Why are communicators and tricorders separate?

[Cary L. Brown]

^ That is not what I was talking about.

Think of it this way: In "Mudd's Women", Harry expressly communicated ahead (surreptitiously, to be sure) to the Rigel XII mining colony using "subspace frequency 3-9". So we can assume that Starfleet personal communicators in both the 23rd and 24th centuries are capable of at least limited extrastellar communication.

But it is never clear if, say, an expedition left behind on a planet (either temporarily or long-term) might also have a little something extra left with them: maybe a satellite could be deposited in orbit. The satellite doesn't have to be a high-tech, high-powered Federation telecom buoy. Instead, it could be just an Expeditionary Package, to serve as a weather monitoring station, a local telecom relay so expedition team members don't loose touch over the horizon, and maybe a modest subspace booster to call nearby starships, space stations or expeditions if there are any in range. Such a "package" could be small, low-power and easy to store, set-up, handle and fix.

Although there's no direct evidence to support this, there is some other "nonsense" from TOS which, in this light, suddenly makes sense.

Specifically, consider that the Enterprise carried several hundred smallish "satellites" which were able to kill off the flying-rubber-vomit-monsters... remember? It's always seems ludicrous to me that the Enterprise would have the ability to manufacture that many, that quickly.

However... if they already had (as a standard part of the ship's mission, though never mentioned on-screen) a large inventory of satellites for the purpose you mention, well... it suddenly becomes practical that you could retrofit them with light sources, removing the transmitter parts and replacing them with easily-manufactured "sunlamp bulbs"... and voila.

A subspace relay satellite would inherently have a powerful power supply and some self-sufficiency built-in already.

The only thing that comes up, really, is the moral issue... how would it go over if you realized that the Federation is dropping what are, potentially, "spy satellites" into the neighborhood of every planet it visits?

 

[Timo]

...Of course, Federation morals are a bit alien to us anyway - yet strangely remniscent of those of the United States (or the former alternate superpower, uneasily rest its atheist soul), with a combination of healthy isolationism, healthy interest in foreign secrets, and healthy desire to dictate or "protect" the course of development in less developed foreign nations. Having spysats everywhere would certainly be par for the course of a superpower that thinks of itself as benign.

It's just that, while insta-comms are ubiquitous in TOS and TNG alike, there is little evidence that Starfleet or the Federation could instantaneously obtain intelligence on distant locations. So perhaps those relays are indeed regularly sown, but they don't have sufficient sensor capabilities to serve as meaningful spysats, either due to technological limitations or then due to political ones.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[SoM]

Really, the jury will spend the rest of its days mulling this over, because in basically every adventure we can choose to assume that the skies above our heroes are saturated with UFP communications networks (or nets available to the UFP through a variety of treaties). Those might be able to pick up the signal of a teeny weeny primitive 20th century transmitter across several lightdays and send it to the other side of the Federation in a matter of minutes.

That is, almost any Alpha quadrant episode could be treated this way. VOY and DS9 might give better examples of extreme ranges "in the wilderness".

Well, in DS9: "The Ascent" (Which is an Alpha ep, set on a "barely habitable" L-class planet that "solid" Odo & Quark crash-land on), Odo's commbadge* is effectively useless in and of itself in terms of reaching any useful reciever/relay. [And even the runabout's bulkier comm system, without the standard booster which is destroyed in the explosion which forced them to crash-land, needs to be raised high on a nearby mountain to get round the atmosphere attenuating the signal into uselessness.]

*Yes, it's a Bajoran commbadge, not a Federation commbadge - and since this is an ep where he's a "solid", we can ignore the "where does Odo's commbadge go" stuff and take that as read - but we know the Feds gave the Bajorans a lot of aid, and I think you yourself have mentioned in the past the unlikelihood of a chest-badge communicator coming up independently. I just presume the Bajoran commbadges are Fed commbadges with a cosmetically-different casing. The Bajorans simply didn't have the resources to go reinventing wheels, especially since whatever they came up with would need to interoperate with Fed/etc commtech anyway.

 

[miraclefan]

Cause it sells more toys, you silly billy!

 

[Timo]

Well, in DS9: "The Ascent" (Which is an Alpha ep, set on a "barely habitable" L-class planet that "solid" Odo & Quark crash-land on), Odo's commbadge* is effectively useless in and of itself in terms of reaching any useful reciever/relay.

That's a good catch (and an ep I haven't seen yet).

One would also want to believe that runabouts have less comm range than bigger starships, considering how they can quickly get out of immediate range with DS9 even with their rather puny warp engines. Indeed, a hierarchy of comm systems and ranges would make sense, with the best badges in TNG doing something like a few lightminutes, the best shuttle or runabout units doing a lightyear or six, and starship communicators achieving 22 lightyears at very best (as per the TNG Tech Manual) before the signal degrades to lightspeed.

A density of commnet relays per every six or seven lightyears would make some sense. that's about how far apart star systems are from their immediate neighbors in this corner of the galaxy, and that's also one-third the maximum distance spannable by instantaneous subspace signals as per TNG TM. A smart organization would sow breadcrumb lines at triple density, so that the loss of any two consecutive units would be tolerable. In more frequently visited locations, there'd of course be a 3D net, but much of the frontier net would consist of breadcrumbs left by past exploration starships.

The examples given so far for commbadge performance would seem to call for nothing greater than the "Schitzoid Man" piece where the departing ship can be contacted after several seconds of high warp acceleration; possibly a few lighthours, and even that might have been with the help of a booster installed in Ira Graves' home. Were Kirk's handheld units perhaps better in this respect? It would sound like a sensible tradeoff: shorter-ranged, more compact communicators for an era where commnets are tighter.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Wingsley]

RE: "moral issue".

Interesting point-of-view.

I don't think my idea of a low-tech "expedition package" satellite would be useful as a spysat. Actually, I think the Federation policy dilemma would be exactly the opposite of what was proposed in your moral concern. Consider Cestus III, which was destroyed by the Gorn. Obviously the fledgling colony there was built like a kind of fort, and there was a Federation lieutenant stationed there that Kirk's landing party rescued. (In addition, Commodore Travers was supposed to be on Cestus III, although it was never made clear if he was just visiting or if he was stationed there.) And Cestus, a frontier planet, clearly had communications on some level with the Enterprise and/or Starfleet. Yet the Gorns took the colony by surprise. Why?

I would suppose the colony was seeded along with several orbiting "expedition package" satellites, possibly solar-powered, to be self-sufficient. Starfleet may have been offering its services to the colony (ferrying in supplies and personnel, and maybe sending people back along with any natural resources the colony was contracted to harvest if necessary; or maybe the colony had a scientific mission there, such as experimental work or astronomy or subspace radio-telescopy or somesuch) on either a temporary or permanent basis. If the colony had a military significance, then maybe Cestus III would eventually evolve into a Federation installation (starbase or deep space station) in the future. If not, maybe the Federation contracted Starfleet to station personnel there to guide the colony's development for other reasons.

In any event, it's a cinch that the Federation knows there are hazards and security risks on the frontier, so they would likely be careful with what technology they would leave behind "out there". Low-tech satellites could provide limited, basic telecomm needs, as well as local services such as coordinating planetary comm, local GPS, etc. These satellites could be easily fabricated and serviced, and would not "give away the store" if they were captured/stolen by some hostile or criminal security threat.

This may also be one of the big differences between a frontier colony/station and a full-blown Federation starbase or deep space station. These better-fortified, more advanced and more powerful facilities would likely have a much stronger security profile (maybe even space vessels assigned to them as the Defiant was to DS9) as well as more powerful telecomm and tracking facilities.