Oolite Bulletins

On approach to a station I spotted a small blue disk in the distance and being curious I investigated. It got larger as I approached and when I passed through it I was witchspaced to another planet 2.4 light years away. Is this the wake of a ship that has recently witchspaced and caught my ship up in it?

Yes.

As seen in Status Quo.

Known as wormholes

I was once in a dogfight with an Asp. Suddenly the Asp chickened out and made a witchspace jump. I was so close that I was caught in the wake and followed the Asp to another system. In this system I quickly located the Asp and continued my attack. They pleaded for their lives (very nice detail by the way), but to no avail.

I like the idea of being able to follow other ships through jumps (even when you do not have enough fuel to make a similar jump yourself). Should an enemy ship be equipped with capacity to jump further than 7 LY this could even save any pilots caught at Oresrati, the planet at the end of the universe.

I recently triggered the Nova mission, but I followed a behemoth out of the system down its own wormhole.
Arriving at another system, all the ships start to leave again, and I follow down another wormhole.

Repeat above steps several times, until I decide to play fair and do the mission properly.

hmm that is interesting.

We broke a mission, making things more realistic.

But in the end in the planetinfo it will be the first system (where you started the chain) will be the one which was destroyed by the nova, not the one where you finally took the refugees.

The nova is in the system where I go to the space station. But that could be after several systems of witchspace 'hitching'.

Interesting. That was different when I did the "follow the other ships through several systems"-thing.

Jakob Kramer wrote:

I like the idea of being able to follow other ships through jumps (even when you do not have enough fuel to make a similar jump yourself). Should an enemy ship be equipped with capacity to jump further than 7 LY this could even save any pilots caught at Oresrati, the planet at the end of the universe.

Come to think of it, what would stop two ships breaking the 7ly barrier by hitching a life through each other's wake. to get to a system (say) 12 ly away? If the first ship makes a 6ly jump into "open" space only to be followed through the wormhole by a second ship, the latter could then make a second jump to the final destination, allowing the first ship to piggy back though the second wormhole.

The complex mathematics and physics of witchspace intertube generation (which I do not have the time or space to relate here) do not allow for witchspace jumps to arbitrary locations. The target of a jump must be near a sufficiently large mass – such as a star – and must be marked by a large and complex network of equipment arranged quite some distance from said large mass. The witchspace beacon, incidentally, is not part of this equipment, it merely marks the “termination focus” produced by their arrangement.

Ending up in interstellar space is only possible by means of an “unravelled” intertube between two planetary systems.