Slipspace COM launcher

Hieu Dinh: "That’s a magnetic accelerator."

Laurette Agryna: "In technical terms, it's an ultraprecise low-mass launcher. Experimental technology about a decade ago for superluminal comms. Expensive as hell. Only Reach and Earth had one of these before the problem of rogue AIs forced us to look to some old-school solutions."

— Hieu Dinh and Laurette Agryna discussing slipspace COM launchers during the Battle of Nysa in 2560.

Slipspace communications (COM) launchers, formally known as ultraprecise Shaw-Fujikawa low-mass launchers, are an piece of technology invented by the United Nations Space Command that allow for faster-than-light communication. Throughout the Human-Covenant War they were the only form of FTL communication available to humanity short of messages carried between star systems by courier starships. However, toward the war's end humanity began to develop wavecoms which allowed for real-time supraluminal communication, making slipspace COM launchers an expensive and relatively niche technology restricted to only a small number of colonies.

The onset of the Created uprising in late 2558 forced the UNSC to fall back on older communications methods to prevent the Created from spying on their communications. As such, slipspace COM launchers were brought back into service throughout the UNSC.

Overview

Slipspace COM launchers operate by sending a small probe into slipspace, encoded with a message, which is then picked up at the target destination by the intended recipient. The probes themselves resemble a small, black sphere around half the size of a grenade. They are launched via a mass driver which fires the projectile into space. Simultaneously, a slipspace portal is generated by a Shaw-Fujikawa translight generator situated in high orbit, which then transports the probe into slipspace and onto the target destination on an ultra-precise trajectory. Once the probe arrives at a given set of coordinates, it drops back into normal space and is then picked up by the recipient.

Although superficially similar to slipspace-capable drop pods or the slipstream probes used by remote scanning outposts, the probes fired by COM launchers are capable of navigating through slipspace by themselves. Comparatively, the aforementioned are simply dropped into and out of slipspace, though are subject to the whims of slipspace's own mechanisms for transportation. The probes fired by a slipspace COM launcher can travel as far and as fast as a UNSC starship.

At the time of their introduction (at least as early as February 2551), slipspace COM launchers were poised to revolutionise supraluminal communications across the Human Sphere. Traditional FTL communications involved a starship known as a courier manually moving between systems and broadcasting communications traffic to a system's local network of communications infrastructure. However, their sheer expensive meant that they never took off, with the cost to build even one launcher comparable to that required to build a whole fleet of spacecraft. This made the value of a single probe worth that of a capital city on an Outer Colony world, and restricted them for only the most important strategic communications. Instead, the mid-26th century saw the proliferation of wavecom communications infrastructure to supplement traditional courier ships, which allow for real-time interstellar communications. Wavecom technology appears to have been in use as early as July 2552, just before the end of the Human-Covenant War.

Usage

During the Human-Covenant War, only a handful of slipspace COM launchers were known to exist; one on Earth, one on Reach, and a secret one on Onyx. Select Valiant-class super-heavy cruisers sporting the class's command refit were also fitted with slipspace comms probe launchers, with the sheer cost of the technology proving infeasible to outfit across the wider fleet.

In February 2551, the Onyx slipspace launcher was used to send a fragment of the smart AI Deep Winter to talk with Kurt Ambrose aboard UNSC Hopeful and warn him of unapproved alterations to the SPARTAN-III augmentation procedures. By expending much of his remaining processing power on the fragment in the probe, Deep Winter was able to talk with Kurt without the need for an extensive server infrastructure - though was only able to communicate to a limited degree. The slipspace COM launcher on Reach was almost certainly destroyed during the fall of the planet in August 2552, while the one on Onyx was destroyed by Sentinels after it was used to send a message to Earth.

Slipspace COM launchers were brought back into service after the Created uprising began in October 2558, thanks to their greater operational security. Other FTL communications systems were easily comprimised by the Created, whereas the direct point-to-point method of the launchers made them perfect for discretely coordinating the UNSC's resistance against the Created. One such installation was built at the Avery J. Johnson Academy of Military Science on Nysa, a world set up as a hidden outpost for the UNSC to fall back on and coordinate from. During the Battle of Nysa in February-March 2560, the academy's slipspace COM launcher was used by Spartan Commander Laurette Agryna to send a request for help to Anvil Station. The message was launched on February 29, 2560, and recieved by Anvil on March 3. Anvil subsequently dispatched a A'uzr-pattern sword frigate, Sword of Conjunction, to Nysa, which arrived to assist in relieving the siege of the academy on March 4.

List of appearances

• Halo: Ghosts of Onyx (First appearance)
• Halo: Battle for the Academy - Part 1