On 2017-12-20 22:09, Richard Aiken wrote:
>
> ISTR there was some sort of unidentified resistance that built up, the
> longer that you ran the stutterwarp. The drive had integral capacity to
> store a certain amount of this resistance (measured in standard days),
> the implication being that this varied from drive to drive (except that
> all the sample vehicles had the same 7.7 days capacity). The ship had to
> be in a significant gravity well in order to "dump" its resistance
> capacitors, which operation took an certain minimum number of hours.
>
> Basically, I read those rules as a mechanism to force ships to take
> about a week to travel from Point A to Point B, after which they had to
> hang around at Point B long enough to potentially get involved in an
> adventure.

The limit was strictly distance-based, without regard to the amount of
time it took to get from A to B (and ship speeds varied a fair amount).
Its purpose to add a sense of geography to interstellar travel, limiting
lines of exploration, travel and warfare.  It's functionally equivalent
to using fixed jump lines. GDW chose a limit that forced travel to
follow narrow paths with lots of choke points and dead-ends.

IIRC, it was described as a build-up of radiation in the drive coils,
that would be catastrophically released when you hit the distance limit.

--
Edward Swatschek
xxxxxx@bitslayer.net