Well, nobody has tried sending ships flying around at relativistic velocities outside of Peace - Samaria had something more strongly resembling science-fictional concepts of hyperspace, back when people there roamed the stars, but Jehovah has extremely spotty scientific records so I don't have many details. So it's possible Peace is a physics oddball here and I'll get dizzy if anyone exceeds the speed limit in another world with any of me aboard.
This experiment as described hasn't been tried with a stationary offworld colony proper - that's too recent and ansible bandwidth is too expensive for people who don't know the right people, wink wink - but what I would expect is that B would get their rebounded message a very tiny bit of time after sending it.
But it's possible you're expecting differently because you don't fully understand the architecture around ansibles and not because of some underlying mismatch in physics. They transmit instantaneously, but no mechanism that decides what to transmit - even a very simple automatic algorithm, even me after I ate all those Internets - is instantaneous. And the hardware around the ansible itself isn't instantaneous either.
Once the message is sent, it arrives right away, but the bounce will always take a measureable amount of time at your point A before B gets it back again, because the ansible itself cannot "decide" to turn the signal around, it's just the conduit, it needs formatted input. (Not that the astronauts would notice even if all the ansible operators at point A decided to take the week off.)
Re: Time Travel?
This experiment as described hasn't been tried with a stationary offworld colony proper - that's too recent and ansible bandwidth is too expensive for people who don't know the right people, wink wink - but what I would expect is that B would get their rebounded message a very tiny bit of time after sending it.
But it's possible you're expecting differently because you don't fully understand the architecture around ansibles and not because of some underlying mismatch in physics. They transmit instantaneously, but no mechanism that decides what to transmit - even a very simple automatic algorithm, even me after I ate all those Internets - is instantaneous. And the hardware around the ansible itself isn't instantaneous either.
Once the message is sent, it arrives right away, but the bounce will always take a measureable amount of time at your point A before B gets it back again, because the ansible itself cannot "decide" to turn the signal around, it's just the conduit, it needs formatted input. (Not that the astronauts would notice even if all the ansible operators at point A decided to take the week off.)