Re: (2296) 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