All,

In canon, can a ship record another ship's transponder broadcast, and
rebroadcast it, essentially taking over that ship's identity?

I've found very little online and the only printed reference that
discusses it much at all is the Starship Operator's Manual Vol 1,
published by Digest Group back in 1988.  Their "short version" is
that the transponder is in an essentially unbreakable black box that
requires a licensed technician to reprogram (i.e. change the signal
being sent).

One of my players is intent on sending a bogus transponder signal but
doesn't want to go so far as altering the black box.  His plan is
"harvest" a transponder signal sent by a random ship after turning
off his own ship's black box.

So - back to my original question, would this work?

One obstacle I can think of would be if the transponder sends some
sort of authentication code based on a "seed" of some sort (kind of
like the way a Symantec cybertoken uses a random number seed only
elsewhere held on a Symantec server somewhere) which would be more
difficult than most would be willing to deal with - to duplicate.

What other obstacles, other than saying "That's now how they
work!  You cannot rebroadcast somebody else's transponder signal
because the Imperium, in their wisdom, incorporated handwavium into
the transponder that precludes this sort of thing" might there be?

In advance, thanks!

Bill Rutherford
xxxxxx@comcast.net