There is the general spoiler page for general questions.
I’m making this set of pages for more specific questions.
The rule is: do not ask or comment about a book until it has been at least a month in issue. I think that will make everybody happy re spoilers.
Hmm – interesting thought, but I don’t think so, more by inference than by any hard evidence. Why worry so much about getting up to the correct v and on the right course before jump if you have still have some control after the vanes kick in?
Also, I think the knn are advertised as the only species who can change vector in jump.
I like Jump and it’s limitations. If you start to erode those limits, then you end up with (shudder) warp drive.
Why worry so much about getting up to the correct v and on the right course before jump if you have still have some control after the vanes kick in?
The ship is going awfully fast. Any tiny deviance from your target at the beginning of the jump is going to be hugely amplified by the end, and if you miss your referent by too much you never come out at all. Even if you have an autopilot it can’t correct your course because your ship’s external instruments don’t function in jump, and without a night walker everyone on the ship is unconscious if they’re human or delirious if they’re hani, so you can’t make a manual correction. Given all that it’s not too surprising people are careful about targeting, even if their jets would still be functional.
Also, I think the knn are advertised as the only species who can change vector in jump.
So alleges Pyanfar, but you could fill a pretty thick book with what Pyanfar doesn’t know about the other Compact species, so I dunno how much credence to give that assertion. Knnn can also jump farther than everyone else, and if you can’t do that there’s no point in changing vector, because chances are there’s not another star in roughly the direction you’re headed that falls within your jump range.
Getting back to the “how much food” issue, I seem to recall a discussion on another web site where we decided that most merchanters took a couple of weeks to transit a jump point. Only foolhardy and desperate individuals like Sandy didn’t slow down.
Its not just the Knnn which do odd things in jump in compact space. The Chi send transmissions, and they may be able to hover, while in jump. (Chanur’s Legacy) For that matter, while most hani dream in space, some (Chur Anifay and Hallan Meras) see things which are supposedly actually happening while asleep in jump. Kif and Mri (Faded Suns) are also entirely sleepwalkers.
So a lot of the restrictions on Jumptech seem to be pointed directly at Humans, and the less like humans the pilots are, the less limited. Is that because the Knnn have superior technology, or because they think fundamentally differently? (and is there a difference?)
On food: Compact ships must be much faster than Human ships if human ships spend weeks transiting jump points…or the Chanur novels are continuances on Sandor level desperation. I find it more likely to take a ship only up to a week to transit a jump point at a reasonably sedate pace, and if its pulling Gs, rather less.
So a lot of the restrictions on Jumptech seem to be pointed directly at Humans, and the less like humans the pilots are, the less limited.
I’m wondering about that too. It seems like the limitations on your jump distance are a) physiological- if you’re not a sleepwalking species, you can’t live more than two weeks or so without dying of dehydration and b) targeting- you can’t aim for a referent so far away that the margin of error on your trajectory will take you outside its gravity well. (a) seems like a bigger problem than (b); the Pride’s longer jumps are clearly at the edge of hani physiological tolerance, but Pyanfar doesn’t worry about missing the system.
Those are the only two limitations- you’re coasting along the jump interface and there seems to be no friction to slow you down, so there’s no real power drain, and your initial speed doesn’t affect the physical distance of the jump, just how long it takes you to make it.
So kif and mri should be able to single-jump farther than hani and humans because they don’t have problem (a), and it always pays to single-jump if you can because cycling the vanes is the most power-intensive thing you do. Given this, how did humans manage to retrace the mri Shon’jir pathway? It seems like some of those jumps should have been too long for humans to survive.
I’m still not convinced you can change vector in jump – unless you’re a knnn, anyway, which I suspect is more a tech thing than any peculiar mental quality.
I think the initial speed does have an impact on jump – not on journey duration but on whether you ever reach the target star at all. I always got the impression that there is something analogous to friction (some sort of energy loss anyway) in jump space – if you don’t have the v at departure, you simply don’t make it to the other side. The factor that seems to affect journey times isn’t so much departure velocity but the number and size of the jump vanes – more vanes = a “deeper stitch into the beyond” (lovely phrase) = faster journey times and longer jumps.
If you take the Mahe autodoc on the Pride, and pair it with very long human jumps (the Mri war is very far down the line from the company wars, and tech must have expanded), you can likely keep the humans alive far enough to backtrack the Mri.
The distinction I wanted to make about the Knnn was that, Knnn brains being vastly different from oxy brains, their tech is likely to be very different. Tech being an extension of brains.
I’ve thought that V isn’t about traversing jumpspace, its about reaching the intersection. That is, there’s something to do with time dilation which makes the intersect possible, which has a level of connection to some sort of reality: the physics of things in multiple frames of time dilation are extremely odd…and after that, the traverse has something more to do with gravity than V. You fall toward mass-points.
What’s been on my mind a lot is the fact that the Knnn are sitting in Sol’s back yard, and while Alliance and Union are struggling to expand on the other side of the Hinder stars…there’s the Kif to consider, likely expansionary. There’s also the Chi, who may want out, and if anyone expects Sol, which set up the hinder stars, which launched the Company fleet, which tossed what seems a pretty massive -exploratory- fleet into compact space twice, and must have, what, ten billion people, easily?
Just what was the Pride doing out in the dark during Chanur’s Legacy?
I’d love to see a comprehensive map.
Hmm, well one possible explanation is (not necessarily canon) the Knnn are the initiators of
Compact technology, which was communicated to the Stsho and the Mahendosat, the curiosity
of the Mahe let the Kif get it, and the Mahe deliberately gave it to the Hani. This would
make a reason for the Knnn to seek similar life forms as allies who had a better chance of
communicating with the oxygenfolk.
Human ships and their methods are due to the understanding of Estelle Bok, and while those
who use her insights for the tech are many, the people who can do that level of work seem
to be rare (non-existent).
Lots of ships sail upon the ocean, the tech levels of what a ship can do are pretty variable
when it comes down to crossing speeds, maneuverability, servicebility in rough weather etc.
You see similar things in aircraft, a 1960 jet fighter took miles to turn, a biplane could
turn almost in its own length. and modern jets can do things that are limited by the pilots
courage and organic limits. A mig 29 can make a wheels up landing, skid along the runway and
have a few dents knocked out with a hammer and be flying again the next day, an American
composite will have most of it turn into unusable garbage doing the same thing. those are
differences on a single planet in aircraft that do the same job.
Trying to figure out where the tech came from in the Compact space is a fun thing.
“You fall towards mass points”
Yes! – my point exactly. Insufficient departure v means you never reach the gravity slope of the target mass point. Possibly you just drift to a halt in hype then fall back to the departure point? Since there’s no record of ships failing to complete a jump and living to tell the tale, I’d assume this is slightly fatal.
One thing that has always puzzled me – how does the jumpfield collapse? Is it a natural function – ie the field collapses when it encounters a gravity well? Or is something as simple a timer? I lean towards the latter, since there seems to be a degree of control – I’m thinking of Capella being able to drop Corinthian out of jump at Tripoint, and the Pride being “set to come out deep in the well”. I seem to remember that computers don’t work too well in jump, although I couldn’t give you a definitive quote for that.
Got to ask. Did this inspire Ari2’s house designs?
http://news.cnet.com/2300-11386_3-10004481.html?tag=rtcol;pop
No…but you should see the house I designed in my head. If I had Bill Gates’ budget, the world would have another wonder! 😉
I just loved the river running through it. I must admit I could quite fancy Ari’s newest place; if only I had the budget too.
So I’ve gone to thinking about populations, which I got to by niggling at the suggestion of the 50 to 100 sol ships which blasted through compact space during late-Chanur. Those ships would take a pretty big production to produce, just the same as the company fleet, 50 carriers, must have taken a huge production to produce, which implies a massive Sol based economy.
So, if Chanur happened at about the time of Cyteen/Regenisis(wherein there are hints of sol having butted up against something alien), that’s two fleets that earth’s produced in about three generations…60-70 years for stationers/worlders, much shorter for spacers.
Now, Union beats the tar out of the Company fleet, producing enough early on to grind it down to the 15 of the Maziani fleet, but Sol produced its fleet as a one off and tossed it at Union. Then apparently did it again (and better?) 60 years later, and tossed it into the Compact.
Which brings me around to the sides of my questions: How many ships can/do Pell/merchanters’ alliance produce, how many Union, and how many Sol? Union/merchanter’s alliance has something of a funny distribution, because union’s merchanters are alliance, buuuut…eventually, the whole question comes down to station based populations, doesn’t it?
You can’t build more than a shuttle down-well, so planetary populations are pointless for fleet building (but they may be tossing up metals and prefab and such…still, getting things out of that gravity well would be expensive) Pell’s station gets pretty big population bumps as refugees flood in during the war, and Cyteen’s pumping people out of vats, building stations, etc, etc..but what are the populations like?
Moving a thousand people per ship out from Sol during the construction of the Great Circle wouldn’t even dent the current population growth, let alone that of a few centuries from now. Sol seems likely to have some 8-10 billion persons, easily…Pell has few enough that addition of six thousand at the outset of Downbelow Station is a Big Deal, so say 10 thousand, 16 once the population is added. or maybe 20-26. And Pell’s a big station. So what’s that leave for a likely population to Union?
They’re pumping out people, yes. But Cyteen itself isn’t hugely populated, Novogord being the only metropolis, the rest being, as I see them portrayed, much more small town/large town sized. So, six million on Cyteen, two million more in the rest of Union during Ari 2?
That still leaves Sol as the gargantuan in the corner.
Anyone have better estimates?
Interesting post. No real comment on populations, except the following impressions:
The sublighter’s station modules probably carried a few hundred rather than a 1000. Just a feeling…
Pell is probably a lot more than 10000. The refugees would have a far larger impact on a closed eco-system than they would on a planet. I got the impression that Q formed only a small section of Pell’s torus.
As far as shipbuilding, I must admit that Sol’s ability to knock out 50 giant carriers did bother me, but looking at the timeline, about 23 years elapsed from the creation of Union to the events of Hellburner, so that’s not so bad. Metals and materials would come from the Belt rather than from Earth, and I’d assume a lot of automated production and assembly of basic hull components.
I just finished reading Serpents Reach. About 1/4 of the way into it, I thought “This is Ari Emory’s nightmare”. What she was afraid of happening, happened. Humankind was spreading out and developing new cultures beyond any control.
Well, and not just the cultures, but I think Ari I and II both feared that the azi escaping the control of Reseune would result in a perpetual slave race, much like I expect the “betas” of the Hydri reach to be. We learn in Port Eternity and SR that the azi of that time have an inborn kill switch that causes them to die at the age of 40.
This is sort of out in left field,CJ. Is Signe Mallory’s name serendipity, or or were you aware of the Mallory family in Connecticut? There were five generations of Mallory’s involved in business with the sea. They ran the gamut from sail making to merchant, to captain. Thus the Mallory Buildings at Mystic Seaport, CT. I love the notion that Signe Mallory is carrying on an old family business. )-D
I love it. I’m sure there COULD be a connection!
Joe Walton at Tor.com just put up a mini-review of Merchanter’s Luck, as a sounds-kinda-gothic-but-isn’t-really.
Jo, not Joe.