Hey Onno, The gates are one way trips. The main expansion effort is to build a gate, carefully calibrate it to make sure you can hit what you are aiming for (by sending something through and waiting 6 years to find out where it lands sometimes for initial launches - much less if it is to someplace that can send back a messenger with the arrival coordinates), building a core ship with the hard to locally fabricate components and an adventuresome crew with as much automation as possible, send it through, then build a return gate on the other side. Gates are expensive to operate but not so expensive as to make interstellar trade unprofitable. The major limitations is usually bulk material to build the gates and the considerable price tag of them. In the setting this is made somewhat worse by the fact that each gate can only be aimed at one place without significant realignment and recalibration periods taking weeks to years to complete depending on the situation.
Deep space gates are possible, but no one has as yet come up with the capital to build two preassembled gates just to get further away. Proposals for doing so are frequently brought up by both the human interests and the Morethans who are trying to relink with any other survivors in distant worlds. Some limited communication has occurred over the years by Morethan scientific jump researchers sending small masses much further than normally possible. These experiments have an extremely low success rate and risk sending their encoded messages inside the zone of human influence tipping their hand. So this communication is very limited at this time. The Morethans basically have two groups outside the zone of human influence, separated by about 18 light years that had been under unified command at the exodus, but were forced to act independently afterwords. Both sides have been working on finding convenient ways to try to link back together. A small portion of the Morethan population were human sympathizers or prisoners of war and remained in system and lived with the prejudices, and other transhumans who lack many of the obvious physical or political signs of the Morethan rebellion still reside in human space as well (with varying degrees of persecution). Gates are typically built in deep space to avoid unnecessary influences caused by gravities, and to avoid the minor variations in landing points from causing objects to jump into solid objects (causing explosions from compressive friction, interacting strong and weak nuclear fields, and the very small % of "direct hit" particles annihilating each other). Landing point variation are about +/- the cube of the distance in light years in % of an AU - so for a 6 ly jump that is about +/-2 AU. By convention most gates are at the North pole of the system disk about 3 AU up, and aim for 3 AU south of the target star to prevent as much risk as possible of sudden jump mass interaction. Beyond the 6 (or 7) ly aiming capability of the gates or using an uncalibrated gate, the landing variation is more like 4/3 the cube of the jump distance (in light years) as full AU with a much higher chance of critical failure causing the jump mass to "smear" across the arrival point in a much more distributed and messy manner. So the Morethan exodus had a +/- 500ish AU arrival spread and a significant portion of the fleets getting "widely distributed" over their landing point by critical failures. Thanks, Clint >From Onno: > Basically the campaign this is for is using TL10ish tech with fusion > torches and jump gates. The jump gate technology for most of the > population of the game is limited to 6 light years before it rapidly loses > its ability to accurately place the item using the gate. Are gates one-way trips? What you write later on looks that way. **************** **************** > The Morethan elite don't value their drone caste workers much more than > expensive tools, and have a decided "survival of the fittest" attitude. > This and their ego (they have not advanced as fast as the humans on their > AI development - because they are smart enough that they "don't need" AIs > to help them in their opinion)are two of the major weaknesses that humans > can exploit in efforts to defeat them. How unified are the Morethans, and are humans willing to exploit that? Can they make the "second-fittest" Morethans an offer they cannot refuse? And Zan replied to me: > If the setting uses jump gates for FTL, then if the station does have a > problem and people do escape it, where do they go? The station may not > have any habitable planets nearby. And if the jump gate is destroyed > then help cannot get there. And if it did then it cannot get out again. Except for economics, is there anything to prevent jump stations in deep space? And on the other extreme, are gates requires to be in space, or can you build them on a planet? Consider Hamilton's Pandora/Void universe. > Of course in some settings the military has ships with built in gate > generators and the civilians only use the gates for cheap travel. If > it's like that then the gate is only money and probably disposable. Babylon 5 ... Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
