Created Sunday 16 October 2022
The Diffuse Interstellar Reporting of Emergencies (DIRE) was a galactic warning system designed by AION and maintained by their guideline enforcement division to allow authorized officials to broadcast emergency alerts and warning messages to the public. DIRE used the LQTCN to broadcast its messages, using a combination of unencrypted QTC signals and INOUT-compliant encrypted signals, to reach as many targeted individuals as possible. DIRE's primary practical use was to warn interstellar citizens of threats to public safety, usually being natural disasters, major industrial mistakes, or (most often) locations of radioactive waste. After the dissolution of the IPC and the rise of its replacement, the Kammakan of Houses, DIRE was deemed too significant and expense to maintain, so it was scrapped, though a few of its concepts and technologies were repurposed to create the Inter-House Combat Alert System (ICAS), a system to warn other houses of imminent or ongoing combat between houses.
All commercially produced INOUT transceivers and a majority of QTC transceivers built after [] TEC were equipped with on-board DIRE decoding systems, allowing AION to properly warn all of and only those affected by the warning. Later in DIRE's lifetime, producers of DIRE-compliant transceivers were also given the option to include small interstellar positional trackers for a rebate on production costs. These trackers were used to specify with improved accuracy the location of the signal receiver in order to further improve specificity of warnings based upon interstellar positions, though with enough technological skill the trackers could be removed or hacked. Upon DIRE's dissolution, this tracking system was repurposed to keep tabs on the locations of interstellar spacecraft.