Blind Jump

""Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy. Without precise calculations you can fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova, and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?""

- Han Solo, Star Wars IV: A New Hope

The limitation for a lot of forms of FTL Travel is the need to make calculations before discarding relativity in order to make the trip safely. Either you need a very precise idea of where you are and where you're going, or you need to plot a course around inconvenient obstructions like stars, either way the jump can't be rushed.

However there will inevitably come a time when such safety measures are impossible. The Empire's space fleet is closing in or the Doomsday Device is Sucking-In Lines, and if the Cool Ship doesn't move  now it's doomed.

However there is one last chance: a Blind Jump, the Dangerous Forbidden Technique of celestial navigation. Skip the calculations, hit the button and pray. It may be a Million-to-One Chance you'll survive the trip, but if you stay you're dead anyway, right?

Naturally the heroes will make it. In fact, it's rare to even see Redshirts falling victim to the supposed hazards of a Blind Jump: the utter foolhardiness of even considering it is usually conveyed through grisly horror stories to the New Meat crew member, as ably demonstrated by captain Solo there.

Probably never destined to be Truth in Television, at least not as presented in Star Wars. Almost any calculation should be nigh-instantaneous with future technology, and space is overwhelmingly empty anyway-- who knows about Subspace or Hyperspace. Then again, considering the fact that the dangers of this trope seem to be complete myth even in its respective fiction, maybe it will be. Assuming of course, that breaking the light barrier will ever be possible.

A subtrope of the Hyperspeed Escape.

Anime

 * Super Dimension Fortress Macross : When the Macross attempts to space fold towards lunar orbit to outflank the Zentradi it instead places them along with South Ataria Island and ocean water with two carriers near Pluto's orbit.
 * Macross: Do You Remember Love has Hikaru and Misa blindly jump on Earth itself by accident when they attempt to escape the Zentradi at a beginning of a space fold.
 * Macross 7 :City 7 through enemy infiltrator sabotage was severed from Battle 7 and the rest of the fleet and was made to jump towards an unknown location. In a later episode enemy vessels try to capture it using a special formation to force it to fold with them. Battle 7 disrupts the formation making City 7 fold blind again.
 * Tenchi Muyo! GXP has Seina Yamada whenever the ship he is on jumps blindly there are always pirates. His stroke of bad luck makes Seto Kamiki Jurai reccomend him his own ship to be used as bait in anti-piracy operations. This results in a overwhelming success rate against pirates.
 * The Leap Rail Shells in Lost Universe open a small warp portal, taking everything inside the blast into hyperspace. At one point, the crew of the Swordbreaker fire several shells and fly into the explosion as a way of quickly getting away from the Gorun Nova. It works, but the ship is severely damaged.
 * In To Aru Majutsu no Index, espers with teleportation based powers often need to make extremely complex calculations to make sure their teleports go off without a hitch. Kuroko mentions offhand that she has to calculate movement through seven dimensions in order to safely teleport. Another teleporter finds out the hard way why blind jumps are dangerous when she messes up a calculation and part of body gets fused with a wall.
 * In The Irresponsible Captain Tylor an enemy salvo takes out the Soyakaze's navigation system in the first few seconds of the fight, but not the jump engines. Tylor orders a series of jumps in an attempt to escape despite the fact that the helmsman points out that they are incapable of plotting a course. Tylor responds "I don't care where we go, we just don't want to be HERE!" As an aversion of the dangers of a blind jump, they jump at least a dozen times only to safely appear in empty space... until the enemy ships show up in pursuit.
 * The final jump lands them uncomfortably close to a star...

Comic Book

 * Nightcrawler is reluctant to teleport into any area he can't see and/or hasn't been to before for exactly this reason.
 * This reluctance is actually justified at least once in the Excalibur series, when Nightcrawler teleports into solid rock due to interference with the local electromagnetic field. In theory, it could have killed him, but fortunately, he had his teammate Shadowcat with him, and her powers were able to get them out of the rock safely, in severe pain but with no lasting harm.

Fanfic

 * A variation of this occurs in Undocumented Features: The Delphinus makes a blind jump to escape GENOM's forces, but winds up stranded in non-space until Skuld pulls them out.
 * In the Harry Potter/Sailor Moon/Ranma ½ crossover The Girl Who Loved, an emotionally-distraught and highly-desperate Harry managed to apparate to China despite never having even seen a picture of the area.

Film

 * The Star Wars Expanded Universe elaborates on the dangers of a blind hyperspace jump: it's insanely dangerous since you're moving at ridiculous speed with no idea what's in the way, but if you're really lucky (or a Jedi) you can maybe pull a few seconds in hyper to escape certain death.
 * Outbound Flight has a hyperdrive malfunction which sends a little Corellian vessel to the figurative doorstep of Commander Mitth'raw'nuruodo, very far from the Republic, who has never found a source of information he wouldn't exploit.
 * On at least one occasion in the EU, a Force-user entered entirely random hyperspace coordinates when fleeing for their life, trusting that the Force would guide them safely. It tends to work.
 * The Lost in Space movie established that without a 'gate' to guide you activating the hyperdrive could send you anywhere. Since they were about to careen into the sun anyway they chanced it, leading to them becoming, well...
 * In Lilo and Stitch, Stitch uses this to escape recapture. It gets handwaved away that he's smarter than a supercomputer, but, he manages to hit an island, on a planet the alien overlords only vaguely know about ('A planet called... 'E- arth'..." and that it's a 'mosquito preserve...), which in itself gets an eyeroll and a sarcastic 'Of course' from the Galactic Councilwoman, as it was more likely Stitch would just have hit water and died/drowned.
 * Kind of used in the movie Down Periscope, as, per the plot, if Kelsey Grammer's ship and crew can destroy an 'enemy' ship before this other guy 'kills' Kelsey's crew, Kelsey will have won, and will get promoted. Kelsey and his crew don't have time to calculate a proper shooting solution, so they just shoot blind, going on instinct and a quick peek through the periscope ... just before his sub gets 'downed', giving Kelsey and his rival time to be smug at each other, just before the target ship goes down.
 * Which is highly irresponsible, if not criminal, given that they're shooting live torpedoes at a harbor where there are other ships.

Literature

 * Arthur Dent activates the Infinite Improbability Drive without any probability settings in all versions of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to escape some incoming missiles. This is probably the worst idea on this page since it could result in anything at all happening. Fortunately it just redecorates the bridge and transforms the missiles into a bowl of petunias and a whale.
 * It does come back to haunt Arthur later on in the series, when he once again encounters the petunias in reincarnated form. Apparently, the being.
 * It was dangerous and desperate, but they were already in desperate danger. This is why it was guaranteed to work; since it was infinitely improbable that it would save them from imminent destruction, the Infinite Improbability Drive made it a statistical certainty. Narrative Causality justified by the text.
 * They also use a teleporter without setting a destination, the alternative was crashing into a sun.
 * Andre Norton's Uncharted Stars. To escape pursuit by Jacks (space pirates), the protagonists must make a hyperspace jump using untested coordinates from a Forerunner artifact that they hope will take them where they want to go.
 * A variant that crops up in some of her stories, especially in the Time Traders series, is that they have carefully plotted courses -- on tapes. If you can't read the label on the tape, or somebody switched it, you have no idea where you're going ... but it will get you there flawlessly. Whether you've got any way to get back -- if, for instance, you used up your fuel -- is another matter.
 * Robert Heinlein.
 * Starman Jones. A starship gets lost during a hyperspace jump. The only way to return is to try to reverse the path they took the first time and hope it brings them home again. The jump was painstakingly calculated before entering FTL, but they did the calculations wrong.
 * With a bit of Science Marches On thrown in. They do the calculations with slide rules and "astrogation charts".
 * The Star Beast. In the backstory to the novel, the starship Trailblazer made a blind hyperspace jump to other solar systems, and had to make another blind jump to get back to Earth.
 * This trope plays a critical role in the plot of Dark Force Rising, where the titular Dark Force, a legendary lost fleet of warships, is only found by the blind luck of a blind jump. Also a bit of a subversion, as more than half of the crew of the ship that made the jump dies due to the mishaps involved.
 * In Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern, dragons are able to teleport through an interdimensional space called between. The original first book Dragonflight demonstrates the dangers by one of the characters relating a story of how, during excavations inside a mountain, they'd found one young dragon and his rider entombed in the rock after making an inaccurate jump. Additionally, when a dragon's rider dies, it causes such tremendous grief to their mount that invariably the dragon makes a blind jump between from which they never return (between being airless and cold, and if you don't find your way out, you suffocate/freeze). In Anne McCaffrey's Talent universe, when the Talents are 'pushing' ships, they are very careful to keep contact with the ship until the receiving Talent has hold, as there are stories of them being "lost".
 * Isaac Asimov's Foundation series has a pretty straight example in the form of a Jump drive where accurate travel requires calculating the specific circumstances of where you are before you jump. In Foundation and Empire, while escaping from the Mule after the fall of Haven, Toran desperately does hyperspace jumps without proper planning. One time the group almost ends up inside a red giant star.
 * A later book has Golan Trevize be surprised that a ship has plotted out a course involving twenty-eight hyper space jumps since this means they can't pause to fine-tune the calculations on the way.
 * Asimov later averts this with Nemesis: the local FTL technobabble is set up in such a way that you can't kill yourself with a blind jump since on emergency, any obstacles are harmlessly pushed aside.
 * Asimov also wrote a short-short story in which a criminal makes his escape with a random jump, relying on the ship's computer to figure out where he ended up and how to get home. After noticing that the computer is taking much longer than it should, he discovers that
 * Possibly to set up Toran and group's blind jumps in the second half of Foundation and Empire, the climax of the first half features a blind jump away from near-Trantor orbit. It isn't actually that risky, as the most likely destination if you vaguely target empty space is empty space... but since they don't know where they've ended up they then have to spend quite some time poring over starcharts until they get enough of an idea of their location to set a course for home.
 * The Space Hawks Choose Your Own Adventure books feature an unusual example: the ability to Blind Jump in case of an emergency is a stated feature of the Phantom starfighters.
 * BattleTech and its attendant fiction play this rather straight. In theory, anyplace with sufficiently low local gravity is safe to jump to and from, including virtually all of interstellar space. However, since the interesting planets are usually too deep inside their star's gravity well to jump to and from directly, a system's two main 'jump points' are as close as safely possible in the system's zenith and nadir (i.e., 'above' and 'below' the star itself, though still a respectable distance away). Or...you can try to use a 'pirate jump point' much closer to your target by taking advantage of the fact that at some points in a solar system, local gravitic influences cancel out just enough to allow the jump drive to work after all. The problem with this approach is that as the smaller celestial bodies in a system move, so do its pirate points move with them...and while actual misjumps in the fiction are relatively rare, they do generally take out the ship involved for good (sometimes in a quite horrific fashion), so this isn't a risk a sane commercial JumpShip captain is likely to ever take. (The military, and the pirates the points were named for, are a different matter.)
 * Another risk factor that sometimes comes up (such as in the novel Warrior: En Garde) is drive charge time. Normally, the jump drive is slowly recharged via a deployed solar sail, a process that tends to take a week or longer. It can be recharged faster via a ship's fusion power plant in an emergency, assuming the ship has the fuel to burn; but this risks potentially undetectable damage to the highly sensitive drive core and thus, again, a catastrophic jump accident.
 * There's a slightly more practical bit of advice, in that if you jump to a pirate point and your drive melts, no-one is going to be around to help you out. If you arrive at the standard local stellar zenith or nadir points, there'll be the equivalent of a service station and rest stop close enough to be of practical use. If you're somewhere relatively civilized.
 * In Bob Shaw's novel Night Walk, making a Null-Space jump outside of one of the few known portal routes is quite a bad idea, since there is no way to know where that jump point will lead to, and there is no way back..
 * In David Feintuch's Seafort Saga, the "Fusion" drive requires extremely precise calculations (out to 7 or 8 decimal places) involving the ship's mass, where you are, where you're going, etc. The drive also has an inherent error (reduced to 1% of the distance traveled by the end of the series, so the usual technique is to aim to a little short of the target and do a smaller corrective jump later. If your target coordinates aren't at least two light-minutes away, wierd things happen, as indicated in Challenger's Hope.
 * In The Stars My Destination, anyone can teleport, but if they don't know exactly where they're going, they will invariably wind up inside a solid object and die horribly. Played straighter than most uses as people actually die of it once in a while.
 * In the Starcraft Novel Queen of Blades, after Raynor warns Horner in the orbiting Battlecruiser Hyperion that the shuttles about to dock with his ship contain Zerg, and there's no other way to prevent their ship from being overrun, Horner initiates a blind warp jump (and so do the crew of the Norad III). This allows the Hyperion to be lost in space for just long enough that they can return to the abandoned crew as Big Damn Heroes.
 * The CoDominium Warworld series has the last ship full of Saurons, malevolent Super Soldiers, escape to a backwater Prison Planet by making a blind jump.
 * In Andrey Livadny's The History of the Galaxy series, nearly all early Hypersphere jumps were blind jumps due to the lack of understanding of the nature of the anomaly and the fact that no navigation systems existed for determining location. Even after the invention of mass-detectors, there were plenty of ships that never returned. That explains why most novels involve someone finding a Lost Colony or ruins of one even in remote systems.
 * A definite possibility in Mikhail Akhmanov's Arrivals From the Dark series, although never actually done in the books. It is explained, though, that jump calculations need to be extremely precise with distance and gravity being major factors. While, theoretically, it is possible to instantaneously jump anywhere in the galaxy, nobody actually does this as they would not know where they would end up. As such, most jumps are relatively short-range (several parsecs). This is known to play havoc with any military plans, as each ship jumps individually, often causing them to end up spread out all over the system. On the other hand, in-system jumps are usually fairly precise.
 * A variant occurs in one of the Dune prequels. Guild freighters can't perform hyperspace jumps with activated shields on board. Duke Leto escapes being attacked on one in transit after a False-Flag Operation by switching his shields on and agreeing to stand trial. There was a chance that the entire freighter, carrying representatives of a dozen factions, could have ended up inside a sun.
 * In the even-earlier prequels concerning the Butlerian Jihad, such jumps do go wrong - often. FTL has just been invented and a large proportion of the early Guild ships are never seen again. This is because navigators haven't yet corrupted themselves into spice-drugged monsters.
 * Not just Guild (which hadn't been created yet at that point) but any Armada ship equipped with the Holtzman drive. Even Space Fighters were sometimes equipped with those. During the Great Purge, all fold-capable ships were used in a massive strike against all machine worlds before Omnius could launch an all-out offensive against the League of Nobles weakened by a plague. The hazards of jumping without proper calculations (even with Norma Cenva secretly installing calculating machines on some flagships) meant that, at the end, only 300 capital ships remained out of 1080. For reference, each Ballista-class battleship had a crew of 1500, and each Javelin-class destroyer probably had at least 500.
 * In Harry Turtledove's Herbig-Haro (the sequel to The Road Not Taken), the protagonist drops out of FTL travel at a point he considered safe according to hopelessly outdated starmaps. He was just barely right.
 * In David Weber's Honor Harrington series hyperspace travel generally requires scrupulous calculations to leave the hyperspace at a desired point, but the hyperspace itself is more like a shortcut than Blind Jump. The wormholes, however, have fixed nodes, which means that newly-discovered ones can only be mapped by jumping through and matching the neighbourhood with known maps. It, however, is not a risk to anyone's life as the nodes are always on the outskirts of a star system.
 * In Francis Cascac's novel Fleeing Earth (Terre en fuite), humans get their hands on advanced methods of propulsion hundreds of thousands of years in the future (after another Ice Age and rebirth of civilization) from a race of invaders known as Drums. After a bioweapon forces the Drums off the planet, humans start building ships propelled by "space magnets" that utilize natural attraction between stellar bodies to accelerate to close to 80% of the speed of light. A later discovery of hyperspace allows them to build FTL colony ships. Unfortunately, all but one are lost, and the only ship to return reveals that interstellar travel using hyperspace is inherently unpredictable. Apparently, there is a "magnetic barrier" of sorts between any two nearby stars that is impossible to penetrate using "space magnets" in normal space and which causes the ship to go wildly off course in hyperspace. The colonists that return reveal that the first jump put them outside the galaxy, and they had to try several more before somehow making it back. The only way to penetrate the barrier in normal space is by flying something at least Moon-sized, which is fine because they end up flying Earth and Venus to another star to escape the Sun going nova. The secret of safe hyperspace travel is revealed at the end, when an archaeological dig on Mars finds ancient ruins and an intact starship not of human or Drum design. They find out that it avoids the barrier by using Time Travel to go to a point before or after the barrier was there.
 * Interestingly, most of the story is read by the Decoy Protagonist from the diary of the true protagonist who accidentally ends up in the 20th century when experimenting with the above-mentioned temporal drive. In the diary, the protagonist also reveals the secret of "space magnetism", only to realize it could change the past and tear up the page.
 * In Walter Jon Williams's Angel Station, FTL travel is achived by using captured black holes (contained within each ship) to open a tear in space-time. Proper calculations are necessary to "ride out the wave" to the proper destination. The protagonists, Ubu Roy and Beautiful Maria, make a random jump, hoping to find a system that will have "catchable" black holes to sell. A similar jump puts a Living Ship (also looking to capture and sell singularities) in the same system, resulting in the events of the book.
 * Vorkosigan Saga: The first jump through a newly discovered wormhole is always blind. You have no idea where your ship is going to come out. Doing this used to be Cordelia Naismith's job.
 * Time Scout features blind jumps across time rather than space, with results no less potentially fatal. Jump through a Time Portal into a time in which you already exist and *poof*, you're dead. And there's no way to know what time it is without going through.

Live Action TV

 * The Cool Ship in Farscape had the 'Starburst Drive', a sort of space-folding jump drive which was always blind, with no way to choose a destination. Fortunately there were other means of getting around if it wasn't crucial to leave quickly.
 * Battlestar Galactica is possibly the Trope Namer. Activating the jump drive without inputting any co-ordinates is known as a "blind jump", and inherently risky because you could end up anywhere. This is notably how  In the finale,   enters coordinates into Galactica's navigation, which

Tabletop Games

 * GURPS counts this as an advantage over normal teleportation as it means you can at least try to go anywhere in the universe even if you've never been there before.
 * In the RPG Seventh Sea, the teleportation school of magic involves crossing over into Hell, walking a while, then coming back out. Every jump has to be a literal blind jump : if you open your eyes while you're in Hell, you either go insane or you get killed in a variety of grisly ways by the inhabitants.
 * Porte mages also require an "anchor" where the exit point will appear that they walk through the other side to get to. A porte mage finds walking to the exit point harder if they have other people that they are guiding with them. A more fitting example of this trope in action would be the escape of The General when rescuing Enrique Orduno from being burned at the stake by the inquisition. He had hired his former first mate, Timmy LeBeau, and a large number of porte mages to tear open a hole large enough for his ship to sail through. The General, Orduno, and his entire crew went in when there was no way any porte mage could have guided the whole ship to an exit point. There were rumors the ship had found its way out someplace far in the Western Sea, but the game line died before the plot could be resolved.
 * Traveller discourages blind jumps because of how the Jump Drive works - it creates a pocket universe in a gravity bubble, shunts to the next destination (measured in parsecs), and then collapses and lets you out. Blindly jumping is a waste of fuel, since odds are good you won't get very far (if the bubble passes through a gravity well, it pops and you get kicked out).
 * Since Warhammer 40000 version of FTL involves driving your ship through daemon-infested Warp, a Blind Jump is the worst thing you can ever do. For the Imperium, Warp jumps require Navigators who use the Astronomicon as a reference point. If a ship loses its Navigator, or if the Navigator loses sight of the Astronomicon, then that ship will essentially be lost in the Warp or a random point in space, possibly forever.
 * Ohhh it gets better! Before the Navigators came about (whether through selective breeding, genetic mutation or just dumb luck) this was about the ONLY way for humans to travel interstellar distances. Very short, very risky "hops" in and out of the Warp, with a "kind of rough idea" where you're going. No sane person would ever think this acceptable, and yet through raw grit, Mankind colonized at least a quarter of the galaxy this way even before the Navigators came along. And they wouldn't even have the benefit of the Astronomicon for another good 10,000 or so years, so it was an upgrade from Blind Jump to blind-in-one-eye jump.

Video Games

 * In Space Rangers, the black holes which sometimes appear at the edge of the systems allow you to make a fuel-free jump to another star system. At the cost of having to fight the enemies inside the black hole's space and ending up in an unpredictable location (in a system that's 50 parsecs deep into the enemy territory, for example).
 * The Unfocused Jumpdrive in X3: Terran Conflict will randomly generate a sector, and warp the player to it; complete with radio hash and distant visible galaxies off the distance. It's great for escaping your doom, but you better hope you brought energy cells for the return trip,otherwise you'll be stranded forever.
 * Which would be why the randomly generated sector always contains at least one crate of energy cells. Unfortunately sometimes they're out of sensor range, or on the opposite side of a swarm of Kha'ak or Xenon ships.
 * The Arilou skiff in Star Control 2 has an 'emergency hyperspace shunt', an application of this trope to the standard hyperdrive. It immediately teleports away from danger but the jump is random, and the ship can end up emerging anywhere on the screen including inside a planet or other ship.
 * This was probably inspired by the original 1979 Asteroids arcade cabinet which had a similar feature for desperate situations.
 * Hyperdrives in Frontier: Elite II could be forced to mis-jump to a completely random location in deep space. This puts incredible strain on the engines, occasionally turning your hyperdrive into scrap metal. It's useful for shaking off pursuers, as a mis-jump can't be tracked.
 * The original Halo backstory had the Pillar Of Autumn do a blind jump to escape Reach, stumbling upon the titular Halo and setting the events of the first game in motion. Later novels RetConed it so Cortana had used untested coordinates from a Forerunner artifact, without telling the Captain, instead.
 * It's actually the law that they have to do this if they find meet a Covenant ship, they must purge all navigational data and make a random jump, so as not to lead the Covenant to Earth or any still functional colony. Cortana still technically followed the law, given that the Forerunner coordinates weren't for a human colony. Also, this law became null at the beginning of Halo 2, when Covenant found Earth anyway.
 * That novel was actually published before the original game so it wasn't retcon. And in the Halo 'verse blind jumps aren't so dangerous. It makes sense, because after all space is rather empty so the chances that you drop out of slipspace in a dangerous area is astronomically slim.
 * The novel Halo: Cole Protocol shows that UNSC sent troops to enforce the titular protocol by destroying any navigational database that could lead the Covenant to Earth.
 * In Alpha Man, it is generally not a good idea to short-range teleport into an area you haven't mapped out yet. Alternatively, if you teleport into a wall that's in plain sight, it probably qualifies as Yet Another Stupid Death.
 * In Mass Effect 2, the Normandy SR-2 uses this trick at least once to escape an enemy attack- though only on one occasion does a character specifically state that there is no course plotted. Justified as the ship is run by an AI who could plot a course to an acceptable location without constant instruction if necessary.
 * EVE Online invokes this trope both as intentional uses and accidents.
 * When a user logs out in space without docking to a station, the ship will try to initiate an emergency warp to a random spot 1 million km away from the current location. If the ship's warp drive is functioning, it will warp out and disappear 60 seconds later. If the warp drive is disrupted by warp disruptors or interdiction fields, the ship will stay there for 15 minutes to be pounded to death. Super-capital ships that are facing certain destruction usually accept the latter because they are designed to shrug off obscene amounts of pounding anyway.
 * The chronicle article of the solar system Old Man Star depicts this trope as a disaster. A construction ship, ordered to build a new star gate in an obscure system, suffers a drive malfunction which sends it into the middle of an uncharted asteroid field. This tears the life support system apart, disables both the warp drive and sub light engines, and kills four out of five crew members. The remaining crew member drifts 44 years to the destination, spending the time inventing ingenious drone designs to replace the ship's lost construction equipment. He finally returns to Gallente Federation space through a star gate he built all by himself. Renaming the system "Old Man Star" is the least the Federation could do in his honor.
 * This might be why Mega Man can't simply teleport straight to the boss room. Since he has no information about the area, he sets down in the first safe area to be found. Mega Man Powered Up hangs a lampshade on it by having Mega Man activate checkpoint flags as he passes.
 * A perfectly valid method of exploration in the Sub Machine series of Flash games. It's even mentioned in some of the in-game texts that entering random numbers is the last resort for the lost or confused. However, since the player is supposed to figure everything out for oneself, don't expect to actually get anywhere with this method.
 * The backstory to the Master of Orion series, presented in the manual for the third game, has the Precursors first sending criminals in blind jumps through an unstable wormhole, then later having to evacuate themselves in the same manner when doing has caused their star to become unstable. In addition, the precursors themselves were actually composed of a variety of different races who all ended up in a single central system due to blind jumps in the other direction.

Web Comics
"Vexxarr: Can't we just dump the capacitors into the warp shunt directly? Minionbot: Yes. Press the emergency warp actuator on Carl's left suite. Vexxarr: There's nothing here but a button labeled "Danger Self Destruct"! Minionbot: This is the emergency warp actuator. Vexxarr: Then why is it labeled Self Destruct? Minionbot: Obviously, the ship designers wanted to discourage its use. Vexxarr: Logical. Minionbot: And because it is functionally the same thing. Vexxarr: Extremely logical."
 * Vexxarr discusses use of FTL drive without benefit of computer controls:

Western Animation

 * This is how the Megas in Megas XLR, originally stolen in Earth orbit in the far future, ended up in Jersey City in 1930. Though it was not originally a blind jump, but ends up that way because Megas got its head blown off while setting course.