Blind Jump: Difference between revisions

* 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 [[Author Existence Failure|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.

* 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 [[Subspace or Hyperspace|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 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.

* 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''The Road Not Taken''), the protagonist drops out of FTL travel at a point he considered safe according to hopelessly outdated starmaps.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.

== [[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.

** 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 [[Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep"|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).

** Ohhh [[Blatant Lies|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 [[Hyperspace Is a Scary Place|the Warp]], with a "kind of rough idea" where you're going. No sane person would ever think this acceptable, and yet [[Determinator|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.