Jump 4-6 Development

[BadgerLord]

I've been wondering, when were Jump 4,5 & 6 Developed.

I know that the Ziru Sirka was static at Jump 2 for thousands of years, and that the Solomani developed Jump 3 near the end of the 8th Interstellar War.

Was Jump 4+ a discovery that occured during the Rule of Man, or not until the rise of the Imperium?

 

[mike wightman]

The answer is to be found in the MT referee's companion sort of.

It gives the dates fo the Imperium achieving the TL necesary for the drive.

300 TL13
700 TL14
1000 TL15

Did the RoM achieve such high TLs? Well according to T4 - maybe :devil:

 

[Vile]

The answer is to be found in the MT referee's companion sort of.

Now, if only Marc would hurry up with that second scanning for the CD-ROM ... really, Marc, the CT CD-ROM is fine. Just concentrate on MT. And then do a TNE one.

 

[Trent]

Did the ancients ever break jump 6, or did they ever make a smaller jump drive that didn't take up 10% of the ship's volume per jump?

 

[shield]

Adv 12 gives hints. It seems they used their portal networks to connect their ships to pocket universes and stored the fuel there. Basically they get round the need for fuel tanks / refueling. All your fuel is on a world in the pocket universe.

Cheers
Richard

 

[mmbutter]

Don't know if T4 stuff is considered "canon" but in Long Way Home there is an ancient wormhole system that allows sector distance travel in hours.

 

[mike wightman]

Yep, in that adventure and its companion, Gateway, the players stumble upon a jump portal network.

Oddly for anything connected with jump space the portals are based on planets or asteroids (perhaps gravity is required to induce the "controlled" misjump that breaks the jump 6 barrier - J36 is theoretically possible then).

 

[Icosahedron]

Did the ancients ever break jump 6, or did they ever make a smaller jump drive that didn't take up 10% of the ship's volume per jump?

According to the TL chart in LBB3, Anti Matter becomes available at TL17. If the Ancients were TL17+, they almost certainly broke J6 and had more compact drives.

BTW, does anyone know why J6 was chosen to be a barrier? Was it just because Traveller is a D6 game?

I ask because the mechanics of LBB5 provide a perfectly reasonable and explicable limit at J8, (J9 allows for zero payload space) so I never saw the point of an artificially imposed limit at J6. IMTU TL16 has J7, TL17 has J8 and TL18 uses the new Antimatter drives. A smooth, serendipitous path. The J6 limit just seems to be an anomaly - so why?

 

[mike wightman]

I think you've hit the nail on the head with the d6 based game theory.

Then 1d6 x 1d6 for range of misjump (except in GT) gives us an upper limit of 36 parsecs jumped.

 

[aramis]

In MT, at TL 18+, jump fuel decreases by considerable amounts.

MT uses Drive Volume (Vd) x5 for JFuel, and (Jn+1)% of Hull for Drive Volume

At TL 17 its Vd x4, TL18 is Vd x3, 19 is Vd x2, TL20 is Vd x1, TL21+ is Vd x0.5

Now, converting that progression to Normal rates:
TL 9-16: Jn*10%
TL 17: Jn*8%
TL 18: Jn*6%
TL 19: Jn*4%
TL 20: Jn*2%
TL 21: Jn*1%