Sometimes you just hit a physical limit and the laws of physics say you can't do better. For example, there's actually a hard capped limit for how many transistors could fit on a silicon microchip...
There's no way around this. It's a fundamental law of physics preventing us from increasing the density of transistors on a microchip. Now, you could make a bigger microchip, you could make them 3D, you could develop a better algorithm to make more effective use of transistors, but you cannot add more. Doing so will destroy the chip.
To be fair, 3D chip designs have
tremendous potential for improvement if we can figure out how to keep them cool, which I don't know enough about to comment on.
Quantum Entanglement communicators could be that paradigm shift from laser coms. There's no reason to think that the laws of physics will simply continue to let technology improve. They don't have to be that convenient. Some things may be flat out impossible because of how the universe works.
Well, to add context to this, there can still be a lot of room for improvement within "this is the best physics will let you do" technologies. Just as 'woven textiles' turn out to have remained the optimal or near-optimal solution for "how will I clothe my nudity" for the past five thousand years, but there have been enormous advances in the comfort, quality, cost, and ease of manufacture of the textiles in question.
Comm lasers present similar opportunities. Improve your signal processing and you improve the effective range (more sensitive receivers). Build a better laser that is more compact or works on different principles (e.g. diode lasers) and you improve the portability, reliability, or other virtues of the system. Improve the software and hardware that modulates the laser and you get better bandwidth. And so on.
But... you're still using a laser for communications, just as we still in most places use combustion to cook our food (though
yes electric ranges and microwaves have become options, just now, in the past century or so out of the thousand or more centuries we've been cooking over fires).
Well see-
I was gonna do a huge song and dance about needing specific optics to catch specific bandwidths otherwise you're basically trying to get the mk1 eyeball to see infrared, but your comment above basically nails the point i was trying to make. Yes it can be done, but over the expected distances that platforms operate, they need a large comm array in order to hit the wide gamut of the EM spectrum they'd be expected to need in order to coordinate efforts with both local and planetary forces. As such, if that array starts to move, yous gonna notice.
Uhh... not necessarily?
I mean, you need an optical sensor array on the cruiser that scans the sky rapidly, looking for light of a known wavelength that isn't associated with 'white' light of other wavelengths. You
know what wavelength the station will be transmitting on, so you can code that in advance. This isn't a trivial problem, but it's a problem we could solve right now if we needed to. It'd impose some limitations, granted- if you're sending a message, it takes the target time to notice it's being flashed at and turn to look in your direction, and you have to make allowances.
On the other hand, there's really no good reason for the cruiser's crew to not keep a camera
constantly pointed at the station under these circumstances, so that might not even be a factor here with a professional team on the receiving end.
also, powering a 1MW laser for communication purposes so you can update a ship on the tactical situation it needs to resolve is still a helluva draw on power. (for lasers, power is bandwidth, so higher w/o burning things is better for communicating more w/ fewer packets)
True, but on the other hand...
Space-Based Laser Communications Break Threshold | Optics & Photonics News
This is kiiind of a solved problem. We can do, today, several hundred megabytes per second from the Moon to the Earth, using a laser transmitter that uses ninety watts and weighs about thirty kilograms. The biggest problem NASA has is receiving laser signals from its satellites through clouds, and that is one problem we do
NOT have.
Given that our ships are more or less within gun range of one another, they aren't going to be
THAT much farther apart than the Earth and the Moon; maybe as much as ten times but not, credibly speaking, hundreds of times. The power requirements for the lasers in question, given even generous assumptions and 2025-era technology, just shouldn't be that serious. I can believe that the technology doesn't fit in a handheld or conveniently man-portable unit, but it's very much doable and doesn't require anything like megawatts unless we're shouting to a myopic sensor platform somewhere around the orbit of Pluto or something goofy like that.
this I'll grant, it is very much like the wheel. At the same time, if you're looking for a vehicle's approach in a Mexican standoff you're very much listening for the sounds of wheels and internal combustion. IE, you can also look for the reflections of the laser off the side of the CL, and go 'Ah HA! the station is communicating with the Virmireans!' just the fact that the conversation is taking place says a lot. light scatter is a cruel mistress
Not untrue, and under present circumstances they might be looking for exactly that, and might even see it if they luck out on the angles of reflection (but not if they don't).
something else to consider, this is a defense platform. Something designed to be as cheap and subtle as a cinder block. Why waste build time and space with a laser comm system? what are the odds of needing that? If they ever had one I could see them being stripped out when we took the action to make these platforms more economical.
Because it is a highly reliable and secure means of communication and you
REALLY need at least one of those on any given fortified weapons platform. A gun platform you can't talk to is far, far less useful than a gun platform you can.
Humor me that it is, or if you find that impossible, remember the telegraph-->radio transition. Communication technology historically admits of radical advancements on the relevant time scale, and I shall depict it as such in play. Radical advancements arise when a technology has critical bottlenecks in performance that different methods can bridge in superior manner. Spoons (or, more pertinently, the field of table utensils as a whole) admit(s) of no such advancements because it's hard to improve on, "hold food while conveying it to mouth," when you have a technology that already does this for trained operators with little room for error. Wheels and textiles are specific technologies and not technological fields on the scale which we are discussing. Communications technology (including radios, telegraphs, and couriers) changes radically, historically speaking, as new technologies address matters of speed, ease of use, reliability, and bandwidth that earlier techs could not match.
Thus it is, has been, and thus -- here -- shall be.
By that logic you're asking me for
a dozen or more transformational breakthroughs in the basic operating principles of communications, and the evidence for that in Mass Effect just plain is not there. There simply are not a dozen plausible intermediate steps as radical as the transition from voice-and-memory to written-messages to express-couriers to telegraph to radio to laser-and-fiberoptic.
I get why you want to be humored- you're trying to posit that:
1) Scientific research has been pursued
as vigorously in Mass Effect as for the last few centuries on Earth, and that
2) Research has been
as fruitful, in that society, in relative terms- that is, Citadel civilization can get as much reward per year of labor by its best minds as Earth has gotten over the past few centuries.
But honestly, I don't see why we should assume (2) is true. Or if (2) is true, (1) almost certainly isn't. Maybe the asari don't bother to push the limits of the possible because they're incremental thinkers and their Prothean beacon tech is better than anything they can invent in the short term, and nobody else bothers because every time they trot out an improved model of anything, the asari just trot out the improved improved model.
Moreover, even if both propositions are true in
some or even most areas, they don't have to be true in literally all areas. Communications historically has been an area of rapid progress from 1800 to today, but that doesn't mean that
all progress somehow comes to a screeching halt forever if communications
specifically stops advancing because it got so good, so fast, that no one needs or can imagine major improvements.
