups of three rooms each. The two rotating habitation rings serve to separate the three groups of Battle Rooms. This permits people on any one ring to access the nearest two groups of Battle Rooms directly. Central passages connect all three groups to each other along the central axis, and allow for general movement from one end of the central core to the other.

  Docking of all ships is also handled at the central, stationary core. It was realized as early as 1929 (Hermann Noordung/Potočnik in an article titled “Designing the Space Station”) that space stations not only need a means of creating artificial gravity—typically through spinning habitation rings—but also a means of docking at a stationary, stabilized platform. The problems of docking at a fully rotating station—in terms of the level of control required, the dynamics of moving, rotating and orienting an object the mass of a shuttle (or larger), the amount of propellant expended in doing so, and the subsequent problems of off-center masses once the vehicles were docked—were found to be insurmountable. Noordung, showing his early insight, also realized that finding a method of moving effectively from the nonrotating core to the rotating rings was critical to the success of such a station.