COMMUNICATIONS
Hyperweb Coherent Antipodal Relay (HCAR or "hypercast")
Most star systems on the wilderzone Hyperweb have powerful radio transmitters and receivers set up in the vicinity of the jumpgates. Tribal engineers have long known how to squirt dense message pulses through the jumpgates. However, the message must be relayed from transmitter to transmitter. Energy requirements are far lower than with message ships and transit through jumpgates slightly faster than do spindleships. Some star systems are close enough to maintain regular hypercast commlinks and thereby a localized trans-stellar O-Web (with some delays and interference due to jumpgate flux). This is the most common means of trans-stellar communication.
Advantages: Convenient and reliable. Any ship near a jumpgate can send or receive messages with nothing more than basic radio.
Disadvantages:
- Not private unless heavily encrypted. Any ship near a jumpgate can receive messages.
- Over a longer thread such as an Axis or Grand Axis, Hyperweb flux commonly corrupts part of the signal, causing the message to arrive in varying degrees of gibberish.
- Occurs at substantially the same speed as spaceship travel. Definitely not real-time communication. A message may take minutes to cross the even the shortest threads, and several hours to days for longer threads.
- It needs to be relayed across star systems. If you were to transmit from System A to System B, the message would stop at B unless someone at B retransmits through the B jumpgate to System C.
Quantum-Reed Transcomm ("Q-Reed," "Q-R," or "squirt")
Q-Reed devices make true faster-than-light communication possible with amazing clarity, but this miraculous technology has severe limitations.
Advantages: Convenient and reliable. Real-time communication across any distance up to 5,000 light years.
Disadvantages:
- Due to a limit enforced by the laws of quantum engineering, a Q-R transcomm can only transmit between units that contain "reeds" grown in the same proto-singularity matrix. Odds are virtually impossible that a randomly encountered Q-R device will link to someone you know. You can alter the resonance of a transcomm to reach unlinked reeds only if you have samples of those reeds present when you begin the relinking process. In so doing, you sever the transcomm from all of its old connections. This process is time-consuming, expensive, and dangerous.
- The hardware is rather bulky and cannot be carried as a hand-held device. The smallest Q-Reeds are about the mass and size of a modern-day car engine block.
- They require substantial amounts of energy to function.
- The heart of a Q-reed system is the quantum resonator "reed," which is constructed of unstable proto-singularity matter. If subjected to powerful implosive force, the reed will explode and (again due to the strange dictates of quantum engineering) a probability exists that every reed in its matrix chain will likewise detonate.
- Production of transcomms is hideously complex and expensive. The Tribes of Man do not have any capacity for independent production. Consequently, only a few transcomms exist in the wilderzone, virtually all of them owned by the Four. (It's rumored that the Imperials brought one to Kepler, and that the Children of Phoenix assault was a pretext for capturing the device.) Though they are more frequently encountered in the Empire, they are still uncommon there as well, and are virtually monopolized by the Imperial Military, which uses them in naval tactical coordination.
Mail packets
Basically a Pony Express style of communication wherein messages must travel with ships in order to get to their destinations. A variation of this is the Proxy (or Courier), a person who memorizes the message and transmits it orally. Proxies with brain implants can be conditioned to tune out their messages so they don't remember what they've said or what's been fed into them until they hear the appropriate codes.
Advantages: Fairly high security possible. Can go anywhere, be concealed in objects, offer full hologram presentation, etc.
Disadvantages:
- Can be intercepted and/or faked. Limited to the speed of Hyperweb travel.
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