Itty Bitty Bigger World: Northbound
Dec. 23rd, 2014 04:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drewkittyFICTION
Itty Bitty Bigger World - Pinball
An ordinary standard SanSan capsule is truly a marvel of the modern world. People use them every day. Most people have no idea of their true capabilities.
There are three basic types of vehicles that run on the capsule network. Ordinary capsules as above, heavy equipment that is compatible with the capsule network, and privately owned vehicles or POVs - by far the rarest of the three, but they do exist.
With the exception of truly heavy equipment (aerial fire platforms and rescue hovercraft come to mind - and even they are shipped unassembled via the capsule network), the only convenient way to get anything anywhere is on the capsule network. So what we used to call trash trucks, police cars, fire trucks, etc. are actually just modified capsules. They come in three sizes: standard, large [double length] and oversize [up to a maximum of 80 feet (25m) long]. It is possible to have private heavy equipment, for example for a construction company, but it is not standard.
Everyone gets a single bot license. A POV uses up your bot license. Just this one fact makes a POV incredibly expensive. Otherwise we'd be overrun with POVs just as we were once almost overrun with bots. A POV capsule cannot be larger than the two standard sizes without a special permit, involving explaining to a panel why your need is so special -- good luck. Imagine a group of Sierra Club and Nature Conservancy members being asked to approve non-standard exhaust modifications to an off road vehicle.
However there is a subculture of people who live aboard their own POVs. This is discouraged for a variety of reasons, mostly involving routing on the capsule network, but there are nomadic types who insist on their rights in this regard. A standard capsule is the equivalent of what was called a "Class B Conversion Van." A large capsule is the equivalent of a "Class A Motor Home." These RCs (for Recreational Capsule of course) are considered an example of excessive consumption, especially if you also own private cubic.
A large RC with slide-outs could easily take up a space 80 feet by 40 feet [25m x 12.5m), the largest space normally provided in an RC campground.
An ordinary capsule was nowhere near so fancy. In ordinary configuration a capsule was precisely 10 meters - 33 feet [10m] UNIT CORRECTION OFF and 3 meters - 10 feet [3m] I SAID UNIT CORRECTION OFF in both width and height.
Let's try this again. Ten meters long, three meters wide and three meters high. This allowed for a tow capsule to take a standard capsule (or the pieces of one) aboard while still being within the large capsule size limits.
Within this space, a standard capsule provided nice comfortable foam seats and standing area suitable for carrying anywhere from one to thirty sitting persons, as many as sixty standing persons, or (if needed) ten casualties lying down.
Hidden compartments in a standard capsule provided numerous features that the general public could certainly learn about if they wished, but either took for granted or didn't care about.
Basic needs: a capsule if provoked could dispense up to 120 one liter bottles of sterile but pH balanced water, sealed in thermostable plastic and potable for up to 100 years. Also if provoked, a capsule could dispense up to 240 survival bars, blandly flavored and containing 1200 calories per bar.
If really, really provoked, the capsule's dispenser could generate effectively unlimited numbers of self-sealing plastic bags for dealing with the varieties of human waste. Normally this function created trash bags in the unlikely event someone boarded with a lot of trash and dismounted without their items.
Under the command of an authorized person, such as anyone trained in first aid, a capsule could convert itself to a field ambulance. In this configuration, additional (already on-board) stretchers made of smart-cloth would be suspended in racks, allowing for a carrying capacity of thirty stretcher cases. Each such stretcher/bed would be able to provide basic medical monitoring, oxygen, suction, basic resuscitation, and defibrillation - all under automated control.
A capsule also contained two bots. These bots were rarely separated from their host capsule because their job was to do things _inside_ the capsule. One ran on a ceiling track and one on a floor track. Between them they could reach any space in the capsule. Normally they cleaned, polished, disposed of trash, etc. - but they were perfectly capable of playing first aid bot, helping restrain wayward luggage, etc.
A webbing dispenser and discreet little loops by every seat permitted the same capsule to be used as a field transport vehicle for mass arrests. Each capsule bot had a stunner on its multipurpose arm.
The interior surface was made of media paint, just like every other surface in San San. The standard displays were intended to resemble a passenger vehicle with "windows" but the display could be customized. A common selection was to wireframe the car features and door to make it appear that the capsule was transparent, at least from the inside, and give the maximum possible view. This selection was automatic when crossing vistas such as the Golden Gate Bridge - unless monitoring found that a passenger was distressed, at which point it would go back to default.
Of course all interior events were monitored by the San San automated network. By definition, a police station or hospital emergency department or fire station or criminal court were now equipped with emergency response parking areas where a capsule with an emergency inside would park itself, open its doors and await further instructions, possibly ignoring any invalid instructions from its occupants and providing convenient fittings, equipment, cover etc for the emergency responders.
Hostage situations inside capsules were generally good only for slapstick comedic value. A capsule bot arm under police control was demonstrably faster than the human nervous system.
It was not generally known, but a capsule suspected of containing hazardous substances could be parked in a blast pit within minutes anywhere on the capsule network. Sometimes this would be hard on the shrubbery or some other decorative or useful feature, but would prevent humans from being at risk.
The exterior surface was also made of media paint, which could have significant uses in any emergency. At least twice that feature had saved my life. Normally it displayed an all silver surface, or would turn dark green to reduce noise pollution near wilderness areas. But it could be set to display advertising... for a significant price based on type of zone, length and annoying qualities of ad, any redeeming social purpose, etc.
Capsules contained integral batteries (part of the frame) for up to six weeks of "household" power, i.e. bots and HVAC and lighting or up to an hour of on-grid movement, fantasizing for the moment that the grid network was unpowered. In practice, the battery capacity was redundant as the capsule would constantly recharge from the electromagnetic couplings that were part of the capsule network. Short of regional disaster, the batteries would only come into play if a small section of local 'track' were damaged or the capsule had to limp off the network to clear a path for much higher priority traffic.
In fact, the batteries were discharged and recharged constantly as part of the power management of the entire San San grid. A minor trickle drain of ten kilowatt/hours per capsule times one hundred million capsules meant a million megawatts of power, which even by San San standards was significant. The same electromagnetic couples that accelerated and powered a capsule harnessed the resulting kinetic energy when it slowed down at a destination.
A capsule normally accelerated at a maximum of 1.5 gravities. If override authority was in place, it could do up to 6 gravities. (Compare to a dedicated CHP flier, which could easily pull 12 gravities when the pilot wore a smartcloth uniform and 100% pressurized oxygen respirator -- and when near its objective, leave the capsule network and maintain powered flight for over an hour. Then reenter the capsule network and recharge on the move.)
If a capsule had to decelerate more quickly than usual, it would warn passengers. If deceleration were unplanned or rapid, the capsule could fire netting across air gaps, deploy additional webbing to trap passengers and keep them from hitting bulkheads, and at last resort fill the entire volume with quickfoam that would absorb enormous kinetic energies without much harm.
One test video had two capsules on the same trackway colliding at full speed. The notional crash dummies did not have time to fly forward before quickfoam explosively filled the entire cubic. The integral capsule bots even had time to dig out the dummies before they would have smothered. A little hard on the trackway - but in a further test, other capsules could cross the (badly) damaged trackway on their own power pending rerouting and repair.
In the extremely unlikely event of a water landing, a capsule not only was watertight and would float, but could inflate multiple skirts of inflated plastic (foam or air or both) and stay afloat and upright in any sea condition short of a hurricane.
A damaged or worn capsule would be rotated out of use and recycled, and a brand new capsule put on the network in its place. A typical capsule had an estimated operating lifespan of seventy years but would be pulled sooner for upgrades. The typical actual working lifetime of a capsule was now about twelve years.
The biggest practical problem with capsules was keeping biologicals out of the capsule network - suicidal people, birds, small animals, etc. This was strictly ecology and aesthetics, because SPLAT.
However capsules had a huge, huge informatics issue that was presently the hard upper limit on their effectiveness as a transport medium.
Routing.
An amazing amount of computing power, human ingenuity and day to day traffic management went into the San San capsule system. For example, it was well known that the city of San Francisco (technically former, but don't tell a resident of The City that!) had about ten times the population density in the late afternoon and early evening than it did at any other time. Large numbers of commuters would be leaving the city - large numbers of shoppers and tourists and thrillseekers would be entering - and residents would be coming home from elsewhere. The capsule paths into SF were only a few more than for cars back in the 20th: four bridges, three underwater tunnels, four ground tracks on former roadway/freeway rights of way and one (still controversial) wireframe skyway.
So do you stage more capsules in the City to be ready for commuters? Or more capsules on the periphery for those returning? Everyone wants door to door service, but the commuters are leaving downtown while the tourists want to go to the seafront. Empty capsules are dead weight in the system but the number of people wanting to leave the seafront for deowntown approaches zero.
The Sausalito Skyway linked the Embarcadero with Sausalito through airspace over the San Francisco Bay. The actual structure used smartpaint to appear invisible, and capsules on the track complied with the specification while on track, but you could still see an shimmering arc linking the two cities, especially at rush hour. The structure could not have been built prior to nanotech, and if the smartpaint were turned off, one would only see what appeared to be a paired cradle of cables, hanging in space from a single vertical tower at the midpoint, which a capsule would nest within and draw power from during movement.
The design specification was that a capsule could maintain forward way - or if necessary reverse - and get off the Skyway safely even if all power were lost and fourteen of sixteen cables were severed at midspan. Even with a total double cable failure, vanishingly unlikely, the capsules already committed to crossing or airborne in mid-span would have good odds of crashing safely and floating without harm to occupants.
Even though your brain told you it was safe, it still felt and looked like being tossed like a football from the Sausalito beach towards an apparent crash-landing somewhere in the Piers of San Francisco. The route was NOT popular. Also, it was not accessible to large or oversized capsules, except dedicated tow/fire trucks.
Network analysis indicated that without the Skyway, the SF capsule system would be unacceptably overloaded at rush hour, defined as greater than a five minute wait for a capsule or capsule average speeds less than 20 kilometers per hour.
But the Skyway had been a difficult build even for San San, and another skyway from South San Francisco to San Leandro had been canceled for now. The Bay Bridge, Bay Bridge II, Golden Gate and San Mateo bridges had already been double-decked. The Sausalito and Transbay Tube and Alameda Tube were at capacity. No matter how many ground tracks you built, with whatever capacity, you were still stuck going south out of San Francisco for a while before you could go east again, and north was right out.
The capsule which Amy and I had taken out of UC Stanford - post haste - was headed right into this traffic jam at the worst possible time. The software had flipped an electronic coin and decided on north. (I pulled the logs later and verified this for myself.) I should have checked, but I was still logy from a flying escape elevator. Amy should have checked, but she was a very recently released hospital patient and had just done a three story slide down a laundry chute.
We'd just been the targets of a suborbital strike from someone who probably didn't care how many people he killed.
Therefore we were headed into the most dense concentration of persons in San San at the worst possible time. Of course. Murphy's Law.
And I'd left the battlesuits behind at UC Stanford. Strike two.
And we were now entering the traffic control zone of San Francisco, the former city. Strike fucking three.
Itty Bitty Bigger World - Pinball
An ordinary standard SanSan capsule is truly a marvel of the modern world. People use them every day. Most people have no idea of their true capabilities.
There are three basic types of vehicles that run on the capsule network. Ordinary capsules as above, heavy equipment that is compatible with the capsule network, and privately owned vehicles or POVs - by far the rarest of the three, but they do exist.
With the exception of truly heavy equipment (aerial fire platforms and rescue hovercraft come to mind - and even they are shipped unassembled via the capsule network), the only convenient way to get anything anywhere is on the capsule network. So what we used to call trash trucks, police cars, fire trucks, etc. are actually just modified capsules. They come in three sizes: standard, large [double length] and oversize [up to a maximum of 80 feet (25m) long]. It is possible to have private heavy equipment, for example for a construction company, but it is not standard.
Everyone gets a single bot license. A POV uses up your bot license. Just this one fact makes a POV incredibly expensive. Otherwise we'd be overrun with POVs just as we were once almost overrun with bots. A POV capsule cannot be larger than the two standard sizes without a special permit, involving explaining to a panel why your need is so special -- good luck. Imagine a group of Sierra Club and Nature Conservancy members being asked to approve non-standard exhaust modifications to an off road vehicle.
However there is a subculture of people who live aboard their own POVs. This is discouraged for a variety of reasons, mostly involving routing on the capsule network, but there are nomadic types who insist on their rights in this regard. A standard capsule is the equivalent of what was called a "Class B Conversion Van." A large capsule is the equivalent of a "Class A Motor Home." These RCs (for Recreational Capsule of course) are considered an example of excessive consumption, especially if you also own private cubic.
A large RC with slide-outs could easily take up a space 80 feet by 40 feet [25m x 12.5m), the largest space normally provided in an RC campground.
An ordinary capsule was nowhere near so fancy. In ordinary configuration a capsule was precisely 10 meters - 33 feet [10m] UNIT CORRECTION OFF and 3 meters - 10 feet [3m] I SAID UNIT CORRECTION OFF in both width and height.
Let's try this again. Ten meters long, three meters wide and three meters high. This allowed for a tow capsule to take a standard capsule (or the pieces of one) aboard while still being within the large capsule size limits.
Within this space, a standard capsule provided nice comfortable foam seats and standing area suitable for carrying anywhere from one to thirty sitting persons, as many as sixty standing persons, or (if needed) ten casualties lying down.
Hidden compartments in a standard capsule provided numerous features that the general public could certainly learn about if they wished, but either took for granted or didn't care about.
Basic needs: a capsule if provoked could dispense up to 120 one liter bottles of sterile but pH balanced water, sealed in thermostable plastic and potable for up to 100 years. Also if provoked, a capsule could dispense up to 240 survival bars, blandly flavored and containing 1200 calories per bar.
If really, really provoked, the capsule's dispenser could generate effectively unlimited numbers of self-sealing plastic bags for dealing with the varieties of human waste. Normally this function created trash bags in the unlikely event someone boarded with a lot of trash and dismounted without their items.
Under the command of an authorized person, such as anyone trained in first aid, a capsule could convert itself to a field ambulance. In this configuration, additional (already on-board) stretchers made of smart-cloth would be suspended in racks, allowing for a carrying capacity of thirty stretcher cases. Each such stretcher/bed would be able to provide basic medical monitoring, oxygen, suction, basic resuscitation, and defibrillation - all under automated control.
A capsule also contained two bots. These bots were rarely separated from their host capsule because their job was to do things _inside_ the capsule. One ran on a ceiling track and one on a floor track. Between them they could reach any space in the capsule. Normally they cleaned, polished, disposed of trash, etc. - but they were perfectly capable of playing first aid bot, helping restrain wayward luggage, etc.
A webbing dispenser and discreet little loops by every seat permitted the same capsule to be used as a field transport vehicle for mass arrests. Each capsule bot had a stunner on its multipurpose arm.
The interior surface was made of media paint, just like every other surface in San San. The standard displays were intended to resemble a passenger vehicle with "windows" but the display could be customized. A common selection was to wireframe the car features and door to make it appear that the capsule was transparent, at least from the inside, and give the maximum possible view. This selection was automatic when crossing vistas such as the Golden Gate Bridge - unless monitoring found that a passenger was distressed, at which point it would go back to default.
Of course all interior events were monitored by the San San automated network. By definition, a police station or hospital emergency department or fire station or criminal court were now equipped with emergency response parking areas where a capsule with an emergency inside would park itself, open its doors and await further instructions, possibly ignoring any invalid instructions from its occupants and providing convenient fittings, equipment, cover etc for the emergency responders.
Hostage situations inside capsules were generally good only for slapstick comedic value. A capsule bot arm under police control was demonstrably faster than the human nervous system.
It was not generally known, but a capsule suspected of containing hazardous substances could be parked in a blast pit within minutes anywhere on the capsule network. Sometimes this would be hard on the shrubbery or some other decorative or useful feature, but would prevent humans from being at risk.
The exterior surface was also made of media paint, which could have significant uses in any emergency. At least twice that feature had saved my life. Normally it displayed an all silver surface, or would turn dark green to reduce noise pollution near wilderness areas. But it could be set to display advertising... for a significant price based on type of zone, length and annoying qualities of ad, any redeeming social purpose, etc.
Capsules contained integral batteries (part of the frame) for up to six weeks of "household" power, i.e. bots and HVAC and lighting or up to an hour of on-grid movement, fantasizing for the moment that the grid network was unpowered. In practice, the battery capacity was redundant as the capsule would constantly recharge from the electromagnetic couplings that were part of the capsule network. Short of regional disaster, the batteries would only come into play if a small section of local 'track' were damaged or the capsule had to limp off the network to clear a path for much higher priority traffic.
In fact, the batteries were discharged and recharged constantly as part of the power management of the entire San San grid. A minor trickle drain of ten kilowatt/hours per capsule times one hundred million capsules meant a million megawatts of power, which even by San San standards was significant. The same electromagnetic couples that accelerated and powered a capsule harnessed the resulting kinetic energy when it slowed down at a destination.
A capsule normally accelerated at a maximum of 1.5 gravities. If override authority was in place, it could do up to 6 gravities. (Compare to a dedicated CHP flier, which could easily pull 12 gravities when the pilot wore a smartcloth uniform and 100% pressurized oxygen respirator -- and when near its objective, leave the capsule network and maintain powered flight for over an hour. Then reenter the capsule network and recharge on the move.)
If a capsule had to decelerate more quickly than usual, it would warn passengers. If deceleration were unplanned or rapid, the capsule could fire netting across air gaps, deploy additional webbing to trap passengers and keep them from hitting bulkheads, and at last resort fill the entire volume with quickfoam that would absorb enormous kinetic energies without much harm.
One test video had two capsules on the same trackway colliding at full speed. The notional crash dummies did not have time to fly forward before quickfoam explosively filled the entire cubic. The integral capsule bots even had time to dig out the dummies before they would have smothered. A little hard on the trackway - but in a further test, other capsules could cross the (badly) damaged trackway on their own power pending rerouting and repair.
In the extremely unlikely event of a water landing, a capsule not only was watertight and would float, but could inflate multiple skirts of inflated plastic (foam or air or both) and stay afloat and upright in any sea condition short of a hurricane.
A damaged or worn capsule would be rotated out of use and recycled, and a brand new capsule put on the network in its place. A typical capsule had an estimated operating lifespan of seventy years but would be pulled sooner for upgrades. The typical actual working lifetime of a capsule was now about twelve years.
The biggest practical problem with capsules was keeping biologicals out of the capsule network - suicidal people, birds, small animals, etc. This was strictly ecology and aesthetics, because SPLAT.
However capsules had a huge, huge informatics issue that was presently the hard upper limit on their effectiveness as a transport medium.
Routing.
An amazing amount of computing power, human ingenuity and day to day traffic management went into the San San capsule system. For example, it was well known that the city of San Francisco (technically former, but don't tell a resident of The City that!) had about ten times the population density in the late afternoon and early evening than it did at any other time. Large numbers of commuters would be leaving the city - large numbers of shoppers and tourists and thrillseekers would be entering - and residents would be coming home from elsewhere. The capsule paths into SF were only a few more than for cars back in the 20th: four bridges, three underwater tunnels, four ground tracks on former roadway/freeway rights of way and one (still controversial) wireframe skyway.
So do you stage more capsules in the City to be ready for commuters? Or more capsules on the periphery for those returning? Everyone wants door to door service, but the commuters are leaving downtown while the tourists want to go to the seafront. Empty capsules are dead weight in the system but the number of people wanting to leave the seafront for deowntown approaches zero.
The Sausalito Skyway linked the Embarcadero with Sausalito through airspace over the San Francisco Bay. The actual structure used smartpaint to appear invisible, and capsules on the track complied with the specification while on track, but you could still see an shimmering arc linking the two cities, especially at rush hour. The structure could not have been built prior to nanotech, and if the smartpaint were turned off, one would only see what appeared to be a paired cradle of cables, hanging in space from a single vertical tower at the midpoint, which a capsule would nest within and draw power from during movement.
The design specification was that a capsule could maintain forward way - or if necessary reverse - and get off the Skyway safely even if all power were lost and fourteen of sixteen cables were severed at midspan. Even with a total double cable failure, vanishingly unlikely, the capsules already committed to crossing or airborne in mid-span would have good odds of crashing safely and floating without harm to occupants.
Even though your brain told you it was safe, it still felt and looked like being tossed like a football from the Sausalito beach towards an apparent crash-landing somewhere in the Piers of San Francisco. The route was NOT popular. Also, it was not accessible to large or oversized capsules, except dedicated tow/fire trucks.
Network analysis indicated that without the Skyway, the SF capsule system would be unacceptably overloaded at rush hour, defined as greater than a five minute wait for a capsule or capsule average speeds less than 20 kilometers per hour.
But the Skyway had been a difficult build even for San San, and another skyway from South San Francisco to San Leandro had been canceled for now. The Bay Bridge, Bay Bridge II, Golden Gate and San Mateo bridges had already been double-decked. The Sausalito and Transbay Tube and Alameda Tube were at capacity. No matter how many ground tracks you built, with whatever capacity, you were still stuck going south out of San Francisco for a while before you could go east again, and north was right out.
The capsule which Amy and I had taken out of UC Stanford - post haste - was headed right into this traffic jam at the worst possible time. The software had flipped an electronic coin and decided on north. (I pulled the logs later and verified this for myself.) I should have checked, but I was still logy from a flying escape elevator. Amy should have checked, but she was a very recently released hospital patient and had just done a three story slide down a laundry chute.
We'd just been the targets of a suborbital strike from someone who probably didn't care how many people he killed.
Therefore we were headed into the most dense concentration of persons in San San at the worst possible time. Of course. Murphy's Law.
And I'd left the battlesuits behind at UC Stanford. Strike two.
And we were now entering the traffic control zone of San Francisco, the former city. Strike fucking three.
