On 5 Oct 2019 at 4:22, Rupert Boleyn wrote:

> You mean aside from Doc Smith? He had FTL comms since forever. Mind
> you, neither the LEnsmen series nor the Skylark series took the
> light-speed limit seriously for very long.

Well, there's a scene in one of the Lensmen books where Kim Kinnison
is explaing things to some society girl at a party, and he analogizes
ship speeds to cars and the comms to radio using a parsecs to miles
analogy.

And the light speed limit only applies in the ether. In the sub ether
the limit is *way* faster. :-)

Ah. Found it. It's in chapter 2 of Gray Lensman.

"The human mind cannot really understand a million of anything. Yet
your father, an immensely wealthy man, gave you clear tide to a
million credits in cash, to train you in finance in the only way that
really produces results-the hard way of actual experience. You lost a
lot of it at first, of course; but at last accounts you had got it
all back, and some besides, in spite of all the smart guys trying to
take it away from you. The fact that your brain can't envisage a
million credits hasn't interferred with your manipulation of that
amount, has it?"

"No, but that's entirely different!" she protested.

"Not in any essential feature," he countered. "I can explain it best,
perhaps, by analogy. You can't visualize, mentally, the size of North
America, either, yet that fact doesn't bother you in the least while
you're driving around on it in an automobile. What do you drive? On
the ground, I mean, not in the air?"

"A DeKhotinsky sporter."

"Um. Top speed a hundred and forty miles an hour, and I suppose you
cruise between ninety and a hundred. We'll have to pretend that you
drive a Crownover sedan, or some other big, slow jalopy, so that you
tour at about sixty and have an absolute top of ninety. Also, you
have a radio. On the broadcast bands you can hear a program from
three or four thousand miles away; or, on short wave, from anywhere
on Tellus. . ."

"I can get tight-beam short-wave programs from the moon," the girl
broke in. "I've heard them lots of times."

"Yes," Kinnison assented dryly, "at such times as there didn't happen
to be any interference."

"Static is pretty bad, lots of times," the heiress agreed.

"Well, change 'miles' to 'parsecs' and you've got the picture of
deep-space speeds and operations," Kinnison informed her. "Our speed
varies, of course, with the density of matter in space; but on the
average-say one atom of substance per ten cubic centimeters of
space-we tour at about sixty parsecs an hour, and full blast is about
ninety. And our ultra-wave communicators, working below the level of
the ether, in the sub-ether. . ."

"Whatever that is," she interrupted.

"That's as good a definition of it as any," he grinned at her. "We
don't know what even the ether is, or whether or not it exists as an
objective reality; to say nothing of what we so nonchalantly call the
sub-ether. We can't understand gravity, even though we make it to
order. Nobody yet has been able to say how it is propagated, or even
whether or not it is propagated-no one has been able to devise any
kind of an apparatus or meter or method by which its nature, period,
or velocity can be determined. Neither do we know anything about time
or space. In fact, fundamentally, we don't really know much of
anything at all," he concluded.

"Says you . . . but that makes me feel better, anyway," she confided,
snuggling a little closer. "Go on about the communicators."

"Ultra-waves are faster than ordinary radio waves, which of course
travel through the ether with the velocity of light, in just about
the same ratio as that of the speed of our ships to the speed of slow
automobiles-that is, the ratio of a parsec to a mile. Roughly
nineteen billion to one. Range, of course, is proportional to the
square of the speed."

"Nineteen billion!" she exclaimed. "And you just said that nobody
could understand even a million!"

"That's the point exactly," he went on, undisturbed. "You don't have
to understand or visualize it. All you have to know is that
deep-space vessels and communicators cover distances in parsecs at
practically the same rate that Tellurian automobiles and radios cover
miles. So, when some space-flea talks to you about parsecs, just
think of miles in terms of an automobile and a teleset and you'll
know as much as he does- maybe more."

"I never heard it explained that way before-it does make it ever so
much simpler. Will you sign this, please?"

"Just one more point." The music had ceased and he was signing her
card, preparatory to escorting her back to her place. "Like your
supposedly tight-beam Luna-Tellus hookups, our long-range, equally
tight-beam communicators are very sensitive to interference, either
natural or artificial. So, while under perfect conditions we can
communicate clear across the galaxy, there are times-particularly
when the pirates are scrambling the channels-that we can't drive a
beam from here to Alpha Centauri. . .. Thanks a lot for the dance."

Notice how that explains things at a "you aren't *quite* a moron"
level, yet doesn't actually explain anything at all. Yet it *does*
given useful rules for thinking about things in that universe.

--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com