I was wondering what effect FTL communication, Star Tek style would have on a Traveller universe. More importantly, on game mechanics and player actions. Trade and speculation, the military, the feudal nature etc. Security, naval tactics etc. I'm planning something similar in a game that's almost ready and I did not really think of the implications of communications that are faster than travel. Sort of like 1910, telegraph always beating those transatlantic liners or dreadnoughts....
FTL Communication - Effect?
- Thread starter Mithras
- Start date
Trade and speculation:
One imperial market should drive prices to the center with far less variability from one world to the next. Why pay 400% when I can order it directly from the next world and have it shipped at 1000 credits per ton for delivery next week. Trade is less an East India Tea Trade model and more like FEDEX.
Military:
Piracy is dead within the imperium. Within a few hours of a pirate raid, Imperail warships are in route to every world within jump range of their last position.
Feudal nature:
The Nobility (individuals weilding vast personal power on a local level) exist because the central government cannot exert a high level of control over vast distances. (slow communication prevents sending a request "What should we do?" to the Core and waiting for a response.) Expect either a large number of government clerks or a Stalin-like central government.
interplanetary stockmarkets (and interplanetary booms/busts/collapses)
interplanetary currencies (and bubbles/inflation/deflation)
searchable interplanetary police data bases
no frontier
billions of terabytes of laws, legal instructions, and military orders from the imperial moot, issued daily
interplanetary advertising markets
massive intelligence networks vs zhodani, imperial citizens, research institutions
interplanetary currencies (and bubbles/inflation/deflation)
searchable interplanetary police data bases
no frontier
billions of terabytes of laws, legal instructions, and military orders from the imperial moot, issued daily
interplanetary advertising markets
massive intelligence networks vs zhodani, imperial citizens, research institutions
leo knight
SOC-12
I tried a similar thing way back when. I had essentially "Jump Telegraph". It sent interstellar signals at jump speeds, but without the time spent travelling to 100 diameters. It was thus just a wee bit faster than jump. The installations were planet based, the rationale being they needed the planet's mass to drive the jump "carrier wave". I imagined them looking like the force field generator on Endor in "Return of the Jedi", some big honkin' antenna pointed skyward. The inspiration was a friend's Boot Hill Wild West setting that included a telegraph office. I figured you could go to the office, encode a message, and they'd send it on its way once they had line of sight to the recieving system.
I only used it in a few adventures. It added some color, and put some fear into the players' hearts that their character's misdeeds might catch up with them sooner, rather than later.
The effect is directly proportional to how much faster than jump a signal can travel, and how expensive or common the transmitters and recievers are. Original Star Trek put some limits on subspace radio to give Kirk some "Age of Sail" autonomy. Ultimately, subspace radio moved at the speed of plot. If the writer wanted the Enterprise to be isolated, well the signal takes hours to get back to a Starbase. If they needed an immediate goose to get them going, Kirk got a Priority One face-to-face with Admiral Komack.
If a ship can carry one, and transmit and recieve readily, central control of fleets becomes possible. A great deal of autonomy by local commanders is lost. Ships can send regular reports back to base, and stranded ships can send distress signals. The equivalent of an APB/ BOLO alert can be transmitted, warning of suspected criminals (like my players) that will arrive in new systems before their ship does. This is part of why I did away with it. I discovered I liked the relatively isolated "Age of Sail" implications of courier vessels and the like.
I think you're on the right track with your analogy to the early days of radio and telegraph. I would keep transmitters as big, expensive, and rare as jump drives. Recievers might be smaller. Perhaps people get news updates from the Imperial Broadcasting Company? It all hinges on what effects you want on your campaign setting.
I only used it in a few adventures. It added some color, and put some fear into the players' hearts that their character's misdeeds might catch up with them sooner, rather than later.
The effect is directly proportional to how much faster than jump a signal can travel, and how expensive or common the transmitters and recievers are. Original Star Trek put some limits on subspace radio to give Kirk some "Age of Sail" autonomy. Ultimately, subspace radio moved at the speed of plot. If the writer wanted the Enterprise to be isolated, well the signal takes hours to get back to a Starbase. If they needed an immediate goose to get them going, Kirk got a Priority One face-to-face with Admiral Komack.
If a ship can carry one, and transmit and recieve readily, central control of fleets becomes possible. A great deal of autonomy by local commanders is lost. Ships can send regular reports back to base, and stranded ships can send distress signals. The equivalent of an APB/ BOLO alert can be transmitted, warning of suspected criminals (like my players) that will arrive in new systems before their ship does. This is part of why I did away with it. I discovered I liked the relatively isolated "Age of Sail" implications of courier vessels and the like.
I think you're on the right track with your analogy to the early days of radio and telegraph. I would keep transmitters as big, expensive, and rare as jump drives. Recievers might be smaller. Perhaps people get news updates from the Imperial Broadcasting Company? It all hinges on what effects you want on your campaign setting.
leo knight
SOC-12
Another thought: over in the Lone Star, they brought up "Forbidden Planet". They had a subspace radio, but had to unship the main reactor and cannibalize parts to run the thing. I seem to recall a line about "short circuiting the continuum on the four parsec level", or somesuch. In short, they could transmit and recieve, but it was a nuisance.
Well, if I whip off the sheet, you can see that it is in fact a Solar System campaign, with radio telecommunications at light-speed, but travel times taking weeks and months.
Now, factoring that in, I do see a role for pirates in the gas giant outback. particularly if they can camouflage their transponders. As for trade and spec? Well, a recent thread ran through this, didn't it ... FTL renders spec dead. But if it takes 3 - 4 months to get there, you might find your commidity is in huge demand by the time you hit orbit!!!! Or not .... there's not much you can do once you finish your initial burn... your going to Jupiter, whether you like it or not. If you hear that Titan now has all the copper it needs, and you have a hold full, you are in trouble. Then again, it could all go the other way, with a shortage developing during your journey time.
Does that sound feasable.
I want a wild and woolly, straight-up Traveller campaign set up in the Solar System, but I want to make sure it really will work ....
I have the history, background, worlds and moons sketched out, the politics and tensions, the economies (a little) and the ship design system, plus zero-G rocket versions of the CT classic ship designs, now its the 'strategic stuff' I'm keen to address.
Now, factoring that in, I do see a role for pirates in the gas giant outback. particularly if they can camouflage their transponders. As for trade and spec? Well, a recent thread ran through this, didn't it ... FTL renders spec dead. But if it takes 3 - 4 months to get there, you might find your commidity is in huge demand by the time you hit orbit!!!! Or not .... there's not much you can do once you finish your initial burn... your going to Jupiter, whether you like it or not. If you hear that Titan now has all the copper it needs, and you have a hold full, you are in trouble. Then again, it could all go the other way, with a shortage developing during your journey time.
Does that sound feasable.
I want a wild and woolly, straight-up Traveller campaign set up in the Solar System, but I want to make sure it really will work ....
I have the history, background, worlds and moons sketched out, the politics and tensions, the economies (a little) and the ship design system, plus zero-G rocket versions of the CT classic ship designs, now its the 'strategic stuff' I'm keen to address.
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Interesting! Here are some 3am observations with the benefit of jet lag...
In terms of piracy, I see a potential problem in the difficulty of concealing a ship's signature in big cold dark space. A distress signal from the region of, say, Saturn will reach Earth about 3 hrs later (I found a helpful resource on light lag in the solar system here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/space/solarsystem/saturn/index.shtml). At that point, any Solar Navy / Space Patrol / Corporate Security telescopes will be trained on the attack. Any vessel in the general time and place of the attack is going to be tracked. If they try hiding powered-down somewhere, they'll give the Patrol / whoever time to track them down to their latest known location.
If there is no interplanetary legal authority then being tracked might not be a problem; there might be no-one to do the tracking, or the pirate could dock at a friendly base to offload the loot and "have its number-plates changed" without anyone interfering.
On spec trade, forwards markets might scupper it, or at least change the dynamics. Industrial-scale users of, say, copper will be unlikely to trust to a spot market served by occasional passing tramp merchants surely. I expect the user would identify a supplier and arrange the transaction at some agreed price; the buyer and/or seller and/or broker would then look for available freight capacity to do the shipping. If the parties are big enough, they might have regular contracts with shipping lines.
Your tramp frighter's best bet might be if they happen to dock somewhere with a temporary glut of a commodity which is in demand somewhere else, where suppliers will be desperate for freighters to ship the stuff to the buyers. The real game for a tramp would be identifying the peaks (and avoiding the troughs) in demand for freight capacity. (This is broadly the approach in GT: Far Trader.)
Looking forward to hearing more about this setting!
In terms of piracy, I see a potential problem in the difficulty of concealing a ship's signature in big cold dark space. A distress signal from the region of, say, Saturn will reach Earth about 3 hrs later (I found a helpful resource on light lag in the solar system here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/space/solarsystem/saturn/index.shtml). At that point, any Solar Navy / Space Patrol / Corporate Security telescopes will be trained on the attack. Any vessel in the general time and place of the attack is going to be tracked. If they try hiding powered-down somewhere, they'll give the Patrol / whoever time to track them down to their latest known location.
If there is no interplanetary legal authority then being tracked might not be a problem; there might be no-one to do the tracking, or the pirate could dock at a friendly base to offload the loot and "have its number-plates changed" without anyone interfering.
On spec trade, forwards markets might scupper it, or at least change the dynamics. Industrial-scale users of, say, copper will be unlikely to trust to a spot market served by occasional passing tramp merchants surely. I expect the user would identify a supplier and arrange the transaction at some agreed price; the buyer and/or seller and/or broker would then look for available freight capacity to do the shipping. If the parties are big enough, they might have regular contracts with shipping lines.
Your tramp frighter's best bet might be if they happen to dock somewhere with a temporary glut of a commodity which is in demand somewhere else, where suppliers will be desperate for freighters to ship the stuff to the buyers. The real game for a tramp would be identifying the peaks (and avoiding the troughs) in demand for freight capacity. (This is broadly the approach in GT: Far Trader.)
Looking forward to hearing more about this setting!
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T
Trent
Guest
High speed FTL comms would destroy traveller.
I mean, if the first imperium had had high speed comms, it would not have fallen to the terrans. One of the reasons it fell was that the capital hadn't even heardof the terrans until they, thanks to vilani frontier governor arrogance and incompetence, had conquered a sector.
High speed comms means terra gets conquered by the 1I and traveller as we know it never existed.
I mean, if the first imperium had had high speed comms, it would not have fallen to the terrans. One of the reasons it fell was that the capital hadn't even heardof the terrans until they, thanks to vilani frontier governor arrogance and incompetence, had conquered a sector.
High speed comms means terra gets conquered by the 1I and traveller as we know it never existed.
Madarin Dude
SOC-13
A big part of the feel of traveller would be lost with FTL communications. I even had the idea of making it a bit harder and incorporating it. Like it takes a huge expensive device so it only happens between high tech high pop worlds but the feel si the remotness of traveller and how it matches the days of sail.
Well, many see Traveller similar to the Age of Sail. Communications == Speed of travel.
With FTL communications, it would boost up to basically just before WWII. Before wide spread air travel, but in the age of radios and telegraphs.
The integration of markets would be possible, but hardly complete. There may be cheaper things available in the core worlds, but transport becomes a larger percentage of the resource cost. So, closer resources tend to be cheaper. Especially in times of immediate need.
I don't buy the loss of piracy. Authorities may well know that something is someplace instantaneously, but it still takes them a week (at least) to get there. And if the authorities have that kind of instant intelligence, the pirate can too.
We have instant communications today, yet we still suffer from pirates. The first responders (aircraft) can't really do much about them, save attack them, assuming they arrive in time. It's still a big world even here, space will offer even greater challenges.
There will likely be a level of centralization in terms of power. No doubt the rise in centralized power today is partly due to instant communication, but the Imperium is still too large as communication is only half the battle, enforcement remains as well, and for enforcement, you need presence. So, that means an expanded imperial effort far beyond what they have now with the feudal system.
And, of course, if FTL comms is just "faster", not necessarily "instant" (i.e if there's a real lag between the Marches and Core, for example), that will just exacerbate things.
Finally, there's is simply the complexity of the Imperium. It's to damn big.
Take, for example, when those Somali pirates were shot after taking the frieghter, and the captain (I think I have this right). The way the story goes, the President gave the order to take the shot. That means the President was in the loop, instant communications, monitored by a staffer, and he was able to react and respond in a timely fashion.
Obviously, he's not doing that for every engagement in, say, Afghanistan. He's far out of the loop of the ground activities there.
The point being, there will always be delegation to lower levels of management of some form. The faster the comms, the easier it will be for the people on the scene to delegate authority back to a central command. But at the same time, the more that happens, the less capable the central authority turns out to be if the volume of such things overwhelms that authority to handle the traffic.
So, FTL can be "game changing", and it would be interesting to see it "introduced" and watch the effects of it bubbling through the galaxy like the internet did here. But I can easily see much of what we view as the Imperium today still retaining a similar structure.
This was the FTL comm I came up with a while back.
Jump Comm
Honestly, it wouldn't be Traveller anymore, but then it might be something just as much fun. If you can get a round-trip message to just about anywhere in the Imperium in 24 hours, it would drastically change Trade, Military Ops, Espionage, the X-Boat routes, distant Nobility, Police bulletins, banking operations, exploration, rescue services, foreign diplomacy, etc...
You're still looking at long travel times, tho. But you could order something from Capital - it would just take a year to get to you (instead of the two year round trip without an FTL comm). It would cut travel time in half.
I could see services opening on each world to distribute the spread of a very high influx of information. Information with almost no delay.
Jump Comm
Honestly, it wouldn't be Traveller anymore, but then it might be something just as much fun. If you can get a round-trip message to just about anywhere in the Imperium in 24 hours, it would drastically change Trade, Military Ops, Espionage, the X-Boat routes, distant Nobility, Police bulletins, banking operations, exploration, rescue services, foreign diplomacy, etc...
You're still looking at long travel times, tho. But you could order something from Capital - it would just take a year to get to you (instead of the two year round trip without an FTL comm). It would cut travel time in half.
I could see services opening on each world to distribute the spread of a very high influx of information. Information with almost no delay.
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ThunderChilde
SOC-13
This is a repeating topic,
The idea that was brewed up in another thread went like this.
the FTL comm used quantum entanglement to transit data, a whole array of devices is needed just to give the bandwith of a phone line today. Even so, it allows near instantaneous comms over a as yet unknown maximum distance to a linked array.
Problem, you cannot move an entanged comm through jumpspace, something happens in that alternate reality that breaks the entanglement. All comm arrays have to be shipped at sublight to the designated system.
So, a narrow pipe for running comms through means only critical gov flashs, and probably bank and high priority commercial traffic move on it. It spreads so slow its like waiting for the Glacier to get here. Yet, for those systems so linked, there is a flow of some near instant information, minute but there.
You end up with local nodes of information flow, kinda like the old telegraph network. It isn't much of a change, and does not break the Imperium, it would be a slow evolution to a more aware Irridium Throne.
The idea that was brewed up in another thread went like this.
the FTL comm used quantum entanglement to transit data, a whole array of devices is needed just to give the bandwith of a phone line today. Even so, it allows near instantaneous comms over a as yet unknown maximum distance to a linked array.
Problem, you cannot move an entanged comm through jumpspace, something happens in that alternate reality that breaks the entanglement. All comm arrays have to be shipped at sublight to the designated system.
So, a narrow pipe for running comms through means only critical gov flashs, and probably bank and high priority commercial traffic move on it. It spreads so slow its like waiting for the Glacier to get here. Yet, for those systems so linked, there is a flow of some near instant information, minute but there.
You end up with local nodes of information flow, kinda like the old telegraph network. It isn't much of a change, and does not break the Imperium, it would be a slow evolution to a more aware Irridium Throne.
Icosahedron
SOC-14 1K
I'm curious about this. Can anyone tell me how many parsecs across the OTU is? I was just wondering how long it would take to cross it at light speed.
Thanks! It is almost finished. A Cold War set-up, with proxy struggles. The big powers are Earth (the Earth Union) and Luna. There are some independant worlds, ex-colonies, notably Mars.
I have UPPs for all inhabited moons and worlds, a STL ship design system (reconfigured Mongoose), and the CT ships rewritten with nuclear thermal drives and spin habitats!
I have UPPs for all inhabited moons and worlds, a STL ship design system (reconfigured Mongoose), and the CT ships rewritten with nuclear thermal drives and spin habitats!
Mithras,
Because there are so many different types of FTL comms, your original question actually has too many answers!
I think it would be best for you to tackle your problem from the other side. Instead of asking about how FTL comms would change the OTU(1), you need to ask about what style of comms you want for your setting and then select the type that fits.
And when you do get that setting finalized, please, please, please, share it with us all!
Regards,
Bill
1 - One type of FTL comms doesn't change the OTU and that's the type it already has.
Because there are so many different types of FTL comms, your original question actually has too many answers!
I think it would be best for you to tackle your problem from the other side. Instead of asking about how FTL comms would change the OTU(1), you need to ask about what style of comms you want for your setting and then select the type that fits.
And when you do get that setting finalized, please, please, please, share it with us all!
Regards,
Bill
1 - One type of FTL comms doesn't change the OTU and that's the type it already has.
The entire universe is oodles of light years across. Charted Space is at least 1600 ly across (the largest map we know of is 16 sectors (@32 parsecs) across, but it only just covers the six big empires surrounding the Imperium. Each of them will have explored some way further.
Hans
The oodle is an exponentially increasing uncertain value with a constant degree of uncertainty: 1 oodle =18 plus or minus 10 while 2 oddles = 324 plus or minus 10.
Some people get confused because the related number "oodles" is also imprecise on it's front end too, it can mean anywhere between 3 and 400 oddles, or in English "a number within 10 of any power of 18 between the 3rd and 400th".
