Personal Meson Communicators

[Terry Mixon]

The traveller wiki mentions personal meson communicators as a staple of TL16, but there is no mention of them in Mongoose, and a look through my Traveller 5 books and, as sadly is usual for me, I can’t find any details on it.

Are there any details on this? Size (assumed to me small), range, or cost? And direct quotes about them?

 

[rinku]

There may be a MegaTraveller or TNE reference. I'll scout around.

 

[rinku]

Okay, the wiki cites Striker, so I'll check that first.

Striker just has TL15 ones. 100km range is 500kg (MCr1), 1000km is 2,000kg, 10,000km one is 30,000kg.

MegaTraveller has TL16 stats for those, and increases the ranges but reduces prices: TL16 regional (500km) communicator is 300kg, Cr250,000.

TNE has a base range of 300km, otherwise the same mass and price. And a miniumm antenna area of 1m2.

Other communicators listed in MegaT and TNE go down to shorter ranged handheld sizes, so I'd say that the intention is that Meson comms don't go down to handheld sizes except possibly at TL20 where the regional ones are of negligible mass - but even then there's the antenna area (radio antennas have no minimum, laser and maser ones have a fixed 1m2 area).

My interpretation is that at TL16 what you basically have are vehicle and hub meson communicators, but regular radio comms between person and hub. Colloquially, that set up might be referred to as "personal meson communicators" just as we might refer to our internet as "fibre optic" regardless of using wifi to link a phone to it.

Or "personal" in the sense of "personal dwelling" or "personal transport". You can definitely have every TL16 home and grav-SUV equipped with one.

 

[collins355]

Good sleuthing - and as you can see from the table in MegaTrav Ref's Manual, even at TL20 the smallest meson communicator still comes in at 100kg!

Yet, just to prove that consistency has never been a strong feature of Traveller publications, the MegaTrav Ref's Companion on page 28 has "Hand Meson Commo" as a feature of TL16, and "pocket Meson Commo" as a feature of TL17. Big pockets maybe!

 

[rinku]

Well, it's not impossible that they intended there be small meson comms with shorter ranges. The smallest listed ones having multi hundred km base ranges does not invalidate that.

I would note that per the same source, Meson coms are necessarily point to point. They do not broadcast - the transmitter and receiver have to both be be in known locations. That means that even at ultratech levels they unlikely to totally replace EM comms.

 

[collins355]

Oooh, exciting! T4 FF&S has some smaller meson communicators....

 

[rinku]

That's the same table as MegaTraveller, but reframed as cubic metres instead of metric tonnes. Which suggests someone wasn't paying attention. Not unusual for T4.

0.3 cubic metres is 300 litres... which as a cube would be 67cm x 67cm x 67cm.

Even the TL18 one of 0.01 cubic metres is 10 litres, a small backpack.

 

[WHULorigan]

The traveller wiki mentions personal meson communicators as a staple of TL16, but there is no mention of them in Mongoose, and a look through my Traveller 5 books and, as sadly is usual for me, I can’t find any details on it.

Are there any details on this? Size (assumed to me small), range, or cost? And direct quotes about them?

In Traveller5 you want to look under "CommPlus" (See Book 2: Starships) and you will likely need to use the various Stage Effects and other Mods to build it out for what you envision. The Stats given in a table or description generally are for Standard TL, Standard Range (S/R =7), Stanndard Size/Mass/Vol at that TL, etc. You modify it from that baseline by adding or subtracting capability and bulk, which adjusts TL.

And CommPlus has been adjusted in T5 to be primarily utilizing neutrinos, not mesons (at least not directly).

 

[Sigtrygg]

is it not a case of personal meson comms means something similar to cell phones today.

The base stations that talk to each other do so over a meson net, with the smaller high TL version being vehicle mounted, or even a very strong suit of battledress , while the individual handsets/suit comms/commdots use EM radiation to talk to the meson tower.

 

[collins355]

is it not a case of personal meson comms means something similar to cell phones today.

The base stations that talk to each other do so over a meson net, with the smaller high TL version being vehicle mounted, or even a very strong suit of battledress , while the individual handsets/suit comms/commdots use EM radiation to talk to the meson tower.

That would seem to be the only solution - but you lose all the presumed advantages of meson/neutrino comms, such as un-interceptability, un-jammability, etc. And you gain all the disadvantges of EM comms.

 

[WHULorigan]

That would seem to be the only solution - but you lose all the presumed advantages of meson/neutrino comms, such as un-interceptability, un-jammability, etc. And you gain all the disadvantges of EM comms.

You still have the advantage of being direct straight-line commlink that cannot be obstructed by intervening obstacles (like planetary cores).

 

[J. L. Brown]

That would seem to be the only solution - but you lose all the presumed advantages of meson/neutrino comms, such as un-interceptability, un-jammability, etc. And you gain all the disadvantges of EM comms.

There might be a network of known relays. Put up a GPS satellite / Meson Communications net, and a Portable Meson Comm can use them to
1} Get its' own exact location, local time, and any steady vector it is moving along, and
2} The exact location of several relay satellites.
This is all photons / EM band stuff, pretty standard -- but the PMC is not transmitting.

The PMC then (using Meson Comms) informs the relay of its' location, and performs an authentication handshake. It can then request:
A} Any cached messages;
B} To cache a message for a specific recipient;
C} To have its' location passed to a specific recipient; or
D} To obtain the current known location of a specific recipient.

I can imagine paranoid PMC operators setting up a remote (perhaps even disposable) antenna, with a secure (wired!) connection to the communications set. The location of the antenna must be known, but the operator can be some distance / outside of minimum-safe-distance in case someone it waiting for co-ordinates.

 

[rinku]

Neutrino comms should be both detectable and able to be broadcast.

In fact, it's a feature of Neutrinos that they just keep on going; in order to detect any you really need a massive amount of them being emitted. So to be useful as a signal you'd pretty much need to flood the area in neutrinos.

As presented in Traveller, though, the pi-neutral meson becomes very detectable when it decays. So you don't need many of them.

 

[MasterGwydion]

According to the books, you can "broadcast" with meson communicators and anyone with a meson communicator within range can pick it up. They are not merely point to point.

 

[WHULorigan]

We have already done Neutrino Communications today at TL 7/8. It was between two facility-sized particle research laboratories, one spelling out the word "Neutrino" encoded by sending it in pulses by letter of A=1,B=2, etc. to the other acting as receiver. But it has been done.

Bump that to TL14-17.

 

[WHULorigan]

As presented in Traveller, though, the pi-neutral meson becomes very detectable when it decays. So you don't need many of them.

The pi⁰ meson decays into two gamma photons.

The pi⁺ meson decays into a muon neutrino and an antimuon, which itself subsequently decays into a position and an electron neutrino.

The pi^- meson decays into a muon antineutrino and a muon, which itself subsequently decays into an electron and an electron antineutrino.

 

[rinku]

According to the books, you can "broadcast" with meson communicators and anyone with a meson communicator within range can pick it up. They are not merely point to point.

Source? I was trawling through old editions on this and those were definitely saying you needed to know the locations of the transmitter and receiver for it to work.

All I could find in what I have for Mongoose 2e was:

High Guard doesn't have specific rules for them aside from a comment that they cannot be jammed.

CSC says they *can* be blocked with a precisely positioned meson screen (which isn't quite the same as jamming, and for which one would think would be extremely difficult for ships in motion)
and says this: "Meson transceivers are bulky devices requiring fine-tuning and precise location information of communication nodes."

 

[rinku]

The pi⁰ meson decays into two gamma photons.

The pi⁺ meson decays into a muon neutrino and an antimuon, which itself subsequently decays into a position and an electron neutrino.

The pi^- meson decays into a muon antineutrino and a muon, which itself subsequently decays into an electron and an electron antineutrino.

Yeah. The whole technology is meant to be based around the first one, since it has to be a neutral particle to work how they want it to.

 

[MasterGwydion]

Source? I was trawling through old editions on this and those were definitely saying you needed to know the locations of the transmitter and receiver for it to work.

All I could find in what I have for Mongoose 2e was:

High Guard doesn't have specific rules for them aside from a comment that they cannot be jammed.

CSC says they *can* be blocked with a precisely positioned meson screen (which isn't quite the same as jamming, and for which one would think would be extremely difficult for ships in motion)
and says this: "Meson transceivers are bulky devices requiring fine-tuning and precise location information of communication nodes."

T5 Book 2 page 145

 

[WHULorigan]

Yeah. The whole technology is meant to be based around the first one, since it has to be a neutral particle to work how they want it to.

Not necessarily. Under Traveller⁵, the suggestion is that meson technology is using the charged pions and their decay products, the muons (at least for the weapons, so presumably for the communicators (either Meson or CommPlus) as well). In the real world, muons have negative charge and have significant penetrative ability thru materials (reaching significant distances underground). The problem tactically for weaponization is that their charge makes them easy to defend against electromagnetically (unless they are neutralized by turning them into exotic muonium atoms, perhaps - but that might affect their penetrative ability).

This would not necessarily be a problem for communicators, however - both muons and neutrinos are decay products of the charged mesons and potentially useful for matter-penetrating communications.