Moving, orbiting or static jump points

[Michael Bernhard Sørensen]

Hi all.

I'm new here and from Denmark. I work in the royal danish air force as a sysadmin, but that's beside the point. I've played Wing Commander a lot in my early days and read the books several times. But I haven't played nor read in recent years.

I have a project I'm working on, a simulator of star systems with stars, planets, moons and space crafts and I want to make my simulator as realistic as possible and conform as much to the game and books as possible.

My question for you guys is about jump points from the games and books. I can't recall ever reading that jump points change location over time like orbiting a planet or star. But would a jump point stay in the same place all the time? What would then happen if a planet passes over a jump point while a carrier was jumping through? At least according to the Wing Commander universe. What is your thoughts on that subject?

I also recall a star system with mini jumps. That is jumps within the same star system. How common could that be in the Wing Commander universe?

Kind regards

BerserkerBernhard

 

[Whistler]

Here is the CIC's collected knowledge on Wing Commander Jump theory:

https://www.wcnews.com/articles/art6.shtml

Hope this is some use to you. Good luck with your new endeavor!

 

[capi3101]

I looked at the CIC's data on jump theory pretty heavily when I was building the star system creation rules for WCRPG. My own interpretation at the time was that it was most likely that jump points would be located either in close proximity to a planet's LaGrange points or out towards the system's heliopause. Now, since the data points to gravitational forces (rather, antigraviton flux) as the chief determiner to the location of jump points, and given that a planet orbits around its star, I would think that the positions of jump points associated with a given planet would remain stable relative to that planet - that they would orbit along with the planet at the same rate of speed. It would explain the viability of the "nav map" model of navigation you see in Privateer - why the positions of the jump points are always the same with time.

Admittedly, that system - and the one I use for WCRPG as a result - would probably be overly simplified were it to be applicable in real life. You'd have a whole bunch of little tiny objects interacting with each other, to say nothing of the other planets in the system all interfering with the overall gravitational landscape of a star system.

So...

A) Were a ship to emerge from a jump in the same physical space as an object on the other side of the jump point, both ship and object would have a Bad Day.
B) The system you're thinking about is Firekka.
C) IIRC (and I'm pretty sure I'm not; I could be thinking about Enyo here), the mini jump-point system is attributed to a pulsar in the system. So, they'd be as common as the density of pulsars in the universe.

Yeah, just read the info on the page Whistler linked. It's definitely worth it.

 

[FekLeyrTarg]

There was one instance of jump-point shifting in "End Run", when Thrakath's fleet rushed back to Kilrah and ended up jumping somewhere else.

 

[ChrisReid]

There's a handful of misc stuff out there like shifting jump points, new jump points being born, in-system mini jumps, long jumps, etc. In most cases, these are supposed to be somewhat rare phenomenon.

I would think jump points would have to move, like everything in the universe moves. Star systems swirl around the galactic center like planets circle a star, so the fact that there are any jump points near stars (and consistent jump points are specifically found near stars), would seem to confirm that. Like capi said, they're gravitic singularities, so it makes sense that they also stay relatively put nearby planets circling under gravitational laws. Wing Commander itself doesn't really care about planets going around stars, so jump point movement obviously isn't detailed to that level either.

 

[Ijuin]

Stars do move around compared to each other--a hundred million years from now, the stars that are now our neighbors will be a couple thousand light years away (and the whole galaxy will have gone through a half-rotation). However, it will take tens of thousands of years for neighboring stars to have moved enough for the naked eye to notice. Jump points probably do "snap" when the connected stars get too far apart and reconnect to closer stars (otherwise a decent fraction of jump points would cross several sectors each, whereas in WC we are told that crossing even a single sector in a single jump is relatively rare, and is what makes the Enigma System and the Pegasus System so important). However, any given pair of jump points should be stable for an average of tens to hundreds of thousands of years.

 

[Aginor]

I agree with most that has been said. Jump points are gravitationally tied to a solar system's star(s). They are on orbits around it. Presumably they are not too close to planets most of the time. Perhaps at Lagrange points, because those are cool, but perhaps not always.