Solarnet

The Solarnet is the catch-all collective term for the communications network that enables relatively seamless communication between the electronic devices throughout Sol System. It was originally concieved as a natural extension of the Internet.

## Function

### Summary

Solarnet relies on dependable centuries old technology and was over-engineered with both total backwards compatibility and easy upgradeability in mind. The Consortium itself enshrined the compatibility of technology back to Zero Day as a literal written part of the Zero Day Accords. Famously, Asteroidal Industries, Inc. offered a guaranteed three hundred year compatibility warranty on all of its products from the date of purchase, both retroactively and forseeably three centuries into the future.

### Technical Hardware

The basic network concept was designed with both economies of scale and fractal networking in mind as a form of redundancy for the entire network. Two primary ways of connecting exist: that of a Local Area Network with independent machines and end-user terminals. Local Area Networks have a direct priority connection to a central mainframe that acts as a service provider. Normally LANs are constructed using relatively up-to-date machines with incredible amounts of processing power. Processing work is done locally; local communication is dialed directly to another machine in the network while outbound communication goes through the mainframe. A total amount of bandwith is allocated for the entire LAN. Terminal computing on the other hand allows for the interface of both much older machines and improvised technology to connect to the network; the machine acts only as an end-user terminal and outsources both its communications and processing power to the mainframe itself by default.

### Protocols

The Solarnet utilizes the same basic stack of application, transport, internetworking, and link protocols both locally and on a much larger scale.

* Ethernet: Hardwire connection maintained within coherent systems. Elsewhere, data is transmitted wirelessly using HF radio and microwaves and tightbeam lasers.
* **SP**: Solar Protocol, the functional equivalent of "Internet Protocol" on Earth. It was developed from the experimental **IPv9** constructed within Asteroidal Industries' Earth-based test laboratories. It assigns a device an address based on an 2304-bit designation. It was created with the baseline assumption of x128 architecture; the then standard for Asteroidal Industries, Inc., it allowed for a maximum of 18 words or 9 longwords with inputtable characters restricted to the forty characters that make up the Solari alphabet, sans punctuation. Thus, an IPv9/SP address reads as a very long string of information and was created in anticipation of allowing whole orders of magnitude of devices to communicate.
* **UDP/SP**: Largely used by both spacers (and much less extensively, some grounders) local to one another for real time communication within a household or work area.
* **TCP/SP**:
	+ **SNTP**: Solar Networking Transfer Protocol is the evolution of HTTPS on Earth and is the basic prefix of any given Solarnet Address
	+ **KPOP**: e-mail analogue. Kerberized Post Office Protocol is the standard way individual spacers communicate. Messages are stored on the mainframe until accessed, read on the user's device or terminal, and then saved locally or deleted. It is secure by default and runs ideally on a sealed server. One-time registration and integration of a device into the Solarnet prompts the user to register for a universal KPOP solarmail address, with any choice of unique handle up to 128 characters. Posession of a KPOP solarmail address is proof *de facto* of Confederate citizenship.

The entire system was engineered with real communications delays in mind. Realtime communication outside of a single system within Sol System is rare.

## Legal

Solarnet's unofficial birthday is in **SY 3**, wherein the Consortium passed an amendment to the Zero Day Accords granting itself the ability to work with the Confederacy to construct the Consortium's portion of the infrastructure of the system.

Possession of a .conf Solarnet address constitutes evidence of citizenship in the Confederacy, and therefore, only born or naturalized citizens of the Confederacy may use an address.

## Exploitation

Haydn von Dehlin exploited Solarnet by registering email addresses for artificial intelligence programs as if they were human beings over a period of three decades leading up to the Solar War. He accomplished this by calculating the difference in net population growth between the Consortium and the rest of Sol System and averaging out registrations over thirty standard years to make it seem natural and organic. These complex AI non-persons (as they were then considered) were given legitimate tasks throughout the infrastructure of the Confederacy and the Rim. Only a very few were hosted on Mars, and none within Consortium space.

This Alliance effort ultimately resulted in spacers seeming much more numerous than they actually were. It also served to fix the inequality in trade between spacers and grounders; Haydn von Dehlin was deeply opposed to the only sustenance-level exchange of resources from Earth in return for spacer labor and the addition of several million shares of resources made for prosperous conditions prior to the Solar War.