Update: There is now a wiki entry for voidlife, which supercedes this.
I still like the idea of space whaling; long voyages to hunt dangerous creatures in the void. I've painted myself into a corner about it a bit, though.
First of all, if sweeping up Space Plankton is a slow but predictable way to collect void energy, there's no demand for hunting space whales. So I either need something the whales have that Space Plankton doesn't, or they are vastly more energetic. Which sort of makes sense, if they're apex predators, they've concentrated more of the energy.
Second, if killing voidwhales is socially unacceptable, you can't just have a whaling economy. Which is also fixable: there are other leviathans that are not intelligent, and that maybe even prey on whales. Release the space-kraken!
Third, and least fixable, you can't make long voyages deep into voidspace, because you fall out after a week. And you can't just hop back in: if you fall out outside of a gate, you disappear.
I've got a few vague ideas: perhaps there are empty gates, with no systems at the other end but where you can drop out and come back. Drawback: if they're present within charted space, it screws up the geography of rifts. And if they're present at the edge of charted space, it screws up the possibility of a frontier. There's the possibility of "up" and "down" gates, but I'm not sure I like that either.
Hmm.
... unless?
Spouse is contemplating a side hustle of RPG editing. I'm 99% sure he hasn't run across this blog yet (I've been waiting for him to notice it) but I'm also 99% sure there is no market for it turned into a product (and not just because you could assemble a good chunk of it by just pruning all my "what if?" out of these entries).
It's slightly more likely to become a fiction project, actually. As mentioned, I've been noodling around with scenes and whatnot, just to get a feel for the world, and while I haven't actually come up with, y'know, a plot, I am beginning to get some characters I think I like. Problem: my favorite viewpoint character is a Zhdez starship, and because I am also a snarky person it is going to feel Murderbot-derivative as it makes observations about the meatfolk and whatnot.
I might have to back off on it being Zhdez; if the Inukari are my Goldilocks-just-right race, they're less alien.
Also, ick: Just realized this is probably getting slurped up to feed AI so if I do write fiction I will someday get a comment about how I stole ideas from some other author who used AI to insta-write something before I do. Not that any of these ideas are all that original; just putting things together in different ways, mostly.
The void
Update: There is now a wiki entry for jumpdrives, which supercedes this.
I... dunno. I think I'm going to stick with "nothing leaves the bubble." Nothing exists in jumpspace/voidspace except as a sort of energy (it's hard to tell, since again, nothing can detect it), or within jump bubbles. Because if I go further down that road, voidspace just becomes an alternate regular space.
So that leaves merging jump fields as the only way to transfer things from one ship to another. I'm tempted to say this normalizes the two fields and synchronizes the ships, though I'll have to give it some thought. It could lead to interesting things like:
If you're jumping short (i.e. arriving in 1/3 the time because you're a J3 ship making a J1 jump) when you arrive in a system, you arrive still carrying a lot of charge. If you sync with a comber, the comber gets to stay out fishing longer, and you get to drop out of jumpspace faster. This is probably only practical if merging jump fields is low-risk.
If it's higher-risk, you still might have picket boats hanging around in voidspace, and incoming warships hand off a little of their jump charge to keep them out longer. Probably more of a combat (and practice) situation, justifying the risk.
This may overcomplicate things, though.
Hmm.
Getting out of the bubble
Update: There is now a wiki entry for jumpdrives, which supercedes this.
One could make a permanent base in jumpspace, I suppose, if there was a way to exit the jump bubble without dropping back into realspace. Ancients know the trick, and it's generally accepted (on zero evidence beyond "well it just makes sense") that that is where their homeworlds are. It does seem apparent that that's where their worldships spend the majority of their time.
I've already decided that some manipulation of the field is possible, because that's how ships move in jumpspace, so I guess it's not impossible to conceive of some way to eject a sub-bubble or whatever.
The field manipulation may help me out with the "why wouldn't the jump field and therefore the ship be a sphere" - you can extend your field out to a spherical max, but you want to have some "slack" for travel. Heck... maybe a J3 ship that isn't under weigh can (must?) extend its bubble out to three times the radius|surface area|volume of a J1 ship, but pulling in the bubble and putting all power to, I dunno which makes more sense, the front or the back is what makes it go faster.
I guess the bubble can pull things in, since that's how combers scoop up phykons. (Do high-J ships make really good fishing boats if they decide not to go interstellar? Or is the comber just specific about how it shapes its field? I guess if it's got no choice but to take a week to do what it's doing, it doesn't need a giant field.)
So if you can eject something (meaning it no longer has a jump field to synchronize) and you can pick something up, that does mean ships can transfer things without merging jump fields (with the attendant level-of-charge issue). Can you just enter a ship's bubble, say as a boarding action, or does it require engineering to make a sub-bubble around you and merge it?
Brightspace fishing
Update: There is now a wiki entry for jumpdrives, which supercedes this.
I've established that the jump field takes almost a week to decay enough to drop back into realspace, meaning that comber ships that enter brightspace to collect energy have a very specific trip time.
Comber navigation is a lot more hands-on than starship navigation, since virtually the whole trip is within brightspace with its attendant hazards. Combers follow routes, as I've established, parallel to the pseudo-ecliptic, so they don't run into starships blindly leaving the gate. The routes leave and re-enter the brightness, so they should have time to see and account for inbound ships that will dive in at the pseudo-poles. Or maybe they just avoid that axis.
It is theoretically possible to never leave jumpspace, but you'd have to keep hopping onto ships fresh from jumpspace, and not just once a week if the fields need to be close in age to synchronize. This is slightly disappointing, because the idea of a permanent base on the other side is kind of appealing.
Starfishing
Since installing various de-DRM softwares and unlocking all the e-books I've accumulated over the years (thereby making my aging Kindle less of a risk), I've been slowly culling the paper books. Some I've just gotten rid of, confident I can read them again in Libby or whatever if I want to read them again, others I've waited until I find them in inexpensive ebook version before letting go of the paperback.
Anyway, while hunting down something else, I came across a reference to Glen Cook's Starfishers trilogy, which I genuinely can't remember if or when I got rid of. I seem to recall being interested in the titular star-fishing concept but being disappointed somehow in the execution. I skimmed the archives-dot-org version and Cook solved the "don't kill the space-whales" issue by having the harvestships... follow the "starfish" and pick up, I kid you not, their poop. May not swipe that exact bit, but I guess the idea of harvesting a byproduct rather than the actual animal is better.
Anyway, I guess that's where that little bit of worldbuilding came from. Always fun to dredge up a scrap of memory like that.
(Little bothered by the "It's named Blackworld, but not because the population is mostly Black people, it's just because it's tidally locked!" bit that I had forgotten though. Could you have simply... not?)
Jump bubble
Update: There is now a wiki entry for jumpdrives, which supercedes this.
Alliance Unbound focused on, for the first time I think, the "jump bubble" around Cherryh's starships. And a lot more about the "vanes" that generate it, and what it looks like from the outside. (Cherryh almost never mentions things that the main character doesn't see and actively notice, and it hasn't really come up before.) This sort of brings me back to the issues I have with volume-based ship construction.
Trav assumes that the important thing about a jump field is the volume it contains, but it very much bugs me that a volume can have a ridiculously variable surface area. Should that matter? Is the field the bubble skin, or something that permeates the volume?
If the limiting factor is actually surface area, that means spheres are the most efficient ship geometry and I'm really not sure I want to go that direction.
An alternative is that the ship creates a portal rather than a bubble, though that pushes toward needle-shaped ships and... really I'm finding that I don't want to constrain ships to any particular shape but I also want the "jump field" concept.
