Item A sounds like a perfect toy for an adventure - the players must
smuggle it into a besieged world so the defenders can coordinate witht
e rescue group in the next str system. Or it's the party is supposed
to sneak in, sabotage the defenses, and then send a message they were
successful. Or steal the defenders plans... whatever.
I kinda like it from a game point of view.

Item B Sounds like 25 ASCII chars per second for 30 seconds. 750
bytes. I guess you could use Morse code,and then compress to the
states somehow. Data compression too. Anyway, you get a paragraph of
text. How much of a jump bubble are you generating? I guess I'm trying
to get a handle on what the cost per byte would be, and what the
telegraph office is going to charge an end user. Are they going to be
huge installations that have very little traffic, but sit waiting to
send the message that the aliens are attacking?

On Wed, Oct 2, 2019 at 9:46 PM Cian Witherspoon <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I’ve been thinking of writing an article on the many, and different Ways that ansibles could be modeled. Most people assume that they function as the equivalent of radio in the modern day - almost infinitely faster than travel, high bandwidth, high baud rate, really long range, low failure rate, etc... and yet, that’s very limiting. So, let’s discuss ansibles outside the context of the Third Imperium (so we’re not stepping on canon), focusing on all the ways they can be different from that standard model.
> For example, a slow broadcast, perhaps 0.5 parsecs a week omnidirectional up to some range - not very useful for players, allows couriers, but definitely provides a courier free local service that can, over time, overtake a merchant working the mains.
> Here’s a couple of models to kick off discussion, both using hexadecimal for some odd reason.
> A) a small device, roughly the size of a small typewriter, with a physical keyboard and a symbolic address of 16 symbols along the top, recovered from the ruins of some ancient civilization. It works in base-16 with physical inputs, with a baud rate of 1 character/second, printing both sent and received characters onto a reel of paper tape (the data output they apparently used is non-compatible, with the keys being kept as backup), with a maximum transmission time of 15 minutes (receiving a message doesn’t seem to reduce this limit) before requiring a 57 minute recharge from its internal mechanisms (other methods of powering the units have not been found yet). Base range is 16 parsecs for an error rate of 12+ (throw 12+ for some error to be introduced into the transmission), with DM+1 for every 4 parsecs beyond that range. The operator pushes a call button, inputs the address of the receiving unit, then presses it again. At this point the clock starts ticking on usage time, but the message cannot be sent until the receiving unit has its accept call button pressed. The message is typed using those 16 characters until either the time limit is up or the end message key is pressed. A transmitting unit cannot receive a message, and a receiving unit cannot transmit.
> These are relatively rare devices - a typical small ancient site will provide a few dozen, attached to apparently non-functional equipment that cannot be adequately studied.
>
> B) a heavily modified jump drive can produce a very interesting thing: a massless jump bubble, which has the rather interesting properties of being very fast (1 parsec a day), with a greater range ((TL-9)^2 parsecs) and also existing in two places at once. However, it must still travel to the target system (with the transmitting system feeding it energy and LHyd the entire time), and once it breaches jump space, only lasts for roughly 30 seconds (depending on construction and design quality, TL*3, +/-10%). It also can’t carry anything. However, it can be modulated to express one of 16 information states, at a maximum rate starting at 50 changes a second at TL10, and doubling every TL afterwards, +/-15%. The modulation as the massless bubble decays can be read by any ship equipped with a jump drive, or is otherwise equipped with the sensors required to read the state of a jump bubble, provided they are within 1ls of the emergence point.
> The message doesn’t have to be set before the bubble is generated, but must be ready to go when it hits emergence.
> This is a large, and expensive system with high demands for power and hydrogen, however it can be used between the 10d and 100d limits.
> It also faces some limitations, such as a minimum standoff distance between stations, the limit of one active bubble per station, the mutual annihilation of bubbles emerging too close to each other, and the fact that linking two stations together with this method just makes an interesting bomb.
>
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