On Wed, Dec 20, 2017 at 11:21 AM, C. Berry <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
I don't recall how detailed 2300's rules about this were, but I always pictured it as there being a fixed energy cost for the microjump itself, plus the cost of the potential change. If you're going "downhill" you can actually recover energy and offset some of the fixed cost. Stutterwarp doesn't work in space curved enough where the gain would be greater than the fixed cost.

ISTR there was some sort of unidentified resistance that built up, the longer that you ran the stutterwarp. The drive had integral capacity to store a certain amount of this resistance (measured in standard days), the implication being that this varied from drive to drive (except that all the sample vehicles had the same 7.7 days capacity). The ship had to be in a significant gravity well in order to "dump" its resistance capacitors, which operation took an certain minimum number of hours.

Basically, I read those rules as a mechanism to force ships to take about a week to travel from Point A to Point B, after which they had to hang around at Point B long enough to potentially get involved in an adventure. 
  
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