Subspace Ansible: Difference between revisions

** The third game has quantum entanglement communication units practically everywhere, after the Systems Alliance takes apart the ''Normandy SR-2'' and finds out all the enhancements Cerberus made to it. It seems as if they're all connected to each other, which wouldn't make sense given EDI's comment about the device in the second game (i.e. a single communication unit can only connect to its partner).

* The plot of ''[[Commander Keen]] 4'' starts with Billy Blaze building a FTL radio and accidentallly picking up a transmission from a group of aliens planning on destroying the galaxy.

** This is based very loosely on the concept of quantum entanglement. It is possible to create pairs of particles both of which are both in superpositions of quantum states (e.g. spin up and spin down at once) and can be separated by a substantial distance. Observing the spin of one of the particles forces it to collapse into one state (either spin up or spin down, but not both) observations of the other particle are then guaranteed to see it in the other state. The particles seem to have needed to communicate faster than light to make this coordination. Unfortunately, in the real world, this does not help ''us'' communicate faster than light -- when we collapse the state of the first particle we can't force it to enter one state or the other, so it's simply random noise which happens to be correlated with random noise somewhere else in the universe, but not a communication channel.

* The ''[[Homeworld]]'' verse is implied to have FTL communication (the ''Veer-Rak'' alerting the ''Kuun-Lan'' which is in another system that Hiigara is under attack at the beginning of ''Cataclysm'', for example) but it's never explained. FTL sensors however, are a bit sketchy: the manual of the first game explains that the Mothership has a cobbled-together short-range<ref>"short" in this case means "couple seconds of advance warning"</ref> sensor that can see if the ship is passing near a high-mass object in realspace but they have to drop out of hyperspace to actually see what it is. ''Homeworld 2'' has Advanced Sensor Arrays buildable on Hiigaran super-capital ships that can detect enemy ships in hyperspace.