OUS Ulysses MD-1999
A late 24th century human starship
Doing a bit of fantasy engineering with the design of the OUS Ulysses — the ship the protagonist is aboard for a few days during the events of Inner Horizon. The flying saucer shape optimizes the the efficiency of the hyperquantum computation by minimizing the difference of the external gravitational field across the hull.
Aegis pod: This is a location for crew members (all conscious beings) to move to in order to improve the speed of the calculations for a filtering teleport. A vessel that has been boarded or had other material introduced can teleport away — leaving the boarding party behind. The most onerous part of the algorithm convergence is capturing the conscious minds. Additional conscious minds from a boarding party can cause the algorithm to struggle for an hour or more. If the hyperquantum computer has seed values for all the minds it wants to teleport in Aegis pods, this time can be cut drastically — down to 5-10 minutes.
Booss chitin: Booss are a sentient species in the galaxy that originally came from gas giant planets like Jupiter. They are buoyant sea jelly-like creatures, except with an exoskeleton of a hard biological plastic that humans refer to as Booss chitin that blocks radiation — it’s transparent in the visual spectrum and below with a faint blue tinge (Booss are photosynthetic, and their chloroplasts are similar to those on Earth in an example of convergent evolution). The Booss grow this material for their own vessels1 and trade it across the galaxy. The Ulysses uses it for windows.
Eukhloe taos: Human binary nomenclature (peacock eukloe as it looks like a peacock feather) for a species of seaweed from the Uutaruu homeworld used in their space vehicles. It is edible and the peacock variety has been bred to provide all essential nutrients for humans — a human could survive on eukloe alone. In addition, it processes human waste, scrubs CO2 from the environment, and produces O2 so is quite useful on a spaceship.
Turbofan atmospheric drive: Shown in the graphic uncovered as it would be for atmospheric flight, this is the primary propulsion system in a gaseous or liquid environment. The covering also creates a directional aperture to enable maneuvering in an atmosphere (or underwater). In addition, the fan is used to pump external coolant when the hyperquantum singularity drive is offline as the singularities still produce prodigious amounts of energy2 regardless of whether they are being used.
Telescopes: There’s a large primary telescope on a deployable robot arm and a smaller one on the bridge. While a technology has advanced quite a bit in the 400 years between today and when this ship is built, space is still big, stuff is far away, and collecting photons is still the best way for sighted humans to look at their immediate environment. The Ulysses’ bridge is nearly entirely Booss chitin and thus transparent in most directions — like a glass room.
Embed terminals: everyone in the diplomatic mission has holographic tattoos called embeds that are effectively Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) that function as all of the on-board computers (see footnotes here). The ship itself has no processors, and all the software is effectively carried by the crew in their tattoos. The interface with the ship systems (sensors, flight controls) occurs through embed terminals that are on many surfaces across the ship. Memorizers (people trained with amazing memory abilities) are part of the crew that monitor the outputs of the ship’s sensors, gauges, and various other metrics instead of the data being recorded.
Ba IV: Barium IV in high pressure vessels — the crystal at high pressure has an extremely complex structure that is used as an entropy reservoir in order to preserve human conscious states, DNA, etc that would otherwise be scrambled3 during teleport due to imperfections (errors) in the hyperquantum computation. Much like a heat engine needs a thermal reservoir to run, a hyperquantum computer needs an entropy reservoir to change horizon states — and the hyperquantum filter algorithms can direct the “waste” (computational errors) to the Ba IV.
Some other views of the Ulysses:
Side note: in the time period of Inner Horizon, there isn’t an economy among humans per se — hyperquantum algorithms are capable of solving the economic linear programming problem nearly instantaneously. People are given choices of tasks4 based on the requirements across the world and simply out of the human need to feel useful most everything gets done. It's a "side quest" economy. Nearly everything in this world is one-off, hand made, or small batch. As such, the Orion Union ships are basically one of a kind. There are similarities — driven more by good design practice than mass production. Human ships and space stations tend to be built around a cylindrical model (either flat saucer-like systems or tall silo-like systems) due efficiency needs of the hyperquantum algorithms5.
The Ulysses uses a hyperquantum singularity drive — singularities, tiny black holes, maximize the information content for their space-time volume (Bekenstein bound) and so maximize the hyperquantum compute capability. In addition, these singularities “evaporate” by giving off Hawking radiation — which is used as a power source for the ship6. The singularities evaporate in a burst of radiation after few months depending on size (larger ones last longer, but give off less Hawking radiation). In order to teleport, however, the hyperquantum computer needs an extremely precise measurement of the local gravitational field vector (especially high accuracy is needed given 1) the conscious minds on board, and 2) the large distance being teleported). This is provided by a gravitational neutron interferometer (GNI or "genie", see here). Extremely precise alignment can be done if someone aboard has Conscious Horizon Interface (CHI) ability which they can use to align the interferometer using a joystick. Typically on human ships, an Uutaruu navigator will have this role — but occasionally humans with sufficient training can do it as well.
In addition to protecting the ship from micro-meteors and radiation with an Aegis field, the hyperquantum computer also establishes an entropy gradient with the horizon states to produce artificial gravity. Since this field has to net to zero in order not to accelerate the vehicle at station-keeping the field direction for a saucer-shaped ship will be similar to the excitation modes of a membrane. The Ulysses’ artificial gravity is set to about 1/2 g across the crew space of the vehicle, but closer to 1 g near the hyperquantum drive with a negative 1/2 g in between. This requires people traversing the radial corridors to follow a spiral path while going through the 360 degree rotation of the gravitational field vector.
However, small imbalances in the entropy gradient can be used to accelerate the ship at constant acceleration (so-called “grad mode” for gradient of the hyperquantum drive). The issue with this is that travel in this manner 1) is limited by human endurance to less than 10-15g’s, 2) is subject to relativity and therefore produces all of the time-dilating effects with the potential for years to pass back on Earth while only running for a few hours, and 3) has to be put in reverse to slow back down. It is almost never used except for very limited accelerations or VTOL in places where the downdraft of the turbofan would cause a problem. The direction of this travel is usually along the axis of the ship (“up” / “down”) and will no longer have the different gravitational directions (“artificial” gravity is produced by the acceleration).
© Jason Smith
Being made from Booss chitin means that they can largely survive in the vacuum of space and only need enclosed vessels for transporting materials.
Under normal circumstances, generating the artificial gravity (entropy gradient) and sustaining the Aegis field consume enough of the energy that the thermal radiators are sufficient in the vacuum of space.
Scrambling DNA can cause cancer, but human cells can prevent damage up to a point. The worst effect of a bad teleport algorithm (or teleporting with an insufficient entropy reservoir) is where it scrambles a person’s conscious state — producing a mental illness called Kakutani syndrome. The severity depends on the level of scrambling; very small amounts may barely be noticed, feeling as a memory of a disturbing dream, but greater amounts cause behavior problems; even greater amounts result in coma or death. The syndrome results from the neurons trying to make sense of memories and learned behavior effectively corrupted with random noise. Patients who survive severe Kakutani syndrome will first have to recover from an initial coma. However, similar to deep learning algorithms transforming a noisy image into an entirely different image, the noise in the patient’s consciousness will be transformed into an entirely different set memories and behaviors that evolve over time. Due to the sense-making drive of the human brain, this new set of memories can have various degrees of coherence — but are also not bounded by human experience. Often the visions are terrifying — a cosmic horror the patient cannot describe (assuming they retained some degree of language ability).
The economic centers where people get these tasks, use services, and pick up goods are called “malls” — they are large hubs of activity that include restaurants, airports, memorizer libraries, and teleport hubs.
There is the cylinder/saucer solution as well as a spherical solution (used by another galactic species, the Kamiser).
There are two back-up fusion reactors that can be used with a back-up conventional hyperquantum computer to allow the ship to teleport over a much reduced range — but sufficient to tack across several hundred megaparsecs per jump.