What are your thoughts on stuttewarp navigation? A course must obviously be researched and laid in. How long would it take?
I think it depends on the trip. Between settled stars it's quick, the courses are already laid out, you just bring up the stellar locations program in your navigational computer, it computes exact distance to the destination and away you go. Stutterwarp isn't like "into the hole and out" like Jump. It's more like sailing today so you could make course corrections pretty much any time you want between your origin and destination. Most people as "time as money" probably use the shortest distance.
Could a captain simply point a direction and "engage"? (aka Dead Reckoning in the newTraveller 2300 book)
Yes, though course corrections would probably have to be made.
Could you detect hazards while in warp in time to avoid them?
Yes. Many people seem to believe that Stutterwarp involves going into some alternate dimension like Traveller Jump drive, Warp travel from Warhammer 40,000, or Star Wars Hyperdrive. You don't actually do this.
Stutterwarp is a scaling up electron tunnel phenomenon, which from my understanding is basically probability. In 2300AD, this probability is explained by teleporting which has somehow been scaled up to move starship sized objects about. Because of this each jump in Stutterwarp takes no time, it's literally instantaneous phenomenon, which can be a bit mind-bending. You do some quantum probability stuff, and one moment you're in one location, the next you're in another. Each jump is pretty short, like on the order of a few hundred meters, with each jump distance getting shorter the higher gravity gradient you're in and longer the less gravity there is. Stutterwarp repeats these jumps thousands of times per second so you in effect end up traveling faster than the speed of light once gravity gets low enough as you make tiny hops around existence to get places like someone was butt-splicing film together to give the effect of teleporting, you "stutter" about, that's why it's called Stutterwarp.
The time it takes to travel between systems with Stutterwarp is actually all time spent in the "real" universe - it's the time it takes for the Stutterwarp (or more properly, the Jerome Drive) to prepare for the next jump, such as charging the capacitor coil, or aligning them, or whatever handwavium that occurs for Stutterwarp to occur. During this period, the a ship's passive sensors can take in data from the outside. Obviously active sensors will not work if you're traveling at effectively faster-than-light speeds as you'll outrun your own broadcasts, but passive sensors work fine. Stutterwarp has no speed vector of its own since you teleport about - you have the speed vector you started your trip at, plus anything your might apply while in mid-trip using your own thrusters, so I don't think there'd be any red or blue shifting of radiation into your sensors - as far as physics is concerned, you're pretty much dead in the water between teleports.
Your passive sensors can gather data on potential threats ahead by paralax differences in the data samples taken between each teleport. The computer would track all of these, figure out what's closer by the shift in perspective each jump and sort them for threat.
This won't take into account small particles and it's never explained exactly how ships avoid tiny particles, with the mysterious vanishing of a ship
Carolina Dream in the
Colonial Atlas explained as a collision with an object. Given that small objects like this can't be rare, I'd rather think this was sloppy quality control on the part of GDW for the writers of the
Colonial Atlas or else you'd think Stutterwarp travel would be really hazardous. So in my 2300 universe, I explain that Stutterwarp has an additional safety feature, the Quantum Precipitation Predictor (QPP). The QPP works by using more quantum probability and powerful computers to "know" (predict) what will be in a Stutterwarp's next hop location. If it finds anything that will be a significant threat to the ship or its occupants, the device automatically plots a course to avoid it. If it can't find a location like this, it doesn't jump at all and gives an error. This means that areas of space with fine debris (like fine sand or dust particles given off by explosions) can shut down a Stutterwarp. Obviously if there's some sort atmosphere, even if it's not 0.1G will shut down a Stutterwarp.
What about the system itself? How long to prepare to enter warp? If you are fleeing the authorities from a planet, how long before you could enter warp?
Stutterwarp isn't Jump. You don't "prepare to enter warp." Stutterwarp is essentially a kind of propulsion system which lets you go faster the less gravity there is, besides certain break points, the "speed" of travel seems linear on how weak the local gravity is. So really Stutterwarp is more like a modern automobile, except instead of speed being a function of time and engine capability, it's a function of gravity gradient and engine capability. Most people don't think about "preparing to drive at 50kph."
Stutterwarps have to prepare for a journey, certainly, just like any trip - even with a car, you probably need to at least grab the car keys. For longer trips you'd get maps, fuel the car up, and so on. Stutterwarp ships need to know any remaining residual charge on their coils (as this determines the maximum distance you can go), how much fuel they have, their provisions and so on, but you don't spend time dimming the lights and so on waiting to go into warp with Stutterwarp.
