On Sun, Jul 23, 2017 at 11:55:06PM -0700, Amber Witherspoon wrote:
> So my pondering is this: what are the effects of increasing the Jump
> Drive limit? Obviously decreasing it makes trade even quicker, makes
> worlds much more paranoid about incoming fleets, and reduces piracy.
> It's also boring, so we can discard it.
> But 500 diameters(x5)? 1000 (x10)? What are the effects of those?

In both of those cases, virtually all habitable planets are well
within their star's jump limit.  Only the hottest (and rarest) stars
would have planets of habitable temperature outside their limits.  For
example, our Sun's limit would extend almost to Jupiter in the 500x
case (3.6 AU beyond Earth), and just short of Saturn in the 1000x case
(8.3 AU beyond Earth).

That would be the largest effect by far.  Insystem travel time in a
system like ours would add on the order of a week for a 2 gee
merchant.

Given the economics of starship operation, essentially all systems
would have completely separate interstellar and in-system travel
networks, meeting at jump ports outside the stellar limit.

Most likely, those ports would be built on one of the types of large
icy bodies that should be common at such distances.  Such a body would
provide ample hydrogen fuel and serve as a base for defenses
(including deep meson sites in wealthier systems).

Those jump ports would be even easier to reach for starships than
planetary surfaces are in "standard" Traveller, and consequently there
would be quite a bit less opportunity for piracy affecting starships.
Piracy may be a larger problem for in-system craft, due to the greatly
increased typical travel distances.

> -if jump masking (can't hit the drive if another jump shadow is in
> the way) is used, ships take longer to jump out based on current
> system astrography and destination

It is very likely that any jump ports would be located such that all
the nearest neighbour stars (e.g. all within jump 3 or so) are never
masked, and certainly not those along mains or Xboat routes.

- Tim