Jump Drive

This Five Earths information can be used as a jumping off point for Jump Drives
==Description==
Also called Fold drive or Teleportation drive, this is a technically-instantaneous drive system, teleporting the vessel from one part of space to another by the use of wormholes or folded space. It is only 'technically' instantaneous, because the time between jumps often needs to be quite long. Firstly, long-range jumps (anything approaching even a single light-year) require up to 8 hours of pre-jump calculation and other preparations, and still tend to be off-position by a few AU, requiring a series of shorter jumps (often with decreasing calculation times) to close with the intended destination. Secondly, teleporting very long ranges requires very much power, and thus it can take a long time, sometimes on the order of days, to fully charge all the capacitors involved, as well as sometimes requiring a lengthy cool-down time.
Vessels using this method of travel tend to be quite large, due to the size of the power systems, and sometimes of the drive, itself. Many such vessels are incapable of planetary landings, instead using shuttles or dropcraft to transfer cargo and/or personnel that, for whatever reason, they do not use a teleportative transporter for.
A variant usable by smaller craft is called 'stutterwarp' or 'short-jump' drive, and works by teleporting much shorter distances, much faster - this may mean 'a single one-light-year jump every eight hours', 'many one-AU jumps per second', or some other combination, but shorter distances usually mean shorter time between jumps. This does have the disadvantage that if the drive fails, the vessel may be stranded in the middle of no-where, multiple parsecs from rescue. Thus, most stutterwarp vessels tend to stay on well-traveled routes, much like some warp and hyperspace vessels do.
The effective speed of the vessel varies far more by the Complexity of its computers and the range of individual jumps than by technology level, to the point that trying to define the speed based on TL would not be terribly accurate or informative.
This drive doesn't lend itself well to FTL communication, beyond courier vessels. Many civilizations that use it eventually develop psi-based forms of FTL communications, though they do not always define them as such.
This is the easiest and safest method of FTL travel available in the parts of the Clockpunk Earth universe astronomically near Sol. It is possible in the other universes, but is generally not used, for efficiency reasons.
==Skill and Use==
Skill: Astrogation (Jumper)/TL (IQ/Average)
Prerequisite: Astronomy of the same TL.
Defaults to Astrogation (Space)-2, Astronomy-4, or Mathematics (Applied)-4.
Specific jumps may be bought as techniques, but cannot exceed Astrogation; base penalty varies from jump to jump. Astrogators may specialize by region of space.
Astrogation (Stutterwarp) functions much like Astrogation (Warp drive), and may default to it at -2 or worse, depending on design - the shorter the time between jumps, the less inconvenient the penalty. Jump-times much longer than one per second generally do not default from Astrogation (Warp drive). Technically, a stutterwarp driven vessel still uses Astrogation (Jumper), in a very fast, but otherwise limited, expert system. These vessels may be limited more by the speed of their computers, than by the limitations of the drive systems. 'Short-jump' vessels, that take long enough between jumps for a human to make a meaningful contribution to the calculations, use the normal Astrogation (Jumper) skill
Category:Spaceship Components
Category:Five Earths