IMTU:
Messages are in two broad categories:
Digital and Physical.
Physical is slow and error prone, but when you just have to send a letter or package it’s the only way.
Sub Traders all have a 5DT portion of the bay set aside as “mail”. You hand your letter with attached postage stubs to a letter carrier. The carrier agency takes it to the star port and removes a postage stub - each stub is worth an amount based on the size and weight of the package. At the star port it’s sorted and waits for a willing ship headed in the correct direction. Each star port it passes thru removes a stub. If it reaches its destination, the local carrier grabs it, removes a stub and delivers it.
Stubs are electronic markers embedded in a chip that is generated when the package is sent.
On low tech worlds sometimes the first star port takes delivery of the package and some cash and generates the marker.
On high tech worlds the sender can generate the markers themselves.
Several problems:
1) if it runs out of stubs before the destination, more then likely it’s just destroyed.
2) if it runs out at the destination, it’s delivered COD
3) letters and parcels have been known to get misrouted.
The ports use locked boxes with a crypto key sent in the previous box - so it’s safe in transit.
Digital is a bit faster and much more reliable.
Each message is an encrypted blob, containing all of the information you need to send. If you have a planetary net, you send it to your recipient with a fully qualified address (ie, emailaddress&planetarybody&system&subsector§or)
The store and forward system determines fastest path, and dispatches the message.
It stores the message until it gets a ack back then it purges it.
Rinse and repeat until the message arrives.
If there are several paths that are close, it will send it along several of them with a duplicate header. If you get several copies of the message the extras are discarded by your local mail program.
This system is physical layer agnostic - actual delivery is left up to the segment.
Many times physical letters are simply scanned and sent this way, as storage costs in the 3I are very low
Sent from my iPhone
I have no idea what the canonical answer (or answers) might be, but if I were designing it, it would look pretty much like email does now -- a store-and-forward network. You'd send your email, appropriately addressed, a DNS-like system would determine the required destination world, and the next available xboat (or other mail transport) headed in that general direction would have your message uploaded to onboard storage. Repeat routing and transloading until it arrives at the right world, at which point a planetary internet takes care of the final delivery steps.
The biggest wrinkle compared to our current internet is that the high latency makes it matter a lot how far away your recipient is. Within a few light-seconds -- say, between Earth and Luna -- you can just put up with latency on requests to servers on the other side of the zone. Beyond that, you really need to think about moving the data closer to the recipient.
Actually, it ends up looking like a cross between email and a CDN. :)
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