Originally posted by TheDS:
[QB]The phenomenon that prevents precipitation within 100 diameters is related to the gravitational reasons for a misjump; that is, if you are too close to a body, you have a chance of misjumping. When precipitating, a misjump would be "impossible", so the only recourse for nature is to kick you out of jump in a different location. There is no difference in energy used (by the ship) for this altered course, nor any difference in time. It just happens.
Marc Miller wrote an article on Jump Space that in JTAS at the end of 2000 (click the link if you're a JTAS subscriber), that explained how it works. I'm not going to quote it word for word here, but basically he says:
Entering jump is possible from anywhere, but if you try to jump from within 100D of a body then you're more likely to misjump (the chance increases if you try to jump from closer to the body).
However, if you try to exit jumpspace within 100D of a body, you will instead be precipitated out of jumpspace
at 100D from the body.
That said, he later says that gravity scrambles the transition into jump space, which is why you have a high chance of misjump or disaster if you jump within 100D of a planet.
Then he says that ships naturally precipitate out of jumpspace at the 100D limit (or more precisely 'as they near the 100D limit'. I don't know why he says this, it just confuses things).
So the upshot of all that is that it appears that if a ship intersects the 100D radius of an object, it will precipitate out of jump. Hence why you have 'jump masking'
All this is paraphrased from the fingers of Marc Miller, so it's up to you if you believe him or if you believe any later canon that someone's written.
One, just about every object will prevent a jump from occuring, or cause a ship to precipitate far away from fuel sources. Asteroid belts become VERY annoying.
Only very massive objects have 100D limits. I'm not sure what the mass limit is, but it's probably around the 100m diameter mark. But since it's based on radius and not something sensible like mass or gravity it's hard to tell.
I figured that you only get 100D limits around objects that are sufficiently dense (I think it was about 10e-11 kg/m3 - denser than vacuum and nebulas), but that's just IMO.
Stars have HUGE imprints.
Yes. Especially Giants and supergiants (Antares' 100D limit is around 1000 AU!). The Sun's 100D limit is at about 0.93 AU.
The Oort cloud will be absolute SUICIDE to your time schedule, and if you're a merchant, you're not carrying anything to decanter an iceball with, so it becomes an even bigger problem now that you're out of jump fuel.
The chance of your ship intersecting the 100D limit of a tiny iceball (or rockball in an asteroid belt) for that matter is miniscule. Especially if you're coming from a direction outside the ecliptic plane of the system.
Let's not even talk about the rouge interstellar objects.
See above. A planet's 100D limit is insignificantly small compared to a cubic parsec of empty space. The chances of a ship intersecting that are microscopically small.
Two, now you can create a defense net at the edge of your solar system. Set up some gossamer balls with a large diameter, drop them all over the place in the outer system... You don't even have to cover the whole sphere, just the avenues of approach, and keep them in place with a few tugs. When wars break out, the enemy is stopped way out in the boonies, with no way to refuel, and they have some armed ships out there to pick them off. Set up a few more of the balls and inflate them at the right time, and the enemy can't jump away even if they have enough fuel in their tanks.
Won't work - the balls won't be massive enough to have a 100D limit. As far as we can tell, the object has to have a vaguely significant gravitational field.
Three, it becomes possible for a ship's position to be known in J-space, when in fact it has NO position beyond how long it's been in there. There is no such thing as physical position in J-space.
I can't see your logic here.
Four, it becomes possible to communicate with ships between J and N-space. If there are ways for objects to intrude into J-space without actually entering it, a ship there should be able to see it, and you can send messages that way.
The only thing that affects anything in jump space is a gravitational field from a sufficiently large object. At worst, even if you could turn that into a weapon to affect things in jump space, all it'd do is cause the ship to precipitate out of jumpspace.
Five, schedules are out the door. Canon clearly goes with a 2-week merchant jump schedule. 1 week in jump, 1 week at the world, with maybe a day wasted transiting to and from the jump point.
No it doesn't - ships take however long they need to go from the planet to its 100D limit (or to get to the star's 100D limit, if that's further out), then they spend a week in jump, and then they take the time to travel to the destination planet from the 100D limit that they precipitated out at.
Rapid transit jumps of 1 week and minimal fueling time are pretty much gone too. It's just TOO likely that you will get bumped by some Oort object, or graze the home star, or some stupid asteroid, or some system runabout in just the wrong place.
Except that it's actually not remotely likely that you'll be precipitated out of jumpspace by an Oort object, and the point of the astrogation roll at the start of the jump is to avoid such objects and the star's 100D limit.
All in all, this is a disaster that was not thought about at all. Some one said "Hey, that sounds cool!" and didn't bother to consider what it meant. While it does SOUND cool, it just doesn't work HERE.
Obviously that's just your opinion. For starters, it clearly HAS been thought about in great detail (this is obvious from the tracts on the subject in Far Trader, and from work that Chris Thrash has done). Also, it's worked for many people so far. Clearly it doesn't work for YOU, and you can obviously ignore it IYTU, but that doesn't mean that others are wrong to incorporate it.
