2300AD: sensors in FTL

[Sangelet]

For those of you knowledgeable of Traveller 2300AD ruleset: any hint of how sensors work in FTL?
In stutterwarp mode it is not clear to me what is the use of sensors: after all the ship is travelling much faster than the light a sensor can detect.
But it does not seem to me very reasonable to go in stutterwarp for days and be effectively blind with no information received from the outside.
One possibility would be that a stutterwarp consists of a sequence of extremely fast quantic jumps. But this means that in the microseconds/nanoseconds between two jumps the ship is in normal space. May be the computer could integrate data received during these short periods of time and integrate them into something meaningful.

if this makes sense then a stutterwarp ship could
- Receive a distress call
- Anticipate an obstacle in the route (dead reckoning travel)

Any thoughts?

 

[wbnc]

For those of you knowledgeable of Traveller 2300AD ruleset: any hint of how sensors work in FTL?
In stutterwarp mode it is not clear to me what is the use of sensors: after all the ship is travelling much faster than the light a sensor can detect.
But it does not seem to me very reasonable to go in stutterwarp for days and be effectively blind with no information received from the outside.
One possibility would be that a stutterwarp consists of a sequence of extremely fast quantic jumps. But this means that in the microseconds/nanoseconds between two jumps the ship is in normal space. May be the computer could integrate data received during these short periods of time and integrate them into something meaningful.

if this makes sense then a stutterwarp ship could
- Receive a distress call
- Anticipate an obstacle in the route (dead reckoning travel)

Any thoughts?

It would be a series of snapshots taken by the ships passive optical, thermal and Passive EM sensors. Each time the ship jumps there is a slight pause, long enough for a system to capture ambient emissions, and compile a rough picture many millions of miles in every direction.

I imagine the image is grainy, incomplete, and full of distortion and gaps...but it would be enough to avoid the stray piece of ice or rock in billions of cubic miles of hard vacuum. to increase the resolution of a snapshot the ship would have to increase the time between stutters. That means slowing down. the faster the ship moves, the more incomplete it's picture of the outside world becomes.

 

[Vagabond Elf]

It's worth remembering that while you're outrunning the active sensors, passives still work. And every time you end a flicker, all the light, IR, and other EM emissions passing through where you are are readable. The light doesn't just hang out at the rock two light-seconds away, it's constantly passing through space.

So you'd have a good idea of what's beside and ahead of you. EM emissions coming from behind you can't catch up, of course, but you already know what's there.

Hmm. Which presents the idea (surely done somewhere in Sci-Fi already!) of needing to know what happened at a given place a couple hours ago, and so jumping off to the place that's two light-hours distant to watch it happen.

 

[Epicenter]

Hmm. Which presents the idea (surely done somewhere in Sci-Fi already!) of needing to know what happened at a given place a couple hours ago, and so jumping off to the place that's two light-hours distant to watch it happen.

I actually had that as a description in a lost space battle against the Kafers.

The players, as their ship fled the scene of the engagement, they got to watch the terrible sight of space debris magically collecting together and fires and explosions being sucked back in as the hulls of several cruisers magically reknit themselves the further away the players got from the battle because Stutterwarp effectively goes faster-than-light.

 

[simonh]

if this makes sense then a stutterwarp ship could
- Receive a distress call
- Anticipate an obstacle in the route (dead reckoning travel)

The first is certainly not true. Let's say the distress signal is 10 seconds long and loops continuosuly. The ship would stutter into the transmission stream, but would only recieve a microseconds long clip of the transmission before jumping again. It would then get another microseconds long clip from a random point in another iteration of the signal, and so on. If it's a digital signal, it would recieve only perhaps a few bytes of the packet stream, probably not enough to even decode the data it received because either it would be missing checksums, packet sequence numbers, etc or it would get those but not enough of the data record to be able to use it for decoding.

To identify and avoid an obstacle it would need to be able to identify the object from a passive signal from far enough away that it could analyze the sensor inputs fast enough to aler course before the vesst reached the object. Not though that even if the object is on the ship's course, it would only hit it if one of the stutter jumps happened to deposit the ship co-terminously with the object. The chances are the ship would jump harmlessly through it.

I don't have my books with me. What is the typical distance between stutter jumps? How long does the ship spend in real space between jumps?

Simon Hibbs

 

[Epicenter]

I don't have my books with me. What is the typical distance between stutter jumps? How long does the ship spend in real space between jumps?

Simon Hibbs

"It depends."

Each jump of a stutterwarp is influenced by how close it is a gravity source. Close-in, the jumps are very short, in "interstellar space" (there's an actual g-threshold, I just don't remember it off of the top of my head), each stutterwarp jump is like thousands of meters.

The speed that a stutterwarp drive cycles is part of its "Warp Efficiency" but most drives cycle thousands of times per second, iirc.

 

[wbnc]

Hmm. Which presents the idea (surely done somewhere in Sci-Fi already!) of needing to know what happened at a given place a couple hours ago, and so jumping off to the place that's two light-hours distant to watch it happen.

Evidently your not the ony one to come up with that idea...this clip is a little odd, but it uses the idea of moving away from a world to see the past...and it includes a good example of a misjump...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yid59_nd9-8

 

[Rick]

The only problem I can see is that the further away you are, the less resolution you have. If you need to see what happened a couple of hours ago; you jump two light-hours out from the incident and you're viewing it from about 2.2 billion km away. The further back you need to see, the less detail you'll actually be able to view.