Can't have everything be grimdark all the time! But maybe it's a bit too convenient to match the tone of the rest of the story. I'll have to think more about it.
Road to Hope
Re: Road to Hope
Re: Road to Hope
Naturally Kyanah employ a different sort of structure in their militaries--including the Ikun military. The key building block is the Cohort, which consists of 30-40 packs, or around 120-240 individuals. Packless Kyanah as well as packs can join, but during training, they must form packs with other members of the cohort; those who fail to do so are sent to other cohorts and eventually discharged without benefits if they wash out multiple times. This is because jobs are created with packs in mind rather than individuals, just like in the civilian sector. Generally the Kyanah (whether in Ikun or other city-states) only make exceptions to this rule when fighting for their very existence, since packless Kyanah aren't seen as fully fledged members of society. Each cohort, upon formation is assigned a Cohort Alpha, an experienced military pack with leadership skills who are responsible for training their new cohort.
This is a very delicate process; in fact a huge part of the 1 year training period (~0.46 Earth years) out of the standard 8 year term (~3.68 Earth years) is getting the trainees to trust their Cohort Alpha and respect their authority. The same Cohort Alpha who trains them will also subsequently command them on any missions they take part in; a Cohort's leadership generally does not change unless the Cohort Alpha is killed (either all members of the pack, or enough that they're no longer a valid pack), discharged, or promoted. Consistent changes in leadership would force new Cohort Alphas to waste enormous amounts of time and effort to basically restart the training/bonding process from scratch, so they're kept to a minimum. However, if a cohort becomes too small to perform its role properly (whether through deaths or retirement) it will often be merged with another cohort. Due to all of this, it's important for Cohort Alpha's to be charismatic and well liked by the packs in their command, and to convince them that their Cohort Alpha is on their side.
Cohort Alphas are said by many to have the hardest job in the Ikun military. They are still expected to be out in the field with their cohort, shooting and getting shot at, and are bombarded with endless demands and instructions from officers, while getting their cohort to cooperate with each other and follow instructions, which is like herding cats. Indeed they have more packs directly reporting to them than any other rank. Yet paradoxically, they also are left to figure out a lot of things for themselves. They get a set budget from their superiors, and with this, are responsible for inventory management and payroll for their cohort; how they fulfill their orders within their given budget is up to them. The internal organization of their cohorts, if any, is up to them; they can teach their trainees whatever skill sets they think are most critical for the cohort's mission. Most competent Cohort Alphas will delegate some of their responsibilities to trusted packs in their cohort; not only does this free up time for them, but it makes the transition to new leadership smoother should the Cohort Alpha retire or have some of their members killed in battle.
Ambitious Cohort Alphas will often use the time saved by this delegation to train additional cohorts and subsequently command multiple cohorts at once. Such activities can often lead to being promoted to Junior Officer, leaving room for some of their delegates to be promoted to Cohort Alphas. Junior Officers can create additional cohorts under their command and assign them Cohort Alphas; they are usually responsible for about 4-6 cohorts. Above them, experienced Junior Officers can become Senior Officers. They can either oversee multiple Junior Officers, directly oversee Cohort Alphas in a larger number than Junior Officers (usually 8-16 cohorts), or some mixture of the two. Under Ikun's military structure, the civilian government is authorized to hand-pick generals from the pool of Senior Officers (or, more rarely, Junior Officers), and upon conclusion of their operation, they revert to Senior Officer (though some operations go on for decades, and their leading generals retain the rank indefinitely). Much like human generals, these packs oversee lower level officers, autonomously manage entire campaigns and operations, and rarely interact directly with the lower ranks. Generals usually don't command individual cohorts, but may sometimes retain one of the cohorts they used to directly command (complete with its own Cohort Alpha) and use said cohort as personal staff to assist with logistics and strategy.
This is pretty much the entire formal hierarchy in Ikun's military (and the same with most other Kyanah city-states). It's quite flat, with the lowest ranking packs being only about 3-4 levels removed from the highest ranking generals. However, there's quite a lot of informal hierarchy, both within and between cohorts, with who gets the biggest budgets and the cushiest assignments. Of Ikun's population of 13 million, around 150,000 individuals are in the Ikun Army and Ikun Air Force, comprising around 30,000 packs. Of these, slightly under a thousand packs are Cohort Alphas, with 100-150 Junior Officers, 60-80 Senior Officers, and around 16-20 packs are generals.
This is a very delicate process; in fact a huge part of the 1 year training period (~0.46 Earth years) out of the standard 8 year term (~3.68 Earth years) is getting the trainees to trust their Cohort Alpha and respect their authority. The same Cohort Alpha who trains them will also subsequently command them on any missions they take part in; a Cohort's leadership generally does not change unless the Cohort Alpha is killed (either all members of the pack, or enough that they're no longer a valid pack), discharged, or promoted. Consistent changes in leadership would force new Cohort Alphas to waste enormous amounts of time and effort to basically restart the training/bonding process from scratch, so they're kept to a minimum. However, if a cohort becomes too small to perform its role properly (whether through deaths or retirement) it will often be merged with another cohort. Due to all of this, it's important for Cohort Alpha's to be charismatic and well liked by the packs in their command, and to convince them that their Cohort Alpha is on their side.
Cohort Alphas are said by many to have the hardest job in the Ikun military. They are still expected to be out in the field with their cohort, shooting and getting shot at, and are bombarded with endless demands and instructions from officers, while getting their cohort to cooperate with each other and follow instructions, which is like herding cats. Indeed they have more packs directly reporting to them than any other rank. Yet paradoxically, they also are left to figure out a lot of things for themselves. They get a set budget from their superiors, and with this, are responsible for inventory management and payroll for their cohort; how they fulfill their orders within their given budget is up to them. The internal organization of their cohorts, if any, is up to them; they can teach their trainees whatever skill sets they think are most critical for the cohort's mission. Most competent Cohort Alphas will delegate some of their responsibilities to trusted packs in their cohort; not only does this free up time for them, but it makes the transition to new leadership smoother should the Cohort Alpha retire or have some of their members killed in battle.
Ambitious Cohort Alphas will often use the time saved by this delegation to train additional cohorts and subsequently command multiple cohorts at once. Such activities can often lead to being promoted to Junior Officer, leaving room for some of their delegates to be promoted to Cohort Alphas. Junior Officers can create additional cohorts under their command and assign them Cohort Alphas; they are usually responsible for about 4-6 cohorts. Above them, experienced Junior Officers can become Senior Officers. They can either oversee multiple Junior Officers, directly oversee Cohort Alphas in a larger number than Junior Officers (usually 8-16 cohorts), or some mixture of the two. Under Ikun's military structure, the civilian government is authorized to hand-pick generals from the pool of Senior Officers (or, more rarely, Junior Officers), and upon conclusion of their operation, they revert to Senior Officer (though some operations go on for decades, and their leading generals retain the rank indefinitely). Much like human generals, these packs oversee lower level officers, autonomously manage entire campaigns and operations, and rarely interact directly with the lower ranks. Generals usually don't command individual cohorts, but may sometimes retain one of the cohorts they used to directly command (complete with its own Cohort Alpha) and use said cohort as personal staff to assist with logistics and strategy.
This is pretty much the entire formal hierarchy in Ikun's military (and the same with most other Kyanah city-states). It's quite flat, with the lowest ranking packs being only about 3-4 levels removed from the highest ranking generals. However, there's quite a lot of informal hierarchy, both within and between cohorts, with who gets the biggest budgets and the cushiest assignments. Of Ikun's population of 13 million, around 150,000 individuals are in the Ikun Army and Ikun Air Force, comprising around 30,000 packs. Of these, slightly under a thousand packs are Cohort Alphas, with 100-150 Junior Officers, 60-80 Senior Officers, and around 16-20 packs are generals.
Re: Road to Hope
Basic principles of Kyanah military doctrine during Project Hope.
- Information is the most important thing. As mentioned, every piece of their equipment has sensors constantly collecting data about battlefield conditions and communicating it in real time to the rest of the army. Autonomous drones add further nodes to the network, gathering information about areas the Kyanah haven't even arrived in. As a result, every soldier has an astonishing level of situational awareness about everything that's going on in the area; it's all but impossible for human soldiers to sneak up on a Kyanah cohort. All this data is being fed into massive supercomputer clusters to predict the enemy's next move. Essentially, they know where every human platoon, every tank, every aircraft, and every artillery piece are at all times, and know where they're going next with high accuracy, often before the humans themselves know.
- Between their engineered Kesler syndrome taking out all human satellites, their own kinetic bombardment satellites, and their hypersonic aircraft that never need to refuel thanks to nuclear power, and their ever expanding network of ground-based laser arrays, the Kyanah have complete air dominance. Anything that flies within a thousand kilometers of their bases gets shot down, and any ground-based human convoys get bombs and Rods from God rained down on them as they advance. Missiles and ICBM attacks are predicted in advance and destroyed by the laser arrays.
- The Kyanah, with their very limited numbers (the North American theater has just 8-10 thousand troops) know that fighting a head-on land war against millions of human soldiers will to them getting slaughtered despite all their tech. It's thus absolutely essential to prevent large groups of human soldiers from ever reaching the Kyanah positions. Thus, they use their aerial and orbital supremacy to derail and fragment any large troop movements, then use their superior stealth and mobility to pick off the survivors.
- Only engage with overwhelming odds. Again, due to their limited numbers, but also due to the pack-centric and fractuous nature of their military organization, even a few deaths can seriously damage operations and threaten cohesion. With their superior situational awareness and mobility, if the odds aren't overwhelmingly in their favor, they can simply retreat and return when they have the upper hand; they pretty much unilaterally decide where and when any battles happen.
- For much the same reason as the two points above, the Kyanah can't just midlessly advance into areas with a large human military presence; urban areas are especially bad for this. They first have to scatter and disrupt the human forces. This is done with aerial and orbial strikes, but also long range railgun artillery that can hit targets from up to 500 km. However, they don't have unlimited bombs and missiles, so they can't just carpet bomb everything. Instead of massed artillery barrages, they prioritize surgical strikes, using AI to predict which locations to shell to cause the most damage. When large area attacks are unavoidable, they occasionally fire tactical nukes (just nuking everything is something they are trying to avoid, as the nuclear winter would turn the already relatively cold Earth even colder). Once the human forces are sufficiently fragmented and disarrayed, the Kyanah themselves finally roll in to mop up the remaining resistance.
- The Kyanah are well aware that in time, humanity's vast logistical networks will grind down their limited forces, and the only way to prevent this is to cripple said logistics. Attacks are thus designed to maximize damage to infrastucture rather than simply kill as many people as possible. Highways, rail hubs, dams, power plants, factories, airports, launch pads, and military bases are all extensively targeted for hundreds of kilometers around their landing sites. However, civilian areas with none of these things are generally left alone. As they say, "a civilian casualty is a wasted bullet". Though of course thousands of civilians are still caught in the cross fire of these attacks. However, their mistaken assumption that they are fighting hundreds of city states as opposed to continent-sized nation-states, makes it much more difficult to realize this objective. Eventually the Kyanah realize this (thought it seems their AI indirectly figured it out first) and adapt accordingly.
- There's no such thing as an interstellar supply line. Anything they need must either be brought with them from the homeworld, or manufactured on the front lines using ISRU techniques. Naturally, they have brought along thousands of scientists and engineers to optimize their ISRU tech. This sort of applies on the homeworld too, city-states tend to be small and not have a lot of resources compared to human nation-states, so every shot they fire has to be for a very good reason. Indeed, one of their big uses of AI, aside from predicting enemy movements, is optimizing their use of equipment to get the most bang for their buck and not waste any ammunition. It's said that in human wars, 97% of all bullets miss; with the Kyanah, it's less than half.
- In general, Ikun's military doctrine can be summarized as an overwhelming display of fangs to terrify the enemy, followed by leaping out of the shadows to bite the enemy whenever their back is turned, and keeping their distance when it isn't.
- Information is the most important thing. As mentioned, every piece of their equipment has sensors constantly collecting data about battlefield conditions and communicating it in real time to the rest of the army. Autonomous drones add further nodes to the network, gathering information about areas the Kyanah haven't even arrived in. As a result, every soldier has an astonishing level of situational awareness about everything that's going on in the area; it's all but impossible for human soldiers to sneak up on a Kyanah cohort. All this data is being fed into massive supercomputer clusters to predict the enemy's next move. Essentially, they know where every human platoon, every tank, every aircraft, and every artillery piece are at all times, and know where they're going next with high accuracy, often before the humans themselves know.
- Between their engineered Kesler syndrome taking out all human satellites, their own kinetic bombardment satellites, and their hypersonic aircraft that never need to refuel thanks to nuclear power, and their ever expanding network of ground-based laser arrays, the Kyanah have complete air dominance. Anything that flies within a thousand kilometers of their bases gets shot down, and any ground-based human convoys get bombs and Rods from God rained down on them as they advance. Missiles and ICBM attacks are predicted in advance and destroyed by the laser arrays.
- The Kyanah, with their very limited numbers (the North American theater has just 8-10 thousand troops) know that fighting a head-on land war against millions of human soldiers will to them getting slaughtered despite all their tech. It's thus absolutely essential to prevent large groups of human soldiers from ever reaching the Kyanah positions. Thus, they use their aerial and orbital supremacy to derail and fragment any large troop movements, then use their superior stealth and mobility to pick off the survivors.
- Only engage with overwhelming odds. Again, due to their limited numbers, but also due to the pack-centric and fractuous nature of their military organization, even a few deaths can seriously damage operations and threaten cohesion. With their superior situational awareness and mobility, if the odds aren't overwhelmingly in their favor, they can simply retreat and return when they have the upper hand; they pretty much unilaterally decide where and when any battles happen.
- For much the same reason as the two points above, the Kyanah can't just midlessly advance into areas with a large human military presence; urban areas are especially bad for this. They first have to scatter and disrupt the human forces. This is done with aerial and orbial strikes, but also long range railgun artillery that can hit targets from up to 500 km. However, they don't have unlimited bombs and missiles, so they can't just carpet bomb everything. Instead of massed artillery barrages, they prioritize surgical strikes, using AI to predict which locations to shell to cause the most damage. When large area attacks are unavoidable, they occasionally fire tactical nukes (just nuking everything is something they are trying to avoid, as the nuclear winter would turn the already relatively cold Earth even colder). Once the human forces are sufficiently fragmented and disarrayed, the Kyanah themselves finally roll in to mop up the remaining resistance.
- The Kyanah are well aware that in time, humanity's vast logistical networks will grind down their limited forces, and the only way to prevent this is to cripple said logistics. Attacks are thus designed to maximize damage to infrastucture rather than simply kill as many people as possible. Highways, rail hubs, dams, power plants, factories, airports, launch pads, and military bases are all extensively targeted for hundreds of kilometers around their landing sites. However, civilian areas with none of these things are generally left alone. As they say, "a civilian casualty is a wasted bullet". Though of course thousands of civilians are still caught in the cross fire of these attacks. However, their mistaken assumption that they are fighting hundreds of city states as opposed to continent-sized nation-states, makes it much more difficult to realize this objective. Eventually the Kyanah realize this (thought it seems their AI indirectly figured it out first) and adapt accordingly.
- There's no such thing as an interstellar supply line. Anything they need must either be brought with them from the homeworld, or manufactured on the front lines using ISRU techniques. Naturally, they have brought along thousands of scientists and engineers to optimize their ISRU tech. This sort of applies on the homeworld too, city-states tend to be small and not have a lot of resources compared to human nation-states, so every shot they fire has to be for a very good reason. Indeed, one of their big uses of AI, aside from predicting enemy movements, is optimizing their use of equipment to get the most bang for their buck and not waste any ammunition. It's said that in human wars, 97% of all bullets miss; with the Kyanah, it's less than half.
- In general, Ikun's military doctrine can be summarized as an overwhelming display of fangs to terrify the enemy, followed by leaping out of the shadows to bite the enemy whenever their back is turned, and keeping their distance when it isn't.
Re: Road to Hope
Perhaps a discussion of Kyanah economic systems would be of interest. While there is of course a lot of diversity in economic systems amongst the countless city-states on their homeworld (with the southern hemisphere tending to be more collectivist and communal than the north), we can focus on the economic system of Ikun, which is quite popular across the northern hemisphere, and elsewhere in the world where the Ikun military has been involved in regime changes. Though it's worth noting that as with language, politics, and religion, there's no hard geographic line where one system begins and another ends, they all just gradually fade into one another. You generally won't find city-states with significantly different government systems, language, or culture near each other unless interventionist foreign governments (such as Ikun itself) have been tampering with the status quo in the region.
Ikun's government doesn't seem to commit to either abstaining from intervening in the economy, nor to single-handedly controlling the economy. Instead it's treated as simply another participant in the economy. Ask a typical Ikun citizen-pack what the purpose of the state is, and the answer will likely be something along the lines of maximizing the wealth of its politicians by selling goods and services to its citizens. In general, there's no inherent taxation, and very few inherent regulations on domestically owned businesses in Ikun. However, in order to get a leg up, it's possible and common for businesses to cede some level of control to the government in exchange for critical benefits. Businesses may, for instance, agree to turn over a portion of their shares or products to the government, let the government make certain operational or staffing decisions, or be compelled to resolve disputes and administrative matters through the official legal system instead of private negotiation. In exchange, these businesses get access to money, materials, and personnel from the state, as well as exemptions from various laws. In extreme cases, businesses can cede total control to the state in exchange for unfettered access to the state's resources, effectively becoming a state-owned company. Most small and medium-sized businesses use one of a series of standard boilerplate contracts, but any large business worth its salt--especially in strategic industries like energy or defense--tends to negotiate a customized arrangement with the government.
Essentially nearly every significant business ends up being some sort of government contractor to one degree or another. This isn't strictly speaking forced, but in practice it can be almost impossible to survive and grow as a business without participating, especially when all the competition is taking advantage of the state's resources, and independent businesses that are successful despite the odds often find themselves under heavy pressure to submit to government involvement. Additionally, packless individuals, non-resident packs and foreign businesses are subject to much heavier restrictions on both doing business in Ikun and accessing the state's resources. As a result, the multi-national megacorporations common on Earth aren't often seen on the Kyanah homeworld; instead businesses seeking to expand globally will establish domestically owned subsidiaries run by local packs in foreign city-states, allowing them to bypass many of these restrictions.
As for social programs, they do exist in a sense, but not necessarily out of some communal spirit or moral imperative to provide for the needy. Instead it merely indicates that either the government has found some way to extract economic value from those who aren't traditionally employable, or is willing to eat the cost as a sort of loss leader, because they have calculated that they will recoup it elsewhere through the increased social stability. For instance, abandoned and orphaned eggs are sometimes collected and raised with the intent of recooping the cost via adoption fees. Hatchlings and children too, in the rare event that one can be found that hasn't already suffered irreparable mental and physical damage from being separated from their pack. Elderly packs (and elderly individual Kyanah whose packs have died) without retirement savings can also sometimes be found in these same facilities, where they are used to provide the constant socialization and stimulation that hatchlings and children require for mental stability. However, it's pretty much impossible to get provided for just by virtue of existing. Even these facilities do a careful cost-benefit analysis of any would-be entrants, and those deemed insufficiently valuable, whether because of physical or mental defects, pack history, or simply being an ethnic minority, or often rejected or only kept for a limited time.
As for land ownership, the city-state of Ikun is considered to own all land and natural resources within its borders, with any other landholders merely renting from the government; this has been the case since the abolition of nobility in Ikun in Y341 (about 290 Earth years before Project Hope). While the government does own the land in Ikun, they don't claim to own the stuff that private packs have built on the land; there's no legal framework like eminent domain to seize private assets that aren't being used for criminal activity through overt violence, except to recover unpaid debts, or if the owner has given up control of such assets through the frameworks previously described. Similarly, failing to pay taxes doesn't lead to prison; persistent failure to pay said taxes along with interest accrued instead just leads to exile and denaturalization, along with a ban from doing future business in Ikun. Curiously, actively filing fraudulent tax documents is considered a crime however. Basically, not paying for the government's services means they'll just tell you to pay up or go away, but actively trying to trick them is what lands you in legal hot water.
Meanwhile, outside of the city's political borders lie its economic borders. Anyone from anywhere in the world--with the exception of foreign militaries and residents of certain sanctioned city-states--can freely traverse through this region without having to deal with the border security around the city proper, and Ikun has no legal jurisdiction unless its citizens are involved in an incident. However, foreigners can't permanently occupy, develop, or remove natural resources from the region without permission from the government. This being said, they do tend to be a lot more free-wheeling with granting permission for foreign entities to have operations out there versus in the city proper. And beyond Ikun's economic borders is classified as "open land", which is basically a free-for-all except where inter-city treaties apply.
Ikun's government doesn't seem to commit to either abstaining from intervening in the economy, nor to single-handedly controlling the economy. Instead it's treated as simply another participant in the economy. Ask a typical Ikun citizen-pack what the purpose of the state is, and the answer will likely be something along the lines of maximizing the wealth of its politicians by selling goods and services to its citizens. In general, there's no inherent taxation, and very few inherent regulations on domestically owned businesses in Ikun. However, in order to get a leg up, it's possible and common for businesses to cede some level of control to the government in exchange for critical benefits. Businesses may, for instance, agree to turn over a portion of their shares or products to the government, let the government make certain operational or staffing decisions, or be compelled to resolve disputes and administrative matters through the official legal system instead of private negotiation. In exchange, these businesses get access to money, materials, and personnel from the state, as well as exemptions from various laws. In extreme cases, businesses can cede total control to the state in exchange for unfettered access to the state's resources, effectively becoming a state-owned company. Most small and medium-sized businesses use one of a series of standard boilerplate contracts, but any large business worth its salt--especially in strategic industries like energy or defense--tends to negotiate a customized arrangement with the government.
Essentially nearly every significant business ends up being some sort of government contractor to one degree or another. This isn't strictly speaking forced, but in practice it can be almost impossible to survive and grow as a business without participating, especially when all the competition is taking advantage of the state's resources, and independent businesses that are successful despite the odds often find themselves under heavy pressure to submit to government involvement. Additionally, packless individuals, non-resident packs and foreign businesses are subject to much heavier restrictions on both doing business in Ikun and accessing the state's resources. As a result, the multi-national megacorporations common on Earth aren't often seen on the Kyanah homeworld; instead businesses seeking to expand globally will establish domestically owned subsidiaries run by local packs in foreign city-states, allowing them to bypass many of these restrictions.
As for social programs, they do exist in a sense, but not necessarily out of some communal spirit or moral imperative to provide for the needy. Instead it merely indicates that either the government has found some way to extract economic value from those who aren't traditionally employable, or is willing to eat the cost as a sort of loss leader, because they have calculated that they will recoup it elsewhere through the increased social stability. For instance, abandoned and orphaned eggs are sometimes collected and raised with the intent of recooping the cost via adoption fees. Hatchlings and children too, in the rare event that one can be found that hasn't already suffered irreparable mental and physical damage from being separated from their pack. Elderly packs (and elderly individual Kyanah whose packs have died) without retirement savings can also sometimes be found in these same facilities, where they are used to provide the constant socialization and stimulation that hatchlings and children require for mental stability. However, it's pretty much impossible to get provided for just by virtue of existing. Even these facilities do a careful cost-benefit analysis of any would-be entrants, and those deemed insufficiently valuable, whether because of physical or mental defects, pack history, or simply being an ethnic minority, or often rejected or only kept for a limited time.
As for land ownership, the city-state of Ikun is considered to own all land and natural resources within its borders, with any other landholders merely renting from the government; this has been the case since the abolition of nobility in Ikun in Y341 (about 290 Earth years before Project Hope). While the government does own the land in Ikun, they don't claim to own the stuff that private packs have built on the land; there's no legal framework like eminent domain to seize private assets that aren't being used for criminal activity through overt violence, except to recover unpaid debts, or if the owner has given up control of such assets through the frameworks previously described. Similarly, failing to pay taxes doesn't lead to prison; persistent failure to pay said taxes along with interest accrued instead just leads to exile and denaturalization, along with a ban from doing future business in Ikun. Curiously, actively filing fraudulent tax documents is considered a crime however. Basically, not paying for the government's services means they'll just tell you to pay up or go away, but actively trying to trick them is what lands you in legal hot water.
Meanwhile, outside of the city's political borders lie its economic borders. Anyone from anywhere in the world--with the exception of foreign militaries and residents of certain sanctioned city-states--can freely traverse through this region without having to deal with the border security around the city proper, and Ikun has no legal jurisdiction unless its citizens are involved in an incident. However, foreigners can't permanently occupy, develop, or remove natural resources from the region without permission from the government. This being said, they do tend to be a lot more free-wheeling with granting permission for foreign entities to have operations out there versus in the city proper. And beyond Ikun's economic borders is classified as "open land", which is basically a free-for-all except where inter-city treaties apply.
Re: Road to Hope
Kyanah computers are really...weird.
They invented machines quite similar to Babbage's analytical engine when their own technology was similar to late 19th century Earth, but unlike Charles Babbage, Kyanah engineers fully implemented this technology and continued to improve upon it, instead of leaving it to languish as a technological dead end. Even before coming to Earth and observing humanity's computers, they were aware of the concept of electronic computers as a theoretical idea, but saw no need to reinvent their pre-existing computer systems from scratch. In time, materials science would advance, leading to a period of exponential advancement and miniaturization, but this would stagnate earlier than our Moore's Law, requiring significant innovations to get around. Eventually, however, advancing nanotechnology allowed the continued miniaturization of gears and other mechanical components to an absurd degree, while the development of room temperature superconductors via zero-G manufacturing solved crucial heat dissipation problems to prevent high-performance computers from simply melting internally.
And so we get to the modern Kyanah computer, a machine similar in its theoretical framework to the Analytical Engine, but so far beyond it as to resemble an alien device (which it literally is). While gears in most computers come in a variety of sizes, the most miniaturized ones have a diameter of just 2-4 nanometers. To enable rapid computation, the fastest gears in consumer-grade computers can spin at around a million RPM, with some components in supercomputers exceeding 10 million RPM, leading to rotational velocities of many kilometers per second. The enormous mechanincal stresses these components are put under, especially the highly miniaturized ones, require complex manufacturing processes and advanced alloys. As a result, nanogears (really a proxy term for any nano-scale mechanical computer part, whether it's a gear or something else) are a highly strategic resource and city-states that can produce high-quality ones in bulk enjoy considerable geopolitical advantages, much like the human semiconductor industry.
While the earliest Kyanah computers were powered by steam engines (like the proposed analytical engine) modern ones simply spin the gears with electric motors, which can be powered by either a wall outlet or a battery. They tend to be more power hungry than human electronic computers, drawing over a kilowatt of power for the average desktop, and computers with large components can be quite loud. There has been considerable research into quieter components, but civilian tech lags quite a bit behind what the military has regarding that, and civilian computers are often characterized by a white noise of whirring and clanking. Most Kyanah are used to it and just ignore it, though ear protection is definitely recommended inside a high-performance computing complex. Kyanah computers can also be a bit dangerous; if you were to stick your hand inside one while it's running (disregarding why in the world anyone would ever do that!), it would be swiftly ground into mincemeat by the hypersonic gears and likely destroy the machine in the process. Fortunately for the average consumer, home computers tend to be "idiot-proofed" and automatically shut off if the protective casing is removed or tampered with.
However, in recent years, the very same ultra-dense batteries and supercapacitors used to power handheld railguns have spilled over into the civilian market, allowing for laptops and tablets that can actually run for more than a few minutes without being plugged in. This includes even more portable devices; unlike humans, who carry their portable computing devices in their pockets in the form of phones; Kyanah utilize wrist-mounted equivalents, which are sometimes ornately decorated to convey wealth and status, much like human watches. Even microscopic sensors and nanobots can have non-trivial compute power crammed into them, though it's obviously far more limited than macroscopic devices.
Displays are another area where Kyanah tech has diverged considerably from human tech. The earliest Kyanah computers simply used arrays of dials that were mechanically turned to display an output that could be read by the user. However, as technology advanced, they managed to hook up the output to a cathode ray tube-like display, which was in turn succeeded by a homogeneous metamaterial sheet capable of changing its color and brightness in response to mechanical pressure. This sort of continuous display has the advantage of effectively unlimited resolution and colors compared to discrete pixel-based displays, and is largely immune to glare (a nice to have feature on a hot and sunny desert planet!) but comparatively struggles at abrupt color changes (though one would have to look very closely at the screen to notice).
Data storage was historically done via punch cards, but this has become largely obsolete due to problems with reusability and miniaturization, so this has instead been replaced by...reusable nanotech punch cards! Instead of tearing physical holes in a piece of paper, nanoparticles are arranged on an inert metallic surface and moved around with electrostatic charges or piezoelectric actuators. As nanoparticles can take any position or orientation on the substrate, this allows for data to be stored in a continuous manner, rather than discrete bits. Reading can be done via a form of nano-scale lidar recording irregularities in the substrate that indicate the presence of nanoparticles. Resarch is underway on using optical levitation to position nanoparticles within a 3D space, allowing for even denser storage, but this remains energy expensive and unreliable. However, even 2D nanocards are quite powerful; they don't use bits and bytes as we understand them, but a single 1 cm by 1 cm chip can store the equivalent of nearly a petabyte of data. And the Kyanah soldiers' AR goggles can have as many as twenty stacked cards inside; it's easy to see how their invasion force combined casually collects a few NSA data centers' worth of data per day about battlefield conditions and human military capabilities.
The Kyanahs' continuous rather than discrete paradigms also extend into software. Low-level instructions tend to be based on continuous signal strength, rather than discrete units of binary, or even another base. Higher-level programming languages are structured in a similar manner, with extensive error-correcting mechanisms built into all levels of software to smooth over inevitable imperfections in signal strength. This leads to Kyanah code being less precise and reliable than human code, but also much more compact and forgiving of minor errors (in fact subtle errors can even be intentionally leveraged, as seen later). Those who have learned both species' programming languages tend to say that it's easier to quickly write complex and detailed programs in Kyanah languages, but harder to code in a disciplined and orderly manner
Experienced Kyanah programmers often leverage esoteric glitches to achieve results with less code, time, or memory usage than the official language specifications imply to be possible, in a manner similar to video game glitches or exploits. As a result, their code is often filled with what humans would call "cursed expressions" (which may not even be technically part of the language in question) and "wtf constants" (inexplicable magic numbers). In fact writing strictly "legal" code is often a sign of a novice programmer; to an advanced one, the rules of a programming language are more like guidelines. Lists of useful glitches are often circulated in manuals and on the internet, but actually being able to explain why they work often requires intimate knowledge of the hardware at a mechanical level. It may seem confusing, but if you know what you're doing, you can combine the abstraction of high level languages with the fine-grained hardware manipulation of low level ones.
In order to test this continuous code, they have what's known as grid testing, where you iterate through every combination of parameters at specific increments and cross reference the output with the desired result. The more critical the application, the tighter the grid increment and the broader the range, though this comes at the cost of spending more time testing, though sophisticated test programs will dynamically vary the increments to focus testing on more common and/or critical regions of the parameter space. Instead of code coverage, they're concerned with the volume of the parameter space that's covered by their grid testing.
They invented machines quite similar to Babbage's analytical engine when their own technology was similar to late 19th century Earth, but unlike Charles Babbage, Kyanah engineers fully implemented this technology and continued to improve upon it, instead of leaving it to languish as a technological dead end. Even before coming to Earth and observing humanity's computers, they were aware of the concept of electronic computers as a theoretical idea, but saw no need to reinvent their pre-existing computer systems from scratch. In time, materials science would advance, leading to a period of exponential advancement and miniaturization, but this would stagnate earlier than our Moore's Law, requiring significant innovations to get around. Eventually, however, advancing nanotechnology allowed the continued miniaturization of gears and other mechanical components to an absurd degree, while the development of room temperature superconductors via zero-G manufacturing solved crucial heat dissipation problems to prevent high-performance computers from simply melting internally.
And so we get to the modern Kyanah computer, a machine similar in its theoretical framework to the Analytical Engine, but so far beyond it as to resemble an alien device (which it literally is). While gears in most computers come in a variety of sizes, the most miniaturized ones have a diameter of just 2-4 nanometers. To enable rapid computation, the fastest gears in consumer-grade computers can spin at around a million RPM, with some components in supercomputers exceeding 10 million RPM, leading to rotational velocities of many kilometers per second. The enormous mechanincal stresses these components are put under, especially the highly miniaturized ones, require complex manufacturing processes and advanced alloys. As a result, nanogears (really a proxy term for any nano-scale mechanical computer part, whether it's a gear or something else) are a highly strategic resource and city-states that can produce high-quality ones in bulk enjoy considerable geopolitical advantages, much like the human semiconductor industry.
While the earliest Kyanah computers were powered by steam engines (like the proposed analytical engine) modern ones simply spin the gears with electric motors, which can be powered by either a wall outlet or a battery. They tend to be more power hungry than human electronic computers, drawing over a kilowatt of power for the average desktop, and computers with large components can be quite loud. There has been considerable research into quieter components, but civilian tech lags quite a bit behind what the military has regarding that, and civilian computers are often characterized by a white noise of whirring and clanking. Most Kyanah are used to it and just ignore it, though ear protection is definitely recommended inside a high-performance computing complex. Kyanah computers can also be a bit dangerous; if you were to stick your hand inside one while it's running (disregarding why in the world anyone would ever do that!), it would be swiftly ground into mincemeat by the hypersonic gears and likely destroy the machine in the process. Fortunately for the average consumer, home computers tend to be "idiot-proofed" and automatically shut off if the protective casing is removed or tampered with.
However, in recent years, the very same ultra-dense batteries and supercapacitors used to power handheld railguns have spilled over into the civilian market, allowing for laptops and tablets that can actually run for more than a few minutes without being plugged in. This includes even more portable devices; unlike humans, who carry their portable computing devices in their pockets in the form of phones; Kyanah utilize wrist-mounted equivalents, which are sometimes ornately decorated to convey wealth and status, much like human watches. Even microscopic sensors and nanobots can have non-trivial compute power crammed into them, though it's obviously far more limited than macroscopic devices.
Displays are another area where Kyanah tech has diverged considerably from human tech. The earliest Kyanah computers simply used arrays of dials that were mechanically turned to display an output that could be read by the user. However, as technology advanced, they managed to hook up the output to a cathode ray tube-like display, which was in turn succeeded by a homogeneous metamaterial sheet capable of changing its color and brightness in response to mechanical pressure. This sort of continuous display has the advantage of effectively unlimited resolution and colors compared to discrete pixel-based displays, and is largely immune to glare (a nice to have feature on a hot and sunny desert planet!) but comparatively struggles at abrupt color changes (though one would have to look very closely at the screen to notice).
Data storage was historically done via punch cards, but this has become largely obsolete due to problems with reusability and miniaturization, so this has instead been replaced by...reusable nanotech punch cards! Instead of tearing physical holes in a piece of paper, nanoparticles are arranged on an inert metallic surface and moved around with electrostatic charges or piezoelectric actuators. As nanoparticles can take any position or orientation on the substrate, this allows for data to be stored in a continuous manner, rather than discrete bits. Reading can be done via a form of nano-scale lidar recording irregularities in the substrate that indicate the presence of nanoparticles. Resarch is underway on using optical levitation to position nanoparticles within a 3D space, allowing for even denser storage, but this remains energy expensive and unreliable. However, even 2D nanocards are quite powerful; they don't use bits and bytes as we understand them, but a single 1 cm by 1 cm chip can store the equivalent of nearly a petabyte of data. And the Kyanah soldiers' AR goggles can have as many as twenty stacked cards inside; it's easy to see how their invasion force combined casually collects a few NSA data centers' worth of data per day about battlefield conditions and human military capabilities.
The Kyanahs' continuous rather than discrete paradigms also extend into software. Low-level instructions tend to be based on continuous signal strength, rather than discrete units of binary, or even another base. Higher-level programming languages are structured in a similar manner, with extensive error-correcting mechanisms built into all levels of software to smooth over inevitable imperfections in signal strength. This leads to Kyanah code being less precise and reliable than human code, but also much more compact and forgiving of minor errors (in fact subtle errors can even be intentionally leveraged, as seen later). Those who have learned both species' programming languages tend to say that it's easier to quickly write complex and detailed programs in Kyanah languages, but harder to code in a disciplined and orderly manner
Experienced Kyanah programmers often leverage esoteric glitches to achieve results with less code, time, or memory usage than the official language specifications imply to be possible, in a manner similar to video game glitches or exploits. As a result, their code is often filled with what humans would call "cursed expressions" (which may not even be technically part of the language in question) and "wtf constants" (inexplicable magic numbers). In fact writing strictly "legal" code is often a sign of a novice programmer; to an advanced one, the rules of a programming language are more like guidelines. Lists of useful glitches are often circulated in manuals and on the internet, but actually being able to explain why they work often requires intimate knowledge of the hardware at a mechanical level. It may seem confusing, but if you know what you're doing, you can combine the abstraction of high level languages with the fine-grained hardware manipulation of low level ones.
In order to test this continuous code, they have what's known as grid testing, where you iterate through every combination of parameters at specific increments and cross reference the output with the desired result. The more critical the application, the tighter the grid increment and the broader the range, though this comes at the cost of spending more time testing, though sophisticated test programs will dynamically vary the increments to focus testing on more common and/or critical regions of the parameter space. Instead of code coverage, they're concerned with the volume of the parameter space that's covered by their grid testing.
Re: Road to Hope
Despite it being impossible for either species to hack into the other's computer systems or even directly communicate between computers, there's still a way in via trickery and social engineering. If one species can transmit a file to the other via radio and convince an engineer to convert it to the appropriate computing paradigm and install it on their species' computers without realizing that it's a malicious executable, then they can do considerable damage. Though getting a programmer to understand it well enough to translate it, but not well enough to recognize it as malware, is an enormously difficult task.
The humans are the first to try. A group of military operatives pretend to be traitors to humanity leaking classified intelligence to the Kyanah, but actually sending a program designed to make their computers' gears jam and overheat, irreversibly damaging delicate nano-scale components. If successful, this would destroy the Kyanahs' space-based supercomputers, which they rely on to perform Stockfish-like analysis of battlefield conditions in real time.
Not only does humanity actually manage to create a malware using this continuous computing paradigm, but they actually manage to get it onto a Kyanah computer. Only for it to do nothing, because the whole time it was running on a within-computer, a type of program that merely simulates an actual computer, much like a human VM. Evidently the Kyanah are aware of cybersecurity and respect humans enough to use it. But worse than that, it gives the Kyanah an idea.
Human traitors have told them that humans lack a thorough understanding of the inner workings of their own AI systems. So the Kyanah begin designing within-computers that simulate not their own mechanical computers, but the discrete electronic computers used by humans. And so begins a project that can roughly be translated into human language as "Operation Drunkard", so named because its goal is to make human AI systems act "drunk" in a way.
Months later the Kyanah radio another file back to the human double agents, which is dutifully transcribed onto a human computer system by one operative who is actually a triple agent. Gradually it spreads across the internet, hiding itself on billions of machines. But it doesn't just delete data or brick computers--that would be far too obvious, humanity would figure out what's going on and adapt. Instead it's far more insidious.
Most of the time, on most machines, it doesn't do anything. But if it detects that an AI model is being trained, it targets the GPUs, randomly altering weights to make the training ineffective. At best the models are suboptimal and take forever to converge; at worst they're no better than random guessing. And because deep learning systems are largely a black box to humans, it takes them a very long time to pinpoint why all their models are suddenly trash.
Which has huge spillover effects in other areas of the war. Humans won't be able to create their own "battle Stockfish" to optimize their strategies. They can't bridge the gap in materials science, because many useful Kyanah materials are AI designed. And as a result, any Kyanah military hardware that falls into human hands will be that much harder to reverse engineer.
The humans are the first to try. A group of military operatives pretend to be traitors to humanity leaking classified intelligence to the Kyanah, but actually sending a program designed to make their computers' gears jam and overheat, irreversibly damaging delicate nano-scale components. If successful, this would destroy the Kyanahs' space-based supercomputers, which they rely on to perform Stockfish-like analysis of battlefield conditions in real time.
Not only does humanity actually manage to create a malware using this continuous computing paradigm, but they actually manage to get it onto a Kyanah computer. Only for it to do nothing, because the whole time it was running on a within-computer, a type of program that merely simulates an actual computer, much like a human VM. Evidently the Kyanah are aware of cybersecurity and respect humans enough to use it. But worse than that, it gives the Kyanah an idea.
Human traitors have told them that humans lack a thorough understanding of the inner workings of their own AI systems. So the Kyanah begin designing within-computers that simulate not their own mechanical computers, but the discrete electronic computers used by humans. And so begins a project that can roughly be translated into human language as "Operation Drunkard", so named because its goal is to make human AI systems act "drunk" in a way.
Months later the Kyanah radio another file back to the human double agents, which is dutifully transcribed onto a human computer system by one operative who is actually a triple agent. Gradually it spreads across the internet, hiding itself on billions of machines. But it doesn't just delete data or brick computers--that would be far too obvious, humanity would figure out what's going on and adapt. Instead it's far more insidious.
Most of the time, on most machines, it doesn't do anything. But if it detects that an AI model is being trained, it targets the GPUs, randomly altering weights to make the training ineffective. At best the models are suboptimal and take forever to converge; at worst they're no better than random guessing. And because deep learning systems are largely a black box to humans, it takes them a very long time to pinpoint why all their models are suddenly trash.
Which has huge spillover effects in other areas of the war. Humans won't be able to create their own "battle Stockfish" to optimize their strategies. They can't bridge the gap in materials science, because many useful Kyanah materials are AI designed. And as a result, any Kyanah military hardware that falls into human hands will be that much harder to reverse engineer.
Re: Road to Hope
Naturally, Kyanah computers communicate with each other, and they have their own analogues to the internet and web. There exists specialized software called transfer programs that can take a numerical pointer to another computer and interface with the hardware in a computer's comms module, converting the pointer into movements of mechanical components allowing the data--encoded in the form of radio, laser, or even neutrino signals with varying frequency and intensity--to be transmitted to a specific destination. Such comms modules and transfer programs weren't invented until after the Utopian Wars, decades after the first mechanical computers, but are a vital component of most Kyanah computers ever since.
The Kyanah internet can be likened to sort of a tree structure. Each node has a data layer, which can be rendered by a client analogous to a human browser, and a pointer layer, which stores pointers to child nodes and metadata on their purpose, structure, and other technical details. Anyone who owns a server node can freely configure it to create as many child nodes as they like. In practice, creation of child nodes is limited by an owner's ability to afford all the required server infrastructure, but child nodes can be gifted or sold to other owners to reduce the burden (or simply deleted). This explains why an entire internet isn't simply controlled by whoever owns the root. Speaking of the root, it is obviously a given that every tree must have a root, and so it is with Kyanah internets. Depending on the root in question, it can either be a single massive server complex, several geographically spread out server complexes to allow multiple redundancies and balance loads, or even a fully distributed and massively redundant system distributed amongst every end user's computer. With the exception of the third type, root servers are often stored in remote locations in open desert (the closest legal equivalent on Earth would probably be international waters, but obviously they don't have oceans) to avoid putting them in the hands of a single government and remain operational even in the event of natural disasters or war.
When querying an internet, all queries naturally start at the root with a specific set of parameters indicating the desired outcome of said query. To process an incoming query, a server will check if its data layer matches the query parameters to a sufficient degree and if so simply follow the instructions given in the query. Otherwise it searches its children to select the most optimal node and forwards the query to it. As child nodes tend to be at least somewhat relevant to the parent node, this generally allows queries to gradually converge on an optimal node as they go deeper. Spammers can of course manipulate the data layer and the metadata on its children to draw in traffic from irrelevant queries, but there are several strategies to prevent that. At the client level, there are multi-queries; many queries can be sent out with small amounts of random noise added to each query parameter to ensure that they don't all end up at the same malicious site, and browser-side algorithms and/or the user can select the most relevant one. Similarly, at the node level, a lot of nodes introduce a contempt factor, wherein if there are many children with nearly-equal relevance scores, the most relevant one won't always be chosen for further search, but instead one of the nearly-as-relevant ones. This makes it less likely for queries to fall into a "local maximum trap" created either by spammers or by accident. As parent nodes control their children's metadata, dubious or malicious nodes can also be flagged by their parent's operators, allowing queries to avoid them.
In general, node operators have a lot of latitude in selecting their own algorithm to evaluate the relevance of themselves and their children, though off-the-shelf algorithms definitely exist. There tends to be an incentive to not outrageously abuse this power, as it can annoy the owners of child nodes, who can delete themselves and acquire a new child somewhere else on the tree, leading to reduced traffic to rogue node. Such repositioning of nodes is not uncommon, though generally the closer to the root one gets, the demand outpaces the supply, so a child very close to root can be quite expensive, and subject the operator to increased scrutiny from governments and the general public alike due to the high visibility. High level node operators tend to also be wealthy and prominent packs, corporations, or government agencies that have an image to maintain, and thus also have an incentive to avoid blatant abuse of the system at the highest levels. Of course, abuses still occur at all levels of the tree to one degree or another, as with any system.
Query parameters tend to be more structured and complex than simply typing into a search bar, with many conditions and even elaborate functions that can be checked against the metadata layer to produce a numerical relevance score for the node, as well as instructions on what to do when a suitable node is reached, whether that be retrieving all or part of the data layer, storing data in the data layer, or performing some other server-side action on behalf of the user (e.g. processing payments). They also include data structures to require or forbid traversal of certain subtrees, which includes simply hardcoding a list of pointers specifying exactly which child to access from each node, allowing exact navigation to specific nodes, though in Kyanah internet culture, getting the desired information, regardless of where it comes from, is usually more prioritized than going to a specific node. The desired child pointer, along with the query parameters, can be passed into a transfer program, which directly interfaces with the machine's comms module to physically send the query parameters to the child. Other data structures included in the query parameter protocol include authentication structures (both to authenticate users and ensure the integrity of queries), and edit instructions for nodes that allow it, creating baked-in support for the equivalent of forums or wikis. In modern times, nobody types in machine readable queries, instead they use a query adapter that can generate queries from natural language. While modern browsers tend to come with a query adapter it's common for tech-savvy packs to use an open source one or code their own to ensure a less biased and more customized online experience.
Queries can sometimes be edited by nodes; this can be done for benign purposes such as optimizing them to ensure more relevant results within the subtree, or to sabotage said queries and prevent them from reaching a relevant node. Authentication codes can verify whether or not a query has been modified, but some nodes--even high-level ones used by millions of packs--do it anyway, which is quite controversial and a subject of hot debate in internet policy. Censorship by authoritarian governments tends to require significant effort unless they simply retain ownership of all child nodes at any depth (which a few actually do, but it isn't very practical for a large internet, unless they also have tons of money to burn). Deleting a child node can't be done by the root, only by itself or its immediate parent, and there's no "node where all the government critics hang out", so trying to attack from the top down could also delete millions of apolitical or pro-government nodes. Simply tracking down and arresting node operators can work, but they may well be in a foreign city-state. So state censorship tends to operate via root nodes editing queries that pass through them. Many query adapters are constantly being updated to allow politically sensitive queries to slip through the cracks and make it to their intended destination untouched.
There is also more than one root; even discounting the countless private roots that require authentication to get in, there are many different internets on the Kyanah homeworld instead of one global internet. At the dawn of the planet's information age, this networking technology was independently invented and implemented in various city states, often using their own incompatible query parameter protocols and transfer programs. Over the years, many of these were merged into other nearby internets with sufficiently compatible software and network technology. Thus the number of internets has gradually declined from a peak of over 10,000 into just 21 "net zones", each associated with but not entirely exclusive to, a geographical region. This number has been constant for a few decades, as of the launch of Project Hope. Many of the existing net zones are quite large, with the biggest having nearly half a billion packs using them, and merging them would require the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars and months or years of effort by programmers and computer engineers, and there's also the often politically charged question of which zone would merge into which. Thus it's unlikely that there will be any more mergers in the forseeable future; the last was in Y910, about 30 Earth years before Project Hope.
Also as an adaptation to the multiple roots, there are what's known as bridge nodes, which transcribe select portions of the trees from other net zones into their own net zone. This is limited to nodes deemed by the operators to be useful or relevant to the public, transcribing everything would be impractical. It also isn't direct, real-time access, instead functioning as a mirror of sorts. It takes considerable technical expertise and often custom hardware to run a bridge node, and lots of money and server space to run a good one, But it's the best they're going to get, the Kyanah are too fractious and distrustful of centralized authorities to ever agree on uniform global protocols like TCP/IP or HTTP. Which is probably a big part of why they have city-states in the first place, instead of nation states or a world government...even hammering it down to 21 was a huge undertaking in global cooperation and diplomacy.
The Kyanah internet can be likened to sort of a tree structure. Each node has a data layer, which can be rendered by a client analogous to a human browser, and a pointer layer, which stores pointers to child nodes and metadata on their purpose, structure, and other technical details. Anyone who owns a server node can freely configure it to create as many child nodes as they like. In practice, creation of child nodes is limited by an owner's ability to afford all the required server infrastructure, but child nodes can be gifted or sold to other owners to reduce the burden (or simply deleted). This explains why an entire internet isn't simply controlled by whoever owns the root. Speaking of the root, it is obviously a given that every tree must have a root, and so it is with Kyanah internets. Depending on the root in question, it can either be a single massive server complex, several geographically spread out server complexes to allow multiple redundancies and balance loads, or even a fully distributed and massively redundant system distributed amongst every end user's computer. With the exception of the third type, root servers are often stored in remote locations in open desert (the closest legal equivalent on Earth would probably be international waters, but obviously they don't have oceans) to avoid putting them in the hands of a single government and remain operational even in the event of natural disasters or war.
When querying an internet, all queries naturally start at the root with a specific set of parameters indicating the desired outcome of said query. To process an incoming query, a server will check if its data layer matches the query parameters to a sufficient degree and if so simply follow the instructions given in the query. Otherwise it searches its children to select the most optimal node and forwards the query to it. As child nodes tend to be at least somewhat relevant to the parent node, this generally allows queries to gradually converge on an optimal node as they go deeper. Spammers can of course manipulate the data layer and the metadata on its children to draw in traffic from irrelevant queries, but there are several strategies to prevent that. At the client level, there are multi-queries; many queries can be sent out with small amounts of random noise added to each query parameter to ensure that they don't all end up at the same malicious site, and browser-side algorithms and/or the user can select the most relevant one. Similarly, at the node level, a lot of nodes introduce a contempt factor, wherein if there are many children with nearly-equal relevance scores, the most relevant one won't always be chosen for further search, but instead one of the nearly-as-relevant ones. This makes it less likely for queries to fall into a "local maximum trap" created either by spammers or by accident. As parent nodes control their children's metadata, dubious or malicious nodes can also be flagged by their parent's operators, allowing queries to avoid them.
In general, node operators have a lot of latitude in selecting their own algorithm to evaluate the relevance of themselves and their children, though off-the-shelf algorithms definitely exist. There tends to be an incentive to not outrageously abuse this power, as it can annoy the owners of child nodes, who can delete themselves and acquire a new child somewhere else on the tree, leading to reduced traffic to rogue node. Such repositioning of nodes is not uncommon, though generally the closer to the root one gets, the demand outpaces the supply, so a child very close to root can be quite expensive, and subject the operator to increased scrutiny from governments and the general public alike due to the high visibility. High level node operators tend to also be wealthy and prominent packs, corporations, or government agencies that have an image to maintain, and thus also have an incentive to avoid blatant abuse of the system at the highest levels. Of course, abuses still occur at all levels of the tree to one degree or another, as with any system.
Query parameters tend to be more structured and complex than simply typing into a search bar, with many conditions and even elaborate functions that can be checked against the metadata layer to produce a numerical relevance score for the node, as well as instructions on what to do when a suitable node is reached, whether that be retrieving all or part of the data layer, storing data in the data layer, or performing some other server-side action on behalf of the user (e.g. processing payments). They also include data structures to require or forbid traversal of certain subtrees, which includes simply hardcoding a list of pointers specifying exactly which child to access from each node, allowing exact navigation to specific nodes, though in Kyanah internet culture, getting the desired information, regardless of where it comes from, is usually more prioritized than going to a specific node. The desired child pointer, along with the query parameters, can be passed into a transfer program, which directly interfaces with the machine's comms module to physically send the query parameters to the child. Other data structures included in the query parameter protocol include authentication structures (both to authenticate users and ensure the integrity of queries), and edit instructions for nodes that allow it, creating baked-in support for the equivalent of forums or wikis. In modern times, nobody types in machine readable queries, instead they use a query adapter that can generate queries from natural language. While modern browsers tend to come with a query adapter it's common for tech-savvy packs to use an open source one or code their own to ensure a less biased and more customized online experience.
Queries can sometimes be edited by nodes; this can be done for benign purposes such as optimizing them to ensure more relevant results within the subtree, or to sabotage said queries and prevent them from reaching a relevant node. Authentication codes can verify whether or not a query has been modified, but some nodes--even high-level ones used by millions of packs--do it anyway, which is quite controversial and a subject of hot debate in internet policy. Censorship by authoritarian governments tends to require significant effort unless they simply retain ownership of all child nodes at any depth (which a few actually do, but it isn't very practical for a large internet, unless they also have tons of money to burn). Deleting a child node can't be done by the root, only by itself or its immediate parent, and there's no "node where all the government critics hang out", so trying to attack from the top down could also delete millions of apolitical or pro-government nodes. Simply tracking down and arresting node operators can work, but they may well be in a foreign city-state. So state censorship tends to operate via root nodes editing queries that pass through them. Many query adapters are constantly being updated to allow politically sensitive queries to slip through the cracks and make it to their intended destination untouched.
There is also more than one root; even discounting the countless private roots that require authentication to get in, there are many different internets on the Kyanah homeworld instead of one global internet. At the dawn of the planet's information age, this networking technology was independently invented and implemented in various city states, often using their own incompatible query parameter protocols and transfer programs. Over the years, many of these were merged into other nearby internets with sufficiently compatible software and network technology. Thus the number of internets has gradually declined from a peak of over 10,000 into just 21 "net zones", each associated with but not entirely exclusive to, a geographical region. This number has been constant for a few decades, as of the launch of Project Hope. Many of the existing net zones are quite large, with the biggest having nearly half a billion packs using them, and merging them would require the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars and months or years of effort by programmers and computer engineers, and there's also the often politically charged question of which zone would merge into which. Thus it's unlikely that there will be any more mergers in the forseeable future; the last was in Y910, about 30 Earth years before Project Hope.
Also as an adaptation to the multiple roots, there are what's known as bridge nodes, which transcribe select portions of the trees from other net zones into their own net zone. This is limited to nodes deemed by the operators to be useful or relevant to the public, transcribing everything would be impractical. It also isn't direct, real-time access, instead functioning as a mirror of sorts. It takes considerable technical expertise and often custom hardware to run a bridge node, and lots of money and server space to run a good one, But it's the best they're going to get, the Kyanah are too fractious and distrustful of centralized authorities to ever agree on uniform global protocols like TCP/IP or HTTP. Which is probably a big part of why they have city-states in the first place, instead of nation states or a world government...even hammering it down to 21 was a huge undertaking in global cooperation and diplomacy.
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firestar464
- Posts: 842
- Joined: Wed Oct 12, 2022 7:45 am
Re: Road to Hope
You mentioned the Kyanah being known for being aggressive. Humans aren't as aggressive and are already pretty cringe on the net. I imaging a typical Kyanah online interaction to go like:
User1: geoengineering good
User2: HOPE HATER HOPE HATER
I WILL ******* DOX AND KILL YOU, AND I WILL HANG YOUR BODY FOR EVERYONE TO SEE
User1: YOU'LL HAVE TO GET THROUGH MY ENTIRE ****** PACK FIRST. WHO, BY THE WAY, WILL TORTURE YOU IN THE ***** AND DISEMBOWEL YOU. YOU WILL DIE, BUT NOT BEFORE WE FORCE YOU TO EAT YOUR OWN DIGESTIVE SYSTEM
Mods: This is normal.
<an hour later>
User1: Anyway...what about that new TV show?
User2: Yeah. Loving it
(as if they haven't just been throwing death threats at each other for the past hour)
User1: geoengineering good
User2: HOPE HATER HOPE HATER
I WILL ******* DOX AND KILL YOU, AND I WILL HANG YOUR BODY FOR EVERYONE TO SEE
User1: YOU'LL HAVE TO GET THROUGH MY ENTIRE ****** PACK FIRST. WHO, BY THE WAY, WILL TORTURE YOU IN THE ***** AND DISEMBOWEL YOU. YOU WILL DIE, BUT NOT BEFORE WE FORCE YOU TO EAT YOUR OWN DIGESTIVE SYSTEM
Mods: This is normal.
<an hour later>
User1: Anyway...what about that new TV show?
User2: Yeah. Loving it
(as if they haven't just been throwing death threats at each other for the past hour)
Re: Road to Hope
Haha I feel like it would also be a bit cringe in Kyanah internet culture--or at least on net zone 1--but for different reasons.firestar464 wrote: ↑Wed Apr 24, 2024 1:41 pm You mentioned the Kyanah being known for being aggressive. Humans aren't as aggressive and are already pretty cringe on the net. I imaging a typical Kyanah online interaction to go like:
User1: geoengineering good
User2: HOPE HATER HOPE HATER
I WILL ******* DOX AND KILL YOU, AND I WILL HANG YOUR BODY FOR EVERYONE TO SEE
User1: YOU'LL HAVE TO GET THROUGH MY ENTIRE ****** PACK FIRST. WHO, BY THE WAY, WILL TORTURE YOU IN THE ***** AND DISEMBOWEL YOU. YOU WILL DIE, BUT NOT BEFORE WE FORCE YOU TO EAT YOUR OWN DIGESTIVE SYSTEM
Mods: This is normal.
<an hour later>
User1: Anyway...what about that new TV show?
User2: Yeah. Loving it
(as if they haven't just been throwing death threats at each other for the past hour)
I think due to how the query parameters work, it's a lot less common to hang around the same node for a long time and post over and over, unless you happen to be the node operator. You find the most relevant node for what you want to say, you say it, and the next time you want to say something, you find the most relevant node for that. So it would probably be bad netiquette for the same two users to be talking back and forth on one node for an hour, even if it was a perfectly wholesome and relevant exchange. Especially as forums are basically the online equivalent of story-threads (I should make a post about Kyanah art and literature...); they're more seen as collaboratively building something (in this case a conversation) rather than having a social discussion with each other, something which is reserved mostly for packs, and sometimes their ikoin.
And whatever pack is the node operator might get a bit annoyed by it, they usually start nodes for a specific purpose and if others come in and start making it into a political space, the parent node might change the metadata to reflect that, which will draw in more packs looking for a place to fight about politics and ruin whatever space the operators were trying to build. (And no they don't all just make politically charged edits to random nodes all the time. Though they definitely have their own versions of trolling and shitposting.)
So yeah these two users would likely just get a lot of replies telling them
(standard Ikun writing, can vary in other city states by a little...or a lot...Kyanah linguistics are complicated) which could be translated as "get a node", as in "stop hogging this node and go edit your own". Just to make things more confusing, "get a node" can also be a signal of unironic appreciation of a piece of content, as in "you should get your own node so you can put all your work in one place for others to find".Though the weirdest part would probably be the implication that these two were talking to each other without their packs the whole time. Would definitely garner suspicions of infidelity from both their packs. Then again, most packs share an online presence together so perhaps "user1" and "user2" aren't the same individuals the whole time.
But you're right that Kyanah will generally get super aggressive over what would to humans seem like nothing, only to quickly de-escalate and carry on with their lives once they've sufficiently defended their dignity.
Re: Road to Hope
As previously mentioned, Kyanah don't seem to care about personal space and privacy amongst their own packs, and thus as far as they're concerned, they have enough living space if they can move around without tripping over each other. A 5 by 5 meter apartment would be seen as a decent starter home for a pack of 4-6 adults and maybe their first pair of young. Units for individual, packless Kyanah are even smaller, 2x3 meters with space for only the barest necessities, is pretty average. Though most will only live in such conditions for a few years or less before they get packs of their own, and the "real" jobs that come with that. Wealthier packs, and those with more young, will often upsize somewhat, but unless it's a literal mansion (and sometimes even then), this usually just means a larger room rather than multiple rooms, and packs will still tend to congregate in the same part of the room; if they're idle and don't have any particular reason to be more than a few feet from their packmates, they probably won't be.
Naturally, this means that every bit of space in a Kyanah dwelling is put to use. Large open spaces are in fact seen as aesthetically displeasing in most cultures, like a pack was too lazy to finish making their living space into a proper home. The reason for this is fairly evident--their world is an arid super-Earth, if they want open spaces they can just go outside, there's no need to make one indoors too. If a pack has some unoccupied floor space that isn't needed for moving around, and they can afford to put something there, they probably will. Generally speaking, they don't divide their homes into multiple distinct areas for different purposes, but just stick everything together in one space.
Usually, essentials like appliances, storage bins, computers and TVs, line every wall; a lot of these would likely be recognizable to a human observer even if some of the details are different. Notably, this doesn't include anything resembling a bath or shower. Kyanah can't sweat, so tend not to get as damp and oily as humans do, and even with the Water Distribution System, tap water is still close to an order of magnitude more expensive on their homeworld than on Earth; during the Project Hope era, it tends to average $50-$70 per cubic meter in Ikun, depending on how you convert to human money. So usually a moist washcloth and some soap is sufficient for wiping off dirt and grime. They tend not to really like getting wet anyway. Another thing that might raise some human eyebrows is the tendency for toilets to just casually sit along the wall in plain view from the rest of the room, as again, Kyanah don't really have any desire to hide or isolate from their own packs. There tends to be a notable lack of chairs in homes and offices as well; trying to use a typical human chair would lead to them either sitting on their own tail or having their tail sticking out at an strange angle that would make sitting down or getting up rather awkward. So they just sit on pillows or cushions on the floor instead.
The placement of windows may also raise some eyebrows. Usually their angle, small size, and positioning near the floor or ceiling indicates that their primary purpose is letting in natural light rather than providing a view. After all, Kyanah aren't descended from tree climbing apes, unlike certain other intelligent species, so generally don't care to be reminded that they're 40 stories in the air, even if that is the most efficient urban planning solution. Instead of the steel and glass exteriors commonly seen in modern and futuristic architecture, their buildings tend to consist mainly of masonry, concrete, or even ceramic facades, often ornately decorated in fancy or important buildings. Some architectural styles lack windows entirely.
The literal and figurative centerpiece of any Kyanah dwelling, however, is the nest. It's a holdover from prehistoric times, when they were used to incubate eggs and hide them from ovivores (despite their apex predator status, eggs were obviously still vulnerable in primitive times), as well as protecting hatchlings from the climate in their ancestral boreal scrublands--a warm climate by human standards, but to Kyanah, the 20-25 Celsius winters hit like 0 does to humans, especially with the 2 bar atmosphere leeching away heat twice as fast. In modern times, eggs are simply kept in electric incubators plugged into a wall outlet, the environment inside their homes can be easily controlled by a thermostat, and even the few ovivores that aren't endangered and can survive in Kyanah cities have no way of navigating through locked doors anyway. But still the practice remains; non-nesting cultures are not unheard of, but rare enough to be the subject of anthropological studies (or whatever the equivalent is).
Kyanah build assembly nests on the ground, rather than submerged burrows or elevated eyries. In prehistoric times, they had to make do with sticks, leaves, and animal hides, but in modern times, with synthetic materials, factories, and global trade networks, they have access to a huge variety of much higher quality textiles from all corners of the world to choose from. It's common to buy a plastic or metal nest frame, often shaped like a cylinder or cone, and fill it with cushions, textiles, and other decorations--chains of small lights resembling human Christmas lights have gone in and out of fashion in Ikun over the years--and drape or otherwise attach enough material to cover up both the frame and the open space at the top. Smart textiles with animated displays provided by metamaterials are also a popular choice in modern nests, but some packs go for a more natural look, with synthetic replicas of ancient or prehistoric materials.
Kyanah packs tend to take great pride in their nests and spend considerable time and money tracking down the right materials and updating it to keep up with fashion trends. A nascent pack building their first nest together is seen as a huge milestone and bonding moment, though first nests are rarely permanent; in time a pack will usually wear them out or outgrow them by having children. Typically, adults will sleep around the edges, while their young, if they have any, occupy the center. Unlike human beds, Kyanah nests are typically only for sleep; having sex in the nest isn't unheard of or wrong, but seen in many cultures as a bit unusual and not exactly vanilla and apparently becoming less and less common century by century; using cushions and/or the floor is a lot more common. Notably, as Kyanah have a nesting instinct, they will, if separated from their homes for whatever reason, often have a strong urge to make a nest out of whatever materials are available; hotels usually provide a blank frame and leave packs to fill it in for themselves.
In general, homes are seen as special spaces that nobody except the pack who lives there is ever supposed to enter; the only real exceptions are emergency responders and maintenance personnel. Even a pack's longest-standing ikoin, who have known them for years, often don't even know exactly where they live, let alone actually coming and visiting. Social interactions between packs, when they do happen, are invariably on neutral ground, and must involve the entirety of both packs, otherwise it's seen as cheating and deemed a massive breach of trust. Even sharing photos from inside a pack's home is seen as oversharing by more traditional-minded Kyanah, though as generation after generation grows up with social media, the cultural zeitgeist is increasingly drawing a distinction between sharing photos of that space and sharing the actual space.
Naturally, this means that every bit of space in a Kyanah dwelling is put to use. Large open spaces are in fact seen as aesthetically displeasing in most cultures, like a pack was too lazy to finish making their living space into a proper home. The reason for this is fairly evident--their world is an arid super-Earth, if they want open spaces they can just go outside, there's no need to make one indoors too. If a pack has some unoccupied floor space that isn't needed for moving around, and they can afford to put something there, they probably will. Generally speaking, they don't divide their homes into multiple distinct areas for different purposes, but just stick everything together in one space.
Usually, essentials like appliances, storage bins, computers and TVs, line every wall; a lot of these would likely be recognizable to a human observer even if some of the details are different. Notably, this doesn't include anything resembling a bath or shower. Kyanah can't sweat, so tend not to get as damp and oily as humans do, and even with the Water Distribution System, tap water is still close to an order of magnitude more expensive on their homeworld than on Earth; during the Project Hope era, it tends to average $50-$70 per cubic meter in Ikun, depending on how you convert to human money. So usually a moist washcloth and some soap is sufficient for wiping off dirt and grime. They tend not to really like getting wet anyway. Another thing that might raise some human eyebrows is the tendency for toilets to just casually sit along the wall in plain view from the rest of the room, as again, Kyanah don't really have any desire to hide or isolate from their own packs. There tends to be a notable lack of chairs in homes and offices as well; trying to use a typical human chair would lead to them either sitting on their own tail or having their tail sticking out at an strange angle that would make sitting down or getting up rather awkward. So they just sit on pillows or cushions on the floor instead.
The placement of windows may also raise some eyebrows. Usually their angle, small size, and positioning near the floor or ceiling indicates that their primary purpose is letting in natural light rather than providing a view. After all, Kyanah aren't descended from tree climbing apes, unlike certain other intelligent species, so generally don't care to be reminded that they're 40 stories in the air, even if that is the most efficient urban planning solution. Instead of the steel and glass exteriors commonly seen in modern and futuristic architecture, their buildings tend to consist mainly of masonry, concrete, or even ceramic facades, often ornately decorated in fancy or important buildings. Some architectural styles lack windows entirely.
The literal and figurative centerpiece of any Kyanah dwelling, however, is the nest. It's a holdover from prehistoric times, when they were used to incubate eggs and hide them from ovivores (despite their apex predator status, eggs were obviously still vulnerable in primitive times), as well as protecting hatchlings from the climate in their ancestral boreal scrublands--a warm climate by human standards, but to Kyanah, the 20-25 Celsius winters hit like 0 does to humans, especially with the 2 bar atmosphere leeching away heat twice as fast. In modern times, eggs are simply kept in electric incubators plugged into a wall outlet, the environment inside their homes can be easily controlled by a thermostat, and even the few ovivores that aren't endangered and can survive in Kyanah cities have no way of navigating through locked doors anyway. But still the practice remains; non-nesting cultures are not unheard of, but rare enough to be the subject of anthropological studies (or whatever the equivalent is).
Kyanah build assembly nests on the ground, rather than submerged burrows or elevated eyries. In prehistoric times, they had to make do with sticks, leaves, and animal hides, but in modern times, with synthetic materials, factories, and global trade networks, they have access to a huge variety of much higher quality textiles from all corners of the world to choose from. It's common to buy a plastic or metal nest frame, often shaped like a cylinder or cone, and fill it with cushions, textiles, and other decorations--chains of small lights resembling human Christmas lights have gone in and out of fashion in Ikun over the years--and drape or otherwise attach enough material to cover up both the frame and the open space at the top. Smart textiles with animated displays provided by metamaterials are also a popular choice in modern nests, but some packs go for a more natural look, with synthetic replicas of ancient or prehistoric materials.
Kyanah packs tend to take great pride in their nests and spend considerable time and money tracking down the right materials and updating it to keep up with fashion trends. A nascent pack building their first nest together is seen as a huge milestone and bonding moment, though first nests are rarely permanent; in time a pack will usually wear them out or outgrow them by having children. Typically, adults will sleep around the edges, while their young, if they have any, occupy the center. Unlike human beds, Kyanah nests are typically only for sleep; having sex in the nest isn't unheard of or wrong, but seen in many cultures as a bit unusual and not exactly vanilla and apparently becoming less and less common century by century; using cushions and/or the floor is a lot more common. Notably, as Kyanah have a nesting instinct, they will, if separated from their homes for whatever reason, often have a strong urge to make a nest out of whatever materials are available; hotels usually provide a blank frame and leave packs to fill it in for themselves.
In general, homes are seen as special spaces that nobody except the pack who lives there is ever supposed to enter; the only real exceptions are emergency responders and maintenance personnel. Even a pack's longest-standing ikoin, who have known them for years, often don't even know exactly where they live, let alone actually coming and visiting. Social interactions between packs, when they do happen, are invariably on neutral ground, and must involve the entirety of both packs, otherwise it's seen as cheating and deemed a massive breach of trust. Even sharing photos from inside a pack's home is seen as oversharing by more traditional-minded Kyanah, though as generation after generation grows up with social media, the cultural zeitgeist is increasingly drawing a distinction between sharing photos of that space and sharing the actual space.
