Does every ships which do not have their own jump engines can go to hyperspace using the Jump gates?
Yup.
I have also one question keeps buggering me about hyperspace traveling: The rules seem to indicate that all ships can travel from beacon to beacon without coming out of the hyperspace. However in the series we see many incidents where raiders are attacking ships that are coming to or leaving B5 in normal space near jump gates where there are no bases. Why did they jump to normal space at the gates? It would seem much more logical that they would keep in the hyperspace all the way till their destination.
Of course, it is also a question of making cargo runs - if your freighter needs to drop off or take on cargo, it needs to travel from the jumpgate to the transfer station, and not every such transfer point is as close to a jumpgate as B5. In another thread some guys did sone calculations... and the mongoose-cited speed of "1 day per AU" is a good approximation; that means a freighter travelling from earth to the jumpgate at Io would need between four and seven days, depending on the current location of earth on it's orbit (if it's close to Jupiter, less travel, if it's on the other side of the sun, more distance - also because you can't fly through tzhe sun, but have to go around).
Yeah, it's probably a safety thing. Drop out of hyperspace, check your systems, get a fresh lock on the beacon without worrying about drifting down the gravitational incline. A ship in a hurry could just zoom from beacon to beacon to beacon if necessary.
Unlikely. Remember, beacons are like rope bridges strung between systems - no calculations needed. And with raiders around it's safer to stay in hyperspace... if you can...
I asked the same thing in a thread some months back and someone replied with the idea that every so often on a long haul you pop out of hyperspace to acquire a fresh lock and to check news which probably doesn't get beamed into hyperspace as communications do.
See above. Safer to stay where the raiders aren't... and get your newsfeed when you enter your target system.
It should be noted that the various systems have more than one jump gate. The Epsilon system has a secondary gate as well (mentioned in the first season I do believe).
There is a maximum number of beacons routes that can be safely attached to each jump gate (around 3 or 4...) and the way the various systems get around that is to have a secondary gate far enough apart from the primary so as not to interfer with the signal.
The consequence of this is that these two gates are not linked by a beacon route (again, interference) so to transfer from one set of beacons to the other, you have to travel between the gates in real space - the perfect place to mount ambushes for raiders...
we see whitestars flying all the way to Earth/Z'ha'dum from B5 without leaving hyperspace
Very true... but I suppose that also depends on the quality of the sensors the ship has.
When different beacon routes are "connected" to different jumpgates, Warships with good sensors can lock onto the next beacon from hyperspace, while Freighters with myopic sensors may not be able to do that, and need to enter normal space, travel from their exit jumpgate top the entry jumpgate of the next beacon route, and go on.
but at the beginning of season 2 Sheridan when told about the Trigati remarks "that'd put them 2 jumps away from B5"
so JMS sometimes thought about them jumping several times to get where they wanted and at other times just turned hyperspace into a motorway
Well... that "2 jumps" might be a matter of speech and measure - if you need to traverse two beacon connections it's "two jumps", even if your ship has good enough sensors to hop from the end of one route to the next without leaving hyperspace.
I'm wondering how this is an inconsistency. I mean its mentioned many times throughout the show that hyperspace has a lot of gravitational eddies, well couldn't these impact on travel times and methods. From some systems to other systems this might be a based on one route, a highway sort of system. From other systems this might be through the need for using multiple jump gates. Hyperspace is a constant shifting expanse that is very different from place to place and time to time. That is until you get First One-level technology.
Good thought. It means you can never know... even a warship with good sensors may sometimes be forced to go to realspace to change beacons when some hyperspace storm clouds their receptios - and that would explain why sometimes they have to go to realspace, and sometimes not, on the very same routes!
I can't remember where, but I know I read somewhere that Vorlon and Minbari ships do not get lost in yperspace due to their very advanced engine and navigational systems.
True about Vorlons - they are first ones after all. But I never heard that about Minbari - only that they can travel a greater distance from the beacons, because their better sensors can detect a beacon at a greater distance then most other younger races.
Vorlons and other first ones (and most likely also half the mid-born races, as well as the Technomages to some lesser degree) don't need hyperspace beacons at all; their sensors are good enough to navigate hyperspace (and many first one sensors can even "see" directly into realspace from hyperspace - that's how the Shadows manage their nice ambushes all the time; even some younger races have managed that trick to some degree or another, though most still need some observer in realspace to transmit sensort images or coordinates into hyperspace - see "In the Beginning" or "Endgame")
