Jenga

Spacecraft Registry

Jenga
Jenga spacestation in Spring 2016
Spacecraft Characteristics
Base Hull	Modular Battlesteel hull
Drive Type	Mass Effect Field Drive
Drive Rating	Max velocity 0.01c
Armament	multiple point defense lasers and light coil gun turrets 1 88mm coil gun (since late 2017)
Owner	Catgirl Industries
Flag of Record	Fenspace Convention
Registry Number	CI-100
Launched	mid 2015
Purpose	Research, construction and living space
Primary Crew	several catgirls and AIs
Other Crew	A lot of Exocomps
Auxillary Vehicles	6 waved cars (in late 2015)
Operational Status	Active

“	Let me get this right. You want us to help you building a base made of lot of giant LEGO parts? So that you can play around with them when you want to? Damn, that sounds stupid crazy... I like it.	”
—Wire Geek, Mid 2015

“	Why do I cannot land anymore in hangar C? I got my fight plan from you two days ago... oh... you took the hangar apart? Okay, will land in hangar D.	”
—Unknown pilot approaching the Catgirl Industries base

“	It has been said that many great discoveries do not started with an ‘Eureka’ but with ‘oh, that’s odd’. In Fenspace, both variants do often happen after some kind of explosion.	”
—heard on an Interwave forum on Mars

“	They take it apart and put it together again on a near-constant basis. Face it – Jenga is the Solar System's biggest cat toy.	”
—Noah Scott, December 3, 2015

“	Well, at least it will not fall apart when you pull out one part.	”
—Naedial Warringer, 2015

“	GINA! When we retire we're getting one of these!	”
—Benjamin Rhodes, upon seeing Jenga 'shuffle' for the first time.

The home base of Catgirl Industries, called Jenga by most people, is an ever-changing pile of large Modules made from waved steel, most of them 24 or 16 meters long and 8 times 8 meters wide. They have several standardized airlock openings, so they can be combined in a lot of different shapes. Thick blue glowing ‘energy cables’ run on the surface of the station, which was a result of the waving of the first Modules. Many of the base systems cannot run on power distributed through internal cables.

When the catgirls decided that wanted to build an orbital base instead of a ground one and had put up some basic plans, they noticed that they needed help. Cathy and Vivio flew over to Hephaestus and had a long talk with the dwarfs. After a lot of discussion about their crazy base design, modifying some of their plans because of suggestions by Hephaestus and handing over most of their money, Hephaestus Mining and Metalworking and Catgirl Industries began with the Jenga project.

In the beginning of the complex, the Modules were just a free floating habitat, but since early-2016 the owners of the base began to upgrade the Modules with engines, independent life-support and some concealed defense weapons. This mobility allowed Catgirl Industries to provide direct support for installing some of their products for larger scale contracts. Most of the module infrastructure is built into the thick bottom and ceiling of the modules to keep it out of the way of the interior areas.

Each catgirl has its own rooms and it is rumored that lots of the personal money of the catgirls go into furnishing their room comfortably. Some of the living areas are not inhabited at the moment, they are either reserved for visitors or potential future members. Others are used as common meeting places, exercise rooms and offices.

Cortana is networked to all of the public places in the module complex and can connect to most private areas on demand. She is responsible for maintaining the computer infrastructure of the company and its own cyberspace. All the modules have a representation in cyberspace, in addition to a huge virtual area that can be used for any kind of planning or activity. The complex has an Interwave backbone node, but its unknown to outsiders which module contains the transmitter.

The exact number of modules seem to fluctuate, because the catgirls seem to like taking them apart from time to time and reassemble them into different configuration and Modules, but on average the count has been growing continuously.

In Summer 2016 Jenga was attacked by a small group of ships owned by the Tanglewood Boys. The low number of point defense turrets allowed the attackers to reach a hangar and unload a large boarding party. Several Modules of Jenga were heavily damaged in the next hours while the Catgirls fought a slow retreat, waiting for the coming reinforcements.

Jenga has received quite a number of military upgrades since this fight, including a large coil gun.

Structure

Jenga's Modules are made from 8 times 8 meters large squares of 10cm thick Battle Steel, which are connected so cubes or cuboids, most of them 16 or 24 meters long. The base plates have mounting points for an thinner inner wall 100cm away, which give the interior a minimum size of 6 times 6 meters.

There are three different kind of base plates created by Hephaestus, a bare wall plate, one with a large quadratic airlock and a third one with mountings for sensors and a popup laser defense turret. The airlock plate also contains interface sockets and pipes around the airlock to transfer energy and and other things between different Modules.

The subtypes of the bare wall plates are equipped with different kind of standardized equipment between the two walls. The first variants constructed had machines for energy production, life support and communication, but since end 2015 Catgirl Industries began to equip the Modules with some of reactionless engines, which have been upgraded several times.

The plates are welded together by special equipment designed by Hephaestus and Catgirl Industries, which produce a continuous and solid outer wall, but they can be disassembled again later. Each assembled Module has one communication plate, which contains three Quantum Entanglement Modules to interconnect all existing Modules to a virtual hexagonal grid. Most Modules contain at least one energy generation and life support plate too.

Most of the interior of the Modules is either vacuum resistant or can be locked down airtight, to allow an easier reconfiguration of the Modules itself.

The Little Big Bang Labs (LBBL)

The Little Big Bang Labs (LBBL) have their own page.

The great hall

Twice every year, for Christmas and for the anniversary of the Catgirl Industries’ foundation, the catgirls assembled a large hall out of unused parts of the space station. The room has to be quite large because all catgirls want to have a party together with their guests. While the anniversary party keeps the room mostly empty for dancing, the Christmas one always featured a large holographic tree in the center. The catgirls could not afford a real one in 2015 when they had Christmas together the first time).

Of course a few days later, the module parts were cleaned up, disassembled and reassembled into their original modules. At least until this was the plan the catgirls followed until 2019.

For Christmas 2019, one of the guests of the catgirls were Dakota. Being a famous holo-artist, Dakota and the catgirls who designed the tree in 2019 had a great time, talking about former experience with their tech and brainstorming about new ideas.

It hasn’t been recorded what exactly happened during the night (and Cortana says her sensors were disrupted), but at one point Dakota and a group of catgirls began to tear up the holographic projectors in the hall and started working on them. A long and very blue-furred night later, the tree was working again and everyone got his well earned sleep.

But in the morning all kind of chaos started in the great hall, one of the catgirls had slept in the branches of the tree! While nobody was sure how, the projections of the system had become solid, a technology both unmatched by Dakota or Catgirl Industries. After a short and careful analysis the catgirls decided to keep the great hall together until they had a clue how the new holographic system was working.

It took a combined team of Trekkies and catgirls with the help of Dakota a lot of time to replicate the system, leading to the Trekkie ‘Solid Holograms’ and Catgirl Industries/Dakotas ‘Hardlight’ technology.

The Grid, Catgirl Industries Cyberspace

“	Its the mirror image of our home, just on the other side of the screen.	”
—Cathy about the Catgirl Industries cyberspace in 2016

The cyberspace of the Catgirl industries home base is made up by a large number of virtual rooms corresponding to the building blocks of the base, each of them connected by portals. The complex is floating above a huge glowing Grid, which can be used to create additional virtual working places if necessary. The Grid is the place where the catgirls and Cortana meet to plan new projects, dream about unmade constructs and sometimes celebrate parties together.

The look and feel of the Grid consists partly to the Tron movies, with lots of Neon or even semi-transparent glowing constructs. Many visitors have been a little bit disappointed when seeing it the first time, the level of graphical realism is lower than the one you see in many places at the Genaros Metaverse.

Visitors have been on the Grid on multiple occasions, both Fen surfing with some VR style equipment and AIs, constructs of pure intelligence and information. The Grid has its own security patterns which roam the starry skies of the Grid, keeping an eye on its inhabitants and securing the catgirls computers from virtual attacks.

In the few occasions the base have been attacked by spaceships, the Grid became the war room of Catgirl Industries, stretching for multiple lightminutes and showing everything the sensors of the base managed to detect. It is said that this war room can connect to other computer systems, should the base ever participate in a larger military operation.

The Grid as a Metaverse node

“	I just took the original code and started modding it, cheer for the team at Genaros for releasing the original code.	”
—Cortana, after being praised for her Metaverse Mod.

Cortanas work on the Grid started as a small private node of the Metaverse project from Genaros, patched for a higher level of central control and security. The protocols are compatible with the original Metaverse protocols, but the internal processing core has been replaced with something Cortana considered more secure than the original fully distributed system. The modified source code was released shortly after the Metaverse Incident on Genaros.

While most people don’t think much about the level of realism of the Grid, its a mistake that the deceiving look of the cyberspace easily provokes.

During the creation of the Grid the primary focus of Cortana was on writing a research and development tool for construction, not a recreational game. While the graphics level of the Grid is quite low compared to some places in Genaros Metaverse, most of the computer power is channeled into a series of plug&play physics simulations. Different sections of the Grid can run different physics modules to help in design and virtual testing of the projects the Catgirls are working on.

If stressed to maximum workload, the Grid can draw on the resources of two waved computers inside each Module of Jenga, which means that there were more waved computers than Catgirls in the base in 2017. But the Catgirls are still not completely happy with their tool and discussing adding more computers to Cortanas and Serinas hardware.

Grid security

“	Its said that most important places in Fenspace exist in two realities, the physical world and cyberspace. If this is true, the home base of Catgirl Industries exist in three realities.	”
—unknown member of the Hacker Underspace, December 2018

What only a few members of the Hacker Underspace know is, that there is a third layer called Subspace, even below the Grid. This layer is not meant for visitors or creative exchanges of ideas, the only intelligence that inhabits this place is Cortana and Serina. Build directly ‘below’ the Grid, the Subspace is filled with tightly controlled flows of information, using a noticeable fraction of its computer capacity to make sure no external program code will ever enter this layer. The Subspace has command authority over everything that happens in the Grid, its the hidden immune system against intruders in the datasphere of the company.

Cortana designed the first parts of Subspace after her experience during an undercover mission of Ford and Cathy. During this mission Cortana had to defend herself against a cyber-attack by Quattro Kuattoro, an expert hacker that chased Cortana out of the infiltrated systems and nearly managed to hack the AI in her own computers on the Stargazer. Cortana vowed that she would never be without a second line of defense against attacks like this again. She knew that there were more powerful AIs in Fenspace, and not all of them were friendly. So in addition to slowly growing her abilities inside the Catgirl Industries base, she also decided to cheat by building a hardware architecture that makes an attackers position much more difficult. Should the Grid ever experience a mayor cyber attack, Subspace could take over, hitting the first attackers from behind and segmenting the free and open datasphere of Catgirl Industries into tightly locked segments, one for each module of the base.

All kinds of security and hacking programs sneak through this layer, waiting for the day they will be released onto the Grid. Some parts of the Subspace are used for corewar style tournaments between attack and defense drone utilities, to test their abilities against each other. Cortana often has meetings with other AIs to exchange know-how and do fun battles against with the new tools on public servers, but she would never consider to reveal the existence of the Subspace for meetings and battles like this.

When the Exocomps spawned a new artificial intelligence at Catgirl Industries in 2016, Cortana and Serina started with a number of upgrades of the Subspace hard- and software. Their new knowledge about swarm behaviour and distributed computing allowed to improve the defensive capabilities of Subspace against stealth infiltration. A short time later new generations of guard programs and scanner software was integrated both into the Grid and into the hidden world below.

Up to the end of 2018 Subspace has only been active once for the defense of the Grid. In autumn 2017 an advanced data worm infiltrate the Catgirl Industries computer system. The program began to multiply in an unused section of the Grid, managed to subvert several Grid security subroutines and attacked parts of the digital infrastructure of one modules when it triggered defensive code running in Subspace. A small section of the Grid suddenly became darker and a wave of black water washed over the Grid structures, taking the foreign code with it while the rest of the Grid guardians took down their subverted companions under control of subspace. Cortana dissected the code, that had been drawn below the Grid into a secure storage afterwards and classified it as a semi-intelligent cyber weapon, with a decision capability comparable to a class D artificial intelligence. She released the code together with a preliminary analysis to the Hacker Underspace two hours later. The appearance of a sophisticated but non-aware cyber weapon like this was considered a mayor step up in the dangers of Fen cyberspace.

A fresh series of security updates appeared on the Metaverse development list soon after this incident, many of them written by members of the Hacker Underspace and based on the analysis of the cyberweapon.

Trivia

• The showers with integrated fur dryers were considered a major obstacle in designing the living space at Jenga.
• Some external airlocks have external ‘universal docking adapters’, most of them bought at Stellvia.
• Spacecrafts less than five meter high and width can land inside some special airlocks/docking bays.
• Many catgirls had very bad experiences with Boskones in their lives, which made them to equip their stations with a bit more ‘defensive’ weapons than necessary.

Quirks

• Everyone plays with LEGO! The base does not accept to stay within the same configuration for more than a month. While moving the Modules into a new configuration might help once, ever two or three months new plates must be added to the base or a few existing Modules have to be taken apart. Otherwise the energy production and engine efficiency begins to drop.
• I thought it was this way! The base does not like too many signs pointing the way to different parts of the station. Paper signs, black boards and even personal printouts get often lost, misprinted or outdated quicker than the base changes. The inhabitants seem to know their way around the station by memory, but it can confuse visitors as hell.

Unique modules and sections

• You have mail. One 16 meter long Module contains a dual link Interwave transmitter that with a pair of dedicated reactors in a second internal 10cm Battle Steel shell.
• BAM! One of the base Modules was equipped with a capital ship coil gun in late 2016. The 24 meter long Module houses the necessary cooling systems, targeting sensors and the necessary reactors to power to coilgun.