Terminus Quest: A CKII Mass Effect Quest

[uju32]

I know very little about cryptography, besides that some types of encryption significantly increase bandwith/data transmission requirements. That said, I have a couple observations:

1) The Reapers are very strongly incentivized to make high bandwith FTL communications as simple and as foundational a technology as possible in ME, because it dumps a firehose of realtime intelligence on current galactic society at their fingertips.
If the galaxy had stumbled across QEC comms, or however FTL Leviathan telepathy works, they lose a tool.


2) Given the presumed advances in computer processing technology and software necessary for a lot of the technologies in the setting, I would suspect that a larger bandwith pipe materially affects the ability of galactic society to deploy ciphers and encryption that wont get brute-forced by anyone snooping on FTL buoy traffic.

Since even the institutionally paranoid Salarians and their mad scientists use it, I suspect that it meets whatever current standards are.
Someone who is better versed in how cryptography works might differ, of course.


3) Several key background elements in this AU rely on high bandwith FTL communications being a thing.

The Rachni breaking into and altering interstellar Citadel military communications as a prelude to multiple military offensives isnt really something that could have been done over low bandwith feeds. Nor could the Virmirean hack of the Rachni comm buoy network. Or the Third Fleet emergency message that triggered Resurgent Grace.


POSTSCRIPT
When Shurna is done expanding our Ministry of Intelligence?

We really need a project to finally figure out how to read captured Rachni computer databases. As far as Im aware, noone in the Citadel or Terminus has figured that out yet, but they know how to read our traffic well enough to hack Citadel communications.

---

Highly unlikely. First they need an explorer corps, and then they need a Rachni Kurik, and that Rachni Kurik has to roll a natural 100 on leading the expedition to find a path through the relays as quickly as we did. Odds are the cluster get's cleared well ahead of any success in such an endeavor.

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One:
The Rachni already have an explorer corps; they wouldnt have been able to set up so many extractive colonies in so many different clusters without a dedicated ability to investigate newly conquered space and identify planets.

They can read Citadel records, but they wouldnt have been relying on Citadel astrographic information when their biological requirements are more permissive.


Two:
We have run into at least one Rachni commander with 20 Martial: Mira's rival.
And Rachni!Kurik is not necessary to interstellar exploration.


Three:
The Rachni have organic advantages with regards to that sort of thing; their ability to maintain cluster-wide FTL telepathy significantly reduces their need for communication infrastructure when exploring new space.

Where we might need to send a taskforce to explore to ensure that the explorers survive, or at worst, that survivors will make it home if things go bad, they can afford to send a single ship; if it dies, they'll know. This appears to be further strengthened by the fact that most Rachni dont appear to be sapient, so they arent risking as many intelligent citizens per ship.



In fact, one of the arguments for keeping pressure on the Rachni by raiding is to prevent them diverting resources to precisely this sort of thing. Military ships guarding Rachni infrastructure are not exploring their way down secondary chains to either murder new species or find a backdoor into Citadel or Terminus space.

 

[Simon_Jester]

1) The Reapers are very strongly incentivized to make high bandwith FTL communications as simple and as foundational a technology as possible in ME, because it dumps a firehose of realtime intelligence on current galactic society at their fingertips.
If the galaxy had stumbled across QEC comms, or however FTL Leviathan telepathy works, they lose a tool.

2) Given the presumed advances in computer processing technology and software necessary for a lot of the technologies in the setting, I would suspect that a larger bandwith pipe materially affects the ability of galactic society to deploy ciphers and encryption that wont get brute-forced by anyone snooping on FTL buoy traffic.

Click to shrink...

Encrypting information usually doesn't make the information take up "more room."

For instance, the message "we attack at dawn" contains eighteen characters of information, including the space between words. An encryption scheme usually won't take the eighteen-characters message and make it significantly more than eighteen characters. It will just replace those eighteen characters with different characters, according to some complex set of rules known to both the sender and the recipient.

If anything, artificially restraining bandwidth access to galactic civilization might have the opposite effect to what you correctly say the Reapers would desire. If communications are low-bandwidth, lots of information travels by high-latency physical methods. When the only way to send a message fast was with a telegraph, people continued to write a lot of messages in the form of physical letters, because sending a ten page document as a telegram was quite costly and impractical for most purposes. If you weren't in enough of a hurry, the savings of having your message arrive four days from now might be worth it. Likewise, if data uplinks over the FTL comm network are limited to, say, fifty kilobytes per second, nobody's sending the bulk of their data traffic down the pipe. Anything big will never get sent that way at all; it'll just be loaded onto a hard drive and flown from one place to another in a courier ship.

3) Several key background elements in this AU rely on high bandwith FTL communications being a thing.

The Rachni breaking into and altering interstellar Citadel military communications as a prelude to multiple military offensives isnt really something that could have been done over low bandwith feeds. Nor could the Virmirean hack of the Rachni comm buoy network. Or the Third Fleet emergency message that triggered Resurgent Grace.

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I don't know. I think either of those could have been done by faking authentication protocols used by a low-bandwidth system to gain access to give instructions to the system.

One:
The Rachni already have an explorer corps; they wouldnt have been able to set up so many extractive colonies in so many different clusters without a dedicated ability to investigate newly conquered space and identify planets.

They can read Citadel records, but they wouldnt have been relying on Citadel astrographic information when their biological requirements are more permissive.

Click to shrink...

To be fair, the rachni could use our survey results and then just make adjustments accordingly for places where we say "this planet is unlivable because the ambient temperature is over 70 degrees Celsius at the poles" or something like that. Worst case, they'd send down some workers and see how they fare; when the Citadel surveyor talking about Eletania says "danger, insanely allergenic crap in the atmosphere that will kill you" do they mean something that only kills puny asari and salarians, or do they mean something that will kill rachni, too? Sending down some workers to take a whiff of that horrible hyper-pollen or whatever it is will cost the rachni little enough.

 

[cryptoam]

know very little about cryptography, besides that some types of encryption significantly increase bandwith/data transmission requirements.

Click to shrink...

In regards to this, I believe you are referring to asymmetric primitives like public key encryption or key exchange mechanisms for example. These primitives are bulky because they must rely on mathematical problems that do not have compact representations relative to symmetric cryptography. However, in real life and any reasonable implementation of encryption, the use of asymmetric cryptography is minimized where possible exactly because of this problem. Therefore while establishing the connection may be somewhat bulky and you may occasionally need to perform rekeying which may cause momentary interruptions(because you may need to use more bandwidth for certain kinds of rekeying*), in general an encrypted connection should be fairly light in terms of overhead for bandwidth.

Spoiler: *

Let us assume we have an protocol which performs rapid(ie on the order of tens of seconds to minutes) rekeying using a key exchange for forward secrecy. Forward secrecy is useful because it ensures that even if key material used at a particular point is leaked, any future keys (and therefore content) will still remain secure. Let us now assume that the designers decided to use McEliece** as the key exchange mechanism for rekeying. For the key exchange, both sides generate fresh McEliece keys*** for the key exchange and they use the largest parameter set(mceliece8192128). This means we need to exchange from both sides the public key and ciphertexts. This means that we have 1358032 bytes (1357824+208) for both sides to send to the other party. Doubled up, this means that a total of aproximately 2716.06 KB of data needs to be exchanged. Assuming that we can spare in addition to the voice/media channel around 22 kb a second, we can complete an entire key exchange in 2 minutes. Of course, this might be a bit extreme. Using similar security levels but with a different key exchange mechanism (NTRUPrime) and the bulkiest parameter set sntrup1277 (in terms of size), we need both parties to transmit to the other side 3914 bytes (1847+2067). This means a total of 7.828 KB needs to be sent for the key exchange to be completed. Assuming that we need to complete the key exchange in under 10 seconds continuously, we need less than 1 KB/s capacity to keep this up continuously. This is much more practical and should be reasonably secure.

Spoiler: **

The reason why one might want to go with McEliece is because it has a far more stable security analysis and has been around as a scheme for a very long time(since 1978). It is also pretty useful if you already have shared the necessary public key material and are either fetching it from a local provider or have cached it locally and are reusing the same public key because then you only need to exchange the ciphertext data which is extremely compact(at most 208 bytes, comporable to RSA-2048 in terms of size). Other post quantum schemes like NTRUPrime have a better sizes for rekeying with fresh public-private keys however. We also haven't discussed using schemes that are even more compact like Kyber which would only require 3136 bytes which would be even smaller than NTRUPrime.

Spoiler: ***

You need to do this because if you reuse keys in the key exchange, the compromise of those past keys may threaten the security of the key that you are generating now.

 

[PoptartProdigy]

Missed some earlier ones.

@PoptartProdigy the numbers in the Status Screen are from the previous census.

Also in regards to Kurik's Run is every system within a different cluster which we could later explore(/exploit)?

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Now corrected.

Each system is within a different cluster. As others have noted, you claimed six of those clusters, albeit your exploitation of them is at present minimal.

Well, I think we made some kind of agreement with the Terminus Alliance to cede claims to about half of Kurik's Traverse on the grounds that it would be impossible for us to exploit twelve frickin' clusters.

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Your agreement was basically to formalize the line of actual control, your final actions along those lines being to rush teams down the Run to plant as many flags as possible. Thus, by the end, y'all went halfsies due to how that race went.

Yeah, that's weird.

Though it could plausibly be explained as an extension of the same system I speculated on. The real information actually changing hands is via the medium of text and the equivalent of emojis, plus one or a few compressed still images. Then the computer does the work of unpacking that into a realistic deepfake of the person doing the talking.

You couldn't have personalized, individualized calls based on that tech for people you don't know, and as of Resurgent Grace no one in Virmire knew anyone outside it or vice versa, really. But since Durrahe and Milera knew each other, they could have the software to do that.

It'd have quirks and imperfections, but I can see a civilization that had the combination of high computing power and low communication bandwidth using it. Got the idea from a David Drake novel, as I recall.

Click to shrink...

Mira went in person because Mira took power in a military coup and somebody abruptly requesting control over significant military assets after a long period of innocuous requests pinged all of her, "I am about to be me'd," instincts. She is a dictator, albeit an elected one. Personal presence is a significant part of her control mechanism for governance.

I think if I adopted this idea for data transmission -- which I do love -- I'd necessarily be asking the thread for some significant amount of grace in ignoring the earlier portions of the text where it contradicts things. Which I'm not 100% averse to doing, but it's not my first option.

 

[Simon_Jester]

Mira went in person because Mira took power in a military coup and somebody abruptly requesting control over significant military assets after a long period of innocuous requests pinged all of her, "I am about to be me'd," instincts. She is a dictator, albeit an elected one. Personal presence is a significant part of her control mechanism for governance.

Click to shrink...

True, though this has the obvious-in-hindsight drawback that paying an immediate personal visit to the people who've abruptly requested tools you suspect will be used to kill you sounds like a good way to land your personal shuttle, step outside, take a look around, and have just enough time to ask "why is the shuttlepad tick-"

Then again, Intrigue is not Mira's greatest strength.

I think if I adopted this idea for data transmission -- which I do love -- I'd necessarily be asking the thread for some significant amount of grace in ignoring the earlier portions of the text where it contradicts things. Which I'm not 100% averse to doing, but it's not my first option.

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I would absolutely grant you that grace for the sake of watching the shenanigans you'd get up to with that data transmission paradigm.

It would also give you something new to add on the tech tree for "something we can invent in the future!"

 

[jjffjhjf]

So... is the Prime Minister position just that of a dictator with a different title, or is it because she couped her way in? Such that if she were to lose an election, step down gracefully, and then get reelected later would she still be/feel like a dictator?

 

[Simon_Jester]

So... is the Prime Minister position just that of a dictator with a different title, or is it because she couped her way in? Such that if she were to lose an election, step down gracefully, and then get reelected later would she still be/feel like a dictator?

Click to shrink...

I think it's mostly just Mira's personal outlook and management style. She doesn't think or feel like the kind of person who runs around gathering a bunch of factions and uniting them; it's why she hates party politics so much.

If she ever ran for office again after stepping down, it'd be a very personal "this is me, you know what I think and have a pretty good idea what I'll do, if there's anything you want to ask me about, sure, go ahead, so now okay, vote for me or not, whatever" sort of thing.

She might not feel like a dictator as such after running for office that way, but she'd be approaching the job from a very different mindset than the kind of person who normally reaches high office as a career politician in a well established democracy.

 

[Randino Treviani]

I think if I adopted this idea for data transmission -- which I do love -- I'd necessarily be asking the thread for some significant amount of grace in ignoring the earlier portions of the text where it contradicts things. Which I'm not 100% averse to doing, but it's not my first option.

Click to shrink...

Ehh. I'd be happy to grant you grace, but personally I'm not much for changing things up just because. I'm not really seeing much appreciable gain here, being fine with the way things were written before and not really seeing much point in complicating exchanges between characters.

 

[Simon_Jester]

Ehh. I'd be happy to grant you grace, but personally I'm not much for changing things up just because. I'm not really seeing much appreciable gain here, being fine with the way things were written before and not really seeing much point in complicating exchanges between characters.

Click to shrink...

Much of the potential for gain that I see is in the form "and this is a reason for someone important to actually go out there and see something for themselves" or "and this is a reason why the person on the spot has to make decisions that cannot be dictated to them by somebody fifty light-years away talking to them over a Space Zoom call."

Given that our quest tends to remain tightly over the shoulder of a handful of specific individuals, while describing action spread across a respectable fraction of the Milky Way galaxy, this is a good thing in my opinion.

 

[Randino Treviani]

Much of the potential for gain that I see is in the form "and this is a reason for someone important to actually go out there and see something for themselves" or "and this is a reason why the person on the spot has to make decisions that cannot be dictated to them by somebody fifty light-years away talking to them over a Space Zoom call."

Given that our quest tends to remain tightly over the shoulder of a handful of specific individuals, while describing action spread across a respectable fraction of the Milky Way galaxy, this is a good thing in my opinion.

Click to shrink...

Yes that is largely the case in a majority of instances thus far and likely will for many to come, I'm just not enough of a tech details guy to really be all that fussed about the why as long as the narrative is played out.

 

[PoptartProdigy]

True, though this has the obvious-in-hindsight drawback that paying an immediate personal visit to the people who've abruptly requested tools you suspect will be used to kill you sounds like a good way to land your personal shuttle, step outside, take a look around, and have just enough time to ask "why is the shuttlepad tick-"

Then again, Intrigue is not Mira's greatest strength.

Click to shrink...

She was not the first person on the ground, suffice it to say.

So... is the Prime Minister position just that of a dictator with a different title, or is it because she couped her way in? Such that if she were to lose an election, step down gracefully, and then get reelected later would she still be/feel like a dictator?

Click to shrink...

Her predecessor spent significant time and effort wearing away at the guardrails on the exercise of his power, and then she came to power by overthrowing him through military force. As Simon says, a good part of it is that she doesn't really get party politics -- she's always been the kind of person to micromanage, to come in and solve things herself or make herself conspicuously present while Expecting That It Be Done -- but the remainder is that she did violently seize a position of near-absolute authority over her polity and spent a good few years not really 100% trusting her spymaster, so there are some instincts in there.

Ehh. I'd be happy to grant you grace, but personally I'm not much for changing things up just because. I'm not really seeing much appreciable gain here, being fine with the way things were written before and not really seeing much point in complicating exchanges between characters.

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From a QMing perspective, it's another challenge to throw at the players that they can deal with, but still meaningfully impacts their actions. From the player perspective, it lets me slide another element of play into things that doesn't massively complicate the narrative, but gives y'all another system to engage with that I think would be cool. It's really the retcon aspect that has me hesitating, I'm not very fond of them.

 

[Simon_Jester]

From a QMing perspective, it's another challenge to throw at the players that they can deal with, but still meaningfully impacts their actions. From the player perspective, it lets me slide another element of play into things that doesn't massively complicate the narrative, but gives y'all another system to engage with that I think would be cool. It's really the retcon aspect that has me hesitating, I'm not very fond of them.

Click to shrink...

Put it to a vote some time, if you like. "Strongly favor," "weakly favor," "neutral," "oppose," "strongly oppose."

 

[Randino Treviani]

From a QMing perspective, it's another challenge to throw at the players that they can deal with, but still meaningfully impacts their actions. From the player perspective, it lets me slide another element of play into things that doesn't massively complicate the narrative, but gives y'all another system to engage with that I think would be cool. It's really the retcon aspect that has me hesitating, I'm not very fond of them.

Click to shrink...

I think between us still easing into balancing internal politics, economics, and espionage against external politics, economics, and espionage, as well as the entire dilemma of benefits the commonwealth to benefits terminus, all against a backdrop of a two fold vital military expansion, we have enough challenges without having to compensate for a sudden tech deficiency as well, to say nothing of there being plenty of new systems to adapt too between Terminus Council Politics, democratic reform, eventually joint Rannoch outreach initiatives, and whatever passes for diplomatic channels between the Citadel and Terminus.

Also, aren't you still working out the next generation of Virmire Capitol ships? Fleshing out a new unnecessary system can probably wait until you know where your going with those in my opinion, unless I've underestimated how long it's going to be until they come up in quest.

 

[Simon_Jester]

I think between us still easing into balancing internal politics, economics, and espionage against external politics, economics, and espionage, as well as the entire dilemma of benefits the commonwealth to benefits terminus, all against a backdrop of a two fold vital military expansion, we have enough challenges without having to compensate for a sudden tech deficiency as well, to say nothing of there being plenty of new systems to adapt too between Terminus Council Politics, democratic reform, eventually joint Rannoch outreach initiatives, and whatever passes for diplomatic channels between the Citadel and Terminus.

Also, aren't you still working out the next generation of Virmire Capitol ships? Fleshing out a new unnecessary system can probably wait until you know where your going with those in my opinion, unless I've underestimated how long it's going to be until they come up in quest.

Click to shrink...

I don't think it'd really be a system as such, and I don't think it would really change 'the rules' much. Messages would still be getting sent around and all, and on the timescale of one of our turns (literally a year) there's ample time for a message to get to anywhere from anywhere even if it's flown in a courier ship.

it's just that nobody's sending streaming video over interstellar distances.

 

[Randino Treviani]

I don't think it'd really be a system as such, and I don't think it would really change 'the rules' much. Messages would still be getting sent around and all, and on the timescale of one of our turns (literally a year) there's ample time for a message to get to anywhere from anywhere even if it's flown in a courier ship.

it's just that nobody's sending streaming video over interstellar distances.

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It's specified as both a challenge and a system in the Poptart's QM vs Player take on things. It might not effect anything length wise when it comes to actions but it does add a thin layer of greater difficulties managing our cluster and responding to developing situations far from relays, like our research sites for instance. I feel an assumption that this is going to have some notable impact is a fairly sensible one to make, and just don't think we really need it on top of all the curve balls we've had to start juggling since the start of fourth term.

 

[AsuraAtlas]

I'd be fine with slightly more challenge in the future if it reduces the cognitive dissonance of "how are you having any communication difficulties at all if the entire galaxy is a zoom call away" that I've encountered at multiple steps in my reread.

That said, it would create even more dissonance with a sudden retcon. Unless the QM can work an explanation into the story somehow, or edit the relevant sections, I think we're fine as is.

 

[Mad0Slayer]

I'd be good with the change and it would honestly be kind of interesting to see how it is explored.

That said, it would create even more dissonance with a sudden retcon. Unless the QM can work an explanation into the story somehow, or edit the relevant sections, I think we're fine as is.

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As for a reason, the one where we used the Rachni Beacon to communicate could be purely because that was all it was used for and there was no additional traffic causing issues. Also, I doubt Rachni comm systems are all that busy with their hive mind so they probably lack a lot of the usual traffic a normal system has to deal with. Not sure if that would work though but it would be up to the QM to decide really.

 

[Tsipouras1997]

Just finished a reread a few days ago and I can hinestly say I have no interest in the dissonance as a result of the retcon.
Or adding more complications/variables to the quest when imo everything has been fine so far as is.

As for the communication limitations posing a threat to the cohesion of the Commonwealth, so long as we control the relays no colony would be stupid enough to get any ideas.
Edit: Plus, while the War is on, I see no such problems arising period.
After it ends, on the other hand it will depend on multiple factors that we can not predict currently.

 

[Randino Treviani]

As for the communication limitations posing a threat to the cohesion of the Commonwealth, so long as we control the relays no colony would be stupid enough to get any ideas.

Click to shrink...

I'm less worried about colonies getting ideas, and more worried about research sites having sudden disasters we take longer to learn about, or piracy along kuriks run that takes a while to come to our attention, or unnoticed corruption because reports have to be kept to limited data packages or physically delivered. That would all be a pain in the ass on top of every thing else.

 

[LysanderArgent]

I think this transmission/communications idea is interesting enough to be voted on, but I would like to vote on it.

 

[Wiggy]

I agree that it would have been a cool setting element, but I'm not super convinced it's worth backtracking for now.

 

[Simon_Jester]

Just finished a reread a few days ago and I can hinestly say I have no interest in the dissonance as a result of the retcon.
Or adding more complications/variables to the quest when imo everything has been fine so far as is.

Click to shrink...

Well, other people are going to be feeling dissonance if we ever have communications trouble again, but fine I guess?

The thing is, I don't think it'd present "more complications/variables," because we don't normally think about things at that level of resolution. When the precise actions of the head of state are a plot point, it's usually something where any pressing problem requiring interstellar communication could be resolved with a phone call or a text message anyway. We'll still be able to issue orders, call for fleet support, and so on without meaningful delay.

If anything, I think that excellent communications raise more complications/variables, because they make it harder to explain why certain issues can't be casually resolved via zoom call.

I'm less worried about colonies getting ideas, and more worried about research sites having sudden disasters we take longer to learn about, or piracy along kuriks run that takes a while to come to our attention, or unnoticed corruption because reports have to be kept to limited data packages or physically delivered. That would all be a pain in the ass on top of every thing else.

Click to shrink...

Well yes, but if the quest never includes, ever, a "control piracy in your sprawling territories" action or a "rout out corruption" action or a "balance security and expense of research outposts" action, it's going to make the game that bit less interesting. I don't see this as something that's going to be forcing us to do a lot more work, just something that will alter the flavor of some of the work we'd already be doing anyway. Poptart doesn't normally give us games where we play Ideal Frictionless Spheres In A Vacuum Simulator.

This just gives them a better and more logically coherent set of reasons why we wouldn't be playing that game.

 

[Randino Treviani]

Well yes, but if the quest never includes, ever, a "control piracy in your sprawling territories" action or a "rout out corruption" action or a "balance security and expense of research outposts" action, it's going to make the game that bit less interesting. I don't see this as something that's going to be forcing us to do a lot more work, just something that will alter the flavor of some of the work we'd already be doing anyway. Poptart doesn't normally give us games where we play Ideal Frictionless Spheres In A Vacuum Simulator.

This just gives them a better and more logically coherent set of reasons why we wouldn't be playing that game.

Click to shrink...

Yes, all these things are eventualities, but the difference is with communication issues they have a better chance to spiral into major problems. The original corruption in virmire took a lot of effort to follow up on. At least three actions in stewardship and one in intrigue. Without constraints on data or need to deliver reports on economic progress directly there is less oppertunity for the growth of corruption do to having a communications tech deficiency.

We have plenty of things on our plate already without not becoming aware of some problem in the background because of a mix of communication issues and our intelligence division still in the process of expanding it's operations to deal with being part of a galactic community. If this were something already implimented, sure, we'd just deal with it, but as something that's randomly cropped up in discussion and tacked on when we already have a very full agenda of things to adjust to, it doesn't appeal to me.

 

[LysanderArgent]

Yes, all these things are eventualities, but the difference is with communication issues they have a better chance to spiral into major problems. The original corruption in virmire took a lot of effort to follow up on. At least three actions in stewardship and one in intrigue. Without constraints on data or need to deliver reports on economic progress directly there is less oppertunity for the growth of corruption do to having a communications tech deficiency.

We have plenty of things on our plate already without not becoming aware of some problem in the background because of a mix of communication issues and our intelligence division still in the process of expanding it's operations to deal with being part of a galactic community. If this were something already implimented, sure, we'd just deal with it, but as something that's randomly cropped up in discussion and tacked on when we already have a very full agenda of things to adjust to, it doesn't appeal to me.

Click to shrink...

Personally I find the idea interesting, but do feel disgruntled about the idea of implementing it; both on the level that it is a retcon, and on the level that it's basically just implementing a mechanical debuff for no gain like you're saying.

If we had assurances that it would be balanced to not just make it harder for us, or that we'd be compensated for taking on the greater difficulty; I'd be pretty much okay with it. Now how you would go about that would be up to QM.

 

[Yatr]

I can't see that this would add to the narrative in a meaningful and interesting way, which is my ultimate priority with quests. And more importantly, what's the point of playing in sci fi if we're just making everything a sci fi reskin of modern warfare and tech challenges? Do we really want to play WW2 in space badly enough to make our lives mechanically harder when it will only slow down information speed and almost necessarily therefor the story? Additionally, what society with the technical skills we and the galactic community have would ever settle for morse-code over video call? It seems a bit of a stretch that the tech can manage real time video calls but they just called it a day on making it widespread. Tech doesn't need to evolve uniformly over time. Just because we're 2000 years before canon doesn't mean all tech needs to be equally or significantly behind. Some technologies cannot/don't need to be improved. It's a perfectly sensible idea that real time video calling was developed and made widely available long before canon. IRL there are numerous technologies that haven't improved in a long time because they don't need to be, and we're way below quest tech level.

Also, retcons are lame unless they have supreme justification.

Just my opinion.