Asimov Hyperspace

Or: how to Navigate in the Milky Way using hyperspace jumps

Hyperspace jumps are the magic way that Asimov used to cheat Relativity in the Robots-Empire-Foundation Universe. In essence, the ship disappears from one point and reappears in another point, at the same time - so here we suppose that there is an Absolute Space and an Absolute Time, which probably is a System of Reference attached to the Milky Way.

It's not clear if we can use hyperspace jumps to move to other galaxies.

Neglecting the technological advances that began with the reign of the Mule (311 - 321 F.E.) , there are some rules that the navigation using jumps most follow:

• Jumps have a maximal practical range, in the order of hundreds of parsecs
• It's not wise to jump close to large masses
• Closer to the Center of the Galaxy, the jumps must be smaller
• One day is required between two jumps. This day is spent in the computation of the ship's position

Extracting some numbers out of that

The velocity is almost as simple to take, if you know data from the stars and you can measure the doppler shift. So, again, velocity is not the critical factor.

We must conclude, then, that the purpose of this one day delay is the determination of the acceleration. Since the Galaxy is pretty much vaccum, the acceleration due to rogue stars or planets should be quite small. So, we can give our first conjecture:

The error of a hyperspace jump increases dramatically when the local acceleration is unknown

Also, why it's necessary to take a series of jumps, instead of one big jump plus correcting small jumps? Probably because one big jump would place you at any arbitrary position, such that it would not - in the average - gain anything. So, our second conjecture:

The error of a hyperspace jump increases dramatically when the length of the jump is above a critical number that depends on the position of the ship

These two conjectures allow us to predict that the hyperspace navigation would follow pre-defined routes, jumping from one known location to another, with only small corrections after each step. In other words, this would explain why Terminus was cut-off from the rest of the Galaxy when the Prefect of Anacreon declared its independence: any route from Terminus to the rest of the Galaxy should begin with a (small) jump into Anacreon, and after that it would follow a known route.

Links:

• My discussions with Lalaith greatly contributed to this analysis
• Alberto Monteiro's home page
• Other Asimov stuff in this site:
  • Main Asimov Page
  • Errors found in the books

Please send any comments to [email protected]

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