Space Nav

Some esteemed lister wrote:
A simple, and modern, example is GPS.  
Something (relatively) far away, and used 
every day to predict where on earth (and 
near Solar system as well!) you are.  I
personally have used a GPS unit to 
determine where I'm going, where I've 
been, and where the hell I am right now. 

[Tomb] Assuming that the US is not 
invoking the special protocol it has in place 
to introduce errors (either localized or 
system wide) in the location information. 

[Tomb] Re: space nav - why is locating 
yourself either/or? You'd use visual, other-
spectra, pulsars, etc. all to locate your 
position - whichever you could locate 
nearest and sufficiently distinctly to 
uniquely place yourself. Probably which 
method was easier or faster would depend 
on a number of factors and no one factor 
would be determinist. You'd have multiple 
methods to locate yourself and you'd use 
stellar objects which had fairly unique 
signatures where feasible. 

Here's an interesting follow up: 
How long do we think it would take for a 
starship to fix position:
a) In deep space
b) In a known planetary system
c) In an unknown planetary system (but 
near a star that probably is cataloged 
somewhere)

[Tomb] Regarding the roughness of space 
transit, the presence of human colony ships 
or military ships or merchant ships tells us 
nothing about the short term post jump 
effects. It merely says that any long term 
jump stresses can be avoided by 6 hour 
layovers or are sufficiently slow as to be 
acceptable (maybe increased risk of 
neurological disease, etc). For all we know, 
jump is terribly rough, but the humans 
compensate with drugs, regenerative 
technology, or some kind of mini-stasis 
field. You could be violently ill for an hour 
after jump. Who knows? As long as it 
doesn't have seriously and rapidly onsetting 
deleterious effects that are persistent, the 
kind of universe described in the game 
could exist. It could also be that if you push 
your jump intervals, the effects accumulate 
(think tough ride for couriers or mercy 
missions). 

My thinking was 6 hours was the "low 
stress option" which would allow you to 
jump continously for a fairly long time. 
Faster cycling would lead to accumulated 
jump stresses. And that military crews had 
methods to cope with this better than 
civilian crews and part of the selection 
process involved resilience to this 
phenomena. The way I envisioned it, 
military crews could push for up to four 
jumps a day, but most civilian ships would 
be happy with 2. To make reasonable (but 
still non-instant) travel times around the 
universe of GZG as depicted by Nyrath the 
Indispensable, Stellar Cartographer to the 
GZGverse, I think I set the maximum jump 
at 7.7 ly. I made military systems more 
capable than civilian ones, and travel in 
cold sleep safer. (This justifies colony 
ships, fish-stick marines, and lifeboaters 
going to cold sleep)

I actually wrote some campaign rules for 
this, but they're temporarily off-web thanks 
to an ISP server dying in a most ugly 
fashion. 

If there is interest, I can get the HTML 
page with my take on things back up again 
fairly quickly. 

[Tomb] One last thought: Deathworld was 
written after Harrison visited Oz. He toned 
it down a bit for the novel. 

---------------------------------------------
Thomas Barclay
Co-Creator of http://www.stargrunt.ca 
Stargrunt II and Dirtside II game site

Corruptisima republica plurimae leges. 
[The more corrupt a republic, the more laws.]
-- Tacitus