Re: [GZG] Re: Was FTL, now FTL comms

David Billinghurst wrote:
> I've always been quite comfortable with interstellar communications
moving
> at the speed of the fastest courier ship.  Gives a bit of delayed
reaction
> for fleet movements so that, as someone else has pointed, a command
system
> of pre-plotted moves, such as in Fifth Frontier War, models the
> communication lag quite nicely.

	Agreed. That mechanism is so elegant.  It gets the job done
	and it gets it done painlessly.
	http://www.projectrho.com/game/fifthfrontierwar.html

> If the ansible system required a gravity
> well or very long array (ie orbit diametre) to work, then the fleets
would
> be out of contact with the High Command until they managed to hook up
with
> the local 'telegraph' office.

	IIRC in the "Renegade Legion" wargames, they take this to
	extremes.  The FTL communication installations are actually
	the main thing of value that the various sides are fighting
	over.

> In one of the back-files, someone coined a lovely phrase for the
bow-wave of
> an FTL ship or fleet re-entering real-space - but I can't remember it
>   David Weber calls it a hyper foot-print, but I'm sure there is a
more
> elegant term for it .

	Oh, now I'm not going to be able to rest until it turns up.
	In an old Murray Leinster short story (about a dog named "Buck")
	it has the inelegant name "whango wave".
	Something like "hyper signature" or "warp wake".
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