SupraLuminal
(Copied straight from .XML 'backup' file, needs formatting and corrections. ZM User (talk) 20:15, 22 April 2024 (PDT))
FTL Communication
Communication between ships and colonies that are light years apart is accomplished by dispatching drones, also referred to as "message torpedos". The drones have terabyte buffers allowing them to carry massive amounts of compressed and encrypted data including sound, images, and video. The drones can transit hyperspace using FTL ten times faster that ships.
It would take a ship two stressful weeks to travel between a typical colony and Earth. The drone can carry a message through in a day-and-a-half. The frequency of drones traveling between colonies depends upon the volume of traffic and the urgency of the messages. Daily launches are considered adequate for routine communication.
When a drone exits hyperspace it begins transmitting an identification code much like a beacon signal. It must be sent a coded recognition message to trigger the broadcast of the stored information. If not triggered in a configurable amount of time, the drone can return to its point of origin, or self-destruct to avoid being a navigation hazard even though they do not typically get within several million kilometers of the destination. Another seven to eight minutes is hardly noticeable.
Updated messages and new destination coordinates can be sent to a drone. It's rarely worth the effort to retrieve and reuse a drone that's low on fuel, but it's possible. They have limited maneuvering capability in normal space.
To communicate with a ship, the drone must be sent to where the ship will be at the end of the drone's transit time, and the ship must be in normal space. Communication with ships in hyperspace is not possible. Some experimentation is being done with ships traveling through hyperspace in formations, but it's a risky maneuver for ships to exit hyperspace in proximity to each other.
Supraluminal Communication
The bottom line is that we don't want Earth to micro-manage the colonies. We don't mind if the colonies have FTL comms, as long as Earth doesn't. Various stories have handled this in several ways. On the author's email list, TH put his foot down thusly on 10/10/15:
The technology in place for FTL comm requires serious infrastructure as it uses wormholes held open by stations sitting in the Oort clouds of the systems involved, with relays to small satellites orbiting the planets involved that are small enough to be able to generate a force bubble close-in to the planet. The technology used to create the wormholes is the same as that used in hyperdrives – in fact, the wormholes start out as a hyperdrive wake held open by the transmission of large amounts of energy between the ship in hyperdrive and the base it departed from. This involves the expenditure of serious amounts of energy, is fantastically expensive to set up, and as a rule, we don’t have such things in the Earthat system or in the colonies. Established Confederacy systems would have this, and if we recovered a Sa’arm infested system, we might get to use it, but standard communication between systems is a message drone.
We may have to turn a blind eye on stories that involve the use of FTL comms, but in general, we don’t have them. Spacecraft in flight don’t – or at least, not small stuff – as the energy required to maintain an energized connection to a drone ‘tethered’ to the transmitting ship until it reached its target and set up a link would be too much for a ship to generate. MAYBE something the size of a cube ship could do it…
This crap was worked out several years ago. I’m going to assume it never made the wiki. Basically, Confederacy systems have the infrastructure, but their bastard stepchildren (us) do not.
(Someday this will be a navigation template. It will provide a bar across the bottom of each article with useful navigation links. Until then, this is just a placeholder to get rid of all the red "broken link" indicators. -ZM User (talk) 10:00, 3 May 2024 (PDT))
