On 1/25/2018 3:40 PM, Caleuche wrote:
> -------- Original Message --------
>   On January 25, 2018 1:04 AM, Kelly St. Clair <xxxxxx@efn.org> wrote:
>> Also, due to the existence of Jump, a rescue ship can always hop out
>> ahead of them and match vectors.  Then it just becomes a matter of
>> making sure your life support and/or low berths will last that long.
>>
>> Sure, it's possible that THEIR drives will fail also - these things
>> happen - but at that point, your setup is looking increasingly
>> contrived.  So I'm gonna say "not many".
>
> I would imagine that this would typically be more of a problem in frontier environments, where the ship making the transfer might be the only ship in the system at the time.

Yup, but that just makes it a long-term, "hope your low berths passed
inspection recently" problem.  Whether it ends up taking a year, or ten
years, or more - far short of "forever" - SOMEONE (possibly employed by
the bank holding the mortgage) will pull up alongside to salvage the
wreck and put it back into service... and, one hopes, revive anyone
still alive.

Even if you invoke the efficiency-falloff rules, that just means the
salvage vessel will be extra super careful with their run-up and vector
matching (within the system) and their Jump calculations (to preserve it
while jumping out to the drifter), relying on their reduced-power drives
only to fine-tune and get them right up next to it.  Most such vessels
will probably have a second Jump's worth of fuel in case they miss; that
saves the bank the cost of /another/ multi-MCr starship (and, oh yeah, a
salvage crew).

It's very very hard to lose an object proceeding on a zero-acceleration
course in deep space, particularly when you can observe it directly with
any decent telescope/EMS array.  Especially when that object is worth
millions of credits to someone.

--
---------------
Kelly St. Clair
xxxxxx@efn.org