Hop Drive
The Hop Drive is a technological enhancement on the Jump Drive which has a performance measured in tens of parsecs. It is a 1st Order of Magnitude Jump Space Drive.
Description[edit]
No information yet available.
FTL Drive Specifications[edit]
See Jump Drive#Jump Drive Specifications, with which Hop Drive shares many similarities. The velocity is 10-fold. The various grades are 8 TLs later than their equivalent Jump Drive grade (Hop-1 at TL-17 though Hop-6 at TL-23), so no major group has access to Hop Drive before then. Entry and exit is at 1,000 planetary diameters instead of 100.
Farports[edit]
The development of the Hop drive enables longer-ranged exploration and transport. While long-ranged scout ships can simply be refitted and ready to go, transports require more support.
One possible support is the farport -- a distant starport extension. This is infrastructure which will lag the hop drive for some years.
Farports will first be built on routes between important worlds. They sit out at a 1000D point, holding fuel for hop ships. They will also have fast shuttles and slow in-system barges, for moving people and cargo between the hop port and the mainworld. They have considerable fuel tankage available, which is in turn serviced by fuel shuttles, or ice-asteroids pushed inward from the oort cloud, or a fuel barge gathering hydrogen from a percolator orbiting a nearby gas giant. In the latter case, the farport will be at a long orbit around a gas giant -- 1000 diameters from a gas giant can range from 0.13 AU to 1.3 AU.
Auxiliary Jump[edit]
In the first years of hop drive, ships will have a hop drive installed with an auxiliary jump drive. This allows a ship to make a long-distance hop, but then jump into the mainworld. In this manner, no farport is necessary. Even with a state which has farports, any ship that is off the major routes would do to also have a jump-1 drive "just in case".
History & Background (Dossier)[edit]
No information yet available.
See also[edit]
Please refer to the following AAB Library Data for more information:
Starship:
- Speed of Travel
- Astronomical Unit (AU)
- FTL
- Light Speed (c)
- Light-week (lw)
- Light-year (ly)
- NAFAL (STL)
- Parsec (pc)
- Starship Drives (Interstellar Drives)
- N-Drive (NAFAL Drive)
- Jump Space Drives
- Jump Space
- Jump Drive History
- Nth Order Jump Space Drives
- J-Drive - Jump Drive ("0th" Order Jump Space Drive)
- H-Drive - Hop Drive (1st Order Jump Space Drive)
- S-Drive - Skip Drive (2nd Order Jump Space Drive)
- L-Drive - Leap Drive (3rd Order Jump Space Drive)
- B-Drive - Bound Drive (4th Order Jump Space Drive)
- V-Drive - Vault Drive (5th Order Jump Space Drive)
- 6-Drive - Six Drive (6th Order Jump Space Drive)
- 7-Drive - Seven Drive (7th Order Jump Space Drive)
- 8-Drive - Eight Drive (8th Order Jump Space Drive)
- 9-Drive - Nine Drive (9th Order Jump Space Drive)
- Hieronymous Device
- Conjectural Drives
- Alternative Interstellar Drive Technologies
Expected Drive Development Sequence: NAFAL to FTL
- Relativistic Drive (NAFAL) → Jump Drive → Hop Drive → Skip Drive → Leap Drive → Bound Drive → Vault Drive → Six Drive → Seven Drive → Eight Drive → Nine Drive
References[edit]
- Marc Miller. T5 Core Rules (Far Future Enterprises, 2013), 280.