An email from Darren got me thinking about jump calculation times and other stuff. A typical jump is 3.5 days of acceleration, 3.5 days of decceleration, and somewhere between 10 - 200 hours of preperatory calculations at 10 hours per light year. This led me down several different trains of thought that I'm wondering if other people have input about.<br /><br />1) Can a large team of astrogators distribute the workload. I.E. a 20LY jump requires 200 man hours, on my large and well staffed ship I have 5 astrogators, can I have them each do 40 hours of work and thereby reduce the time required? You can't do this if the work has to progress in a linear way, like the result of step A is needed for step B and so forth, but I'm curious if anyone has allowed it.<br /><br />2) Should it really take that long to begin with? I know computers weren't as impressive in 1983, but I'm imagining the computer doing most of the work. The computer MUST have a database with all the relevant information about every body in the Frontier large enough and close enough to affect a jump along any of the charted jump routes....that information is required regardless of whether the man does the calculation or the machine does, so it MUST be there. Given that....why does a person need to do the calculating? I'd bet the vast majority of the work would be done by the computer and it would be done in a matter of minutes or a few hours at most.<br /><br />3) How long in advance can you pre-calculate a jump? I assume eventually objects will move enough to make you have to redo your calculations, but how long does that take? If it takes 200 hours to plot a 20LY jump, then apparently you can start at least 200 hours ahead of time. If the players want to be able to make a quick getaway, can they calculate their escape jump before beginning their planetside mission for example?<br /><br />4) Can you calculate your next jump without decelerating from your first one? I.E. can I stay coasting near jump speed while calculating another jump so that we can save 7 days of the accel/deccel cycle?<br /><br />5) My gut feeling is that the jump calculations should be faster, and that you could calculate the next jump without decelerating. However that has two drastic implications. One is that you could jump from one side of the Frontier to the other in a little over a week. The other is that provided the jump routes are charted, a fleet could jump from system to system and not stay in each one long enough to be detected...meaning that the Sathar Fleet could <i>attack in force anywhere at any time.</i> So question 5 is should I just leave everything the same even if it doesn't make sense to me? Such a seemingly small rules change seems to have a lot of ramifications.
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