Jump Into Empty Hexes, Y/N?

[jawillroy]

For an example, you've got a two-parsec gap to jump over, and only a J-1 ship. Can you do it in two jumps, with an intervening layover in The Deep? Over my long and changeable history of creating small Traveller universi, my opinion on this topic has wavered. My first instinct as a teen was to say "if you can somehow carry the extra fuel, why not?" and wave it through, so my scrappy little Free Trader could get to richer pastures- just carry collapsible tanks. Right?

As I've returned to CT I've come to the conclusion that I don't really like that solution. It's too easy.

IMTU, I'm sticking to the notion that you need some sort of mass to home in on to get out of jump. (Thanks, C.J. Cherryh!) It helps rationalize a lot of "worlds" that are popping up in WorldGen; no pop or low pop, but a decent port in place - there's nothing that's an inherent draw at all. Except - there's sufficient mass, a star, even a large enough rock, to focus on and come out of jump; maybe some iceballs out there to turn into fuel. So a port develops, just a little waystation in the dark, a place where ships meet. And when they get there, they trade, if they can. It's expensive to jump with nothing to show for it. There won't be enough cargo going around to ship in or out of a place like that, but a handful of Free Traders clustered around a barren rock will be ready to make deals. Some of these places will even be able to develop decent port facilities, in time.

Now, I wouldn't go so far as to say that jumping into the dark is *impossible* - just that you've got either have an absolutely crackerjack navigator spending a huge amount of time scanning the dark trying to find a telltale occlusion that somehow hasn't got on the charts. (maybe roll 15+ per week of nonstop observation, + nav skill, + number of months spent looking - IF the Referee decides there's something to be found there)

EDIT: Thinking about this, I think even THIS is too easy: Maybe a one-time roll, 18+, +nav, +terms served in scouts, navy or merchants, to know about ONE "jump-point" in The Deep (Ref's choice,) this reflecting a nugget of information gleaned over the course of an entire career as a spacer. If these things were that easy to find, they'd be all over the charts...

The other thought is that mis-jumps that end up in The Deep occur there, because the mass there precipitated the ship out of jumpspace.

Once found, you're going to need a generate program to run up a flight plan (nobody's going to sell you a chart to go there) and I'd make it an extremely risky thing to attempt, at least the first time: (12+ to avoid misjump, with mods for nav skill. You really want to try this? This is what happened to all those Scouts you killed in CharGen.)

Upon successful jumping, the ship will find an airless rock - (roll for planet size, atmosphere automatically zero, low possibility of frozen water.) But now you can jump elsewhere - if you have fuel.

And if you do, you've got a secret now - a jump point that nobody but you knows about.

Probably.

This also leads to another possibility: the Aged Scout with a Story: "This one isn't on any of the charts, I found it, and I didn't tell a soul. And now I'm telling you." Version A, where he's telling you the truth. Version B, where he's selling you a lie.

 

[castiglione]

Not being able to jump into an empty hex kind of begs the question as to how new territory gets explored.

Even with a "crackerjack" navigator, you'd have a pretty high number of ships just getting lost. And with ships that expensive, I really doubt any government body would cheerfully send out a bunch of ships when there's a good chance not many will return. Not mention the lack of human volunteers you'd get after a while. The scouts always had a high death rate but I always assumed that was because of individuals getting crunched by some local animal or other or falling down a cliff during a planetary survey, not due to ships just flying off into nowhere and not coming back.

 

[Jame]

I and everyone I've played with says "Yes, you can jump to empty hexes."

It is easy, yes, but IMNHO that's part of the point. It's fairly easy to travel; the hard part is getting a ship.

 

[Major B]

I think this would add a level of predictability that I don't like. If I were a system defense planner I could take a survey of the objects in system big enough to serve as jump "anchors" then correlate with the number of points a potential enemy could come from within range and come up with a somewhat refined set of points I had to defend.

If I were that planner I would like it because it allows me to focus my defenses where they do the most good, but it would mean that piracy and raiding just because much harder to accomplish and that is a big part of the flavor of MTU (and I think the OTU too).

Could be that I'm reading too much inot the idea, though I kind of like the freedom to go outside the lines when you can plan the logistics necessary to make it work.

Besides, even if your merchant crew decides to use the collapsable tank to make the jump, that means their cargo space is at least minimized if not wholly used. The economics alone would limit the instances of players trying that tactic, at least until circumstances force them to do it. And then they will have to answer the potentially awkward questions about WHY thay want to buy that collapsable tank.

 

[jawillroy]

"Not being able to jump into an empty hex kind of begs the question as to how new territory gets explored."

With interstellar exploration it's less chancy than that, because your interstellar explorer generally knows ahead of time that there's a star system at the other end of the jump they're planning. It's not a question of dumping scoutships into Old Man Deep until they hit something.

These chance jump-points that I'm mulling over would be almost impossible to find except by accident: a star occluded by an object that wasn't charted before, or a lucky hunk of mass knocking a misjumped ship back into realspace.

The only time you're ever going to have anybody combing The Deep for wandering planetoids is when there's a specific area that needs to be bridged.

"Even with a "crackerjack" navigator, you'd have a pretty high number of ships just getting lost."

Absolutely - it's one reason why such a thing would be undiscovered even if it existed.

Picture it, though: you've got two moderate-sized Jump-1 mains, separated by a gap a parsec wide - and some clever boots shooting the stars thinks he's located a mass out there. And he can't convince a soul to attempt the jump and confirm it! He tells his story to everyone he meets. His conviction turns to obsession, and ruins his career. He becomes a mocked and pitied figure in the places where spacers meet.

And one day, some detatched duty Scout checks the lunatic's observations, and thinks: "Great Howling Empty Void, I think HE'S RIGHT!"

A week later, our intrepid hero's aged Scout/Courier exits jumpspace in the terrible, sunless deep - with a frozen mote of a planetoid a light second away, and a set of confirmed jump-coordinates logged into comp. And the knowledge that whoever could establish a way-post here could become very powerful, very rich, and if the word got out too soon, very dead.

 

[jawillroy]

"If I were a system defense planner I could take a survey of the objects in system big enough to serve as jump "anchors" then correlate with the number of points a potential enemy could come from within range and come up with a somewhat refined set of points I had to defend."

I dunno - I figure there's enough massy bits in a star system that this really isn't such an issue- a star system's still an awfully huge territory to worry about. But that in those empty parsecs there's generally not enough to lock on unless you know exactly where to look.

 

[jawillroy]

An Elaboration

One of the reasons I'm seeing a problem that needs solving is this: Say you've got a one-parsec gap separating two jump-one mains, all of which has been traveled by human spacefarers for centuries, millenia. Everybody knows that there's this gap that prevents the most common class of merchant ships - Jump 1 vessels - from getting from one main to the other. If it's a trivial matter to jump into empty hexes, why hasn't anyone taken the initiative to set up some sort of deep-space installation there? A fusion plant, a habitat area, a fuel storage facility and a freetrader or two to keep it resupplied, and BAMMO, you've got a hub for interstellar commerce that would grow from a lousy D-port to an A or B facility in no time.

But I don't think I've heard of anyone doing this in ANY TU.

 

[Major B]

Everybody knows that there's this gap that prevents the most common class of merchant ships - Jump 1 vessels - from getting from one main to the other. If it's a trivial matter to jump into empty hexes, why hasn't anyone taken the initiative to set up some sort of deep-space installation there? A fusion plant, a habitat area, a fuel storage facility and a freetrader or two to keep it resupplied, and BAMMO, you've got a hub for interstellar commerce that would grow from a lousy D-port to an A or B facility in no time.

But I don't think I've heard of anyone doing this in ANY TU.

I had a similar thought, which was why I posted earlier that I didn't like your idea. I think that the costs involved would be significant, so not really a "trivial matter" but still the long-term payoff (as you say) could be enormous if someone was willing to take the risk with up-front funding.

I have a concept in mind for some military vessels designed to be mobile base platforms. I see the military having a need to bypass charted lanes so they will be doing the research and developing the materiel solutions. That will follow closely by entrepreneurs who see the potential profit. Eventually these bases could develop into traffic hubs. Some would be secret (mostly military but also megacorps who want to safeguard an effective monopoly on a trade-route shorcut) or others could be a freeport.

Your idea makes that type of activity less likely so it won't fly IMTU - but yours also has the benefit of the "rock" which can be the foundation for constructing the waypoint. For my concept everything will have to be brought along, piece by piece.

 

[jawillroy]

I guess that my thought is this: if you can just jump a ship into a void like that, I don't really agree that it's all that difficult to start up a way-station. A merchant corporation with a small fleet - a few free traders to do supply runs, with one converted to run as a tanker; an old subbie left out there to serve as a fuel depot/warehouse, and I'd say you're in business. The company fleet gets free fuel, berthing and warehousing. Charge a markup on fuel and dock fees on everybody else and strike a deal with the local duke to provide protection in return for a cut of the proceeds. Fold the profits into physical plant and you can retire the subbie for a station.

And that'd be a puny set-up started by, basically, a nothing little trade company - any Free Trader that was ever tempted to put a down payment on a second ship would eventually be able to achieve this. The IN or a corporation would be able to do it right.

If there wasn't a definite reason for it <i>not</i> happening, it would be happening all the time.

 

[dean]

I'm also an adherent to the you-need-a-mass-at-the-end-of-the-jump theory, myself.

However, that mass has to be awfully large, or you have to be unsafely close to it to be successful in having it pop you out of jump space.

For example, a star system and it's planets are easily massive enough to be able to make jumps with a simple set of data; the relative coordinates (x,y,z) and it's approximate aggregate mass; within an order of magnitude is close enough for these star-tied jumps. For safety, and because inner approaches are considered hostile automatically by the locals, most ships arrive out past the jump-bouy (10-100 diameters, depending upon the position of any other major masses in the system) and putter their way in-system. This large distance pretty much guarantees that ships will not be jumping in on top of each other or any significant masses that might exist in the system. In addition, it makes point defense of this sphere infeasible. (Note you also need to be outside the mass-diameter in order to jump out, of you get pulled right back into normal space before you leave).

A small planetoid in the middle of a parsec is not as jump-point friendly for a variety of reasons. First, as you noted, it's hard to detect. Second, even if you find it by noting stellar occulsions, you really need to know it's approximate mass to calculate a jump using it. For a star system, being off by an order of magnitude isn't fatal. For a small mass, you either miscalculate and come out so far way you have a month's M fuel trying to get to the target (all the fuel you carry, mind you), or you jump into it and BOOM! all your problems are solved anyway. Third, these types of objects obviously aren't capable of providing an economical source of fuel; any very dense, small objects that would be difficult to detect would likely be fairly useless in this regard. Fourth, economically speaking, jumping one parsec twice is silly. The ony time this is a great boon is when you are reaching otherwise uneconomically remote locations - and the reward has to be significant to offset the cost of making multiple jumps.

It may be that some of the belt systems in the canon universe could be sunless systems, useful because they not only provide an enconomic incentive to go to (mine the ores), but also because they provide a large, stable mass to use as a jump-referent.

My 2 centicredits.

 

[daryen]

One of the reasons I'm seeing a problem that needs solving is this: Say you've got a one-parsec gap separating two jump-one mains, all of which has been traveled by human spacefarers for centuries, millenia. Everybody knows that there's this gap that prevents the most common class of merchant ships - Jump 1 vessels - from getting from one main to the other. If it's a trivial matter to jump into empty hexes, why hasn't anyone taken the initiative to set up some sort of deep-space installation there? A fusion plant, a habitat area, a fuel storage facility and a freetrader or two to keep it resupplied, and BAMMO, you've got a hub for interstellar commerce that would grow from a lousy D-port to an A or B facility in no time.

But I don't think I've heard of anyone doing this in ANY TU.

Sure they have.

The first appearance of such a thing is in The Traveller Adventure. One of the adventures in the overall campaign involves raiding such a place and capturing ships from an enemy corporation.

In the Regency Sourcebook they give such places a name: calibration points. Many of the most major calibration points are then even included ON THE MAP.

Finally, in 1248 Spinward States, there are two such calibration points that do actually develop into "real" systems with full UWPs (providing a J4 route into and out of the Islands worlds in Reft).

So, yes, these things have been used and even described before in the OTU.

 

[Garyius2003]

Here is a post I worked up months ago on point for a rift station. I figured TL-13 and and the station ending up J-2 out, but you get the point...



I think it would be very likely that refueling points for the rift would be made, at sublight.

Assume that you have a huge tank of water/ice/fuel made and filled, most likely of hull armor.

Use an iceball for armor in front, or lots of extra armor up there.

Attach an M-drive and quarters module, boost for a few months (assume topping out at 1/4 c to avoid dying when they hit a marble; and avoid time issues that make my head hurt).

Jump ship comes out and grabs the quarters and the drives.

Tank wanders out for years.

Crew starts new tank, and new tank, and new tank.

Crew jumps out with drives and quarters modules and starts slowing tank one down.

Tank one stops J-X out.

Some other crew does it on the other side if needed.

Repeat.

Bingo, for a few billion credits the rift is bridged. You lose the capital costs for the tanks, and maybe they could be boosted back if their value equaled the cost of the crewing and drive cost. Everything else is reusable and being used for profit. If your Traveller allows bots the crewing costs could even be low.

All you need is a customer base who will pay 80,000Cr per ton of fuel.

The only way this doesn't work is if your Traveller requires a mass to jump to, or your Traveller does not allow big changes in real space speed through jumping.

Classic Traveller proof at TL13:

Assume 10,000 ton tank and armor 4. 500 MCr per tank. (Needs based on volume expected years later --assume one per month) 12 needed per year=6,000MCr

Quarters/Bridge/Drives module: 1,500 MCr (Assume one tank per month, three months to speed up or slow down: 6 needed, 7 for a spare) 7 needed=10,500MCr (One time cost)

Jump ship which can jump J2 and carry 1,000 tons (I get 918 for the tank drives/bridge/quarters package) MCr 485 (Plus one spare) 2 at MCr970

First year capital cost = 18,000 MCr

Second year capital cost = 6,000 MCr + replacement budget =8,000MCr

Assume 300 crew needed (300*4,000 per month) = Yearly 14.5 MCr.

Assume 10% Maint/Ops costs (for drives modules and jump ships) Yearly= 1,150MCr

Annual costs (After year one) 9,165MCr.

So long as you sell 9,000 tons of fuel monthly for more than 850MCr the plan makes commerical sense. The question is who would pay 80,000Cr per ton.

 

[Supplement Four]

IMTU, I'm sticking to the notion that you need some sort of mass to home in on to get out of jump.

I didn't know Cherryh did it, but I've used that "idea" of jump before. The jump is initiated by the J-Drive, but this is only a sling-shot type effect. The vessel is "thrown" at a massive body, "caught" in that body's grave well, and slowly tumbled back into normal space. The tumble back into N-Space takes a week or so, give or take 10%:smirk:.

So, ships will use their spectrometers when attempting a jump to a new system never before explored and typically exit at the 100 diam limit of the system's start. Then, closer scans of the system can be made to find worlds.

This is definitely against OTU thinking, because in the OTU, a ship can make two jumps, back to back, as long as it has the fuel (drop tanks...dismountable fuel tanks...tankers and fueling stations...etc).

 

[Whipsnade]

IMTU, I'm sticking to the notion that you need some sort of mass to home in on to get out of jump. (Thanks, C.J. Cherryh!)

Jawillroy,

This is Traveller, not the Merchanter Universe.

Cherryh's setting is great, but it's not Traveller

It helps rationalize a lot of "worlds" that are popping up in WorldGen...

There are plenty of other explanations for those worlds, explanations that don't disembowel Official Traveller Universe canonical history on a whim.

Surf on over to the ZhoBerka website, follow any of the astrography links there, and open up a map for any sector between Corridor and Ley and Antares and the Solomani Rim. See all the multi-parsec gaps between all the mains and clusters? You might be surprised to know that the pre-Ziru Sirka Vilani explored all that territory with jump1 drives. They crossed each and every one of those empty hexes and they didn't need any 'mass' to do so.

Like one physicist's comment on string theory, The "Brown Dwarf Boobery" found GT:ISW is so bad it isn't even wrong. You don't need mass to either make or precipitate from jumps and you've never needed mass to either make or precipitate from jumps.

That's the OTU position on the matter. What you do in YTU is your own affair.


Have fun,
Bill

 

[jawillroy]

Dean: I like your rationale with regard to "jump unfriendly planetoids" - On the one hand, I like that it might be a really difficult, dangerous thing to do! On the other hand, you could argue it'd get less risky once the size of the jump-anchor became a known factor.

I don't think jumping one parsec twice is actually all that silly: IMTU the majority of merchant craft are short-haulers: long-jump vessels are the realm of military and government-subsidized shipping. I agree that it's not something you're going to do for giggles: but if that J-2 gap lies between an industrial world and an agricultural world, there's an opportunity for making large money off this kind of run. The need to build such a place presupposes an existing demand to cross the rift.

daryen: Thank you! I bow to your command of canon. Question: do you think that the assumption is that a calibration point is *necessary* for navigation in the open hexes? What does canon say a calibration point *is?*

Garyius2003, I've no more brain left today to run costs, but I can't help but think it could be started smaller, and done cheaper - especially if it were done in-house by a single trade corp, and kept proprietary. Every ship you send there brings fuel, supplies, and cargo that will sell well at the other side of the rift; it leaves the cargo at the way-station for the next company ship to come through (from the other side!) and goes back the way it came. None of this is based on carrying passengers or paid freight; everything stays in house. I suspect a trade corp could build up quite a profitable enterprise in the deep. The trick would be building it up into something strong before the word got out. Once non-company ships start calling, that's when it gets really interesting.

 

[jawillroy]

Don't *taze* me, Whipsnade! No need to be snippy. I've been patchke-ing around with this game since 1985, but I never did bother with OTU all that much, and I'm just re-approaching it, and I'm curious to see what other folks do with it, is all.

But but but. I'm hearing one canon source that says "Jumping in to empty hexes is fine" and I'm hearing another that says "calibration points exist in some empty hexes." If there's no big deal in jumping across empty space (barring your own fuel haulage), then why bother with calibration points at all? (setting aside the question of what those points and why you have to calibrate there.)

 

[dean]

I don't think jumping one parsec twice is actually all that silly: IMTU the majority of merchant craft are short-haulers: long-jump vessels are the realm of military and government-subsidized shipping. I agree that it's not something you're going to do for giggles: but if that J-2 gap lies between an industrial world and an agricultural world, there's an opportunity for making large money off this kind of run. The need to build such a place presupposes an existing demand to cross the rift.

It appears I failed to mention IMTU that to actually work as a jump-reference, it has to be fairly massive. Not large, just having a lot of mass. It also needs to be relatively well matched to the vector and velocity of the local universe.

Now, if the place in space you are thinking of building this wayport at is indeed without any significant masses, then it's really, really hard to accumulate the necessary mass of matter to be able to use it as a jump-referent, since it's all M-drive boosting. That's the part that really kills the economics. It'd take a half dozen largish nickel-iron asteroids to make up enough mass. There's a lot of nothing out there between the stars...

I also like to think that ships that misjump drop out of jumpspace because of the random masses that fly around out there. In many cases, a mis-jumped ship will be pulled out and the object that pulled the ship out is later detected moving away from the ship on another vector at a very high velocity. You could track the object and ascertain it's mass and vector, but in many cases it's simply moving too fast to be useful as a jump-referent.

 

[Fritz_Brown]

Fourth, economically speaking, jumping one parsec twice is silly. The ony time this is a great boon is when you are reaching otherwise uneconomically remote locations - and the reward has to be significant to offset the cost of making multiple jumps.

Au contraire, mon frere. If you have a horseshoe-shaped main, say 10-12 jumps long, with a few parsecs between the ends (beyond normal TL for most folks), a mid-point would be a huge time/money-saver! (Yes, if you play late-OTU, where TL15 is ubiquitous, this isn't as big a deal.) 2 jumps vs 10? Oh yeah - that would be viable!

Always remember, jawillroy, this is Bill's main point:

What you do in YTU is your own affair. Have fun.

(He doesn't use smilies enough... )

It appears I failed to mention IMTU that to actually work as a jump-reference, it has to be fairly massive. Not large, just having a lot of mass. It also needs to be relatively well matched to the vector and velocity of the local universe.
[SNIP]
You could track the object and ascertain it's mass and vector, but in many cases it's simply moving too fast to be useful as a jump-referent.

Yup, that would muck things up for certain.

 

[aramis]

Canon, specifically The Traveller Adventure, says, yes, you can jump to empty hexes; it's just two jumps. yes, each requires full calcs.

 

[daryen]

daryen: Thank you! I bow to your command of canon. Question: do you think that the assumption is that a calibration point is *necessary* for navigation in the open hexes? What does canon say a calibration point *is?*

A "calibration point" is just a fuel dump.

In other words, if a ship has sufficient fuel for two jumps, it doesn't need a calibration point. However, if a calibration point is present, then a source of fuel is available, so the ship can just jump in, refuel, and jump out.

The "calibration point" is not necessary for the open space jump. It is simply an organized refueling point in the open space. It is a convenience, not a requirement.

Also, they are usually owned by someone. That someone (whether a government or corporation) will usually like to keep their exact locations a secret so they can have an advantage over others who do not have conveniently located fuel depots in the middle of nowhere.

But, just to be clear, calibration points are not, in any way, necessary for a ship to jump into, or jump out of, an "empty hex".

Oh, one more example: Bryn Avgrunn Base from GURPS Traveller: Sword Worlds