Hyperspace for dummies
 

Hello
I have just posted an article about my take on the various issues regarding hyperspace travel. I have tried to explain/rationalise/handwave things said about hyperspace and hyperjumping in the traveller canon and elsewhere.

Take a look, there might be something you can use for your own campaign but be warned; it contradicts some GURPS Traveller notions such as jump masking when a star is merely blocking the path.

Anyhow, you can find the post here.

Re: Hyperspace for dummies
 

Several of your decisions contradict prior and present canon; namely, the T5 playtest explicitly states all fuel for jump is consumed by the drive plant itself at jump, as did MT sources; CT and TNE sources merely imply strongly. (while many TNE fans came up with the hydrogen bubble thing...)

Further, CT, MT, and T5 state that the jump drive is in fact a form of fusion reactor; albeit it's more a module attached to the main plant than an actual plant itself, if one goes by the CT mechanics and T5 mechanics. In MT, the Jump Drive takes no external power source, but the rest of the ship does need power, and the Jump drive operates for mere minutes. JTAS 24 notes that the hydrogen is NOT required for jump, and other similar power sources can be utilized instead. DA1 Annic Nova also has a fuel-less jump drive.

Jump Dimming in CT and MT was explained: The initiation energy for jump engine function was at the very limits of the PP to produce, and all energy was needed for jump transition.

Jumpspace has been repeatedly described in canon as an undulating gray wall, 1m from the hull of the ship.

GT didn't add the blocking rules, Marc Miller did. Back in the 1980's. In a magazine article.

Re: Hyperspace for dummies
 

Well, I should have mentioned that I tried to reconsile the things said about hyperspace and jumpdrives in canon in a way that made sense to me, real world or gameplay wise. Most, if not all, of my 'explanations' differ from canon, that was the reason for posting; to make sense out of the many disparate, contradictory and sometimes silly remarks from canon.

I should also have stated that canon to me stopped when Megatraveller was published. Old testament Traveller if you like.

Well, you have been doubly warned now ;)

Re: Hyperspace for dummies
 

Am I the only one to find the above explanation silly in the extreme?

My 'explanation' tried to, in a similar vein as my 'explanation' to the 100 diameters rule, pretend that the canon explanations were in fact the layman versions told in school books and popular science articles. Along the lines of 'atoms are like miniature solar systems where the electrons orbit the nucleus like planets around a sun'.

This way I could keep the canon explanations for nonscientific players and have a more believable (to me at least) explanation for the scientifically inclined I usually have as players (ie my kids and my girlfriend).

Have the cake yet eat it too.

Re: Hyperspace for dummies
 

Mind you, the "explanation" requires us to believe that every single one of those old-time Vilani ship designers were absolute morons.

I've always gone with the idea that the explanation is folk mythology. The true reason? I've no idea.

Jump Dimming: The practice, followed by some starship pilots, of dimming the ship's interior and exterior lights before going into jump. Lights on a ship are typically dimmed for a period of about two minutes; the lights are brought back up to full strength as soon as the ship is in jumpspace.

According to an old Vilani superstition, this custom arose out of the need for most of the ship's power to be diverted into the computer and jump-drive systems, so that the jump drive could be guided into creating the jump field properly, something that has never actually been necessary and would have taken more than two minutes if it had. Non-Vilani pilots do not follow this tradition.

The above is from an article about various myths and legends of the 3rd Imperium that I'm working on.


Hans

Re: Hyperspace for dummies
 

Not quite. Marc Miller says that that's what he had in mind all along, but the article doesn't actually say so. It mentions jump shadowing all right, but jump masking is not even implied, much less explicit.


Hans

Re: Hyperspace for dummies
 

And according to the latest version of Traveller (Mongoose...is this the T5 you were referring to, Hans?) the jump fuel is used as an ablative shield of sorts, to protect the ship while it is in Jumpspace.

Also specified in MongTrav, is Jump masking (details are given) and the fact that you need a power plant of the same rating (or higher) to power the Jump drive.

Re: Hyperspace for dummies
 

If jumpfuel is really consumed during the entire jump, how can one explain drop tanks?

Re: Hyperspace for dummies
 

Go read the rules and find out.

Altho drop tanks are in Book 2: High Guard.

They also don't tend to survive Jump, in MongTrav.

Re: Hyperspace for dummies
 

Note: Jump dimming was invented by DGP so that the lights could go out at the appropriate moment during a shipboard murder plot. The effect drove the explanation.

Re: Hyperspace for dummies
 

That works very well, and adds a little charm of Mythopoeia to TTU. I have often thought there wasn't enough and have put a bit IMTU.

Re: Hyperspace for dummies
 

I assumed the fuel was consumed pre-jump to charge capacitors that were then discharged to activate the jump drive in one energetic burst, so I come down on the "no fuel in jumpspace" side I guess. It would also (kinda) help explain the Jump Dimming tradition, if you go with the "we need all our energy output at the moment of jump" crowd.

Bear in mind that (in my experience), when an airliner preparing to leave the gate switches from the external generators to internal power, the lights in the cabin will dim or go off for a couple of seconds - this might be the real-world origin of the "tradition" in Traveller. At least, that's what it reminded me of in a small way.

Just a thought.

Re: Hyperspace for dummies
 

The only way that the jump bubble concept makes any kind of sense to me is if the jump grid on the ship's hull is pumping out hydrogen continually for the week that the ship is in jump to make the "bubble" (actually a very thin hydrogen atmosphere around the ship that needs to be continuously replenished because jumpspace is destroying the hydrogen).

Of course that also means that if the hull is damaged, then so too is the jump grid, and that means the ship shouldn't be able to jump without being destroyed in jumpspace because there will be patches on the hull that aren't covered by the jump grid.

Re: Hyperspace for dummies
 

I've never heard of this hydrogen bubble concept before - is that a MongTrav thing? (Played Traveller in one fashion or another since 1982 or thereabouts, but haven't picked up MongTrav yet).

Re: Hyperspace for dummies
 

GURPS Traveller mentions this (venting during jump) use for part of the hydrogen.

Re: Hyperspace for dummies
 

Hm, well, guess I missed that part.

Re: Hyperspace for dummies
 

It also means that jump shuttles for System Defense Boats without jump grids shouldn't work... and jump cutters with just any old cutter module can't be taken into jump space, and the illustration on pg23 of CT Suppliment 9 (Fighting Ships) just flies in the face of it.

If the jump grid is absolutely necessary, it almost has to be highly redundant and having some part of a vessel covered is sufficient... whatever the jump grid does is easily extended over a larger area without too much trouble. (Well, maybe it might require someone to make an jumpdrive engineering roll or something if the players are doing something highly unusual...)

Re: Hyperspace for dummies
 

One explains drop tanks as things used only on pre-contragrav aircraft. The Gazelle is easily glossed over.

As for other explanations, one does not try and explain how a 100 dton ship uses 20 tons of hydrogen in a fusion reactor in either 20 minutes or 168 hours.

Now if it was _coal_ instead of hydrogen we could call Traveller _Steampunk_ and this would explain the very heavy computers too. :)

Re: Hyperspace for dummies
 

Great stuff! Please post it when you are finished writing. Or better yet, turn it into a e23 pdf I can buy.

I have another Traveller 'fact' I treat as a myth IMTU:
The myth: "The Vargr are genetically engineered dogs, produced by the Ancients at least 300 000 years ago"
The fact: Dogs didn't diverge from their wold ancestors until 15 000 - to 40 000 BC, with the absolute upper limit set at 140 000 years BC. Humans (Vilani but especially Solomani) have always used racial discrimination against the Vargr and one of the ways to justify this is by stating that they are 'merely' uplifted pets of the humans. Many Vargr consider comparisons and jokes about dogs to be highly offensive, in fact, there is a movement among richer Vargr in Glisten and District 268 to domesticate Chimpanzee and even Gorillas to turn the tables on the humans; "See, we have YOUR ancestors as pets on a leach"

Re: Hyperspace for dummies
 

Originally posted by Fred Brackin
High guard give a detailed description on how they work in the design sequence so the Gazelle is not the only case.

Re: Hyperspace for dummies
 

That would mean that jumpdrives are insanely powerful fusion reactors and one wonders why the Navy doesn't use them to power their weaponry for short bursts? A fusion drive consume 1% per week EP (250 MW in the official Traveller universe) per 100 dTon. A jumpdrive consume 10% in less than an hour.

You are probably right about the real world origin of the jump dimming idea.

Re: Hyperspace for dummies
 

Actually that'd mean that jump capacitors were insanely good at holding a charge from the fusion drives, and then releasing it all at once to kick the ship into jump. I don't think the fusion drives would need to be that powerful, comparatively, although more powerful reactors could charge the capacitors faster. The capacitors would be the powerful bit, and that would make sense with military weapons as well I think (build a charge on the laser capacitor and release it when ready, kinda like a camera flash).

Again, these are all assumptions built over decades, without anything to back them up. If there are places in Traveller canon that contradict my assumptions, that's fine, I must just have missed them.

Re: Hyperspace for dummies
 

Just to double check -- my memory says there was something about sentient life required for jump, which is why the x-boat 'pilots' need to be there. Am I remembering that wrong?

Re: Hyperspace for dummies
 

Astrogators' can pre-calculate Jump before the drive is activated.

As long as the parameters don't change (speed, loc, etc), you can plot your Jump while you are on the way to the jump limit.

It's Traveller canon that for whatever reason, automated Jumps (aka, Jump message torpedoes...which are Canon....) with no living crew rarely work properly (ie, they usually Misjump).

Also, there are Jump tapes (see GT:ISW), if you think you don't need a Jump navigator.

You are going to need a real-space navigator regardless, however....

Re: Jumpspace for dummies
 

It's jumpspace, not hyperspace.

All the fuel is expended prior to jump initiation. You can't have drop tanks if that is not true. Unless Mongoose has retconned drop tanks out of existence, any description that has some of the fuel expended during jump is in direct an unreconcilable contradiction to another part of canon.

A minor additional indication is the canonical instances of jumps that have taken considerably more than the normal maximum of 185 hours. There are examples of ships returning to real space after spending centuries in jumpspace. If you need a steady supply of hydrogen to protect the ship and if a standard supply is exhausted after a week, such extended sojourns in jumpspace would have destroyed the ships.

Also, if a normal supply of hydrogen protects the ship for, say, 185 hours, then the average jump (168 hours) will result in the ship arriving with several tons of hydrogen still left in the tanks, enough to affect the economics of starship travel.

OTOH, the amount of energy you get out of a full load of jump fuel is either insanely high or the fusion process is unbelievably inefficient. Also, if the jump drive is simply a fusion plant, how come it doesn't improve with tech level? (That is to say, a TL15 J1 drive ought to use a lot less fuel than a TL9 J1 drive).

My own suggestion for an explanation, which I've been promulgating for over a decade now, is this:

Jumpspace is dense. How dense? Just dense enough to produce the effect described below. If you just open a hole into jumpspace and shove a starship across the dimensional barrier, you get much the same effect you get if something strikes a water surface at high speed: The water can't get away in time and the object might as well have struck a concrete surface.

So what a jump drive does, is open a small aperture into jumpspace, and then pump in a lot of hydrogen. This process takes 20 minutes and results in the adjacent area of jumpspace temporarily becoming a lot softer, more diluted. The ship is the propelled across the interdimensional barrier, which closes behind it. If the ship doesn't cross the barrrier fast, the hydrogen will disperse and entry once again becomes impractical.

Higher levels of jumpspace are denser and require greater amounts of hydrogen.
No, it would not. The amount of energy you get out of dimming the lights for two minutes is utterly insignificant, as is the cost of installing enough extra capacity to keep them burning.

Boxer01 (post #10 of this thread) already gave the correct explanation.


Hans

Re: Hyperspace for dummies
 

It's one of the fanon explanations that has been percolating through the Traveller Community for decades. It's directly contradicted by at least one canonical incident where some rebels sent an empty ship to make a kinetic kill attack against a world ("A Dagger at Efate"). A refined explanation says that a statistically significant number of misjumps (say, 3%) occur if there are no sentients aboard. This explains X-boat pilots and also explains why X-torp networks would be more expensive and less reliable than X-boats, while still keeping jump torpedoes viable for distress calls, 97% being good odds when you're in drakh orbit without a maneuver drive.


Hans

Re: Hyperspace for dummies
 

Ah, good old Hans, still as charming as ever. :)

re: Dimming and airliners, I was just musing about my own personal explaination as to what a real-world analog might have been, not trying to say that it was THE reason. I never read the adventure where they had to have the lights go out for murder, and I'd never heard that as "the reason" before, so cut me some slack, chief.

Re: Jumpspace for dummies
 

Nope. Drop tanks are in the new High Guard (Book 2).

They are not very economical, tho.

Almost exactly how MongTrav describes it.

From MongTrav Core Rulebook, page 141......"To Jump, a ship creates a bubble of hyperspace by means of injecting high-energy exotic particles into an artificial singularity. The singularity is driven out of our universe, creating a tiny parallel universe which is then blown up like a balloon by injecting hydrogen into it. The Jump bubble is folded around the ship, carrying it into the little pocket universe. ......while in Jump space, the ship is completely and utterly cut off from the universe.It hangs in a shimmering bubble of boiling hydrogen, a pocket dimension from which nothing can escape."

Also, in MongTrav, actually firing up the Jump Drive normally takes anywhere from 10-60 seconds. And is done once, at the beginning of the Jump.

Re: Hyperspace for dummies
 

There are a couple of JTAS articles that should be examined on this - one by Marc Miller and another talking about Jump Nets.

Re: Hyperspace for dummies
 

Nothing canonical, but I did propose that as part of a 'house rule' at The Color of Jumpspace.