Early Jump Drive designs.

[far-trader]

Originally posted by T. Foster:
<snip> ...the fuel depot halway between Terra and Barnard's Star (as mentioned by far-trader) is canonical from CT AM6 (Solomani). It's also in GT: Rim of Fire, which adds an additional twist by saying the earliest Solomani j-drives consumed double the standard amount of fuel. This was explained by the designer (Jon F. Zeigler) as a way of justifying that canonical deep-space fuel depot rather than just building ships with extra fuel capacity (fuel for 2 jump-1s there and 2 jump-1s back would normally be 40% of the ship's volume, which is very doable, but 80% isn't so doable...).

Very interesting, and it twigged a memory of seeing a discussion or publication explaining a similar fix. As I recall it the early Terran Jump drive was described as actually more like a Micro-Jump drive. It used the same amount of fuel as a J1 and required the same size but only covered about half the distance, as per the CT rules for micro-jumps (anything less than a full parsec). So the Terran's had to set up a few fuel caches before actually making the trip. Does anybody else remember that?

 

[Ranger]

I recall reading that the original Earth J drive was developed for in system jumps from Earth to Jupiter. Theoretically, the initial designers would not have even realized they had figured out a way to exceed the speed of light, as a 7 day trip to Jupiter would be much slower than the time it would take light to travel the same distance. Pushing the light speed limit might have been a long and slow process resulting in multiple short jumps beyond the Solar System building a series of fuel stations as the designers kept pushing the limits of the technology at the time.

Just my thoughts,

Rob

 

[far-trader]

Yes Ranger that's ringing some of the same bells, but I still haven't nailed down the source

I think I also recall an early misjump enroute to Jupiter that had the ship come out around Pluto and the crew limping back in system. Could be wrong about that though.

I do like the idea (yours it seems) of a graduated series of early jump tests. That works too.