Re: Communication and Travel

You wrote: 

>John hints that there might be some form of interstellar 
communications >in his senarios but doesn't actually say so.  The 

<snip math>

>(really pushing it)  A normal military ship would take about 12 days 
(1 >jump per day) and a merchant ship 24 to 36 days (say 30).
>This means a month of travel to one of the closest worlds.   If human
>space is about 40 light years accross, thats 3 months travel at a 
normal >pace.  And that if the ship doesn't make any stops.
>Convoys and fleets will take longer as they will need to periodicly
>reform.

Yikes!	Methinks I'm gonna use Alderson drives in my 'deviant' 
universe.  I've got spacegoing Greeks, so why not snag something 
different for the FTL?	BTW, my computor hiccuped a few weeks ago, and 
I lost the e-mails of the two folks on the list with whom I had 
discussed the Nea Rhomaioi via e-mail, and could you two buzz me?  I 
got a couple of questions and ideas to kick around.  Back to on-topic 
stuff:	The Traveller Universe was built around this sort of hellacious 
time delay, but the charted space was huuuuuuuuge (almost 920 
light-years from the Imperial-Zhodani border to the Solomani-Hiver 
border), and it took only 46 weeks to cross,at Jump-6, flat-out, one 
per week.  91 if you take three days between jumps for 
maintinence/refueling and a jump-4 ship.  If that's going to be the way 
the FT/DS/GS universe works, so be it.	But then expect the 
communications lag to play a MAJOR part of the background.  To the 
point that it would be overwhelming.  Regional governors would have 
almost complete autonomy--if it takes a year or three to send a message 
back to Terra for little questions like "Should I nuke this damned 
Eurie settlement on that planet we claimed a few years ago?" then 
action will be taken and sorta passed on as a fait acomplii to the 
central government.  In a relatively short time, the commo lag will 
force a massive decentralization and fragmentation--if not in name, 
than in fact.  Eventually you'll get a large number of small 
mini-states, each small enough to communicate from one end to the other 
in a short enough time to respond quickly to invasion, and each caught 
up in it's own concerns.

As for me, I'll be digging through my FF&S (the TNE kind, not the 
current bastardization) and reading up on the alternate FTL drives 
presented there.  I'm undecided on FTL commo, but kinda favoring it.

John M. Atkinson