Solo Traveller - Aloin's Saga #4

The Iridium Queen lifts off from Golus

Day 132-1107 dawned clear and cool with a light breeze from the north-west. At 0933 Local Time, as the heat of the day was beginning to build, the Iridium Queen lifted off from Golus Downport. Climbing over the Jakabsan range, the ship went supersonic at an altitude of 15 kilometres.

To Aloin, his rangy frame wedged into the Scan station at the rear of the small bridge, it was the greatest ride of his life. The dun-coloured dune lands and burnt-umber farm plots scattered around Golous Downport fell away beneath them like patches on the fabric of the planet. Through the bridge’s port-side window he could see the little white smudge of Tartesh, his home town, twinkling in the morning light and beyond it the green/yellow of the Aldesarn Valley and the thin black line of the canal marching southward, bringing meltwater down from the pole.

Captain Elera Lukk had the helm, guiding the ship spacewards with almost casual indifference. Navigator Miska Ilurrin was riding co-pilot, running Nav plots for the Jump on her terminal while keeping an eye on Lukk’s control settings. In her forties, the taciturn Navigator was a Celephaizon like her Captain.

As the colour drained from the sky, fading from pale blue to black, and the first stars began to appear, Ilurrin tapped her ear bud. “Thank you, Golus Down,” she said. “See you next time.” She paused. “Affirmative,” she acknowledged. “Clear on heading 271, Azimuth 67. Iridium Queen out.” She tapped her ear bud again and glanced at Captain Lukk. “Hand off from Golus Down,” Ilurrin said. ”We cross their horizon in two minutes. Golus Highport will rise on 180 in seven minutes. We’re to switch to Channel 7 for COAC.”

Captain Lukk grunted and stretched. “As if we’ll need them,” she said, “now we’ve got Aloin on Scan.” She winked at Ilurin. “You awake back there, lad?” she snapped in Aloin’s direction. Aloin started, tearing his eyes away from the whirls and chords and harmonies of stars that filled the windows of the bridge.

“Yes, Captain,” he said.

“Scan clear?” Lukk asked and grinned at Ilurin, her left hand tapping a command on her console.

Aloin’s quickly looked down at the Scan screen in front of him. Golus’ icon filled the bottom third of the display, Golus Downport’s ID and call sign slowly drifting below the horizon. An ID that identified the Highport was slowly crawling up over the arc of the planet. Then, suddenly, the screen began to fritz and static. Frantically altering the signal filters, Aloin tried to compensate for the interference. “Ma’am,” he said, trying to keep the panic out of his voice, “we’re being jammed.”

“Did you see anything? Any ship that might be jamming us?”

“Uh, no ma’am, Downport’s below the horizon and the Highport’s … uh, I think the Highport was above the horizon. I didn’t see anything else, Ma’am.”

“You sure?” Captain Lukk asked. “What about that Suaryan freighter on the in-bound?”

Aloin shook his head. “I’m sorry, Ma’am, I didn’t see it.”

“And that bulk hauler? Did you see the bulk hauler?”

Aloin shook his head again. “No Ma’am. I’m sorry, Ma’am,” he said miserably.

Lukk swivelled her chair around and glared at Aloin. “Do you know what happens to a 100,000 ton bulk hauler when it runs down a 200 ton freighter?” she demanded.

Aloin shook his head and stared at the static on his scan screen.

“Nothing, “ Lukk said. “It might, if it is unlucky, get its paint scratched as the freight blows itself to pieces.”

Pulling her pipe out of her belt pouch, Lukk clamped her teeth on the stem. “Bit tough on the freighter crew, though,” she added. “Especially if they were depending on Scan to keep them safe.” Tapping a button on her consol, she hopped down from her chair. Aloin gasped in astonishment as his scan screen abruptly cleared. He quickly checked the plot and the near-time archive.

Captain Lukk patted his knee as she hobbled towards the bridge hatch. “Don’t worry, lad,” she said. “There’s no Suaryan out there, and there’s no bulk hauler.” She paused and looked up at him. “This time,” she added.  Aloin flushed. “Good work on knowing where the ‘ports were, even if only at a glance,” she continued. “Sometimes you only get a glance at a screen, but you need to recall everything.”

“Take us out, Miska,” Lukk ordered, casting one last glance across the boards. “You have the helm until Jump. And you, lad,” she said to Aloin, “will watch your Scan until Kiir comes up to relieve you. And I will ensure that Kiir goes through Scan with you from screen to nubbin, until you know jamming from faulting and can fix either.”

Nodding to herself, Captain Lukk left the bridge. Two hundred and forty minutes later, and a little over 480,000 kilometres from Golus, the Iridium Queen Jumped Outsystem, bound for Miazan with a cargo of 50 tons of petrochemicals.

---

Commentary:

As I was writing this, I checked the speculative trade table in a pdf copy of Classic Traveller Starter Edition Book 2 Charts I picked up from, I think, DrivethruRPG during a sale. I was astonished to see that Petrochemicals are only available in 1d6 ton loads. So how had Captain Lukk scored 50 tons?

I checked the speculative trade table in my copy of The Traveller Book (1983 edition) and found the same notation – 1D tons of Petrochemicals. Then I pulled out my Little Black Book Traveller Book 2: Starships (1977 edition) and found Petrochemicals 6D * 5 tons. Wow! That’s quite a change, though Mongoose Traveller has Petrochemicals being available in 1D * 10 ton loads, Mega Traveller, as is its want, complicates things further by having three class sizes of cargo, with the cargo size further affected by the population of the originating planet. I like what my LBBs are serving me so they have become my Spec Trading table of choice.

A to Z: J is for Jump Drive

In Science Fiction, there is usually a need to be able to get from star system to star system in a reasonable amount of time. There are a few writers who enjoy telling a really scientifically staunch story that has the characters travelling between the stars at relativistic speeds in light-huggers (Alastair Reynolds’ “Revelation Space” series and Larry Niven’s “Protector” spring to mind, and though Gary Gibson’s “Stealing Light” novel has a future human species adhering to Einsteinian Space/Time, he gets around it by having the humans’ sub-light ships hitch rides aboard alien craft which can go faster than light), most writers opt for the macguffin of some form of Faster-than-Light stardrive – see the entertaining “Atomic Rocket” website for articles on the subject.

In Traveller, there are a few rules but no detail. The rules are:

• A Jump takes one week, no matter the distance covered.

• The starship and its passengers are completely isolated from both other ships and people in Jump Space, and from other ships and people in Real Space.

• A starship cannot enter Jump Space within 100 diameters of a planet or a star.

• A starship in Jump Space passing within 100 diameters of a planet or star will be precipitated out of Jump Space into Real Space.

While we have few other concrete details, we can, of course, speculate:

A starship cannot enter Jump Space within 100 diameters of a planet or a star and a starship in Jump Space passing within 100 diameters of a planet or star will be precipitated out of Jump Space into Real Space.
The implication of this is that gravity wells and mass points interfere with both the transition from Real Space to Jump Space, and travel within Jump Space. This reminds me a lot of CJ Cherryh’s novel, “Tri-planetary”, and the triple mass-point of the title which allows starships to drop back into Real Space to both correct course and indulge in illicit trade.

I think it’s in GURPs: Traveller that we first see the idea of Jump Masking. This is where the relationship between the destination Main World and its stellar Primary become important when plotting Jumps. In part, this seems like a game mechanic to force player characters and their ships to spend a little more time in Real Space where they might fall prey to pirates or raiders (and so create tense and exciting game sessions), and in part this seems to be a logical extension of the 100 diameter rule. For instance, our sun – a standard G Class star - has a diameter of about 1.4 million kilometres. This means that a ship has to be at least 140 million kilometres from our sun to Jump, or to exit Jump. As Earth orbits our sun at a mean 149 million kilometres, then ships with line of sight to Earth would, in theory, only have to worry about Earth’s 100 diameter zone.

Though, even if the Main World is outside the 100 diameter limit of the primary star, there will be times of the year when the Primary will be between the Main World and the world any incoming ship is jumping from. In that case, it is likely that there will be an inbound Jump Zone at, say, the destination system zenith and an outbound Jump Zone at the system nadir.

The starship and its passengers are completely isolated from both other ships and people in Jump Space, and from other ships and people in Real Space.
This is one of the distinctive features of Traveller Jump Space in that once the ship has Jumped, it is pretty much self contained within its Jump Bubble. The Jump Bubble extends some little way beyond the exterior surface of the ship so that it is, in theory, possible for other matter to travel along with the ship. CJ Cherryh’s Chanur novels are, to me, the most evocative of Traveller-esque fiction written by someone who has probably never heard of Traveller. In one of the novels, the characters Jump while passing through a dust/gravel cloud near an asteroid belt. When they drop out of Jump Space, there is consternation from local System Traffic control as they release a cloud of near-light speed gravel from their Jump field and send it sleeting across the destination system.

A Jump takes one week, no matter the distance covered.
This is the biggy and one of the constants of Traveller. Jump Drives are rated by the distance, in parsecs, they can move a ship in a single Jump. A Jump takes one week and can range from one to six parsecs. But, how does it work?

We are told that as the Jump Drive activates, it creates a bubble (the Jump Bubble) around the ship. Simultaneously, it tears a hole in three-dimensional space and draws the Jump Bubble into Jump Space. The hole seals behind the departing ship and, to an observer, the ship vanishes. A week later, the Jump Drive tears a second hole in three-dimensional space and expels the Jump Bubble into Real Space. The Jump Bubble collapses during this process and the release of energy creates what is known as a Jump Flash. This Flash is detectable out to several million kilometres so if one wishes to come and go quietly, one needs to drop down out of Jump Space way out in the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud, away from the Zenith and Nadir Jump Zones, and come insystem on a very low deltaV approach.

I postulated a theory that Jump Drives actually access higher energy states. The topography of these energy states directly maps over the topography of Real Space, but each higher energy state is smaller than the next lower. This curves space.

Gravity is a constant, and as such gravity wells created by stars, planets and planetoidal masses penetrate through the stacked energy states. This means that mass points will interrupt travel through higher energy states and precipitate the starship back into Real Space.

As each higher energy state is smaller than the one below it, distances between points are shorter and so travel for the same amount of time will take one further at a higher energy state than at a lower energy state. On the other hand, it takes more fuel to attain the higher energy state which is why a Jump-6 ship needs to have 60% of its mass as fuel, when a Jump-1 ship only requires 10% of its mass as fuel.

Jump Flash is partially caused by the drop down of the starship into normal space, and partially by the leakage of energy from the higher energy states into Real Space.

It is believed that Human-built Jump Drives are not very efficient as Droyne ships do not give off Jump Flashes when they drop down into Real Space. Which makes one wonder what the Droyne know of Jump Space and higher energy states that Humans are yet to discover.