ColdRain wrote:In rough measure, then, the route from Azimol to Seren looks like about 5 links of around 10 light-years length each. Few of these links will follow the plane of the map, so add, say 50% more to the distance to cover that, for a total of 75 light-years.
Insider's FTL Tech page notes jumps are preferably 6 light-years or less. Stars won't always be positioned for convenience either, so many jumps will be shorter. I'll use 4.5 light-years as a guesstimate of the average distance of a jump along this route.
Hey all. I'm new here and if you don't mind I'm gonna chime in here, since I've done a bit of stellar mapping for unrelated writing projects.
For some quick background it was working on a similar situation as Outsider in that ships could only jump so far (8 LY in my case) and did some mapping on that assumption. One thing I found was that star positions and distances were very random and rarely were less than 4 ly between. For example, going by the 4.5 ly assumption and plugging that into Astrosynthesis (a great program if you haven't seen it, it lets you autogenerate proximity routes) and using Hipparcos data for stars within 50 LY of the Sun you end up with
very few routes - basically, isolated clusters. At 6 you start to get interconnectedness and at 8 you can go almost anywhere within reason. Going up to the safe(?) limit of 10 gives you even more routes.
Please note that this is statistical over the volume, not necessarily specific stars. But in general almost every star will have 2-4 jumps manageable at 4-6 with several more at 10. For example Sol has 1 at <4.5, one at <6, one at <8 and three at <10.
I would say
very roughly you're doubling the number of routes for every 2 LY increase (this is a very off-the-cuff estimate, just looking at the output).
And additionally Hipparcos doesn't cover extremely faint stars so the output isn't going to be 100% accurate and would open up a greater number of routes, both short and long.
Anyhow, the takeway is that expecting a 4.5 LY average is extremely optimistic. A more typical route would probably be mostly 6 LY jumps with a scattering of 8s.
It's also worth noting that taking the occasional 10 can let you potentially skip over a
lot of intervening space. As an example, jumping from Sol to Sirius is an 8.6 ly jump direct. To go there via 'safe' <8 ly jumps would take
nine jumps! You have to go almost the exact opposite direction and then loop around to get to Sirius. Of course 8.6 isn't much past 8, so it's not really pushing things - plus Sirius is a fairly massive star and would consequently be easier to 'hit'. But it makes a nice example. Another 10 coming from Sol (to Gliese 65, 8.6 ly as well oddly enough) saves 5 shorter jumps.
Using long jumps can potentially pay
significant dividends for shipping firms and militaries. One would expect hyperspatial navigation for identified 'shortcuts' to be extremely valuable, with as much precise navdata available as possible. Shortuctting 4-8 smaller jumps is (IIRC) a month or two saved. That's pretty significant.
And to end things off I've done up some images to show the progression of jump route length.
4.5 ly
6 ly
8 ly
10 ly
Color-coding should be fairly self-explanatory.
Link for Astrosynthesis
This ended up being longer than expected. Hah.