For Honor We Stand (71 page)

Synchrotron radiation:  radiation emitted as a result of the acceleration of superrelativistic charged particles through a magnetic field.

SWACS:  Space Warning and Control System.  An integrated sensor, computer, and command/communications/control suite placed on various warships to provide an exceptionally high level of sensor coverage and detail and to coordinate the defense against attacking vessels.  SWACS is capable of simultaneously tracking up to a four thousand targets (such a large number is needed in a large fleet engagement where there might be a hundred ships firing missiles at one another) up to a range of 30 AU (approximately the distance from Sol to Neptune) at high resolution and up to 100 AU at lower resolution (lower resolution does not mean that the vessels will not be detected, it just means that a group of vessels might be reported as a single target until it gets closer).  Carriers typically carry five or six Mongoose Medium Attack Craft equipped with SWACS to provide superior sensor coverage for task forces while SWACS equipped Destroyers are deployed to threatened systems that do not already have adequate system sensor defense grids in place.  The system includes a capability for providing non-verbal direction to fighters and other ships to assist those vessels in intercepting enemy vessels.  This system is the distant descendant of the AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) system first fielded by the United States on aircraft in the twentieth century.

Tabi’a:  (Arabic) any formation in which multiple warriors or vessels array themselves to form a protective wall.  In the Rashidian Space Navy, the term is used to denote any squadron or other unit tasked with protecting another ship.

Talon:  The primary anti-ship missile carried by Union warships.  Manufactured by Raytheon-Hughes Space Combat Systems, the Talon is an extremely fast, stealthy, and agile missile with both passive and active multi-modal sensor homing and a 5-150 kiloton variable yield fusion warhead.  The Talon is designed to elude and penetrate enemy countermeasures and point defense systems, use its on board artificial intelligence and high resolution active sensors to find a “soft spot” on the enemy ship, and then detonate its warhead in a location designed to inflict the most damage.  One talon is capable of obliterating ships up to Frigate size and of putting ships up to Heavy Cruiser size out of commission.  Against most targets with functioning point defense systems, the Talon is a better choice than the heavier Raven (see).  Beginning in February 2315, Talons were equipped with Cooperative Interactive Logic Mode, a technology adopted from the Raven.

TDY:  Temporary duty.  Any duty assignment given for a short time, typically to keep an individual occupied between “permanent” duty assignments.  For an officer, TDY is typically some boring and repetitive administrative task performed at a work station on a Capital Warship or installation and often bears little relationship to the officer’s primary area of expertise.  For example, a highly-skilled weapons officer is likely to be given TDY in Convoy Routing or Navigation Aids Maintenance. 

Teller-Ulam soufflé:  a reference to the “Teller-Ulam Design” which is the fundamental architecture for every thermonuclear weapon ever built by humans.  The design may be the only practical design for a true thermonuclear weapon, as it was independently arrived upon by Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov (and was known in the U.S.S.R. as “Sakharov’s Third Idea”), as well as every alien civilization to have developed thermonuclear weapons the design of which is known to humans.  The design consists of a fusion boosted implosion type (“Fat Man”) fission bomb and a mass of lithium deuteride contained in a uranium casing with a rod of fissionable material in its center.  The compression of the lithium deuteride by detonation of the fission weapon, along with the neutrons generated by the weapon, plus those generated by the casing and by the rod triggered by the neutron flux created by the primary detonation, ignites a fusion reaction in the deuterium contained in the lithium deuteride. 

TEMPCOM:  Temporary Command.  Provisional command of a vessel for a short period of time, usually given to an officer of a rank generally regarded as insufficiently senior for permanent command of a ship of that type.  Often the Executive Officer of a vessel will be placed in TEMPCOM of a vessel to bring it from a rear area to a combat zone where the permanent commander will take charge, or from a combat area to a rear area where it is to receive refit or repairs.  TEMPCOM is distinguished from “Acting Command,” in that an officer in TEMPCOM receives the assignment from higher authority, while an officer in Acting Command succeeds to the post by the death or other incapacity of the CO. 

Terran Union:  the common name for the Union of Earth and Terran Settled Worlds, a Federal Constitutional Republic consisting of Earth and (as of January 2315) 518 of the total 611 worlds known to be settled by human beings.  Often simply referred to as the “Union.”  Formed in 2155 upon the collapse of the Earth and Colonial Confederation (commonly referred to as the “Earth Confederation” or simply the “Confederation”) resulting from the Revolt of the Estates which began in 2154.  The territorial space controlled by the Union has a shape roughly like that of a watermelon 2500 light years long and 800 light years wide aligned lengthwise through the Orion-Cygnus Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy.  Population, approximately 205 billion.  With the exception of the Krag Hegemony, the Union is the most populous and largest political entity in Known Space, as well as the most economically successful.

TF:  Task Force.  A group of warships assembled for a particular mission or “task.”  Distinguished from a “fleet” in that a fleet is a permanent or very long-lived formation usually assigned to a particular system or region of space while a task force is assembled for a limited period of time then disbanded.  Task forces are generally designated by letters of the alphabet, e.g. Task Force TD or Tango Delta.  Units may be spun off from a task force; these are usually designated by the name of the task force followed by a color or a number.  E.g., Task Force Bravo Victor Seven or Task Force Galaxy Foxtrot Green. 

Tindall, Howard W. (“Bill”):  Born February 20, 1925; died, November 20, 1995.  Engineer and Administrator with the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration during the Gemini, Apollo, and Space Shuttle programs.  Tindall may present the Apollo lunar landing program’s most extreme example of someone who made an extraordinarily brilliant and essential individual contribution to the program but who is virtually unknown.  Under his unofficial title of “Mission Techniques” (the official title was “Chief of Apollo Data Coordination”), Tindall oversaw the highly challenging development of the precise procedures for landing on the moon within the extreme constraints imposed the primitive computer and communications technology available in the late 1960s.  Those procedures included what information would be transmitted by the ground to the spacecraft or from the spacecraft to the ground at any particular mission stage, what would be displayed on the spacecraft displays and when, what data would be input into the spacecraft computer and what computations would be performed and when, what computations would be performed on the ground, what navigational instrument would be used and when, the precise moment the Lunar Module would engage its landing radar, etc.  Flight Director Gene Kranz once stated that Tindall “was pretty much the architect for all of the techniques that we used to go down to the surface of the Moon.”  Tindall, a soft-spoken and humble man, harbored a keen sense of humor combined with a talent for incisive prose.  These two talents came together in the pithy, humorous memoranda he wrote during the Apollo years that became famous throughout the program as “Tindallgrams.”  It appears that Max Robichaux’s first XO, Robert Garcia, may have been a fan of Tindall, as his memorandum to Max about the deck gun mounts is written very much in the style of a Tindallgram and even appropriates some language from one of the more famous ones.  Max Robichaux’s middle name is a tribute to this unsung hero of the Apollo Program. 

Type:  When applied to warships, this term refers to the general category and function of the vessel, as opposed to Class which refers to a specific design or production run of vessels within a type.  The most common Types of warship are, in decreasing order of size, Carrier, Battleship, Battlecruiser, Cruiser, Frigate, Destroyer, Corvette, and Patrol Vessel.  There are of course, other Types of naval vessel that are not categorized as warships, including Tanker, Tender, Tug, Hospital Ship, Troop Carrier, Landing Ship, Cargo Vessel, etc.

U.E.S.F.:  United Earth Space Forces.  The international military arm formed in 2034 by United States and Canada, the European Union, and the China/Japan Alliance to retake the Earth’s moon from the Ning-Braha who had occupied it, presumably as a prelude to a planned invasion of Earth.  The U.E.S.F. drew its personnel primarily from the navies and air forces of the founding powers and drew its command structure, regulations, traditions, and other institutional foundations mainly from their “Salt Water Navies.”  The Ning-Braha technology captured by the U.E.S.F. in this campaign was the catalyst for mankind’s colonization of the stars. The U.E.S.F. is the direct institutional ancestor of the Union Space Navy.

Union: 
see
Terran Union.

Union Forces Voicecom Alphabet (or UFVA):  because letters of the alphabet as normally spoken can be easily confused over the voice channels (for example, “B and “D” sound very much alike), military and police forces have long used standardized sets of words to stand for the letters of the alphabet with which the words begin.  The UFVA is used universally by all Union Naval, System Guard, Marine, and other forces, as well as by civilian space vessels and Space Traffic Controllers in Union Space and by most non-Union human worlds.  The UFVA is derived, in turn, from the alphabetic system introduced by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on Earth in the 1950’s.  Only a few letters have been changed:  Golf to Galaxy (the game of golf having become extinct centuries ago), November to Nebula (the month being associated with some of the bloodiest and least decisive battles of the First Interstellar War), Quebec to Quarter (the official pronunciation, “kay beck” leading many civilian operators to believe that the designator stood for “K” rather than “Q”), and Yankee to Yardarm (the association of “Yankee” with the United States of America was deemed to be in appropriate in an alphabet used on an interplanetary basis).  The Alphabet is as follows:

Alfa (not “Alpha” because some will mispronounce the “ph”)

Bravo

Charlie

Delta

Echo

Foxtrot

Galaxy

Hotel

India

Juliett

Kilo (pronounced “kee low”)

Lima (pronounced “lee ma”)

Mike

Nebula

Oscar

Papa

Quarter

Sierra

Tango

Uniform

Victor

Whisky

Ray

Yardarm

Zulu

UNREP:  UNderway REPlenishment.  The refueling or resupply of a ship from a tanker or tender while both ships are underway, thereby saving the time and fuel involved in bringing both ships to a stop and then reaccelerating them. 

USNGS (Uniform Sierra Nebula Galaxy Sierra):  Union Space Navy Galactic Survey.  The most important star catalog in Known Space—used universally by the Union Space Navy, as well as by the Union Merchant Naval Service, most human navigators even outside of the Union, and many alien species.  Most star systems more than a few hundred light years from Earth are identified mainly by a USNGS catalog ID and, in some cases, by a Local Proper Name (such as Markab B).  The USNGS catalog number consists of a one digit number and four groups of three digits, all separated by dashes.  The one digit number designates which survey is being used—each new survey entirely supersedes the preceding survey, so the number is given mainly for record purposes so that later users of logs and recordings will know which survey was in use at the time.  As of 2315, the Fourth Survey was in use.  The first four digit group designates which of the 10,000 Sectors in the galaxy the star is located (in 2315, stars were cataloged in only 3970 Sectors and, of those, only 2014 were surveyed with anything approaching completeness), the second group designates the Subsector (10,000 per sector), the third the Section (10,000 Sections per subsector), and the fourth the number of the star in the Section beginning with the North, Spinward, Coreward corner (sections are small enough that none has yet been found to have more than 9149 stars—if one is ever cataloged with more than ten thousand stars, then an additional digit will be assigned).  Accordingly, a catalog number would be in this form:  USNGS 4-1153-0158-9899-5648 (the USNGS is often omitted).  Some astrocartographers have asserted that the current catalog designations are unnecessarily cumbersome and that stars should be identified by their galactic coordinates, which would allow each star to be designated by three numbers, each consisting of seven digits.  This proposal has not won favor, mostly because the very high proper motion of some stars would require constant revision of their designation as they move through the galaxy.  Most agencies that use these designations, particularly the Union Postal Service, believe strongly that a system’s “name” should not change every five to ten years.  Another disadvantage of naming stars by coordinates alone is that, in the case of some close binaries, two stars would have the same or almost the same coordinates, unless a decimal point and at least one additional digit were to be inserted in at least one of the coordinates.  See also article on Star and Planet Names in Volume I of this series.