Marriage at the Lamp's Chapel

It is nice to be on the other side for once! We had a marriage in the Chapel, and this time I could relax as part of the congregation. I did not have to worry about everything going perfectly, since I was not the one officiating. 

That duty was for the Directix Emerita, founder of the Societas, Nicoletta Mithra. I was in awe to finally meet her. She had always remained but a familiar name I encounter, an author of theological treatises. My favorite one is an essay on sin and redemption that she wrote, expanding and commenting Lord Gaven Lok'ri's earlier work on the "Rejection of the Recent Concept of Forgivable Generational Inherited Sin".

But I digress into academic considerations, so let me get back to the marriage of Neferure Giergali and Thulla Icin. It was a magnificent ceremony, imbued with symbolism. First, Neferure and Thulla approached the altar and each other carrying a torch. The fire of their hearts and hearths was conjoined in a central brazier, and it shone more brightly than the separate fires. From there candles were lit throughout the congregation bearing witness. 

There was also a touch of Mishi - as the Ni-Kunni focus on life-giving water in most of their ceremonies. Neferure and Thulla washed each others hands, symbolizing the purification of the soul and washing away any obstacles left from the past.

Finally, after signing and sealing the marital contract, they pronounced their vows, hands bound together with a ribbon, representing the unbreakable bond that now ties them together, just as their unbreakable faith binds them to God.

In our vast Empire, we have many different variations of the marriage rite. Speaking somewhat disrespectfully one could say that there is a big portfolio of Theology Council approved customs from which a priest can choose. In today's ceremony there was such a nice balance between the three parts! One that puts the light and the warmth of the hearth central, one that revolves around the water cleansing the past and preparing them for the future, and one that "ties the knot" and expresses their bond. It is a wedding I will remember very fondly. 

And I do hope it has given incentive to the Directrix Emerita to grace us with her presence more often.

Epikouria Chronicles VI

A month ago, in Gottin's Lamp we have had a state visit from queen Synthia of Kaztropolis, but now it appears that also the wormhole colony of Epikouria got a state visit, from Prince Seraghis.

Brother Hugo writes about this visit in his latest letter - as before, this letter took time to reach me so it is relaying events that are several weeks old... Anyway, brother Hugo did not get to see the famous Lord himself, but he knows about this from the janitors and lower deck workers who had to work triple shifts to make sure the station was in perfect order for this high-profile visitor.

Prince Sergahis has had an illustrious career as military commander. He was a high-ranking officer (tribunus colonel if I remember it right) in the Amarr-Minmatar warzone. He unified Amarr capsuleer ranks and led Task Force 641, an elite group of pilots. After a long and arduous siege, known as "Operation Winter Sapphire", he managed to wrest Huola from Minmatar control, and purge their seditious influence from this rebel stronghold. This cemented his fame as the Hero of Huola.

I personally met Prince later, after he retired from the warzone and handed over command there to Cyrelle Aurilen from the Praetoria Imperialis Excubitoris. He went back to his native Aridia, and formed the Zaraehvar corporation to bring order back the Mahoynen constellation and boost trade and industry in the region of Mishi. During that time, I was exploring in Aridia, following the historical Sani Sabik routes that connect the old Takmahl constellation of Araz to the Delve region. My goal was to learn more about the reach of this ancient civilization, and to prove they were able to venture outside Araz. Prince offered me hospitality and protection, and even joined me and several LUMEN members in the exploration of an abandoned Blood Raider station. I was happy to help out in turn, doing logistics during his policing operations against the pirates of Aridia.

After that, I sort of lost track of Prince Seraghis - I do remember that his plans to pacify the entire Aridia region got frustrated by the so-called LowSechnaya pirates. He went back home, to his ancestral Holdings in Soliara, and there founded the "Knights of Soliara". I think he has been mostly tending to his Holdings and businesses, and his relations to the Holders of other systems in the Helan constellation.

After Prince left, the Zaraehvar group command passed to Cardinal Umbian, who chose to start a colony in the wormholes. They call themselves "Ghosts of Aridia" and named their wormhole system "New Huola" in honor of Prince's most well known military victory. They are the very same Ghosts that got evicted from New Huola and were taken on as refugees by Publius and his colonists.

So, given their joint past, it is not surprising that Prince Seraghis would visit his old brothers in arms here in Epikouria. Brother Hugo does not discuss the purpose of the meeting, probably this is not known publicly. In between the lines I can read that the Knights of Soliara came out to help the Ghosts during the battle that took place in Epikouria as described in Brother Hugo's previous letter. I surmise that probably trade discussions were also on the table, as wormholers are always looking for a market to sell their rich harvests.

PS. Links to keep track of the letters of Brother Hugo:
I. First Contact
II. Diplomatic Talks 
III. Refugee crisis
IV. Setting up a new home station
V. Epikouria under siege

Scan probe mathematics

It appears I am in a mood for mathematics and spacetime geometry lately. This time, I try to answer my own curiosity as regards scanning down anomalies. Doing that in Sanctified Vidette has taught me a lot about the connection between scan probe strength, scan deviation and how fast one can scan down an anomaly. It is a long log entry, but it will serve me well to write down in detail what I learned.

1/ Astrometric pinpointing 

I believe an example works best to explain this. Let us stay that you start out as usual with your scan probes at 8AU, centered on the current guess for the anomaly's position. The scan will refine the position of the anomaly. The base number goes one notch down: so the maximum deviation between the indicated position after the scan and the real position goes down to at least 4AU.

The Anathema is one of the ships boosted for scan deviation, giving you a reduction factor of 0.75 , which brings the maximum deviation after scanning down to 4 ✕ 0.75 = 3AU. 

If you've installed a pinpointing array I, you get another factor 0.9 (it is 0.8 for the T2 version, but let us stick to T1). Combined with the Anathema, you now have 3AU ✕ 0.9 = 2.7AU maximum deviation.

You have trained astrometrics perhaps to level IV, it gives you another factor (1-0.05✕level) = 0.8, so now we're at 2.7AU ✕ 0.8 = 2.16AU 

Finally, say you have trained astrometric pinpointing to level III. This corresponds to yet another factor (1-0.05✕level) = 0.85, bringing the maximum deviation down to 2.16 ✕ 0.85 = 1.84AU. 

Hurray! You can skip right down to 2AU for your next scan, since the number dropped below 2. 

In all of the above, I assumed that the signal strength (the percentage shown each time you scan the signature) is still at 0%. If you get it to say, 55%, this gives you an additional factor (1-0.55)=0.45, and you get down to 1.84 ✕ 0.55 = 0.83 , which is great news because now you can skip three notches and go straight to 1AU for your next scan.

2/ Scan probe sensor strength

You need to bring the signal strength up to 100% before the anomaly becomes warpable. This is where your probe strength comes in - that is the number you see when you hover over the scan probe loaded in the probe launcher. It can be boosted by the astrometric rangefinding skill, a scan rangefinding array, a gravity capacitor rig, ship bonuses, some boosters and implants, and better core scanner probes. Note that for combat probes, the number is halved but for the table below, you should double it, as if it is a core scanner probe.

The table below gives you, for anomalies of class I to V, as a function of the probe strength, the deviation you need to get down to in order to get to 100% signal strength on your next scan and thus lock down the anomaly.

probe strength	Level I	Level II	Level III	Level IV	Level V
40	0.46976	0.23488	0.11744	0.05872	0.02936
50	0.5872	0.2936	0.1468	0.0734	0.0367
60	0.70464	0.35232	0.17616	0.08808	0.04404
70	0.82208	0.41104	0.20552	0.10276	0.05138
80	0.93952	0.46976	0.23488	0.11744	0.05872
90	1.05696	0.52848	0.26424	0.13212	0.06606
100	1.1744	0.5872	0.2936	0.1468	0.0734
110	1.29184	0.64592	0.32296	0.16148	0.08074
120	1.40928	0.70464	0.35232	0.17616	0.08808
130	1.52672	0.76336	0.38168	0.19084	0.09542
140	1.64416	0.82208	0.41104	0.20552	0.10276
150	1.7616	0.8808	0.4404	0.2202	0.1101
160	1.87904	0.93952	0.46976	0.23488	0.11744
170	1.99648	0.99824	0.49912	0.24956	0.12478
180	2.11392	1.05696	0.52848	0.26424	0.13212
190	2.23136	1.11568	0.55784	0.27892	0.13946
200	2.3488	1.1744	0.5872	0.2936	0.1468

So, what this means is that if you have a level I anomaly, and your scanner probes' strength is at 70, you need to bring down the probes to the 0.5AU notch to get to 100% signal strength with certainty - the 1AU notch will not be good enough. However, if you have 90 strength, you only need to be at 1AU resolution to get the anomaly with certainty. If you are all the way up to 180, you do not even need to get closer than 2AU before locking it down. Combining good pinpointing (as explained above) with probe strength of at least 170-180 is the "secret" to scanning down level I anomalies in just two rounds of scanning, first 8AU and then 2AU.

Now note that some numbers here are even smaller than your smallest 0.25AU resolution. You can get those by either getting lucky on your positioning, or by tightening the probe formation closer (control-scroll down in the solar system map).

Phased fields

I am happy to see that dr. Cornelius published the results of our joint research on a publicly accessible forum. All too often scientific findings remain hidden behind paywalls, as unscrupulous publishers profit from the work of scientists forced to seek a high-impact journal to please their funding agencies.

It turns out that the Signal Cartel's information about some new spacetime anomalies appearing was right. They were wrong in assuming that the epicenter of this would be the Sentinel Military Zone. Rather, these new anomalies pop up a bit everywhere, and it is not clear what causes them. What we do know about them, is that they can lead to phase defects in our universe - and that may warrant a bit of an explanation. 

Apart from the three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension that we can experience, the universe still has a lot of hidden dimensions, usually inaccessible. You can think of phase as one of these hidden dimensions. It differs in two important aspects from our usual spatial dimension (say, left or right on the x-axis). Firstly, it is a so-called "compact" dimension. It is not extended like our usual spatial dimensions, but it is curled up into a circle. So, if we would try to draw a map of one spatial dimension and the phase dimension, it would look like a cylinder, as in the figure below. Moving our usual left-right is moving parallel to the axis of the cylinder, whereas the angle around the cylinder represents the phase. 

The second difference with usual spatial dimensions is that we can move freely in the spatial direction, but not in the phase direction. You can choose where you stand along the line, but in each spot, you cannot choose your phase, it is fixed for you. You have to stay on the red line! The property of having a well defined phase value is also known as phase coherence, and it is very strong due to the large vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field and dark matter. 

There is another important property called "phase rigidity", meaning that the phase remains the same as you move along the line. You can imagine this as tension along the line on the cylinder. Think of it as a rubber band: it will tend to straighten out, and any fluctuations such as in (a) will quickly be brought back to situation (b). That is, we have over our usual space not only a well defined phase in each point, but also the same value of the phase as in all neighboring points.

Some very energetic natural processes (or human messing around with the phase rigidity by weakening the Higgs vacuum expectation value) allow to pull the string around the cylinder, as in figure (c) below.  Imagine pressing your finger down on the rubber band and moving it around the cylinder. It is very had if the rubber band has high tension! You need to keep your finger pressed down on the rubber band if you do not want it to snap back - and that is what the new technology of a phase anchor more or less does. 

By twisting the phase in this way, it is possible to intersect our universe line with a line of another universe, and access matter present in another universe, separated from us in phase space, and thus normally inaccessible to us. 

But playing around with that is dangerous! If you pull too strongly and bring it all around, such as in figure (d), you create two full phase windings around the cylinder: one clockwise and one anticlockwise around the cylinder. These could get separated, and then you would be left with a single winding, as in figure (e). Now there is no way that the tension in the rubber band will flatten this out any more! Pulling on the band no longer results in a straight line. We have created a "topologically protected" phase twist in our own universe. The only way to remove a clockwise winding, is by annihilating it with an an anticlockwise winding, which releases an enormous amount of energy stored in the phase field.

Hence the stark warnings of space-environmental organisations. It may start all good and well for mining, but before you know it we will have topologically protected phase windings roaming all over the universe causing havoc. And... it may also start a new arms race trying to create military applications such as phase recombination bombs. All this may end up seriously damaging spacetime, or rather, further damaging it, after the Seyllin incident already punched wormholes into it.

Materialistic temptations

I received a folder with advertisements for ships. 

This happens regularly, I am sure every pilot has their mailbox flooded with these. Usually I just throw these away.

But this one caught my eye - and expedition command ship? It is a new model, for sure, I have never seen anything like it. And I have to say, I was immediately charmed! This is the first time I have seen a battlecruiser-class hull geared for long-term scientific expeditions that involve camping out in space. And it has a way to boost the decoding powers and data hacking capacity of fleet members. Even d-scan range can be boosted. Ah, and the spatious hangars it has for collecting all sorts of archaeological finds! 

However, it is scandalously expensive. I must not give in to temptation and remember my vow of poverty, by which I also pledge to only keep ships that will aid me in my quest, in stead of collecting endless fleets of ships like most fellow pilots. 

Still, it is tempting.

I guess I will start by studying the skillbooks on the techniques that need to be mastered for these boosts, and we will see from there.

A trove of wormhole data

After a week of observations, during which dr. Fritte Cornelius and I worked in shifts to ensure  continuous monitoring of Sanctified Vidette, we have obtained a catalogue of over five hundred surveyed wormholes. Add to this list earlier efforts and other efforts from the Signal Cartel, and the total available for statistical analysis is well over two thousand five hundred wormholes! 

Dr. Cornelius concluded that we had enough data for decent statistics, and I agreed (much to the relief of mr. Damus, my overworked cloak technician). My new friend and Signal cartel scientist is working now on a full report for their scientific division - I hope that this publication will be shared with all in the cluster. 

I think I can already reveal that our earlier hypothesis stands confirmed, now on a much firmer ground. There is no statistically significant deviation corresponding to a preference for a link to one or other Jove observatory system or region. The wormholes in Sanctified Vidette - and the other Drifter systems - spawn exactly as if they are drawn from a uniform distribution within the set of all known-space systems with a Jove observatory. 

I have returned back to our familiar skies of Domain, and docked up the Indagatrix for maintenance and small repairs. After such a long stay camping out in space, it would be imprudent not to get her checked up. 

I will not stay docked up for long, though. Dr. Cornelius invited me to another expedition, somewhat urgently. He seems convinced that something is about to happen in another Drifter wormhole, the Sentinel Military Zone established by EDENCOM. He does not appear at liberty to tell me what he knows, but he mentioned a growing number of spacetime anomalies of a different kind - not wormholes. This may be the source of the rumors that have been in the news. 

Of course, if something does happens in the EDENCOM wormhole because of spacetime experiments with Drifter technology, I would like to document it before the entire universe blames Amarr again as they always do when things go wrong.

Through the looking glass

Have you noticed that when you look into a wormhole, you see an image of that part of the universe where you will end up if you enter the wormhole? Looking at this wormhole, one might recognize several nebula typical of the sky of perhaps the Insmother region. 

To understand how the image visible in the wormhole is formed, let us begin with depicting the curved space near a traversable wormhole connecting two "flat" spacetimes. We will stick to two spatial dimensions, and pretend that we are ants that can only move on the sheet. That allows to embed the sheet in a third dimension just to make visualization possible - but keep in mind that for the ant this third dimension does not exist. The wormhole then looks like this:

It is a curved surface, with a neck connecting two sheets. The upper sheet could be flat spacetime somewhere in Domain, the lower sheet could be flat spacetime somewhere in Seclusion. The wormhole connects both through a narrow neck. The ants (and Amarr exploration frigates) can travel from one sheet to the other via a continuous path.

Now let's imagine you are at a certain distance from the wormhole and you shine a powerful laser beam, such as the ones commonly found on our ships. Start by pointing the laser in a different direction than the wormhole. The laser will highlight a straight line away from you. Now, as you point it closer to the edge of the wormhole, the line will bend, and your pointer will be deflected.

The left image shows the curved spacetime with a wormhole. Note how the rays, emitted by someone in the "lower" universe, remain in the lower part. From the point of view of the observer, the rays look as in the right image, where the circle represents the wormhole opening. You can clearly see the deflection when pointing near the wormhole's edge. It is in fact much stronger than the deflection from a star or any other commonly found massive object, with the exception of a black hole. Very close to the edge, the rays can even loop around. That is why you see an mirror image of space around you very close to the wormhole's edge. This is gravitational lensing in action.

Next, point the laser into the wormhole. Now the laser beams follow paths like these:

They cross from the lower universe (for example somewhere in Seclusion) to the upper universe (for example Domain). In the laser pointer's own universe, the rays are seen to enter the wormhole, as shown by dashed lines in the right figure. They emerge in the universe on the other side (full lines flaring out). When pointing closer to the edge, you can see that the rays swirl around while they are in the neck of the wormhole, and are strongly bent. 

Tracing the light backwards, this means that you will get the full 360 degree view of the universe on the other side, visible as an image in the wormhole. Closer to the edge of the wormhole, the image gets more compressed and scrambled and harder to distinguish. The view is less distorted in the center, but note also that the rays (black and red) towards the center of the hole bend back - so you see a mirrored image of the target universe.

((ooc note: I made the figures in Wolfram Mathematica; they show the geodesics of the classic textbook metric for traversable wormholes first proposed by Morris and Thorne in Am. J. Phys. 56, 395-412 back in 1988 and used in science fiction ever since))

Visit to the Nexus

In the quieter moments between gathering data on the wormholes of Sanctified Vidette, I went over to the Amarr station to visit the captured Drifter Nexus. The Amarr station, as you can see below, is still a place for peaceful research, and in contrast to the Republic wormhole, ours is not a military naval base full of warships:

The Nexus still looks as mysterious as it was at first, with all the once scattered beams nicely lined up into a long needle-like structure. At first I thought some antennae at the top were new, but comparing with the older footage it seems they were already there. The scale of the structure continues to amaze me!

Below is an image looking down from the top, through the central tunnel of the needle. The beams are arranged in a concentric layered structure, and you can see down all the way to the far end - the perspective belies its immense length.

The damage from the war against the drifters is still visible on the outside, much as it was at the end of the war. It is of course more important to understand the intricate mechanisms inside the beams than it is to patch up some scratched plating on the outside.

Our scientists are still hard at work. I briefly spoke to some of them on-line (capsuleers can not dock up at the research station) and they were very enthusiast about the new technologies that they find and the things they learn about space-time and the way extra dimensions can be folded up into intricate quantum manifolds and unfolded again. Who knows, perhaps one day we will be able to create our own private pockets of spacetime much like the abyssal space bubbles but then stable!

Cartel kicked out again

While out in Sanctified Vidette on my science mission with dr. Cornelius, I received news from Mehatoor. The Angel Cartel tried once again to corrupt that system, which is home to not only LUMEN's headquarters but also the headquarters of the 24th Imperial Crusade fighting the Minmatar rebels in the warzone. 

It looks to me like the Cartel and the Republic are in cahoots. I do not think it is far fetched to hypothesize that the Republic pays the Cartel to bring its nastiness to Mehatoor when the war is not going well for them. Privateers attacking the busy shipping lines passing through Mehatoor, and attracting regular pirates in their wake.

Angel Cartel corruption happened once in the past, and the local Holders got chided by the Empress. However, the next time this happened, our pilots put a stop to it, enlisting with the 24th to defeat the Cartel. Then, we got praise from the Empress! 

So when the Cartel tried their hand again less than a week ago, LUMEN and its allies knew the drill.  Fleets formed quickly and decisively to halt the push of the Cartel, and the insurgency was suppressed efficiently. I thank God that our pilots have secured such a swift victory, without which I probably would have had to interrupt my investigations here.

Wormhole spectra

Wormhole physics - it bridges not only gaps in spacetime, but also gaps between people!

I met up with dr. Fritte Cornelius in Sanctified Vidette. What a pleasure! He greeted me not with distrust, but with the enthusiasm of a fellow scientist meeting someone who is interested in the same somewhat esoteric topics! He was eager to share knowledge, in the fullest trust that we are working towards the common goal of a better understanding of the world around us, not as adversaries but as fellow explorers. The true scientific spirit!

The wormhole experts from the Signal Cartel gather much more data that I, as an amateur, did. I would just record the basic characteristics of the wormhole, and hop from one to the other, and be done. Dr. Cornelius does a much more thorough spectral analysis of the wormhole! He patiently explained techniques and the state-of-the-art methods, and shared some of their software tools and databases. I really felt like a student who for the first time sees how the actual surveying is done, and I learned a lot. 

Despite using Chemal Tech Exploration boosters I am still much slower than he is at doing a full spatiotemporal spectral analysis, but I did manage to upload some valuable data in the joint dataset that we are compiling. That will be fed into the modeling software to extract any changes in the quantum-gravitational spacetime metric across the Drifter wormhole. Meanwhile, I feel like I am getting expert training! 

I have been able before to identify what class of wormhole system a particular connection leads to when it goes to Anoikis. However, for wormholes leading to our own cluster the identification of known space regions has eluded me - apart from the obvious Amarr nebula I am not too familiar with foreign skies. That is starting to change, as I am learning to recognize more and more features of the properties and destination of a wormhole connection at first glance.

We have completed first day of full mapping of Sanctified Vidette, arduous work. I am looking forward to tomorrow!