Non-weapons of war, weapons of war

Fiber is VERY high tech for 19th century. Heliographs/shutter lamps with Morse code would speed up wpm through the visual channels by several hundred percent, though. Adding instruments (i.e., bandwidth) is far easier with these light instruments than with semaphore towers as well.

Obviously does little for the oceanic gaps, though, unless there are high mountains on both sides of the gap. The record heliograph transmission for the US army was nearly 300 km from Mount Ellen, Utah to Mount Uncompahgre, Colorado using an 20 cm square mirrors.

There is a place where I sail where one side of the bay is 50 miles from other and you can see the hilltops from one side from the hilltops of the other quite readily (~300m high on one side and ~200 meters on the other). This might work in some locations where semaphores would not be possible to discern. Of course not every day is clear here in the North Atlantic! Nor probably everywhere on Safehold.

laz wrote:

iranuke wrote:...

The easiest way to increase communication speed over water is to increase the speed of the ships. Steam propulsion has about doubled the speed over water, now all you need are more steam ships and they are working on it.

Yes but are they going to make a dedicated mail ship or 10? and will they open it up for civilian mail/parcels/cargo? with dedicated routes? not quite fedex.

Or they could lay fiberoptic cable and setup a optical telegraph.

the other side of the question is:
is there a way to speed up semaphore traffic? or semaphore bandwidth?
if for no other reason then to poke a sharp stick at the wonder the archangles (on purpose) and the COG by improving on their work.

also on the non-weapons front: zippers, velcro, duck tape, leatherman, weather prediction (fast communications), stapler, ballpoint pen with waterproof ink, COFFEE.


laz

laz wrote:is there a way to speed up semaphore traffic? or semaphore bandwidth?

Sure. Paralell processing. If you´re doing fixed routes, you can go the same way as Pratchett did with Discworld and simply raise the level of information per "tick" each semaphore tower can convey.

If for example you add the ability to send even just the 10-20 most used words or letter combinations as a single "tick" each, it can speed things up surprisingly much.

If you go a bit more serious and train the personnel very well, you might be able to send a hundred words and letter combinations as single "ticks"(ie as fast as you normally send just a single letter), at that point, twice the normal rate of traffic is possible.

If doing it by hand, you could cut the message in half and then have 2 persons next to each other transmit half each.
Of course you will always need 2 people on the receiving end as well as 1 person just wont be able to focus on both signallers at the same time.

Of course, the "in person" trick also works with semaphore towers, but it starts getting "a bit" expensive by that point.

Tenshinai wrote:

laz wrote:is there a way to speed up semaphore traffic? or semaphore bandwidth?

Sure. Paralell processing. If you´re doing fixed routes, you can go the same way as Pratchett did with Discworld and simply raise the level of information per "tick" each semaphore tower can convey.

If for example you add the ability to send even just the 10-20 most used words or letter combinations as a single "tick" each, it can speed things up surprisingly much.

They already do that. Messages are sent in coded shorthand.

SWM wrote:

Tenshinai wrote:They already do that. Messages are sent in coded shorthand.

Yes. A lot of commercial codebooks were originally developed with compression in mind far more than secrecy when costs for msgs by the character were so very high.

SWM wrote:They already do that. Messages are sent in coded shorthand.

No, two different things. Encoding means you reduce the amount of "ticks" you have to send before you send(don´t forget you add latency into the system by having to encode messages in this shorthand as well), what i proposed was adding complexity to each "tick" to stretch the amount of data they each can potentially convey and thereby improve speed additionally.

Shorthand is good but have limits, what i said is only really limited by how much training you want to give operators and how many common words or syllables you can cover, and how much they cover in each message.

After that it´s pretty much just doubling up that is left.

jgnfld wrote:Fiber is VERY high tech for 19th century. Heliographs/shutter lamps with Morse code would speed up wpm through the visual channels by several hundred percent, though. Adding instruments (i.e., bandwidth) is far easier with these light instruments than with semaphore towers as well.

Obviously does little for the oceanic gaps, ...

The basic principle of drawn glass fibers is well within 19th century technology. They might not be able to draw glass fibers as fine as modern fiber optics, but they won't be able to use electronics to take advantage of super-fine optics either.

I don't know that fiber-optics would be economical for long distances over land, but the could solve the over-water communications problem. The real world solved the problem of laying a trans-oceanic cable in 1858. Safehold is rapidly approaching the same steam/sail technology. They just have to lay crude optic-fiber across each strait to narrow for reliable heliograph communications.

String glass fiber overland would increase security of communications because they'd (mostly) foil casual eavesdroppers and be proof against low visibility conditions. But it would be the trans-oceanic optic-fiber links that would speed communications.

Wikipedia wrote:A transatlantic telegraph cable is an undersea cable running under the Atlantic Ocean used for telegraph communications. The first was laid across the floor of the Atlantic from Telegraph Field, Foilhommerum Bay, Valentia Island in western Ireland to Heart's Content in eastern Newfoundland. The first communications occurred August 16, 1858, reducing the communication time between North America and Europe from ten days – the time it took to deliver a message by ship – to a matter of minutes. Transatlantic telegraph cables have been replaced by transatlantic telecommunications cables.

.
.

jgnfld wrote:Fiber is VERY high tech for 19th century. Heliographs/shutter lamps with Morse code would speed up wpm through the visual channels by several hundred percent, though. Adding instruments (i.e., bandwidth) is far easier with these light instruments than with semaphore towers as well.

Obviously does little for the oceanic gaps, though, unless there are high mountains on both sides of the gap. The record heliograph transmission for the US army was nearly 300 km from Mount Ellen, Utah to Mount Uncompahgre, Colorado using an 20 cm square mirrors.

There is a place where I sail where one side of the bay is 50 miles from other and you can see the hilltops from one side from the hilltops of the other quite readily (~300m high on one side and ~200 meters on the other). This might work in some locations where semaphores would not be possible to discern. Of course not every day is clear here in the North Atlantic! Nor probably everywhere on Safehold.

Fiber needs repeater and a very bright light source to go any distance. We use repeater to boost the light signal (A repeater is a light detector/receiver and laser transmitter) about ever 10 miles or so powered by electricity. Fiber like copper has attenuation and the light signal will go below detection level if not boosted. (Fiber works by bouncing the light signal off the sides of the fiber like a mirror so that the light stays in the fiber and travel down it. Glass is not 100% transparent so the signal loses a little energy as it bounces it way towards the other end.) Plus how bright of a light was you going to use to send your message. We use lasers and still have to have repeater for long distance.

Yes. Regular plate glass is opaque very fast. Looking lengthwise down a glass rod will prove this to you. High quality fibers capable of multiple kilometers are complex and were only invented in the 70s and after.

Chief-CWH wrote:...

Fiber needs repeater and a very bright light source to go any distance. We use repeater to boost the light signal (A repeater is a light detector/receiver and laser transmitter) about ever 10 miles or so powered by electricity. Fiber like copper has attenuation and the light signal will go below detection level if not boosted. (Fiber works by bouncing the light signal off the sides of the fiber like a mirror so that the light stays in the fiber and travel down it. Glass is not 100% transparent so the signal loses a little energy as it bounces it way towards the other end.) Plus how bright of a light was you going to use to send your message. We use lasers and still have to have repeater for long distance.

jgnfld wrote:Yes. Regular plate glass is opaque very fast. Looking lengthwise down a glass rod will prove this to you. High quality fibers capable of multiple kilometers are complex and were only invented in the 70s and after.

I'm pretty sure that OWL has the formula for boro-silicate glass or whatever formulation is required for optical fibers. The problem is indeed going to be light intensity and/or repeaters in mid-ocean, not the drawing of coarse fibers.

Chief-CWH wrote:Plus how bright of a light was you going to use to send your message. We use lasers and still have to have repeater for long distance.

As bright as can be produced without melting the optic fiber.

Lasers are used because they're very closely controllable as to light frequency, which allows multiplexing multiple signals on each fiber. Safehold isn't going to be capable of multiplexing without electronics for a while, but a very bright (magnesium flare? Limelight?) light and a simple shutter should allow transmission speeds comparable to a single line telegraph.