wormhole Datalink

            Wormholes frequently come to mind as ‘magic doors’ allowing almost instantaneous travel between distant locations, but it is less widely known that there are far more wormholes serving data-link roles than there are transport.

            Wormholes are spatial distortions which can be used to link two locations with a route far shorter than alternate routes in real space, and as such can offer near instantaneous translation of objects, or information, seemingly faster than light to an outside observer, but no violation of the light speed rule occurs. Transport wormholes have to be necessarily large to allow the passage of their items, and gates exist from metres across for personnel movement, to kilometres across for starships, however the physical space required to pass information can be much, much smaller, say perhaps the width of a photon, and as such data-link wormholes can be extremely small. The other advantage with small wormholes is that they do not need large amounts of power to sustain them.

            A standard data-link wormhole is contained within two small anchor gates, essentially scaled down versions of larger gate complexes, they are generally toroids of DCM, small plasma (or electrical) power source feeds a superconductive conduit in the centre of the torus and provides the DCM with energy to distort space to form the well in which the wormhole resides. In addition to the torus there is instrumentation to control the shape of the well, though only a small distortion is generated it is essential for the wormhole to be positioned exactly in line with the receiver/transmission beam, and hardwired instrumentation is built into the anchor gate. The gates are manufactured as pairs, the two toroids are first placed together and a vast power surge is applied and with ancillary distortion apparatus creates the wormhole between the two toroids, these are then separated, and the rest of the device is constructed around them (the wormhole is now fixed to the two gates, as even if no power is supplied the wormhole remains in near infinite collapse between the gates). The wormhole anchor gates are typically less than 30cm in diameter, and these dimensions pretty much define the size of the finished data-link unit, some datalinks have been produced with anchor gates as small as 5cm, though the relative cost of manufacture has prevents a massive exploitation of units of the this type so far in the Federation, though it is hard to imagine a reason why these links should not proliferate eventually.

            The information sent down the wormholes is nearly always conveyed as optical signals, the use of photons means that no material needs to be actually placed within the wormhole itself, and not only does this remove the need to permanently sustain the gate in an operational mode, but also prevents complications with matter in the high curvature regions of the wormhole throat. The signal transmission/receiver boom over the wormhole simply consists of a length of ultra-high purity optical fibre which guides the photons in the direction of the wormhole throat. A data link unit may also contain some optical processing blocks which extend the transmission function, perhaps increasing the compression, or buffering information, though for most data-link units the data has already been prepared for transmission.