I 've been following the discussion, and note a *major* suumption being
made by practically everyone. An incorrect assumption, at that.
Interstellar space is not "empty". It's full of all sorts of dark
matter. Comet nuclei, the occasional planet, giant molecular clouds,
etc.
A comet nucleus is a "dirty snowball", that is, it's water ice, with
amonia, methanne, and a fair amount of "dirt". The dirt willl be mostly
fairly finely divided stuff like carbonaceus chondrite meteoric
material. Plus bits or rock and other things. And these snowballs will
be tens to hundreds of kilometers in diameter.
It'll be *real* easy to extract hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and
many other things useful for ship fuel or life support from these. And
even the small ones will supply fuel and other consumables for *decades*
of heavy use.
This may be a good reason for carrying fuel purification plants. If you
mis-jump into an "empty" hex, you have a fair chance of locating
something useful if you stretch your sensors to the limit and use
manuever fuel (and low berths) carefully. In CT or MT, scratch the bit
about manuever fuel. :-)
Also, once found, relocating them would be easy. Especially if you
plant a good beacon. I'm willing to bet that pirates and
revolutionaries would find these ideal hideouts.
I'd also be willing to bet that a number of such "bases" whether
illegal, or just "company secret" might survive the Virus, because
they'd have long practice in "I'm not here" tactics. If a ship jumps in
and doesn't give the right codes, they won't broadcast anything to it.
And if it acts "wrong" it'll be considered an enemy and dealt with. If
it's merely a misjumped ship, well, accidents happen.
This could explain the survival of groups of merchant ships. The
locations and codes wouldn't be entered into the ship's computers so as
to prevent them being found by the law or by competitors. Likewise, log
entries would be faked to make it seem like the ship had made one jump,
not two (or more) small jumps. So the virus might never find out about
them.
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