The “covert stars” collection is a series of booklets dedicated to the strategic and social aspects of space technology. This one, written by engineer and sociologist S.E Adewunmi, deals with an old point of contention: space stealth.

The first part of the book, “The Tale of the Hydrogen Steamer”, aims at dispelling the widespread historical myth that stealth is impossible in space. Adewunmi argues that, to become hard to find, all a ship has to do is to cool the hull down and thus nullify its infrared signature. The recipe for space stealth is a known quantity: it requires is a sleek ship, equipped with heat sinks, active cooling that keeps the hull near the temperature of the cosmic background and a deep black finish that prevents easy visual acquisition. Such vessels have been in use since the interplanetary age, almost two centuries ago; they are called “hydrogen steamers”, as they employ liquid hydrogen for cooling. Though not completely invisible, hydrogen steamers are nigh-impossible to detect at long ranges (> 50,000 km) and challenging to acquire at medium ranges (between 50,000 and 10,000 km), which makes them ideal space-to-space strike platforms. They can also be used in strategic deterrence, positioned in deep space at ideal strike times from inhabited planets.

In the second part of the book, “The Stealth Onion”, Adewunmi explores an enigma: if they are so good at stealth, why aren't hydrogen steamers more widely used in modern warfare? Indeed, though disposable stealth drones and probes are everywhere and widely employed in various roles, hydrogen steamers are few and far between, generally relegated to sublight operations in counter-insurgency contexts. As modern space to space warfare relies on fast, nimble vessels capable of tactical teleportation, the slow, cramped hydrogen steamers have little use in active combat beyond the initial volley: calculating tactical jumps requires them to deploy radiators to compensate for the heat output of navigation computers, nullifying their stealth capabilities. Though all superpowers maintain vestigial stealth fleets, their use is purely theoretical, and they have never been fielded in actual combat, neither are they employed as a strategic deterrent, where faster-than-light missiles occupy the same niche at a fraction of the cost. Likewise, “pirates” (Adewunmi considers this term antiquated and prefers the denomination of “unsanctioned militaries”) rarely have the means to maintain hydrogen steamers, as they require frequent refits to retain their stealth properties. And yet, orbital shipyards keep building stealth ships…why?

The question is addressed in the third part of the book, “Dark Lanes”. Adewunmi explains that the main use of stealth ships in the interstellar age is with…civilian outfits. Indeed, cargo ships have no need for fast translations or a large human crew: they can calculate their jumps over days or even weeks, negating the need for active heat dissipation, and operate on autopilot. Given that interplanetary and interstellar economic intelligence mostly relies on the analysis of ship signatures — a single engine wake gives a vector, a delta-v budget, a manufacturer, sometimes often an expected tonnage — stealth cargo ships, as light as they may be, create breathing room for cooperatives and communes to conduct unseen business, which might not necessarily be illegal in nature. Indeed, stealth cargo ships are primarily a tool of sovereignty, not contraband, which is much more adequately carried on regular cargo ships, where small packages are easily “drowned” among legal containers. Using hydrogen steamers to carry goods away from the prying eyes of interstellar superpowers can thus be understood as a political stance, a technical means to reassert the independence of non-aligned polities. In this regard, argues Adewunmi, the civilian usage of stealth ships as “dark laners” is not that different from their old military role in strategic deterrence: in both cases, stealth is a political statement.

Art by Sir_Lazz for Starmoth.

Space clothing is integral to the life of a spacer — be they a temporary crew member on a spaceship, or a veteran navigator. Though spacers (and astronauts, spationauts, or however spaceship crew are called in their local culture) do not form a coherent cultural group and as such do not have anything resembling “traditional clothes”, certain types of space clothing are found all across human space.

Casual wear for spacers is often aerospace-inspired, with countless declinations of the industrial-era pilot jacket, which might be modified and interpreted to such an extent that it becomes unrecognisable for whoever is not familiar with the history of human spaceflight. Indeed, and contrary to what a certain brand of science fiction may have predicted, spaceships, be they military or civilian, aren't based on boats, and spacers don't consider themselves as the heirs of the sailors of old. A common saying among them is that “space is a deeper sky” — a way to signify that, by and large, they see themselves as pilots first and foremost.

Flight suits are the most common space garments, and indeed the type of clothing most commonly associated with spacers. Very closely inspired by worksuits or jumpsuits — which themselves became extremely common during the post-apocalyptic Low Age, due to their ease of production — these single-piece garments can be worn as is, over underwear, or over casual clothes. They are an integral part of workplace safety, providing protection against cuts and bruises, thermal regulation (within reason), high-g compensation (by inflating pouches in the legs during high-g manoeuvres to keep blood from rushing away from the head), a tactile interface with various on-board systems and, when worn with gloves and a flexible helmet, airtight insulation. Flight suits are worn with short sleeves aboard ships that are known for running hot — often fast vessels with feeble heat dissipation capabilities. The ship's heraldry is embroidered on the chest. Spacers typically own a dozen flightsuits each.

Mechanical counterpressure suits are also a common sight, and worn in place or over flight suits on many vessels. These suits allow for hard vacuum exposure and extra-vehicular activity. Instead of being pressurised and inflated like a regular hardsuit (the stereotypical, large, bulky spacesuit that's still very common in popular visions of spaceflight), counterpressure suits use tight elastic garments to apply pressure on the skin exposed to hard vacuum, preventing decompression of the spacer's body. Cooling is ensured by evaporation inside the suit. A counterpressure suit allows for unconstrained movement and can be worn inside or outside a ship, without the need for removing or donning the garment in the airlock. The suit links with the user's monad, allowing for fine instinctive control of manoeuvring thrusters and electronics. Most counterpressure suits can be worn on the surface of temperate (but otherwise hostile) planets, albeit very hot or freezing atmospheres require additional heat regulation capabilities: such suits are slightly bulkier and known as exosuits.

Clothing illustrated by Garnouille. 

Space — the final frontier! Well. For a small part of humankind, at least. Out of the eight billion humans who constitute the extent of our species in the Milky Way, five billion live on Earth, most of the other three on Earth-like worlds, and few of them have any desire to leave their cradle. In total, less than 5% of humanity has embraced the spacer lifestyle, inhabiting stations, spaceships, and underground settlements on moons or planetoids.

Still, four hundred million spacers is a lot of people, and some of these communities have been around for almost two centuries — the oldest off-world settlement is the lunar city of Shackleton crater, which recently celebrated the 175th anniversary of its foundation. How did spacers adapt so well to their new environment? Such was the question journalist Peter Vangelis tasked himself with answering in this pop-science book, as he took a shuttle to the nearest space station, the venerable Nana Buluku Orbital in low Earth orbit.

Instead, he found a wild and somewhat inconvenient truth — spacers did not really adapt. Because space sucks. The list of adverse health effects zero-g and radiation have on the human body takes a good third of the book — because they are quite numerous. Zero-g puts a heavy toll on pretty much every single part of the human body, from the obvious (bone and muscle loss, the face becoming puffier), to the lesser known (spacers have skyrocketing rates of eye diseases due to issues with the pressure in their cornea) and the frankly arcane (the gut microbiome really doesn't enjoy the absence of gravity, and it turns out neurons don't either). Radiation exposure especially doesn't only increase the rates of tumours, but it also has cascading impacts on every part of the human body. And treating wounds? Oh, yes, blood doesn't flow outside the wounds, it has to be mechanically pumped out. And anaesthesia doesn't work as well as it should, or in some cases, doesn't work whatsoever.

Space really sucks. The whole universe wants you dead. So what did we do about it?

Not much, in the grand scheme of things, and it's not by lack of trying — just about all medical techniques, with the notable exception of full genetic engineering (the voluntary creation of human subspecies remains a touchy and complex political topic) have been mobilised to try to solve the plight of spacers. With the hindsight of two centuries of continued space presence, modern technology has managed to mitigate the most grievous impacts somewhat. After all, most spacers live long and fulfilling lives, their life expectancy in good health is only slightly below average (115 years instead of 121 for the terrestrial human cohort) and, odd skin colours notwithstanding, they look broadly human. Radiation turned out to be less of a problem than anticipated, and modern treatments are superb at handling cancer, especially in the preventative phase. We can replace eyes. We can fix gut microbiomes. We can put spacers in centrifugal gravity stations so they give birth without complications. We can handle zero-g traumatic injuries with enough training and dedicated equipment. We can, broadly speaking, alleviate the murderous desires of space.

Or can we? What Vangelis discovered in his investigations is that spacers…actually spend quite a lot of time on solid, Earth-like ground! On average, a spacer spends three months a year in the environment of a terrestrial garden world, and those who don't tend to live in massive centrifugal gravity stations that emulate such environments. Spacers who never come back to a planet-like environment, now, that's another issue. Focusing on this cohort paints a much bleaker picture -- because modern medicine can only do so much. It can't repair multiple failing organs at once. It can't rewire neurons. It can't support weakened hearts for a century. Even implants can't do much when they themselves are getting tumours. That's why most deep space travellers either take frequent stops on uninhabited Earth-likes, or are artificial intelligences, unconstrained by human bodies.

We don't live in space, concludes Vangelis, not really. We live alongside it. Because while it's beautiful and full of wonders, it still wants to kill us.

Art made for Starmoth by Garnouille. 

Space piracy exists in a strange — if somewhat amusing — conceptual limbo: if most analysts agree on the fact that it does exist, very few can give a unified, consensual definition of it. While communal legal codes define notions such as “unlawful appropriation of cargo” or “craft hijacking”, they do not have a clear concept of piracy in space.

One thing is certain, however. The stereotypical pirate, preying on cargo ships from their asteroid hideout, boarding innocent vessels, stealing their AI and plundering their riches does not exist in any realistic capacity. The very nature of geometry drive FTL travel makes interception an extremely complex affair and there is little economic case for such a practice of piracy, considering the risks of triggering an overwhelming response from the powers that be. It doesn't mean unlawful endeavours carried out with ships are unheard of.

A working definition of piracy could be elaborated by considering the three main elements that are required (yet not sufficient) for proper space pirates to exist:

• A lightly or un-policed space with enough of an economy to allow for valuables to be carried in and out of the system (said valuable can be goods, people or information.)
• Organized groups or polities with the equipment, inclination and geographical presence to coerce civilian ships into giving in to their (often monetary) demands.
  
• A local context, be it political or ideological, that leads the would-be pirates to seek for subsistence and wealth through violent means. 
• A widely accepted -- regional or interstellar -- perception of the aforementioned actions as unlawful and falling under the definition of piracy. 

One may see an immediate problem with this definition: it is recursive. A pirate is first and foremost defined by the fact that the rest of human space sees them as such. This is the most crucial aspect of what it means to be a space pirate: perception. In regions like Smyrnia-Silesia or Tyra, there is a continuum between organized protection rackets and legitimate proto-states. Many self-proclaimed Smyrnian pirates, like the infamous Solovyovan Recyclers, started as the former and ended up as the latter. They transformed their racket into a system of trade taxes and organized fleets, often used to protect merchants against the racketeers they used to be. As the regions with rampant piracy also tend to be low-intensity warzones, some outside analysts tend to consider that piracy proper doesn't even exist, classifying all piracy-adjacent endeavours as military actions against civilian trade. It is not wholly nonsensical: in anarchic regions, there is no such thing as a neutral merchant.

A long-range network sync array on the Interloper, Elora's most distant asteroid moon.

So here's a story. Once upon a time, there was something called the Internet. You may understand it as an Earth-wide digital network that linked billions of users and connected computers together for the last part of the industrial era. The Internet was staggeringly complex and remains arguably unsurpassed in scope and scale (remember that, at that time, Earth demographics were at an all-time high and by 2070 the planet had more inhabitants than the entirety of present-day human space). It was so complex, actually, that six hundred years and a Low Age later, its shadow keeps looming over our digital infrastructure. Some of the Internet's elements and design principles were straight-up reused in modern networks, while a few of our modern artificial intelligences coalesced out of Internet remnants.

Modern networks, however, are fractured. They are born of the Low Age and bear the mark of an uncertain, energy-limited time. An industrial-era time traveller would find our digital infrastructure arcane, impenetrable even. First because a large part of modern shared networks are asynchronous. As the geometry drive does not allow for instant FTL communication, exchanges of information between distant star systems occur at the pace of messenger ships, or net-engines. These small, nimble vessels (often cargo conversions of Inyanga or Simurgh frames) are loaded to the brim with hard drives and fly on regular patterns, only stopping for repairs and refuelling. When they approach a planet, they are pinged by orbital platforms that beam data towards them. These platforms are in turn fed data by automated collecting algorithms that sweep planetary networks to create an archive-snapshot of current sites and repositories. These network images are then carried to other worlds and uploaded using the same system. On average, the “refresh time” of the interstellar net is about one month between Communal Space and the Traverse, while more distant worlds may have to wait for several years to get a snapshot and vice versa. In that regard, the interstellar net is much more comparable to early 19th century communications than the industrial Internet. Planetary networks work in isolation, with regular updates as to the activity of extraplanetary networks arriving in waves with messenger ships. It goes without saying that the physical infrastructure that allows planets to rapidly upload petabytes of data to messenger ships is critical. It is not rare for attacks to focus on the beaming arrays, either through hacking or more direct, unconventional means — exotic adversarial attacks based on interference with the laser lenses causing false packets of data to be sent are not unheard of!

Planetary networks themselves are rarely unified. The local fragmentation of power between communes, cooperatives, and syndicates tends to create a wide variety of standards, infrastructure and file formats, even in relatively unified spaces like Terran networks under the aegis of the USRE or Laniakea. Sifting through this increasingly complex weave of isolated social networks, incompatible websites and different codebases requires dedicated software or quasi-AI assistants. There is a constant back and forth between insularity and the unified force of open-source endeavours, of which the Biblioteca operating system is a great example. On large planets such as the Earth or Elora, this dynamic is slowly starting to favour unified networks, while the opposite is true on politically scattered worlds such as Smyrnia-Silesia.

The two aforementioned aspects mean that interstellar networks are more similar to the early than late Internet. Social media mostly exists under the shape of forums and boards, that suffer less from asynchronous data transfer than more immediate communication structures — the most popular massively multiplayer games are real-time space sims where travel times are measured in weeks, even months. 

Our industrial-era time traveller would also be surprised by the extent to which modern digital networks rely on physical media. While hands-free interfaces using augmented reality contact lenses or glasses are very common, modern humans remain historically wary of wireless transmission. Though this is mostly a cultural artefact from the Low Age, there are a few good reasons to prefer wired connections and hard drives over cloud storage and wireless exchanges. On politically chaotic worlds, the wireless environments of densely populated areas are packed with data snoopers, self-sustaining viruses and various logic bombs that make confidential wired data transfer vastly more reliable. Furthermore, many planets are subject to geomagnetic conditions that make wireless and cloud storage unreliable — even on Elora, powerful magnetic storms can knock down worldwide networks several hours or days at a time. Thus, it is not surprising to see people relying on hard drives, flash storage keys and even the odd cassette tapes — those are very resilient and, while slower than other kinds of storage, can carry massive amounts of data.

Illustration by Jaime Guerrero for Eclipse Phase, distributed by Posthuman Studios under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-alike 3.0 Unported License.