So far I've looked for the need for a mind to monitor a jump in progress in
- Classic Traveller, The Traveller Book (nope)
- the Traveller's Digest (nope)
- Mega Traveller Starship Operator's Manual (nope)
- Gurps Traveller starships (Nope)
- TNE - Fire, Fusion and Steel (Nope) although it includes an alternate technology called a Psionic Transfer Drive on p. 48 which mirrors the Dune Guild Navigator model using Psions
- T4 rulebook (nope)
- T5 (nope)
- MgT 1st Ed (Nope)
Importantly,there's a specific model of how Jump works introduced in Mega Traveller, but implicit in Classic Traveller, which is this:
- You calculate a tumble through J-Space (Astrogation) taking into account gravitational fields between you and the destination (Jump point masking).
- You pump energy into the hull grid, which opens a portal into one of the 6 accessible levels of J-Space, and start to tumble through it toward your exit point, emerging about a week later.
- There's a jump field around the ship, which separates you from the reality of J-Space.
So everything happens before entry to J-Space - calculations, energising of the hull grid etc - to determine a successful jump or a mis-jump. Once in J-Space, there's no control available, you are not flying through J-Space as in Niven's universe. Therefore a sentient mind monitoring or controlling anything makes no sense at all in this model. Will keep looking to see where the Niven model crept in.
MgT 1 st Ed also follows this model of everything that matters happens before entry:
While in Jump space, the ship is completely and utterly cut off from the universe. It hangs in a shimmering bubble of boiling hydrogen, a pocket dimension from which nothing can escape. It cannot communicate with the normal universe, not even by psionic means. It is utterly alone. ~ p. 141
In fact, the statement in the Robot handbook simply says this:
... a moderately capable conscious sentient aboard to look over the jump calculations and sit out the weeklong jump. (Robot Handbook p. 255)
So I read this simply as a human double checks the Ship Brain's work before jump entry. Nothing here seems mandatory, if there was no sentient to look over the calculations, the ship could go ahead and jump just fine, though there's perhaps some higher chance of an error not caught by a double check.
J
