The story isn’t about the technology but the people do the author doesn’t want to make the ship the star. And because of that, the less techno-babble the better because it can only make things worse. I think I caught delta-v used as a substitute for velocity rather than a change in or potential for change in velocity. Little things like that can derail the immersion in the story.

There are a lot of things in life that are done stupidly for complicated reasons. There are a lot of things done so study you’re surprised there aren’t more deaths. Manually updating the astrogation data seems like implausibly stupid but then again I have a friend who works with data for the financial industry and the incompetence is frightful. So maybe it is plausible.

What seems less likely is the software engineers back at the design bureau allowing the crew to do anything more than create macros. It sounds like Ish has complete access to the source code and api’s for interfacing with every system on the ship. That doesn’t strike me as likely.

Having finished the whole series, I’m listening to a new podcast, the Leviathan Chronicles. It’s a full radio play like the Green Hornet with a cast and sound effects and everything. Really impressive except for the writing. At least once every five minutes I keep going “no, that’s not how it works.” They had heat-sensing radar (huh?) and fishing trawlers shooting through harbors like speedboats and using macguyver logic to duct tape two different pieces of kit together and a minor reprogramming of all the control software to add an ROV to a sub with radio controls (???) Radio. Underwater. I can accept a superscience team having kit we’ve never heard of but the stuff from the real world still needs to behave like stuff in the real world.

Fortunately for the Trelader Tales, very few of the plot complications are overly technical. Most of the difficulties come from people. Technology can change, stories can feel dated if the tech is the star. People don’t change and so long as the human motivations are at the center of the story, it will remain timeless.

I know it’s sort of the basis for the communications in the solar clipper universe.

Thanks for a great read (so far)! Now to listen to the other three…

In Cherryh’s Alliance/Union universe, outbound ships head to system zenith to jump, while inbound ships come in at system nadir (or vice versa–in any event the danger of collision is reduced). This allows the placement of informational buoys at just two locations that are then accessed (and fed) by the ships and (in-system) by the orbital stations or whatever authority is in place.

Basically, every time a ship comes into Neris from Gugara, it does a zip-flash download of the latest news and trading info as soon as it enters the system, which it uploaded just before it jumped from Gugara. It would include not only the Gugara info, but the latest received at the station from other ships inbound to Gugara. Granted, that info was however many light-minutes/hours old at jump but it’s going to be pretty up to date. No need for specialized jump/messenger bots since jump is instantaneous, if trade volume between systems is frequent enough.

I suspect too that there would be any number of algorithim-based “spec” programs that make predictions based on the latest info available.

Honestly, as I read about Pip getting the info on trading during the course of Quarter Share, I just assumed what was happening was something similar to Cherryh’s info-buoy system.

Now onto communications…I think the biggest problem would be data volume. How much data can you transfer in a few seconds? There are a 120B people across 100′s (1000′s?) of planets. Even just dealing with critical data like alerts, major news, CPJCT critical updates, and the like would amount to an incredible amount of data. Add in business transactions and stock/trade traffic and I think you have more data than you can transmit in the few seconds that you can keep the link open. Maybe on the core worlds where you have really heavy traffic….But I bet it would be really expensive.

That’s where we’re going.

Sorta.

Thank you again work writing these marvelous stories!