you guys ever stop to think about interstellar communications infrastructure in sci fi with jump points?
ok consider the following: travel between stars means going to a jump point and waving a magic wand. When you do, you arrive on the other side but since the speed of the two stars is so different you won't stay in the jump point for long; you're kinda thrown out of it
but if there's two magic wands sitting there they can twiddle bits in each other without actually jumping
so for communication you have two options: jump a ship/drone over and drop off the message or twiddle bits on the thingies
sending a ship specifically for a message would be a big hassle, if you immediately jumped back it would be a strain on the magic wand and you'd have to release a tape, and if you don't immediately jump back, you're stuck on the other side for a while
so it is possible, has enormous bandwidth (you could drop off as many hard drives as you want), but can't be done on a whim
another option is to send your message to a ship that is passing through anyway, and ask them to relay it. this would be the most efficient for bulk transfers - they are already going and storing a message isn't that much harder. it would need to use encryption for privacy since the courier could just read the message if not and they aren't necessarily trusted; they might keep a copy and give it to spies to decrypt anyway. you would also want to send it on multiple ships if you can just in case the message gets lost on one
and, of course, if you are in a light traffic area, the next ship passing through might be a long ways from now
so again we have high bandwidth, fairly low cost (the process would prolly be automatable on any ship's radio), but potentially low privacy and high latency
(don't forget too that you'd have to get the message to a ship, i imagine there'd be communications relays sent about so you send the message to one of them and they store and forward when a ship passes through. could still take a long time in lag tho)
then the final option is to twiddle the bits. this is obviously specific to my magic wand assumptions. but the way this works is you send a message to the relay at the jump point with regular radio or whatever.
this magic wand needs to be pretty large to prevent cross-talk across the bits and all it can sense is high or low rattling in a region... and the thing physically rattles a bit and that's what you detect so like you want some kind of damper and sensor and time delay to get a clear signal
so we have this large facility with like 10000 cubic meters devoted to receiving a single bit of information over several milliseconds repeated over and over again
bandwidth so far is like 50 BITS per second
so you build as many bit stations as you can fit without interfering with other traffic, space is big so you can do quite a bit so you get a lattice of like 1600 of these.... OMG A 56K MODEM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
or on more remote regions you might only have like 8 bits
the jump points connect in a node map. so to get a message from middle of nowhere outpost 135 to starbase 12 you follow something like this. let's say we're sending a tweet
1) send message to local relay (1 second lag)
2) local relay sends over the jump point (4 second transmission lag)
3) other side forwards via radio to next jump point (3 second light speed lag)
4) jump point forwards the hub at starbase 26 (7 second transmission lag - you have to wait for other traffic to complete)
5) starbase 26 adds your message to the transmission queue and forwards when a slot is available (120 second wait)
6) message is routed through starbase 15 (8 second light speed lag, 60 second queue wait, 10 second transmission lag)
7) message added to existing ship traffic since it is not high enough priority to justify the use of real-time bandwidth who forward it through starbase 4 (5 minute wait)
starbase 4 sends to starbase 12 via ship relay (15 minute wait)
so a multistep process based on availability and stuff with about 4 minutes of wait through the "real time" system and 20 minutes of wait through the non-priority central hub ship forwarding
and remember: the message was just 160 characters. tho since much the time was high-bandwidth ship transfers you prolly could have like 10x'd the message and still took about the same time
but the bottleneck will quickly become the 50 bytes / second subspace transmitter at your outpost
* * *
what i find interesting about this is the routing and transmission control protocols needed to regulate traffic on these low speed links as well as the capabilities for compression and storing offered by the modern computers running the drivers
no seriously that's what i find most interesting about it
but in second place would be the way people would talk on this. it'd be like sending telegrams. no real-time video chats with starfleet command, more like "P1: 4 BOP S 12. RI." omg 4 birds of prey in sector 12, what do we do?!?!?
then after the exciting battle the message from starfleet command finally arrives
gee i think i've seen that on television somewhere
which means it has to be cool