Jumping while underway

1. Presumably, artificial intelligence can identify constellations, and adjust for drift.

2. What do we use to identify cosmic ecks rays? Hopefully, something smaller than giant ass arrays.
 
I am pretty sure a handheld camera is enough to show millions of stars, so even Basic Sensors should be as good or better than My cellphone and it's apps. You don't need anymore than that to triangulate positions. Just that, the accurate starmap, and the ship's computer. This is probably what the jump software actually does.
Do you get accurate spectrum's to identify those stars and accurate angles? Maybe the pixel size will be small enough to get accurate angles but I doubt it is down to the level needed for the high accuracy of jumping into a system from 1 or more parsecs away. The distance massively magnifies any inaccuracy.
 
Pulsars are pretty easy to spot, all you need is an x ray detectror which is part of the basic sensor system of every ship.

This is trivial now, +/-5m accuracy at TL7, by TL9 it is not even worth a roll.
 
So, basically, you can judge your position accurately at close to 5 meters of resolution at a distance of hundreds or thousands of parsecs at TL-7, but from TL-9 on the most accurate you can plot your jump is plus or minus 3,000 kilometers. Is that right? Seems as if accurately determining the ship's position is easy in comparison.
 
Link to source
We compare two different methods. The first method measures the parallax directly by utilising the long baselines of the SKA to form high angular resolution images. The second method uses the arrival times of the radio signals of pulsars to fit a transformation between time coordinates in the terrestrial frame and the comoving pulsar frame directly yielding the parallax. We find that with the first method a parallax with an accuracy of 20% or less can be measured up to a maximum distance of 13 kpc, which would include 9000 pulsars. By timing pulsars with the most stable arrival times for the radio emission, parallaxes can be measured for about 3600 ms pulsars up to a distance of 9 kpc with an accuracy of 20%.

5 meters across thousands of parsecs?
 
I agree with the idea of using known stellar phenomenon like pulsars to triangulate your position. Those beacons are well known and powerful enough to be easily used throughout known space. Every spaceship and starship's computer would have a file with the relevant data on them and so long as you had working sensors you should be able to figure your relative position - even if you are just determining which star system you are in.

The jump accuracy, at least as listed in the rules, doesn't reference whether it's done at speed or at rest. "Rest" is always relative as every system has it's own specific angular velocity, so I'm willing to fudge on that a bit and say it's always relative to the system you are currently in. And Traveller M-drives, even measily 1G drives can easily counter any difference between two systems (at least in most instances - if we are talking about some of the weirder systems that have been recently discovered that are blazing their way across the universe then that's the exception to the rule). So jumping from a rest makes the calculations more accurate than if your velocity is much greater. That's where even with the computers coming in, the variances already inherent in jumping can affect accuracy.

Jump space doesn't exist today, and per the game canon you might be able to predict your emergence locus, but the time travelling is variable (plus or minus). Other things that can cause changes include your distance to a strong enough gravity well (the 100D limit), so even within the game there are already a number of factors affecting your jump accuracy. While this is an insertable game mechanic, I think it helps address a few of the more egregious rules holes.

I've never gotten the game companion, so I don't know what is in there (related to the comment about something similar being there).
 
It knows it's exact position in time and space, and transmits that.

You have a number spread around the parsec, and the spacecraft triangulates it's position in relation to them, adjusting for drift in spacetime, by the time the spacecraft picks up that signal.
 
So, basically, you can judge your position accurately at close to 5 meters of resolution at a distance of hundreds or thousands of parsecs at TL-7, but from TL-9 on the most accurate you can plot your jump is plus or minus 3,000 kilometers. Is that right? Seems as if accurately determining the ship's position is easy in comparison.
There is a random element to carrying a pocket of N-Space through J-Space, as shown by the possibility of enough time passing to have your ship's electrons decay prior to exit if you really Bork the Bwap, showering the local zone with the decaying quarks and photons of your former characters.
It's like curling without a sweeper. All the accuracy in the galaxy is not going to evade unknown and random minor influences, even when you do it right.
Plus, jump exit rules are more influenced by techno-babble than in universe physics.
 
There is a random element to carrying a pocket of N-Space through J-Space, as shown by the possibility of enough time passing to have your ship's electrons decay prior to exit if you really Bork the Bwap, showering the local zone with the decaying quarks and photons of your former characters.
It's like curling without a sweeper. All the accuracy in the galaxy is not going to evade unknown and random minor influences, even when you do it right.
Plus, jump exit rules are more influenced by techno-babble than in universe physics.
Right, but I am talking about identifying your position after you exit jumpspace.
 
I like the momentum free aspect of jump space but you could easily sat that for a perfectly plotted jump to known clear space the exit point opens with a vector equal to the direction and velocity of a circular orbit of the star at that point. However, given that there is never completely clear space some degree of random precipitation and vector would be likely - but no ultra-high sub light speed planet smashers emerging from a jump point a couple of 100 thousand km away.
 
It knows it's exact position in time and space, and transmits that.

You have a number spread around the parsec, and the spacecraft triangulates it's position in relation to them, adjusting for drift in spacetime, by the time the spacecraft picks up that signal.
Why bother when you can just use pulsars.
A radio transmitter would have to powered to the same energy level as the pulsar
a radio receiver is a lot larger than an x ray receiver.
 
There is a random element to carrying a pocket of N-Space through J-Space, as shown by the possibility of enough time passing to have your ship's electrons decay prior to exit if you really Bork the Bwap, showering the local zone with the decaying quarks and photons of your former characters.
Half life of the electron 6.6×1028 years, if you are in jump space that long I don't think you need to worry about where you are on exit :)
 
Granted, I am only a few years into Traveller, with my exposure being to MgT2E and the available online resources, but I've taken the idea of jumpspace itself from the Traveller wiki and its description that all sophonts perceive it differently, and therefore no accurate description of it exists, as long-term observation can drive one nuts.

At my (virtual) table, jumpspace is a quantum black box that changes when observed. Standard Astrogation checks take all visible and measurable n space phenomena, and knows that if it feeds those values into jumpspace with a relative velocity of 0, a reasonably predictable value comes out the other side. However, the further that relative velocity is from zero, the more unpredictable the value from the black box of jumpspace becomes. Why? Who knows; quantum black box. All we know is that, if the number going in is zero, the number coming out is pretty much what you expect, and you can jump safely.

So handling velocities significantly higher than zero requires an increase in the Astrogation roll's difficulty. Your Astrogator is a professional, so they try to handle it, using theoretical methods of calculating the jump if you're moving hell for leather... but they're not reliable, there are arguments as to their efficacy, and if you get it wrong, it's a failed or a misjump.
 
it feeds those values into jumpspace with a relative velocity of 0,
Relative to what? This is the problem. You're solving the problem by pretending that there is a single resting frame of reference in the universe (there isn't). In which case you can drop the "relative" term.

You can say that all the stars and maybe the planets too are sort of sitting in space, or perhaps pinned by giant celestial thumbtacks to a cosmic corkboard. They'd have to be pinned, I guess, unless you also decide there is no gravity - things would start moving immediately and we'd see a Universe Sandbox style smashup. There would be no seasons, no waxing and waning of moons, no orbiting anything.
Of course, your Traveller universe is imaginary, and your cosmology could be turtles all the way down if you want (Wikipedia has a nice article, if you're not familiar with the phrase). The problem in a Traveller context is that as science fiction, the players often want to interact with the science bits and if cosmology, the physical characteristics of space, the astrography of space, the fundamentals of physics, are re-imagined from the ground up, the referee has to do a massive amount of work, and teach it to the players, so that they can feel immersed, and so that they can think their way through the challenges you put in front of them (which is, IMHO, a major part of scifi adventuring). There is a danger that the referee just makes stuff up as he goes along, and every interaction with the environment becomes referee fiat - this can be ok for a time but does tend to rob the players of agency.

This is why many referees assume the physics are the same in the Traveller universe, except for some concessions to scifi tropes so that we can have our ray guns and rocket ships: i.e. J drives and grav tech, but still have a place that makes sense and works in knowable ways.

These concessions raise questions about their interactions with real physics, prompting efforts to reconcile things so that there is a consistent universe in which the players understand the rules. That is why we are all trying to figure out whether you keep your vector when you jump; it is a thing to which there is no correct answer, but there are answers that limit some the game problems, while raising others - whichever assumption you make you have to find a way to deal with the resulting game problems but this is better than not being aware of this, and suddenly having things fall apart when the players decide to push the envelope, or ask annoying questions. The zero velocity idea opens a whole can of worms best left closed., however, because it blows up everything in the way the real universe is structured. If your players don't mind you not letting them peek behind the curtain in case they see the turtles, you'll be fine, but IMO you'll be missing out on the whole point of scifi.

A poetic description of the crux of the problem, with credit to Monty Python, there is a video on Youtube with singing and dancing:

The Galaxy Song
Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown,
And things seem hard or tough,
And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft,
And you feel that you've had quite eno-o-o-o-o-ough,
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at 900 miles an hour.
It's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned,
The sun that is the source of all our power.
Now the sun, and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day,
In the outer spiral arm, at 40, 000 miles an hour,
Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars;
It's a hundred thousand light-years side to side;
It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light-years thick,
But out by us it's just three thousand light-years wide.
We're thirty thousand light-years from Galactic Central Point,
We go 'round every two hundred million years;
And our galaxy itself is one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
Our universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
In all of the directions it can whiz;
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth;
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth!
 
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