open hails
- Thread starter soornge
- Start date
My guess is that is probably happens all the time. But i'd guess they are time stamped so you'll know if you need to worry about them.
yea i was thinking that it might account for all the "clean up" that comm officers always are talking about : going to disregard infinite range not be rude but that makes no sense based on the nature of physics and secondly an open hail on all chanbels would ve broadcast across all bands the starship could send and recieve : nasa picks up old transmission all the time: really dont want to go into it but can just go to any ilearning station to figure out why
Doesn't there have to be some sort of range? In Enterprise they had to put down a few Echo Stations so that they could continue to contact Earth.
Once in a while a ship would pick up a random distress signal, but I'd think that a "hail" would be directed toward a specific ship/base/whatever, and probably stardate-stamped.
In the real world, normal radio signals fall off with the square of the distance, becoming indistingushable from CMB after a few light years for all but the most powerful and directed radio waves. Ships like the Horizon are capable of transmitting radio waves that can be differentiated in the 100-200ly range.
Subspace communications is anyone's guess, but there seems to be evidence that it's very fast when there are repeater stations or ships along the way, once you lose that network the signals drop to a much slower (yet still FTL) speed, but there may well be a range. We have no idea how collimated those signals are.
I'm having trouble parsing soornge's posts though, so perhaps he's on about something else?
Subspace communications is anyone's guess, but there seems to be evidence that it's very fast when there are repeater stations or ships along the way, once you lose that network the signals drop to a much slower (yet still FTL) speed, but there may well be a range. We have no idea how collimated those signals are.
I'm having trouble parsing soornge's posts though, so perhaps he's on about something else?
In much the same way that we use phones or walkie talkies now. Those open hailing frequencies are open at that time only. Once the hail has been received and a communication frequency locked on, or once they determine that the hail is not being received, the hailing frequencies would be closed again. No subspace chatter polluting the spacewaves.
I imagine the comms dept generally sorts through (triages) all the calls and routes the most vital to whoever is on bridge duty, alerting them if they're not paying attention. But the bridge duty comms officer would be looking for unusual bandwidths/locations of origin/ship codes among those sent to them, probably with a computer auto-alert if something of note comes up. The translator would sift through for keywords like "help" and "emergency".
What old transmissions are you talking about? Voyager 1 is the furthest thing we've got from Earth and it's not even a light-day out. Even setting aside what Paul said about signal attenuation, NASA isn't in a position to pick up old transmissions. (And couldn't be, considering that those transmissions are traveling at the speed of light, so we could never outpace them anyway.)
Setting aside attenuation, you could pick up a reflection of a signal. We do this all the time with the moon retro-reflectors 
Setting aside attenuation, you could pick up a reflection of a signal. We do this all the time with the moon retro-reflectors
Yeah, but that's a laser bouncing off of a mirror, almost the spherical cow of detecting a reflected signal. Even without attenuation, I wouldn't think you could pick up an arbitrary reflected signal in any distinguishable sense; it'd be too scattered.
(On astronomical scales, I mean; I know there's ionosphere reflection for increasing radio range etc., but I'm assuming that soornge meant, like, detecting one of our radio transmissions reflecting off another planet or star or something.)
One might bring up the fact that our heroes and villains are always able to tell instantaneously whether the other side is responding or not. The "No response, Sir!" statement would make no sense in normal radio communications, where a message would be going out and getting the response would be a matter of giving it sufficient time. After all, such time is never given!
But FTL communications might work fundamentally differently. "Opening a frequency" might mean establishing a specific A-to-B connection between two FTL communications devices, rather than broadcasting a signal into open space. If the other device refused the connection, that would immediately count as "No response, Sir!" and be qualitatively different from general silence.
This could be a characteristic of the FTL communications system (which we know is different enough from radio that our heroes always bother to say "They are using radio, Sir, that quaint and outdated method of communications"). Or it could be simple procedure: a communications link won't go live without the cooperation of the receiving end even today when the communications themselves are of the "smart" type, with cybernetic queries and responses flying back and forth long before the first word is spoken or typed.
In the latter case, space would be full of "old" messages that would be of zero worth because they were tailored by party A to be read by party B and cannot be read by party C. In the former case, there wouldn't be any "old" messages, as an unanswered hail would never have existed in the first place.
Timo Saloniemi
But FTL communications might work fundamentally differently. "Opening a frequency" might mean establishing a specific A-to-B connection between two FTL communications devices, rather than broadcasting a signal into open space. If the other device refused the connection, that would immediately count as "No response, Sir!" and be qualitatively different from general silence.
This could be a characteristic of the FTL communications system (which we know is different enough from radio that our heroes always bother to say "They are using radio, Sir, that quaint and outdated method of communications"). Or it could be simple procedure: a communications link won't go live without the cooperation of the receiving end even today when the communications themselves are of the "smart" type, with cybernetic queries and responses flying back and forth long before the first word is spoken or typed.
In the latter case, space would be full of "old" messages that would be of zero worth because they were tailored by party A to be read by party B and cannot be read by party C. In the former case, there wouldn't be any "old" messages, as an unanswered hail would never have existed in the first place.
Timo Saloniemi
That's not necessarily true in the latter case; if it does rely on a handshake protocol akin to TCP-IP, then the message would never actually be transmitted in the first place without the handshake established just like in the former case. In the latter case it could also be true that space could be full of the subspace equivalent of SYN packets that never got an ACK, but not necessarily full of the messages themselves, readable or otherwise.
Ah, indeed, that is what I thought I was saying, but clearly didn't: that handshakes might be discernible but not useful to outside parties. Except as indicators that communications attempts did take place, that is.
Subspace comms might be physically neater affairs, with no outside evidence remaining of a failed or even a successful exchange. We hear of occassional sensing of signals (but not actual interception of contents) now and then, such as at the end of "Conspiracy". But not of standard Starfleet subspace signals, supposedly. Or Klingon or Romulan ones. Or do we? (Klaa "intercepts" Kirk's message in ST5:TFF, but that's a case of Klaa pretending to be the receiving end rather than overhearing anything being exchanged between A and B.)
Timo Saloniemi
Subspace comms might be physically neater affairs, with no outside evidence remaining of a failed or even a successful exchange. We hear of occassional sensing of signals (but not actual interception of contents) now and then, such as at the end of "Conspiracy". But not of standard Starfleet subspace signals, supposedly. Or Klingon or Romulan ones. Or do we? (Klaa "intercepts" Kirk's message in ST5:TFF, but that's a case of Klaa pretending to be the receiving end rather than overhearing anything being exchanged between A and B.)
Timo Saloniemi
That could just be movie magic. Consider the related case, where whenever someone "hails" another character over the intercom or communicator, the response never has a gap even though, logically, the computer can't know where to route the signal until after the first character has finished saying "Riker to Picard," for instance. We always see that happen from one end or the other and it's always at a regular conversational pace, though logically, there should be at least a couple seconds' pause after the originating speaker finishes before they get a reply, since the computer can only play their hail for the recipient after the sender has finished speaking.
We could just be eliding over the thirty second gap while Worf or Uhura waits for the hail to finish ringing and go to voicemail.
Well, that would have made the DS9 ep "The Sound Of Her Voice" a lot shorter...
The "Picard to Riker" comms delay is usually hidden by movie "magic" almost by default: we either only ever see one end of the exchange (meaning Riker could be responding in mid-phrase off camera or Picard could be forced to wait off camera), or then both ends (meaning there's a cut and an adjoining optional timegap there).
Although I don't see how this should be a problem even without said "magic". Picard says "Picard to Riker". Riker responds "Riker here". He would, quite regardless of whether he hears the "Picard to" part or not - "Riker here" would be his response to very fact that he is being paged at all. He isn't saying "Hello, Captain" or anything like that, after all, to suggest he would be aware of who is making the call.
If that doesn't suffice, we can note that there's no necessity for the call to be "routed". Every single soul aboard the ship might be hearing it - it's not as if such a means of connecting is ever used for idle chatting (which no doubt has other channels available), so the ship certainly wouldn't be swamped by such messages usually. And the camera never oversees a person who would be in a position to just shrug at the call and continue his or her business - if not with the Picard, the camera is justly with the Riker in question.
Timo Saloniemi
Although I don't see how this should be a problem even without said "magic". Picard says "Picard to Riker". Riker responds "Riker here". He would, quite regardless of whether he hears the "Picard to" part or not - "Riker here" would be his response to very fact that he is being paged at all. He isn't saying "Hello, Captain" or anything like that, after all, to suggest he would be aware of who is making the call.
If that doesn't suffice, we can note that there's no necessity for the call to be "routed". Every single soul aboard the ship might be hearing it - it's not as if such a means of connecting is ever used for idle chatting (which no doubt has other channels available), so the ship certainly wouldn't be swamped by such messages usually. And the camera never oversees a person who would be in a position to just shrug at the call and continue his or her business - if not with the Picard, the camera is justly with the Riker in question.
Timo Saloniemi
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