The Authorized Ender Companion (61 page)

Orientations within the Battle Room environment are very important, and need to be mentioned. Andrew (Ender) Wiggin illustrated how important understanding one’s orientation within the Room environment could be toward winning a battle, and established what are now considered to be the standard references for orientation within the Battle Rooms. In the Wiggin nomenclature, the Battle Gate used to enter the Battle Room is considered to be the “up” gate. The far Battle Gate (the “Enemy’s Gate”) is down. To the left is east; to the right, west. Above is north, and below is south. Though any one of the four surrounding walls could be considered “north,” and the remaining walls being assigned the remaining directions, typical use has been to consider the Teacher’s Gate as being located on the south wall, with the other orientations falling into place. This also places the Student’s Gates, previously mentioned, along the southern edges of the “up” and “down” walls.

As discussed, there are five doorways for each Battle Room. The doors to the Student’s Gates and the Teacher’s Gate are designed as “sloats”—they pull slightly away from the center of the Battle Room, and then slide sideways into a recessed slot (pocket) in the adjacent wall. The action of these three doors is not speed-critical, and therefore this simple, robust approach is warranted. The two doors of the Battle Gates, however, must move out of position far too quickly at the onset of the “Victory Ritual” (when four remaining soldiers from a given team each press the large, lit panels at the corners of their “Enemy’s Gate”) for the slower sloat doors to be practical. Therefore, the Battle Gates are one of the few applications of “force field” technology on the Battle School.

These are not the force fields used by the Formic-derived star drives, or the Ecstatic shields derived from the Molecular Detachment Device. The force fields used to block the Battle Gates represent a purely Earth-based development for repulsive force fields. They function much as a solid wall would: strike the surface of the force field, and one feels an equal and opposite reaction. These force fields can be adjusted to provide anything from a purely elastic reaction (an object will bounce off the field with fully conserved, though reversed, momentum) to a purely inelastic reaction (an object will dump all of its momentum into the field, striking it like a dead blow hammer). These fields are not self-sustaining and in fact require a large expenditure of energy to maintain. Therefore, the Battle Gate openings are provided with mechanically sloated doors for general use, and force fields for use during training sessions. The force fields are translucent (transmit light but not
images), but can be made nearly—but never fully—opaque. They do not emit any light of their own.

The construction of the Earth-based Battle Rooms filled a very important need in the early development of zero-G strategic training. Unfortunately, prototype testing is not without its failures. For example, the initial implementation of the Battle Rooms incorporated hard-surfaced handholds on the interior faces of the Battle Rooms, extending out from the walls into the playing volume. This design caused numerous injuries during practice and gaming sessions, including broken fingers, wrists, and ankles, as well as sprained lower backs from striking or snagging these extended handrails during newly developing zero-G maneuvers (such as “sliding the walls”). This led to a rapid redesign and reimplementation of the handholds as recessed elements with a slightly compliant surface material. Handholds for climbing (movement) are placed at the standard 0.3m (1 foot) apart; handholds for reorientation and related wall maneuvers are spaced nominally at 1m.

The most notable failure of all, however, occurred well after the initial test-and-adjust period and the two-month-long Site Acceptance Test for the Earth-based Battle Rooms. Five months into the initial trials of these Battle Rooms, a full bank of artificially generated planar gravity fields failed and the affected Battle Room was thrown, without warning, into its natural full-Earth-Gravity condition during a fully attended training session. Eighty children—two armies of forty children each—were either killed or badly injured when they fell from heights as far up as 75 meters. The horror of losing the zero-G field with young students suspended 75 meters in the air has been impossible to forget. This disaster led to a near-immediate acceptance of the existing proposal to create an orbiting Battle School—a low Earth-orbiting space station designed to provide a series of nine Battle Rooms (with “natural” zero-G), plus living quarters, classrooms, support logistics, and a permanent outwardly-facing military presence in space.

THE BATTLE SCHOOL

The Battle School is a special purpose space station, built with the cooperation of the Earth’s major political and economic powers, and larger international corporations, designed to provide a unique training environment for the next generation of military minds.

The School is approximately 550 meters long and 500 meters wide. It consists of a nonrotating central core, and two 350-meter diameter rotating habitation rings. The volume is approximately 26 million cubic meters, and the mass is roughly 30 million metric tons (30 billion kg).

The stable orbital attitude (orientation) of the Battle School in orbit is maintained through the use of large magnetic torque bars built into the stationary core, as well as Hydrazine-II fired attitude control thrusters.

The nonrotating central core houses the nine Battle Rooms, the main docking bays, fighter bays and other weapon emplacements. The majority of the station’s infrastructure is also located in the central core—power generation, heating/ventilation/air-conditioning systems (HVAC), air purification systems, water purification systems, recycling systems, refrigeration, cryogenics, oxygen generation, storage, etc. Quarters for the International Fleet’s military defense crew are also located in the central core, as are many of the administrative offices, the larger lecture halls, and many of the regular classrooms.

The central core is also home to many of the station’s scientific laboratories and micro-G fabrication facilities, ranging from pharmaceuticals to structural and electrical materials fabrication.

The electro-synthetic planar gravity generators are distributed throughout the stationary central core to create an even gravity field. Typically, they are placed in the structures below and supporting the floors, where they require the least amount of focusing to create a uniform field. They are placed in the curved corridors that provide access to the various levels of the Battle Rooms, where their short effective range can be used to advantage.

The Battle School was designed and assembled under an accelerated schedule. The finished state of the Battle School reflects this fast-tracked approach. Overhead piping and wiring runs remain exposed in some sections of the station. Manual overrides for valves were placed, late in the design process, where space allowed (sometimes tens of meters away from the equipment rooms they control). Critical areas such as the Battle Rooms, where the designs began and sufficient time was available to refine the designs, show a high degree of finish. Other areas such as barracks, classrooms, and the command and control center show the rough edges: last-minute piping runs, hand-run power and data lines, excessive splices and joints, and other evidence of insufficient time to review and clean up the designs.

Regardless of its use as a specialized training facility, the Battle School shares a lot in common with naval battleships and aircraft carriers from Earth’s own wars. The four corners of the stationary central core are fitted out with energy weapons on the top and bottom surfaces for a total of eight emplacements. The sides of the central region are also populated with launching tubes for short-range fighters, considered primarily for emergency defense of the Battle School.

Within the Battle School, a series of airtight bulkhead doors are provided to allow the isolation of sections of the ship in the event of a breach in the hull or a loss of internal air pressure.

The heart of the Battle School is, without question, the Battle Rooms. The Battle Rooms are divided up into three groups of three rooms each. The two rotating habitation rings serve to separate the three groups of Battle Rooms. This permits people on any one ring to access the nearest two groups of Battle Rooms directly. Central passages connect all three groups to each other along the central axis, and allow for general movement from one end of the central core to the other.

Docking of all ships is also handled at the central, stationary core. It was realized as early as 1929 (Hermann Noordung/Potočnik in an article titled “Designing the Space Station”) that space stations not only need a means of creating artificial gravity—typically through spinning habitation rings—but also a means of docking at a stationary, stabilized platform. The problems of docking at a fully rotating station—in terms of the level of control required, the dynamics of moving, rotating and orienting an object the mass of a shuttle (or larger), the amount of propellant expended in doing so, and the subsequent problems of off-center masses once the vehicles were docked—were found to be insurmountable. Noordung, showing his early insight, also realized that finding a method of moving effectively from the nonrotating core to the rotating rings was critical to the success of such a station.