accuracy(?) in astrography (was: RE: [FT universe] was [URL] ...)

> The Man, Oerjan, writes:

> Ah Oerjan, but I had heard suggested that the approach from a star to

Well, your accuracy is only as good as your detection capability, assuming
your jump engines can put you in a spot that is relatively small (say, within
a few hundred kilometers of where you want to be). I mean, if you know
*exactly* where something is, and your jump engines can put you close
to a given spot, you're golden, n'est-ce pas? (oh, geez, now Tom's got
me doing it!).

To put all this in perspective, go find a huge room, like an auditorium or an
indoor sports arena. Scatter around this room a dozen baseballs or something
similar. Those'll represent star systems. Now take a grain of sand,
representing your deep-space cache. Place it somewhere in the room, not
anywhere near one of the balls. Go away for a week. Come back and try and find
it again. If you had the foresight to make an accurate map of where the grain
of sand is relative to all the detectable stars, you should be able to get
back to it again (this assumes your jump technology is such that it'll allow
this kind of accuracy). Otherwise...

Anyway, Oerjan asked about accuracy in astrography. The accuracy is only as
good as what you can see/detect. There's plenty of undetected 'dark
matter' out there (comets ejected from solar systems, burnt out stars, etc) to
play havoc with things if they come close enough. And the move we study the
universe at large, the more we learn and refine our sky maps. Accuracy is
dependent on the detection technology of the time.

Now most of you know the stars won't have moved very much relative to one
another in a course of 1000 or so years, so once you've got them pinpointed,
they really won't move very far in the course of a given campaign. For
example, our own sun is heading in the general direction of Vega, which lies
~27
lightyears away, at a butt-kicking speed of 12 miles/second.

We may actually get there one day...

Mk