Hyperspace jump ???

[lurker]

[vanir]

Indeed and where a waypoint system comes into play in our gaming is mostly with starfighters with limited navcomputers or preprogrammed astromechs.
With a full navcomputer in a space transport, scoutship or bigger you can break up the total hyperspace journey into a series of low difficulty and fairly direct legs or waypoints and calculate each separately as you embark each new section of the total journey.

But with a limited navcomputer all this business we've been discussing becomes all the more important, because they can only hold a limited number of coordinate locations to use as waypoints and you have to enter these either at a starport (standard class or better), or using a more powerful ship computer and datalink to upload the new stored locations (say a corvette or light cruiser you dock with or datalink with).

A lot of starfighters have a maximum of 2 sets of jump coordinates, which doesn't leave much room for any waypoints entered into a course. Just one for a mission destination, and one for a rendezvous or staging point.
Obviously even equipped with hyperdrives these starfighter types are meant for short range attacks within a sector and for long journeys would be carried within a cruiser's bays.

Then with astromechs you can preprogram 10 jump coordinates, so you could have a safeworld retreat entered, the mission destination plus a few waypoints, a staging area and home base, plus an alternate route with its own waypoints, you could venture starfighter assaults from several sectors away or even another galactic region fairly securely using X-Wing and Y-Wing fighters so this gives them fantastic reach.

But full navcomputers like in scoutships and transports, let's example a scout explorer plotting new hyperspace paths in the unknown regions or deep core, he makes short jumps at slow speed (adding several hours to jump distances to reduce high difficulties for unexplored areas), whilst trailblazing new hyperspace routes he'll sell later. He does repeated jumps, calculations, readings, more calculations, more short jumps, more readings, etc., all without visiting a starport or docking with another ship.


So it also depends on the sort of craft your party are flying. Starfighters or older transports with limited navcomputers, or using astromechs, then they're bound to at least sketch out complex courses at starport docks so they can enter preset waypoints into the astromech or limited nav system from the starport computer chart library or similar (access typically included in docking fees at standard class and better starports).

If in new transports or well equipped scouts they just spend most of their effort at starports accumulating local charts and lesser known routes using streetwise and adventuring skills. Once in space they can program as many waypoints into a course plan as they care to when they actually need to astrogate the jump. The chart library is on their own shipcomputer (represented by the "full navcomputer" designation), although it is up to PCs to increase the chart databanks as they adventure. If a flight plan is too complicated they can just break up the journey with more waypoints on the fly, no prob.

[Volar the Healer]

It's believed spacetime is curved. I always figured hyperspace jumps are always perfecly straight lines below the curve of spacetime. This explains why blind jumps can lead anywhere - including into a star.

This means in order to open a new hyperspace jump route it would first have to be mapped by a scout ship moving sublight or making a series of very small jumps.

Even in the movies, folks can't go wherever they want, whenever they want. They must follow "routes" (which have been previously mapped). The "calculations" Han Solo referred to might be to account for things like asteroids and stars (which DO move) possibly blocking a known route.

These ideas seem to fit with what we saw in the movies.
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