Update: There is now a wiki entry for jumpdrives, which supercedes this.
One of the best-kept - for now - secrets of the Inukari Union is the location of a system beyond Palleanaer. A misjumped trader was guided by voidwhales to a dark point: a gate with no voidlife feeding on its energy and making it "visible" to human navigation. The trader was able to return to Palleanaer, identifying the location of the gate - 3107 in the next sector over, in Traveller notation. But without a false star, there was no way to return to the system.
However, the Inukari Navy kept a literal eye on the location, and recently some of its most sensitive navigators have been able to detect the faint glow enough to navigate to Trans-Palleanaer, finding that dormant phykons (space algae) on the trader's hull have had a population explosion.
Triangulation from the visible false stars of Palleanaer and Sterhon should make it possible for even a less-sensitive navigator to find the infant false star within the range of a J-3 ship, but it's considerably more risky than a typical jump since the margin for error is greatly reduced.
Close-up on 1129
Update: There is now a wiki entry for jumpdrives, which supercedes this.
Thenor 1129 is a dead gate, generally no longer even shown on maps.
It provided a second J3 link between Terran space and the Ring, and was chiefly a naval base with a significant agricultural colony on the mainworld.
It was a fairly open secret that the agricultural colony was primarily mechanized, and the population was actually a psionics skunkworks. Less well-known at the time was that the project was heavily focused on studying telepathic group minds, forbidden by the Ancients.
The project was either a rousing success or an abject failure, depending on the metrics used: a gestalt was achieved, which immediately broke through the supposed telepathic blocks to consume every sentient mind on first the planet, and then the naval base.
Or at least, that is the story the Ancients have given, and there is no way to verify it. An unprecedented, even pre-Departure, three Ancient worldships blockaded Thenor in voidspace. Arriving ships were invited to dock on a worldship, and those who declined the invitation were casually destroyed.
Over the course of several months, the "guest" crews were able to watch the false star dim to nothing. Exactly how the Ancients killed off the voidlife is unknown; the Ancients declined to answer any questions. At least one crewmember was summarily executed after refusing an Ancient Leader's command to stop asking.
The fate of the system's population is similarly unknown. Public opinion is somewhat split on whether the groupmind became so powerful it threatened the worldships and so the system was quarantined, or whether the system was sterilized and the Ancients simply did not wish the rest of charted space to see the results.
Regular attempts are made to re-contact Thenor, usually by attempting to convince voidwhales to guide ships to the blind gate. These expeditions usually end up having to return to their point of origin, but occasionally one disappears. This leads to inevitable arguments about whether they simply did not make it to any system before their jump field decayed, whether they made it to Thenor's gate but were destroyed by a worldship on picket duty, or whether they made it to Thenor itself and were absorbed into the hivemind.
Because telepathy, and telepathic bonds, do not last across a jump, the hivemind is not considered a threat to other systems even if it still exists.
The Ancients' explanation is not widely accepted in current Terran government circles - the firm belief is that the psionic research posed a threat to the Zhdezi and that they convinced the Ancients to kill two birds with one stone by removing Thenor as both a J3 bridge to the Ring and as a research facility.
Voyager in Night
JDN reviewed Cherryh's Voyager in Night which reminded me: there are canonically Ancients in the Alliance/Union setting, albeit not nearly as old as mine, much less my Precursors. But the hani actually could be uplifted Earth lions.
Navigating inside brightspace
Update: There is now a wiki entry for jumpdrives, which supercedes this.
The convention is that outbound ships stay in that plane until they exit the brightspace. Incoming ships come in above or below the ecliptic, diving down to the center of the brightspace just as they drop out to realspace. That gives them time to observe and plan for combers, who stay in planes parallel to the ecliptic.
Voidwhales dipping into brightspace for space krill or space fish can "see" ships much better than ships can see them, and avoid them accordingly. There isn't much large voidlife (big enough to damage a ship) inside the false star other than that, so collisions aren't generally an issue unless you're going way too fast.
That does imply that ships dropping out of jump are "visible," briefly, as the bugs-on-the-windshield turn into bright energy. Not sure if that's invisible to sensors like it is in jumpspace, or if you'd have to catch it by looking out a window at the right time.
Gate life
Update: There is now a wiki entry for jumpdrives, which supercedes this.
All of this comes down to: if something kills off the space algae, and accordingly all the rest of the food chain disappears, you cannot see the gate. It doesn't affect the gate's function, you just can't find it in the darkness of space.
You can pick up induced fluctuations in the jump field when you're very close; that's how you find the center of brightspace, so if something - a voidwhale, an Ancient ship, some other deus ex - leads you close enough, you can find it. And maybe the residue of space algae on the hull wakes up in the (not yet) brightspace and starts reproducing, and you've just lit a beacon to a new planet.
I should probably figure out some history of where this has happened on the current map.
Bright moon
Update: There is now a wiki entry for jumpdrives, which supercedes this.
All right, I think I have it nailed down: Brightspace is caused by space algae. Perfectly logical!
No, hear me out: the gate point gives off some kind of energy that the tiniest void lifeforms can pick up, and they convert (some of) it into the hallucinatory light that navigators can see. The closer to the gate point, the more intense/brighter the voidlife is, until it's basically solid light at the center. That's the false star.
The "surface" of the false star is not well defined and is just determined by how quickly the algae attenuates. Mostly because the rest of the void is constantly eating it: vast voidwhales dipping into the bright and coming out again, trailing a comet's tail of glowing particles, etc. There are currents and flares and so forth, a big fuzzy aurora of voidlight.
It's all psychic/hallucinated anyway, so the fact that navigators can see the moonlight-bright false star a week away doesn't have to make physics sense. (Or maybe travel in jumpspace is relatively slow and they are subjectively not far away anyway. Probably not, though: you can't easily see other ships flying between them, I don't think.)
Light and dark
Update: There is now a wiki entry for jumpdrives, which supercedes this.
I keep saying "brightspace" and I like the term (although abbreviating "brightspace energy" to "bs energy" is perhaps too on the nose), but there's one slight problem.
I was thinking about how ships communicate if there's only a hallucinatory image, no radio or even real light. (The windows on the bridge do not cast any light on the consoles, which has got to be a weird look.) And then I realized: if it's a hallucinatory image of the real ship: light signaling. Transcribed by humans (or Wolves), good old Morse(-type) code. Or larger screens, if you're up close enough. Mount a short-throw projector on a protrusion and project messages on the side of your ship, whatever.
That in turn made me think of the ships looking like bioluminescent deep-sea fish, and realized I kind of want that look overall. Popping out into jumpspace without a false star, just an energy well of some sort (more handwaving) and schooling glowfish shimmering in the dark, lurking voidsharks visible only as silhouettes against the faint glow of void algae... stuff like that.
But then how do you figure out where your destination is? You can't leave a buoy in jumpspace - it will drop back to realspace as soon as it leaves your jump field. Maybe you can pick them up through fluctuations in your jump field, one of the few things that sensors can "see" in jumpspace. Which means in theory you could have a fully bot ship, but it would be flying blind so, y'know, probably a bad idea.
Or maybe (looking at the header image) the false star is no brighter than moonlight, no larger than an oversized moon, buuuuut being a hallucinatory image, you can somehow see the distant ones just fine.
