Jump safety

Quien

Quien

Rear Admiral
I was playing Privateer again the other day, and one thing that struck me was how do you know it’s safe to jump? If something was on the other end wanting to jump through or hadn’t moved out the way quick enough wouldn’t there be two ships at the same point?

Obviously in game it isn’t a risk, but I’m more thinking if you were actually there.
 
This comes up a couple times in the novels! Here's a bit from Fleet Action that explains what happens: "Standard fleet procedure was to have at least one-minute intervals between jumps. The actual point of rematerialization was problematic, never occurring at precisely the same spot, and if a ship in transit should come out of jump in the same space occupied by another vessel no one in the two ships involved would ever even realize that their existence had suddenly winked out in a white hot explosion."

There's one of the reasons we see scout missions through jump points pretty regularly: a carrier will send a wing of fighters through to make sure the area is clear. Gemini is pretty rough but we do see in some later stories that areas of space that are being built up eventually have buoys and relay stations that communicate through jump points and help keep them safer. (There's a mission in WC4 where you see one under construction, meant to indicate Confed is now building infrastructure since the war has ended.)
 
Thanks so much! Pretty dangerous work scouting jump points. I assume that for at least the regular trade routes in Gemini there’d be buoys or too many merchant ships would vanish.

I need to re-read the novels. Sadly my Dad did a clean out of all his bookshelves a couple of years ago without telling me, and there went all my books.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
that communicate through jump points
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Is it possible?

I also have a jump-related question about Privateer. How is it possible for a ship (especially the Steltek drone) to keep pounding you while you are jumping? Does the pounding take place during the jump sequence initialization or do shots actually jump with your ship?
 
Moreover, is it really so easy to jump to Kilrathi space from the blockade point systems (Tango, Charlie, and Alpha)? I mean shouldn't the welcome committee be larger and shouldn't there be mine fields and turrets? 🤔🤔
 
It's easier for an individual raider to slip through than a fleet group, as the individual ship would have a lower EM/Heat Signature.

By the time of Privateer 2669, Confed had suffered horrendous losses. The TCS Valliant and TCS Winterrowd are gone, and the 6th Battlefleet was destroyed in Midgard. All Terrell could muster to confront the Steltek Drone was a group of Paradigm Destroyers.

Not counting the losses mentioned above by the various bartenders. Any ships or fighter craft considered first-rate that could be spared would have been sent to the front lines in the Vega and Epsilon Sectors.

Gemini was a sideshow for most of the war as the Jumplines into the sector are not conducive to a war of maneuver but a slugfest with neither side willing to invest in. It was more beneficial for the Kilrathi to find willing pawns in the Retros and supply them with second-hand fighters to cause chaos behind the lines.
 
It's a bit of a throw away line in the WC movie and it's novelization, but part way into the story there's a report about the fleet's progress making it back to Sol, and you learn that there were a couple reactor malfunctions, but also that a couple of ships were lost at jump points. THere's no other information but the implication is that it was the Jump itself that caused the loss, and most likely the fact that they are rushing the jumps that caused them to fail the Jumps. So you can kind of imagine a scenario where they aren't waiting to jump or taking the time to scout ahead and taking risks with the jump.

TOLWYN

Our status?


BELLEGARDE

We're running at 110 percent. We've already lost three ships. Two at jump points, one's reactor core melted down.
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And that's actually what it's implied they are doing right at the start of them movie when they're calculating how long it will take to get the Fleet to Earth
BELLEGARDE

We're spread all over the sector. The earliest our advance elements could reach Sol is forty-two hours. And that is piecemeal and taking risks with the jumps, sir.
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I need to re-read the novels. Sadly my Dad did a clean out of all his bookshelves a couple of years ago without telling me, and there went all my books.
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Some good news there, Baen released their Wing Commander novels as ebooks a couple years back!

I also have a jump-related question about Privateer. How is it possible for a ship (especially the Steltek drone) to keep pounding you while you are jumping? Does the pounding take place during the jump sequence initialization or do shots actually jump with your ship?
Click to expand...

The game flags you invulnerable when it cuts to the external camera for the jump so you don't actually take any of those hits.

It's a bit of a throw away line in the WC movie and it's novelization, but part way into the story there's a report about the fleet's progress making it back to Sol, and you learn that there were a couple reactor malfunctions, but also that a couple of ships were lost at jump points. THere's no other information but the implication is that it was the Jump itself that caused the loss, and most likely the fact that they are rushing the jumps that caused them to fail the Jumps. So you can kind of imagine a scenario where they aren't waiting to jump or taking the time to scout ahead and taking risks with the jump.
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This shows up a lot in the novels. And the reason for both (and the surprising consistency of most of this lore) is the jump physics doc that Siobahn Beeman wrote for Wing Commander II (which was reprinted with some movie gilding in the Confed Handbook). It's one of those foundational documents of Wing Commander lore that made it to everybody from Bill Forstchen to Chris Roberts!
 
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