Improved Semophores

This is based off the Clacks system from Discworld.

The Church of God Awaiting has been making use of arm semaphores since the beginning. If communication between ships and armies is complex, why not introduce a refined version of the semaphore system to relay military orders, request for twenty thousand pairs of new socks for the army and similar orders more efficiently for those people without the benefit of Fed-tech. One idea that Terry proposed was using said system to relaying images long distance by having a rough version of them made using a grid, and putting them into lines that are one by one relayed.

Zor

The COGA has _not_ been using arm semaphores. You should take a look at infodump.thefifthimperium.com for a clearer description.

imperatorzor wrote:This is based off the Clacks system from Discworld.


The Church of God Awaiting has been making use of arm semaphores since the beginning. If communication between ships and armies is complex, why not introduce a refined version of the semaphore system to relay military orders, request for twenty thousand pairs of new socks for the army and similar orders more efficiently for those people without the benefit of Fed-tech. One idea that Terry proposed was using said system to relaying images long distance by having a rough version of them made using a grid, and putting them into lines that are one by one relayed.

Zor

imperatorzor wrote:This is based off the Clacks system from Discworld.

The Church of God Awaiting has been making use of arm semaphores since the beginning. If communication between ships and armies is complex, why not introduce a refined version of the semaphore system to relay military orders, request for twenty thousand pairs of new socks for the army and similar orders more efficiently for those people without the benefit of Fed-tech. One idea that Terry proposed was using said system to relaying images long distance by having a rough version of them made using a grid, and putting them into lines that are one by one relayed.

Zor

You appear to be describing image transmission, which is hopeless from a bandwidth standpoint.

If I remember correctly, the messages sent over the semaphore system are encoded. This is almost certainly for security reasons, but also for reducing message size; An incredible amount of information can be transmitted by assigning a unique 5-character code to each imaginable portion of a typical message. E.g.: DWNTX = "... ship via Langhorne canal ...", etc.

You can find good examples of this kind of coding in THE CODEBREAKERS by Herman Kahn under the heading of "commercial codes".

If this is in fact being done, they've already taken the most important step to reduce message size and speed up transmission.

Philip Stanley