RE: FTL COMMUNICATIONS

I agree with everything except the "basically free" part.
It cost precious mass to add the message retention and
broadcast system to a ship. This is space that the ship
could be charging for cargo. So each trip will probably
charge the cargo rate for the space the message system
takes up regardless of the actual number of messages.

"All trafic will bear" - Nicholas Van Rijin

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Brian Bell
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-----Original Message-----
From: Roger Burton West [mailto:roger@firedrake.org]
Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2002 10:03
To: gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu
Subject: Re: FTL COMMUNICATIONS

On Tue, Feb 26, 2002 at 08:32:59AM -0600, DAWGFACE47@webtv.net wrote:
>BUT the merchant fleets, comprised of	both corporate and independently
>owned	vessels, would go where there was a need to go with cargo,
>passengers, mail  ( both official and private) , news, and rumors.

If you have an internet-style packet-based routeing system, of course,
you get a courier network throughout civilised space basically free.
Here's how it could work:

Each message has a header which describes (among other things) its
destination. A message, when it's sent, is broadcast to every
participating ship in the local system, which stores it. After the ship
has jumped, it checks the message headers; if that message has already
been in the new system, the ship deletes its local copy. Otherwise, it
broadcasts it again (possibly intermediated by a planetary booster
transmitter, if necessary). Eventually, the station to which the message
is addressed picks it up (probably in multiple copies, which is no bad
thing).

You'd need to have an expiry system - probably, the more you pay, the
longer your message will hang around before being deleted - to avoid
total congestion of the airwaves, but this will transmit messages
through well-travelled systems nearly as fast as a dedicated courier
net, and at much lower cost.