Integral Annihilation

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A curious feature of Imperial academia is the antidegree (occasionally and unofficially referred to as the dishonorary antidegree).

One cannot, of course, simply revoke a degree obtained without fraud; it is a time-bound certification of ability which stands as testimony to the competence of its holder at that time. However, it cannot be denied that there are those who, in later life, fall from the path of wisdom, and who do not respond to the gentle correction of their peers.

Let it be stated first that our institutions of learning are chary of awarding antidegrees. It is not their purpose to harass those whose knowledge has become obsolescent with the passage of time and who no longer practice in their field, save that they continue to opine on current matters; nor are they intended to be other than a last resort when gentler measures have failed. Perhaps most importantly, they must not and will not be used as a stick to beat unconventional hypothesists and heterodox thinkers, from whom so much of our advancement ultimately proceeds.

But in those rare cases when one willfully leaves the path of wisdom and the quest for truth, be it for petty reasons of ideology, utility, or personal advancement, or for some imagined grander cause, and in the worst cases does so with the support of actual fraud, the antidegree stands as a last resort to prevent the propagation of lies and false paradigms under the color of abandoned integrity.

Apart from its direct effects (the antiqualification being deemed to cancel out the initial qualification), the antidegree carries with it social censure, including effective expulsion from the academic exultancy, and in legal terms immunizes the awarding institution from potential suits over the awardance of the initial qualification to a presumably unworthy candidate, unless it can be demonstrated that this could reasonably have been established at the time.

Rarely, an institution may issue an antidegree to an individual that was never awarded a degree in the first place (the ridiculously named honorary dishonorary antidegree) as a particularly pointed criticism of some unusually noteworthy proclamation of unwisdom. Such has no legal effect, but where the Imperial intelligentsia are concerned, has all the social function of the old custom of judicial incredibility.

Repent, Horologist! Said The Tick-Tock Man

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Ladies and gentlemen, I take you now to – the calendar!

Specifically, I take you to the Harmonious Calendar, the standard calendar used by Imperial chronometrists ever since the Founding (although in its basic structure it required little adjustment, primarily the setting of a new base point/year zero, and the standardization – if not translation – of day, month, and season names into now-standard Eldraeic.

Its units are, naturally enough, dictated by the period and rotation of Eliéra around its star, and as such, it uses a 333-day solar year. That year is divided into 37 weeks of nine cycles – a complete planetary rotation, completing a day and a night¹, is referred to as a cycle – each; a convenience of this arrangement is that the year always begins (at the winter solstice) on the first cycle of the week, Amphimis, and ends on the last cycle of the week, Nyxis.

The year is also divided into twelve months of three weeks (or 27 cycles) each, a total of 324 cycles, and nine intercalary cycles are added (six at the start and end of the year, and three in the middle) to make up the full count. While the length of a month is not an exact divisor of the length of the year, it was taken from the period of Seléne, the major moon; however, the months no longer follow her phases, as they’ve been synchronized with the years.

Since Eliéra’s orbital year includes an additional 0.3 days, a “leap” cycle is inserted to calibrate the calendar² every third year, but omitting every thirtieth. Its name is derived from its function, and Calibration Day is added each year immediately after the intercalary day for the summer solstice, Midyear’s Day.

The twelve months of the year are also divided into six two-month seasons (shown by the color-coding and the key at the bottom), in accordance with the cultural tradition of dividing things into groups of six and assigning them correspondences with the classical elements.

(The above image is uncomfortably tiny, sad to say, when fit into the blog format, but if you open just the image in a new tab from the context menu, you should be able to magnify it back to its original size.)

  1. Or a night and a day. For convenience, the cycle on the Upperside runs from dawn to the following dawn, and that on the Underside from dusk to the following dusk, and thus constitutes the exact same period regardless of your location.
  2. Since Calibration Day is already an anomaly in the regular progression of the cycles, leap seconds and other minor temporal adjustments are traditionally included in the Calibration correction.

The Exception That Proves The Rule

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One question that is often asked by those newly come to the Empire is how, in a society which claims to value the liberties of the individual – and, indeed, specifically one’s freedom to associate and disassociate as one pleases – the Empire justifies its strict immigration policy. Does this not, they ask, vitiate the freedom of association of the citizen-shareholder who is asked to turn over his choices in this matter to the quote-better judgment-unquote of the Imperial Guard of Borders and Volumes?

The answer is that there is a specific means to address this. The V-series visa, which bypasses normal inplacement procedures, is based on the ancient eldrae custom of vouchsafe. Both as custom and as a matter of law, the tradition of vouchsafe allows someone to vouch for the good conduct of another; the one who takes the oath takes complete responsibility, both personal and legal, for the actions of the other, and suffers the same consequences if that person acts improperly. The consequences range from public scorn, if the person vouched for behaves rudely, to even death, if that person commits a capital crime.

So one need not simply accept that one has signed over all one’s judgment concerning freedom of association to the Imperial Guard of Borders and Volumes when one becomes a citizen-shareholder; if one sincerely believes that their judgment is superior than that of civilization’s appointed guardians, they may pledge vouchsafe for the admittance of anyone not specifically banned from the Empire, and they will be granted admittance – but by doing so, they accept the responsibility to their fellow citizen-shareholders that would otherwise be vested in the Empire for any and all social, civil, and criminal liabilities imposed upon the citizen-shareholder body by he for whom they pledged vouchsafe, even to the extent of wagering their citizen-shareholdership (forfeited should the vouchsafee require deportation) and even, upon occasion, life itself upon their judgment of their vouchsafee’s capacity for good behavior.

In this way, the freedom of association is maintained, but the externalities of unwise association are properly vested upon he who chose poorly in imposing them upon his fellows.

(And, of course, this system provides valuable feedback to the IGBV. Should the number of V-series visas issued and completed successfully – with the vouchsafee departing with a clean record or being upgraded to standard inplacement – rise, this will be and has been taken as a sign that inplacement standards are too strict relative to societal standards, and they will correspondingly be eased, to the aid of future potential immigrants.)

– The Aeonic Book of Practical Imperialism: A Guide for the Recovering Outsider

Emissary, Speak Not

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“What many fail to realize is that much of the art of diplomacy is not haggling; it is antihaggling. That is to say, it is not to clarify and define a price, but rather to obfuscate and obscure it.

“This is why we do not draw lines in the sand. That invites razorwalking and rules-lawyering. A man or a polity that has been set a limit to their actions will step right up to it, if not poke their nose across it. Even worse is to declare consequences to violations of such lines: one must then execute on precisely those consequences. To fail to do so is to be seen as weak; to exceed them as unfaithful to one’s word; and if one carries them through exactly, one is merely exacting a price that the buyer was willing to pay.

“Rather, the wise let it be known that ‘sufficient incivility’, as the charming traditional euphemism goes, will result in ‘such consequences as are appropriate’. The man – or the polity – whose perception of danger is clouded by fog walks much more carefully, and those who do not know whether transgressions will result in a formal reprimand, a bullet in the brain, or the Imperial Navy raining fire from orbit oft prefer not to gamble.”

– Calen Minaxianos-ith-Minaxianos, “Quantum of Discourse”

Alas, Probably Not In Python

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intagliated particle: An intagliated particle is a subatomic particle which contains more metadata than the universe-defined natural parameter set (position, momentum, mass, charge, spin, color, etc.). Such metadata can be strictly passive; can interact with other entities via the mechanisms of natural or artificial laws; or can be internally active. While simple intagliation can be carried out using a peeker-poker or particle graver, this last state is typically achieved by “infecting” the particle with a species of active femtotechnology.

For example, muon stabilization is achieved by a primitive femtomachine which attaches itself to the muon. In the most simplistic and metaphorical terms imaginable – and my editor has assured me, gentle reader, that he stands ready to intercept the letters from outraged physicists that will no doubt ensue – this femtomachine executes a script which is triggered when the muon enters a pre-decay state, and “reboots” the muon back to its initial parameters.

– sidebar, A Young Engineer’s First Book of Ontophysics

Noising The Signal

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The problem of military intelligence being given away by social networking is a very old one. Directly useful OSINT (i.e., extranet social postings directly translatable to location) has become a rarity among contemporary military forces, due to greater technical capabilities and COMSEC discipline; however, negative social OSINT is still an issue. When extranet social postings from military-affiliated or -contracted individuals cease due to COMSEC, it is possible to infer that this is due to a forward deployment, and for a competent MILINT analyst to deduce from this such information as units deployed, specializations involved, possible deployment locations, etc., etc.

To address this issue, the Fifth Lord of the Admiralty created NATTER SPATTER.

Under the aegis of OPERATION NATTER SPATTER, the Stratarchy of Data Warfare maintains a team of AI forgers which monitor the extranet social postings of Imperial Military Service personnel and contractees, learn how to precisely model and imitate them, and are prepared to step in at a moment’s notice when COMSEC takes effect with a consistent stream of forged data – memeweave postings, imagery, slinky recordings, and even exomemories – indirected in such a manner as to be indistinguishable from the genuine article, and demonstrating a continued civilian life. A stochastic social event generator seasons the basic event stream with sufficient nonrepresentative variation to prevent NATTER SPATTER content from being identified by excessively consistent mundanity.

While NATTER SPATTER postings will not, naturally, survive a full consistency check against the complete event record, public and private, such a full consistency check is beyond the capacity of many intelligence agencies and serves, in other cases, to drive the cost of obtaining this type of OSINT higher in terms of computation and time than can be justified.

– SDW: Ongoing Operations Summary (IMS ONLY: NOFORN)

On The Problem of Technobabble and Ontotechnology

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(An In-Character Meta Explanation)

“This metal is unaffected by entropy over time? How does that work?”

“We taught the atoms to sing time-refusal.”

“Oh, come on. That’s not… what does that even mean?”

“You see those thirty fat volumes of technomagical equations to make the sanest man go mad?”

“…atoms that sing time-refusal. Got it.”

Scientists Behaving Badly

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From: Kóris Marukanin (Director of Surreal Research)
To: Irreality Vault (All Staff)
Subject: Inappropriate usage of cystal universes
Priority: Immediate
Security: IRREALITY INTERNAL SURREAL

I should like to begin by once again congratulating Reizei Chíra’s team on their successful creation of a syntropic cystal universe. While further experimentation has demonstrated the necessity for a great deal of additional work to combine syntropy with time’s arrow moving in its customary direction, the magnitude of this achievement cannot be overstated.

However, I must also take a moment to remind all staff that while the construction and maintenance of cystal universes is an innately expensive business, those of a syntropic cystal universe is even more so. If the work of our infrastructure department has escaped your notice thus far, please be advised that the routine operation of the Vault consumes quantities of antimatter perhaps best expressed in terms of moonlets.

This being the case, please cease forthwith and do not resume the practice of using experimental syntropic universes, of any volume, as a means to repair broken items. This is literally multiple orders of magnitude more costly, in terms both economic and cosmic, than the most ostentatious normal repair process imaginable.

I am a reasonable sophont. I will consider applications for syntropic repair of unique and irreplaceable historical artifacts or one-of-a-kind Precursor archaeology. I will even see if it is possible to work damaged items of great sentimental value to their possessors and which wouldn’t survive normal repair processes into the existing experimental schedule.

But even if it was your favorite esklav mug that you knocked off the console, and you know who you are, put down the irreality engine and just take it into town.

Kóris Marukanin
Director of Surreal Research

Eldraeic Modifier of the Day: boz

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In formal Eldraeic, the modifier boz indicates that a word is being used in a vernacular (possibly referring to a local dialect or borrowing, although most commonly indicating a way the word has come to be used in Trade) fashion, rather than in accordance with its proper definition. The modifier boz is derived from the word bosh (“a mush or porridge; a soft, wet, pulpy mass”). This is in no way, gentle reader, a commentary on the Conclave of Linguistics and Ontology’s perceptions of the sort of mentality that resorts to vernacular to express itself, and if you believe any part of that sentence, please contact me for an exciting investment opportunity in the Three-Ended Wormhole Corporation.

– “Wordplayer’s Corner”, the Imperial Infoclast

Written on the Exchange Walls

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Perhaps due to their unusually wide variability across a large number of trait-clines, the variety of ciseflish trade cants have no word cognate to race. When one is needed, they borrow the Eldraeic word kaelídárath, which is technically defined as “true-breeding phenotypically-distinct group taxonomically junior to subspecies”¹ and whose original roots mean “a group of people aesthetic in definition”. That neither of these definitions accurately reflects current usage of the word in Trade vernacular is perhaps a sad reflection upon the current state of galactic education.

Nor, consequently, do they have any word cognate to racism. Their closest equivalent is also an Eldraeic borrowing, which universally adds to the preextant -ehch “dishonorable” suffix the cant prefix for “fundamentally unprofitable”, placing it among the small and unusual category of double-condemnatories.

(This, of course, should not be taken to imply that the ciseflish are incapable of empathizing with racism in other species; merely of sympathizing with it. Ciseflish merchants can and will empathize with exotic racism for precisely the time and to precisely the degree necessary to wring the maximal profit from it, then go back aboard and laugh about the pathetic morons they just exploited. Not to do so, of course, would be inefficient, inopportunistic, and not at all in accord with the tenets of the Path of Ever-Growing Plenitude.)

– Words of the Profits: Implications of Ciseflish Trade Cants,
Mirú Altúráldé & Toru min Forill,
Imperial University of Almeä

  1. That this same word is also the cognate to breed (of animal) in relevant translation matrices is something that has offended a remarkable number of cultures, not relieved by the official statement of the Conclave of Linguistics and Ontology merely being an assertion of self-equivalency².
  2. “It is what it is. Necessarily.”

The Way of the Will

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Mentalics is a bastardized discipline, dating back to its origins. To be fair to the ancients, they lacked the knowledge and conceptual grounding to differentiate the farspeech family of disciplines, based around the EM-sensitivity of the liacoré complex of the brain, and the psychokinetic family, based around phased-array nanopicosomes interfaced with the peripheral nervous system. Both logically appeared to fall under “the will is the deed”. One may place more blame, perhaps, on more recent thinkers for adding mechanical enhancements via cerebroergetics and other aids and incidents into our field, and yet.

It is what it is. The breadth of our field requires like breadth of preparatory study, which we shall now begin.

– Academician Alder Kamini,
Ellenith Cerebral Academy

Jargon (1/n)

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burlies: archaic military slang for troops formally designated, at the time, as grenadiers; specifically, those equipped with a BRL (“Backpack Rockets Launcher”) as their primary weapon, specializing therefore in high-angle indirect fire. While the derivation from the acronym is obvious, a secondary cause was the effect of the BRL and its control package on the profile of those equipped with it.

(Just a random thought I had today. Incidentally, today I also learned a new word: flathatting.)

Zampolits

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From: Thane Cíëng (Fleet Attaché [Vonis Prime Mission], Diplomatic Attachment WG, Active Operations PWG, Second Directorate)
To: Altaní Toréjez, Voniensa Republic Navy WG
Cc: Intentions Analysis PWG
Subject: Command chain reorganization
Authenticity: 4E11; SENDER, RELAY (4/4), RECIPIENT
Security: EYES ONLY BLUE ICE SHADOW
Distribution: Executive & Analysts
Date: 7167 Cailmaen 7, Wineful rising 7

As you requested, I tasked appropriate assets to investigate whether the decision of the Republic Navy to put counselors on the bridge of every starship is as innocuous as it is claimed. The answer is yes and no. From the perspective of the Explorer Division, the counselors are advertised as highly trained empaths, psychologists, and memeticists, and their training is similar – allowing for the cultural delta – to specialists the Imperial Exploratory Service use in contact missions.

On the lesser hands, those counselors assigned to the support fleet and in particular to those primary units with the greatest military potential are assigned from rather different backgrounds (off the books), and while they do receive the same on-books training at the Fleet Academy, if I didn’t know better, I would be inclined to think that I am looking at political officers.

While the regulations permitting counselors to relieve captains and other officers in the event of “psychological or memetic incapacity” could simply be written broadly, as imprecise languages permit and indeed encourage, the ease with which it would be possible to find convenient loopholes may also imply that those are intended.

I think I don’t know better.

– Cíëng, ExSec

Occlusion

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When they refer to Ochale as the Masked Empire, for those of you who don’t know, it’s not some tired cliché about inscrutability. Ochaleans quite literally wear masks from the day of their birth to that of their death. Their spouse will see their face, and their children when they’re young, and very occasionally their very dearest friends, but no others. So far as they are concerned, their masks – those elaborate constructs of porcelain and brass, clockwork and light – are their true identities, untainted by the ever-shifting passions of the moment.

The mask may shift, but only with deliberation, or an Ochalean may change their mask – and therefore their identity, and to allude to the other mask-identities of an Ochalean is an unspeakable impertinence – but to intentionally bare one’s face to the world is to forever give up being of Ochale, and thenceforth only be from Ochale.

Take Uálé Amoli te Haixíä, for example.

We went up together on Silverfall Eight. If you’re history-minded, you’ll know that was the first relief crew for Silverfall City, though it was just Silverfall Base then, with the first dedicated mining module. (If you visit the city, drop in on it. It’s the front room of the Drink Deep now.) We worked together figuring out all the tricks and traps in driving shafts and drifts through moon-rock and cracking ancient lava tubes.

But I spent two years on the moon with te Haixíä, was closer to her than anyone but husband and blood-sisters, and I never saw her face.

(I learned a lot about making regolith-glass, though.)

– Tinith Silverfall-ith-Mirarí, unpublished memoir

Heavy Walkery

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So, it has been brought to my attention that back in Chop Shop I used the term “warstrider” without having previously defined said term, on the blog at least. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa – I really thought that those later revisions to the heavy cavalry makeup had come up before, and apparently that was only in my head.

So let’s talk about the base platforms for heavy cavalry. (As you probably recall, while they aren’t field-swappable modules, a heavy cavalry asset for the Imperial Legions consists of a base platform with a module socket, and a module fitted in said socket. The module determines the type of the asset: you have the Basher (tactical assault/”MBT”), Stormfall (long-range assault/”self-propelled gun”), Longeye (long-range assault/”self-propelled graser”), Thunderbolt (droner), Stinger (nanoswarm droner), Flammifer (tactical arsonier), Strategos (command vehicle), Pugnacious (pummel/”combat engineering vehicle”), Trison (wrecker/”combat engineering vehicle”), and Valkyrja (tankbulance).

As for the base platforms, there are two of them. The vast majority of these are the HV-type, and a heavy cavalry asset built off the HV-type platform is a tank:

HV-type tank base platform

The HV-type tank base platform is a low-slung vehicle with all-around glacis design, designed to minimize its target profile and give it a low center of gravity. In dimensions, it is approximately 12 m (39 ft) long, 4 m (13 ft) wide, and 3 m (10 ft) high; its total mass (varying, of course, by module), however, is of the order of 60 short tons, due to the extensive use of lightweight composites.

8 m of the length and 3.5 m of the width at the front is the module socket; height of modules varies, but none take it much above the basic 3 m height. The crew compartment is located immediately behind the module. At the rear of the platform, an externally-opening compartment can be used to hold resupply, additional ammunition, or a “hot soup” fuel pod to increase vehicle endurance.

The drivetrain of the HV-type tank makes use of neither wheels nor treads; rather, it sits atop eight semi-squishy rollagons, near-spheres of a “smart fluid” rotated electromagnetically from within the sealed main hull, enabling it to move with equal facility in any direction, at speeds of up to 150 mph on a good, flat roadbed. Note that this is not a drivetrain developed specifically for military purposes: modern civilian groundcraft use similar technology.

The propulsion system also has considerable electromagnetic control over the shape of the rollagons; while they don’t have them normally, if you need spiked wheels or some other shape-variation to cross some tricky terrain, it can provide them on demand; if need be, they can even form “paddle-propellers” for amphibious operation.

A limited vector-control/impeller system permits the tank to apply vertical thrust to itself; this is used primarily downwards on light-gravity worlds to keep ground pressure high enough for the rollagons to be effective, occasionally upwards to reduce ground pressure where the ground is soft, and even more occasionally to lessen the severity of falls, ground collapses, or deliberate drops from low-flying transports.

That being said, there are occasions where despite the incredible flexibility of the rollagon platform, you still can’t get a vehicle through with any kind of wheeled or wheel-like (rollagon, tracks, etc., etc.) drivetrain. It’s rocky. It’s partially nonexistent. It’s sheer, trending to vertical. Maybe, even, it’s been liberally filled with anti-wheel-like barriers which for some reason you can’t simply blast out of the way with any of your obscene plethora of weapons systems.

For this, there is the HS-type base platform, which can accept any of the same modules and roles as the HV-type platform. A heavy cavalry asset built off the HS-type platform is a warstrider, because civilian vehicles using walker drivetrains are generally called striders. (It’s not always such a clear parallel, such as the light cavalry using chariot to refer to the military version of the civilian skimmer, but in this case it is.)

HS-type warstrider base platform

The HS-type warstrider base platform is also a low-slung vehicle with all-around glacis design. It is designed with additional underbelly armor and point defense, since it operates further from the ground (and thus is vulnerable to weapons other than mines from beneath). In dimensions, it is approximately 12.2 m (40 ft) long, 5 m (16.5 ft) wide (due to the additional space required by the leg machinery), and 6 m (20 ft) high with the legs at full extension, capable of crouching at a standstill to 3.7 m (12 ft).

The HS-type shares its basic layout with the HV-type, with an 8 m x 3.5 m front-located module socket, capable of making use of the same modules as the HV.

The drivetrain of the HS-type warstrider makes use of six myosynth-powered articulated walking legs arranged in three pairs from front to rear. These legs extend at a slight “wide stance” diagonal to maximize stability, and end in wide foot pads to reduce ground pressure. These foot pads include mechanisms to enable them to better grip the terrain and, if necessary, climb sheer surfaces¹. While effective for traversing almost any terrain, this drivetrain is unfortunately slower than the HV-type drivetrain, giving HS-type warstriders a maximum speed of no more than 60 mph.

The HS-type also shares the limited vector-control/impeller system of the HV-type and uses it for the same purposes (primarily controlling ground pressure).

So, looking at the above, you can’t really call a warstrider a type of mecha except in the most general terms: it’s not humaniform, and it’s not vertical axis oriented for all the long-established reasons that that would be a terrible idea on the battlefield.

Names aside, it’s also not much like the typical Star Wars walker, insofar as the (Galactic) Empire loves to build these super-tall (72’/22 m for an AT-AT!) designs with a regrettable tendency to fall over when tripped by some hot-shot farm boy. (Intimidating, maybe, but the IL prefers lethal any day of the week.) The Star Wars design it is closest to is the Clone Wars era AT-TE, also a low-slung hexaped, largely because that design also makes sense.

tl;dr a warstrider really is just a tank on stubby spider legs.

They’re the minority platform because for most purposes they’re not quite as good as the HV-types. They’re slower (although the sight of one galloping at its full speed is a hell of a thing). The drivetrain is more power hungry. They’re chonkier, with a higher target profile, even when crouching in minimum-visibility posture. And so you don’t want to use them as your primary cavalry asset.

But when you need their unique capabilities, it’s very nice to have them available.

  1. The maneuver at Ard Beléïm where one enterprising warstrider commander had his units use their tractor-feet to hang in concealment from the cliff below a vital road and then leap out to intercept a vital Dahallan convoy was a definite “this is some arachnoid bullshit!” moment for all involved.

Flexible Protection

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PALAXIAS, PALAXIAS (4829-03-04) – In a public release today, the Office of the Shore Lords announced the formal transfer of all projects under REFLECTION DANCE from the Bureau of Innovation to the Bureau of Ships, confirming that the deployment of the Carp Scale Mirror to all IN starships has begun.

The Carp Scale Mirror represents a leap forward in ray shielding technology. Based on designs for a unipolar Meng mirror projection system developed at the Sur-Dodecíäd Blooms University of Sar Haixíä, the Carp Scale Mirror projects an array of interlocking “fish-scale” mirror fields around the starship. Whether in their semi-translucent resting state or raised to full, perfect reflectivity, the shifting scales create the look of a sleek fish swimming through space, hence the name.

Adding the boson-reflecting qualities of the Meng mirror, already extensively used in torch drives, to the existing kinetic barriers providing protection against massive particles will ensure that for the foreseeable future, the starships of the Imperial Navy will continue to be the best protected fortresses in the galaxy.

Chop Shop

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A perennial problem in extra-infrastructure medical care has been providing the necessary intermediate step between field medicine and the care provided by a hospital, where – thanks to the lack of infrastructure – patients cannot be transferred to the latter with the necessary alacrity.

The most recent answer to these problems is the Field Support Hospital (FSH, often pronounced “fish”), co-developed between the Emergency Management Authority and the Imperial Legions to fill in the gap between the fundamentally paramedical casualty collection points and evacuation to an established facility, catering not only to the established races common among Imperial citizen-shareholders, but additionally to a variety of visitors, allies, and even potential battlefield enemies.

The design of the FSH concentrates on modularity and transportability as key elements. Thus, it consists of six containerized units, which link together via environmentally sealed passages to form the entire facility. (A standard FSH deployment makes use of one of each type, but arbitrary combinations are possible.) While they share power and resources while connected, each module has a dedicated power, life support, and basic utilities node.

These modules are designed to be delivered in multiple ways: they can be air-transported by the G5-TT Corveé tactical transport or by standards-compliant civilian carryalls and skycranes. They can also be fitted to the demilitarized¹ versions of the HV-type tank or HS-type warstrider chassis. While the modules expand after deployment to their full operational size, providing more working area, they are capable of functioning in reduced-capability mode when compacted, allowing patient sustenance and emergency care to continue during an unplanned bug-out.

Of the modules themselves, the HAV-FSHa is the triage module, capable of accepting new patients from outside or by being docked to directly to the HV-12m/HS-12m Valkyrja tankbulance, the V40 Ralihú IFV, or disaster-rated civilian ambulances. While the G5-TT Corveé, et. al., cannot unload patients directly into the HAV-FSHa, its fittings are compatible with a number of modular landing-pad systems suitable for use on hostile-environment worlds.

The HAV-FSHb module provides surgical facilities equipped for trauma repair. This serves to prevent patients from bleeding out before transfer to the healing vats in module HAV-FSHc (or, in the case of species currently not provided for by Imperial nanomedicine, stabilize them for transfer to an upstream medical facility).

After triage and/or treatment, patients are transferred to one of two modules. The HAV-FSHd module contains facilities for post-operative care and observation, where patients remain for a short time before release or evacuation to an upstream facility. More serious casualties are transferred to the HAV-FSHe module, for either chilldown and evacuation in nanostasis or cryostasis, or for emergency upload.

The final module, the HAV-FSHf, is a resource-providing module, providing fabricators and their feedstock for pharmaceuticals, replacement blood, and disposable medical supplies, as well as recycling facilities. Additionally, it contains an integrated plasma-flash crematorium suitable for the rapid disposal of bodies and biological waste, which reprocesses as much of its output as possible into new organic feedstock.

– Emergency Management: Facilities, introduction to Section II

  1. The HV(c)/HS(c) chassis removes the advanced tactical sensor package and the four altazimuth-mounted mass drivers (as effective offensive weapons). However, it retains the armor and point-defense systems, useful in both the rear-battlespace and disaster-stricken environments.