How does information travel in ED universe?

[Aella Fess]

As the title says, I was wondering how exactly does infomation travel in ED universe. By information I mean ship logs, news, radio auditions etc. FTL travel is impossible without creating wormholes by FSD and FSD requires a lot of resources and hardware. So how can rescue missions know exactly where to find us? How can radio waves travel FTL in ED universe, while they should be restricted by speed of light? Is there any answer to those questions in the lore?
My guess would be that it's because of couriers network, each settlement after receiving information could transfer it to other settlements via couriers - logical but highly impractical and expensive solution..

 

[alexzk]

It is transferred over FTL channel, called "Internet 2023".

 

[Helmut Grokenberger]

"Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws."

- Douglas Adams

 

[TR]

This is a good theory: https://elitepve.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2891

 

[Codger]

It's Space Magic, of course.

 

[Old Duck]

As the title says, I was wondering how exactly does infomation travel in ED universe. By information I mean ship logs, news, radio auditions etc. FTL travel is impossible without creating wormholes by FSD and FSD requires a lot of resources and hardware. So how can rescue missions know exactly where to find us? How can radio waves travel FTL in ED universe, while they should be restricted by speed of light? Is there any answer to those questions in the lore?
My guess would be that it's because of couriers network, each settlement after receiving information could transfer it to other settlements via couriers - logical but highly impractical and expensive solution..

IIRC, Elite originally was supposed to be set in a "no FTL except by ship" setting, so you're right, couriers were needed for things like delivering messages to other star systems. This was all thrown out the window with the invention of telepresence, where we can send high-bandwidth low-latency data across the galaxy in milliseconds. And as others have said, being an online game, there's no way to enforce an "information speed limit", because we can use a side-channel like Discord or third-party tools to send information like market prices almost instantly to all players everywhere.

Personally I think Elite would be pretty awesome as a single-player game where the "no FTL comms" was enforced, with news and information spreading slowly across the Bubble in a Paul Revere fashion. But such a game mechanic is probably more complicated than warranted by the typical player who prefers the fiction in "science fiction" over the science.

 

[Tyres O'Flaherty]

On your trip to Hutton, you can easily go over 1,000c. I forget the exact speed ceiling though - it may even be 2,000c

 

[Untilting]

As the title says, I was wondering how exactly does infomation travel in ED universe. By information I mean ship logs, news, radio auditions etc. FTL travel is impossible without creating wormholes by FSD and FSD requires a lot of resources and hardware. So how can rescue missions know exactly where to find us? How can radio waves travel FTL in ED universe, while they should be restricted by speed of light? Is there any answer to those questions in the lore?
My guess would be that it's because of couriers network, each settlement after receiving information could transfer it to other settlements via couriers - logical but highly impractical and expensive solution..

Inconsistently. I believe it uses handwavium technology.

 

[Tyres O'Flaherty]

Inconsistently. I believe it uses handwavium technology.

Like wingardium leviosa.

 

[Planewalker]

On your trip to Hutton, you can easily go over 1,000c. I forget the exact speed ceiling though - it may even be 2,000c

2001c, homage to the movie.

 

[Aella Fess]

IIRC, Elite originally was supposed to be set in a "no FTL except by ship" setting, so you're right, couriers were needed for things like delivering messages to other star systems. This was all thrown out the window with the invention of telepresence, where we can send high-bandwidth low-latency data across the galaxy in milliseconds. And as others have said, being an online game, there's no way to enforce an "information speed limit", because we can use a side-channel like Discord or third-party tools to send information like market prices almost instantly to all players everywhere.

Personally I think Elite would be pretty awesome as a single-player game where the "no FTL comms" was enforced, with news and information spreading slowly across the Bubble in a Paul Revere fashion. But such a game mechanic is probably more complicated than warranted by the typical player who prefers the fiction in "science fiction" over the science.

Thanks for the great post and pointing out telepresence! Personally I like to think that accepting missions like courier jobs with delivering data to another system is kind of what could represent spreading information across bubble. Still there is a problem though with, for example, universal cartographics and banking system. Even being in most remote part of galaxy on fleet carrier UC gets info about our exploration data in an instant and sends us credits. And of course, gameplay is always more important than lore and in-game world coherence, so we have to deal with oversimplification of things. As you pointed out - in solo games it could be a nice feature, no-ftl information travel, but in online game I doubt that it would be interesting or popular among players.

This is a good theory: https://elitepve.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2891

Thanks for this link, I did not know about this forum, already found some interesting things there

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Simplest handwavium explanation I've seen for this:
- hyperspace per-jump distance increases as mass decreases, and energy use decreases as mass decreases
- electromagnetic transmissions have zero mass
- so hyperspatial electromagnetic transmissions have infinite range and only nominal energy requirements

(Handwave further that because you can't bolt a hyperdrive to a photon, you do need mutually tuned transmitters and receivers to get this to work, so no hyperspatial death rays)

IIRC, Elite originally was supposed to be set in a "no FTL except by ship" setting, so you're right, couriers were needed for things like delivering messages to other star systems. This was all thrown out the window with the invention of telepresence

Telepresence was part of the lore since before ED released - the Imperial Senate uses it to meet on non-ceremonial occasions, according to an early (and rare) lore explainer post, and many of the licensed fiction books (going back to "The Dark Wheel" in 1984, but many of the ED books too) have characters communicating holographically in real-time over inter-system distances.

Even in-system arrival of system authority ships to a troubled trader in any theoretically useful timescale (or visibility of anyone else in supercruise at all) requires FTL comms and detection on the intra-system range.

"No FTL comms except attached to a hyperdrive ship" is an interesting concept and some sci-fi settings use it, but even for a single-player game it'd be tough to work in.

 

[SlickPBW]

I always thought it traveled via my mother-in-law; the fastest, most efficient, and sometimes biased form of communication in the galaxy.

 

[zimms]

"In mysterious ways."

There will never be "perfect" lore explanations for things like that in games. Gameplay has to come first. A couple of years ago I still wished that telepresence would go away once we have proper multicrew. But that ship has sailed for good imho.

We won't ever get this full seamless experience people once hoped for. There will always be a lot of borders and obstacles. Limitation for indoor instances, teleportation elevators and blue circles is what Elite has instead and that's all here to stay.

 

[Old Duck]

Telepresence was part of the lore since before ED released - the Imperial Senate uses it to meet on non-ceremonial occasions, according to an early (and rare) lore explainer post, and many of the licensed fiction books (going back to "The Dark Wheel" in 1984, but many of the ED books too) have characters communicating holographically in real-time over inter-system distances.

Huh... Well that conflicts to what I've been told, but I've learned to give your words extra weight, so I'll take your word for it.

Even in-system arrival of system authority ships to a troubled trader in any theoretically useful timescale (or visibility of anyone else in supercruise at all) requires FTL comms and detection on the intra-system range.

Supercruise is this weird magical nonsense that wouldn't work as presented in a realistic science fiction setting. I'm not actually a fan of it, but it is what it is, and I will definitely grant you that SC breaks FTL in a way that hyperspace doesn't. That said, wasn't SC added because players demanded it? IIRC, it was not part of Frontier's original plan for ED.

"No FTL comms except attached to a hyperdrive ship" is an interesting concept and some sci-fi settings use it, but even for a single-player game it'd be tough to work in.

The best way to have no FTL comms is to have no FTL. I'm okay with this. I used to get annoyed that I could communicate to my fleet scattered throughout the galaxy in X4, until I realized that it actually makes sense, because the jump gates (artificial wormholes) would relay any radio signals between systems. I'm no astrophysicist, but I don't consider wormholes to be FTL, but rather "shortcuts" that ships travel through at regular speeds. Hyperspace is kinda the fictional version of this, and I'm okay with hyperspace as portrayed in Elite as a form of "shortcut" over vast distances. Now whether one should be able to send radio waves though hyperspace is beyond my understanding. I accept it in X4, because the gates are artificial constructs that permanently connect two systems, rather than being a hole temporarily punched into space using a hyperdrive / FSD.

Of course it all reverts back to the cliche "It's just a game" answer, but I don't think the OP was satisfied with that, nor am I if a game tries to have a serious lore based in science.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Huh... Well that conflicts to what I've been told, but I've learned to give your words extra weight, so I'll take your word for it.

No need, it's all available online.

Here's the lore post https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/governments-and-politics-in-elite-dangerous.225156/ (Jan 2016, so just after the original Horizons release, but still over a year before Multicrew) - scroll down to the section on where the Senate meets.

The text of the Dark Wheel is on the http://www.elitehomepage.org/dkwheel.htm (first telepresence comms are in Chapter 2; further evidence that they're taking place inter-system in chapters 3 and 4).

The first real-time conversation between people highly unlikely to be in the same non-FTL region takes place on page 6 of Drew Wagar's Reclamation - that's early enough to be in the preview on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Elite-Recl...0KUY2MX4&revisionId=224290fc&format=2&depth=1 (the relevant section starts about 35% of the way through the preview). Originally published June 2014, so about 6 months before ED 1.0.

Supercruise is this weird magical nonsense that wouldn't work as presented in a realistic science fiction setting. I'm not actually a fan of it, but it is what it is, and I will definitely grant you that SC breaks FTL in a way that hyperspace doesn't. That said, wasn't SC added because players demanded it? IIRC, it was not part of Frontier's original plan for ED.

Yes, the original plan was microjumps between POIs. Tricky call - supercruise is more Elite-like and works much better for exploration (in the broad sense); a lot of the rest of the core game design was clearly put together on the assumption of microjumps and couldn't be redone quickly enough. Still, I don't think the original microjumps plan was because of a desire to avoid FTL sensors.

 

[IstvaanDCIV]

In my mind there has to be some kind of instantaneous FTL transmission being used within the fictional world of Elite Dangerous. The lack of much market information is a limitation of the game rather than the universe, and third-party resources such as inara.cz, PTN etc are effectively what independent pilots draw on in order to find out the best places to buy and sell goods. I think that community-made information sources outside of the game have become such an integral part of the play experience, that we might as well consider them as playing a role similar to what information sources would be available in-universe.

 

[Mark Lock]

it's simple, information throughout the galaxy is transfered through Quantum Entanglement , so it is instantaneous , no matter the distance

 

[GJ51]

Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum​

Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum

Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum is a strange dimension where Dario Shakespeare can change the past, present & future simultaneously with simply a wave of his stæf. Everything became one & everyone became everything. Those who passed through it became Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulated, and had...

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[IstvaanDCIV]

it's simple, information throughout the galaxy is transfered through Quantum Entanglement , so it is instantaneous , no matter the distance

Or a tachyonic radio. I think the precise flavour of technobabble matters less than the impact we see it make in the game and its universe. Mission providers know more or less instantly whenever you've completed the mission, failed it, or have chosen to abandon it. Telepresence technology is capable of delivering a high-bandwidth full sensory experience reliably and without any appreciable packet loss whatsoever. That's why I think the lack of market information in the game, and much other data that isn't readily to hand but should be, isn't reflective of the universe it's supposed to portray.