I recover from surgery, get home, get bored, login to COTI and find this...
Some things Marc has repeatedly said are NOT canon:
1. Anything under 100 tons jumping. 101-ton jump ships work, but 99-ton jump anythings simply don't. ...
I hope you are feeling better.
Question: what is the status of the jump net seen in CT Supplement 9, on the
"Jump Ship"? It used the net to be able to transport external cargo like asteroids and such. Presumably some similar technique permits a dispersed structure tender to take on and transport a large craft otherwise incapable of jump (such as the
Empress Troyhune, in the same book). I've been using that net with a 50 dT cutter, in a module with a jump drive, fuel, some additional bridge space, and a few ELBs. In an emergency the crew could launch the cutter, go outside and erect the net around the boat on spars so it fills out 100 dT, and have an emergency means of interstellar travel. Lets me give ships a way to summon rescue if they're on their own and misjump to deep space or if they're stranded in the outer system of a hostile system with a wrecked jump drive.
The castes of the Droyne (and ancients) are said to be genetic, but triggered by psionic poking. Even the subcastes are said to be so. When you alter the available subcaste genome, you alter the species.
As in they're one mutable species or as in you agree with Rancke?
The word that stands out to me in this comment is "Simultaneous". It seems to leave the possibility open that FTL communication (other than physically by Starship) is at least a possibility (via psionics or technology), as long as it is not "real-time" (i.e. simultaneous).
MgT mentions that the Ancients had an ansible system of some sort at one point.
I've considered jump gates - in essence parking the jump drives and fuel outside of the ship. All that gives me is a ship with a one-way ticket and a very easy military target, but there are some potential applications for long-distance shipping in very civilized regions since the ships aren't carrying that fuel load.
Also considered transports that are entirely dependent on drop tanks; if you compare the price for a dTon of cargo to the cost of the drop tank the exchange is break-even, I think, unless we decide the tanks can be reconditioned and reused at a reasonable price. However, the long-range shipping model has to follow a different paradigm to exist, so if we assume such a paradigm exists then it seems to work for the J3+ set. Might work especially well for the military J6 network, running a base-to-base communications link.
Also briefly considered an
Annic Nova based jump gate option: park a set of solar arrays hella close to a sun and beam power via laser to a jump gate or array-equipped transport out past the jump shadow. That one died in the womb when I learned that lasers didn't have the range to do that. Still considering
Annic Nova based jump-drives: my math says you gotta get in fairly close to the sun to draw the levels of power needed with anything like a reasonable solar array - and then you gotta cruise out past the jump shadow to jump - so the problem of storing the power while you get out to jump point and then delivering it to the jump system with the requisite haste still leaves this one in the hands of one of the Imperial Research Stations. The business of having to spend time diving sunward and then flying outward means it's not commercially or militarily viable, so it's a rather low priority research project.
Jump communications has me stymied. The nature of jump space defeats any coherent signal I might try to send through it. I gotta protect the signal by putting it in a ship. There's that psionic thing, but I was under the impression that was light-speed limited.
