Talk:Jump Point

Anon's Editing Notes

Like my description note said, the words "transient" and "Lagrange" don't show up in rulebooks (at least) before BattleForce 2, p. 71 (and carried forward to AeroTech 2, p. 72). Contrast with DropShips & JumpShips - Operations Manual, p. 30 and BattleSpace - Rulebook, p. 44. Text and the long-lived diagram of a sphere indicate that transient points weren't considered yet. I even checked MechWarrior, 2nd ed.

Looking at the outer "life zone" distances in Campaign Operations, the rule of thumb for finding the distance saved when using a non-transient pirate point is to subtract 1 from the star's subtype before entering the "Proximity Point Table." Doing that for a few selected star types in travel times results in the time savings I cited of around 5% to 10%. A proper spreadsheet analysis of all possible time savings is left as an exercise for the reader.

Compared to AeroTech 2, p. 57, Strategic Operations: Advanced Aerospace Rules, p. 76 seems to have lost the note in the "Hyperspace Navigation Table" indicating that the +4 modifier for using a transient point is cumulative with the +4 modifier for using a non-standard point (a "double pirate point" penalty, if you will). I suspect this is both caused by and contributes to the confusion around the definition of "pirate point."

Personal speculation: "transient points" got added because authors did the math and realized "pirate points" as written in the old rulebooks didn't lead to the kinds of time savings seen in lore & fiction.

Personal prediction: someone writing something important will confuse a Lagrange point with a barycenter.— The preceding unsigned comment was posted by 192.145.116.143 (talk • contribs) .

The main issue I am seeing right now is what are the terms used "in universe" because as far as Sarna is concerned, lore is literally everything no matter what the rules say. And reading this, I am thinking that all your work is 100% rules based.--Dmon (talk) 06:26, 23 October 2023 (EDT)

And checking, I have removed the table. It is pretty much a direct copy the one in the rule book so can be deemed a copyright violation.--Dmon (talk) 06:32, 23 October 2023 (EDT)

I'm anxious about going beyond rulebooks and space-focused sourcebooks on this for a couple of reasons.

The big one is that hyperspace is magic, and a lot of this boils down to "Kell Hounds did it back in '29," just like the Phantom 'Mech. Hyperspace navigation isn't supposed to be something the average person in the 31st century understands, including MechWarriors. With few (any?) main characters in the novels doing hyperspace navigation for a living, I don't think their words or opinions should be relied on too heavily for this.

And the reason to discount anybody's opinion (ground-pounder or otherwise) is that much of what's written about hyperspace navigation is contradicting. A "pirate point" in DropShips and JumpShips and core BattleSpace is specifically not a "pirate point" in Interstellar Operations. Strategic Operations says that only L1 points have jump points, but Dawn of the Jihad describes Case White materializing at an L2, with both statements made by in-universe characters that should know what they're talking about.

It's understandable that a MechWarrior would internalize "'pirate point' means shorter transit times" and leave it at that.

In my opinion, the best that can be done here is:

• Describe hyperspace travel in vague terms of what players can do without going too deep into how/why, because how/why often has multiple, contradicting answers (even among current publications) or was deliberately left to role-playing gamemaster discretion.

• Rely more on game systems where hyperspace jumps are a normal part of gameplay rather than "special case" or "campaign" rules, because the different rulesets often produce contradicting results (even among current publications), and systems where jumps are normal probably best describe what a jump normally looks like.

I'm already planning second pass at this (preferably before bedtime this time), and the first thing I'm planning to do is dump an annotated bibliography here in the Talk page of the books I'll be using, noting trends and changes over time to try to find coherence. Ziyyigo-Tipyigo (talk) 01:29, 1 November 2023 (EDT)