Good.

It's starting to get a little late; anything else important to discuss today?

Nope, good night!

Good night!

She's back the next day with a couple of more advanced genecrafting books - she's not sure if they'll answer their questions, but they come broadly recommended - and mostly-bad news about the dogwood stand crows' crafter friend; they're in the middle of making a new territorial claim, having decided to move to somewhere more naturally defensible than their old territory, and they're very reasonably not interested in contact with the newcomers until they've settled in there. They did include a network-connection in their message, and she's sent a letter asking about their skills and what they expect their household to run lean on once it's up and running properly again, but she hasn't heard back yet - she'll probably get another letter today, and she has the connection with her so she'll get it when it's sent.

How do network connections work?

Specialized crafting can give crafting-material all sorts of weird properties; network connections have one that keeps them connected to each other at arbitrary distances - she doesn't know if Sun's species will have encountered the property before or what they might recognize it as if they had. The actual mechanism is that they match each other - if one changes the other one will change the same way - and a machine on the sending end reads a page of writing and encodes it into changes in the connection for a machine on the other end to read and use to write a new copy of the page. Or the machines on either end can do more complicated things instead, but that's the basic principle; she can get a book on how the encoding and decoding is done if they'd like.

Cool! How arbitrary a distance are we talking about, here, does this exceed the speed of light?

- she didn't know light to have a speed; she does expect that she would have heard if distance was ever a problem in practice, though, it would be in the books on nomadism, and it isn't.

You'd have to get thousands of miles away to notice even if you were looking for it, on a single planet. Could they have a connection to test this with?

She doesn't have both ends of one and doesn't expect any of the people on the other ends of the ones she has to want to be involved at this point. The dogwood stand crafter might be able to make them, though, it's a little odd that they had one on hand otherwise.

That would be really important information to have. If it does work faster than light, it could be faster than subspace, which they figured out when developing warp and which is faster than light but not instant.

She doesn't even know what those concepts are, she's not going to be any help. She'll check the library for likely-looking books tonight, she guesses.

They'd appreciate that!

Mmhmm.

She also has some preliminary ideas about getting the new control setup working in walkers; she doesn't expect to have a good version immediately but if someone can bring the one she left here out a ways she can try a few things, see what they think of them.

They would be happy to do that for her.

Cool.

(The main problem, she explains while that's happening, is that the vehicles their control system are for have a very different kind of propulsion system; they push themselves forward, like a boat or a balloon, instead of stepping in arbitrary directions like a walker does. Their steering system is therefore based on modifying that push to send it in a different direction, but walkers don't have a push to modify; a natural steering system for a walker will tell it that its forward is at a new position on its circumference, not that it should turn its circumference to put a set forward point in a new place. It's not insurmountable but it's going to take some experimentation to get the translation right; in the long run they'll probably want to change either the walkers or the controls to get a more natural match going.)

That makes sense. Meston can look up some more obscure vehicles to see if they have anything like that.

And lone sassafras gets to work, largely deconstructing the walker - the base stays intact, but the cabin is reduced to a flat platform, with most the extra material transformed into a tripod to lift the whole thing off the ground by a couple of feet, and the legs are shortened to nonfunctionality; these changes reveal more clearly how the cabin platform rotates independently from the base the legs are attached to. She sits on the central platform to work on the new control panel, pausing frequently to try different controls and watch the stubby legs react; occasionally they flail uselessly or fail to react at all, but most of the time the problem is that the base winds up rotated incorrectly relative to the now-tethered upper platform, so that the forward gait of the legs is askew from it, or that the rotation is too fast or too slow.

She's not going to get a version that's safe to ride working today, she eventually reports, but she has a good idea of what problems she'll need to solve to do it; she can set it back into working order now if they'd like.

It's not urgent. How much load can it bear? How does that need to be distributed?

She hasn't reinforced this one but that can be done; a reinforced walker is limited by volume rather than weight for any normal sort of material. Distribution does matter - crafters solve that sort of problem by adjusting the carrying platform to compensate, but their species will just have to do it manually until someone invents a better solution for them - she doesn't think that'll take long, though, it's similar to other solved problems.

There's a letter from the other crafter waiting for her when she gets back into her walker, and she takes a few minutes to read it. They dabble in lots of kinds of crafting, she reports; they do know how to make network-connections, and they know more fleshcrafting than she does including a few medical tricks, and some things abut pebble machines, the sort that do complicated network things. They're going to be pinched for livestock - or, would be, part of her problem is supporting her surplus, their problems can solve each other. And they sound very nervous of the newcomers - they weren't planning on making contact, they were just intending to pass along information they got from the crows to, she assumes, other members of their old community. The apology will probably help with that but she'll see if she can draw them out about specific things that might need to be addressed for them.

Okay. Sun's received an estimate that there will be a draft apology first thing in the morning.

Sounds good. Is there anything else for now?

Nope, good night!

Good night!

She's looking more well-rested the next day, and has good news and bad news: the good news is that she had time to go through the genecrafting books, and she's pretty sure that it can solve their problem and that she has a lead on who to talk to about that; a few of the books recommend a genecrafter who writes under the name goosewing to go to for cutting-edge training or unusual problems, and their books have directions at the back on how to find them. The bad news is that the other local crafter may be a lost cause; they're taking care of a sibling that the newcomers approached and touched, and have no idea if they're going to recover, and they quite reasonably don't want to have anything to do with them while dealing with that.

Unfortunate. The apology is written and they have a draft translation now?

Mmhmm?