evilauthor wrote:Fridge Brilliance:
From the moment it was first described, I always found the Church's world wide semaphore network to be a bit implausible. How does it transmit so much message traffic - including ENCRYPTED message traffic - so flawlessly? Every semaphore tower is manned by human beings who must receive, remember, and retransmit every letter of every message that passes through them. And they seem able to do it flawlessly given how much of the traffic is encrypted gibberish for security reasons; any transcription errors can render an encrypted message unreadable.
I had originally dismissed this doubt as simply an authorial conceit, a handwave to make the setting work. But this snippet provides a plausible answer: A greater proportion of Safehold's population has eidetic memory than is true for today's Earth. Perhaps it's great enough to staff a world spanning semaphore network?
A semaphore station will transmit a message as soon as it receives it, or more likely it will transmit a character as soon as it receives it. The way I figure it is that the stations/network are full duplex, that is they can transmit it both directions at once, a bit like a highway, especially when you get stations that can transmit multiple messages at once in a given direction. So a station will have one guys look west, the moment he sees a change one the station to the west of them on semaphore that transmits to him, he'll tell some of the other members of the station what's being sent to them, and they'll change the semaphore pointing to the station to the east of them, and so on. There might be a clock thing, you only check every several seconds, to give the other guys a chance the change things.
Oh well, business as usual I guess.