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Post Proscriptions: Learning electricity

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Re: Post Proscriptions: Learning electricity
Post by n7axw   » Tue Jan 26, 2016 9:58 am

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Weird Harold wrote:
lyonheart wrote:If it is fully described then no longer proscribed, wide experimentation is only to be expected, but how does the inner circle and just two PICA's prevent radio transmissions potentially alerting the Gbabba?


I don't think anyone will be particularly worried about light-speed radio waves alerting the Gbaba.

IIRC, Safehold is something like 500 Ly away from Gbaba space, so it would be 500 years before the first signals reach the Gbaba to be detected. That should give a very comfortable cushion for moving beyond simple spark transmitters and radio frequencies in general; TF level use of electricity seems to be fairly low power/high-sensitivity that is generally undetectable against background noise. (spread spectrum or quantum entanglement, perhaps?)


To say nothing of said radio waves simply running out of energy before they get to Gbaba...

Don
When any group seeks political power in God's name, both religion and politics are instantly corrupted.
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Re: Post Proscriptions: Learning electricity
Post by Bluestrike2   » Tue Jan 26, 2016 4:43 pm

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Radio transmissions are really only a concern if the Gbaba are within the system itself or, at worst, maybe a few light-years from it. The inverse-square law means that terrestrial radio signals aren't going to stand out above the cosmic background at interstellar distances.

Radio devices have gotten "quieter" over successive generations; early transmitters required more power to punch out a signal that could be picked up. And once you get to digital signals, the power requirements drop drastically as does overall leakage. So long as you don't have any assholes powering up massive transmitters to direct a message back towards the Gbaba, it's not really an issue. Especially since any search for Safehold would have been over for centuries.

If you look at the tech transfers (for lack of a better term) that have already occurred, such as steam engines, the Inner Circle has tried to skip as many intermediate steps as they can get away with. That trend will only continue, and after the great Reveal, it'll accelerate as quickly as they can get away with. When they do start out producing radios (which'll be pretty quickly after the Reveal, just to improve their ability to respond to the social upheaval that'll result), Safehold-produced units will be much more efficient than early Terran examples. The gap between the introduction of radios and the transition to digital signals will be very short by comparison.

I think we'll see a lot of that sort of acceleration with the future books. It'll have a lot of benefits, but one of the biggest is taking advantage of their higher birth rates (for farm labor and to combat infant mortality, despite it being less of a problem than it was on Earth) before industrialization leads a cultural shift that results in a drop in birth rates like we've seen with industrialized nations here on Earth. We'll see modern TF tech, particularly in medicine and with antigerone treatments since they'll need every warm body they can get and Cayleb isn't an asshole who will let children die from treatable cancers, coexisting alongside homegrown tech.

lyonheart wrote:Hi Evil Author,

If it is fully described then no longer proscribed, wide experimentation is only to be expected, but how does the inner circle and just two PICA's prevent radio transmissions potentially alerting the Gbabba?

Policing the whole planet could wear OWL and dozens of PICA's out, so how quickly could or can the inner circle reveal their very superior 'quiet' communications network?

Will it be that the Seijins reveal their network and offer it worldwide to avoid such dangers?

That certainly won't stop the very curious, especially without an explanation of the Gbabba, which requires the 'great reveal', thereby causing another religious war.

Isn't life complicated?

L
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Re: Post Proscriptions: Learning electricity
Post by n7axw   » Tue Jan 26, 2016 5:51 pm

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Bluestrike2 wrote:Radio transmissions are really only a concern if the Gbaba are within the system itself or, at worst, maybe a few light-years from it. The inverse-square law means that terrestrial radio signals aren't going to stand out above the cosmic background at interstellar distances.

Radio devices have gotten "quieter" over successive generations; early transmitters required more power to punch out a signal that could be picked up. And once you get to digital signals, the power requirements drop drastically as does overall leakage. So long as you don't have any assholes powering up massive transmitters to direct a message back towards the Gbaba, it's not really an issue. Especially since any search for Safehold would have been over for centuries.

If you look at the tech transfers (for lack of a better term) that have already occurred, such as steam engines, the Inner Circle has tried to skip as many intermediate steps as they can get away with. That trend will only continue, and after the great Reveal, it'll accelerate as quickly as they can get away with. When they do start out producing radios (which'll be pretty quickly after the Reveal, just to improve their ability to respond to the social upheaval that'll result), Safehold-produced units will be much more efficient than early Terran examples. The gap between the introduction of radios and the transition to digital signals will be very short by comparison.

I think we'll see a lot of that sort of acceleration with the future books. It'll have a lot of benefits, but one of the biggest is taking advantage of their higher birth rates (for farm labor and to combat infant mortality, despite it being less of a problem than it was on Earth) before industrialization leads a cultural shift that results in a drop in birth rates like we've seen with industrialized nations here on Earth. We'll see modern TF tech, particularly in medicine and with antigerone treatments since they'll need every warm body they can get and Cayleb isn't an asshole who will let children die from treatable cancers, coexisting alongside homegrown tech.



Ahem...it's an arsehole on Safehold...just joking... :lol:

The inverse square law. I had forgotten about that. But the point is that radio signals are omnidirectional and the bigger the sphere is as the signals expand outward, the less energy is available in any specific direction. Eventually the energy weakens to the point of being effectively non-existent, having fallen below the galactic noise floor...long before they could travel the 500 light years to the Gbabba.

Is it possible to beam a monstrous signal to the Gbabba? I can't completely rule it out, although it is unlikely. What beaming would do is focus the power of a signal in a given direction. The signal would still be omnidirectional, but much weaker in all directions but where the beam is pointed. But still, the signal that is beamed would not stay focused on the direction where it is pointed, but spread out and eventually dissapate just like the omnidirectional signal. The difference would be that it would take longer and travel further before that happened. How much energy measured in watts it would take to keep a beamed signal above the galactic noise floor for 500 light years I'll leave to the mathamaticians. But it would really be huge. And bear in mind that it would take 500 years. Radiowaves only travel the speed of light, no matter how powerful the signal at point of origin.

One other comment here is that the thing that has allowed the effective radiated power of transmitters to go down is that receivers have becone so much better, both in terms of sensitivity and side rejection to prevent off band splatter.

Don

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When any group seeks political power in God's name, both religion and politics are instantly corrupted.
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Re: Post Proscriptions: Learning electricity
Post by Laenole   » Tue Jan 26, 2016 11:51 pm

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Safehold only 500 Ly form Gbaba space? If that is from their occupied volume, that seems a ridiculously short distance to flee in 10 years unless Terran fleet speed is only 50 Ly/y. Assuming the speed and distance is correct, the Gbaba would need only 126 ships, operating in pairs, to visit every star within 632 Ly of their border (11 years distance with Gbaba's 15% speed bonus). (A visit is defined as coming within 1,000 AU). Their ships would be out for 22 years. It would seem to me that the Gbaba could afford to decrease the interval between visits by a factor of 2, 4, even 8 times. This would seem to indicate that Langhorn was correct in saying developing advanced technology would only bring the Gbaba down on Safehold. His method was still despicable.

I suppose that the 500 Ly may be the distance beyond Gbaba
patrol range. But, how is that known? What is Safehold's distance from Sol?

See viewtopic.php?f=7&t=7776
"New Terran Federation Evaluation of Terran Threat" for ore discussion.

Laenole
"All that glitters is not gold"
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Re: Post Proscriptions: Learning electricity
Post by n7axw   » Wed Jan 27, 2016 1:22 am

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Laenole wrote:Safehold only 500 Ly form Gbaba space? If that is from their occupied volume, that seems a ridiculously short distance to flee in 10 years unless Terran fleet speed is only 50 Ly/y. Assuming the speed and distance is correct, the Gbaba would need only 126 ships, operating in pairs, to visit every star within 632 Ly of their border (11 years distance with Gbaba's 15% speed bonus). (A visit is defined as coming within 1,000 AU). Their ships would be out for 22 years. It would seem to me that the Gbaba could afford to decrease the interval between visits by a factor of 2, 4, even 8 times. This would seem to indicate that Langhorn was correct in saying developing advanced technology would only bring the Gbaba down on Safehold. His method was still despicable.

I suppose that the 500 Ly may be the distance beyond Gbaba
patrol range. But, how is that known? What is Safehold's distance from Sol?

See viewtopic.php?f=7&t=7776
"New Terran Federation Evaluation of Terran Threat" for ore discussion.

Laenole
"All that glitters is not gold"


There is no distance given so far as I know, at least in textev, nor in any info dump of which I'm aware. That makes the use of any figure arbitrary, useful only for the sake of discussion.

Don

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When any group seeks political power in God's name, both religion and politics are instantly corrupted.
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Re: Post Proscriptions: Learning electricity
Post by evilauthor   » Wed Jan 27, 2016 1:55 am

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IIRC, the only measurement for how far Safehold is from Earth is a TIME measurement. It's a 20 year voyage.

Even then, we don't know if that's 20 years traveling in a straight line at top speed, or 20 years slowly sneaking around a winding course trying to be as stealthy as possible while looking for a new home because of paranoia about accidental detection. I'd bet the latter, but a good case could be made for the former.
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Re: Post Proscriptions: Learning electricity
Post by n7axw   » Wed Jan 27, 2016 8:57 am

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Tipped off by a post in another thread, I went back in OAR and looked...

It was 10 years in hyper which carried Operation Ark thousands of light-years.

Don

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When any group seeks political power in God's name, both religion and politics are instantly corrupted.
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Re: Post Proscriptions: Learning electricity
Post by evilauthor   » Wed Jan 27, 2016 2:18 pm

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n7axw wrote:Tipped off by a post in another thread, I went back in OAR and looked...

It was 10 years in hyper which carried Operation Ark thousands of light-years.

Don

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I stand corrected.
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Re: Post Proscriptions: Learning electricity
Post by Dauntless   » Wed Jan 27, 2016 4:00 pm

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did it ever actually say that it was RADIO that the Gbabba used to track the previous attempt?

I seem to recall something about the govenor sending a message that they were about to die and that they thought they had been tracked via EMISSIONS, but don't recall them saying explicitly emissions of what
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Re: Post Proscriptions: Learning electricity
Post by Expert snuggler   » Wed Jan 27, 2016 6:32 pm

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Radio is the first thing that comes to 21st-century minds, but it's a great point that it might have been something else.

The TF had compact fusion plants. What if the Gbaba were tracking neutrino emissions? No matter how well you shield your electrical equipment, it would require theoretical breakthroughs to shield neutrinos.

They'd have to detect it against the background noise of a nearby star, though.
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