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.