<snip>
>
>     >
>     Thomas,
>     Thanks for replying - are you referring to the "Deep Space Jumps"
>     sidebar on p171 of GT:IW?
>
>     A quick shufti at GT: Rim Of Fire's history chapter doesn't turn up
>     anything on the relaxation, but 700 years (from ~2300 AD to ~3000
>     AD) is
>     a slightly nontrivial period of time and the 2I covered a slightly
>     nontrivial chunk of space. Especially since the timeline has gone
>     boink
>     (aforementioned rogue gas dwarf, etc), I'll just have to figure out
>     which bunch of nutcases (or PCs, but I repeat myself) figure a way
>     around it.
>
>
> As I recall from the IW playtest the question was the Imperium board
> game dis not allow deep jumps. You must jump from world to world. And
> this was done for game balance and scenario planning reasons. But it
> is the source of the “no deep space jumps" canon for the IW. 
>
> Contradicting that is the original Terrian mission to Bernard Star.
> Where the team made several jumps to a deep space depot between the two. 
>
> And during the FFW there was the battle of the two suns, where the
> Zhodani constructed a deep space base for military operations. 
>
> So when the process was invented and when it became safe enough for
> general use is a question up for repeated debate. 
>
>
> --
>
Looks like things changed somewhat between playtest and publication, then.

GT:IW p23:

"While the mission crew was to be commanded by an American astronaut,
most of its members were from the other spacefaring powers. The first
step was to locate a “jump point,” a wandering planet or brown-dwarf
star located at a convenient point in interstellar space. Such bodies
were known to exist, although locating them precisely was often quite
difficult, and it was unlikely for one to be in a convenient location.
Here the American mission planners were lucky – a candidate rogue planet
was found, located so that jump-1 starships could reach it from both Sol
and Barnard’s Star. Once the jump point was established, and the
painstaking work of computing jump coordinates was done, the mission
could proceed."

Thanks for confirming that I'll have to GM-fiat it.

This is of course completely orthogonal to Rupert's suggestion about the
significant-target-mass constraint being relaxed and restored multiple
times over the ensuing millennia, by multiple different mobs.  And
that's just two major human races - there's two more non-minor human
races to worry about (Zhodani, Yaskoydri), ntm the non-human major races
and the plethora of minor ones.