"...Require vastly less infrastructure to communicate from anywhere to anywhere, Obi-Wan.  If this idea works."

"It might require less complicated infrastructure, but it would be more expensive. Kyber is more valuable than the tech behind hypercomms, and you'd have to give a kyber crystal to each person."

"Valuable for what?  Weaponry?"

"That's not the use to which something as sublime as the Force is best put.  And you wouldn't need a crystal for each person, but instead each connection.  You could many-to-one relay."

"...you think a kyber crystal could let you communicate back and forth through the Force with someone else, even if they weren't holding a crystal themselves? And then you could relay messages to others?"

"...What?  How does that - no?  Just that on one end of a crystal-mediated connection, you could collect many comms at once."

"Oh, there are a couple broadcasters who have crystals, all over the galaxy, who communicate with each other? And then everyone else communicates with the nearest broadcaster through an ordinary network, and their messages are passed along?"

"That's generally the idea, yes.  And I do realize you're about to say I've invented hypercomm buoys all over again, but there are distinct advantages in being able to - connect any two points directly, rather than having to route through a chain of interruptable relays."

"But I don't think there's really a way to transform audio and video into signals through the Force. Maybe you could make a system for really important message where people just called a local Jedi and told them what to say to the Jedi on the other end, but that doesn't scale."

"...Obi-wan.  We have visions.  And besides, that no encoding schema exists now, does not mean an encoding scheme will never exist to transmit information by way of kyber; it just means we haven't made it yet."

"Well, I certainly wish you luck. I can help you experiment with sending messages, if you want."

"The offer's appreciated; I might want some help field-testing.  I half expect Mace thinks I'm going to run off to debate Dooku the second I set a remotely unsupervised foot out of the Temple or something."

"Are you?"

"...No?  That would be stupid.  I'm too Interesting to be let go if I get in the other Sith's hands.  I do think that it's bizarre that they won't let me talk to him, though.  I am firmly convinced that there is nothing the Dark Side can offer me; he's not going to change my mind on that.  What I do believe is that the Sith were onto something with the Force as liberator - but the Dark Side is..."

She trails off.

"You wouldn't know the word I'd use to describe it, I should hope.  But it's a slaver.  And I will have nothing to do with slavers.  I will not forge my own chains."

Obi-Wan finishes the lightsaber within a few hours. Most of the basic structure of the saber is the same as his first one, but the front is entirely redesigned, with the new nozzle and several modified buttons.

He tests it out. "This feels good! I don't know exactly what it is, but it just... fits in my hands really well. I'm going to try this with one of those new shields you got."

"That sounds like a good plan," she grins at him.  "I've always thought that the proper tool for a Jedi Guardian was a shield, more than a sword."