So you've misjumped. Now what?

[Condottiere]

Mongoose has incorporated astrogation into its Jump Control programme, and I don't seem to be able to locate jump tapes.

An interesting question would be if other editions have also jettisoned Generate.

If there was some freelancer calculating out factor one jump courses, he'd have to invest a hundred grand in a factor one Jump Control programme, thirty grand in a bandwidth five computer, and learn Astrogation Zero (however much that would be in student loans), plus annual operating costs.

So rent, ramen, free air, one hundred thirty starbux per annum for computer and programme maintenance, student loan repayment, possibly no rent due to living in parent's basement.

Mining cryptocurrency on the side when not calculating out jump routes.


Forty year mortgage at five percent would be sixty five hundred starbux per annum, or a tad under five hundred fifty repayment for computer and programme per month.

 

[Grav_Moped]

Mongoose has incorporated astrogation into its Jump Control programme, and I don't seem to be able to locate jump tapes.

An interesting question would be if other editions have also jettisoned Generate.

If there was some freelancer calculating out factor one jump courses, he'd have to invest a hundred grand in a factor one Jump Control programme, thirty grand in a bandwidth five computer, and learn Astrogation Zero (however much that would be in student loans), plus annual operating costs.

So rent, ramen, free air, one hundred thirty starbux per annum for computer and programme maintenance, student loan repayment, possibly no rent due to living in parent's basement.

Mining cryptocurrency on the side when not calculating out jump routes.


Forty year mortgage at five percent would be sixty five hundred starbux per annum, or a tad under five hundred fifty repayment for computer and programme per month.

With Classic rules, all he'd need is Computer-1, Navigation-1*, the Generate app**, an account with Space-mazon Web Services to run a Mod/1 virtual machine in the cloud, and an external High Tech Space 8-Track Tape burner for his laptop.

In other words, it's profitable enough that the cost of a jump cart should be a lot lower. The Generate app should be cheaper too, due to the competition. But it's not about economics, it's a game mechanism... which is probably why it got abstracted away in High Guard, along with the rest of the programming rules, and vanished from later rule sets.



*in later versions, maybe Comp-3 or higher. CT skill levels have greater impact. A high enough EDU stat could replace the Nav-0 skill if the individual's course of study included astronomy.

** Doesn't need the Jump-n app to calculate a Jump course.

 

[whartung]

Or, conversely, compare the competitively-low cost of a forged cassette acquired by a Steward or Gunner with Streetwise skill from a Black Market contact in a regular port-of-call. Especially useful for getting to (and, with a second, bundled purchase, back from) one of those oh-so-potentially-lucrative Red Zone worlds when the Port Authority flatly declines to sell you an official one.

Or it gets even better.

You go up and purchase the cassette for Randi Sigma Tria, but, because of nefarious influences, you get a cassette for that notorious back water Shanghai Si. Shockingly, you find it mislabeled as well, which makes your navigators surprise when you pop out of Jump even more fitting.

"Cap, this ain't Randi..."

 

[boomslang]

Or it gets even better.

You go up and purchase the cassette for Randi Sigma Tria, but, because of nefarious influences, you get a cassette for that notorious back water Shanghai Si. Shockingly, you find it mislabeled as well, which makes your navigators surprise when you pop out of Jump even more fitting.

"Cap, this ain't Randi..."

Excellent. :devil:

 

[boomslang]

With Classic rules, all he'd need is Computer-1, Navigation-1*, the Generate app**, an account with Space-mazon Web Services to run a Mod/1 virtual machine in the cloud, and an external High Tech Space 8-Track Tape burner for his laptop.

I am thinking the "cassette" is more like a thumb drive or (shudder) an SD card.

A KCr10 thumb drive with erase-upon-read firmware. Yipes.

 

[Silverhawk]

In our current adventure, our GM used the preprogrammed jump course to muddy the waters. The people we are interested in talking (or is it "talking") to bought two different destinations.

So the dilemma is which is the correct course and which is the decoy.

Hopefully, we find out soon.

 

[Grav_Moped]

I am thinking the "cassette" is more like a thumb drive or (shudder) an SD card.

A KCr10 thumb drive with erase-upon-read firmware. Yipes.

Nah. This was the 1970s.

It's a C-90 tape.

A key part of Navigation skill is knowing where to find a pencil in an emergency.


(Yes, I'm old. If you know why you might need to use a pencil on a cassette tape, you're old too.)

 

[kilemall]

The jump tape was clearly a McGuffin to level up your ship- start out on the trade routes, training wheels, then level up to Generate and gain freeeeeedom, go where you will.


It's a subtle difference between CT-77 and CT-81, the jump cassettes are ONLY available for worlds on a trade route in 77, in 81/TTB there are tapes available for all systems in range for Cr10000 x Jump-number. I believe the full intended mechanic of limiting travel until the Generate was bought/programmed was dropped along with the trade routes defined process, and not really emphasized to go along with the 'new' referee defined routes.

 

[Condottiere]

Ten kilostarbux per parsec is clearly overpriced.

Unless it's for one of those megatonne freighters.

 

[kilemall]

Ten kilostarbux per parsec is clearly overpriced.

Unless it's for one of those megatonne freighters.

Told everyone the jump tape business was corrupt, which just trickles down from having megacredit (but reliable) software.



Now then, willing to take a risk writing the Generate program? Saves big bucks- or false economy in increasing the chance of misjump.......

 

[Condottiere]

Maybe it's a protection racket?

It would be a shame if your freetrader failed to arrive at your preferred exit point.

 

[kilemall]

Maybe it's a protection racket?

It would be a shame if your freetrader failed to arrive at your preferred exit point.

By that criteria Life Support and Fuel is a protection racket.

 

[Condottiere]

That's paid for, unless you stowaway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmqd9ofpW-s

 

[Enoki]

Told everyone the jump tape business was corrupt, which just trickles down from having megacredit (but reliable) software.

Now then, willing to take a risk writing the Generate program? Saves big bucks- or false economy in increasing the chance of misjump.......

On software, I see the navigation program as a navigator 0 or 1 with the ship stopped to jump. The program will do what someone with the navigation skill does manually. You just put in the destination. That is you type in the system you're jumping to and the program uses the canned data within it.
What the navigation skill does is allow someone who's more skilled to 'tweak' the program to get better results. They can also aim the exit point elsewhere in the system beyond the main world.

So, for the most part you can leave jump calculations and execution up to the ship's computer so long as things are routine. What player skills do is increase the accuracy and potentially safety (they could make an error in calculation) of a jump.
This allows somebody with say a scout ship and pilot skill alone to jump the ship without an engineer and navigator aboard just using the computer programs. That works so long as you've done the maintenance on the engines and such and are following the routine jump procedure.

It gets dicey (pun intended) really quick when you're running at some fraction of C from pirates or the government and haven't bothered to do any maintenance on things for months...

 

[whartung]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmqd9ofpW-s

So...do you think those showers save any water or anything?

 

[Condottiere]

Apparently, you pay in blood.

 

[BlackBat242]

Told everyone the jump tape business was corrupt, which just trickles down from having megacredit (but reliable) software.

Now then, willing to take a risk writing the Generate program? Saves big bucks- or false economy in increasing the chance of misjump.......

On software, I see the navigation program as a navigator 0 or 1 with the ship stopped to jump. The program will do what someone with the navigation skill does manually. You just put in the destination. That is you type in the system you're jumping to and the program uses the canned data within it.
What the navigation skill does is allow someone who's more skilled to 'tweak' the program to get better results. They can also aim the exit point elsewhere in the system beyond the main world.

So, for the most part you can leave jump calculations and execution up to the ship's computer so long as things are routine. What player skills do is increase the accuracy and potentially safety (they could make an error in calculation) of a jump.
This allows somebody with say a scout ship and pilot skill alone to jump the ship without an engineer and navigator aboard just using the computer programs. That works so long as you've done the maintenance on the engines and such and are following the routine jump procedure.

It gets dicey (pun intended) really quick when you're running at some fraction of C from pirates or the government and haven't bothered to do any maintenance on things for months...

An example of a "minor" error in code...

Technophobia: It’s A Survival Mechanism, Not An Irrational Fear
James Albright November 16, 2020

Going Digital for the First Time
In 1982, I was a copilot flying U.S. Air Force Boeing 707s (EC-135Js) with only one thing in the cockpit that could be remotely called a computer, and that was the flight director. A mission always started the day before with the navigator pulling out a paper chart, a plotter and dividers. After a few hours he would have a navigation log. Then I would take that log and a book of charts and add fuel computations. I would hand all of that to the aircraft commander, who would pick up the phone and order a fuel load for the next day’s mission. This ritual took about 4 hr. All that changed the following year when the squadron got its first desktop computer, an IBM PC 5150.

The original IBM PC was an 8-bit computer. (More on that later.) Using what I had learned in college by programming mainframe computers, I wrote a program to automate the chore of preparing navigation and fuel logs. After that, our squadron started churning out navigation logs in minutes instead of hours.

Before I got the program running, I upgraded to aircraft commander and was assigned to fly a mission our squadron only got once every few years and it required some unusual flight planning. We were required to fly just a couple of hundred feet above the water and head right at Russian spy ships decked out to look like fishing trawlers. These ships became known as AGIs, since the U.S. Navy classified them as “Auxiliary, General Intelligence.” We were told they were armed and that it was best for us to fly as fast as possible, as low as possible. So, that’s what we did. When I wrote the fuel-planning software, I made sure it included the airplane’s entire operating envelope. Job done.

A few years later I was an examiner pilot and none of our copilots could remember the days of having to chase through charts to compute fuel burns. They just plugged the navigation data into the software and out came the fuel log. In fact, that was true of many of our aircraft commanders. They just looked at the top line of the fuel log and ordered whatever it said.

However, when I saw that an “AGI Hunter” trip came up, I eagerly added myself to the schedule to administer a route check. The evening before the flight, I checked the crew’s paperwork and thought the fuel load was a little light. Skimming each leg of the flight plan, I saw typical fuel burns of, say, “-5,500 lb.” for a shorter leg and upward of “-20,000” for a long one, meaning that was how much fuel was “subtracted” from the tanks. When I got to the low-altitude, high-speed leg, the fuel burn was “+10,300 lb.” In other words, they ended that leg with more gas than when they started. Considerably more. I called the logistics branch and added 20,000 lb. to the fuel order.

That night I examined my computer code, written many years before, and found the error. I was missing a multiplier for the legs flown at high speeds below 1,000 ft. MSL. Nobody had ever flight-planned that since I released the program and my oversight went unnoticed.

 

[Grav_Moped]

How to get recovered if you've misjumped into deep space:

1. Open up your comm channels.
2. Wait for the inevitable inbound message: "Hi, this is Tammy from Shipyard Services about your starship's extended warranty..."
3. Get bearing and distance on the transmission.
4. Proceed directly to the ship that's sending it, capture it, and use it to fly back to civilization. Its crew won't be missed.

 

[Condottiere]