On 25 Aug 2017 at 8:19, Graham Donald (via tml list) wrote:

> Something that is harder to fit into the standard Traveller Universe
> (Unless you head far to Spinward) is the idea of a 'Sargasso of space'
> a location where for whatever reason lost spacecraft conglomerate in
> large numbers.

[snip]

> The third version and probably the easiest to work into a Traveller
> scenario or campaign appears in the Sequoya Series by Sabrina Chase.
> This is a deep space Sargasso created like the one created by Andre
> Norton due to a still functioning Precursor device which draws ships
> out of Jumpspace into it's vicinity. In the series the characters are
> fleeing pirates when this happens, they find themselves stuck in deep
> space with a fried jump drive but a functioning real space drive and
> follow an automated distress signal to the Sargasso where they manage
> to find enough parts to fix the drive and make a single jump to
> safety. They however are comparatively lucky, many of the ships they
> find have suffered serious damage when pulled out of jumpspace and
> even in the case of the ship whose distress call they followed they
> find that the survivors had died long before.

Yet another example is an a Jerry Pournelle short story set in his
Co-Dominium universe.

The Alderson drive (named after the scientist at CalTech who designed
it for Pournelle) involves a currently unknown force generated by
fusion reactions. This force links stars and creates points where
turning on the drive jumps you to a point near the star at the other
end of the "tramline" linking the stars.

for various reasons, the Alderson points can be limited in a system
(ie there won't be one linking a star to every star near it).

In the short story ("He fell into a Hole" or something like that)
there's an Alderson point that give a quicker trip back towards Sol.,
but sometimes ships disappeared using it.

In the story an mportant ship disappears and someone Very Important
is on it. In an effort to find them a person who'd been arrested for
unauthorized research (scientific research is *very* restricted in
the CoDominium so as to maintain the balance of power between the USA
& USSR) isgiven the resources  to try out his theory.

Turns out there is a neutron star (or was it a black hole) between
the two stars. And every once in a while a large enough chunk of the
debris orbiting it impacts it, generating the Alderson force long
enough to divert the tramline for a while. So instead of winding up
at star B, you wind up at the neutron star. And way too close for
comfort.

You can't jump out because by the time you arrive, the energy that
diverted the tramline is gone.

Survivors of all the missing ships are gathered on the more intact
ones, farther out from the neutron star.

They've figured out that the temporary Alderson point formation has
something to do with stuff impacting the star, but they don't have
the background to figure out the details. And they aren't willing to
risk scarce resources needed for survival to attempt it.

Doesmn't help that by the time they figure out there's going to be an
impact, there isn't time to get to where the Alderson point would be.

The arrival of the "rescue" party changes this. The ex-scientist
knows enough to be able to calculate where you'd need to be and when.
Of course, that requires a "known" impact.

After a lot of arguing and fighting, everybody transfers to the new
ship, except for a few folks who set uo to crash their ship into the
star at the right time and place for the other ship to escape.

And many years back, here on the TML we posited that the "ship
destroyed" result for a misjump doesn't actually destroy the ships.
Rather they get drawn to a location by the Feinberg emissions there.

A remote globular cluster would be nice, except the probability of
habitable planets in one approaches zero. So we "decided" on some
area in the Large Magellanic Cloud (satellite galaxy of the Milky
Way).

So here you are having your jump go badly wrong (to get a ship
destroyed result you need to be *really* pushing your luck). But yu
aren't dead. and then you figure out roughly where you are... 50
kiloparsecs from home....

Luckliy, everyone seems to arrive in about the same spot, and it was
possible to get to a habitable system from there.

Over the millenia, a *lot* of misjumped ships (and not just from the
Imperium and its neighbors, or even from the Milky Way) have arrived
there.

There's a nice little civilization getting by.
Of course, they can't get home again. Unless maybe a few misjumped
from somewhere in the Cloud.

--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com