An acceleration flat, or more simply a flat, is a padded structure to cushion and contain the occupant during high acceleration maneuvers in space. It has become a generic term for any padded couch, chair, bed, cot, or stretcher.
Arte Steh
A Martian word describing a person from Earth. Arte myawn is commonly used when referring to the people of Earth collectively.
AlKapThil
An aluminum based ceramic composite used for electronics manufacturing, space applications, and additive manufacturing processes. It is a teal-green blue color, reflective, flexible, and lightweight.
Biosuit
A type of spacesuit that uses shape-memory alloy mechanical counter-pressure rather than a pressurized air volume to maintain body pressure in vacuum. This avoids the “constant volume” problem of traditional soft suits, and as such affords a greater degree of mobility. Biosuits require thick gloves and large helmets, and most biosuits are worn with an aesthetic, protective, or otherwise utility exterior layer over the counter-pressure straps.
Celarium
A Martian term for arcologies, or arcologically inspired technologies, derived from the controlled ecological life-support systems (CELSS) pioneered on Mars. The term denotes an enclosed ecological system, typically with extensive bio-regenerative ecologies or life support supplements. If used to describe a region of a city, or a significant habitat in space, it implies immense scale and high population density.
CHOMP
Combat and Hazardous Operations Modular Platforms, or CHOMPs, are, in essence, six-legged rocket tanks. Thick boron-filament armor doubles as radiation shielding, legs provide locomotion and mobility, and rockets in the legs provide agility and limited propcan-like functionality. Radiators for the significant power system are along the CHOMP under-belly, protected in a carbon fiber mesh. CHOMPs have a crew of three. They have a maximum passenger capacity of eleven. If comfort is a concern maximum occupancy is only six, excluding the three crew.
Cooperative Defense [CADSS]
Cooperative Defense Services of the Spanning Worlds Independence, or more commonly Cooperative Defense or CADSS, is the shared defense services of the Spanning Worlds. With its unusual, federated structure, Cooperative Defense has some branches that have extremely localized chains of command, while others are spread across and managed by all the Spanning Worlds. Consequently, Cooperative Defense splits into seven branches: Consolidated Command (CCC), Joint Atmospheric Operations Corps (C-JAOC), Marine Corps (CMC), Space Corps (CSC), Joint Special Operations Corps (C-JSOC), Joint Intelligence Support Activity (C-JISA), and CADSS Special Activities Unit (C-SAU). Marine Corps and Space Corps branches are extremely localized, while the other branches are jointly operated by different mixtures of the four Spanning Worlds’ governments, with consolidated command acting as a more traditional, federal, military branch to oversee and coordinate all other military operations.
Cut Knife
A cut knife is a rhenium bladed tool with a battery in the hilt and a special sheath that can quickly heat the rhenium edge to several thousand Kelvin as the knife is drawn. It is an invaluable tool for both cutting and space welding.The etymology of the word is not entirely clear. One of the two leading theories is that cut, the Martian word for a feint, was added to the knife because a cut knife is mostly used as a welding and cauterization tool in space. Hence, its design is a feint, or cut, because while it is a knife, it is mainly utilized for purposes other than being a sharp edge.The other leading theory is that the word is a partial reduplication, which is a linguistic feature where a duplicated word intensifies or modifies the meaning of the simple form of the word. Since a knife already cuts, the reduplication with cut knife thus implies it cuts more intensely, with heat. This reduplication would have to originate from the earliest Martian dialects, given the contemporary usage of cut in Di Lingua where, while it refers to feints, is often used in the context where cut is understood to be something more akin to bullshit.
Delta-vee
Delta-vee represents the change in velocity. It describes how much a spacecraft, or other space-borne object, can change its velocity, and thus its orbital trajectory.
Di Lingua
This is the Martian language term for the Martian language. Born out of the chaos of the Isolation, this Martian creole has modified grammar structures from commonly spoken Earth languages, a changed phonology, script, and alphabet, and many lexical borrowings from many of Earth’s languages. Widely used in inhabited space, excluding Earth, it is the second most spoken language after Upblanda.
EAR
Extraocular Augmented Reality, or EAR, refers to the set of optical, auditory, and haptic wearables or, more commonly, implants that produce augmented reality interfaces that use sight, sound, and touch. However, since this interface technology is ubiquitous, it can also refer to the distributed network technologies that connect embedded devices to user-endpoint EAR interfaces. Thus, the EAR network refers to anything you can access wirelessly through your personal EAR interface.
Earth Reckoning
Refers to any reckoning of time that explicitly depends on an Earth-based calendar. Most often the historical Gregorian calendar, any Earth-based calendar describing dates and times is Earth reckoning.
ERR–AL
Einstein-Rosen-Rojas–Alcubierre-Li, or ERR–AL, is the miraculous application of particle accelerators to exploit properties of the dark matter vacuum to produce intermittent, traversable, wormholes and effective faster-than-light speed. It is also known as gidizip in Di Lingua, though this usually refers to the act of using an ERR–AL drive rather than the drive itself or the underlying science and technology.If you travel using an ERR–AL drive, the accelerated reference frame will yield a proper-time penalty. That is, if you were to travel to the furthest reaches of inhabited space and return to Sol, then what was a journey of several days subjectively, also called tau time, would yield months passed from the perspective of your friends and family down the Earth gravity well, also called proper time.It is more accurate to say the ERR–AL drive decreases the distance between two points in space through a series of short-lived wormholes. These wormholes are produced immediately in front of the axial length of the particle accelerators and are stabilized by a warped subluminal bubble of spacetime—produced transversely by the particle accelerators through the Alcubierre-Li effect. As such, the ERR–AL trajectories through spacetime are generated by particle accelerators replenishing a false vacuum. Thus, for interstellar travel, a spacecraft must either have its own continuously operating particle accelerator or travel within the wake of one, making ERR–AL energy intensive, size limited, and preventing apparent superluminal communication except through couriers.
Gidizip
The Martian word for using an ERR–AL to travel, less commonly used to refer to the technology itself.
Grond Steh
The Martian word for people from Mars. It is common to use the alternative Grond myawn to refer to the Martian people collectively.
Homeworlds Federation
When the Isolation of Earth ended, the planet was still in a period of political, cultural, and environmental turmoil which led to the conditions for the creation of the Homeworlds Federation. In the period after the Alcubierre-Li effect was demonstrated practically, but before the ERR–AL drives were invented, many disgruntled Earthers traveled to the nearest, barely habitable, worlds and created what they believed to be better Homeworlds away from the turmoil of Earth.Highly idiosyncratic, fundamentally independent, and fractious, the Homeworlds did not unite as a coherent political entity, even within individual star systems. That was not until AG, Earth’s largest corporation, completed the K-tube network. While similar in some ways to the Spanning Worlds, the Homeworlds Federation is even more extremely decentralized to where Barnard’s star’s contribution to the Federation is via a handful of military outposts and a significant weapons trade, with essentially no other diplomatic, governmental, economic, or cultural ties to the rest of the federation.Current members are Tartarus, Rigil Toliman, Proxima Astraeus, Tau Ceti, and Barnard’s star. Rigil Toliman and Proxima Astraeus are technically a single system composed of three stars that form the Adeyemi Balanza-Llach cloud. However, the distance between Proxima Astraeus and the twin Rigil Toliman is over three-hundred and fifty times larger than the distance between Rigil and Toliman individually, so they are traditionally considered separate systems.
HEAT BRACE
A Hardsuit for Extravehicular Activity and Transport in Biological, Radiological, Atmospheric, or Contaminated Environments, aka HEAT BRACE, is a large hardsuit designed to be operated in extreme environments, particularly those that contain radiological hazards. HEAT BRACEs have extensive power systems and life support that allow self-sufficient operation for prolonged periods of time.
IBIS
Interstellar Block Investment System, or IBIS, is a distributed encrypted digital system used to maintain data and seal dates for pDAOs, corporations, governments, and non-governmental organizations. If local forks of IBIS are included, it is used on every world of every star system except for Barnard’s system.
Ink Display
Any thin and lightweight full-color electronic display that uses electric manipulation of physical dye particles to produce high resolution, low power, visual displays. These displays can be static, as the dyes can remain in place without power, or they can be dynamic. Ink displays can come in all sizes, configurations, and topologies.
K-tube/K-station
The K-tube, K-tube network, and K-stations are a collection of autonomously operated ERR–AL spacecraft and attendant stations that yield increased access to interstellar travel while also increasing the apparent speed of transit between stars.Utilization of compact autonomous ERR–AL capable crafts enables the creation of massive wakes of traversable wormholes and produces a mega-structure known as a Krasnikov tube. These temporary structures are not made of physical material, but the temporary warping of spacetime around the ERR–AL drives of various autonomous craft which regenerate a speed-boosting effect for return travel. By circulating K-tube autos back and forth between stars along these so-called Krasnikov tubes, this effect can be exploited to decrease interstellar travel times. It is even possible for purely Newtonian craft, which is spacecraft without an ERR–AL drive, to achieve interstellar travel by following the wakes of the K-autos, and even ERR–AL capable spacecraft see a significant boost to apparent superluminal speed.One downside to the K-tube network is the relative velocities between star systems are quite large. Even with clever ERR–AL trajectories that cancel out as much of the relative velocities between stars as possible, spacecraft utilizing the K-tubes must spend huge amounts of delta-vee to be brought on orbit around the local star. This necessitates the use of hybrid propellant fusion-driven rockets that can yield high thrust and high delta-vee, but this also creates the largest constraint to travel along the K-tube network. Large fusion tugs that can bring large spacecraft and carry significant cargo payloads reduce the cost of these constraints and, along with the speed boosts of the K-tube network, dramatically lower the barrier to entry for interstellar travel. In fact, of the nearly one million spacecraft that take part in interstellar trade every Solar year, nearly two-thirds are not ERR–AL capable. Even three-quarters of the ERR–AL capable spacecraft use fusion tug services to conserve their own delta-vee budgets.
Propcan
Propcan, or propulsion can, refers to any chemical or nuclear-powered Newtonian rocket without many thrills or frills, simply an enclosed space that can, at least in theory, be pressurized. If a spacecraft is just a rocket nozzle, propellant tanks, and a flat to sit in, that’s a rocketcan.
Rihanarchia, Rihanarchism, Rihanarchist, Rihanex
Rihanarchia is Earth’s unified governance and economic system where decision-making is driven by betting, futures, or other predictive market mechanisms derived from the liberalized market principles of “rihan” or bet making.A Rihanex organization is a corporate entity, autonomous organization, or platform that operates on Rihanarchism principles, engaging in trading, investments, or market operations that leverage predictive and betting market strategies to deliver value to stakeholders.
Seal/Seal Codes
A seal is a roughly thumb-sized quantum cryptographic device designed to utilize IBIS to authenticate identities. By being biometrically linked to the user, fully end-to-end encrypted transactions are possible, and thus the seal is used for signing contracts, communication, and electronic access control among other applications. Users can use seals over an EAR network or physically interact with a seal reading device.Seal codes are a particular type of EAR readable visual code that can compress and transmit a seal-based cryptographic handshake. If you have a seal that was not intended to access a particular seal-code, it is indecipherable.
Spanning Worlds Independence
If viewed from a three-dimensional representation of the galaxy, the four stars in the Spanning Worlds—Sipapu, Vega, Ya Ke, and Zi Wei Yuan—appear to flank, or span, the United Planets. Collectively, the Spanning Worlds are the furthest stars from Sol by significant margins, and the proper time to travel to these stars from Sol takes on the order of months. As a result, communication and coordination between Sol and the Spanning Worlds is incredibly challenging, a fact that created insurmountable cultural, economic, and political tensions that ultimately led to these former United Planets worlds declaring their independence. Average travel times among the Spanning Worlds are shorter than average travel times to Sol yet are still long in absolute terms—a situation that leads to a constant tension between cooperation and independence.
Sol Universal Time
Sol Universal Time is a proper time reckoning where a day is twenty-four hours, a year is three-hundred and sixty-five days, and time is represented by the number of twenty-four-hour days since Day Zero (the groundbreaking day for permanent human habitation on Titan, one of Saturn’s moons in the Solar system).
Stellah Steh
The Martian word for anyone born in the Solar system, but not on Earth or Mars. Commonly stellah myawn is used when referring to the people from the Solar system, but not Earth or Mars, collectively.
Swawn
The “independent Tonn”, Spanning Worlds won, or swawn, (represented by the symbol S₩) is the predominant currency of exchange in the Spanning Worlds except for Ahtash that uses the Ahtashi Lira. Not accepted in Barnard’s system.
Tonn
The Tonn, represented by the symbol Ŧ, is the most used denomination for currency exchanges in the United Planets, and is the second most used currency outside of the United Planets. Not accepted in Barnard’s system.
United Planets
The United Planets of the Local Bubble, or UPLB, represents nearly two-thirds of the entire human population and is spread over forty-one light years. The United Planets currently represents and governs the systems of Sol, Copernicus, Nursia, Bakunawa, Luyten, Gowjin, Wolf, and Issetock and formerly included Vega, Ya Ke, Zi Wei Yuan, and Sipapu. It has a total population approaching thirteen billion, though three-quarters of this population live on Earth. Despite the trope of a meddling Earther, of the nine billion people living on Earth the overwhelming majority have no interest whatsoever in interstellar affairs.
Upblanda
A term that refers to any of the common Earther languages in use in the United Planets, all of which include many borrow-words from Di Lingua.
Upper
An often-pejorative term for people from the United Planets of the Local Bubble, though this can also refer to people from either Earth, Sol, or Copernicus more narrowly.