[Long] Isolating Multiple Jump Drives

[Dinadon]

My main space setting I'm working on has two forms of FTL travel. One's a jump gate network that's old, but also still under construction. The other is a jump drive, with some bad press to it.

The jump gate's are built only by two races (they were one when they started). The Pilgrims travel between the stars in generation ships. They'll build the first gate for a system whilst enroute, then build a second whilst traversing the system (and ensuring the first one works). The first gate will connect to a gate from the previous system using normal EM communication methods. After that it is connected to the network. A gate has two modes, energy and matter, it's also rare for a gate to be shut down completely. Gates are left in energy mode as standard, which allows transmitting of EM signals to any other gate in energy mode that it could perform a matter connection to. There's a delay proportional to physical distance. The matter mode has a 'line of light' limitation Radio communications dosen't lag when in matter mode, but more importantly ships can pass through. It takes time (again proportional to distance) to be able to re-establish a given matter gate pairing (the same time occurs as a start up delay). Gates are considered mundane physics, and most gates end up at roughly Saturn distance.

Jump drives are a human invention. Humans don't quite get why the older races won't want anything to do with it. It certainly requires fiddly work to get the harmonics right for two carbon based lifeforms from different planets, let alone for some of the types the older races are. No one really wants to see their insides turned inside out. Jump drives have variable distances, less gravity means further distance, but there is a min jump distance. Atmospheres tend to be bad, especially for the better drives (the ship is at least in a bubble, but you don't want the bubble to get stuck and still be there when the jump hole collapses). Being in hyperspace in rather boring, though the colours can be pretty. Ships can't stay in hyperspace forever as the bubble will collapse on its own eventually. Hyperspace is impenitrable to EM. Jump drives are considered exotic physics.

A key point in the background is the end of the Type 2 jump drive. New Type 2's wouldn't last as long as older ones, and they had been in service for far longer than the Type 1. Then scaremongering get's involved, and most of huminity drops most of the Type 2's. Of course, that same most of humanity have been helpful in establishing jump gates in their systems. The rest of humanity, not really concerned with jump gates, end up designing the Type 3. Were as the Type 2 is based on the Type 1 (and the Type 1 is based on a laboratory accident), the Type 3 is designed from a first principles approach. The current jump drive is the Type 5.

So the crux: Ways of keeping these two groups mostly seperate, in the sense of being able to use one setting to get two different types of space campaign.

[SuedodeuS]

Originally Posted by Dinadon

So the crux: Ways of keeping these two groups mostly seperate, in the sense of being able to use one setting to get two different types of space campaign.

Interdiction. Jump drives can cause problems for the places being jumped to - namely a fleet of smart missiles suddenly popping up outside your window. If it's possible to have some sort of interdiction field that will prevent ships from jumping into your area, you can make a lot of regions cut off to jumpers. Places with such fields would undoubtedly have a gate nearby. So, you can have fringe-world/exploration campaigns that utilize jump drives, but campaigns occuring in the "core" systems (that is, those that have gates) would have to make use of the gates.

[capnq]

Originally Posted by Dinadon

Jump drives are a human invention. Humans don't quite get why the older races won't want anything to do with it. It certainly requires fiddly work to get the harmonics right for two carbon based lifeforms from different planets, let alone for some of the types the older races are. No one really wants to see their insides turned inside out.
[...]
So the crux: Ways of keeping these two groups mostly seperate, in the sense of being able to use one setting to get two different types of space campaign.

Perhaps the jump gates put out some kind of interference that gives a penalty to using the jump drive, i.e. it makes it even harder "to get the harmonics right".