Star Travel

Star travel in the Third Horizon requires both steady nerves and plenty of time – how long the trip will take can be affected by anything from corsair attacks and asteroid fields to the immense distances of binary or trinary star systems. No captain should leave port without doing solid research about the route. Help is provided by the Bulletin’s Astrostradium – an enormous database describing a large number of routes, coordinates and space stations all across the Horizon. Interplanetary travel times can also vary greatly depending on the orbit of the planet you are traveling to. Chapter 12 describes the minimum distances from the sun to the planets in the Kua system. Spaceflights are rarely longer than the shortest distance between the planetary bodies, as the pilots will chart courses toward their destinations’ approaching orbits. Thus, the ship and the planet are moving towards each other. Calculate travel times using the shortest distance listed between two planets.

TRAVEL BETWEEN SYSTEMS

Travel between systems is via the portals – mysterious wormholes left behind by the Portal Builders (read more in Chapter 13). The portals are found close to the sun of each system, closer than any of the planetary orbits. Some stars have more than one portal, each one leading to a different system. The entry field into a portal is not the same as the exit field; they lead to and from the same destination but are separate from each other.
Travel between two portals in a system takes about one day, and the preparations before the jump also take about a day – usually spent waiting for a convoy to come along to split the jump fee with. The jump itself is instantaneous. Heavily trafficked systems like Kua usually see one or two convoys per week, while convoys in the outer systems could be whole segments (p 232) apart.
Bulk haulers are the highest priority for the portal stations and are cleared to jump straight away. They usually arrive at Kua once per segment, on the way to or from either Mira or Dabaran. One in five bulk haulers have Kua as their final destination, the rest only pass through. Smaller ships dock and unload some of their cargo as the space hulks pass by. The Kua portals are 3 AU apart, a journey the bulk haulers make in three days, but smaller vessels do much faster.

PORTAL JUMPS

Jumping through a portal means traveling into the portal fields close to the sun of the system. Exactly how the portal fields function is unknown, but their proximity to the stars would indicate that they are powered by the stars’ radiation or gravitation. The portal fields themselves are in constant movement, seemingly connected to the phases of their suns. Advanced mathematics are necessary before any portal jump to compute the field’s current size, and a safe entry vector. Without such calculations, there is a great risk of only partly hitting the field – for the unlucky crew this means an instant of bright light, after which the ship simply disappears, or at the very least suffers enormous damage. No human can travel through a portal field while awake. The crew must be put in stasis (cryogenic sleep), or they will suffer terrible mental and physical trauma (called “bad stasis”, “hyper sickness” or “frostbite”), if they are unlucky enough to survive. On voyages through several systems, most of the crew is left in stasis for the entire time and only woken up at the final destination. In dangerous systems, such as Odacon, all of the crew is woken up after clearing the jump.

Portal Jumping

• FEES AND CONVOYS. For a price, the portal stations can calculate the portal fields’ movements and current size, making the jump relatively safe. The fees are usually high, between 5,000 and 10,000 birr, which means most skippers prefer to share the cost by forming convoys and jumping together. Portal jumps with coordinates calculated for a convoy gives a +3 to the pilot’s PILOT test.

• BULK HAULERS. Another way to jump is to wait for a bulk hauler to come by and jump alongside it. The haulers always get their coordinates and entry vectors on approaching the portal station, and tagging along with them is free, but requires an Easy (+1) PILOT test. Unfortunately, bulk hauler jumps are few and far between.

• SOLO JUMP. The broke skipper’s last resort is to have the ship’s crew itself make all jump calculations. This takes about four hours and requires a successful SCIENCE test. Each extra six reduces the time by one hour (to a minimum of one hour). The jump itself requires a PILOT test at -1.

• JUMPING BLIND. The truly desperate, often corsairs on the run and other criminals, can choose to jump blind, without any astronical calculations. This requires an unassisted PILOT test at -3.

PLANETSIDE LANDING

Making a trip from orbit down to a planet’s surface usually takes one to a few hours. All ships must make preparations for atmospheric entry or take-off. This includes warming up the graviton projectors, securing the cargo and adjusting heat shields. Most freighters in the Third Horizon are too big for it to be practical for them to land planetside, instead docking with space stations in orbit above the planet where they unload their cargo to smaller vessels. Orbit ports are found above most planets with large enough populations, while systems with fewer inhabitants instead rely on spaceports on the portal stations.

In the orbit ports, cargo from the bulk haulers is redistributed to smaller spaceships and then brought down to the surface below. Some cargo is put up for auction (usually in planetside souks) where free traders bid on contracts for transporting it to colonies and space stations farther from the hub of the system. Systems on the periphery of the Horizon, outside of the circle of Dabaran and the Miran chain, are not visited by bulk haulers at all.