Communication via tuned mass effect sounds
better than lasers (in that it's potentially FTL over interplanetary distances where that matters) in some ways, and
worse in others (waaay bulkier, requires specially engineered receiving unit and careful tuning, probably possible for other people to tell you're doing it even if they can't read your messages, and probably low bandwidth).
I derive this from the fact that whatever the games use for comms, it's functionally indistinct from radio or laser comms as far as I can tell. I doubt it isn't laser, at that point. The issue is that I don't know what's better than laser, but worse than quantum entanglement communicators. And given that I am unwilling to have communications technology sit at, "Yeah, laser and whatever that thing we use for FTL comms is it," for two millennia without a change, that leaves me with very limited options. At the moment, I've been positing that for various socioeconomic reasons, people have not adopted laser communicators on a sufficiently small or widespread scale to apply in this scenario.
Now, you say you recognize the issue with which I am confronted; I welcome suggestions on how to resolve this. Any pleasing-sounding technobabble with a minimum of plausibility would do.
Well, honestly, I perceive the problem, in that it's a desire I find natural: "How can I have a tech tree in this specific field?" But I think the correct solution in this case is the Zen solution: when one opens one's mind, one perceives that the problem never really existed.
I'd honestly just say "yes, lasers are the primary mean for focused communications, with radio used as a backup or broadcast alternative." The comm buoys presumably
STILL use lasers and generate some kind of interstellar mass effect corridor as they do in the game era, then fire laser pulses along the corridor to move at ludicrous speed over galactic distances. They probably have inferior bandwidth and reliability, and probably also inferior message speed, than is now the case... but they work. Maybe only for voice communications, which is the upper limit on what we've seen them used for? Have we seen the comm buoy network used for anything that couldn't realistically be done with a phone line and a dialup modem?
And then, well... there just aren't any other FTL communications systems, everything else is speed at light unless people do as Alliterate suggests and develop a weird hack based on having tuned mass effect receivers ping each other over interplanetary distances (interstellar seems unlikely/impossible). And, eventually, quantum entanglement.
And why is that a problem?
...
In this, and in some other areas where it's not obvious to you how to improve technology from this era to the game era without saying "stuff that already exists in 2015-era Earth 'hasn't been invented yet' by galactic civilization..."
My solution would be to say "the basic nature of this technology really doesn't change, people just very gradually improved the quality and ease of manufacture and reliability." It's a common SF conceit, and it's justified.
I mean, a lot of technologies have stayed pretty much fixed for two millenia in that we use the same tool now that we did then. Cloth still works the same way, in that it is woven out of threads; we got a lot better at making threads and weaving them automatically and so on, but it's not a fundamentally different principle. Knives and hatchets and hammers and so on haven't changed that fundamentally; a Roman carpenter could pick up the hand tools used by a modern carpenter and have a pretty good idea of how to use them. We still cook things on stoves and in ovens, and nothing much changed on that front until we
very suddenly invented a lot of new ways to heat an oven starting around 1800. Some things are just functional-for-purpose, and while you can twiddle around the details of the design, you don't necessarily have to reinvent the wheel. The wheel being a great example, actually, in that we still use very clearly recognizable
wheels as technology, even though the supporting infrastructure of what we make them of and how we attach them to vehicles has changed quite a lot.
Miniaturizing into handheld units instead of, say, units the size of a truck, while still preserving the ability to detect the laser signal space-is-big distances? Sure, fine. That may take progress. But the bare fact that comm lasers are being used
at all is a bit like the fact that people use hatchets to chop firewood. By the standard of someone who knows how to build spaceships, it is a simple, reliable technology that works
very very well, so there is no pressing need to change the basic principle of what is done and how it is done.
The hatchet you buy today is a better hatchet than would have been available two thousand years ago, and it costs proportionately much less of your income than it would have back then. But it's still a hatchet, and no genius-level breakthroughs
specifically in hatchet technology were required to get here from there. All the big advances were in other areas that also had other benefits, and just coincidentally improved hatchets as a spin-off.
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