penny wrote:I certainly did not consider quantum fluctuations in the hyper generator and the wall, which I would agree is very important. But shouldn't a good astrogator take those factors into consideration and apply the recommended weight to each one. Found in the front of the book in the coursebook Astrography 101?:
I still can't see an astrogator's job merely being inputting beginning and ending coordinates in the GPS and letting the computer do the rest. Or storyline led me astray.
How exactly do you account for a quantum fluctuation? By its very nature, you don't know the direction nor magnitude of the effect.
As for the job of the astrogator, here is a brief example from Shadow of Saganami:
Chapter 8 wrote:"Plot us a least-time course to the Spindle System, if you please, Ms. Zilwicki," Terekhov requested courteously, and Helen swallowed hard. She'd calculated endless courses to all sorts of destinations . . . under classroom conditions.
"Aye, aye, Sir!" she said quickly, giving the only possible answer, and began punching data requests into her console.
Lieutenant Commander Wright sat back, elbows propped on his chair's arm rests, with a mildly interested expression. Part of her resented his presence, but most of her was deeply relieved he was there. He might not intervene to save her from herself if he saw her making a mistake during her calculations. But at least she could count on him to stop her at the end if she'd plotted a course to put them inside a star somewhere on the far side of the League.
The computers began obediently spewing out information, and she plotted the endpoints of the necessary course, feeling grateful that Hexapuma was already outside the local star's hyper limit. At least she didn't have to crank that into her calculations!
Next she punched in a search order, directing the computer to overlay her rough course with the strongest h-space gravity waves and to isolate the wave patterns which would carry them towards Spindle. She also remembered to allow for velocity loss on downward hyper translations to follow a given grav wave. She'd forgotten to do that once in an Academy astrogation problem and wound up adding over sixty hours to the total voyage time she was calculating.
She felt a small trickle of satisfaction as she realized the same thing would have happened here, if she'd simply asked the computers to plot a course along the most powerful gravity waves, because one strong section of them never rose above the Gamma bands, which would have required at least three downward translations. That would not only have cost them over sixty percent of their base velocity at each downward translation, but Hexapuma's maximum apparent velocity would have been far lower in the lower bands, as well.
She punched in waypoints along the blinking green line of her rough course as the computer refined the best options for gravity waves and the necessary impeller drive transitions between them. The blinking line stopped blinking, burning a steady green, as the waypoints marched along it.
From Echoes of Honor, here is an example difficulties of coordinating more than one ship:
Chapter 38 wrote:Control had to be so fine at such low ranges that something as small as a tiny difference in the cycle time of the hyper generators of two different ships could throw their n-space emergences off by light-seconds and hopelessly scramble his formation.
Finally from chapter 54 of Torch of Freedom we know that the hyper-generator includes mechanical parts that can wear: in this case a rotor shaft that snapped and caused additional damage.