Suggestion for the Emergency Jump

[HaVoC]

I found out yesterday that when I use emergency jump, the fleet in question is moved to a location that is decided in random and that limits the amount of tactics in the War Room and uses more resources than necessary at times (Admiral Difficulty).

For example, I wanted to go from Helios Alpha (Was in Caprica) to Helios Gamma (Sagitarron) through Cocalus. The Fleet I sent was just 2000 points in order to reinforce other fleets which were defending planets in Helios Gamma.

I had saved enough Tylium (Mind you I'm playing in Admiral difficulty) in order to have enough for an emergency jump. So I'm interecepted by a Cylon Fleet and I use the emergency jump function... and I end up being moved back to Helios Alpha but not in Caprica, instead in the proximity of the gas planet Zeus. I tested that many times and I saw that it may send me to where I intended to go or simply backtrack even further.

My point is that we should be able to choose where to make the emergency jump to as long as we are in the proper starlanes/system and the right path. Cause as a result of that, I had to spend 2x the Tylium or more at times because my fleet just emergency jumped to random locations which were even closer to danger.

I don't see a reason why we shouldn't be able to choose where to emergency jump to unless I'm missing something :)

Cheers!

[fisher 2000]

I think the emergancy jump should have a small chance of destroying your fleet since my head canon thinks an emergancy jump is a blind jump... and we all know the risks of blind jumps

[GHawkins the Grey]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von HaVoC:

My point is that we should be able to choose where to make the emergency jump to as long as we are in the proper starlanes/system and the right path. Cause as a result of that, I had to spend 2x the Tylium or more at times because my fleet just emergency jumped to random locations which were even closer to danger.

In the TV series, specifically in the episode "33" where the civilian fleet with Galactica is being engaged by a pursuing Cylon fleet every 33 minutes, they mention that it's tough enough to plot a new jump in that timeframe. Admittedly, they are beyond the red line and thus in uncharted space.

That is however a jump where someone uses the optical sensors on a ship to calculate how to jump and know where they want to end up.. An emergency jump is more akin to "Oh frak, get us out of here and I don't care where we go!". They don't have time to calculate where they want to go, they might just load the latest coordinates they jumped to or coordinates they remember and just jump.

Or, as Cain and Shaw put it in Razor;
"Don't bother calculating, just do it!"
"You want to do a blind jump sir? We might end up inside a star."
"It doesn't matter where we jump, just frakking do it lieutenant!"

And, our heroes (I dislike Cain, hence she does not get that title) Adama and Starbuck do it again at the very end.
"Starbuck, jump the ship!"
"I don't have the rendevous coordinates."
"Doesn't matter! Just jump us out of here. Jump!"

[HaVoC]

I agree with all that you say but in our case we're in charted space so I believe the coordinates can be calculated considering how much back-forth is happening between the same known starlanes and the same known systems :)

Was just an idea ^^

[GHawkins the Grey]

Jumping is actually more precise than that. It's not like GPS coordinates that are relevant no matter where you are on planet Earth. So I obviously understand where your idea is coming from. But it's harder to fit into BSG's lore.

First, the jumping ship must calculate their own position according to their star maps. Which means, they must first find their origin point (the point in space where X, Y and Z are 0).

After that, they must calculate what XYZ the point they want to go to is relative to their origin point. If I want to jump from Caprica orbit to Picon orbit, XYZ might be 20,10,10 (of an undefined unit). But if I jump to Picon from Tauron, Picon's orbit XYZ might be -50,40,20.

And that's what they need to calculate, because your origin point changes all the time and because of that, the XYZ for the jumps changes all the time.

(Yes, I am an owner of the "Science of Battlestar Galactica", which has dedicated about 13 pages to FTL navigation. I read up on it just for this topic.)

[HaVoC]

Awesome man, I just learned something new ^^
Thanks for the elaborate answer!

[ramjbjb]

As Ghawkins has mentioned, there's a lot more into "jumping" in the lore than just some fast calculations and spinning up the FTL drives. During the show initial miniseries when Galactica is pretty much forced to do a jump to Ragnar Anchorage people are quite nervous about doing something like that, specially because Galactica (According to Tigh) hasn't done a FTL jump in 20 years at least.

One would assume that Tylium should be quite expensive and FTL drives probably seldomly used unless totally necessary during peace time. Also, let's remember that travelling between colonies was shown to be done at sub-light speeds mostly, even in ships with FTL drives (Colonial one had FTL drives but the trip from Caprica to Galactica, and the trip back interrupted by the news of the attack, was done without using FTL drives at all).

And also let's not forget how many of the civilian ships Colonial One was able to bring together which lacked a FTL drive alltogether.

In general it seems that during the time between the 1st and 2nd cylon wars most of the travel within the red line confines was being done at sub-light speeds anyway. Kinda makes sense because it seems that ships in the show were able to reach pretty significant sub-light speeds, and that the 12 colonies were all within pretty much the same multi-star system anyway, well within reasonable sub-light travel times. If we assume FTL needing a lot of Tylium to work, and Tylium to be as expensive as expected for a material that's the energetic base of the whole Colonial civilization, probably FTL was exceedingly rare even in the military and almost unheard of in the civilian world.

So if that was like that prior to the nuking of the 12 colonies, one would expect it to be the same way before the 1st Cylon war, or at any period of peace time. At any rate it seems that FTL was possible but rarely used unless totally necessary, bottom line being that I very much doubt there was as much FTL "Back and forth" travelling as someone mentioned avobe.

And even then there's an inherent risk associated with FTL jumping. Col. Tigh goes on to mention that any small miscalculation and they might end up appearing in the middle of the sun.

So I guess that when making fast calculations for an emergency jump you're not going to bother being extremely precise. What you want is to GTFO with your skin intact, so WHERE you end up takes a very secondary priority to just getting away ASAP (as long as you make sure it's not straight into any celestial body).

I personally would've made any ship taking an emergency jump stay one turn "off map", representing it appearing somewhere in the middle of nowhere and being forced to spend a whole turn finding out their precise whereabouts and then plotting a proper calculated jump into somewhere near civilization. The way it is is Ok enough though. I think the destination being random fits perfectly in the "emergency" nature of the jump itself.

[GHawkins the Grey]

Oh ramjbjb, I wish you hadn't gone there. Now I have to science the ♥♥♥♥ out of it (I went full Mark Watney, yay. Also, I write this particular bit as I finish my post and I'll say, there's a plottwist at the end).

I'll agree with you that it appears that there was a lot of sub-light travel in the Colonies. I however believe that it was between Colonies in the same star system (as in, sublight ships in Helios Alpha travel to Caprica, Gemenon, Picon and Tauron, but never to Helios Beta). I do not believe that ships ever travelled between systems with sublight engines and that FTL capable ships were used for such journeys. The "Science of Battlestar Galactica" talks a lot about thrust and things, but is very inconclusive on the relative speeds achieved. But in the chapter on sublight propulsion, it does literally state "To travel between star systems, they use another form of propulsion entirely". And the next chapter is on FTL.

So, why do I think, other than the quote above, the Colonials use FTL for intra-system travel?

Well, simply, time. According to the Colonies of Kobol starmap, there's 128 SU (roughly equal to our AU, Astronomical Unit, distance in space) between Helios Alpha and Helios Beta.

According to my memory, Galactica as a museum is parked some 3 hours from Caprica (her squadron was 2 hours from Caprica when destroyed and they were going towards Caprica, so it's a reasonable figure and works for my example).

You'll want to park something like a museum in a very predictable orbit. It's no good if your "schoolbus" has to do all kinds of fancy maneuvers to link up with it, so we'll go with Geo Sync Orbit. We'll use earth's GEO measures since Caprica appears roughly Earth-like, which means she's 35,786km up in the sky.

3 hours to travel 35,786km means that ships go roughly 11,928 km/h. Obviously there's faster ships, there's slower ships and we don't know if the 3 hours means at that speed, or if the 3 hours also include the landing procedure or whatever. In which case, their speed would be higher. But again, it works for the example.

An Astronomical Unit is 149,597,871 km, which means that the Colonials appear to go 0.00007973375521574 AU/h. It's still damn fast, but it won't get you anywhere in a hurry if we're talking about star systems.

Remember that Helios Alpha and Beta are 128 SU (AU) apart? That means Galactica, if her speed does not exceed that 0.00007973375521574 AU/h figure, she'll take 1,605,342 hours to travel the distance. That's 66,889 days, 2,197 months or 183 years. It's however unlikely that Galactica would stick to an arbitrary speed limit.

Her most likely method of travel would be to thrust until the halfway point, thus increasing speed for 50% of the journey, then flip over so her engines are pointing at where they are going and thrust the other 50% of the journey to brake again (and not pass by their destination while all they can do is wave at it).

Then, to get an accurate measurement of Galactica's speed, we need to figure out how much thrust her engines produce. The "Science of Battlestar Galactica" gets really, really sciency on this point, but it boils down to "we don't know". It mostly talks about how much thrust modern engines provide and how Tylium (if that also powers her sublight engines) is more potent than any fuel known to man.

So, we'll use another method to figure out how long Galactica would take to cross 128 SU (AU). We can do so by ignoring the magic of artificial gravity the Colonials have and limit her acceleration to 1g. We've never in the series seen people talk about getting heavier under acceleration, so we'll just assume they cruise at 1g.

For that we need Galactica's mass. Which the book states as 121,116,068,400 kg. We'll drop that into this space travel calculator I found. Distance to 128 AU and a default fuel conversation at 0.008 (because we don't know how efficient Galactica is with whatever fuel she uses).

And we end up with something that's much more practical; 1.06 month. Or 32 days. That's pretty doable.

(It is now at this point that I actually realize that sub-light travel in the colonies might be possible and practical after all, thanks ramjbjb!)

The distance between the Helios Alpha and Beta binary and the Helios Delta and Gamma binary is 10,091 SU (AU). Putting that distance into the calculator, we end up with 9 months (293 days) of travel. Which again, should be doable, but I seriously think they'd rather use the FTL drives for that travel.

So, I started this post with the assumption that it was not practical to use sublight engines to travel between the Colonies. And at the end of it, I realize that travel between at least the local binary is pretty doable. Though the rich folks will obviously be travelling on FTL ships while the cheaper flights will be sublight.

Then again, I wouldn't want to be put on a Boeing 747 for 32 days, cause that's what the interior of Colonial One looks like.

So yeah, these are all guestimates. But I dare say I did my best. Now I wonder how many people will read this...

[ramjbjb]

Well, I'll refer again to the miniseries ;). Sublight travel between the different solar "sub-system" in the Helios System took mere days. Not even months ;).

As you correctly mention Galactica was going to be a Museum Ship nearby Caprica. Meaning, Galactica was in the Helios Alpha sub-system.

After the Cylon initial attack Galactica is hit by a nuke and is in dire need to rearm. Col Tigh mentions to Adama that Ragnar Anchorage (that, as we know, is nearby Helios Gamma) has supplies to get the battlestar running but that there are two problems: 1- Ragnar is, at best sublight speed, 3 days away. and 2- The whole Cylon fleet is between Galactica and the anchorage.

That's where Adama decides to FTL-Jump directly into Ragnar's orbit, bypassing the Cylon blockade and getting there almost instantaneously...

But the point was made - from Helios Alpha to Ragnar it's 3 days at the best sub-light speeds Galactica could do (which needless to say was already a very old ship, guess newers could be even faster).

If that's the standard for an old battlestar, one would expect civvies to be maybe slower but not MUCH slower...and even if they could hit only 1/3 of Galactica's top sublight speed ,they'd be able to do an Helios Alpha - Helios Gamma in roughly 9-10 days only. Perfectly feasible and perfectly acceptable for any kind of inter-colonial transportation.


Obviously sublight speeds are not "capped" by anything other than the speed of light itself, but the power/weight of the thrusters would decide how fast you'd reach to high speeds and I'm assuming that the "top sublight" speeds for spacecraft would be decided by the degree of shielding of the ship against particles that at high fractions of C would be very damaging to ship hulls.

At any rate it'd seem that intra-colonial travels at sublight speeds between the Helios "sub-systems" would take quite less than one full month ,if two of the farthest points of the colonies could be travelled between in 3 days ;).

[GHawkins the Grey]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von ramjbjb:

At any rate it'd seem that intra-colonial travels at sublight speeds between the Helios "sub-systems" would take quite less than one full month ,if two of the farthest points of the colonies could be travelled between in 3 days ;).

Damn you, I totally forgot about that comment.

Back to sciencing then, because... Tigh's comment is actually impossible when using the calculator I just used. And even if the calculator is not entirely trustworthy and we ditch it, even a simple math solution still says; impossible.

There's 11091 SU (AU) between the Alpha/Beta binary and the Delta/Gamma binary, or 0.16 light year. Even at the speed of light, if she were able to reach that in sublight (it'd not be called sublight then, but okay), it'd take her 58 days. But Galactica can not reach the speed of light with her sublight (the hint is in sublight) engines, she'd always be slower than light. Which means it has to take her longer than 58 days.

The following quotes are from the BSG series bible;
"The ability to travel faster than the speed of light is, of course, impossible so FTL is a bit of a misnomer even in Galactica's world. Technically speaking neither Galactica nor any other "FTL" capable ship actually goes faster than the speed of light. What happens during a "Jump" is that the fabric of space itself is folded and the slup travels from point A to point B directly."

"The speed of light also governs communications and sensor information. The farther away a ship is from Galactica, the longer it will take the signal to travel. If Galactica and one of her fighters are "only" as far away as the distance between the Earth and Mars (say, 700 million kilometers), there will be an 11 minute lag in a radio conversation. The same goes for optical observations in that by the time we spot a Cylon basestar- at that same distance, it's had 11 minutes to move closer to Galactica."

Which means that the map for the Twelve Colonies was only written into the true lore, after the miniseries. I think originally, Ragnar was supposed to be in the Helios Alpha system, not circling the Helios Delta/Gamma binary.

[ramjbjb]

"canon" lore disagreeing between the source and the published approved books is not exclusive to BSG. Any Star Wars fan will certainly tell you that ;).

I always deal with it the same way: for me the source (the show, be it a series or movie) is the ultimate truth. The extra associated material/information comes second. Any disagreement between both is decided in favor of whatever it's said on screen.

Inconsistencies are to be expected in things like this, because screenwrites probably didn't think much about the actual phisical consequences of the storyline, but the extra lore information through books, etc, usually is a lot more detailed and thought out.

In any case if I was a colonial captain and wanted to know about distances/times, I'd take Tigh's word (specially when it's literally a matter of life or death to get that information right ;)) in the matter much more to heart that what a bookwriter gives in a book. You know, there are printing mistakes and that stuff in the publishing world. XDDDD

Even in real life historical books are full of factual errors, some induced by wrong information being spread and taken as gospel (lots of instances of that) or maybe a printing error that needs adressing in later editions ;). Let's say this is the case here then! :D

[fisher 2000]

I thought the redline was the capability of a ships jump drive range and not actual space. I take this info from one of the webisodes with the stranded raptor

[ramjbjb]

Red line indeed is that. Kind of. With a twist. Red line is the range beyond which a FTL jump will suffer from less and less accuracy, not just the capability of the FTLs drive. A jump beyond the red line was perfectly possible. It was just risky, and the farther from the red line, the more risky it was.

However the term "red line" it's also referred to as a "range". In the sense that Colonials didn't venture out of Helios almost at all, so anywhere out of the "red line" (The reach of the safe limits for their FTL drives jumping from the Helios system) was pretty much uncharted, adding up unknown possible celestial bodies to the risk of the less accurate jump itself.

So while nominally meaning the safe range of FTL jump, the "red line" also meant the areas beyond which colonials hadn't ventured and weren't uncharted. Or in other words, whatever was within "the red line" was thought as "colonial territory" of sorts.

[GHawkins the Grey]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von fisher 2000:

I thought the redline was the capability of a ships jump drive range and not actual space. I take this info from one of the webisodes with the stranded raptor

The red line is the theoretical limit which results in a safe jump. Everything within the red line, you can calculate with reasonably good accuracy. Everything beyond the red line, your error probability increases dramatically. Errors that can end up with your ship jumping into a sun.

That's because when making jump calculations, you have to take into consideration that the universe you see around you is outdated. If you jump to a system 10 light years away, you have to calculate what that system did in those 10 years. Or you might end up not where you want to, because you point at where you -see- your star system, not where it moved to. You can compare it to very heavy lag during an FPS game. You shoot where your enemy appears to be, but he's actually already moved along.

Beyond the Red Line, the risk increases your calculations will be wrong in regards to what those stellar objects have been doing in the time since you see them. Having to calculate a jump to a system 200 light years away means you have to calculate 200 years of stellar drift.

So yeah, jumping the Red Line isn't good. Especially because you jump so far away that returning to where you were is again jumping across the red line, so you'll most likely get lost.

Ursprünglich geschrieben von ramjbjb:

Inconsistencies are to be expected in things like this, because screenwrites probably didn't think much about the actual phisical consequences of the storyline, but the extra lore information through books, etc, usually is a lot more detailed and thought out.

The person who wrote that Galactica can not go faster than light is Ronald D. Moore, the director of the new show. I'd say that his word is ultimate truth, regardless of what the screen writers wrote.

It is very likely that the position of Ragnar was changed as the show progressed. The Twelve Colonies were never visited again in detail and only later really fleshed out. At the point of the miniseries, they didn't even know if they'd get a season. Virgon is also supposedly within reach of Galactica's viper squadron, despite that now being located in Helios Beta.

[ramjbjb]

@GHawkins.

Oh it's not that the person who wrote Galactica stated that Galactica can't go at speeds over c. It's that a certain Albert Einstein already established that inquestionable fact around 110 years ago ;).

What I'm pointing at is at an...ahem..."printing error" in the actual distances within the Helios system in the reference books because of an...erm... mistake in placing the decimal dot one position to the right? ;). Meaning the actual distances are 10 times closer than what the reference book says.

I mean it's pretty clear that the inconsistency is because the screenwriters didn't think too much about what Tigh was saying, but if we're going to keep lore consistency...it's the only "lore-friendly" explanation to the discrepancy, because other than that the placement of Ragnar in the outskirts of Helios Gamma is also confirmed in the show at some point IIRC... ;).

So if Ragnar is where it is, confirmed on screen, Galactica was where it was, also confirmed on the screen, and was able to reach from point A to B in 3 days at subluminal speed (nothing travelling in real space can go over C, period), which ALSO was established in the screen.... that means that the distance between A and B was actually MUCH closer than what the reference books says.

It's a typo in the books, I'm telling ya (in the sense of that book existing within the BSG universe, I mean. You know, they usually are written as if the reader is living within that universe, so I'm blaming a typo in that universe, to explain the discrepancy that otherwise would obviously point that the whole thing is a freakin sci-fi show we shouldn't take that seriously. But then where'd be the fun???? XD)

[GHawkins the Grey]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von ramjbjb:

So if Ragnar is where it is, confirmed on screen, Galactica was where it was, also confirmed on the screen, and was able to reach from point A to B in 3 days at subluminal speed (nothing travelling in real space can go over C, period), which ALSO was established in the screen.... that means that the distance between A and B was actually MUCH closer than what the reference books says.

Do you have a source on the on-screen location of Ragnar. Because I do not recall Ragnar's position ever being established on screen.

Using wayback machine on battlestarwiki, which even in death (rip) continues to be the best source of information, I have begun searching through references as to when Ragnar is first mentioned as being in orbit around Delta/Gamma.

The first "info" on Ragnar's orbit appears to be the following tweet;
https://twitter.com/SergeGraystone/status/10897544075

Which was in promotion of the series Caprica. The map I refer to, was created for Caprica specifically by the writer that also wrote the "Science of Battlestar Galacitca" and the co-executive producer of the show.

Ragnar is only referenced as being in orbit around Delta/Gamma after Caprica is aired, which was almost 7 years /after/ the miniseries.

So the lore was expanded only at that point to include Ragnar as being in orbit around Delta/Gamma.