[TML] Noncanonical TU 3D.

[Jens Rydholm]

Jerry W Barrington wrote:
> On 1/4/08 4:33 AM, "Timothy Little" <tim at little-possums.net> wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, Jan 04, 2008 at 03:25:58AM -0500, Jerry W Barrington wrote:
>>> One question: why can't a ship carry enough fuel to make it to
>>> Wolf 359 in 2 jumps?  That would get around that limit.
>> It might take more than 50% of the volume of the ship to make a jump
>> with the early drives.  There are ways around that problem with a
>> multi-stage ship, but I could see that getting extraordinarily
>> expensive.
> 
> Drop tanks can add a jump to anything though.  :)

When I built a 3D map (on hold for now, but I will resume or restart at 
some point), I used a special rule to guard against this. If you allow 
drop tanks and several jumps in sequence, all sorts of odd problems 
start to appear with the maps (mostly that you cannot visualize them in 2D).

My rule stated that you need to jump to a significant gravity well. 
After I finished writing, the idea evolved so that space is essentially 
the surface of a sphere (in 4D), and the gravity wells point in towards 
the center of the sphere. Jumpspace is using shortcuts between the 
gravity wells.

Do I make sense? I am very tired, and I must sleep now. But that was the 
general idea. Feel free to require clarifications :-)

I have made a program that creates 2D maps of jump routes in 3D space, 
using Graphviz (www.graphviz.org) to create the graphics. Works quite 
well, and enables maps to be printed to paper as something more visual 
than a table of coordinates. The program is not finished, but it should 
be easy for any programmer to generate Graphviz input from coordinate 
distances.

/ Jens 'Spacejens' Rydholm
   Karlstad, Sweden