[TML] Noncanonical TU 3D.

[Garry Ward]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jens Rydholm" <jens.rydholm at bredband.net>
To: "The Traveller Mailing List" <tml at travellercentral.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2008 4:04 PM
Subject: Re: [TML] Noncanonical TU 3D.


> 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.
That's the same principle that I've been working on. Everything bends 
towards an unknown center point and stars, planets, whatever, make 
depressions in the surface thereof.

Differing Jump # reflect being able to move further down the curves where 
the end points are closer together so you go farther.

Also why ships can make micro (or self relative) jumps; they're simply 
working across the depth of their own depression in the fabric of space/time 
to the nearest minimally bent portion.

Garry
>
> 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
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