On Fri, 12 Jun 2020 21:24:40 -0400, xxxxxx@gmail.com wrote:

>Some sci fi franchise (I've read so many, I lose which one it was) had jump
>space reacting badly with electrical stuff so you shut all electricals
>down. It might be the Republic of Cinnabar series from Drake (With The
>Lightnings, Lt Leary Commanding, etc) and if I recall, they had riggers go
>out onto the hull to manipulate the main sheets (sort of a jump space a la
>age of sale) and they could not use power equipment or comms (head to head
>if  you needed to talk, muscle needed to be a rigger) and the good navs
>would stand on the hull and read the eddies in jump space to help trim the
>rig for best efficiency.

Yes, this was RCN, although when you were _inside_ the hull, you could
continue to use electrical/electronic equipment. _Outside_ the protection
of the hull, electricity - electrical charge, basically - would impact what
in a real sail I might call the "wind-catching" characteristics of the
sails (which were made of a special (or specially-treated) material), and
possibly the equivalent of "drag" on the hull, so that what you 'know'
about navigating your ship would be wrong.

In that series, "jump space" (which was informally called 'sponge space',
and entered using a 'hyper generator') was notionally a sort of
hyper/super/meta space in which various "bubbles" of "real space" (with
possibly different fundamental constants) were embedded; "sailing"
consisted more-or-less of moving along the surface of your bubble (more
accurately, the interface of the surface of your bubble and the surface of
adjacent bubbles); if you misread things, you could end up entering the
wrong bubble (with the wrong fundamental constants) and oopsie (can you say
'destroyed mishap'?). There was an unexplained 'Casimir radiation' that
acted as 'wind' to drive the ship (caught by the sails) in 'sponge space'.

Travel through sponge space wasn't quantized like jump, and speed wasn't
constant; this was really a case of interstellar travel moving at the speed
of plot. Nevertheless, with a few rules governing speed and distance, I
think the RCN universe was ultimately very _Traveller_-compatible, and
would love to see a Drake-authorized RCN _Traveller_ or _Cepheus Engine_
setting.

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