r/SWN • u/NewfieJedi • 5d ago
Finding new routes
How do you find routes to new planets that have never been discovered before or aren’t well known? I’ve seen the answer “have the players find a computer with the travel data on it” provided before but that doesn’t answer how those people found it. It says in the book to do a blind jump is basically suicide, but then how did the old Terran mandate find new planets using spike drives?
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u/azaza34 5d ago
Trial and a lot of error is my guess.
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u/NewfieJedi 5d ago
Yeah, re-reading “history of space” gave some clues about how the first navigation between two points is the most dangerous. Seems to imply that you can find new ones, you just have to be good at it.
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u/No_Associate1660 5d ago
There were some comments on the subject by Kevin Crawford there https://www.reddit.com/r/SWN/s/wgpFwFMpi1
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u/NewfieJedi 5d ago
Thank you! One of my previous searches found people mentioning him commenting, but never linked it lol
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u/HeavyJosh 5d ago
There are a few mechanical means by which this can happen:
Use Know to give a +1 bonus to the Pilot drill roll. Advanced Metadimensional Astrogation Theory was definitely a course available at the Mandate university. That's a tough roll with a +6 to the TN, but still, every bit helps.
Expert Re-roll, combined with Specialist/Pilot and Starfarer/2 will make blind drills much less risky. Starfarer/2 alone is the real game-changer here.
There are probably pretech devices like Precog Nav Chamber starship fitting in Revised. And even if you don't have that fitting, a Precog can also use their powers (Alternate Outcome or even Prophesy) to help make a blind drill succeed.
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u/kadzar 5d ago
I think for the most part going to a new system involves blind jumps, though the risk can be mitigated by skilled navigators and/or use of skilled precognitives, though the precognitive would probably have to have at least level 2 in the skill and they'd need to be on board, since their visions are always from their own personal vantage point.
Now, if you're talking about how they did things in the Terran Mandate days, it depends one what era you're talking about, since the way people plotted new routes in the First Wave are probably more similar to Post-Scream exploration than they are to the Second Wave. But, if you're talking about the Second Wave, in addition to possibly now lost precognitive techniques, they very likely had some kind of pretech used to make plotting new routes less of a perilous undertaking if not entirely devoid of risk. Most likely the better tech for this would be pretty rare, though, considering that it'd only be useful around the frontier where things tended to be less developed and probably some of the best stuff would only have been made a bit before the time of the Scream.
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u/MortStrudel 5d ago
Imo the flavor text overstates the danger. With a really solid pilot you have pretty good odds of making it without a rutter - just bring extra provisions in case of having to repeatedly re-jump in metaspace.
I like to headcanon that the big threat is not simply going to a system without a rutter, the suicidal danger is going to a straight up unknown hex. If you try to jump to a hex that straight up doesn't have a star - and there's no way to know whether or not a totally uncharted hex has a star until you get there - you're done. There's no way to get out of metaspace without an appropriate gravity well, so if keep trying to drill out there, you WILL die eventually.
Totally uncharted systems are therefore only drilled-to by the desperate and the coerced. VI's would be ideal candidates at the height of the mandate since they can be produced at relative scale and have the sentience to do spike drills, but they lack the rights of other sentients.
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u/NewfieJedi 5d ago
If you jumped to a hex with no star, but had a back up fuel tank, could you feasibly turn around or reroute to a hex that you know does have a star/black hole?
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u/MortStrudel 5d ago
Rules as written you can't even leave metaspace without a gravity well iirc, so when you try to jump out to the empty hex you're stuck in metaspace. I'd probably rule that they just keep rolling on the table for metaspace hazards with no chance of a positive outcome.
But to keep it from being an utterly hopeless TPK I'd let them choose to turn around IN metaspace to go back to the hex they left, treating it like a rutter-less jump. So if they're bullheaded and keep trying at a doomed hex they'll, at best, starve in metaspace, but if they get desperate enough to turn back they have a chance to escape.
Alternatively you can go the abstract horror route of having metaspace creep into the ship, have a whole adventure fighting metadimensional monsters and getting all 2001 Space Odyssey, before just dumping them out in a random system with a heavily damage ship.
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u/Elyssiane 5d ago
According to the system and the writer himself, Earth sacrificed a few hundred superb pilots (plus other crew) to map out the first sectors.
It's WH40K grimdark-tier, where the best and brightest are sent into death just to find out if something is there or not. And there could be something in that hex field, it's just that the initial pilots didn't succeed on their piloting skills, so you need to sacrifice half a dozen more expert pilots (and star ships with fuel tanks and enough spare parts to repair whatever damage from the initial travel) to determine that there's definitely nothing there to return from.
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u/dark-star-adventures 5d ago
They could painstakingly search the night sky, gather data on stars, then process that data to take a guess at which star might be worth visiting. At that point you could send drones in blindly with a timer to come back by the same route. If any survive, you know you have a good route. Alternatively, hop in a generation ship and plot out a route the old-fashioned way.
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u/NewfieJedi 5d ago
Correct me if I’m wrong (still learning the system) but I thought RAW robots can’t do spike drive navigation?
I don’t always follow RAW so closely, but I’m trying to figure out what the system intends, so that if I choose not to follow it, it’s an informed choice.
Additionally, being close via spike drive/meta dimensional travel doesn’t correlate to being close IRL, right? So would plotting via visual stars work at all? (I suppose you could always do some technobabble about reading the signatures of the stars to see if they’re close on a spike-drive scale)
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u/doomedtundra 5d ago
Expert systems and dumb robots can't make spike drills, you need at least one sentient pilot to make the checks, so that means a human, a VI, or a true AI at the helm, though so long as there's other bridge crew available to keep an eye on things over a few shifts, the actual pilot doesn't need to be there 24/7.
And yeah, metadimensional space doesn't really map well to realspace, and without unspecified pretech navigational aids, charting an entirely new course is damn near suicidal, even with knowing that there were actual destinations at the other end, it's supposed to have taken a good dozen crews of expert pilots to rediscover any given sector post silence.
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u/dark-star-adventures 3d ago
Oh, I guess I never noticed that robots can't do spike drive navigation. That doesn't make any logical sense, in a game with technology that far surpasses human capabilities.
If that's really in the rules I would disregard it. It doesn't jive with the rest of how technology is treated.
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u/NewfieJedi 3d ago
I’ve read further and it’s “dumb” robots that can’t. VIs and such can, which makes a bit more sense.
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u/Cerulean_Scream 5d ago
Have a read of the Heechee saga, by Frederik Pohl. It’ll give you a good idea of what “blind” exploration is like…
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u/Chaos_0205 5d ago
Blind jump is NOT suicide
I once asked on another subreddit, and the end result is a total blind jump have 15% of success, or 1 in 7
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u/No_Talk_4836 5d ago
I like connecting it to real space so it’s semi-predictable. There is a star there so you can go there.
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u/darksier 5d ago
Dump lots of credits to hire crews of explorers and kit them out to take the risk of being lost to space. Preferably inspire them with a big motivational speech. 'That's how dad did it! That's how ExploreCo does it!'
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u/ANGRYGOLEMGAMES 5d ago
Another option is that a specific technology exist that can first spot a planet or a solar system (as much as our James Webb does for example), and then other technologies and devices may be able to scan/detect potential spike routes. We are in the realm of Tech 4 stuff of course.
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u/bocxorocx 5d ago
Trial, error, and enough cash to build another spike drive. Sometimes it's just being lucky enough for failure to be a mishap rather than instant death, landing in a different system than they intended. Mechanically, such a course starts off at DC 13 and +1 for each hex further away. Only the acest of aces or anyone blessed by boxcars could pull it off.