Inaccurate Jumps in Traveller

[phavoc]

Jumps have a time deviation of 6d6 hours which can leave you a fair ways away from your target, which means you'll need to transit to your destination.

Further, piracy wouldn't occur in well populated systems and with most trade vessels being jump 1 or 2 means that some trade routes require jumping through less populated / less regulated space.

This article is from 2016, but piracy is alive and well in well-traveled areas like the Malacca straight, Yellow sea and the South China sea. Space is so much vaster than our oceans. Well-populated systems would have more targets, and more patrols, but most likely a higher chance of landing a fat target, too. With jump drive pirates could attack and get as much cargo as they could take, and flee before defenders could arrive.

http://www.businessinsider.com/worst-pirate-attack-locations-esri-data-2016-8/#2-south-china-sea-62-acts-of-piracy-9

phavoc, I did not mean to suggest these are static, fixed flight ways but they are most definitely predictable by any space faring culture and easily plotted otherwise the target ships couldn't fly there. This is another task for astrogators beyond calculating jump travel. Spend some time investigating the system by exploration or a little legwork dock side and you'll have a picture of all destinations, their importance and what traffic is like. Just decide where would be the best choice for hunting.

I was perhaps a tad too literal. Apologies to you Reynard. I agree with you that I expect a mainworld in a system to lay out somewhat static flight lanes for in-system ships to take. Having defined lanes would aid in ships being able to aid one another and also for system patrols to be far more effective. This is a bonus for merchants, and pirates as well. In ye olde days of steam, there where somewhat regular shipping lanes that many ships traversed. Some because it was roughly the best route, and others because if you needed assistance you needed to be somewhat close to the regular charted shipping lanes. Some merchants took other paths because their ports of call were out of the way, or some thought by striking it off on their own the liklihood of encountering a bad guy was much reduced. During WW1 and WW2 some merchants adopted this idea in the pacific and south atlantic to avoid german auxilaries and raiders.