Subspace Radio and the Horizon

[Wingsley]

In "A Piece of the Action", Kirk indicates that the Horizon's transmission had not been received until 100 years after Horizon's visit to Sigma Iotia II. Kirk's explanation flatly stated that there was no subspace radio in those days, and thus, Horizon used conventional lightspeed radio signals. Problem:

If starships had no means other than lightspeed radio for communication, and it would take 100 years to send a signal to home base, that means the Horizon was at least 100 light-years from a home base or radio relay buoy. So what sense did it make for the ship to use such an ineffective means of communication?

The Horizon's lack of subspace radio (and the clear statement on Kirk's part that there was no subspace radio in those days) contradicts "Balance of Terror", in which the treaty to end the Earth-Romulan Conflict was negotiated by subspace radio "over a century ago".

"Balance" makes it clear that subspace radio had to exist, but that the technolgical state of starships and transceivers 100 years before TOS was relatively crude.

So how can these two histories be reconciled?

ENT seemed to assume that NX-class starships had at least limited subspace radio capabilities.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Three possible solutions.

1) Horizon wasn't a Starfleet vessel, and may have been a civilian ship that stumbled on Sigma Iota-II and reported the contact back to Earth (or might even have been Travis' family).

2) For something I've always assumed about subspace radio, that long-distance transmissions are very power intensive and might even require the main deflector dish. A starship that doesn't have a deflector dish wouldn't be able to transmit a long distance without use of a relay network (and even then, only with huge time lag).

3) Kirk may have mispoke, and Horizon actually launched a recorder marker with a copy of its mission logs and didn't have time to transmit its telemetry when it was lost; the recorder marker wasn't recovered until very recently.

 

[Shazam!]

Maybe the Horizon just didn't have subspace radio communications. Maybe no Starfleet ships did. Maybe it was some new technology that was managed on Earth.

 

[Wingsley]

Maybe the Horizon just didn't have subspace radio communications. Maybe no Starfleet ships did. Maybe it was some new technology that was managed on Earth.

That contradicts "Balance of Terror".

 

[Shazam!]

How?

 

[Masao]

The explanation I've come up with is that subspace radio is sort of like terrestrial broadcast TV. Reception is relatively simple, but broadcast requires a big station. So, There are subspace transmitters on Earth and large starbases but not on most ships, which can still receive messages. There might be special command ships with spacegoing subspace transmitters.

 

[Timo]

Or it could simply be that the range of a subspace radio is limited. Ships that have a subspace radio and are within a network of relays have subspace communications; ships that have a subspace radio but are outside the network do not have subspace communications.

That should be semantically perfectly in keeping with the TOS episodes. What is said in "Piece" is this:

Kirk: "Difficult to explain [so obviously this is an oversimplification of the technical details for you primitive Iotians!]. We received a report a hundred years late because it was sent by conventional radio. Your system is on the outer reaches of the galaxy. They didn't have subspace communication in those days."

Clearly, distance is a key factor here. Is it just a factor that creates the century-long comm lag when radio is used? Perhaps the writer intended it that way. But we may argue that the distance also precluded subspace communications - a fact that changed later on, when the range of the transmitters increased, or the support network improved.

The TNG Tech Manual does a wonderful job in explaining all the subspace comms discrepancies, by claiming that subspace transmissions decay into lightspeed signals after X lightyears. This solves all the problems, including the discrepancy discussed here...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[USS Jack Riley]

Three possible solutions.

1) Horizon wasn't a Starfleet vessel, and may have been a civilian ship that stumbled on Sigma Iota-II and reported the contact back to Earth (or might even have been Travis' family).

2) For something I've always assumed about subspace radio, that long-distance transmissions are very power intensive and might even require the main deflector dish. A starship that doesn't have a deflector dish wouldn't be able to transmit a long distance without use of a relay network (and even then, only with huge time lag).

3) Kirk may have mispoke, and Horizon actually launched a recorder marker with a copy of its mission logs and didn't have time to transmit its telemetry when it was lost; the recorder marker wasn't recovered until very recently.

Another possibility is that the subspace radio was damaged when they sent the signal. Haven't seen the ep in a while, but it is plausible.

 

[Timo]

Yet Kirk said that there had been no subspace communications (at least not for the Horizon) "in those days", suggesting that the lack was not a random occurrence but a permanent feature of "those days".

That is, unless Kirk was lying. We shouldn't forget that Kirk knew that Sigma Iotia had been the last place from which the Horizon had sent an a-okay message; the last one to see the victim alive is usually the murderer. Kirk could have been feeding disinformation to the Iotians from the very start. Perhaps the hundred-year delay was due to some completely different reason, deliberation or scheme, and Kirk wanted to hide that from the Iotians?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Wingsley]

In "Balance of Terror", Spock indicated in his historical address to the ship that the treaty was negotiated via subspace radio. But he also said that neither of the opposing sides has seen each other. Add to this that it's going to be pretty silly to send ships out on combat missions is they have no means of communication. Add on top of that the logic that if a ship can exceed the speed of light, it should be able to communicate at FTL velocities as well. Think of it this way: how can ships fight in an FTL war if they are blind? They have to have FTL tracking scanners to track the enemy as well as to find their way through deep space, right? And if they have "subspace radar", why wouldn't they at least have some crude form of subspace radio?

 

[Ronald Held]

is it more plausible that the Horizon did not have subspace radio, or it was damaged for a long time(maybe too expensive to be repaired)?

 

[Masao]

....Add to this that it's going to be pretty silly to send ships out on combat missions is they have no means of communication.

Militaries have been able to communicate faster than they could travel for less than 150 years. Before then, couriers traveling by ship or horse were the fastest means of reliable communication. So, just because our modern militaries can communicate faster than they can travel, we shouldn't assume that all militaries past and future should be able to.

 

[Captain Robert April]

Three possible solutions.

1) Horizon wasn't a Starfleet vessel, and may have been a civilian ship that stumbled on Sigma Iota-II and reported the contact back to Earth (or might even have been Travis' family).

The Horizon is clearly described as a Federation starship.

2) For something I've always assumed about subspace radio, that long-distance transmissions are very power intensive and might even require the main deflector dish. A starship that doesn't have a deflector dish wouldn't be able to transmit a long distance without use of a relay network (and even then, only with huge time lag).

A ship without some sort of deflection system would find itself wiped out by the next dirt clod it came across, but you may be onto something regarding having to be within range of a relay station to have something resembling reliable subspace communications. Sigma Iotia is out in the boonies, so it's not any kind of stretch to assume that they're waaaaaay off the grid, especially when the Horizon stopped by.

3) Kirk may have mispoke, and Horizon actually launched a recorder marker with a copy of its mission logs and didn't have time to transmit its telemetry when it was lost; the recorder marker wasn't recovered until very recently.

Not only is this not supported by dialogue in the show, it's contradicted at least once.

 

[Timo]

The Horizon is clearly described as a Federation starship.

Kirk somewhat hesitantly admits that the Horizon is from the same "outfit" as the Enterprise. Might be Starfleet, might be Federation, might be random aliens doing a survey job for the Feds, whatever; Kirk would have no reason to go into the particulars. And in TOS terms, "starship" is a rather exclusive definer, so perhaps it should be emphasized that the Horizon is never considered one of those. Our heroes never call the Horizon anything specific; the Iotians call her "the other ship". Perhaps only starships rated a subspace communicator back in those days?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Captain Robert April]

Time to start parsing the script....

 

[Verteron]

Kirk: "Difficult to explain [so obviously this is an oversimplification of the technical details for you primitive Iotians!]. We received a report a hundred years late because it was sent by conventional radio. Your system is on the outer reaches of the galaxy. They didn't have subspace communication in those days."

This quote makes significantly more sense if we imply the word "here" in the last sentence. As in They didn't have subspace communication in those days, HERE.

Hence, what Kirk meant was that the subspace relay network hadn't reached this far out yet, now it has (so they have all the benefits), but in those days, without a relay network, the communication simply dropped out of subspace, which matches up with what ISTR the TNG Technical Manual saying about subspace comms.

Just my theory, anyway.

 

[Wingsley]

Chiming in on this line of conversation, it may be that there would be a difference between the notion of FTL/subspace "communication" in the days of Archer (perhaps very few, if any, relays or network of same; and subspace "radio" aboard starships was a "short range" device with a range of only a few light-years without relays) as opposed to the 23rd century, when modern starships' subspace transceivers could reach much further.

Perhaps the much weaker technology of the Archer days relied on a subspace version of "bread crumb" relays (the "echo" buoys) being left in the ship's wake while exploring deep space; if a single link in this chain of "bread crumb" buoys were to fail, the improvised relay network would fail along with it, and the surviving buoys would revert to conventional lightspeed radio signals.

Would this reconcile "Action" and "Balance"?

 

[Timo]

I'd say breadcrumbs are still used in the TNG era, making it possible for Starfleet command to reassign a few "deep space exploration vessels" to rendezvous with the Voyager when contact with the latter is made by unconventional means in "Pathfinder". Deep space vessels would still need to sow relays every seven lightyears if the TNG Tech Manual holds true; that way, not even the failure of two relays in a row would cut the signal that can travel 22 ly on a single boost.

The Horizon thing can have many explanations: no shipboard transmitters back then; no shipboard transmitters back then for ships as humble as the Horizon; shipboard transmitters but too short a range for actual realtime communications and no relay net. It just doesn't sound like that big a deal. What's a bit more annoying is that Archer was able to maintain subspace communications so easily. The drama of ENT would not have required that, and indeed might have benefited from lack of communications with the home base. What if, say, the recall message in "The Expanse" had arrived via courier, an alien one that Archer couldn't necessarily trust?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Myasishchev]

In "Balance of Terror", Spock indicated in his historical address to the ship that the treaty was negotiated via subspace radio. But he also said that neither of the opposing sides has seen each other. Add to this that it's going to be pretty silly to send ships out on combat missions is they have no means of communication. Add on top of that the logic that if a ship can exceed the speed of light, it should be able to communicate at FTL velocities as well. Think of it this way: how can ships fight in an FTL war if they are blind? They have to have FTL tracking scanners to track the enemy as well as to find their way through deep space, right? And if they have "subspace radar", why wouldn't they at least have some crude form of subspace radio?

Most naval engagements in the history of humankind prior to World War II taken place near land, because ships were blind, at least over large distances--distances dwarfed by the operational ranges of FTL spaceships.

However, this strategic blindness didn't preclude them from fighting at points of interest, like Salamis, Actium, Trafalgar, or Jutland. FTL shouldn't preclude strategically blind spaceships from fighting at sublight near analogous centers of gravity, either.

Imposing a naval siege on a whole planet could only be reasonably acheived by close blockade without FTL sensors, but the targets would be obvious--political and industrial centers important to the continued functioning of the war machine. So, while there would always be a certain opaque element to naval strategy--do I concentrate offensively or defensively, or here or there? do I maintain a fleet in being or risk a decisive action?

There's no real need to use FTL sensors to find one's way through space, either. Stars move in predictable ways, so a navigational computer could calculate the actual position of a star, depending on the capabilities of their telescopes, spectrography, and so on, its satellites, at any given distance. Even with completely "blind jumping," without so much as looking out a window, let alone running computations on current positions of celestial objects, the odds of striking anything would be obscenely high, although it would be generally inefficient (and I note that this does assume the frontages of warp fields to not be very large).

Of course, FTL sensors can be equated with the enormous increase in information available to a commander following the advent of, first, spotting aircraft, and then radio transmission, and finally radar, during the interwar period and WW2 itself, which allowed blue water interceptions to become far, far more common than previous.

 

[Meredith]

Maybe their Jarvis Coil was broken and they couldn't send radio signals through subspace and it had to plod along in regular space. Maybe if you send a radio signal via subspace if you don't have enough energy to keep the radio wave "in" subspace it will drop out of subspace and pold along at C.