Communication in the Commonwealth

[Fossaman]

It's also still way too much latency for a viable internet. I think you'd still wind up with Email and Usenet and the local network. Occasionally in something like the St. Kat's commercial cluster you'd have a inter-station network, but the latency would be barely tolerable.

I figured this was obvious. There's a what, six second lag for a back-and-forth to the moon? That's enough to rule out real-time interaction. Conversation via phone or video would be difficult. Get any further out than lunar orbit and there's really no point doing anything but dead-drop communication.

To get into some more technical aspects, handling timestamps for display order for something like a forum would be very, very interesting. How do you establish a common frame of reference? I can see an observatory service monitoring fluctuations in various astronomical objects to determine frames of reference. Light levels in your local sun, for system time. I don't think there's any way to establish a common frame of reference for inter-system communications, though. You might be able to see the same object from both systems, but you'd be seeing it from two different times in the past.

I kind of like David Weber's take on FTL communication; he uses gravity detection and gravity pulses in his books, on the premise that gravity is faster than light (I don't know if that's true or not. It sounds reasonable.). Short pulse for zero, long pulse for one (or for dots and dashes, if you're using morse code).

[Atarlost]

Nothing that carries information can be FTL because FTL violates causality. Weber postulates a special reference frame by which he breaks reletivity. This is the only way to have both FTL and causality. AFAIK George doesn't use a special reference frame because stargates operate across distances such that the causality violation isn't really noticable. I think the causality errors only show up if you have things in different reference frames, and star systems in the same region of space should have fairly similar velocities so any time displacements caused by the gates should be smaller than the time required for light to travel between systems. At least I can wave my hands and make myself believe it's not a probleb.

[Prophet]

Current theories place the speed of gravity to within 1% of the speed of light.
Here's a great article on many theories regarding FTL communication (superluminal) FTL travel and the time paradoxes that accompany both.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/R ... FTL.html#8

SO, unless the researchers at the LHC manage to isolate some Higgs Bosons and somehow disprove current quantum gravity theory in the next 200 years with experimental evidence that C is not the absolute maximum attainable speed, FTL is no go...

Of course Transcendence is a fictional game and anything is possible, becuase here George is god.

[schilcote]

Hey, I had a brainwave on what might be a way for the Commonwealth to communicate inside itself. Is there any explanation for those two round things that you always find by the stargate? Perhaps those are for communication using whatever technology the gate uses. One is for sending and reciving transmissions from the next system, and one is for sending and reciving transmissions from the last system, or perhaps one is for sending and reciving from the system the gate points to, and the other talks to the other gate and stations in the system. Infact, this could give a small insight into how the gates work. The bit you enter is just a matter/energy converter, and then your energy is transmitted to the next gate via the communication thingies. Interesting idea?

[Aury]

Nothing that carries information can be FTL because FTL violates causality.

ORLY? Entangled particles.

[Atarlost]

Entangled particles cannot be used to transmit information. Any attempt to manipulate either particle destroys the entanglement. At best they can only be used as an extremely fragile one time pad for encryption because their behavior, though linked, is random.

[Bobby]

the commstation on either side of the gate would work if the transmitter was on the gate or if it used every ship that passed rather than a single com-bot, but as long as we are using every ship anyway there's no need for the transmitter on the gates, depending on how powerful ships' radios are.

then again, what pirate would attack an unarmed non-hostile bot with no valuables.

as for time across systems, they could use a commonwealth earth calender and atomic clocks to maintain it. people live on stations not planets anyway, day can be as long or as short as the folks with the light switch want.

[Aury]

then again, what pirate would attack an unarmed non-hostile bot with no valuables.

A really bored pirate with nothing better to do. Or one who just wants to have a little fun messing w/ everyone's communications. Or perhapse one who wants to interrupt communications to launch a major assualt or something. Information is one of the most valuable things after all.

[Atarlost]

Add in one who hopes to get paid not to.

[schilcote]

the commstation on either side of the gate would work if the transmitter was on the gate or if it used every ship that passed rather than a single com-bot, but as long as we are using every ship anyway there's no need for the transmitter on the gates, depending on how powerful ships' radios are.

I didn't say the transciver was next to or on the gate, I said it WAS the gate. The little beacons next to the gate look like they were made by the same pepole at about the same time as the gate, and as far as I know they don't do anything else, so why can't they be for communications?

[Atarlost]

They're light seconds from the gate. Plenty of room to stick a jamming source in between. Or a big metal plate. There are two beacons so two plasteel barricades and the net is down.

[Aury]

Anyways, humans probably wouldn't have access to them for communications.

[Bobby]

we don't know how the gate beacons communicate, perhaps they use gravity waves or something else that won't be blocked by a metal plate. even if they use normal em waves they can probably go around large objects because of the distance(like waves in a pond go around a finger, or radio waves go around a skyscraper) and you would need very very large metal plates, would a thin foil disrupt it?


I think it is safe to say that communication in the commonwealth is difficult to maintain, easy to intercept, and slow, at least compared to on earth. Within a station you have a viable internet(perhaps between a few stations, if each one had a copy, message boards not so much), stations can e-mail each other, and inter-system communication is more like the mails.

[Atarlost]

For a plate to not block them they would have to use a wavelength longer than the size (not thickness) of the plate. Possible data rate is inversely proportional to wavelength. If a titanium barricade won't block them they're too low a data rate to be useful.

[Aury]

For a plate to not block them they would have to use a wavelength longer than the size (not thickness) of the plate. Possible data rate is inversely proportional to wavelength. If a titanium barricade won't block them they're too low a data rate to be useful.

Well, gamma radiation would probably penetrate a flimsy little titanium barricade, but on second thought, I doubt that would be beneficial to the ships passing through.