- Fatal Factor
- |
- Senior Heroic Member
Im pretty sure TFOR says the cole protocol dictates a random jump away AWAY from earth and any colony on penalty of death, so you can take that as any random vector NOT including the 180 by 180 degree arc in a 3D coordinate system which would take you closer to a nearby human world. So i believe that over the course of many encounters, a statistical analysis of the exit vectors of human ships would yield a probable direction of human space when you extrapolate them backwards. Send probes in that direction until you encounter more ships. Rinse and repeat, the statistical model improves with every encounter. Eventually youd find 'hot spots' in the extrapolated data which would correlate to inner colonies and in the end, earth. So yeah i think i just broke the cole protocol, sorry. Unless ive missed something, one day im gonna get pen and paper out to draw it and think about it properly.
I realised this a few years ago, was gonna spring it on the community some day but i suppose the cat is out of the bag now.
Posted by: Guscon
Posted by: Fatal Factor
Theres a problem with the cole protocol anyway, if my thought experiments are correct. As in, after enough covie encounters, it starts to have the opposite effect than intended ;)
I have to think about it some more though.As in, look at which directions ships never jump to, in order to find out where the protected areas are?
As I remember it, is not all navdata wiped first, then a random jump is plotted? In theory a ship could be heading straight for Earth, but with the almost infinite number of possible jump configurations, it'd be a vanishingly small probability.
As it is, even in the case a ship were heading for Earth, it would be much more likely for it to drop out of slipspace before arriving, or perhaps even blowing past the system and dropping out somewhere on the other side.