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story identification - What is the work that had FTL travel but no FTL communications?


I remember reading a work (It was most likley a series of books though not 100% sure) that had a universe where there was technology for FTL spaceflight, but no FTL communications (excluding of course using FTL ship as a courier).



Can someone identify it?


I think it may have been Weber's Honor Harrington world but it's been a long while so I'm not remembering enough details


NOTE: One detail I remember is that at the end, some sort of FTL communication was jury-rigged or initially developed as the plot progressed, but it was limited range



Answer



The Honorverse certainly fits the description - there is FTL spaceflight (riding gravity waves using Warshawski sails or wormholes - sublight travel uses a related gravitic drive called an impeller) but communication either inter- or intra-system is limited to lightspeed. And a similar restriction applies to some of the ship-to-ship weaponry using lasers and gamma ray lasers (grasers) - to paraphrase (since I can't remember the exact quote and I haven't got the books on my Kindle yet)



grasers were a light-speed weapon - the first you knew you were being attacked by one was when you got hit



There are FTL sensors, however, since gravity is ruled to propagate faster than the speed of light, allowing for the detection of ships using their impeller drives, and as the series of books progresses a crude FTL communication method develops for use in-system, using sensor drones equipped with gravity emitters; however the gravity emitters can only generate 'pulses' at a slow rate, and so the drones can only emit, at best, a kind of Morse code. The limited range (in an interstellar context) of gravitic sensors makes this impractical for use between systems.


This lack of inter-system communication (except by, as you say, FTL courier) becomes an important plot point in several of the books, for example in The Honor of the Queen where the only way to send for reinforcements is to despatch a courier to a neighbouring system and then hope the cavalry arrives in time...



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