RE: [FT] Taskforce and Fleet Actions

At 3:57 AM -0400 8/14/01, Jerry Cantrill wrote:
>
>pp.s. How far could a ship jump once it left the influence of the
>stellar system?
>or, How many jumps would it take to reach Tau Ceti, 3.5 parsecs away?

I looked at the jump distance, total distance and regeneration time 
for military craft (~6 hrs) to get about a months travel time from 
one side of the NAC to the other using Winchell Chung's  Mostly-Canon 
Map .

A repost of what I figured. Feel free to check my math.

I got to looking closely at the FTL background the other
day.

The longest successful jump was 7 Light years, that was with
a specialized scientific research craft. That ship tried a
longer jump and never returned.

Figure a bit over a Parsec (1 Parsec is = 3.3 Light Years)
is about the standard for civil shipping 4 LY in other
words. Military grade FTL drives are a bit better, put them
at 5 LY. Anything further is too risky and isn't really done
unless you have a fast courier. Also included is recharge
time between one FTL hop and another. ~6 hours is what the
book says (I was recalling an hour, sorry...).

Some of these planets are right at or under a parsec. So a
quick jump from one to the other is easy. A long trip from
one side of the NAC Mu Arae (9:-3:-2) to GJ 1289 (-2:7:-3)
is about 11.7 parsecs or 396 Light years. If we can do that
in 4 LY hops we are talking about 99 hops and probably about
594 hours given no drive failures or other problems. That
comes out to 25 days worth of travel.

Merchant vessels with passengers tend to only do their FTL
hops at night when the passengers are sleeping since it does
take a bit out of you. The books describe it as a very
sickening feeling.

The 25 days worth of travel is about right for what you'd
expect for such a scale on the map. It does make for a good
ability to move around, however, its not a quick thing.

So with 3.5 parsecs being 11.55 LY, and assuming that a 5 LY hop for 
a military Grade FTL drive, you're looking at 2 jumps at 5 ly apiece 
and then a .5 ly hop for the closer jump. Presumably there is an 
extra jump or two there for refining your position to the system 
hyperlimit so 5 jumps total. 6 hrs each minimum, its a 30 hour trip 
doing the hyper space thing. Some depends on your FTL navigator's 
ability to precisely refine his coordinates and get the insertions 
right. Likely it would take less with an ace navigator.

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