Johannes replied to me: > > How do you misplace a colony, anyway? An entire planet is hard > > to hide, and neither will it simply change course and sail off > > into the dark. Some ideas: > > > > FTL travel might depend on hyperspace of some sorts. Propably a convenient > 2 dimensional one that makes maps easier to read. Or on wormhols (the sf > version not the physics version) which is a lot like one dimensional > hyperspace. > > Now due to rare events the mapping of hyperspace to real space might > change, or wormholes cease to exist. Which means that planets can simply > fall off the charts and for all practical purposes have sailed off into > the dark.
Reminds me of the Vorkosigan universe by Bujold, where the wormhole connections shifted on a scale of centuries, and the Uplift books by Brin, where connections might disappear on a more astronomical timescale. And nothing says that connections on the wormhole/jumpline map have anything to do with realspace proximity. Worlds a single jump away might be thousands of parsecs distant, while the route to Alpha Centauri requires a dozen hops. Lost colonies are mostly relevant if they can be found again, so assume an average of slightly more than two wormholes per system. There is a good chance that any two worlds have more than one connection, but the other one could be MUCH longer. _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
