What do you do during jump?

	My group are all avid role-players. For example their characters
were all drafted (they claimed kidnapped) into the Scout service under some
obscure rule and we have spend the last three months playing out the six
week basic training. Anyway...
	Jump takes a week. A ship usually dieters around for up to another
week and jumps again. So about half a full-time spacefarer's life is spent
in jump. Jump is boring. I mean, you can't even look out the windows. Great
if you're travelling a high-tech luxary liner with holo-vision (tm)
entertainment &c but your average Subsidised Merchant or Scout is just a bare
TL9 (?). Entertainment facilities = pack of cards.
	So what do your characters do to entertain themselves in jump? Most
referees I imagine just skip over jump declaiming you character spends the
time reading an improving book. But how a character spends its recreation
time says a lot about a character. There's only so much maintenence you can
do to a starship.
	In my group there was eight of them packed onto an elderly scout ship.
In theory a scout ship (Snapshot plan) can take eight. But we all know about
the life support. Being different nationalities, religions and being cooped
up in a ship where half the available room was taken up with "cargo" and the
smell getting worse does not lead to domestic peace. In fact is was probably
their unifying hatred of their draft officer/captor that kept them coming to
blows.
	Their relief from boredrum involved constructing a complicated game.
They locked the door between the corridor and the day room open and welded
a ramp over the lintel. Then one person would get into a shopping cart (one
of their few momentos from their home planet) and starting at the bridge
another would push them full speed up the corridor and onto the ramp. The
trick then was for the passenger/payload to leap from the cart, pass above
the table welded to the floor and below the pipe running across the ceiling
and land on the other side before crashing into the engineering door. Points
were scored for sucess, style, and finesse.
	I'm not sure I'll ever understand how the TL4 imagination works.

				Jo Jaquinta
				[email removed]

P.S. sysgen4 -- planetary mapping is well on the way. I would greatly
appreciate it if all those how have uses the sysgen suite of programs can
write to me commenting on them so I can put them together for the next
release. Target date -- 1 July.