Science of Stellar Empire: FTL Communications
How Stellar Empire’s Ansible Network Works (and How It’s Different from the Original).
Let’s talk about instant communication
In most sci-fi universes, faster-than-light travel gets all the attention. Warp drives! Subspace tunnels! Folding space! But honestly, instant communication is way more game-changing. It’s also way harder to explain without sounding like a space wizard.
In Stellar Empire, we solve this problem with something called the Ansible Network.
And yes, I know.
I did not invent the term “ansible.” That credit goes to Ursula K. Le Guin, who first coined it in 1966 in Rocannon’s World. Her ansible was eloquently abstract: a kind of gravity-like device that let you speak instantly across space. Elegant, mysterious, and totally unexplained.
Mine? It’s messier. More grounded. More… sciency?
So how does the Stellar Empire ansible work?
At the heart of the system are special crystalline structures called Mother-stones. These aren’t just shiny rocks; they’re bonded, entangled, and weirdly alive.
Each Mother-stone can be split into child crystals called Quesee, which remain entangled with their origin stone across any distance. Tap one, and the others vibrate. Literally. The Quesee nickname is a heterograph of the initial letters "QC" from the words "Quantum Consanguinity."
Indescribably, these fragments obey a Quantum Law of Consanguinity; the piece of the whole represents the whole. When any Quesee is struck, all Quesee (including the mother-stone) are struck instantaneously, no matter their place in the universe.
As such, in the early days, people actually tapped messages in code across the network. Think Morse code meets interstellar geology.
Then in SY 2190, engineers realized they could run fiber-optic lines into the Quesee to send continuous pulses of light, not just taps. Boom: data throughput exploded, and the modern Ansible Network was born.
Then in SY 3299, the youngest mother-stone ever discovered, Clarellite, the Institute took control of her and make communication ingots. Each Quesee has been inscribed, marked, encoded, and forged into a seamless ingot with internalized radios. This allows an even closer approximation of private realtime communication (for sale) in Stellar Empire, while still stuck within the rules of the system.
Not just magic: The rules of the system
If you’re imagining Star Trek’s subspace comms, hold up. This thing has rules. Because physics.
Only five “networks” exist: With only five mother-stones available (and one is even lost), there are only five discrete networks of galactic communication, which provides a limit to making long-distance phone calls. (And good luck finding another Mother Stone, they’re rarer than sober pirates.)
Bandwidth is limited: Taps are instantaneous, sure. But once you switch to light-pulse mode, you’re not only bottlenecked by the speed of light, but only a single communication can happen at any given time. Intelligent super computers must handle traffic on the network or else things get confused super fast.
Encryption is a must: In the early days, open Quesee were vulnerable to trolls. Literally people would flood tap-networks with noise or overwrite messages. That’s why the newest mother stone uses a sealed Queues and a POQC (Power Over Quantum Consanguinity) to power a sealed receiver.
Fiber is the backbone: While the stones do the magical sync trick, the actual data rides fiber-optic threads, and data for things like the OmniWeb are stored, cached, in local data servers.
Putting the Network into Practice
Communication within a star system still must happen at sub-light speeds. Even using a blinker light for communication, you have a delay in data-transfer within a system.
Larger systems may have multiple Quesee to disseminate data, but even then intra-system communication wouldn’t be allowed to clog up the Quesee system.
The Fun Problems
Let’s be honest: the best sci-fi tech isn’t the kind that just works. It’s the kind that causes problems.
Some ideas of problems and stories I’ve had are;
Maybe there’s a story about a Quesee that goes out of sync and start echoing ghost data.
Or maybe a story about InStar Opertives trying to take down a black-market Mother-stone auction.
Or a side character in a story about grifters selling fake Quesee that are just polished beach glass.
The Ansible Network is a system full of narrative tension. That’s why I love it.
So, I can hear Science Fiction nerds asking; why not just use quantum entanglement?
Let’s start this by saying I am not a scientist, or a theoretical physicist.
However, I do know that actual quantum entanglement doesn’t work like people think. You can’t just “send messages” through entangled particles. They’re correlated, but they don’t carry usable information on their own.
I don’t know enough to go deeper than that, but that’s why I leaned into the ansible name, and the idea of consanguinity. I wanted a system that felt like it could work with only the smallest of unexplainable concessions.
The Quesee/Mother-stones are only required for syncing the communication. Everything else already exists in our world today; communication over light, tight encryption for privacy, caching data to reduce round-trip requests.
Just like the other ‘Science of Stellar Empire,’ I want the science part of the fiction to help tell the story and keep the universe feeling big, and wild, and lived in. We haven’t eliminated the need for couriers, and we haven’t deus ex machina’d communication into the background. It’s something characters, and governments, need to think about and consider.
Lore meets infrastructure
The Ansible Network has world-building baked into every part of it. For example;
Governments will attempt to regulate Quesee bandwidth like oil. Communication is a strategic resource, but with its own threat. Anyone who gets their hands on one can be a hostile player.
Private sectors will want to get their hands on them, and may try to (in violation of galactic laws) attempt to violate conventions or common courtesy when it comes to communication over Quesee.
Espionage is a real threat, with communication going everywhere, its likely only a matter of time before your most recent encryption is cracked.
Heck, I have to imagine now that most communication is light based, there are poets and hipsters who tap messages on Quesee ‘just because they can’ and it doesn’t interrupt the light broadcasts.
Final Thought: When Rocks Talk, People Listen
I didn’t set out to reinvent the ansible. I just wanted FTL comms to feel like something real. Something people would fight over, hoard, hack, and curse when it breaks mid-transmission.
And somewhere along the way, I realized my co-creator Mike was correct when he said;
Communication isn't just about speed.
It's about what you're willing to do to be heard.- Mike Rogers
Next in The Science of Stellar Empire: we’re talking Shielding and Hull Alloys. I’ve been name dropping a number of hulls, armors, and shields in the recent Empirefall Chronicles, so I owe you an article on that.
And if you want to see the original wiki writeup on the Ansible Network, it’s here;
Ansible Network - Stellar Empire Wiki