Hyperspace: limitations and difficulties

Hyperspace travel has its limitations, and those limitations directly affect the difficulties in surviving an ongoing chase through it.

1. The velocity at which you travel through hyperspace directly related to the velocity you were travelling at before you entered hyperspace
2. Hyperspace travel is unidirectional – you can’t change direction once you enter
3. You cannot communicate into, out of, or across hyperspace

What this means is that travelling in convoy is not the simplest of affairs, and it is far too easy to lose ships en route.^[1]You have to agree on your maths before departure and getting it wrong could mean you end up light years away – or in the middle of a star It also means that if you know someone’s exit velocity, you can calculate where they might be travelling to and extrapolate a destination.

However, since all you really know is their direction of travel, you can only really extrapolate that your target will leave hyperspace somewhere on your projected line – you can’t extrapolate when. This means that you could leave hyperspace earlier or later than someone might expect and change direction.^[2]This is a good way to lose ships in convoy if someone screws up their timings and exits too soon or too late or just generally does their maths wrong

The extraterrestrial threat chasing the fleet seems to be excellent at tracking other ships through hyperspace. They normally arrive between 48 and 72 hours of any stop, regardless of how many cut-outs and changes of direction were made. No one knows how they are so effective in tracking the fleet – thorough inspections of the ships have revealed no recognisable tracking devices, though there are still facets of the xenotechnology that are not properly understood.

All these factors combined make it quite hard for the fleet to maintain cohesion while fleeing for their lives, and it is unfortunately not unusual for ships to be lost as a consequence of fleet movements.

This continues on from Hyperspace: how it works (more or less).