- Good computers, accurate charts, rutter programs, extra-time and Navigation skill are all valuable assets. Extra time means re-iteration of calculations for finer grain results.
- For charging time, we could say that the jump drive takes time to charge up it's hyperplasma reserve, but having extra jump drives installed will allow an extra contiguous jump each on a single journey.
- Range and power- The more power a jump drive has- with more expensive super stardrives, available in a number of grades, and consuming more power points- the plasma beam can travel without deviation for a greater distance, so the accurate short jump distance is extended. TGLS's idea for how to use the Speed/Range tables might work here, but I haven't thought the calculations through. Personally, I'd be tempted to define a series of range bands, from 0.1 to 1 ly, 1-100 ly, and 100-1000 ly, say, and give each an error bar for deviation (e.g. 5%/20%/50%). Then the better jump drives extend these by a x2/x5/x10 multiplier for each grade. I'm not sure how to include (E)'s idea about shallow and deep jumps- perhaps short range jumps in-system only use negligible amounts of fuel.
- As (E) suggested, a jump point is not a special point in space, it's just a place that is under very controlled conditions- much like an airport. You could land your plane in a field or on a stretch of road if you wanted, but an airport has a nice smooth runway, a weather report and a handy fuel supply. Likewise, jump points in developed systems are staging areas where a traffic controller, the JTC, has measured all the local gravitational influences, has pre-calculated the current launch solutions for a number of popular destinations, and has up-to-date data of known anomalies for major routes. A busy JTC may have ships queued up in a holding pattern close to a large body of mass so their own masses don't influence other departing ships. It would also be a useful bottleneck for authorities to impose control, with passport checks, cargo checks for contraband, or departure taxes.
- A ship's intended destination can be inferred from it's red streak at launch, especially if the observing ship has sufficient jump path analytical power. Of course, the ship's actual arrival point will be random.
- It may be possible to block a jump if you can target the origin point of another ship's hyperplasma bolt with your own plasma cannon, but this should be quite hard. You could also deflect a jump if you can interpose a large mass between the launch point and destination, which would be tricky, but would send the jumpship wildly off in the wrong direction.
- High quality jump drives, such as from Blue Danube Corporation, may have superior plasma cannon beam generation, due to tighter focussing, improved shockwave propagation, helical stabilisation fields, etc. These add a quality bonus to the Navigation roll, which reduces deviation. Old or low quality drives suffer beam dispersion, fuzzy focusing, "hiccoughing", intermittent pulsing, etc, which adds a penalty to the Navigation roll, and may also have a larger implicit deviation error for the same ranges.
- We could allow higher quality gases for plasma generation. I'm thinking of the regular fuel as just hydrogen, which has to be purified then condensed to a supercooled, quantum coherent state. This can be done on-board with hydrogen harvested from a gas giant or extracted from water, but usually ships purchase it at space stations. Impurities or imperfect coherence could reduce the effectiveness (the range?) of the hyperplasma conduit. Higher grade fuels could be introduced, with extra quarkiness, for example, available only to elite groups.
- Advanced technologies might include- a plasma beam with a neutral gravitational charge that suffers little or no path deviation; a probe that is sent through the conduit to help guide the conduit tip closer to the destination; jump gates which can open for several ships to pass simultaneously, opened by a ring of plasma cannons that a ship enters via the centre, or more. If we can technobabble about how it works, we can look for things to fiddle with and enhance.