How does Long Range Comms Work?

[Loriath]

I was wondering how long range comms would work in the Elite Universe. So, I thought about it and wrote down some ideas, then I did a stupid thing. I posted it on the FD Forums hoping for some intelligent discussion. Well that was a complete fail, so I am bringing it here, where it should have been in the First place. Here is what I wrote:

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was trying to figure out how communications between systems, and across vast distances are achieved in the Game Universe and was hoping someone had the answers.

It seems to me that there is a mass communications database, but there does not seem to be the ability for FTL transmissions. This would make it rather difficult to pass information from system to system in a timely fashion.

How could the Federation learn of the Emperors murder as they did, in what appears to be near real time? In the game, it seems that transmissions even between stations in the same system are difficult. We have been limited to learning the prices at a station by landing and interfacing with the stations commodity market computer systems, so with that as the basis, it would seem that Tr/Rx great distances in system are hard.

We only hear comms in Normal space from a far as our Scanners can see. Local chat in a RES is devoid of chatter from further Away. In Super Cruise, we can only hear chatter from others in SC with us, but not local space around stations, and we never hear chat from outside the system.

As I said, I have thought a lot about this, and come up with a practical way of it working based on limitations. Relay systems.

For example, you leave a station and there is comms traffic destined for within the system. The station then transmits the encrypted data to a special device that is built into each ship that is leaving that station. It first asks the ship if the destination of your planned jump is System based, or out of system (we can get to that in a minute). If System based if you are destined for the intended recipient station.

If the jump is system based, it transmits the data to your ship for Relay. You jump into SC and if you are destined for the station that the data is meant for, your ship carries the data on board device and is automatically transferred when you enter local space to the station. If you are not going to the destination system, it waits for other craft to enter SC and sends a query as to their destination and if it finds a match, it relays it to the that ship for delivery. Now if you Enter SC and no candidate is found, it transmits to the local Nav Beacon where it will await another ship till it gets a destination.

For longer range messages, you may carry the data on the ship to another system before it is transferred. The data relay is smart, and will not just dump the data to another ship unless it can ensure the data is moving closer to its intended destination. If you are on your way through a system and the data you are carrying is destined for a direction that you are not going, again it can be put to a local Nav Beacon until it finds another ship to relay along.

For redundancy, data coming from one place to another may be passed to multiple ships to ensure that the data gets there. I may be able to take data across 100 ly faster in my DB Explorer than you in your sidewinder, but if we both carry it and I die, the data will continue with you.

Now I am working with the idea that data can be sent out on Multiple ships with each ship carrying data for multiple destinations, and that this data is securely transferred without our assistance, and without our knowledge, and that every ship would have these relay devices as would every station, outpost, and Nav Beacon. These would be installed at the ship factory and regardless of Manufacturer, would all operate the same (Just like our HUD's )

Some stations could be a lot further out of normal shipping lanes and see little traffic, so messages would take longer to arrive to and from these places. But busier places would be able to pass information a lot faster.

Another Idea is that when you jump from one system to another, the hole you punch in WitchSpace allows Nav Beacons to relay transmission through that passage by themselves. But I have not thought about how that would work to the degree of the other idea.

Is there another explanation in Lore that I don't know about and I have been wasting my time thinking about how this works?

[TorTorden]

I like it, and kind of similar to my solution which I pretty much would copy from the Gap books.
There they also had faster than light travel, but not FTL communication.

There they had automated communication probes capable of jumping between systems, meet with other probes at set intervals and relays information. It will take time maybe even days but this is a lot faster than waiting 300 years for a radio signal.
In the gap they had more control on hyperjump exits so these probes would just jump into range of a station/outpost, burst transmit info to the station and jump on.

Here is what I'm thinking for non particularly sensitive communication .
You have a series of high wake capable drones who jump between systems and upload info to the navigation beacons, the stations and outposts themselves have supercruise capable drones that shuttle back and forth between their station and the nav beacon, in system com's can be conducted via navigation beacon as well, since these drones go there anyways but private or dedicated drones could move directly between stations in the system as well.

For large galaxy event news or just the big money media corporations I see no reason that long jump capable drones couldn't exist, since they basically just need a FSD and a fuel tank I think they could easily reach a range of hundreds of light years, so if a media group dispatch such a drone to each of their departement or affiliates the news of the emperors assassination could be spread across populated space in mere minutes.

But your video mail to your mother could take a while since it would due to costs use cheaper channels.

[Gorf]

I'm intrigued as to why you think it's not possible for on-board comms to achieve FTL travel when that's what the ship does.

The FSD has a minimum mass of one tonne, and can fling anything upwards of 50t of matter across interstellar distances, pretty much instantanously. You'd think that the technology to do the same with a packet of essentially massless electromagnetic data would have been developed well before that, so it would be cheap enough to incorporate into every ship, and it would be lighter, and (because the comms device is not frame-shifting itself) cover the span of the galaxy.

It's not an unreasonable assumption. Back in 2015, over 1000 years ago,there was nowhere on the planet that you could reach quicker than your voice.

[TorTorden]

Its not really a matter of what makes sense, but trying to make sense of things that doesn't make sense.
If that makes sense?

If easy FTL Coms existed then why isn't every stations trade data accessible instantly whether your are docked or not?
The RL reason is its due to game mechanics, trading is a lot more work and interesting when it involves searching.
And knowing a good trade is like knowing a secret (granted trading is quite broken anyways).
To explain these game mechanics in an RP setting, the easiest thing that comes to mind is the lack of FTL communications.

[Xebeth]

For news and general communications I've always worked on the premise that ships travelling between system automatically carry this information and transmit it locally when then arrive in a system, even if its just an intermediate jump. Each package of data has a unique code, if the stations in the system have received data with that code already they simply ignore it, if it's new they upload it to their news feeds. The codes are generated by the news source, this would be quite simple, just needing a combination of date, source identifier, and sequential number.

For trade data, I work on the concept that information is power - trade data, which could give a competitive advantage, is closely controlled by the large corporations and minor factions who do not want it falling into the hands of their competitors. As independent pilots we do not get to see this data, it's important to remember that trade and commerce is going on in the background all the time without us, and we are just minor players in what goes on. Some weight is added to this concept by the fact that sometimes you get missions to acquire stolen trade data.

[TorTorden]

I do not buy how trade data should be confidential in any way.
The stock markets aren't in any way today, so why would it in the year 3301.

No you want to as many people as possible to see what you want to sell and people who wants to buy almost as much.

[Xebeth]

I do not buy how trade data should be confidential in any way.
The stock markets aren't in any way today, so why would it in the year 3301.

No you want to as many people as possible to see what you want to sell and people who wants to buy almost as much.

Well the stock markets aren't really the same thing, the commodities market is probably a closer analogy, but this still isn't really the same, as even here most trades don't actually involve the physical movement of goods.

For me, ED is more like the old trade routes of the 16th to 19th centuries, where people were actually selling real goods (rather than just numbers on a computer), in these cases knowing where to buy coffee beans for the lowest value was of vital commercial importance, as was keeping this information from your competitors.

In fact ED (at least for me) has a whole 18th century Caribbean vibe, you have trading of real goods, powers vying for dominance (think the English, Spanish, and Portuguese), exploration, and of course pirates.

[Cmdr Kharma]

Yep.....

That's the way I look at it as well.....

Only difference is discovering new items to trade......

Like picking up Saffron for the first time and seeing how well and where it sells.....

I know we have the "Rares"......But it's not quite the same thing....

[Y0URD34D]

How about quantum entanglement of photons???
As far as I know, the communtication between two paired photons is instant regardless of distance, so for really important stuff a station has a QEC-suite, simmilar to the one in ME, and the paired photons are kept in a central space, somewhere safe (Founders World comes to mind). Think of it as a master server.
This would also explain why ships on the other side of the galaxy still get up-to-date Galnet newsfeeds, simply by a QEC-sytem in every navbeacon or ship (probably ships, as there are less of them).
Maybe only CMDRs are allotted QEC-systems, and everyone else still uses radio.

Just my 0.02€

Greetings,
Y0URD34D

[Gorf]

Market prices aren't kept secret - it's simply not possible to broadcast them. Interstellar comms work between ships or small groups of ships because there's no way to bang out a true broadcast (that reaches anyone, anywhere, who particularly wants to listen). Comms are directed to their target and that's how they can be instantaneous. If you want to receive market prices you can pay for an individual transmission but beyond that there just isn't any benefit to a station sending its commodity prices to every individual ship in the galaxy regardless of its distance or even ability to trade.

For exactly the same reason, discovered and scanned systems aren't available to all ships by default. You can do the scan yourself, or you can pay for the data to be transmitted to you.

All just made up on the spur of the moment and all sounds lore-plausible to me.

The only hole in my suggestion relates to the need to carry exploration data around on your ship and you can only download it by RS232 which has been around for more than a thousand years. If comms can be directed and instantaneous over the expanse of the galaxy, why are we still expected to even be in the civilised systems, let alone docked, before we can sell exploration data.