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Weaponised Jump Drives

Given that the Jump Drive as it stands in Traveller fundamentally works by opening a hole into another universe for the ship to pass through it is entirely possible that there are many more ways to fail to do this - fail to Jump - than there are to Jump successfully. Some of these may have been discovered during the history of developing a working Jump Drive. And it is not impossible that some of these ways of failing to successfully Jump could be quite ... explosive.

As such it may be possible, perhaps even at fairly low levels of technology - TL10, or perhaps even TL9 - to create devices that use weaponised Jump Drive technology for destructive ends. These would be Jump-drive-related devices that are optimised to fail to Jump as destructively as possible.

They would not be dual-use devices capable of also being used as normal Jump Drives, and would also most likely be single-use devices - 'Misjump Bombs' is you will. Of course, given that Jump Drives are quite expensive [one Jump unit sufficient to Jump 50 displacement tons of starship costs 3MCr], then these weapons are likely to likewise be quite expensive, and so will probably be quite rare. On the other hand, depending on their destructive power they might be considered a good investment...

It is possible that there could be more than one type of 'Misjump Bomb', though different levels of technology may be required for the creation of different types of these.

At their most basic, and given the amount of energy they use, they might simply explode with great force.
Some might use the failed Jumpspace portal to generate damage-causing gravity waves and gravity gradients.
Others might generate destructive gravitational shearing or twisting forces.
Some might be effective only when they interact with a planetary gravity well, but when they do so generate gravitational effects to cause earthquakes and other damage.
Perhaps some put out a powerful pulse of radiation or other energy for destructive ends.
Some might fold space destructively around themselves, crushing other things within their area of effect. This could perhaps form a short-lived black hole effect.
Others again might make a directional 'rip' into Jumpspace, from which Jumpspace itself spills out destructively into normal space. This might be for a short time or for longer periods.

For more peaceable purposes it might be possible to use a controlled rip in the normal space-Jumpspace interface to generate energy, in what would effectively be a form of perpetual-motion machine. This would probably only be possible at very high levels of technology.

At their worst, Misjump Bombs might cause permanent damage to the fabric of space-time itself in any region where they are used. This could be in the form of lasting strange gravitational and energy effects wherever they were used. Or perhaps, as a worst-case scenario, the creation of a growing rift in which Jumpspace begins to overwrite normal space, or in which normal and Jump-spaces merge, to no good end.

Perhaps a group of characters are unexpectedly precipitated out of Jumpspace by such a rift in deep interstellar space. Perhaps it was produced by some secret research base, now in trouble or destroyed, or it is the result of some use of these weapons by the Ancients, and is now drifting into the path of shipping or towards an inhabited planet...

These ideas were inspired by the 'Hell-Class Weapons' from the Revelation Space books of Alastair Reynolds.

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