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Jump Space:Run Silent-Run Deep

I've been toying with a concept of a divergent Traveller universe, more so the technology that allows travel through jump space and would enjoy some feedback.

Simply said, the passage through jump space being much more hazardous than the 'commonplace' load coordinates-activate J-drive process in a standard game.

I'm viewing jump space as a very hostile and potentially lethal region to navigate, making the a fore-mentioned one week jaunt something other than a 'layover' between destinations.

The most notable differences would be two-fold, how the hulls of ships are constructed and the active presence of a jump navigator on the bridge during such operations.

The rethought hulls would now more resemble WWI-WWII submarines in the sense of there being a definite inner and outer hull surface with a 'void' between, said cavity would contain the various bits pertaining to the vessel's jump drive systems and related j-space navigational arrays.

Now the starships would have less of a 'projected' jump-bubble, more a like a surface hugging aura following the vessel's contours. Mind that now there would be a series of affixed 'rods' and like antenna on the hull's exterior that act to project the jump shields and also 'ground' any wild jump space energies that may physically strike during travels in said region.

Not suggesting something as grandiose as yard-arms or full masts like a sailing vessel but more compact but distinct fittings similar to lighting rods or sections of a Faraday cage, such more prevalent around hull sections containing crew compartments or vital ship systems.

Mind construction of such ships likely not to be compatible with the standing canon materials concerning naval architecture but what's so 'standard' about popping out of 'real-space' and zipping along through a sub-dimensional ocean ?

Yes, I do consider jump space an endless infinite ocean of a sort, with currents, 'physical' features beneath it's conceptual surface as well as strange and incredible life forms very different from our own.

My biggest 'complaint' with Traveller, or for that matter the overall concept of hyperspace as presented in most fiction, films and television series, has been the region so navigated is an empty void without feature or possible hazards.

It might just make that one week near-snooze ride on cruise-control more of a possible white-knuckle experience and bring jump space into being part of the adventure.
 
A problem I can see is that it puts a serious kink in interstellar commerce. Okay, we can still do some trade - they were sailing to China back in the day when they were pretty sure a good number of the ships would never get back. However, who in his right mind pays Cr10,000 for a white knuckle ride and a chance at death? Adventurers, the noble whose prospects at home are so bad that the risk is worth it, that kind. You've lost the routine passenger trade.

You'd have to adjust some of the trade rules - and some of the ships - to reflect a much higher percentage of the kind of low berth desperate folk willing to take that chance and a much lower percentage of the moneyed folk who can put down Cr10,000 for a single trip. It's an interesting view, but it requires recasting the nature of interstellar commerce.
 
I really like it, making the time in jump an actual event rather than the bland fall in fall out.

For inspiration you could take a look at how hyperspace travel works in Babylon 5.
 
I like it too, Patron Zero. All too often in my campaigns jump travel consists of a roughly 168 hour "void". The players say they're jumping to X, I roll for a duration, and then announce "170 hours later you arrive in the X system".

Boring.

Have you read the RCN series by David Drake? His system there consists of the sails, masts, and spars you don't want to use, but there's another facet you might want to employ as it creates a need for human navigators without roping psionics into the picture.

The FTL system in the RCN series supposes an near infinite number of universes each with differing physical constants. All these universes are flooded with something called Casimar radiation. You set up a sail, really a section of material capable of holding an electrical charge, the sail interacts with the Casimar radiation, and you get shunted into another universe. You maintain your normal space vector and, by altering sail orientations and charges, you can slide between any number of universes before returning to your own.

The neat bit involves the electrical charge on the sails. Apparently, the coupling effect between the sails and the Casimar radiation is so fragile that any stray electrical charge or frequency out on the hull will incredibly mess up your navigation. No radios, no phones, no lights, no computers, nothing electrical except the sails themselves can be out on the hull.

This means raising and lowering masts, angling spars, furling and unfurling sails all have to be done mechanically. And because all the hydraulics, fittings, joints, and whatnot involved are continually stressed by the ship's passage, they jam, leak, and otherwise fail to work often enough to require riggers receiving orders by semaphore telegraph posts to work out on the hull.

Making things even more fun, navigation depends on making regular eyeball observations of the universe you're currently traveling in along with all the nearby universes. You've got to go out the hull, make your observations, go back inside to run any calculations you might need too, and go back out on the hull to ensue the changes in your sail plan are made correctly.

Just as with real life, old school, shoot-the-sun, watch the weather, and mark the stars navigation here on Earth, some people have a knack for it and some do not. Those who are good at it can fly faster and more accurate courses between stars.

It's a fun series and the FTL system Drake describes, while unabashedly designed to create certain effects, is a fascinating one.
 
While I like the idea of the Navigator being busy in Hyperspace...
... it does have some issues.

Actually, if you look at it, you're starting down the same path that Games Workshop did with their 40K verse. (Which, even from the first time I opened the original RT, looked like a really traveller-influenced setting. I didn't know until later that they had been a GDW licensee...)

The issues:
  • you need either drugs, or 2 navigators for every ship. Preferably 3, so that they can have some decent downtime.
  • the passage rates should change. The more dangerous, the less profit margin.
  • If you're going more sub-like, you probably should go ahead use vertical orientation... horizontal decks are a nasty trope. (Albedo's ship sourcebook rocks for that...)
  • anything that bristles is likely to be lost in combat. Your jump drive should be a surface hit now.

It's a cool idea, tho.
 
I really like it, making the time in jump an actual event rather than the bland fall in fall out.

For inspiration you could take a look at how hyperspace travel works in Babylon 5.

There are MONSTERS hiding in hyperspace in Babylon Five! Bogeymen out of your worst nightmares! :eek:

Actually, that's not a bad thought! :devil:
 
There's a couple of sci-fi references that might give you ideas:

Aramis already mentioned WH40K and the OP description really gave me that vibe when talking about "jump space as a very hostile and potentially lethal region to navigate" and "jump space an endless infinite ocean of a sort, with currents, 'physical' features beneath it's conceptual surface". I wouldn't agree with Aramis though that you need navigators in an alternate state of consciousness to navigate they just need to be very good or skilled with some pecular piece of navigational equipment (perhaps like the AD&D Spelljammer helm).

Gene Rodenberry's Andromeda has the Slipstream drive where the organic pilot (or navigator for your purpose) can sense the correct path to follow to get them to their destination. The paths can be easy or more difficult to follow. Its probably best to reduce the travel times to fit in with Traveller i.e you might cover a parsec an hour, that way you avoid requiring the navigator to spend a week in the hotseat.

The RCN books are good, I like the idea of spacers in the rigging just like ships of the Age of Sail. From the same Baen stable there's the Honor Harrington books with different levels of gravity flows. The deeper i you go the faster you travel but the more power it requires.

Similar is David Brins Uplift Universe where one of the ways to go FTL is to enter different levels of hyperspace, each of which become successively faster but also weirder.

Babylon 5 has lots of flotsam and jetsam floating around in its hyperspace other universe.

I did a campaign using Space:1889 and Forgotten Futures where steampunk space ships used Aether propellers in real space for sublight propulsion but using something like a jump bubble (a Tesla Field) they could access a huge network of aether flows beneath the universe where the aether propeller could achieve greater speeds due to the concentrated nature of the aether medium. Think of it like a huge aether filled cave system and the space ship is like a cave diver. Some tunnels had faster flows than others and were directional so making a round trip wasn't easy. The closer you got to the wall of the tunnels the easier it was to "see" realspace and get a navigational fix.

Of course there were other things in the tunnels too. Stations anchored there, native life, other ships and aliens who knew the rules of navigation and tried to enforce them. Exploration was handled a bit like a classic dungeon crawl exploring and extending the map of the tunnel systems.

I designed the ships using the Forgotten Futures rules and so escaped the silliness of the Space:1889 flying battleships.

You could convert Traveller ships in a fairly straight forward manner:
1. The Jump Grid becomes your aura or antennas, its easy enough to explain them that way but a surface hit should significantly degrade performance and protection from those jumpspace energies.
2. The Jump drive should operate continuously to keep the ship in jumpspace. so that either means jump fuel is consumed over the course of the journey or imho its better to build a dedicated powerplant to run the jumpdrive and do away with jump fuel.
3. The big change will be writing tasks for navigating jumpspace terrain and defining why and when jumpspace navigation tasks need to be resolved.
 
it sounds exciting when first considered. but by the tenth jump it will be repetitive and there's nothing more boring than carefully attended repetition.

players use jump time for the characters to do what they want. they interact and make plans, or train and roll for success (having holo-booths on-board greatly expands training opportunities). if the players don't want to do anything then one simply says "you arrive".
 
My thanks for all the kind comments and more-so for the referrals to materials concerning jump space and related travel, very helpful and most appreciated.

Before I overlook any needed clarification, I did say potential white-knuckle experience, not to be taken as such expected to happen on every incursion to J-space but always a possibility

I did not consider the larger picture regarding commerce issue, cost of shipping freight and transporting cargo, talk about not seeing the forest for a few scary looking trees.

Passenger safety would and always should be a concern for the ship operator as well as the traveler themselves, so with an acknowledged danger-acceptable risk involved obvious measures would be taken to lower potential loss of life or property.

A ship's j-shield rating might now become a selling point to a prospective voyager or a party shipping freight, does one spend the additional funds to increase their odds of part and parcel arriving without incident or does one simply roll the dice and hope for the best.

On-board a ship measures could be taken to lessen the risks for passengers and carried cargo, sections dedicated to either would have additional protection from J-space, whether that be something as simple as more physical shielding or electronic counter-measures. That goes back to areas of the vessel having rated compartments akin to a modern day safe-room or storm shelter, simply specifically and specially designed to face the worst-case scenarios.

One thing though, before preparing to enter J-space, a wise and experienced crew would inspect the outer hull for any damage that might endanger the trip through such region. Minor things like lost or broken insulating 'tiles' or bent-broken 'aerials' needing repair might delay launch for sake of safety. So likely more vac-suit time for crew members serving on ships that do not operate remote inspection drones or simply lack the faith to trust their lives-livelihood to a machine.

Lastly, with the hulls not somewhat less clean and smooth overall, aerodynamic streamlining would be available only to the 'luxury' class vessels as a sign of status and wealth if not an abject impossibility overall. That fact clearly implying that ships capable of J-space travel don't go planet-side on worlds with heavy atmospheres, restricting visits to available orbital facilities or making use of shuttles or launches. There might even be a ban by some governments or communities on allowing J-ships (starships) from inner system travel, restricting the on-offloading of freight and passengers to outer system way-stations. Said concerns over potential contamination of lingering-residual radiations or fear of J-ships carrying unseen-undiscovered hitch-hikers from that travels in said zone.

Yes, admittedly we are talking a bit of a tear-down-rebuild of some of the basic tenets of space travel in the game but look at the overall possibilities such redressing might offer as adventure seeds and opportunities for savvy characters to profit from.
 
This also ignores one of the big items in Traveller ship operational cost that DOES NOT appear, and that is insurance for ship and cargo. In the real world, no shipper is going to put cargo on a ship that cannot get insurance, but except for certain areas of the world, that is not a high cost item.

If you have a
possible white-knuckle experience and bring jump space into being part of the adventure.

risk factor involved, and for "white knuckle" I would assume that you are thinking of a minimum of a 1 in 6 chance of not coming out of jump or misjumping to who knows where, your insurance cost explodes. If there is a 16% chance of vanishing, you are looking at probably 18% to 20% insurance rates, FOR EVERY JUMP. Your basic Classic Free Trader runs 37.08 Million Credits, without cargo, so even a 16.67% rate for insurance (1 in 6 chance of loss) means that you have to put up, IN CASH, 6.18 Million Credits every jump.

It would also mean that any planet that invested several Billion Credits in a single warship is likely to loose that ship within the first year of operation if it does a significant amount of jumping. Therefore, no one is going to build large ships. If you think that is not going to be the case, I would suggest that you read up on the argument that went on around 1900 as to the size of battleships, large verses smaller.

Overall, a "white knuckle" jump experience is going to mean that very few jumps are going to be made.
 
Where doest the OP mention there is a significant chance the ship will be lost? My understanding is that he just want to make it more of an event in game, but still pretty safe if done with the correct protocols followed.

Oh, and how many Roman or Carthaginian merchants were insured? Just because insurance brokers have made a small fortune for themselves and their lackeys insist that you pay them it does not follow that in the far future insurance brokers have such a legal stranglehold on transportation.
 
Overall, a "white knuckle" jump experience is going to mean that very few jumps are going to be made.

White knuckle does not equal an unacceptable risk to life.

Rollercoasters provide white knuckle rides but rarely result in death or injury. This is about PC experience rather than a measurement of how dangerous intersteller travel is.

Consider two tea clippers in the Victorian era racing each other home with valuable cargo. As they round the Cape one puts on every stitch of canvas ekes out every advantage over its competitor which takes a more sedate course. The first crew has a white knuckle ride compared to the other.

Despite the hazards they faced Clippers and their cargoes were insured because the returns and profits could be so high. One big factor involved was the reputation of the captain, certainly the OP could incorporate the fame or reputation of a ships Navigator when touting for business or seeking insurance.

Oh and right at this moment I look forward SO much to Mike's Utopia were insurance companies no longer cripple normal human adventurism.
 
This also ignores one of the big items in Traveller ship operational cost that DOES NOT appear, and that is insurance for ship and cargo. In the real world, no shipper is going to put cargo on a ship that cannot get insurance, but except for certain areas of the world, that is not a high cost item. ...

He did say he'd overlooked the commercial impact. There are ways to mitigate that, for example by having some routes be safer than others. The safety of a route could well define whether trade between two worlds is confined to high-value items or can extend to more mundane merchandise. It could add to the rarity and therefore price of high-value items that were specific to a given world. It could determine whether a trade route exists or not, making some worlds centers of interstellar trade while leaving others as isolated backwaters.

Similarly, events that threaten the safety of some of the crew without threatening the ship or its cargo - like a jump field intrusion that had lethal effects on living organisms without having much effect on inanimate matter - would add tension without necessarily affecting the trade picture.

I always said those starship crews were overpaid. About time they started earning their keep.:devil:
 
A ship emerges from jump space and fails to alter vector or answer traffic control comms.

You are tasked to intercept and lend assistance.

You realise something is wrong when you see the strange grooves, if you didn't know better you would swear they are claw or bite marks.

You board and can find no sign of the crew.

You download the datalogs and immediately your own jump engines come online, something wants you to enter jump space....
 
Glad to see the flavor and intent of the concept is catching on and not outright rejected, that's much appreciated.

I think a ship not returning from jump would be more one of those rare and generally not documented occurrences that urban legends are based upon, that said there would be some possibility of a chance event that would be notable as odd or unusual.

And agree that length of jump as well as size-displacement of the vessel would factor into whatever charts or tables might be developed for tracking said misadventures.

Where this idea took seed for me was the scene in the classic SF film, Forbidden Planet were before activating the hyper-drive, the crew of the Star Cruiser C57-D entered the specifically designed 'jump' stations for said event.
 
Despite the hazards they faced Clippers and their cargoes were insured because the returns and profits could be so high. One big factor involved was the reputation of the captain, certainly the OP could incorporate the fame or reputation of a ships Navigator when touting for business or seeking insurance.

Oh and right at this moment I look forward SO much to Mike's Utopia were insurance companies no longer cripple normal human adventurism.

The Tea Clippers did have a very high profit margin. Kindly relate that to the profit margin of the average Free Trader or any type of merchant ship in Traveller.

I fail to see a connection between a roller-coaster ride and having "white knuckle" jump. When a person climbs into a roller-coaster in the US, he or she does so in the knowledge that the roller-coaster has been built to meet very tight specifications and that the operator does have a substantial liability insurance policy. If something does go wrong and someone is injured, a major liability suit against the operator of the roller-coaster, the builder, and the architect is a given. Living close to Six Flags Great America, problems with the roller-coasters there are a common occurrence, as are the law suits and out-of-court settlements. A roller-coaster is designed to safely scare you. When is does not do that, someone pays.

To make a "white knuckle" experience out of jumps means that the ship has a high probability of being destroyed or vanishing with no return.

How many people on this forum would climb into an aircraft it they knew in advance that there was a 10% chance of the aircraft crashing or disappearing without a trace, every time they flew? For that matter, how would airlines stay in business with that loss rate?
 
The Tea Clippers did have a very high profit margin.

it was astoundingly high. specialty ships were built exclusively to ship tea. they were narrow, limiting their cargo space and making them useless for shipping anything else (in effect they were disposable), and were badly undermanned and heavily oversailed, making them dangerous to operate. but sail they did, with a will, because the payday at the end of the trip was unbelievable.

Kindly relate that to the profit margin of the average Free Trader or any type of merchant ship in Traveller.

(does no-one play this game at all?) that depends on what is being shipped where. "bring us five hundred fire sticks with which we may slay our churlish foes and we will reward thee and thine with our uninhabited mountain country" (which you happen to know has several mines ....)
 
The

I fail to see a connection between a roller-coaster ride and having "white knuckle" jump.

>snip<

To make a "white knuckle" experience out of jumps means that the ship has a high probability of being destroyed or vanishing with no return.

The definition of a "white knuckle ride" comes from a fairground ride which makes you excited and frightened at the same time.

You're assuming to evoke fright and excitement there has to be a high chance of catastrophic failure of the ship.

However thats not the case. In a role playing game there are no set conditions of victory or failure. The adventure is in the experience that the Players have through their Player Characters.

In Patron Zero's set-up, excitement might be evoked by gaining an advantage by making more difficult jump navigation skill checks to reduce the time taken in jump. Fear might be that if they fail those checks they lose the race with that other "Tea Clipper" or Free Trader.

Also I chose the Tea Clipper example because as others have noted the change to the Jump mechanic will have knock-on effects on the classic Traveller commercial model. One possible result of taking the "white knuckle" jump option might mean an increase in profits.

Finally there's a good example of a white-knuckle ride that effects the crew but not the ship in Asimov's "I Robot". When the Hyperdrive is first developed and tested it is discovered that the jump causes the tempory death of humans. As described in the book its a terrifying experience for the crew followed by the elation of returning to life.

Commercial aviation is only one of many comparisons that could be made to interstellar navigation. What was the chance of surviving an ocean crossing during the Age of Sail? What is the current failure rate of commercial space launches? The factor of hazard is proportional to the level of adventure and adventure is necessary in a role playing game. If one wants to fly an airliner between Los Angelus and Hawaii one can use a flight simulator, one can even pre-select the emergencies one might like to deal with.
 
...You download the datalogs and immediately your own jump engines come online, something wants you to enter jump space....

WACK! :eek: SPACE THE FUEL! SPACE THE FUEL!!

...How many people on this forum would climb into an aircraft it they knew in advance that there was a 10% chance of the aircraft crashing or disappearing without a trace, every time they flew? For that matter, how would airlines stay in business with that loss rate?

...I did not consider the larger picture regarding commerce issue, cost of shipping freight and transporting cargo, talk about not seeing the forest for a few scary looking trees. ... Yes, admittedly we are talking a bit of a tear-down-rebuild of some of the basic tenets of space travel in the game but look at the overall possibilities such redressing might offer as adventure seeds and opportunities for savvy characters to profit from.

(Emphasis added)

It isn't hyperspace like 21'st century air flight. It's hyperspace like 16th-17th century sea voyages.
 
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