An Infernal Racket
Posted: Mon Feb 28, 2022 6:19 pm
N A T U R A • N O N F A C I T
S A L T U S
S A L T U S
Frost 24, 121 Age of Steel
Deemed by Professor Haber to have a solid grasp of all things electrical, and with frankly little to contribute to the actual writing of the paper, Anton soon found himself reassigned to another one of the scientist's research projects at the end of Ash. It was far more mature, and by the standards of men such as Haber that meant significantly less exciting, and with a much smaller team but the student didn't particularly mind one way or the other. Focused on refining and enhancing the strength and range of radio waves, it had an immediate, tangible, impact and was well supported by the State.
Telecommunications in general was one of very few fields where it could be reasonably said that Zaichaer outmatched their Imperial cousins, the Gelerians having - in the eyes of zealous adherents to New Atheism at least - taken unforgivable shortcuts with their Lorestone Communication Relay. Less ideologically motivated scientists simply considered that using magic was cheating and didn't really count. Unvarnished opinions of Imperial magitek engineers were not well known within Zaichaeri, but those not blinkered by the official line assumed that they were very exasperated by the intransigence of the City of Brass.
In principle, communication via electronic means had been well understood by Zaichaer for decades. Intentionally controlled pulses of electricity as it flowed in systemic, consistent, fashion resulted in useful information being encoded in the energy itself which could then be captured and interpreted at a receiver station. Such proliferated everywhere that the State built electrical lines, spreading the telegraph lines directly alongside them. But in practice this was far from sufficient, especially for the principal purpose of the State - war.
While transmitting orders to a forward position massively cut down the time required to relay instructions to commanders on the front, they were exceptionally vulnerable to raids by by enemy mages or airships which could cut one of the lines during their miles long spans over open country with impunity. Additionally, they were all but useless for conveying instructions to airships until they came in to dock, the vessels operating autonomously after departing line of sight of skydock - and its semaphores and signal lights - unless they were overtaken by a courier.
One of Haber's colleagues who had entered the Hall of Inventors instead of remaining at the Institute had won himself fame, and a very comfortable lifestyle, by wedding the basic concepts wired telegraphy with the then novel discovery - or rather, transmission - of radio waves. Considered a dead end by the Imperial scientists who had discovered it - the phenomena had been briefly considered for the Relay before deciding that the mnemonosyte hub and Scrivened wire spoke model was both more reliable and capable of transmitting far more information - passing the details on to Zaichaer as part of the 'brotherly scholarly exchanges' between the two powers.
The device the Imperial papers described was very primitive, and the actual manufacture was trivial for even Zaichaeri artisans. Consisting of only a transformer to modify the electricity to the proper voltage, a spark gap to discharge the energy, and an antenna to transmit the resultant waves, it could be created with off the shelf parts with even the embryonic electronics industry. By adding on a telegraph switch that operated much the same as it would in a wired device, the waves could be pulsed by a similar method. A receiver of similar make attuned to the same frequency then absorbed the waves given off, and from there the apparatus worked in the same fashion as a typical telegraph.
Anton admitted that he was cheating. He was committing the same sin of arcana that his colleagues had railed against in order to expand this brave frontier of science instead of making do with the splint of magic. But gazing at the device in operation with Semblance the problem was so obvious that it frustrated beyond belief that he couldn't just shake the PhD candidate who had staked his thesis upon refining the device and tell him what was wrong. Oh, it wasn't that the device didn't work - it worked quite well in fact, transmitting telegraph signals over the air that were then easily picked up by a receiver regardless of what direction it was from the transmitter.
No, the problem was that the range was dreadfully short, and to Anton - and only Anton - the cause was blindingly obvious. He had, of course, stopped one of his rants in his room to laugh that turn of phrase multiple times, each one immediately obliterating his train of thought. Puns at his own expense aside, he struggled to suppress his frown every time the wireless telegraph was activated.
When the surge of electricity crossed the gap, a clash of cymbals that continued to cascade as long as the current was supplied, it then flowed up to the attached antenna. And upon there anything close to music or tonality died a horrible, wrenching death. The sound that was produced by the newborn radio waves was like if every instrument in a band somehow played every note at once, blaring over and over again. He had been forced to make up an excuse to request assignment on the receiver station, a small airship that progressively got further and further away from the transmitter during each test.
From this vantage spot, with his skills, he knew what the problem was but he had no idea how to resolve it. The blaring dissonance was bleeding off into the air, and even ignoring the fact that it screamed its existence in all directions the receiving antenna was only attuned to a narrow set of harmonies. Most of the cacophonous medley was simply wasted, and what was worse, each unheard scream was not only electricity that could have better used, it actively interfered with its own propagation through the atmosphere.
The researchers already knew that they were wasting precious energy with an omnidirectional signal, but that was an already known and understood phenomena. Low-hanging fruit, in other words. Besides, the benefits were deemed valuable enough to continue research regardless - greater range could be had by limiting the signal, but that increased the complexity of the system, to say nothing of the fact that an airship broadcasting a distress call needed to be able to send out a message as far as possible in every direction.
While there were theoretical concerns about messages being intercepted, Zaichaer was the only nation on the continent taking such technology seriously. Every other power made do with magic to secure their communication, or in the Imperium's case wedded magic with science. Only Zaichaer made do without the crutch of the arcane, and so only Zaichaer would be able to read the messages sent through such a system. True, eventually the other powers of Karnor would catch on, and the State's allies in the Northlands would of course be given the same in a slow process which mirrored how the Imperium gave its technical largess over, but by then it was certain that the Hall of Inventors would've moved beyond the current models regardless.
Which left Anton with no easy fix to offer for the most obvious problem in the world. He knew what song the receiver wanted to hear, what it was listening for. Now he just had to figure out how to make the transmitter only sing that song, instead of belting out every possible noise that it was capable of making all at once. This was a more difficult challenge than before, with the furnace he could intuit the fix and and work from there to suggest how to implement it. Now he had to actually figure out what the solution was as well.
In other words, he was in search of an instrument. Some device or apparatus that could take the chaotic radio waves and focus them upon a narrower band of possibilities, reducing the noise down to a single identifiable strain. Once again, he was left without any clear way to communicate without revealing his secret to his peers. No instruments were fine enough to detect what Semblance could reveal, at least yet, so he would also have to come up with yet another excuse for his 'ingenious insights' on top of the work of actually solving the problem.
Settling in to work, Anton was given no recourse but to turn to the raw equations. Able to see what was actually there, he could at least refine the mathematical model of that particular phenomena so that it more accurately reflected reality. From there he was able to calculate a loss rate and show the others what he had seen in an instant in language that they would actually believe. After that, well, then came the hard part. At least he wouldn't need more math. For a while.