South Saxon
SOC-1
Any suggestions for the best resources on communication devices and their effective ranges?
Hi, Noob to the forum. Communication systems in Traveller.
- Thread starter South Saxon
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mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
For CT Striker had rules for radios, for MegaTraveller in addition to what McPerth has posted there is a good guide to their use on pp 38,39 of the Referee's Companion.
Spinward Scout
SOC-14 5K
MT also had a great section on Communications Channels in the Referee's Companion, if I remember right.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Have you got me on ignore or something? 
pages 38 and 39
pages 38 and 39
T4's(Marc Miller's Traveller) Fire Fusion and steel rule set gives you rules for radio with many options like directional, frequency hopping, and so on as well as giving you the rules to calculate volume, mass, area, power usage, and cost.
The same goes for laser communicators and meson communicators, ranges from a few km for grav vehicle mounts to 1000AU systems. Tech level built at affects all of the stats.
Spinward Scout
SOC-14 5K
Sorry, scrolled right by.Have you got me on ignore or something?
pages 38 and 39
South Saxon
SOC-1
That sounds promising, thank you.
Spinward Scout
SOC-14 5K
I always thought that any Comm system going through Jumpspace would move at Jump-36. Which is the max level of Jumpspace according to MegaTraveller.
Communicating at 36 parsecs in a week would change the dynamic of Traveller significantly. But only until you build ships that can have a Jump-36 drive.
Communicating at 36 parsecs in a week would change the dynamic of Traveller significantly. But only until you build ships that can have a Jump-36 drive.
Modulate a signal on a turret laser. 250MW and an unrealistic lack of beam dispersion, and there you have it. Receiver is the "We're being shot at!" laser detector.
Timely is relative.
T5 had (until fixed in a later edition) a way to send a yes/no message at Jump-28 across the X-Boat network, or Jump-42 across a Jump-6 network.
Parking a ship larger than a ship that has jumped, on its jump origin point at any time prior to normal jump exit, would bring the jumped ship back to its origin at the end of 7 days in Jumpspace.*
XBoats can't misjump, so the reasons for a scheduled ship to not arrive are that it either was not sent, or was recalled.
"Step on" the jump origin point for the ship that's about to arrive (having left six days ago), and the "message" of it's absence happens in under a day, at Jump-4 distance. That is, the message traveled Jump-4 in one day -- one-seventh the time required by a Jump-4: Jump-28. (At Jump-6, it's 7x6= Jump-42.)
There are additional delays if you want signal confirmation, and options for using parallel J-4 scheduled routes to send 2-bit signals, and so forth.
Basically, the yes/no message has to be pre-defined, and worth interrupting an entire day's worth of message traffic for.
And it doesn't work any longer, at least as the rules are now written.
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*Pretty sure it was originally to justify really large combatant ships (use 'em to bring back hostiles to finish them off, and you need a larger ship than your adversary to be able to make it happen or not happen). T5.2 has an awkwardly-worded paragraph on it, which looked to me as though they were rules-lawyering this trick out of existence.
That's one way of doing it, yes.
Perhaps as a "the *actual* maser comms are out" manuever...
Timely does have a range of frames, but after "it's gonna be a few years to get a response," some of them will be moot points.
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