Scavenging in the Spinward Marches

> Date: Wed, 24 Apr 91 14:28:42 CDT
> From: "Simpson, Bart" [email removed]
> Subject: (2296) Scavenging in the Spinward Marches
>
> of time. The idea I came up with is basically searching the empty areas in
> the sector at least Jump-2 away from a world. I figured that with a seeker,
> you could completely fill the cargo bay and ord holds with fuel and there
> would be enough fuel to make 2 jump-2's. I figured the farther away from
> a system, the better the chance of finding a misjumped starship. Considering
> the area I'm looking at (the 'Abyss' - fairly much in the center of the
> Spinward Marches Sector) there are over ten empty hexes at least a jump-2
> from the nearest world.
>

To paraphrase Douglas Adams: "Space is big.  You wouldn't believe how mind-
bogglingly big space really is."  Your chances of finding a misjumped starship
are effectively 0.  Just for sake of argument, let's take a look at a few
numbers: Each hex is one parsec across...3.26 light years.  If we jump to the
center of the hex, a radar pulse would take 3.26 years to travel to the edge
and back...and even TL21 active sensors are limited to 500,000km.  Let's take
an approximation of a hex as a disk 3.26 ly in diameter and 500,000km thick.
Our chance of randomly jumping within actice detection range of a derelict is
roughly equal to the total area of the disk divided by the area our sensors
cover.  The area of the disk is 8E26sq km, and the area that our sensors
cover is 7.8E11 sq km...making our chance about 1E-15.  That is to say that
about one billion lost ships must be contained in the hex before we have
one chance in a million of finding one.

I'm limiting this discussion to active sensors because old derelicts will
be stone cold dead, and rather hard to find on passives.  If you think that
radio beacons will help--I'd guess a typical starship could power life support
and commo for a couple of months minimum after a misjump--then go ahead.  At
Jump-2 from the nearest world, the passengers and crew will still be dead
from power loss even if they all piled into cold sleep berths in the 6+ years
before a radio message would reach the nearest world.  Given that the power
will only last for months, the odds of intercepting the message by jumping
randomly into space still aren't good...and would only apply for very recent
derelicts.

I'd be inclined to help the players just a little bit more, if the end result
of obtaining a starship was the referee's goal. The difficulties inherent in
finding a derelict in a star system would be considerably less--whether the
victim of a pirate attack that is repairable, or, say, a single person crewed
seeker tethered to a rock next to the body of the crewman who died in a mining
laser accident.  If you insist on deepspace, the Traveller background has
generally assumed that it was possible to jump repeatably to some point in
deepspace...perhaps you could leak the coordinates of a pirate rendesvous where
captured ships are jumped before looting, or a refueling point from the Third
or Fourth Frontier War that was found by the enemy and raided. (Presumably
found by ferreting out the coordinates through espionage...you see the diffi-
culties that would come from trying to search a space.)

Rob Dean

> From: "Simpson, Bart" [email removed]
<...>
> but they might have access to a Scout/Courier or Seeker for a limited amount
> of time. The idea I came up with is basically searching the empty areas in
> the sector at least Jump-2 away from a world. I figured that with a seeker,
> you could completely fill the cargo bay and ord holds with fuel and there
> would be enough fuel to make 2 jump-2's. I figured the farther away from
> a system, the better the chance of finding a misjumped starship. Considering
> the area I'm looking at (the 'Abyss' - fairly much in the center of the
> Spinward Marches Sector) there are over ten empty hexes at least a jump-2
> from the nearest world.
>
	Ever Hear of Serching for a Needle in a Haystack?
Let's assume that 1000 ships are lost in the hex...If they are evenly
distributed then the average seperation would be 1/10th of a parsec, or
about 3 x 10^12km. I don't know how far away sensors would work, as
there would be little local interferance, but the travel times would be
daunting, unless you had the fuel to do a microjump-1.
	I'm not saying that it is impossible to find, but it would be
a rare occurance. Then one has to think of what the crew would do if they
found themselves stranded in the middle of nowhere. First is the "aliens"
solution, start the ship moving towards the nearest inhabited system, and
have everyone get into low berths, hopefully you would be revivable
when you were detected going through the system.
	Acutally that's the only solution I can think of, I guess some
crews would blow themseleves up, others accelerate until they ran out of
fuel, perhaps reaching relativistic speeds, maybe some would just sit
around and hope for rescue. Most of these would have an impact on how
difficult it would be to salvage the ship.

	I agree that places jump-2 away would have probably more lost
ships, as fewer people can recover from a misjump placing them more than
jump-1 from a system. Then again, a lot of people jump their maximum
distance, (case in point, the salvagers coming back won't be able to
do anything if they misjump), and will be in the same general situation.
Also consider that at jump-2 away, those people with J-1 fuel left that
are still stranded (which are the extra ones, not found at J-1), but that
extra fuel can be used to power the thrusters for a considerable period
of time.

	Lastly, the universe is large, if you've thought of something
probably someone else has as well. Therefore if it is profitable
to run salvage into empty hexes, someone else is probably doing it as
well, and they may not be pleasant about you cutting in on their "turf".

				-Dan

Dan Corrin, Network Manager, Mechanical Engineering, UWO, London, Ontario
TML/CZ FTP site coordinator:     [email removed].        [phone removed]