There's been a lot of talk about this topic, most of the good stuff
has already been said so hopefully this will be a (final) summary.
My background is that I *am* a theoretical physicist (in training)
specializing in astrophysics. That's just for the record.
Okay, first, unless the quantization on the gravity field is important
(assume it's not) the *strength* of the field should *not* influence
the motion of anything inside the star ship, including the jump drive.
Any object in free fall in a uniform field will not detect the fact
that they are in said field. If the field is *not* uniform, then,
in the case of gravity, you will feel what we call tidal forces, which
as was pointed out, fall off as the cube of the distance. Therefore
the person who pointed out that this was the origin of the 100
diameter rule was exactly right for the best physical reasons I can
think of (thus minimizing the size of the Physics Nullifier Box needed.)
The 100 diameter rule will be subject to modifications due to density
of the object and length of the starship, but I don't think it will
play to large a role. I'll do the math if anyone really wants to know.
A new point, just because you jump from 100 diameters away from the
nearest celestial body doesn't mean that you automatically arrive
that close to your destination, it only provides a lower bound.
How do you know where the body is that you want to get close to from
the next system? If the system is well known, sure the library
computer could keep an ephemeris for all the planetary information
and calculate it, but that could be a lot of worlds. It assumes you
know what *direction* you're heading in from *exactly* or you don't
know where your coordinate axes for the planetary reference frame
will be. My opinion is that it would be difficult to keep track
of this at best, and the consequences aren't too horriffic.
If one is jumping into Sol system and they don't know where all the
celestial bodies are, I'd just jump into the region between, say,
Earth and Mars orbit. Or perpendicular to the plane of the system
(if that is known.) And then accelerate to the planet. Even at
only 1 g that won't take more than a couple of days, tops. The
chance of actually hitting something in there is negligible. Note
that if you aren't showing up in system at 100 diameters, that gives
the pirates (in a fast ship) much more time to match vectors and do
pirate things.
Finally, the chance of hitting something 100 diameters away from Earth is
basically insignificant even if there are 1000 ships arriving on this
edge each day. Finally, I see no reason to not be accelerating when
you jump. So one should be able to make it to jump point that much
faster.
On a related note, assume the jump drive does not violate any
conservation principles (except information density.) Then one
ought to reenter jump space with the same momentum and energy as
when one leaves (when you're in jump space this gets transfered to
the vacuum zero point energy or some other magical hand waving
concept.) This can cause interesting situations when jumping
to a star that has a high proper motion relative to the origin.
In that case, you may *want* to accumulate a lot of momentum
(relative to the center of the galaxy) before jumping so that
one doesn't have to accelerate half way to the planet, if you
see what I mean.
Enjoy,
Nick Christenson
[email removed]