Thoughts on using jump technology for FTL comms? Other than the obvious comm drone with a jump drive. Maybe something in the data ark will let them use jump fields to transmit signals as well as physical objects. Not that this is needed yet really, but I'm hoping to see the Celestia up and running soon and comm lag was cumbersome in "Head of the dragon". Comments?
Currently, the object needs to have a jump field produced around itself to jump. Currently, I don't think that comms transmission using jumped drive is viable. That being said, the ark might have information on quantum entanglement or maybe when a ship jumps the transit to another dimension. I discussed this in the Jump torpedo topic. If the jump drive phases a ship out to another dimension and is not affected by matter or shields when the ship 'passes' through them, and the ship is affected by blackholes and ZPED's, then we could deduce that the place that the ship goes to, is the same place matter is sent to from a blackhole or a ZPED produces energy from and could be a sort of energy dimension. If this is true, you might be able to use the ZPED, or another version of it as a comms device to transmit the data through the energy dimension. Of course, we would need Ryk to give us more details on the workings of the jump drive and ZPED's to get a better idea of what is going on when you jump.
Using current technology though, they could build a series of jump capable comm drones and have them jump to and from the battlefield continuously providing information to the command post. Sort of like what was used in "Head of the Dragon", but automated instead of using shuttles and the jump fighter for the primary source of information.
My impression is that the jump calculations are too complex to be entrusted to an automated drone - yet. Ryk had descriptions of lugging the computer core from a shuttle to the bridge to speed up the calculations, so I get the impression of TV in 1940 right now. Color and HD haven't hit yet, but perhaps soon.
It seems like they would have to know much more about how the jump drive actually works to have any chance of doing better than jump drones. That being said, jump drones can do a really good jump if the amount of time between when the jump is started to when a jump is finished is small enough.
@Eric Nay:
I'm not sure that's actually much of an issue. While it would be ideal for a drone to do it's own calculations, it might be better to simply give the drone the required information. Such a drone would only need the information required to 1) jump to it's destination, 2) transmit it's message, 3) wait either a given amount of time or until it gets a reply, 4) do a return jump. Step 3 could be skipped to minimize risk or if it's known both sender and receiver have jump comm drones. This could provide two way communication with a lag time proportional to the number of jumps between the sender and receiver plus the amount of time required to record the message and deploy the comm drone (which might only need to be done once).
Effectively jump communications between two parties could be done if they are only a jump away by using two pairs of jump comm drones, with perhaps another pair to help synchronize between the two pairs of jumping drones. While two drones are swapping paces, the other two are recording the current conversation while playing back what they recorded before they swapped positions. Using the above approach, if the comm drones where able to jump close enough and the time between when a is started to when a jump is finished is small enough, then it wouldn't be any different from a phone/video call today. I'm thinking the jump drive has enough accuracy and precision to handle the close enough part, but the few seconds to actually jump is far longer than the 0.1-0.01 seconds it would probably require for real-time conversation. The downside is that the rapid jump flashes would stand out a fair bit. It should also be noted that the number of com drones required given N sides to the conversation is N^2-N minimium comm drones and N^2 for ideal synchronization. So if Nathan wants to hold a conversation with 9 other ships, it would take at least 90 and ideally 100 comm drones and the lag would be 2*T*J, where T is the time between when a jump starts and when a jump finishes (assumed the same for each comm drone) and J is the highest number of jumps between any two of the ships.
Nuclearman:
I would think only N (or 2N) drones + 1 drone server would be needed in an N way conversation. There would be a central fixed point to communicate (drone server) and each ship's drone would jump back and forth, dumping the data/conversation each way. Sort of like a jump ethernet, if you start adding jump drones jumping between servers.
Nuclearman:
I would think only N (or 2N) drones + 1 drone server would be needed in an N way conversation. There would be a central fixed point to communicate (drone server) and each ship’s drone would jump back and forth, dumping the data/conversation each way. Sort of like a jump ethernet, if you start adding jump drones jumping between servers.
An excellent point. I was thinking about that was well since that is close to what is used in the series at one point, but I was looking for an approach that would allow for real-time communications with the least amount of improvement to delay between when a jump starts to when it finishes. That approach adds an additional jump of delay into the comm system in the cases where it could have been only one jump. Although, now that I think about it more, I was probably overzealous on the need to minimize lag. That delay becomes less of an issue as the number of jumps required increases as well as the the time between when a jump starts to when it finishes decreases. Therefore, I would imagine that more resource intensive approach would be limited to cases of high important, the number of sides is small enough, and the total number of drones available to each side is sufficient. Otherwise, in most cases the delay likely becomes less of an issue than the resource cost, especially if it's used as a general purpose email like comm system, where it might eventually be used by hundreds or even thousands. Although that scale requirement is probably a few books away yet at least.
I do believe it would require at least 2N+1 drones though. There would be N drones at the central location, and those drones would swap places with the N drones for each of the N sides of the conversation, plus one drone to help with synchronization. Although, there also might be a few more intermediate comm drones in cases where multiple jumps are required.
Since they don't have much of an industrial base yet, the manufacturing of FTL drones for comm is a little way off.
What can they do quickly, with minimal work? A single comm drone jumping back and forth between the one system they now hold and whatever system they take on next? So they don't lose their toehold?
In the real world out here I read a scientific article dealing with using a type of crystal due to shards of the same crystal resonating on the same wavelength at the quantum level no matter if the crystal shards are in the same room or are thousands of miles apart. I'm thinking that Mr. Brown can use this as a basis for FTL comms from some research data from the Data Arks. Just an idea anyway... 😉
@Eric G.:
LOL that's not real life, that's Anne McCaffrey's Crystal Singer series 😛
The crystal idea might be from fictional work, but quantum entanglement is part of science today. Which follows the same ideal and could provide the FTL communications that will be needed later in the series.
The zped creates a gravity field. Grav fields are ftl. therefore a spy drone with a zped could modulate the field, and you can insert info in the modulation.
Gravity fields do not propagate faster than the speed of light. They propagate at exactly the speed of light.
yes, but this is fiction 😉
Something has to propagage FTL, otherwise the ships wouldn't go FTL! It may have something to do with the 'reduced mass' which the FTL emitters do, in which case it is possible a sensor in a stationary FTL field could detect something.
Gravity as FTL is from a famous soap opera series where a capacitor stores more energy than an equivalent amount of matter/antimatter.
All gravitational interactions between bodies in all dynamical systems had to be taken as instantaneous. . . . Indeed, as astronomers we were taught to calculate orbits using instantaneous forces; then extract the position of some body along its orbit at a time of interest, and calculate where that position would appear as seen from Earth by allowing for the finite propagation speed of light from there to here. . . . That was the required procedure to get the correct answers.” (“The Speed of Gravity – What the Experiments Say” , Tom Van Flandern, Physics Letters A, 250 (1-3) (1998) pp. 1-11)
Unlike light, gravity has no aberration. Its “speed” must be instantaneous. At least 10 to the 13 faster than light.
