How the Vizierate keeps the Net updated.
Message Packet Service Frequency and Basic Concept
Basically, a Vizierate starship, specially designed for this work (they are called Message Packets) departs on the route from each Octant Capital and Zargonia at the start of every shift. Leaving Zargonia, that’s eight different routes but, for example, leaving Captree there are only three routes that cover all eight destinations, so only three Message Packets leave.
A Message Packet departs each Octant Capital for each route to the Colony A worlds in the same Octant, and vice versa, at the start of Red Shift every Cycle (unless they happen to be on a route already serviced by a Capital-to-Capital dispatch.)
A Message Packet departs each Octant Capital for each route to the Colony B worlds in the same Octant, and vice versa, at the start of Red Shift every three Cycles (unless they happen to be on a route already serviced by a Capital-to-Capital or Colony A dispatch.).
A small number of Way Stations are not covered by this arrangement, and these are serviced by Message Packets every ten Cycles.
In normal circumstances, when a Message Packet arrives in a system, it transmits its data to the system Mainworld, and ongoing messages are relayed from there to relevant Message packets waiting at the outbound jump points ready to jump on their next scheduled Shift or Cycle.
The Vizierate service provides transmissions for PubNet, VizNet and BurNet. The Legion provides their own service for MilNet. The Vizierate Message packet service also doesn’t service Legion installations, unless they happen to be on a route between Colonised worlds. The material he uncovers is light on detail about how messages are transferred between PubNet and MilNet, but they do suggest this happens.
Example: Oliver’s Messages to His Parents
Oliver sent his message at Witnish, with the expectation that, at least as far as his dad was concerned, the message would have to get to Russell’s World, and a return message from there to Zargonia.
As it happens, Witnish is on a Capital-to-Capital route joining Memoria Niccolo in Octant 5 to New Zargland in Octant 7, so he can expect his message was outbound from Witnish at the start of the Shift after he sent it. From there it probably went to Memoria Niccolo, being the closer of the two worlds. From Memoria Niccolo, a Capital-to-Capital route to Russell’s World via Outpost Harrison (and reading that may prompt one of those times Oliver may especially enjoy or regret his excellent memory…)
The return from Russell’s World is a Capital-To-Capital route to Zargonia via Way Station Graceton.
Adding all that up (and Viznet even has a little online tool that can help), assuming average travel times, and that his father responded immediately, the earliest he could reasonably expect a response at Zargonia is eight Cycles from now.
As for his mother, he doesn’t know where she is, so the Message Packet propagation will have to find her.
Message Addressing
It’s not necessary to know where someone is to send a message, messages propagate across the network at all nodes until they find the recipient. In the example above, the message would also have been sent to New Zargland from Witnish, and along all the routes from Memoria Niccolo. However, when we talk about ‘a message being sent’ in general, we only need to consider that series of message instances that led to the message being received by the recipient.
When the recipient receives the message that fact is propagated back to the network and the message copies are gradually deleted from all the ‘awaiting delivery’ queues at all the nodes so that message storage can be recovered (storage capacity at TL9 is impressive, but not infinite.)
By default, messages have a 1 kiloCycle time-out. If a message is still on the central message server on Zargonia 1 kiloCycle after it was sent, that server will send an ‘undelivered message’ message, and begin the delete propagation of the original throughout the Net.