I figured that would be a big factor But still - how to power the plates of the tubes in the communicator? How did they accomplish transmit and receive, over such great distances, with such a tiny antenna (the poorly soldered lid), with only TWO TUBES? Dave W7UUU
Super High Frequency FT8 compandored SSB, worked out by Joe Taylor's great grandson early in the 23 century. The tubes have self heating diLithium impregnated filaments, the B+ is furnished by negative entropic super capacitors.
I didn't know star trek communicators had tubes. I thought they had better technology in the 24th century! I guess it's just like lost in space. 1997 state of the art ship with lasers, force fields, light speed.....and that robot....with a high tech 1960's reel to reel tape memory memory! Go Figure. Haha
Well, they may have used primitive communications technology, but the computation/navigation technology was even more basic! Spock is holding an E6B, which would be recognized by any aviator from WWII, during Earth's early 20th Century. It's a circular slide rule, with some specialized scales for aviation things like density altitude on Earth. It also has a portion for drawing wind triangles, for problems involving velocity through the air, wind velocity, and velocity over the ground. Analog computation with no electronics whatsoever! Oh, and why did the ship's computer always sound a bit like a punched card reader when it was "thinking"?
Could be! But, space-time laws don't apply in sub-space. Nominal particle/wave scatterings following the inverse square law are subverted into something weird and wonderful. I'll let some math wiz explain it!
