Mermaid.live doesn’t let you download your diagrams without making an account, so I just NFT’ed it.
Here’s an update to the YAP frame format. Ansible links are extremely low-bandwidth. No quantitative data rate yet, but let’s just say you’re limited to text if you want real time communication.
If two ansibles are to communicate, they must have wafers shaved from the same crystal of tailstone, and any ansible with a wafer sourced from the same crystal can listen in. Encryption is handled out of band, with a one time pad shared between the operators of the endpoints before turning the ansible on for the first time. The OTP is used to exchange a symmetric key used to encrypt future frames.
After turning on and establishing a secure connection, other negotiations take place, including frame length and time slot. YAP uses Time division multiple access, so the sender can be known from the time slot when a frame is received. I’d expect a K2 civilization to have sufficiently accurate clocks.
ARF (Aggregation and Reassembly of Frames) handles things like bundling links together for more bandwidth as well as allowing simultaneous transmitting and receiving (full duplex). If you want full duplex, both ansibles need two wafers, one for receive and the other for transmit, and the ARF tag helps keep track of that. It also aids in resuming a communication from an interruption. Data transfers can take a long time, on the order of days to weeks for large files like fabricator schematics, so you want the link to be failure tolerant.
The biggest chunk of the header is the handoff tag. This tells the ansible what the higher layer protocol is. Monkey foxes have been computing for 95 thousand years by the time of first contact, so they have a lot of layer 3 protocols, though YIP (Yinrih Internetworking Protocol) v1 and v3 account for most of the traffic prior to first contact, with Terran IP traffic finding a place afterward.
Last comes a checksum. It’s physically impossible for data to be corrupted while traversing the Underlay, but the electronics used to sense the Science™️ going on with the wafer can misread things. There’s a persistent superstition that the Underlay is actually Hell, and that the yinrih have been routing their FTL comms through the realm of the damned. Garbled packets are said to be the work of damned shades desperately seeking sensation of any kind. The Bright Way (who incidentally discovered tailstone and the Underlay and originally built out the star system’s interplanetary telecom infrastructure) vehemently refuses to discuss the matter and strongly discourages the faithful from bringing the topic up.
It’s funny to me that your worldbuilding involves something as specific and as unknown as a internet protocol.
But also, they’ve had computers for 95 THOUSAND years?? And how long had humans had computers by first contact? The fact that they had such a head start, yet are still within a 100-200 years of human technological development makes them seem kinda incompetent, honestly.
And they’re only on the third version of IP? I’ve heard of technical debt, but wow. They’re developing the Internet on the same timescale we developed agriculture.
I focus on the stuff that interests me.
Yinrih live over 700 years on average, so that 95 thousand year figure scales down to about 10 thousand years when you account for their lifespan. The Doylist explanation is I want them to be relatable, so their society and tech are “bigger” but still recognizable. I’m cheerfully aware that none of this will be accurate when/if we get to this point IRL, so I’m not going to bother trying.
These are all human-coined terms, hence all the dog puns. They’ve had plenty of protocols prior to YIP, and the v1/v3 designation is just a sly nod to IPv4 vs IPv6, as the two protocols are in a similar situation, with v3 being introduced ages ago but there being single stack v1 networks in widespread use.
If you want a more in-universe explanation, there’s a practical limit on how quickly a society can progress when it is stretched across interstellar scales. People will inevitably start working on the same problem and come to similar solutions if they can’t talk to each other. Famously, calculus was invented twice, at the same time, because Isaac Newton & Leibniz couldn’t communicate with each other. With the internet, it’s much easier to discover whether another person is working on the same problem (or has even solved it for you) but if it takes 100 years to send a signal from one colony to the next, then the Internet is useless.