Blind Jump: Difference between revisions

Naturally the heroes will make it. In fact, it's rare to even see [[Red Shirt|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.

 

 

A subtrope of the [[Hyperspeed Escape]].

*** 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 [[Precursors|Forerunner]] artifact that they hope will take them where they want to go.

* [[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''.

** 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 {{spoiler|he's close to a nova too recent to appear in the computer's star charts, and realizes that the computer will keep trying and failing to get a navigational fix until the ship's power runs out.}}

** 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.

* ''[[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.

*** 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 [[AI Is a Crapshoot|Omnius]] could launch an all-out offensive against the [[Feudal Future|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 [[The Battlestar|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 [[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 [[Subspace or Hyperspace|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.

* ''[[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 [[Hyperspace Is a Scary Place|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.

 

== [[Video Games]] ==