Post Proscriptions: Learning electricity

evilauthor wrote:That said, TF hypercomms must be massive facilities if only planets and not ships can have them. OTOH, they're for communications between worlds many lightyears apart, so it doesn't rule out the possibility of ships creating FTL transmissions that could be detectable over much shorter distances.

Not necessarily. Suppose a hypercom requires a very accurate location of the target. You could only mount them on bodies whose future positions could be known with high accuracy.

Yes, you could mount such a unit on a ship but the receiver would not be able to reply--and what modern communications system is entirely one way? We call such things distress beacons, not communications devices.

Weird Harold wrote:Also, "Radio," aka anything in the electromagnetic spectrum, is going to be a side-effect of experimentation with basic electricity -- mostly a problem for potentially waking the OBS rather than the Gbaba whether the Proscriptions are overturned or not.

Disabling the OBS is a prerequisite for overturning the Proscriptions, so presumably not a problem for the main topic.

An interesting question comes to mind : how do you proceed to distinguish a radiotelegraph from thunder ? The only way I can see is by recording the thing and checking for rhythm.

If it's not a spark gap, then being on a single frequency would give it away.

A Big Data approach could flush out non-technical giveaways. Lightning doesn't concentrate during business hours, for example.

Expert snuggler wrote:A Big Data approach could flush out non-technical giveaways. Lightning doesn't concentrate during business hours, for example.

And most people's mobile phones don't light up the clouds when used[1] or only work when there's said cloud cover!

[1] I suppose if your lithium battery explodes with sufficient enthusiasm then it might be visible from orbit with the right sensors!

And perhaps the hypercom technology is limited to "paired devices" (ansible by any other name), and thus FTL and impossible to detect directly via sensors (though the housing facility could give off some pretty distinctive energy readings).

Think "Applied Phlebotinum" plus "Quantum Entanglement".

peke wrote:And perhaps the hypercom technology is limited to "paired devices" (ansible by any other name), and thus FTL and impossible to detect directly via sensors (though the housing facility could give off some pretty distinctive energy readings).

Think "Applied Phlebotinum" plus "Quantum Entanglement".

I dunno. Weber's never been a big fan of using quantum spookiness in his tech. Going from here to there always requires going through all the points between, even if said "points between" is a short cut through another dimension or a wormhole turning space-time into pretzel.

Even spark-gap transmitters have some very distinctive RF characteristics. Starting with the modulation used to transmit the data, and going on into the details of generating the RF - striking and quenching DC sparks is a non-trivial exercise. If they weren't distinguishable from lightning strikes, they'd not be much use to anybody.

Expert snuggler wrote:If it's not a spark gap, then being on a single frequency would give it away.

A Big Data approach could flush out non-technical giveaways. Lightning doesn't concentrate during business hours, for example.