www.ditl.org

I don't think it has to do with the device, but the distace the message must travel through subspace, the longer it goes the more it's degraded, however if it's picked up and refocused along the way it'll be much clearer and get there much faster.

How would degradation (which affects amplitude) affect velocity?

One way of explaining the very variable communication delays we've seen over the years is to suggest that subspace signals slow down over time. Hence the relays aren't there to clear up distortion, they're there to ensure fast transmissions. Thus a ship within the area of the network can achieve near zero lag, but once you get outside it the lag ramps up massively.

There's no particular reason why a subspace signal should slow down that I can think of, but it's black magic technology anyway, so there's no real reason it shouldn't do whatever the writers want it to.

that's what I ment.

the relays speed up the travel somehow.

What do you think the Internet would have evolved into by the 24th century?

With regard to the fusion reactors: have they ever been shown? They seem pretty important (the ships emergency power source), yet they're rarely mentioned, which is weird consdiering how many times the warp core breeches or is about to breech or captains just ditch them...

They haven't to my knowledge, but that was my understanding.

IIRC, Geordi mentioned them once.

Lazar wrote:What do you think the Internet would have evolved into by the 24th century?

well, there's this group of people out in the Delta/Beta Quadrants...

Hah.......I was actually thinking about the Binars.

The Borg slipped my mind for a moment.

Lt. Staplic wrote:well, there's this group of people out in the Delta/Beta Quadrants...

I was thinking this:
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Hirogen ... ns_network

Voyager used it to talk to Starfleet (and send the Doctor) in "Message in a Bottle". Apparently regular messages would degrade, but a holographic message wouldn't decay as much, so they sent the Doctor. While doing so, a Hirogen BOfH tried to prevent them, but 7 proved she was a much nastier BOfH.

Later on, they tried to send regular messages back to Starfleet, but the message degraded and got stuck, thus needing them to perform percussive maintenance on a network server.

My question would have been, why didn't they make the messages holographic, and send them that way.

The important question is, where are the Hirogen females?

well, the Hirogen are like Atmun from Egyption mythology...They don't need females.

They reproduce asexualy? They're hermaphrodites?