Arioch wrote:Because information travels at the speed of a starship, it takes time for information to travel from one location to another.
I was thinking about this.
Is there anything preventing the employment of comm drones that hop between two star systems? The idea being that at each jump point, you have an unmanned comm station with a drone. A manned vessel sends a message (along with intended destination) to the comm station, which deploys the drone. The drone hops to the next system, passes the message to the comm station on that side, then the drone returns. The other comm station sends the message by radio to the comm station across the system, which repeats the process.
Doing it this way, you wouldn't need a manned 'courier' vessel in order to get reports home, unless you didn't want your trail of comm stations being followed, and the message would travel
much faster.
A manned vessel out at the frontier would still be important, because that would be the one laying the comm stations in the first place.
Or are drones too unreliable even for this role?
If every cloud had a silver lining, there would be a lot more plane crashes.