Re: Commo Traffic and Direction Finding...

Since this hasn't been brought up,

I can build equipment in my basement that is extremely difficult to
pick up let alone trace.  (Well, I could if I had a basement, I'd
have to do it in my computer room.)

You might want to look a bit into spread spectrum.  Avoidance technology
is not as easy as you'd expect.

On to other matters, why would you think it was difficult for
communications
with tight beam lasers from a bouncing vehicle?  That's what laser
gyros are for, and I can see them getting much better than they are now.
Sure, you may have occasional loss of LOS, but with the proper use of a 
digital protocol communications could still be affective.

Here, try this, laser to nearby tower that mostly cover the planet (kind
of like cell-phone towers.) fibre everywhere else.  With the right
equipment
tapping the fibre would be extremely hard.  If you set an interference
pattern up properly someone moving the fibre could be detected because
of
the stretch, much less someone changing the path length by inserting a
tapping device.  This one is discussed in crypto circles all the time as
a way of verifiable key exchange.

But wait, the nearby cell-phone towers are toast.  You have to have
prepared units on the ground that are withing LOS.  They only come
on when they are hit with a comm laser and use lasers to bounce the
signal to the nearest laser towers and then into the fibre.

I do get so tired of everyone coming up with "You can't do that".
This is a sci-fi game, many things are done for balance, even
at that the BS for why it is that way is just as good as the BS
for why you don't want it to work that way.

Roger