Asteriod Belts and the 100D Jump Limit

[Dave Chase]

Does the 100D Jump limit apply to asteriod belt?
(I know it applies to any object within 100D of the ship but does it apply to an asteriod belt?)

Does the 100D Jump limit which can drop a ship out of Jump apply to the entire belt (cricle/orbit)?
If so, does that make as good of a Jump Barrier to interplanets that the star's 100D Jump limit (Shadow) does not cover?

Does a system of nothing but asteriods impose a Jump limit hazard to all who attempt to enter or leave such a system?

Dave Chase

 

[rinku]

Asteroid belts aren't usually as dense as most people think. You should usually be able to clear 100D quickly. In our own belt, Ceres (950km) is large enough to rate as a dwarf planet (in MGT terms, it can arguably be classed as a small size one), with Vesta (530km), Pallas (550ish km) and Hygea (400ism km) making up the other known big ones. The vast majority are less than 100km in diameter. A 1km rock (typical of the majority) only has a 100km jump shadow. You'd have to aim for it to have any realistic chance of it affecting you.

Usually an asteroid will be hundreds of thousands of km from its nearest neighbours - allowing plenty of space for jumping.

However, this *is* just the local situation. It's conceivable for a system with no planets (especially no gas giants) to have chaotic belts that are much denser. A young sun in which planetary formation is still taking place would be a possible example.

In any case, as the majority of the rocks should be orbiting in the local plane of the ecliptic you should have jump windows above and below this, even in a really dense belt.

As well, if the belt is populated you would think someone is going to edit inconvenient rocks by changing their orbit in the event they were a navigational hazard.

So, no. I don't think there's any worry. By default, I'd assume the starport is located at a 200km rock and work on a 100D of 20,000km.

In relation to the star, yes it does impose a 100D jump shadow.

Jumping into an asteroid system doesn't impose any more of a risk than into a normal system with an asteroid belt. The way jump travel is stated to work, you can't collide with any significant mass coming in, as you'll drop out of jump space as soon as you hit the 100D limit. What happens immediately AFTER that depends on vectors...

 

[DFW]

If it were much denser than ours, it would coalesce due to gravity. The "belt"
isn't really a problem for jump not real space navigation.