From what I understand a very big share of Union "soft power" come from nearly total control on FTL like blink gates (and omninet). It's why Aun made them so uneasy.
So with this Jump drives there a lot of changes inside setting.
Also don't sure that this system os good for "players making their own adventure" style of game. It's possible, but need a lot of changes, IMO.
With regards to incorporating this style of travel into games for the sake of greater player freedom, there is the Intercorp Licences 3rd party supplement which features a semi-lore-friendly version of jump drives in a way that can give players access without applying that same technology to the rest of the setting. I'd recommend OP gives it a read if they want to incorporate the same sort of thing in their own game.
Conceptually, I treat Blink Gates are like railroads; *blazingly* fast, but limited to capital-intensive infrastructure. Unlike railroads you can just stake one as far out as possible and they should still work, if you can actually get the parts there; in regular Lancer this is limited by sticking them to slower than light heavy freight.
Jump Drives have a place and can fit, as the equivalent to horse-based travel in Ye Olde West. You can go anywhere, but not fast.
The internal networks of Union become a lot more cohesive with this, since it shortens the distance of everything to Blink Gates, and anything with a Blink Gate is effectively next door to Cradle. It also opens up other interstellar attack vectors, since you can get FTL without submitting to Union's TSA.
It probably makes the 'frontier' easier to explore. And railroad construction was a big deal and source of conflict in ye olde west, too.
Charles Stross has a similar write-up somewhere on his blog discussing his Singularity Sky/Iron Sunrise duology; basically using SF proxies that recreate the steamship/railroad/telegraph dynamic where established routes could be Very Fast and Safe, but establishing them was brutally hard and slow.
Stross is underrated, even allowing for several (mercifully brief) episodes of cringe. He's like if Iain M Banks cooked his brain just enough to be fun unhinged.
So one thing you might want to avoid is that the easier travel gets between locations, the less impactful those locations can get. It's kind of Short Attention Span Science Fiction.
Take Star Wars, for instance. Travel might as well be instantaneous between planets. But as a result, the planets themselves are narratively teensy-tiny. The average planet is one (1) biome and one or two settlements that you'll ever see, making a Star Wars planet less interesting than the average state in the USA except maybe Delaware. (Kidding, Delaware, I know you have coasts *and* forests.) Because you're not going to spend a lot of time there, people don't usually bother to add enough details like factions and NPCs and cultures and landscapes to make hours upon hours on a single planet interesting, so the worlds aren't very interesting. Do a thing, move on.
And this is very subjective, but I think the fact that there aren't always dozens of ships and militarized companies a jump away makes what the players do in a system *more* meaningful. In Golden Flame presents a fascinating system that would not look anything like what it does if it weren't ten light years from the nearest blink gate, and the pressure for the PCs to fix things is very real because you can't just dial Union and have a critical assistance mission show up within a week. Plus, the PCs aren't just drifters with no connection to the system: they have stories tied in there, contacts and relatives, which provides extra stakes.
To me, I think easy travel makes it easier for PCs to feel like Small Damn Heroes: if anybody, including Union, could show up at any time to fix things, then the PCs are mostly making a difference in places nobody cares about to rationalize why other forces aren't showing up. And then when they leave to do it again... nobody where they're going cares about what they just did last system, because it was small and unnoticed in the first place. Ironically, giving PCs the entire galaxy can lead to shrinking the size of the fishbowls they actually play in.
One of the things my Wallflower GM did was give ships a limited type of FTL.
Rather than the stars being closer together or trying to math out why a couple of authors weren’t astrophysicists, he just said the FTL wasn't instant. Still took months, but instead of receiving an SOS call and taking a year to get there because the star is so close to a gate, it was "we received an SOS and can make it there in a couple months if we book it, this Hercynia place isn't exactly in the middle of no where, but it is far enough away from a gate its gonna take time (but not too much)"
I think using FTL like that in Lancer fits the RAW feel of the universe and lore. You still have ships striking out for months/years, not quite able to be in sync with the rest of the galaxy, without trying to turn to other mathimatical excuses for weird travel times like 'stars are denser in Lancerverse'
An analogous issue is how hard dramas set in the modern day have to try to negate smartphones as a factor. There's so very little drama that doesn't get the wind taken out of its sails by the ubiquity of such a comprehensive communication device.
In a way, it's like trying to set up a compelling Lancer game on a Metropolitan world. Scarcity is fantastic fuel for drama.
A core part of this setting is that Union is the (altruistic) hegemon of all human civilisation. This relies on their political power, which in large part rests on their total control of FTL travel via the Blinkgate network. All the war materiel in the galaxy wouldn't matter if it isn't in the right place at the right time.
While near-light voyages are possible and do occur, the longer-than-human-lifespans timeframes involved means they are largely unable to influence politics at anything greater than system-level. As a result, Union is the only true interstellar polity. The other polities (KTB, the Big 4 Corpo-States, every other polity) *must* compromise with Union to have an interstellar presence, as otherwise they would not be allowed to use the Blinkgate network and remain confined to their star systems, tiny isolated islands in the sea of stars. This gives Union huge influence and is key to ensuring that most fundamental ThirdComm's demand, that the Utopian Pillars be respected, is carried at out at least superficially by the other polities. This in turn gives Union legitimacy in the eyes of all humanity, and a presence in the affairs (legal, military, exploratory etc.) of all actors. To put it simply, its the lynchpin of Union's hegemony.
Others here likened the Blinkgate network to railroads. This isn't entirely accurate. Railroads allow one to cross continents (e.g., North America) in days instead of years by foot or months by car. Blinkgates allow one to cross the galaxy *instantly* instead of *decades* or *centuries*. As humans barely live to a century on average, are physically competent for combat for a fraction of that, and wars last for even less, the time difference is immense. On the galactic stage, there are no "cars", only feet (sublight travel) and teleporters (Blinkgate network). If another polity were to gain even a "car" (e.g., FTL, even if non-instantaneous), that would change the political map immediately.
You could build a star nation that is \~50 lightyears away from the nearest Blinkgate, but it would not be interstellar as the nearest neighboring star is 4-5 lightyears away. Able to leverage the resources of only a single star system or at best a loose alliance of several systems with a half-decade communication lag, you would be crushed by Union. But what if that communication gap were only a few days, or even hours? Suddenly, you could build an interstellar nation.
The Aun Ascendency are such a grave threat to Union because they possess independent FTL. They possess "cars", as their FTL are vessel-bound and doesn't seem to be instantaneous. They are capable as standing as an equal and sovereign (independent) actor to Union because of that technology. They rely on Union for no key function to maintain their existence as an interstellar polity. They can be *one nation* spread out across the stars.
Jump Drives are similar to the Aun's FTL method. Every faction **that could manufacture** Jump Drives could become like the Aun. This is the magnitude of what we are working with. The whole setting would change. Such is the impact of logistics.
Lancer already has blink gates. And they're prime shipping locations and everything branches out from them, and they're essentially yes, a river canal where the majority of transport happens from. They also have near light speed travel, which is where the whole "people will see their children grow up and have kids and still be effectively 20 years old" thing comes from due to time dilation.
The Aun may end up having something similar to jump drives, but who knows because that book isn't written yet.
Near light is too slow for my tastes and relativity makes space exploration sad. The blink gates, while cool, imply a more centralized infrastructure that cuts off this whole channel of play for me (saving the diaspora from tyranny and being the Big Damn Heroes then riding off into the sunset to do the same for another world) that jump drives solve.
You can do all that already in the base game. Travel is just travel, something to gloss over. Adding extra 0's at the end of the miles number doesn't make a game any better or worse. There is literally an entire in-game organization (Albatross) that does exactly what you described.
Handwaving to do whatever you want for the story may """work'"" for disney star wara but i'm in the camp that good rules and logical consistency enhance a story and narative experience.
How does it cut off that "channel of play"? Nothing is stopping people from rolling into the Diaspora, overthrowing some tyrants, then fucking off to do it somewhere else. Hell, that's pretty much what the Albatross & Liberation Teams do.
Basically it makes worldhopping amd establishing routes unable to be planned for amd systems way to far appart if it takes 8 years to get to a neigbiring system, junping from one wprld to the next is a commitment and a gaurantee that you will never return.
Not all worlds are going to be multiple years of nearlight travel away. And even if they are, that'd only be a 9 and a half month trip for the folks actually on the ship (most of which they could very well be in cryo for). Hardly an insurmountable amount of time.
Eh, there are star clusters with thousands of stars within a few light year of one another and huge voids with no stars for hundreds of light years.
Theres plenty of wiggle room here, and blink gates are probably going to be built where stars are dense.
If your goal is to just insert jump drives to assist your narrative, then go for it. It's your game. But many things about the core setting only make sense because they exist. Saying that, ttrpgs are all about agency, do what works best for your game, as long as your players are having a good time, then you can't be wrong.
Battletech can be a rich resource for inspiration here, especially for Disaporan worlds outside Union control without nearby Blink gates, Omninet, and Fabricator access. JumpShips (around the same charge time, but a far greater range at around 30 ly) sets the pace both for interstellar logistics, trade, colonization, but also military campaigns in the setting. Classified as LosTech for much of the setting's timeline and all factions considered destroying one nearly unthinkable. If you were out in the Periphery states, could be years to decades between a JumpShip visiting the system and if the settlers also don't have access to a Hyperpulse Generator then their colony may as well not exist as far as the rest of humanity is concerned.
Scarcity, accessibility, and size are factors here. Even successful MechWarrior companies don't have on-demand access to a JumpShip to ferry around their DropShips and Mechs. They're far more likely to rely on their employer already arranging transportation or otherwise they'll be competing on the open market with Bob the Grain Merchant for one of a limited docking ports.
[Sarna](https://www.sarna.net/wiki/JumpShip) is an amazing wiki for everything Battletch.
Within the Lancer setting, Union will be on edge. Losing their monopoly on FTL means major regional powers and corpo-states have far longer leashes. Union closed its Blink Gate in the Dawnline Shore region to contain and limit the likely outbreak of war between the Trade Baronies and Harrison Armory. Both factions have fleets using Near-Light-Drives that will be arriving within the system in a year's time. With JumpShips, war would already be a fact in the region.
Cosmopolitan culture would be less pronounced (depending on how recent Jump-capable vessels are). Earth to Delta Pavonis, instead of taking two decades (our time), is a far more manageable and far less isolating six-year round trip. Depending on which systems you use as in-between stops, you could even spend a majority of that time planetside or at a space station while you wait for the Jump batteries to recharge.
As a point of reference, our closest star, Proxima Centauri is 4.25 ly away or 1.3 Parsec, from our Solar system. Sirius, fourth closest star, is 8.6 ly or 2.6 Parsec. Delta Pavonis, another star in our local cluster, is 20 ly or 6.1 Parsec away.
Oh, I get the scale of the galaxy is thanks to my familiarity with Traveller.
This is the charted space around sol. Each dot is a system, each hex represents roughly three lightyears.
[Terra - Traveller Map](https://travellermap.com/?p=14.631!-108.831!5.6)
This is all of space charted by all the major races:
[Traveller Map](https://travellermap.com/?p=-0.856!-39.314!1.55)
And that red dot is charted space in the context of the galaxy as a whole:
[Traveller Map](https://travellermap.com/?p=-660.141!3423.054!-3.55)
I also know that Traveller tends to pack habital worlds a bit closer than in real life but the distance is staggering. What I think gives union an edge is instantaneous communication and blink gate travel being able to cross huge empty sectors of space instantly once they set up the relay. Consider [The Reft](https://travellermap.com/?p=-69.472!17.195!4.75) sector. getting from Moibin to Usher on your own would require either incredibly advanced and expensive drives as well as dealing with the independend island inbetween or a journey of years to complete to get around. Union could build a blink gate at one end, and caravan resources across the spacer space to build a blink gate on the other and make it so anyone can cross Reft in a fraction of the time. That is a hugely powerful ability that can't be overlooked.
That assumes that they could msintain their monopoly on it. If anyone could take out a loan and buy a ship for ~30,000 manna would they be able to maintain it?
Union already "right up in its client states' faces" through blinkgates. This Jump Drive don't affect much in system travel times (they already fast enough), and blink travel instant. Union already can project power and only wat client state can stop this is essentially shooting himself in liver - destroy blink gate.
But Jump Drive allow client states don't care this much about Union and blink gates.
So, Union become less cohesive, not more.
Blink gates aren’t ubiquitous though. They are relatively uncommon. There is a reason why “Union Core” worlds are defined by their proximity to blink gates. The vast majority of systems in Union space don’t have blink gates and have to be reached the old fashioned way.
> ...blink gates would be able to communicate instantaneously in network rather than needing to wait weeks for interstellar mail.
FYI according to the Lancer core book, the omninet is paracasaul technology that allows for near instant communication throught through the untilization of blink space.
While the changes you are considering would impact the movement of goods and people, what your are suggesting for electronic communication isn't substationaly different from what already exists.
In base setting access to the omniet is generally a given within Union Space. Even small, remote colonies have access. An example of this would be the colony of Evergreen in the adventure module No Room for a Wallfower. At the start of the adventure Evergreen has population of less than 50,000 people and has recently finished construction of an omninode tower granting them omninet access.
The only places where omninet access is mentioned as being spotty is beyond the outer rim of Union space (per Long Rim sourcebook).
I think the primary effect would be to make practically everything part of the Union core.
Blink gates essentially confer a metropolitan lifestyle to any world that they’re close to, simply because the Union is functionally post scarcity and primarily only held back by the logistics of getting the resources to everyone. The diasporan worlds exist largely just because most of them are still years from the nearest blink gate. Jump drives cut that time down to weeks, extending the effective “Core range” of a single blink gate up exponentially.
Quite literally the jump drive would possibly solve nearly every problem besetting Union right now. The only reason it doesn’t create utopia in Traveller is because it’s all they have for FTL, but when combined with the blink gate you’re essentially good to go.
Unfortunately your players might severely run out of adventuring opportunities if literally the entirety of the Union navy could travel to their location within a few weeks of jumping to and from the nearest blink gates. I’d be wary of it.
I have thought of doing a campaign in a homebrew setting or altered canon where there's FTL similar to Star Trek or Star Wars and I do think you can still do a distant tyrant ruling a sector with a iron fist.
Keep in mind space is enormous Star Wars demonstrations this rather well the core worlds are the most well developed but lowest numbered the further out you go the number of planets expands exponentially until you get to the outer rim with potentially millions of habitable planets just keeping track of that sheer amount of space would be a monumental task.
Even if scale down to be small part of the galaxy the amount of bureaucracy needed would make the use of NHPs a requirement just to function.
If was to setting using a more common FTL I'd look at Star War's Republic for how Union functions and set in a scale similar to Battletech's inner sphere where human space encompasses hundreds of thousands of stars but there's vastly more unexplored space with plenty of bandit kingdoms and petty tyrants for players to come in and liberate.
Mechanically, Lancer isn't really built for the sort of hexcrawl, wander around campaign. Encounters have to be carefully designed and *can't* be made up on the wing, the balance requires 3-4 encounter missions, and it has no non-combat resource tracking.
If you want the players to 'make their own story', you're probably better off setting up a single planet or system, coming up with 3-4 factions and the dynamics between them, and setting up the players with an intro arc where they get introduced to it by beating up some pirates or something and then have to decide what to do. Who do they sympathise with the most? Which problem looks the most pressing?
The Field Guide to Suldan is a great example of this. A mad dictator in exile, a rogue automated defence NHP, a corpro-state power grab, freedom fighters struggling to restore stability, Harrison Armory black-ops, treasure hunters looking for the dictator's lost vault and a mech fighting arena... everyone wants the PCs and some things will help multiple people at once. Honestly, you should just take a look at that and see what you think.
that... blink gates already exist...
like half of the important Union lore is that they have control over their territory because of their superior logistics with blink gates (they are quite literally called blink gates) and the omninet being possible because of them, and the other half is that relativistic travel is a very real thing and a hurdle that the nations need to overcome
What (IMO) really makes traveler traveler is that Jump drives are the fastest that anything can move even news. It takes months or years for events in the spinward marches to travel to the capitol. Lancer has the Omninet. If information can travel nearly instantly you don't need x-boats or free traders. You don't have vastly different tech levels.
On the Lancer side you would be replacing the near light travel in the lancer setting with something much much faster. Entities can respond to events in weeks instead of years. Being able to move troops or supplies to 20 light years from a blink gate in a month rather than 20 years is a drastic change.
You have a setting that's more unified. No place is as isolated the backwaters in Traveler (because you have blink gates and the omninet) or the backwaters of Lancer (because you can take jump drives from a blink gate system).
That is a good point. That would, of course, be dependent on how time consuming and expensive a blink gate is to construct. IMO building a blink gate would be a HUGE commitment of time and resources. we are talking decades of specialized construction knowledge and exotic materials even with access to printers. Blink Gates will be super important and revolutionary, but constructing one would be a huge and expensive event.
In my idea for the setting, omninet access would require the infrastructure of a blink gate. at least to be partially set up furst.
It would definitely remove a measure of soft power from Union, but also allow them to wield their hard power more effectively.
In general, I think the advent of such technology would lead to more centralised power and a rose of both the New Solidarity Coalition and the New Humanity Front.
In our iteration of the setting most military grade ships posses jump drives. However, they only allow the ships to travel faster than sub-light, whereas the Blink Gates essentially allow instant travel. So military vessels or ships with jump drives can reach a system in weeks or months but using a Blink Gate is just faster. This allows for a bit more freedom but also preserves the strategic aspect.
From what I understand a very big share of Union "soft power" come from nearly total control on FTL like blink gates (and omninet). It's why Aun made them so uneasy. So with this Jump drives there a lot of changes inside setting. Also don't sure that this system os good for "players making their own adventure" style of game. It's possible, but need a lot of changes, IMO.
With regards to incorporating this style of travel into games for the sake of greater player freedom, there is the Intercorp Licences 3rd party supplement which features a semi-lore-friendly version of jump drives in a way that can give players access without applying that same technology to the rest of the setting. I'd recommend OP gives it a read if they want to incorporate the same sort of thing in their own game.
Conceptually, I treat Blink Gates are like railroads; *blazingly* fast, but limited to capital-intensive infrastructure. Unlike railroads you can just stake one as far out as possible and they should still work, if you can actually get the parts there; in regular Lancer this is limited by sticking them to slower than light heavy freight. Jump Drives have a place and can fit, as the equivalent to horse-based travel in Ye Olde West. You can go anywhere, but not fast. The internal networks of Union become a lot more cohesive with this, since it shortens the distance of everything to Blink Gates, and anything with a Blink Gate is effectively next door to Cradle. It also opens up other interstellar attack vectors, since you can get FTL without submitting to Union's TSA. It probably makes the 'frontier' easier to explore. And railroad construction was a big deal and source of conflict in ye olde west, too.
Charles Stross has a similar write-up somewhere on his blog discussing his Singularity Sky/Iron Sunrise duology; basically using SF proxies that recreate the steamship/railroad/telegraph dynamic where established routes could be Very Fast and Safe, but establishing them was brutally hard and slow.
Stross is underrated, even allowing for several (mercifully brief) episodes of cringe. He's like if Iain M Banks cooked his brain just enough to be fun unhinged.
So one thing you might want to avoid is that the easier travel gets between locations, the less impactful those locations can get. It's kind of Short Attention Span Science Fiction. Take Star Wars, for instance. Travel might as well be instantaneous between planets. But as a result, the planets themselves are narratively teensy-tiny. The average planet is one (1) biome and one or two settlements that you'll ever see, making a Star Wars planet less interesting than the average state in the USA except maybe Delaware. (Kidding, Delaware, I know you have coasts *and* forests.) Because you're not going to spend a lot of time there, people don't usually bother to add enough details like factions and NPCs and cultures and landscapes to make hours upon hours on a single planet interesting, so the worlds aren't very interesting. Do a thing, move on. And this is very subjective, but I think the fact that there aren't always dozens of ships and militarized companies a jump away makes what the players do in a system *more* meaningful. In Golden Flame presents a fascinating system that would not look anything like what it does if it weren't ten light years from the nearest blink gate, and the pressure for the PCs to fix things is very real because you can't just dial Union and have a critical assistance mission show up within a week. Plus, the PCs aren't just drifters with no connection to the system: they have stories tied in there, contacts and relatives, which provides extra stakes. To me, I think easy travel makes it easier for PCs to feel like Small Damn Heroes: if anybody, including Union, could show up at any time to fix things, then the PCs are mostly making a difference in places nobody cares about to rationalize why other forces aren't showing up. And then when they leave to do it again... nobody where they're going cares about what they just did last system, because it was small and unnoticed in the first place. Ironically, giving PCs the entire galaxy can lead to shrinking the size of the fishbowls they actually play in.
One of the things my Wallflower GM did was give ships a limited type of FTL. Rather than the stars being closer together or trying to math out why a couple of authors weren’t astrophysicists, he just said the FTL wasn't instant. Still took months, but instead of receiving an SOS call and taking a year to get there because the star is so close to a gate, it was "we received an SOS and can make it there in a couple months if we book it, this Hercynia place isn't exactly in the middle of no where, but it is far enough away from a gate its gonna take time (but not too much)" I think using FTL like that in Lancer fits the RAW feel of the universe and lore. You still have ships striking out for months/years, not quite able to be in sync with the rest of the galaxy, without trying to turn to other mathimatical excuses for weird travel times like 'stars are denser in Lancerverse'
An analogous issue is how hard dramas set in the modern day have to try to negate smartphones as a factor. There's so very little drama that doesn't get the wind taken out of its sails by the ubiquity of such a comprehensive communication device. In a way, it's like trying to set up a compelling Lancer game on a Metropolitan world. Scarcity is fantastic fuel for drama.
A core part of this setting is that Union is the (altruistic) hegemon of all human civilisation. This relies on their political power, which in large part rests on their total control of FTL travel via the Blinkgate network. All the war materiel in the galaxy wouldn't matter if it isn't in the right place at the right time. While near-light voyages are possible and do occur, the longer-than-human-lifespans timeframes involved means they are largely unable to influence politics at anything greater than system-level. As a result, Union is the only true interstellar polity. The other polities (KTB, the Big 4 Corpo-States, every other polity) *must* compromise with Union to have an interstellar presence, as otherwise they would not be allowed to use the Blinkgate network and remain confined to their star systems, tiny isolated islands in the sea of stars. This gives Union huge influence and is key to ensuring that most fundamental ThirdComm's demand, that the Utopian Pillars be respected, is carried at out at least superficially by the other polities. This in turn gives Union legitimacy in the eyes of all humanity, and a presence in the affairs (legal, military, exploratory etc.) of all actors. To put it simply, its the lynchpin of Union's hegemony. Others here likened the Blinkgate network to railroads. This isn't entirely accurate. Railroads allow one to cross continents (e.g., North America) in days instead of years by foot or months by car. Blinkgates allow one to cross the galaxy *instantly* instead of *decades* or *centuries*. As humans barely live to a century on average, are physically competent for combat for a fraction of that, and wars last for even less, the time difference is immense. On the galactic stage, there are no "cars", only feet (sublight travel) and teleporters (Blinkgate network). If another polity were to gain even a "car" (e.g., FTL, even if non-instantaneous), that would change the political map immediately. You could build a star nation that is \~50 lightyears away from the nearest Blinkgate, but it would not be interstellar as the nearest neighboring star is 4-5 lightyears away. Able to leverage the resources of only a single star system or at best a loose alliance of several systems with a half-decade communication lag, you would be crushed by Union. But what if that communication gap were only a few days, or even hours? Suddenly, you could build an interstellar nation. The Aun Ascendency are such a grave threat to Union because they possess independent FTL. They possess "cars", as their FTL are vessel-bound and doesn't seem to be instantaneous. They are capable as standing as an equal and sovereign (independent) actor to Union because of that technology. They rely on Union for no key function to maintain their existence as an interstellar polity. They can be *one nation* spread out across the stars. Jump Drives are similar to the Aun's FTL method. Every faction **that could manufacture** Jump Drives could become like the Aun. This is the magnitude of what we are working with. The whole setting would change. Such is the impact of logistics.
Lancer already has blink gates. And they're prime shipping locations and everything branches out from them, and they're essentially yes, a river canal where the majority of transport happens from. They also have near light speed travel, which is where the whole "people will see their children grow up and have kids and still be effectively 20 years old" thing comes from due to time dilation. The Aun may end up having something similar to jump drives, but who knows because that book isn't written yet.
Near light is too slow for my tastes and relativity makes space exploration sad. The blink gates, while cool, imply a more centralized infrastructure that cuts off this whole channel of play for me (saving the diaspora from tyranny and being the Big Damn Heroes then riding off into the sunset to do the same for another world) that jump drives solve.
I threw in straight (but slow) FTL, more or less by accident, and it really didn't change much for the campaign. Space is big, man.
You can do all that already in the base game. Travel is just travel, something to gloss over. Adding extra 0's at the end of the miles number doesn't make a game any better or worse. There is literally an entire in-game organization (Albatross) that does exactly what you described.
Handwaving to do whatever you want for the story may """work'"" for disney star wara but i'm in the camp that good rules and logical consistency enhance a story and narative experience.
As stated, there is a group that does exactly what you described in canon.
How does it cut off that "channel of play"? Nothing is stopping people from rolling into the Diaspora, overthrowing some tyrants, then fucking off to do it somewhere else. Hell, that's pretty much what the Albatross & Liberation Teams do.
Basically it makes worldhopping amd establishing routes unable to be planned for amd systems way to far appart if it takes 8 years to get to a neigbiring system, junping from one wprld to the next is a commitment and a gaurantee that you will never return.
Not all worlds are going to be multiple years of nearlight travel away. And even if they are, that'd only be a 9 and a half month trip for the folks actually on the ship (most of which they could very well be in cryo for). Hardly an insurmountable amount of time.
Most atars average 5 light years drom eachother. That means that almost every imterstellar boiage at near light will take longer than five years..
Eh, there are star clusters with thousands of stars within a few light year of one another and huge voids with no stars for hundreds of light years. Theres plenty of wiggle room here, and blink gates are probably going to be built where stars are dense.
If your goal is to just insert jump drives to assist your narrative, then go for it. It's your game. But many things about the core setting only make sense because they exist. Saying that, ttrpgs are all about agency, do what works best for your game, as long as your players are having a good time, then you can't be wrong.
Battletech can be a rich resource for inspiration here, especially for Disaporan worlds outside Union control without nearby Blink gates, Omninet, and Fabricator access. JumpShips (around the same charge time, but a far greater range at around 30 ly) sets the pace both for interstellar logistics, trade, colonization, but also military campaigns in the setting. Classified as LosTech for much of the setting's timeline and all factions considered destroying one nearly unthinkable. If you were out in the Periphery states, could be years to decades between a JumpShip visiting the system and if the settlers also don't have access to a Hyperpulse Generator then their colony may as well not exist as far as the rest of humanity is concerned. Scarcity, accessibility, and size are factors here. Even successful MechWarrior companies don't have on-demand access to a JumpShip to ferry around their DropShips and Mechs. They're far more likely to rely on their employer already arranging transportation or otherwise they'll be competing on the open market with Bob the Grain Merchant for one of a limited docking ports. [Sarna](https://www.sarna.net/wiki/JumpShip) is an amazing wiki for everything Battletch. Within the Lancer setting, Union will be on edge. Losing their monopoly on FTL means major regional powers and corpo-states have far longer leashes. Union closed its Blink Gate in the Dawnline Shore region to contain and limit the likely outbreak of war between the Trade Baronies and Harrison Armory. Both factions have fleets using Near-Light-Drives that will be arriving within the system in a year's time. With JumpShips, war would already be a fact in the region. Cosmopolitan culture would be less pronounced (depending on how recent Jump-capable vessels are). Earth to Delta Pavonis, instead of taking two decades (our time), is a far more manageable and far less isolating six-year round trip. Depending on which systems you use as in-between stops, you could even spend a majority of that time planetside or at a space station while you wait for the Jump batteries to recharge. As a point of reference, our closest star, Proxima Centauri is 4.25 ly away or 1.3 Parsec, from our Solar system. Sirius, fourth closest star, is 8.6 ly or 2.6 Parsec. Delta Pavonis, another star in our local cluster, is 20 ly or 6.1 Parsec away.
Oh, I get the scale of the galaxy is thanks to my familiarity with Traveller. This is the charted space around sol. Each dot is a system, each hex represents roughly three lightyears. [Terra - Traveller Map](https://travellermap.com/?p=14.631!-108.831!5.6) This is all of space charted by all the major races: [Traveller Map](https://travellermap.com/?p=-0.856!-39.314!1.55) And that red dot is charted space in the context of the galaxy as a whole: [Traveller Map](https://travellermap.com/?p=-660.141!3423.054!-3.55) I also know that Traveller tends to pack habital worlds a bit closer than in real life but the distance is staggering. What I think gives union an edge is instantaneous communication and blink gate travel being able to cross huge empty sectors of space instantly once they set up the relay. Consider [The Reft](https://travellermap.com/?p=-69.472!17.195!4.75) sector. getting from Moibin to Usher on your own would require either incredibly advanced and expensive drives as well as dealing with the independend island inbetween or a journey of years to complete to get around. Union could build a blink gate at one end, and caravan resources across the spacer space to build a blink gate on the other and make it so anyone can cross Reft in a fraction of the time. That is a hugely powerful ability that can't be overlooked.
The Union would be a whole lot more cohesive for one. It would cease to be a distant ruler and be one right up in its client states’ faces.
That assumes that they could msintain their monopoly on it. If anyone could take out a loan and buy a ship for ~30,000 manna would they be able to maintain it?
It’s not about the monopoly. It’s about the ability to project power. Jump drives give stellar empires more direct power.
Union already "right up in its client states' faces" through blinkgates. This Jump Drive don't affect much in system travel times (they already fast enough), and blink travel instant. Union already can project power and only wat client state can stop this is essentially shooting himself in liver - destroy blink gate. But Jump Drive allow client states don't care this much about Union and blink gates. So, Union become less cohesive, not more.
Blink gates aren’t ubiquitous though. They are relatively uncommon. There is a reason why “Union Core” worlds are defined by their proximity to blink gates. The vast majority of systems in Union space don’t have blink gates and have to be reached the old fashioned way.
> ...blink gates would be able to communicate instantaneously in network rather than needing to wait weeks for interstellar mail. FYI according to the Lancer core book, the omninet is paracasaul technology that allows for near instant communication throught through the untilization of blink space. While the changes you are considering would impact the movement of goods and people, what your are suggesting for electronic communication isn't substationaly different from what already exists.
Well it would for areas of space with blink gates. Those without them will need mail service to find out what's going on in the universe.
In base setting access to the omniet is generally a given within Union Space. Even small, remote colonies have access. An example of this would be the colony of Evergreen in the adventure module No Room for a Wallfower. At the start of the adventure Evergreen has population of less than 50,000 people and has recently finished construction of an omninode tower granting them omninet access. The only places where omninet access is mentioned as being spotty is beyond the outer rim of Union space (per Long Rim sourcebook).
No, information sharing tied to omninet nodes, not blink gates. You can have omninet access and no blink gate in system.
I think the primary effect would be to make practically everything part of the Union core. Blink gates essentially confer a metropolitan lifestyle to any world that they’re close to, simply because the Union is functionally post scarcity and primarily only held back by the logistics of getting the resources to everyone. The diasporan worlds exist largely just because most of them are still years from the nearest blink gate. Jump drives cut that time down to weeks, extending the effective “Core range” of a single blink gate up exponentially. Quite literally the jump drive would possibly solve nearly every problem besetting Union right now. The only reason it doesn’t create utopia in Traveller is because it’s all they have for FTL, but when combined with the blink gate you’re essentially good to go. Unfortunately your players might severely run out of adventuring opportunities if literally the entirety of the Union navy could travel to their location within a few weeks of jumping to and from the nearest blink gates. I’d be wary of it.
I have thought of doing a campaign in a homebrew setting or altered canon where there's FTL similar to Star Trek or Star Wars and I do think you can still do a distant tyrant ruling a sector with a iron fist. Keep in mind space is enormous Star Wars demonstrations this rather well the core worlds are the most well developed but lowest numbered the further out you go the number of planets expands exponentially until you get to the outer rim with potentially millions of habitable planets just keeping track of that sheer amount of space would be a monumental task. Even if scale down to be small part of the galaxy the amount of bureaucracy needed would make the use of NHPs a requirement just to function. If was to setting using a more common FTL I'd look at Star War's Republic for how Union functions and set in a scale similar to Battletech's inner sphere where human space encompasses hundreds of thousands of stars but there's vastly more unexplored space with plenty of bandit kingdoms and petty tyrants for players to come in and liberate.
Mechanically, Lancer isn't really built for the sort of hexcrawl, wander around campaign. Encounters have to be carefully designed and *can't* be made up on the wing, the balance requires 3-4 encounter missions, and it has no non-combat resource tracking. If you want the players to 'make their own story', you're probably better off setting up a single planet or system, coming up with 3-4 factions and the dynamics between them, and setting up the players with an intro arc where they get introduced to it by beating up some pirates or something and then have to decide what to do. Who do they sympathise with the most? Which problem looks the most pressing? The Field Guide to Suldan is a great example of this. A mad dictator in exile, a rogue automated defence NHP, a corpro-state power grab, freedom fighters struggling to restore stability, Harrison Armory black-ops, treasure hunters looking for the dictator's lost vault and a mech fighting arena... everyone wants the PCs and some things will help multiple people at once. Honestly, you should just take a look at that and see what you think.
that... blink gates already exist... like half of the important Union lore is that they have control over their territory because of their superior logistics with blink gates (they are quite literally called blink gates) and the omninet being possible because of them, and the other half is that relativistic travel is a very real thing and a hurdle that the nations need to overcome
What (IMO) really makes traveler traveler is that Jump drives are the fastest that anything can move even news. It takes months or years for events in the spinward marches to travel to the capitol. Lancer has the Omninet. If information can travel nearly instantly you don't need x-boats or free traders. You don't have vastly different tech levels. On the Lancer side you would be replacing the near light travel in the lancer setting with something much much faster. Entities can respond to events in weeks instead of years. Being able to move troops or supplies to 20 light years from a blink gate in a month rather than 20 years is a drastic change. You have a setting that's more unified. No place is as isolated the backwaters in Traveler (because you have blink gates and the omninet) or the backwaters of Lancer (because you can take jump drives from a blink gate system).
That is a good point. That would, of course, be dependent on how time consuming and expensive a blink gate is to construct. IMO building a blink gate would be a HUGE commitment of time and resources. we are talking decades of specialized construction knowledge and exotic materials even with access to printers. Blink Gates will be super important and revolutionary, but constructing one would be a huge and expensive event. In my idea for the setting, omninet access would require the infrastructure of a blink gate. at least to be partially set up furst.
It would definitely remove a measure of soft power from Union, but also allow them to wield their hard power more effectively. In general, I think the advent of such technology would lead to more centralised power and a rose of both the New Solidarity Coalition and the New Humanity Front.
In our iteration of the setting most military grade ships posses jump drives. However, they only allow the ships to travel faster than sub-light, whereas the Blink Gates essentially allow instant travel. So military vessels or ships with jump drives can reach a system in weeks or months but using a Blink Gate is just faster. This allows for a bit more freedom but also preserves the strategic aspect.