How does a traveller keep in touch?

[Morte]

Say you're off in the wilds, somewhere like Theta Borealis with no big powers and not that much population. There's no XBoat setup, or imperial mail, or whatever. How do you keep in touch with your contacts when you and they are wandering around space and perhaps avoiding authority?

There's go to be some sort of postal system, even if the service is not very good, because a business will arise to fill the need for it. And one can send mail "general delivery" for ship dwellers to pick up. One could send the same message to each for five starports, and hope one connects in reasonable time.

For less traceable/interruptible messages, I figure old classics like code phrases in the newspaper ads (or equivalent) have got to be worth a go. It happens that my character is an expert cryptographer/steganographer.

These are doable, but I wonder has anyone found an elegant way to do it better?

 

[Lemnoc]

This sounds like a job for the courier service!

I’ve long held that, information being mostly electronic in the far future, almost every ship would carry a “mailbag” of data—news briefs and events occurring around the Imperium. Included in those might be general purpose bulletins, “Danny call your mother,” that—for a small price—might be conveyed by every ship. I believe information mechanisms like this operated in the Age of Sail. Not as dependable or secure as XBoats, but a way to keep current events circulating.

Plus this gives you a way of giving players a little walking around money even when their missions turn out to be a bust. They can collect a few coins just delivering the mail.

 

[Morte]

almost every ship would carry a [..]“mailbag” of data [..] might be conveyed by every ship.

Hmm. The "every ship" part sounds interesting, spreading data more like the old school usenet news file than email.

Back in the pre-web pre-internet days there was a thing called "the news file" that bounced around connected institutions delivering/collecting fresh posts and merging with other news files along the way. It crossed the oceans overnight, when bandwidth was cheap. Data in an unbalanced jump network could do the same. So you can send your message off into the Cerenkov Blue Yonder, to be copied and recopied until it expires, in the hope that the intended recipient or their mail agent(s) will intersect with it.

With proper crypto and stego one can be discreet.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

How do you keep in touch with your contacts when you and they are wandering around space and perhaps avoiding authority?

A soon as your phone has bars again, you can check for any new messages (however many weeks old they may be). You may have to go where there is a decent starport though before you see any bars again. Local wyfy won't get you to a network to broadcast any Spacebook posts you've made on your phone.

 

[Captain Jonah]

Well every ship can carry the mail, any message you want to send will need to be sent to every possible place the recipient could be at. You could send a message to every world in the subsector.
Then you send another one two weeks later in response to one you just received from a contact, then a week later a third after a friend tips you to a good deal.

Your contact will check for mail at the worlds he stops at but as both of you move he could receive the messages in any order. Only the time stamp would tell him the order of messages.

Or you could arrange to stop at a certain world every month or two and have your contacts or friends send messages there. Much like the Firefly episode where the crew went to a friendly port to collect mail and deliveries.

I would think that due to the fact that messages will go all over the place, to numerous worlds and by official and unofficial carriers crypto is going to be the norm. Probably any traveller is going to have a set of codes used for each contact or friend so if one code is cracked the rest of his post is safe.

It is entirely possible that you could turn up to a station to collect a month’s worth of mail that has been wandering all over the sub sector including a message from someone on the world you were on the day before he sent the message. Jump is the ultimate “Do not disturb” and you really are back to the days of the pony express. Getting months old messages will be the norm for any Traveller.

In terms of avoiding notice. Open an account on every possible world you may visit, get some sort of ID that the message service will accept, you could have a different name for every world and have your less legal friends send messages under the false name to that world. There are probably a lot of Mr Jones’s sending encrypted messages to Mr Smiths. :lol:

 

[Nathan Brazil]

..but I wonder has anyone found an elegant way to do it better?

"The question is shrouded in technicality."

Since you are mentioning Theta Borealis Sector, I will answer your question in relation to the Third Imperium campaign and its technology. If your campaign is different, please provide more detail.
I look at like it is like Internet email, except your messages are transmited at the speed of Jump.
If your contact is in the same star system, no problem. Radio, local postal service, what have you. Secret encoded messages, have at it. If your contact is in another star system, the er... fun begins.

You are not getting an answer in less than two weeks. No way around it. Jump drive takes a week. So you send your encoded message on the next ship out. Contact gets it 1 week later and responds say within even minutes of transmission from courier ship. Say there is an Xboat like system and it goes back minutes after a response is made. 1 week back.
Message and response time: 2 weeks + minutes to receive/respond. Also keep in mind since jump is limited to 6 parsecs, divide by 6 and round up. Multiply that 2 weeks.
Rinse and repeat until you or your contact are in the same star system.

It is implied that in Third Imperium some, if not all, messaging is done as a sort of unicast. The examples that come to mind are late ship payments (Core Rules) and Naval arrest warrants (Secrets of the Ancients). Messages are sent by ship, even merchant ships, I suspect fulfill the role as they get paid to ship "mail". The messages go from some originating point to all nearby systems, eventually. At a "gateway", say the Starport (if Imperial owned) or the primary government if too primitive or whatnot, receives the transmission (xboat or merchant). Messages are distrubuted to the appropriate places. There are likely some standards, expiration dates or other protocols that prevent messages from propogating for thru the system forever.

Since you are out where the xboats don't run, I would think that your nearby 5 star systems have agreements with each other to receive messages. Otherwise your "gateway" may be limited or non-existent (real life example: the way some countries right now filter or restrict Internet traffic in or out of their computers/gateways).

 

[Lemnoc]

Hmm. The "every ship" part sounds interesting, spreading data more like the old school usenet news file than email.

Back in the pre-web pre-internet days there was a thing called "the news file" that bounced around connected institutions delivering/collecting fresh posts and merging with other news files along the way. It crossed the oceans overnight, when bandwidth was cheap. Data in an unbalanced jump network could do the same. So you can send your message off into the Cerenkov Blue Yonder, to be copied and recopied until it expires, in the hope that the intended recipient or their mail agent(s) will intersect with it.

With proper crypto and stego one can be discreet.

Usenet, BBS would be a good way of modeling and describing this.

I imagine the data files would be ubiquitous and generic, fairly small, nothing fancy, and would each carry a timestamp. Captains carrying fresher news and bulletins would be able to "out-market" skippers with staler news.

I once ran a sandbox like this, where the ship owners (Patrons) just stuck up their series of missions like the old Wanted posters of the Old West. Players could take what they wanted.

 

[dragoner]

I have in fact made the Theta Borealis sector, it plays a fairly large part in my campaign. Here it is as an attachment:

http://www.travellerrpg.com/CotI/Discuss/attachment.php?attachmentid=852&d=1330238513

Messages travel by mail services, private couriers; for the Imperial forces, they have their own courier service.

 

[Lemnoc]

I've tried to imagine this might be how money might operate in the far future. Every ship, right before it departs a system, receives intra-system banking data—timestamped and powerfully encrypted—that's used to update in-system banking data. While you're there, you can draw from a debit card and your transactions are recorded. When you leave the system, the account is updated and your banking data follows you to the next system.

If you do not participate in this program, you do not have debit/credit options on arrival, full stop. Cash-carry. Trying to crack or garble this encryption is, literally, bank fraud and bank robbery, and adventures in their own right.

if the data packets were small enough, you might imagine every ship could carry a "mail sack" of banking data so that all banks everywhere were being constantly updated and synched with everyone's data. The banks pay a little for this, and so Travellers entering a system pick up a few nickels for beer.

 

[torus]

Surely someone has developed a protocol for tcp/ip over jump ship network? Or for some ideas, have a look here http://ipnsig.org

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

Surely someone has developed a protocol for tcp/ip over jump ship network?

Yes, probably several network types. All limited by jump time is all.

 

[Lemnoc]

Surely someone has developed a protocol for tcp/ip over jump ship network? Or for some ideas, have a look here http://ipnsig.org

Yes, looking at the problem as one of routed and redistributed data packets is illuminating.

I see the Imperium operating on a two-week quanta of admitted and acknowledged imperfect data. Some decisions must be made, others must wait—yours, young bureaucrat, is to recognize and know the difference. "Fact checking" would be an all-consuming passion, Risk Management an entire university discipline.

 

[dragoner]

Banks and other similar institutions either use their own or registered private couriers to carry data on main routes. PC's on some smaller routes can carry mail, which is both physical and data, as a way to earn money. Money is rfid marked and tracked, with another portion existing on cred sticks, similar to pre-paid debit cards.

IMTU the higher TL societies are also post scarcity such as Banks' Culture, so currency is more convenience by some point.

 

[Lemnoc]

Banks and other similar institutions either use their own or registered private couriers to carry data on main routes. PC's on some smaller routes can carry mail, which is both physical and data, as a way to earn money. Money is rfid marked and tracked, with another portion existing on cred sticks, similar to pre-paid debit cards.

You speak with the certainty of someone knowing exactly how the future will unfold... in a 2D universe. :lol:

 

[dragoner]

mkay ...

 

[locarno24]

This is essentially what the 'mail drums' are, isn't it? Non-urgent general status updates

Copy the 'bulletin board' state from the starport on one world and merge (latest getting priority) with the bulletin board in the starport at the next.

Ideally a copy goes on an outbound ship on a regular drumbeat - which is why it gets subsidised to the point of KCr25 for a 5 dTon shipment, and then gets sent out again from there, and so on.

Give it a couple of months, and every world within a subsector will have received a given message from somewhere. Not the fastest method of communication, but the only practical way of contacting someone whose address is 'wherever some bugger will pay me a mortgage payment's worth of credits to be'.

 

[F33D]

I see it as a sophisticated internet where the different nodes have a data lag equal to Jump time.

Since data storage is almost unlimited on computers of the day, star ships participate in transmitting packets as they travel.

Physical mail goes via Scout couriers, X-Boat, & Subbies (even if just one off mail subsidy/payment to a Tramp).

 

[alex_greene]

I've thought about this, and it occurred to me that while a Traveller might not have a home planet, he might follow a circuit along a subsector, stopping at favourite systems on a semi-regular basis; such worlds provide stopovers for a time, a chance to perform maintenance on their ships (if they are crews) or boltholes or safe houses to lie low for a time (if they live out of a suitcase).

Such worlds, visited more frequently than others, would provide facilities for the Traveller that shipboard life could not provide: companionship for the night, hospital facilities, a place to stock up with new entertainment data wafers and bullets and the good food instead of those tasteless dry biscuits and protein slush ... and a place to collect his post.

TAS members have it easy: they can designate a specific TAS office as a c/o inbox, directing all mails to that address. The TAS member can send a request from any other TAS office to that central point to forward his mails to the office on the world he is on; it might take weeks to deliver the request and even longer to forward his mails, but if he is stuck on an extended layover on some other planet for any reason, he would be fairly assured that his mail will be forwarded by return of X-boat where possible, the fees taken care of by the TAS. The TAS member may designate members of the crew of which he is a member as companions, allowing them to make use of the TAS member's inbox for their mail, but forwarding of their mails could only be done at the behest of the TAS member - and woe betide the companions, should they and the TAS member fall out o favour with one another.

Non-TAS members may make similar arrangements with civilian mail services, designating one system as a central point for delivery of mail; however, they may or may not have a forwarding service - or it might be prohibitively expensive, and unreliable compared to services such as the TAS. Such a Traveller, and that probably means most player characters, might have to visit that system and collect his data wafers in person, paying any accumulated storage fees required.

Since Scouts are considered to be on Detached duty while they are in play, rather than former members, that probably allows them privileged access to the X-Boat network, particularly if they'd done a stint as X-Boat pilot or Courier during chargen; they would probably have the most reliable network of communications of them all, and a world designated as their central mail point - always the world with the Scout base from which they mustered.

Just my Cr .02 worth.

 

[Infojunky]

All this talk has me thinking about Mail Ships serving the back and beyond.

As well as the informal mail system that merchants would use. I see merchants talking and trading information all the way to and from jump, while delivery isn't guaranteed I can see space having their own informal network of news traveling at the speed of their jump.

The afore mentioned Mail ships operate like subsidized merchants, stopping in a system only long enough to drop their physical mail and pick up.

 

[alex_greene]

All this talk has me thinking about Mail Ships serving the back and beyond.

As well as the informal mail system that merchants would use. I see merchants talking and trading information all the way to and from jump, while delivery isn't guaranteed I can see space having their own informal network of news traveling at the speed of their jump.

The afore mentioned Mail ships operate like subsidized merchants, stopping in a system only long enough to drop their physical mail and pick up.

Most of that mail would take the form of stacks of data wafers or data crystals - petabytes of data, probably in something small enough to fit in one courier's pocket.

The rest would be everything that can't be electronically transferred - cunning hats, low-tech letters scrawled with real ink on old-fashioned paper, antique books, objets d'art, actual paperwork on paper, acetate or other media, low-tech archived data storage (DVDs, CDs, even floppy disks, tapes or punched cards!) and any number of bulky parcels - toys, care packages, mail-order catalogue stuff ... and the occasional apparently dead body in a coffin ...