F-190-Oliver: Spanial (N-Space to Mundo Zargo)

When Jennie relieves him at the end of Blue Shift she is alert and professional, only some shadow underneath her eyes betraying that she shorted herself on sleep.

He relives her at next Green Shift and she him, then again through Blue and Red, working on his projects.

Gregar visits him in Control at Blue Shift, offers to bring him in a meal.

Next Green Shift when he arrives at Control, Jennie is excited.

“Look!  It’s in Polterman’s number!”

She breaks into a brief spurt of Navigator’s techno-babble before semi-explaining with more simplified techno-babble.

“Polterman’s number is a value used in some FTL calculations, but Polterman’s number itself is a proxy value.   If you break out the components, the overshoot risk seems to increase when both the relative error on the insertion track and the exit window rotation are high!

“Sometimes you can do something about the insertion track – the course the ship flies in N-space before jumping – and sometimes you can’t, but the Navigator can control the amount of rotation on the exit window.  If we’re right it means those jumps can be made safer at the cost of more N-space thrust time at the destination end.”

She frowns through her excitement.

“I wish I had a bigger set of data to look at.”