Richard Aiken wrote:

> ... especially the fact that most routes are well-known and stable. As I have mentioned previously, IMTU the hexagonal jump map is an actual in-game artifact.

Yes, I make the same assumptions.

> As you said, it's "point and Jump." You can only jump along the hex rows and only to hexes which contain a system [e.g. known jump point].

I relax that quite a lot - you can Jump into any hex in-range (but see below), but if there's
nothing there, what's the point? Unless you have drop tanks (ducks, runs for cover :-) ), and
have some good reason to go there. And you know how to get *back* (since my Jump Points are
non-commutative). Like I said in my original posting, the Scout Service have been mapping
these out for thousands of years.

> 1) Jump points are in the inner rather than the outer system. Since the rationale for their existence are locations where "spacetime is stretched thin," locations that are deep inside strong gravity wells just make more sense. Also, since ships IMTU use fuel-hungry fusion reaction drives, getting to a jump point out in the Oort cloud would take a verryyyyyy looooonnnng time (as they would need to coast most of the way).

Personally I assume that Jump-capable ships use their Jump drives, detuned to act as
stutterwarp drives, and that these use very little fuel (compared to a real Jump).
So you arrive way the heck out from the star, and gradually micro-Jump towards civilization.
It probably takes 5-6 micro-Jumps to get between the Jump point and any habitable planets
(of course there may be other places of interest in the system). Micro-Jumps are close
to instant but require calculation time (I handwave all this in-game). Then ships use real
reaction mass (water, usually) to make final docking manoeuvres, and so on.

I put Jump Points far out because it fits better (in my mind) with the "feel" of
Traveller - the lonely corvette patrolling the Jump Point, long lags in communications
speed forcing individual commanders to take action on their own, piracy, and so on. It's
all very Hornblower :-)

> Of course - as you note for your system - these "facts" have consequent and quite significant implications of military and piratical import. E.g. they tend to make piracy fairly economical in those systems without sufficient security and also give naval forces a significant edge on the defense as opposed to the attack.

Indeed, some of my design decisions were made to accommodate the needs of my plot (e.g.
in a very few cases you cannot Jump from System A to System B, even though this is "in
range"). A very reasonable corollary to this would be to say that the Jump route from
System X to System Y may be "difficult" (for no adequately explored reason, as Douglas
Adams might have said), and hence requires more time "making the calculations to enter
Jumpspace" and/or a higher quality drive, and/or this being in tip-top shape, and/or
high-quality fuel, and so on, and so on. Otherwise Bad Things may happen...

Good discussion, thanks! As usual, I make no claim that any of this is canon.
Everyone can choose whatever works best for their own TU.

Jonathan