On 13May2023 0227, David Johnson - piperfan at zarthani.net (via tml
list) wrote:
> Hi Timothy.
>
>> Of course, next step, messages in Jumpspace (not *through* but *in*).
>> Perhaps hard to do and thus limited, but with nothing else to stare at
>> for a week, advertisers might be on to something here!
>
> In Poul Anderson's Technic Civilization stories -- including tales of
> Dominic Flandry and Nicholas Van Rijn -- it turns out a ship in
> hyperspace can detect other ships, within a limited-but-unspecified
> range, also in hyperspace by sensing the emanations from their jump
> drive. (Don't know if Anderson's ideas about jump drive influenced
> /Traveller/'s creators but their respective versions of jump drive work
> very much the same way and Anderson's stories were published well before
> /Traveller/ was developed.)

Anderson's FTL worked much more like the Stutterwarp of 2300AD, though
without the range cap.

As for detection, the range of detection was about one light year.

>
> Eventually, folks learn to vary the "harmonics" (or some such aspect) of
> their jump drives as a way of communicating with nearby ships also in
> hyperspace. Communication is difficult -- essentially some form of
> "Morse code" made by modulating the jump driver emanations -- but possible.
>
> One of the many fascinating things about Anderson's writing is that in
> the early stories there is no communication while in hyperspace, then in
> one story someone is being chased by some "aliens" who know how to
> detect them, then in subsequent stories others learn how to do the
> "modulating" and thus to communicate, and by the later stories -- the
> setting stretches across nearly a thousand years of time -- this sort of
> hyperspace communication is commonplace.

Playing games with your drives pulse rate was also important in
small-scale ship-to-ship combat, as getting in sync with another ship's
drive was required if you were to board them or use short ranged weapons.

--
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>