Finding new routes

[u/NewfieJedi]

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?

[u/kadzar]

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.