| 1 | ->''"Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy. Without precise calculations you can fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova, and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?"'' |
| 2 | -->-- '''Han Solo''', ''Franchise/StarWars: Episode IV — Film/ANewHope'' |
| 3 | |
| 4 | The limitation for a lot of forms of FasterThanLightTravel is the need to make calculations before discarding relativity in order to make the trip safely. Either you need a very precise idea of where you are and where you're going, or you need to plot a course around inconvenient obstructions like stars. Either way, the jump can't be rushed. |
| 5 | |
| 6 | However there will inevitably come a time when such safety measures are impossible. TheEmpire's space fleet is closing in or the DoomsdayDevice is SuckingInLines, and if the CoolShip doesn't [[HyperspeedEscape move]] ''now'', it's doomed. |
| 7 | |
| 8 | However there is one last chance: a Blind Jump, the DangerousForbiddenTechnique of celestial navigation. Skip the calculations, hit the button and cross your fingers. It may be a MillionToOneChance you'll survive the trip, but [[GodzillaThreshold if you stay you're dead anyway]], right? |
| 9 | |
| 10 | Naturally the heroes will make it. After all, it's CrazyEnoughToWork. In fact, it's rare for even the most crimson of {{Redshirt}}s to become a victim of the supposed hazards of a Blind Jump: the utter foolhardiness of even considering it is usually conveyed through grisly horror stories to the NewMeat crew member, as ably demonstrated by Captain Solo there. |
| 11 | |
| 12 | Probably never destined to be TruthInTelevision, at least not as presented in ''Franchise/StarWars''. Almost any calculation should be nigh-instantaneous with future technology, and space is overwhelmingly empty anyway (but, maybe, that's the point: being stranded light-years away from anything at all with broken engines is a grisly fate) — who knows about SubspaceOrHyperspace. Then again, considering the fact that the dangers of this trope seem to be complete myth even in its respective fiction, maybe it will be. Assuming of course, that breaking the light barrier will ever be possible. |
| 13 | |
| 14 | A subtrope of the HyperspeedEscape. Not to be confused with LeapOfFaith, in which one literally jumps to an unseen landing point. Compare RandomTransportation. Contrast TeleportersVisualizationClause, which is when a jump ''requires'' a clear idea of where you're going. |
| 15 | |
| 16 | ---- |
| 17 | !!Examples: |
| 18 | [[foldercontrol]] |
| 19 | [[folder:Anime & Manga]] |
| 20 | * ''Anime/{{Macross}}'': |
| 21 | ** ''Anime/SuperDimensionFortressMacross'' : When the Macross attempts to space fold towards lunar orbit to outflank the Zentradi, it instead ends up near Pluto's orbit, along with with South Ataria Island, two carriers, and some ocean water. |
| 22 | ** ''Anime/MacrossDoYouRememberLove'' has Hikaru and Misa blindly jump to Earth itself by accident when they attempt to escape the Zentradi at a beginning of a space fold. |
| 23 | ** ''Anime/Macross7'': City 7 through enemy infiltrator sabotage was severed from Battle 7 and the rest of the fleet and was made to jump towards an unknown location. In a later episode enemy vessels try to capture it using a special formation to force it to fold with them. Battle 7 disrupts the formation, making City 7 fold blind again. |
| 24 | * ''Anime/TenchiMuyoGXP'' has Seina Yamada whenever the ship he is on jumps blindly there are always pirates. His stroke of bad luck makes Seto Kamiki Jurai recommend him his own ship to be used as bait in anti-piracy operations. This results in a overwhelming success rate against pirates. |
| 25 | * The Leap Rail Shells in ''Literature/LostUniverse'' open a small warp portal, taking everything inside the blast into hyperspace. At one point, the crew of the ''Swordbreaker'' fire several shells and fly into the explosion as a way of quickly getting away from the ''Gorun Nova''. It works, but the ship is severely damaged. |
| 26 | * In ''Literature/ACertainMagicalIndex'', espers with teleportation based powers often need to make extremely complex calculations to make sure their teleports go off without a hitch. Kuroko mentions offhand that she has to calculate movement through eleven dimensions in order to safely teleport. Another teleporter finds out the hard way why blind jumps are dangerous when she messes up a calculation and part of her body gets fused with a wall. |
| 27 | * In ''The Anime/IrresponsibleCaptainTylor'' an enemy salvo takes out the Soyakaze's navigation system in the first few seconds of the fight, but not the jump engines. Tylor orders a series of jumps in an attempt to escape despite the fact that the helmsman points out that they are incapable of plotting a course. Tylor responds "I don't care where we go, we just don't want to be HERE!" As an aversion of the dangers of a blind jump, they jump at least a dozen times only to safely appear in empty space... until the enemy ships show up in pursuit. The final jump lands them uncomfortably close to a star... [[spoiler: close enough to [[GravitySucks draw in the enemy's fire,]] [[KillItWithFire causing a solar flare to wipe out the attackers]] as the ''Soyokaze'' barely escapes.]] |
| 28 | [[/folder]] |
| 29 | |
| 30 | [[folder:Comic Books]] |
| 31 | * ''ComicBook/GuardiansOfTheGalaxy:'' |
| 32 | ** When the Badoon conquered mankind, a young Nikki Gold got into a spaceship and fled the planet, randomly activating the hyperdrive on the grounds ''anywhere'' would be better than facing genocidal lizard-men. The ship then drifted in space until she found another ship which she was able to salvage. |
| 33 | ** The ''Drydock'', mobile shipyard of humanity's space fleet, tried doing this during the Badoon invasion. Unfortunately, while it did escape, the experimental hyperdrive hadn't been properly tested, and it turned out to give off a type of radiation utterly lethal to humans (and human sub-species), so the entire crew died, leaving the base AI alone, after which it went completely insane. |
| 34 | * ComicBook/{{Nightcrawler}} is reluctant to teleport into any area he can't see and/or hasn't been to before for exactly this reason. This reluctance is actually justified at least once in the ''ComicBook/{{Excalibur}}'' series, when Nightcrawler teleports into solid rock due to interference with the local electromagnetic field. In theory, it could have killed him, but [[PlotTailoredToTheParty fortunately]], he had his teammate [[Characters/MarvelComicsKittyPryde Shadowcat]] with him, and her powers were able to get them out of the rock safely, in severe pain but with no lasting harm. |
| 35 | * ''ComicBook/TheTransformersMoreThanMeetsTheEye'': |
| 36 | ** The plot of kicks-off when a malfunction in the Lost Light's quantum engines causes the ship to make a blind quantum jump before the coordinates and ship systems were prepared. This launches the Lost Light to a random part of the galaxy and the crew spends part of the second issue going over maps to figure out where the hell they landed. The blind jump later turns out to have had much worse consequences than previously thought; [[spoiler: when the malfunction occurred the ship's computer had narrowed down two destinations. This meant the quantum engines were being told to go to two different locations, a problem they solved by ''creating a second Lost Light''. This quantum duplicate appeared in one destination and was destroyed shortly after in an attack while the ship we were following ended up somewhere else.]] |
| 37 | ** They actually repeat this in the finale [[spoiler:but take it further. Faced with the knowledge that when they finish their final lap in the Lost Light the ship will be stripped for parts, they will all go their separate ways and Megatron, who had long undergone a HeelFaceTurn at this point and was considered a friend and member of the crew, would be [[UncertainDoom either incarcerated or executed]] for his war crimes, the crew decide to replicate the accident that started their journey, except instead of sending their duplicates to a random part of space they would be transported to a random ''alternate universe''. The final issue begins depicting the crew reuniting at Ratchet's funeral, [[AndTheAdventureContinues and finishes with the duplicates beginning their voyage in a universe they know nothing about...]] ]] |
| 38 | * In the non-canon ''Franchise/StarWars'' comic book story "Into the Great Unknown", Han and Chewie make a blind jump to escape some Imperials and end up on Earth. Eventually Franchise/IndianaJones [[{{Crossover}} shows up]]. |
| 39 | * In an early issue of ''ComicBook/{{Star Wars Marvel|1977}}'', Han helps guide a SpacePirate-controlled Star Destroyer to a world he tells them has treasure on it, then escapes on the Falcon. The pirate captain is about to blow him away, until Han tells him to check their navigational system. Turns out Han had dumped all their navigational charts into the Falcon and then erased them from the Star Destroyer. The navigator tells the captain that unless they want to make a deal with Han, they are effectively stranded, unless they want to start making their hyperspace jumps by guesswork, and risk hitting a star or a black hole. |
| 40 | * ''ComicBook/WonderWoman'' [[ComicBook/WonderWoman1942 Vol 1]]: "Glitch" is understandably panicked during a fight on an invading Ytirflirk ship when one of their foes is knocked into a switch that activates the "star drive" without any pre calculation, which he explains as a warp drive like in ''Franchise/StarTrek'' when asked, but far less stable. He is concerned that not only will everyone on board end up killed but also quite possibly a lot of people on the surface if they don't get it shut down. |
| 41 | [[/folder]] |
| 42 | |
| 43 | [[folder:Fan Works]] |
| 44 | * A variation of this occurs in ''Fanfic/UndocumentedFeatures'': The ''Delphinus'' makes a blind jump to escape [[Anime/BubblegumCrisis GENOM's]] forces, but winds up stranded in non-space until [[Manga/AhMyGoddess Skuld]] pulls them out. |
| 45 | * In the ''Literature/HarryPotter / Anime/SailorMoon/Manga/RanmaOneHalf'' crossover ''The Girl Who Loved'', an emotionally-distraught and highly-desperate Harry managed to apparate to China despite never having even seen a picture of the area. |
| 46 | ** This actually happens in a few ''Harry Potter'' crossovers. Harry, usually as a child being abused by the Durselys, blindly apparates to either another country or another world entirely. Eg. The Wayward Plan; Lily and James [[AbusiveParents fake their deaths and abandon 15-month old girl!Harry to the Dursleys]] on [[ManipulativeBastard Dumbledore's]] request, but 6-year-old girl Harry [[SpannerInTheWorks massively fucks up Dumbles' plans]] when she blindly apparates all the way to Konoha, where she promptly gets adopted by Tsunade, who was "just visiting". In the ''Fanfic/InquisitorCarrowChronicles'', he's sent straight into the distant future of ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'' -- and eventually, due to the interference of an Eldar Wych, gets sent back... after becoming an Inquisitor of the Ordo Malleus and a brother of the Charnel Guard. |
| 47 | ** In ''Fanfic/MakeAWish'', many Death Eaters die because the Portkeys they use to reach Harry Potter during his world tour vacation were created by a guy who wants them to die and lack any of the safety charms that are placed on normal Portkeys. Highlights include teleporting into mid-air ten stories above the ground, teleporting into an elevator shaft, teleporting onto train tracks with an incoming train, and teleporting inside a vending machine. The Death Eaters are also just unlucky. At one point they teleport somewhere with no problems at first, only to realize that there's an angry Nundu right next to them. In the sequel ''The Hunt for Harry Potter'', a bunch of would-be assassins teleport into Harry's fortress when they spot a weakness in the fortress' wards, not knowing that the unwarded section is the fortress' septic tank. Thanks to their water-breathing charms they survive being trapped for weeks in raw sewage, though they probably wish they hadn't. |
| 48 | * Fanfic/BeyondTheOuterGateLies: Harry does this twice. The first time in the very beginning, to escape Great Red. Since he is already outside his universe, he doesn't see it as much of a risk. The second time involves escaping a pocket dimension. |
| 49 | * In ''Fanfic/AndersonQuestKillingVampiresAndWerewolvesAndLeprechuans'', Micolash comments that, from secondhand accounts, this was the ultimate fate of infamous Yharnam architect and inventor [[Franchise/{{Discworld}} Bergholt Stuttley Johnson]], who barged in an experiment where several School of Mensis scientists were busy trying to create a means to directly access the Great Ones' dimension. Johnson told them they were doing it all wrong, grabbed a hammer and hit the prototype, vanishing from reality. Micolash despairs of the possibility he might be left the last of humanity as he drifts across dimensions. |
| 50 | [[/folder]] |
| 51 | |
| 52 | [[folder:Films — Animation]] |
| 53 | * In ''WesternAnimation/LiloAndStitch'', Stitch faces recapture after stealing a police cruiser ("Yeah, he took the red one.") so [[HyperspeedEscape he activates the hyperdrive]]. The ship's computer tells him this would be a ''bad'' idea because navigation is disabled. He doesn't care. Fortunately, his jump takes him to a habitable planet that just happens to be a [[InsignificantLittleBluePlanet mosquito preserve]], which severely limits what the Grand Councilwoman can do in terms of recapturing him. ''Un''fortunately, he lands on an island, and he can't swim. (Although even that is good luck of a sort: he almost landed in the water itself.) |
| 54 | [[/folder]] |
| 55 | |
| 56 | [[folder:Films — Live-Action]] |
| 57 | * ''Film/LostInSpace'' established that without two "gates" to guide you (one at the departure, one at the destination), activating the hyperdrive could send you ''anywhere''. Since they were about to careen into the sun anyway they chanced it, leading to them becoming, [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin well...]] |
| 58 | * In the ''Franchise/StarWars'' franchise, it's stated (see the quote above) that ships must plot their lightspeed jumps precisely, but there are exceptions. |
| 59 | ** ''Film/ANewHope'': Han Solo has the ''Millennium Falcon'' make an emergency jump to escape a Star Destroyer when her DeflectorShields start to collapse. |
| 60 | ** ''Film/TheForceAwakens'': |
| 61 | *** And then he one-ups himself and pulls a jump from within a larger ship's hanger, with a rathtar chewing on the cockpit. Needless to say, the rathtar doesn't survive. |
| 62 | *** [[InvertedTrope Inverted]] later on in the movie where he manually pulls ''out'' of lightspeed much later than is safe to get past Starkiller Base's shields, effectively pulling a Blind Landing. |
| 63 | ** In ''Film/RogueOne'', Cassian Andor uses a blind jump to escape from Jedha after the Death Star blasts it to hell. |
| 64 | ** Early in ''Film/TheRiseOfSkywalker'', Poe Dameron is piloting the ''Millennium Falcon'' and finds himself being chased by a swarm of TIE fighters. Thanks to the Hyperspace Tracking that debuted in ''Film/TheLastJedi'', they can track him through hyperspace, so he uses a trick called "lightspeed skipping": multiple blind jumps to random locations. He pulls it off, but arrives at the Resistance base with the ''Falcon'' on fire. |
| 65 | [[/folder]] |
| 66 | |
| 67 | [[folder:Literature]] |
| 68 | * In ''Literature/AWrinkleInTime'', this is why Meg's father is on Camazotz: He was the second to try out a "tessering" program that was intended to send people to Mars but didn't work as planned. (The first volunteer, Hank, was never seen or heard from again after the team waited for a year, implying he was stranded in deep space.) |
| 69 | * Creator/IsaacAsimov: |
| 70 | ** ''Literature/FoundationSeries'': The series has a pretty straight example in the form of a Jump drive where accurate travel requires calculating the specific circumstances of where you are before you jump. The original trilogy was written in the '40s (and revised in the '50s), when you'd expect to do that sort of calculation by hand. Later books in the [[TrilogyCreep series]] were written in the '80s, when you'd expect computers to be capable of routine navigation calculations. |
| 71 | *** "Literature/{{The General|Foundation}}": Devers tries to escape from General Riose's fleet after escaping from their forward base by making hyperspace jumps without proper planning. He explains the danger to Ducem Barr. It isn't very risky in itself, as the most likely destination if you vaguely target empty space is empty space... but since they don't know ''where'' they've ended up, it takes quite some time poring over starcharts until they can pinpoint their location. |
| 72 | *** "Literature/TheMule": Toran and the rest of the protagonists try to escape from the Mule after the fall of Haven, desperately making {{hyperspace|OrSubspace}} jumps without proper planning. One time their ship almost ends up inside a red giant star. They barely get clear, and after that, they spend quite some time poring over starcharts until they can pinpoint their location and calculate their path to Trantor. |
| 73 | *** ''Literature/FoundationsEdge'': When Golan Trevize instructs the computer to travel to Sayshell, he's surprised to learn that it is capable of plotting out a course involving twenty-eight {{Hyperspace|OrSubspace}} jumps. He's uncomfortable with committing to it because he'd be unable to fine-tune the calculations after each jump.[[note]]It's mentioned in a conversation that he ''could'' try to plot a course of '''one''' jump (due to how the engines work, the universe is treated as a single place during the jump that can be reentered at any desired location), but custom dictates performing multiple jumps, with checks after every one, due to perceived accuracy issues.[[/note]] It's InUniverse TechnologyMarchesOn; Trevize is using a new, much more powerful computer that is no longer subject to the limitations of older technology. He is even more surprised when he finds out that the ship only made 23 jumps instead - the computer was powerful enough to optimize out five jumps in the brief fractions of seconds it spent in realspace between the jumps. |
| 74 | *** ''Literature/FoundationAndChaos'': A hypership is dragged out of hyperspace by a local supernova. This causes all of the ship's systems to fail, including the emergency distress beacon. And, all of the [[spoiler:human]] crew members die due to neutrino poisoning. The captain explains that neutrinos, in huge amounts, have a small amount of chance interactions with proteins which kill people, painfully. |
| 75 | ** ''Nemesis'': A blind jump isn't dangerous because in this version of FTLTravel, in an emergency, the ship and any obstacles are harmlessly pushed aside from one another (with the object with the smaller mass receiving the larger push). The crew of the test ship initially ''think'' they did an accidental blind jump by having missed some important factor for the calculations when they notice the stars look different after the jump despite its intended short distance -- until they realise the ship had simply been reoriented while in hyperspace. |
| 76 | ** Dr Asimov also wrote a short-short story in which a criminal makes his escape with a random jump, relying on the ship's computer to figure out where he ended up and how to get to a safe place to sell the loot. After noticing that the computer is taking much longer than it should, he discovers that [[spoiler:he's close to a nova too recent to appear in the computer's star charts, and realizes that the computer will keep trying and failing to get a navigational fix until the ship's power runs out.]] Since he murdered the person who actually programmed the computer... |
| 77 | ** ''Literature/TheStarsLikeDust'': In the backstory, one of the characters stumbled by chance on a planet which is the center of a planned revolution when the ship he was on was hit by a small meteorite; it's assumed that said meteorite interfered with the ship's gyroscope, resulting in an accidental Blind Jump. [[spoiler:Ultimately subverted, however, when [[IdiotBall the same character who made that assumption]] boasts that the others will never find the Rebellion World without him, because the chances of randomly arriving within a billion miles of any star are '''250 quadrillion to one against'''. [[note]]They believe the star they are looking for is in the Horsehead Nebula, meaning it can't be seen at a distance.[[/note]] The protagonist, on hearing this, realizes the jump wasn't blind at all: the ship never actually changed direction, and the planet they are looking for is [[HiddenInPlainSight in the same star system the ship was aiming for]].]] |
| 78 | * Creator/RobertAHeinlein: |
| 79 | ** ''Literature/StarmanJones''. A starship gets lost during a hyperspace jump due to a miscalculation before the initial entry into hyperspace. The only way to return is to try to reverse the path they took the first time and hope it brings them home again. |
| 80 | ** ''Literature/TheStarBeast''. In the backstory to the novel, the starship ''Trailblazer'' made a blind hyperspace jump to other solar systems, and had to make another blind jump to get back to Earth. |
| 81 | * Creator/AndreNorton: |
| 82 | ** In the sequel to ''Literature/TheZeroStone'', ''Uncharted Stars'', to escape pursuit by Jacks (space pirates), the MainCharacters must make a hyperspace jump using untested coordinates from a [[{{Precursors}} Forerunner]] artifact that they hope will take them where they want to go. |
| 83 | ** A variant that crops up in the ''Literature/TheTimeTraders'' series, is that they have carefully plotted courses -- on tapes. If you can't read the label on the tape, or somebody switched it, you have no idea where you're going ... but it ''will'' get you there flawlessly. Whether you've got any way to get ''back'' -- if, for instance, you used up your fuel -- is another matter. |
| 84 | * In Creator/WalterJonWilliams's ''Literature/AngelStation'', FTL travel is achieved by using captured black holes (contained within each ship) to open a tear in space-time. Proper calculations are necessary to "ride out the wave" to the proper destination. The MainCharacters, Ubu Roy and Beautiful Maria, make a random jump, hoping to find a system that will have "catchable" black holes to sell. A similar jump puts a LivingShip (also looking to capture and sell singularities) in the same system, resulting in the events of the book. |
| 85 | * A definite possibility in Mikhail Akhmanov's ''Literature/ArrivalsFromTheDark'' series, although never actually done in the books. It is explained, though, that jump calculations need to be extremely precise with distance and gravity being major factors. While, theoretically, it is possible to instantaneously jump anywhere in the galaxy, nobody actually does this as they would not know where they would end up. As such, most jumps are relatively short-range (several parsecs). This is known to play havoc with any military plans, as each ship jumps individually, often causing them to end up spread out all over the system. On the other hand, in-system jumps are usually fairly precise. |
| 86 | * ''TabletopGame/BattleTech'' and its attendant fiction play this rather straight. In theory, anyplace with sufficiently low local gravity is safe to jump to and from, including virtually all of interstellar space. However, since the interesting ''planets'' are usually too deep inside their star's gravity well to jump to and from directly, a system's two main 'jump points' are as close as safely possible in the system's zenith and nadir (i.e., 'above' and 'below' the star itself, though still a respectable distance away). ''Or''...you can try to use a 'pirate jump point' much closer to your target by taking advantage of the fact that at some points in a solar system, local gravitic influences cancel out ''just'' enough to allow the jump drive to work after all. The problem with this approach is that as the smaller celestial bodies in a system move, so do its pirate points move with them...and while actual misjumps in the fiction are relatively rare, they do generally take out the ship involved for good (sometimes in a quite horrific fashion), so this isn't a risk a sane commercial [=JumpShip=] captain is likely to ever take. (The military, and the pirates the points were named for, are a different matter.) |
| 87 | ** Another risk factor that sometimes comes up (such as in the novel ''Warrior: En Garde'') is drive charge time. Normally, the jump drive is slowly recharged via a deployed SolarSail, a process that tends to take a week or longer. It ''can'' be recharged faster via a ship's fusion power plant in an emergency, assuming the ship has the fuel to burn; but this risks potentially undetectable damage to the highly sensitive drive core and thus, again, a catastrophic jump accident. |
| 88 | ** There's a slightly more practical bit of advice, in that if you jump to a pirate point and your drive melts, no-one is going to be around to help you out. If you arrive at the standard local stellar zenith or nadir points, there'll be the equivalent of a service station and rest stop close enough to be of practical use. If you're somewhere relatively civilized. |
| 89 | * The ''Space Hawks'' Literature/ChooseYourOwnAdventure books feature an unusual example: the ability to Blind Jump in case of an emergency is a stated ''feature'' of the Phantom starfighters. [[spoiler: It works without a hitch in most cases, dropping you safely away from danger, but in one book it drops you in the middle of nowhere, resulting in a BadEnd.]] |
| 90 | * In Creator/AnneMcCaffrey's ''Literature/DragonridersOfPern'', dragons are able to teleport through an interdimensional space called ''between''. The original first book ''Dragonflight'' demonstrates the dangers by one of the characters relating a story of how, during excavations inside a mountain, they'd found one young dragon and his rider entombed in the rock after making an inaccurate jump. Additionally, when a dragon's rider dies, it causes such tremendous grief to their mount that invariably the dragon makes a blind jump ''between'' from which they never return (''between'' being airless and cold, and if you don't find your way out, you suffocate/freeze). |
| 91 | * ''Literature/HeecheeSaga'': ''Gateway'' revolves around an alien space station humans have found within our solar system which holds hundreds of small starships capable of faster-than-light travel. However, heading to a new destination is always a blind jump simply because the navigation system on these is so alien that nobody has been able to figure out how the settings correspond to anything about the destination beyond a few basics: The computer lights up when valid coordinates are selected, the settings can be repeated to reliably always lead to the same destination, and nobody who has tried changing the navigation settings in mid-flight has ever returned. |
| 92 | * In Creator/HarryTurtledove's ''Herbig-Haro'' (the sequel to ''The Road Not Taken''), the protagonist drops out of FTL travel at a point he considered safe according to hopelessly outdated starmaps. He was just barely right. |
| 93 | * In Creator/AndreyLivadny's ''Literature/TheHistoryOfTheGalaxy'' series, nearly all early [[SubspaceOrHyperspace Hypersphere]] jumps were blind jumps due to the lack of understanding of the nature of the anomaly and the fact that no navigation systems existed for determining location. Even after the invention of mass-detectors, there were plenty of ships that never returned (to put it into perspective, there were 7023 ships launched during the 50-year Great Exodus; a thousand years later, only a few hundred inhabited worlds are known to humanity at large). That explains why most novels involve someone finding a LostColony or ruins of one even in remote systems. |
| 94 | ** Specifically, traveling through Hypersphere involves using "[[HyperspaceLanes horizontal tension lines]]" that stretch between large celestial bodies (e.g. stars, planets) within a certain radius to guide ships traveling to another star. When arriving to a star system, the crew had to quickly initiate the "surfacing" procedure before the ship got caught by another "horizontal" and continued on its way. Without mass-detectors, early ship had no idea where they would end up and didn't know if there were any other objects at the location. |
| 95 | * Arthur Dent activates the Infinite Improbability Drive without any probability settings in all versions of ''Franchise/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy'' to escape some incoming missiles. This is probably the worst idea on this page since it could result in ''anything at all'' happening. Fortunately it just redecorates the bridge and transforms the missiles into [[RuleOfFunny a bowl of petunias and a whale]]. |
| 96 | ** It does come back to haunt Arthur later on in ''Literature/LifeTheUniverseAndEverything'', when he once again encounters the petunias in reincarnated form. Apparently, the being [[spoiler:keeps getting reborn as different beings which are soon to die because of Arthur]]. |
| 97 | ** It was dangerous and desperate, but they were already in desperate danger. This is why it was guaranteed to work; since it was infinitely improbable that it would save them from imminent destruction, the Infinite Improbability Drive made it a statistical certainty. NarrativeCausality justified by the text. |
| 98 | *** They also use a teleporter without setting a destination, the alternative was crashing into a sun. |
| 99 | * In Creator/DavidWeber's ''Literature/HonorHarrington'' series hyperspace travel generally requires scrupulous calculations to leave the hyperspace at a desired point, but the hyperspace itself is more like a shortcut than Blind Jump. The wormholes, however, have fixed nodes, which means that newly-discovered ones can only be mapped by jumping through and matching the neighbourhood with known maps. It, however, is not a risk to anyone's life as the nodes are always on the outskirts of a star system. |
| 100 | ** You can still be destroyed if you don't take the wormhole jump just right. Also, with ''known'' wormhole jumps, there's a chance of colliding with another ship after coming out. This is why the known jumps have "Astro Control" services at each end: Following their directions will greatly reduce the chances of getting your ship destroyed, but will not totally eliminate them. |
| 101 | ** You can also be destroyed if a wormhole's terminus is actually known to someone else who has mined the terminus. Normally this is insane, as a wormhole value is based on people knowing where it is and where it goes. However, if only you know where the exits are, and everyone else thinks its deadly, it is a great invasion route. |
| 102 | * ''Literature/ImperialRadch'': In ''Literature/AncillaryJustice'', ships usually exit gate-space well distant from stations and planets, in order to avoid colliding with other ships. [[spoiler:In the third book, Anaander Mianaai gates a ship up to Athoek Station and strikes a chronically mis-scheduled passenger shuttle, killing hundreds and leaving the populace more uncooperative.]] |
| 103 | * Space travel in the ''Literature/KrisLongknife'' universe works on a PortalNetwork of jump points that are theorized to have been built by a trio of {{Precursors}}. Two key traits of jump points are: |
| 104 | ** There's no way to see what's on the other side. This is counteracted in civilized space by placing traffic buoys on either side to send an alert that a ship is about to pass through, and Kris's people eventually invent a "periscope" that can see out the other side of a jump point. What prompts the latter invention is the their tracking a spaceship through a jump but having their buoy not return; the periscope reveals that the star on the far side is in the middle of a supernova. |
| 105 | ** If you enter one at zero rotation and at less than 50,000 km/h, you'll only travel a short distance to the next point. Entering faster jumps you further, but the destination is unpredictable on the first try: while exactly matching your original velocity and rotation gets you back, it takes until ''Redoubtable'' before Kris's ArtificialIntelligence companion Nelly is able to devise an algorithm to predict a set of systems one might end up in after a fast jump. A blind jump led Kris's great-grandfather Ray Longknife to the discovery of the LostColony of Santa Maria, Kris's great-grandmother Rita Longknife was lost leading a fleet of battlecruisers into a blind jump during the Iteeche War 80 years before the series, and during the series [[spoiler:a conspiracy in Greenfeld leads to the cruiser carrying Hank Peterwald's body home to perform a bad jump in order to conceal evidence of foul play in his death from a sabotaged EscapePod]]. |
| 106 | * In the ''Literature/LiadenUniverse'' series, there is a move colloquially called the "Smuggler's Ace", which is a blind hyperspace jump a short distance (generally from somewhere within a solar system to somewhere within the same solar system) -- just enough to shake a pursuer or avoid being pinned down in a firefight, while minimizing the risks of jumping blind. |
| 107 | * In Bob Shaw's novel ''Literature/NightWalk'', making a [[HyperspaceIsAScaryPlace Null-Space jump]] outside of one of the few known [[PortalNetwork portal routes]] is quite a bad idea, since there is no way to know where that jump point will lead to, and there is no way back. [[spoiler:They get better]]. |
| 108 | * Usually averted in ''Literature/PerryRhodan'', as sensors make hypertravel relatively safe. Original hyperjump technology could be used for it, but never was on screen. When they switched from jumpships to hypertravel, though, the sensors weren't yet developed that allowed looking 'out' from hyperspace. As a result, on one of the first test rides of the new technology, they crashed into the shields around the Akon system (''not'' the Arkon system!) as they didn't know of it. |
| 109 | * A variant occurs in one of the ''Literature/PreludeToDune'' prequels. Guild freighters can't perform hyperspace jumps with activated shields on board. Duke Leto escapes being attacked on one in transit after a FalseFlagOperation by switching his shields on and agreeing to stand trial. There was a chance that the entire freighter, carrying representatives of a dozen factions, could have ended up inside a sun. |
| 110 | ** In the even-earlier [[Literature/LegendsOfDune prequels concerning the Butlerian Jihad]], such jumps do go wrong - often. FTL has just been invented and a large proportion of the early Guild ships are never seen again. This is because navigators haven't yet corrupted themselves into spice-drugged monsters. |
| 111 | *** Not just Guild (which hadn't been created yet at that point) but any Armada ship equipped with the Holtzman drive. Even {{Space Fighter}}s were sometimes equipped with those. During the Great Purge, all fold-capable ships were used in a massive strike against all machine worlds before [[AIIsACrapshoot Omnius]] could launch an all-out offensive against the [[FeudalFuture League of Nobles]] weakened by a plague. The hazards of jumping without proper calculations (even with Norma Cenva secretly installing calculating machines on some flagships) meant that, at the end, only 300 capital ships remained out of 1080. For reference, each ''Ballista''-class [[TheBattlestar battleship]] had a crew of 1500, and each ''Javelin''-class destroyer probably had at least 500. |
| 112 | * In David Feintuch's ''Literature/SeafortSaga'', the "Fusion" drive requires extremely precise calculations (out to 7 or 8 decimal places) involving the ship's mass, where you are, where you're going, etc. The drive also has an inherent error (reduced to 1% of the distance traveled by the end of the series, so the usual technique is to aim to a little short of the target and do a smaller corrective jump later. If your target coordinates aren't at least two light-minutes away, weird things happen, as indicated in ''Challenger's Hope''. |
| 113 | * This happens a few times in the ''{{Literature/Slingshot}}'' series, usually out of desperation. Notably, the opening scene has the main protagonist do something like it: while the calculations have been made, she does a jump from a point very close to a singularity, which is about as much a no-no as making no calculations. [[spoiler: We later find out that the jump shattered every single distance record for FTL jumps.]] |
| 114 | * In the ''VideoGame/StarCraft'' novel ''Queen of Blades'', after Raynor warns Horner in the orbiting Battlecruiser ''Hyperion'' that the shuttles about to dock with his ship contain Zerg, and there's no other way to prevent their ship from being overrun, Horner initiates a blind warp jump (and so do the crew of the ''Norad III''). This allows the ''Hyperion'' to be lost in space for just long enough that they can return to the abandoned crew as BigDamnHeroes. |
| 115 | * In ''Literature/TheStarsMyDestination'', anyone can teleport, but if they don't know exactly where they're going, they will invariably wind up inside a solid object and die horribly. Played straighter than most uses as people actually die of it once in a while. |
| 116 | * ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'': In the [[Franchise/StarTrekExpandedUniverse novel]] "Vendetta" the ''Enterprise'' is chasing Delcara's Planet Killer so they can retrieve Captain Picard at a very high warp speed. And the crew is ferverently hoping they don't hit a planet or even an asteroid because if they did ships could spend the next millenium searching for [[LudicrousGibs all the pieces]] of the ''Enterprise'' and still not find them all. |
| 117 | * The ''Star Trek''/''ComicBook/XMen'' crossover novel ''Planet X'' features the ''Enterprise''-E being attacked by an alien ship powerful enough to bring the ''Enterprise'' shields down by 88% with one shot. With no way to engage this enemy ship in a straight battle, the crew and the visiting X-Men are forced to have Nightcrawler attempt a blind jump onto the enemy ship as his abilities will allow him to bypass the ship’s shields, studying the readings the ''Enterprise'' has already taken of the ship to allow him to teleport to a suitably deserted part of the enemy vessel. |
| 118 | * ''Franchise/StarWarsLegends'' elaborates on the dangers of a blind hyperspace jump: it's insanely dangerous since you're moving at ridiculous speed with no idea what's in the way, but if you're really lucky (or a Jedi) you can ''maybe'' pull a few seconds in hyper to escape certain death. |
| 119 | ** ''Literature/OutboundFlight'' has a hyperdrive malfunction which sends a little Corellian vessel to the figurative doorstep of [[GuileHero Commander Mitth'raw'nuruodo]], very far from the Republic, who has never found a source of information he wouldn't exploit. |
| 120 | ** On at least one occasion in the EU, a Force-user entered entirely random hyperspace coordinates when fleeing for their life, trusting that the Force would guide them safely. It tends to work. |
| 121 | ** ''Literature/XWingSeries'': Gavin Darklighter once escapes from a Star Destroyer ambush this way, making a 15 second blind hyperspace jump. Even though it was better than getting shot down or taken prisoner by the Imperials, as Gavin puts it such jumps are, "about as stupid as making fat jokes around a Hutt, and nearly always as fatal" so he counts it as the longest 15 seconds of his life. Gavin makes his way to the Halanit system about out of fuel, but the colonists there are happy to supply him with more. |
| 122 | ** ''Literature/TheThrawnTrilogy'': The ''Katana'' fleet was a force of two hundred dreadnoughts slaved to its flagship, but when its crew fell victim to a hive virus and went insane, the navigator sent the fleet to a random corner of the galaxy, passing into legend. At least until some smugglers made a Blind Jump of their own and had the astronomical good fortune to blunder into a bunch of pre-Clone Wars capital ships. |
| 123 | *** At least it was good fortune later on--at the time, they assumed the ships were part of the fleet that had just chased them, and made another blind jump. That one didn't work out so well, hitting the mass shadow of a large comet, damaging the ship's FTL drive and killing most of the crew. |
| 124 | ** In the {{novelization}} of ''Literature/RevengeOfTheSith'', after Obi-Wan escapes from Utapau, he makes a series of random jumps that leave him in the middle of nowhere. It takes a few minutes for him to figure out where he is so he can decide where to go next. |
| 125 | ** ''Literature/NewJediOrder:'' In the ''Edge of Victory'' duology, [[LesCollaborateurs the Peace Brigade]] tries to capture former Jedi trainee Uldir Lochett. Uldir [[ThrownOutTheAirlock ejects a traitor onboard his rescue vessel into space]] and then frantically jumps to light speed without punching in the coordinates, while wondering if he'll come out of the jump alive (a later book reveals that he does). |
| 126 | ** In a tie-in novella to ''VideoGame/JediKnightDarkForcesII'' it's revealed that the planet of Ruusan was rediscovered by the smuggler Jerg when he came out of hyperspace after a blind jump that he was forced to take to avoid being blown into atoms by an Imperial patrol vessel. |
| 127 | * In Francis Cascac's novel ''Fleeing Earth'' (''Literature/TerreEnFuite''), humans get their hands on advanced methods of propulsion hundreds of thousands of years in the future (after another Ice Age and rebirth of civilization) from a race of invaders known as Drums. After a bioweapon forces the Drums off the planet, humans start building ships propelled by "space magnets" that utilize natural attraction between stellar bodies to accelerate to close to 80% of the speed of light. A later discovery of [[SubspaceOrHyperspace hyperspace]] allows them to build FTL colony ships. Unfortunately, all but one are lost, and the only ship to return reveals that interstellar travel using hyperspace is inherently unpredictable. Apparently, there is a "magnetic barrier" of sorts between any two nearby stars that is impossible to penetrate using "space magnets" in normal space and which causes the ship to go wildly off course in hyperspace. The colonists that return reveal that the first jump put them outside the galaxy, and they had to try several more before somehow making it back. The only way to penetrate the barrier in normal space is by flying something at least Moon-sized, which is fine because they end up flying Earth and Venus to another star to escape the Sun going nova. The secret of safe hyperspace travel is revealed at the end, when an archaeological dig on Mars finds ancient ruins and an intact starship not of human or Drum design. They find out that it avoids the barrier by using TimeTravel to go to a point before or after the barrier was there. |
| 128 | ** Interestingly, most of the story is read by the DecoyProtagonist from the diary of the true protagonist who accidentally ends up in the 20th century when experimenting with the above-mentioned temporal drive. In the diary, the protagonist also reveals the secret of "space magnetism", only to realize it could change the past and tear up the page. |
| 129 | * ''Literature/TimeScout'' features blind jumps across time rather than space, with results no less potentially fatal. Jump through a TimePortal into a time in which you already exist and *poof*, you're dead. And there's no way to know what time it is without going through. |
| 130 | * In [=McCaffrey=]'s ''Literature/TowerAndTheHive'' series, when the Talents are "pushing" ships, they are very careful to keep contact with the ship until the receiving Talent has hold, as there are stories of them being "lost". |
| 131 | * ''Literature/VorkosiganSaga'': The first jump through a newly discovered wormhole is always blind. You have no idea where your ship is going to come out. Doing this used to be Cordelia Naismith's job. |
| 132 | * ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'': Averted in ''[[Literature/CiaphasCain The Emperor's Finest]]''. As the ship Cain is on is tracking a space hulk, they need to pop out into realspace at the same place the hulk did, run the calculations, and then go back in the warp. Even when the sector of realspace is occupied by half an ork Waaaggh!. |
| 133 | * The ''Literature/WarWorld'' series has the last ship full of Saurons, malevolent SuperSoldiers, escape to a backwater PrisonPlanet by making a blind jump. |
| 134 | * A magical variant in ''Literature/TheWheelOfTime'': in the DreamLand of Tel'aran'rhiod, a DreamWalker can focus their mind on a desire and intuitively transport themselves to a location that's appropriate to the desire. It's considered prohibitively risky, since the dreamer has absolutely no control over the specific location they jump to, the technique doesn't account for dangers at the destination point, and people who die in Tel'aran'rhiod end up DeaderThanDead. |
| 135 | * ''Franchise/TheWitcher'': At the climax of ''Literature/TheTimeOfContempt'' Ciri makes a jumps through an unstable magical portal to escape a massive fight that's broken out at the WizardingSchool and winds up in a desert. Since the destination was random, Geralt spends the rest of the series searching everywhere for her. |
| 136 | [[/folder]] |
| 137 | |
| 138 | [[folder:Live-Action TV]] |
| 139 | * Done with more justifiable danger in ''{{Series/Andromeda}}''. The slipstream network is like an ever-shifting maze to navigate and getting through it requires strong intuition and reflexes. This means that blindly jumping through it carries the strong risk of sending yourself down the wrong path, potentially stranding yourself or simply launching your ship ''way'' off-course. Computers and auto-pilots can't properly use the slipstream network because they make nothing ''but'' blind jumps; they lack the natural intuition of organic beings, so each jump has a 50:50 shot at picking the right branch. Since the average slipstream jump involves several such branches, their chances of getting to the right location decrease with each screw-up. In the backstory, the titular starship spent decades trying to make it back to charted space after its original crew was wiped out; without anyone to chart a path for it, the on-board computers kept feeding it random guesses that just got it hopelessly lost. |
| 140 | * Given the way Hyperspace is a separate navigable layer of space and the HyperspaceIsAScaryPlace nature of ''Series/BabylonFive'', it's an extremely bad idea to blindly roam around in Hyperspace. Without a navigation lock on a known Hyperspace exit point you're all but guaranteed to get irrevocably lost in hell. Worse is that Hyperspace "moves" and losing engine power will cause you to drift away from the navigation beacons. Still, there are massive Explorer Class ships whose job it is to build new jumpgates and the nav beacons that go with them in previously unexplored space. How exactly they do this without getting lost is never explored. The Vorlons once used the "blind jump lost in hell" nature of Hyperspace to try and get rid of a piece of technology, unfortunately it was later accidentally found. |
| 141 | * ''Series/{{Battlestar Galactica|2003}}'': Activating the jump drive without inputting any co-ordinates is known as a "blind jump", and inherently risky because you could end up ''anywhere''. This is notably how Admiral Cain and the ''Pegasus'' escape the initial Cylon attack. In the finale, [[spoiler: Starbuck]] enters coordinates into ''Galactica's'' navigation, which [[spoiler: she derived from the song "All Along the Watchtower". It leads them to Earth and a place to settle.]] |
| 142 | * Averted in ''Series/DarkMatter2015''. Even when the alternative is death by missile, Two absolutely refuses to risk a blind jump. They settle for some evasive maneuvers to buy enough time to calculate a proper jump, which is a close call. |
| 143 | * ''Series/DoctorWho'': |
| 144 | ** [[Recap/DoctorWhoS16E6TheArmageddonFactor "The Armageddon Factor"]] ended with the Doctor hooking a randomizer up to the [=TARDIS=] control panel, so ''all'' his travels will be space-time blind jumps, reasoning that this will help them evade their current enemy, the Black Guardian, as he can't track the Doctor if even the Doctor has no idea where he's going. |
| 145 | *** In the ''Literature/EighthDoctorAdventures'' novel "The Fall of Yquantine", the Eighth Doctor installs a Randomiser in his companion, Compassion, after she mutates into a sentient TARDIS, to try and keep her away from the Time Lords who want to use her as breeding stock to create a new generation of [=TARDISes=]. |
| 146 | ** The Cult of Skaro's "Emergency Temporal Shift" seems to act like this: transporting the Dalek to a random point in time as a last-resort escape mechanism. The [[Recap/DoctorWhoS28E13Doomsday first time]] they [[Recap/DoctorWhoS29E4DaleksInManhattan use it]], nothing too bad happens to them. The [[Recap/DoctorWhoS29E5EvolutionOfTheDaleks second time]], [[Recap/DoctorWhoS30E12TheStolenEarth however]], [[spoiler:Dalek Caan finds himself thrown into the Time War, and passing through the Time Lock exposed him to the whole of time at once, driving him insane.]] |
| 147 | ** [[Recap/DoctorWhoS30E12TheStolenEarth "The Stolen Earth"]]/[[Recap/DoctorWhoS30E13JourneysEnd "Journey's End"]]: Martha attempts to use a reverse-engineered teleporter despite the fact that the scientists have no idea how to program the thing correctly. Lucky for Martha, the tech has an empathic link and she is teleported to her mother's house instead of being scattered into atoms. |
| 148 | * [[LivingShip Leviathans]] in ''Series/{{Farscape}}'' can "Starburst" in emergencies, a sort of random teleport with no way to choose a destination AND even a small jump invalidates all previous navigation points. Fortunately there's also a slower "Hetch drive" for when you don't need to leave in a hurry. |
| 149 | * ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'': Played with in "[[Recap/StarTrekTheNextGenerationS2E11Contagion Contagion]]". Picard triggers the sequence that will destroy the Iconian facility, planning to use the gateway to escape. Even if he can't get to ''Enterprise'', which the gateway will cycle to eventually, wherever he ends up will be better than being blown up. Fortunately, the gateway cycles to the nearby Romulan ship, which Picard figures is better than nothing. By this point, the Romulans have computer failure so bad that their ship is going to blow itself up, and the commander doesn't feel shooting Picard is even worth the effort. He's beamed off when ''Enterprise'' detects his signal. |
| 150 | * ''Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine'': In the epiosde "[[Recap/StarTrekDeepSpaceNineS02E06Melora Melora]]" the criminal Fallit hijacks a runabout, taking Dax and Melora hostage along with Quark. He orders Dax to jump to warp. She objects that they have to set a course first otherwise they might collide with an astronomical object of some sort. His response is basically fine, set any course and take us to warp now. |
| 151 | [[/folder]] |
| 152 | |
| 153 | [[folder:Tabletop Games]] |
| 154 | * ''TabletopGame/{{GURPS}}'' counts this as an advantage over normal teleportation as it means you can at least ''try'' to go anywhere in the universe even if you've never been there before. |
| 155 | * In the RPG ''TabletopGame/SeventhSea'', the teleportation school of magic involves crossing over into Hell, walking a while, then coming back out. Every jump has to be a literal blind jump : if you open your eyes while you're in Hell, you either go insane or you get killed in a variety of grisly ways by the inhabitants. |
| 156 | ** Porte mages also require an "anchor" where the exit point will appear that they walk through the other side to get to. A porte mage finds walking to the exit point harder if they have other people that they are guiding with them. A more fitting example of this trope in action would be the escape of [[EveryoneCallsHimBarkeep The General]] when rescuing Enrique Orduno from being burned at the stake by the inquisition. He had hired his former first mate, Timmy [=LeBeau=], and a large number of porte mages to tear open a hole large enough for his ship to sail through. The General, Orduno, and his entire crew went in when there was no way any porte mage could have guided the whole ship to an exit point. There were rumors the ship had found its way out someplace far in the Western Sea, but the game line died before the plot could be resolved. |
| 157 | * ''TabletopGame/{{Traveller}}'' discourages blind jumps because of how the Jump Drive works - it creates a pocket universe in a gravity bubble, shunts to the next destination (measured in parsecs), and then collapses and lets you out. Blindly jumping is a waste of fuel, since odds are good you won't get very far (if the bubble passes through a gravity well, it pops and you get kicked out). |
| 158 | * This is a terrible, terrible idea in ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}'', where FTLTravel involves [[HyperspaceIsAScaryPlace passing through Hell]]. Without a Navigator able to use the Astronomicon as a psychic lighthouse, you're more likely to get lost in the Warp than survive to get lost in deep space. The kicker is that the Astronomicon is only ten thousand years old, and the Navigator caste not much older - yet even without them, mankind still managed to colonize a quarter of the galaxy through brief, insanely risky "hops" through the Warp. |
| 159 | ** The twist is that the Warp is not just unstable, but it's instability is unstable. Humanity formed its first empire when the Warp was relatively stable, allowing fairly safe navigation even without the Astronomicon. It was only later that it became particularly unstable and isolated most human worlds until the Emperor came along. |
| 160 | ** There is one faction that uses Blind Jumps extensively, and indeed exclusively: the [[OurOrcsAreDifferent Orks]] never developed proper Warp engines, but instead get around by hitchhiking on Space Hulks, giant amalgamations of derelict spaceships and other debris that drift through the Warp to randomly appear in realspace. Whenever the Orks' Wyrdboyz detect one's imminent arrival, the greenskins build a fleet of their own ramshackle ships and board the Space Hulk, using it as a flagship that draws the rest of the fleet into the Warp with it when it disappears. The Orks can't control where they're going when traveling in this matter, but it doesn't matter, [[BloodKnight since they'll happily fight whatever they find when they get there.]] |
| 161 | * In most versions of ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'', the mid-range teleport spell Dimension Door can damage you if you accidentally teleport into a solid object, or trap you between dimensions. There's a variety of mishaps for the longer-range Teleport spell, most of which involve teleporting into "thematically similar" places. (For instance, if you try to teleport into a tower you're not very familiar with, you might teleport into ''another'' tower, which could be ''very far'' from where you wanted to go. Or you could explode.) Most systems also have an aversion, called either Greater Teleport or [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Teleport Without Error]], which is higher-level but can't screw up. |
| 162 | * In ''Tabletopgame/BattleTech'', the Kearny-Fuchida drive can sometimes malfunction from age, poor maintenance, or attempts to recharging it too quickly. In the [[Franchise/BattleTechExpandedUniverse expanded universe]] novel ''Far Country'', the KF drive on a [=JumpShip=] malfunctions, totaling the ship and stranding it an unknown system that contains a pre-technology sapient species, [[AbsentAliens the only such in the game's universe]]. |
| 163 | * Traditional tabletop game ''Xia: Legends of a Drift System'' features a randomly generated star map, done by drawing and laying tiles. Moving to the edge of a tile gives the player two options: safely scan the next sector (which ends the player's movement), or continue the move and risk a blind jump. Seeing as the titular drift system has asteroid fields, derelict graveyards, six planets, and the star Xia itself, this can be a very risky proposition indeed. |
| 164 | [[/folder]] |
| 165 | |
| 166 | [[folder:Video Games]] |
| 167 | * In ''VideoGame/{{Anachronox}}'', Anachronox is an artificial planet created by a long-dead race that serves as a transportation hub for the entire galaxy. Sender Spikes are able to warp any ship that approaches them to a companion Spike at the destination, and vice versa. One NPC you meet makes a living testing Spikes that haven't been used, a dangerous occupation since there's no guide as to where these Spikes send ships, no guarantee that the companion Spike will still be there, or even that the destination won't be immediately fatal. Late in the game, the crew attempt to use a Spike only to have its position disrupted by a shockwave, flinging their ship to parts unknown. Lucky for them, they happened upon a planet. |
| 168 | * In ''VideoGame/EndlessSky'', pressing the Jump key with no hyperspace destination will have the game pick an exit route for you at random. The developers describe it as this trope; a panic button used when anywhere else is better than the system you're in. |
| 169 | * The superhero-themed game ''VideoGame/GeminiHeroesReborn'' have it's hero Cassandra's psychic powers manifesting for the first time, in the form of teleportation, but she inexplicably teleports too far from the facility she's infiltrating and into her school's ''gym'', and must find a way to port back. |
| 170 | * In ''VideoGame/SpaceRangers'', the black holes which sometimes appear at the edge of the systems allow you to make a fuel-free jump to another star system. At the cost of having to fight the enemies inside the black hole's space and ending up in an unpredictable location (in a system that's 50 parsecs deep into the enemy territory, for example). |
| 171 | * The Unfocused Jumpdrive in ''[[VideoGame/{{X}} X3: Terran Conflict]]'' and its ExpansionPack allows ships to jump off the PortalNetwork grid. Most the time, it dumps ships near rogue asteroids in intergalactic space. The sectors are randomly generated, sometimes have [[AIIsACrapshoot Xenon]] or Kha'ak patrols, always have enough energy cells floating around for a return trip, and are the only way to find the one-of-a-kind Goner Aran mothership. Of note is that the Unfocused Jumpdrive is only installed on the player's current ship; if they use it on a carrier or frigate and launch fighters before jumping out, the fighters will be stranded in intergalactic space and therefore considered destroyed. |
| 172 | * The Arilou skiff in ''VideoGame/StarControl 2'' has an 'emergency hyperspace shunt', an application of this trope to the standard hyperdrive. It immediately teleports away from danger but the jump is random, and the ship can end up emerging anywhere on the screen including inside a planet or other ship. This was probably inspired by the original 1979 ''VideoGame/{{Asteroids}}'' arcade cabinet which had a similar feature for desperate situations. |
| 173 | * Hyperdrives in ''[[VideoGame/{{Elite}} Frontier: Elite II]]'' could be forced to mis-jump to a completely random location in deep space. This puts incredible strain on the engines, occasionally turning your hyperdrive into scrap metal. It's useful for shaking off pursuers, as a mis-jump can't be tracked. |
| 174 | * ''Franchise/{{Halo}}'': |
| 175 | ** In ''VideoGame/HaloCombatEvolved'', the ''Pillar Of Autumn'' did a blind jump to escape Reach, stumbling upon the titular Halo and setting the events of the first game in motion. The tie-in novel ''Literature/HaloTheFallOfReach'', however, reveals that Cortana had secretly used untested coordinates from a [[{{Precursors}} Forerunner]] artifact instead, which is also implied in the prequel game ''VideoGame/HaloReach''. |
| 176 | ** The UNSC actually has a law (referred to as "The Cole Protocol") requiring all human ships to do this if they run into a Covenant ship; they must purge all navigational data and, if forced to retreat, make a random jump so as to not lead the Covenant to Earth or any other still functional colony. Cortana still technically followed the law, given that the Forerunner coordinates weren't for a human world. Obviously, the Cole Protocol became null at the beginning of ''VideoGame/{{Halo 2}}'', when the Covenant found Earth anyways. |
| 177 | * In ''VideoGame/AlphaMan'', it is generally not a good idea to short-range teleport into an area you haven't mapped out yet. Alternatively, if you teleport ''into a wall that's in plain sight'', it probably qualifies as YetAnotherStupidDeath. |
| 178 | * In ''VideoGame/MassEffect2'', the Normandy SR-2 uses this trick at least once to escape an enemy attack - though only on one occasion does a character specifically state that there is no course plotted. [[JustifiedTrope Justified]] as the ship is run by an AI who could plot a course to an acceptable location without constant instruction if necessary. |
| 179 | ** From the backstory, it is forbidden to open a [[PortalNetwork mass relay]] before having found the other side through normal exploration. This is because one such Blind Jump once [[BugWar unleashed the Rachni on the galaxy]]. The First Contact War was also started because the humans were transgressing this rule ([[DisproportionateRetribution without knowing about it]]). |
| 180 | * This might be why VideoGame/{{Mega Man|Classic}} can't simply teleport straight to the boss room. Since he has no information about the area, he sets down in the first safe area to be found. ''VideoGame/MegaManPoweredUp'' hangs a lampshade on it by having Mega Man activate checkpoint flags as he passes. |
| 181 | * A perfectly valid method of exploration in the ''VideoGame/{{Submachine}}'' series of Flash games. It's even mentioned in some of the in-game texts that entering random numbers is the last resort for the lost or confused. However, since the player is supposed to figure everything out for oneself, don't expect to actually get anywhere with this method. |
| 182 | * ''VideoGame/DungeonCrawl'': The Teleport scroll will warp the caster to a random square on the current floor. It's up to chance whether the destination is more dangerous than the starting point. |
| 183 | * The backstory to the ''VideoGame/MasterOfOrion'' series, [[AllThereInTheManual presented in the manual for the third game]], has the {{Precursors}} first sending criminals in blind jumps through an unstable wormhole, then later having to evacuate themselves in the same manner when doing has caused their star to become unstable. In addition, the precursors themselves were actually composed of a variety of different races who all ended up in a single central system due to blind jumps in the other direction. |
| 184 | * ''VideoGame/EveOnline'' invokes this trope both as intentional uses and accidents. |
| 185 | ** When a user logs out in space without docking to a station, the ship will try to initiate an emergency warp to a random spot 1 million km away from the current location. If the ship's warp drive is functioning, it will warp out and disappear 60 seconds later. If the warp drive is disrupted by warp disruptors or [[NoWarpingZone interdiction fields]], the ship will stay there for 15 minutes to be pounded to death. Super-capital ships that are facing certain destruction usually accept the latter because they are designed to shrug off obscene amounts of pounding anyway. |
| 186 | ** The chronicle article of the solar system Old Man Star depicts this trope as a disaster. A construction ship, ordered to build a new star gate in an obscure system, suffers a drive malfunction which sends it into the middle of an uncharted asteroid field. This tears the life support system apart, disables both the warp drive and sub light engines, and kills four out of five crew members. The remaining crew member drifts 44 years to the destination, spending the time inventing ingenious drone designs to replace the ship's lost construction equipment. He finally returns to Gallente Federation space through a star gate he built all by himself. Renaming the system "Old Man Star" is the least the Federation could do in his honor. |
| 187 | ** Partly averted in actual play. Aside from logging off, it's impossible to jump without setting a specific destination. However, it is possible to set a destination further away than your maximum range, which will result in you dropping out of your jump in the middle of nowhere. It's also possible to set waypoints in the middle of a jump, which you can then use as a destination. Technically your own jump therefore isn't blind, but it's close enough that the chance of someone else ending up in the same place by accident is essentially zero. |
| 188 | *** Also an example of AllThereInTheManual, with the background fluff explaining how the warp drive requires a mass signature to lock on to, so jumps to planets and space stations are fine but you can't just go to a random point in space. How players are able to warp to waypoints set at random points in space is not explained, however. |
| 189 | * ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'' has an artifact called "The Last Relic of Argus", from the world where the Eredar lived. When Velen led his Draenei faction from Argus before the [[TheLegionsOfHell Burning Legion]] took over the planet, he took it with him. The artifact will teleport you to a series of randomized locations that could be anywhere on Azeroth. The flavor text reads "Teleports you exactly where you want to go... if you aren't too picky." Notably, this allowed Paladins, who had recently received a nerf to their "[[ScrewThisImOuttaHere Bubble Hearth]]" escape strategy (Divine Shield was no longer able to stay up for the entire duration of casting your Hearthstone), to still execute the trick using the relic instead, albeit only once every 12 hours. |
| 190 | * Played with in ''VideoGame/EarthAndBeyond''. All ships were equipped with thrusters for normal flight and warp drives for traveling around larger distances. Warping could be done in 2 methods; traveling by "autopilot" along a programmed course between navigation points, or "free warping" by pointing your ship in the direction you want to go and activating your warp drive. Using navigation points required only an initial energy drain on your reactor and then you could fly indefinitely until you reached your target, which did not have to be along a straight line. Free warping however pulled a constant drain on your reactor thereby limiting the distance you could travel, and there was no ability to turn while in free warp. Free warping was useful for making quick escapes from dangerous situations without opening your map to plot a course, and could be used to discover nav points that were too far from main routes for most sensors to detect. |
| 191 | ** A somewhat lesser example that applies to story only was in the Ancient Gates. When humans discovered them and started to open them they had no idea where they would lead. A few were opened during the course of the game giving access to new high level zones. |
| 192 | * ''VideoGame/JediStarfighter'': Reti, an ally of the main characters is forced to make a blind jump into hyperspace to escape when Jango Fett comes after him for the bounty on his head. It's never revealed if Reti survived, with some of his allies going to look for him at the end. |
| 193 | * ''VideoGame/{{Stellaris}}'': This is how ships flee from combat in later versions. Once they successfully warp out of a hostile system, the ships are considered MIA as they go dark to make their way back to the capital outside of the usual hyperspace lanes. |
| 194 | [[/folder]] |
| 195 | |
| 196 | [[folder:Visual Novels]] |
| 197 | * ''VisualNovel/FaultMilestoneOne'': The story begins with [[spoiler:the MainCharacters doing a magical equivalent of a Blind Jump to escape the invaders]]. |
| 198 | [[/folder]] |
| 199 | |
| 200 | [[folder:Web Original]] |
| 201 | * The short film "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8LD0iUYv80 FTL]]". A pilot tests the first FTL-capable spacecraft. His first jump is textbook, and he arrive to Mars in under 3 minutes. However, during the jump back, something goes wrong, and the ship enters an uncontrolled jump. The vessel drops out near something that looks like a series of ringworlds, surrounding a star (possibly a DysonSphere in the process of being constructed). The ship is heavily damaged. Two strange crystalline/energy beings/probes fly up to the craft and scan it. The pilot is disintegrated, while staring at the photo of his wife and son. Almost a day later, mission control detects a wormhole opening in Earth's orbit. The same two being/probe come out of it and make a beeline for the pilot's home. They rematerialize him in his backyard and depart, while he embraces his wife and son, who thought he was dead. |
| 202 | * The Website/SCPFoundation has [[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-301 SCP-301]], a region 3 meters in diameter located in the middle of a national park. Any physical matter that enters 301 temporarily disappears from existence, then reappears in another location. When two Foundation agents accidentally entered the region, one was sent to a desolate desert and the other ended up in an area of deep water. |
| 203 | [[/folder]] |
| 204 | |
| 205 | [[folder:Western Animation]] |
| 206 | * In ''WesternAnimation/GreenLanternTheAnimatedSeries'', the crew is very wary of using the ship's Ultra-Warp drive when they don't have [[SpaceshipGirl Aya]] to make the proper calculations. The drive is many times more powerful than a standard hyperdrive which makes computer-assisted precision all the more necessary. They end up trying it twice. The first time, they nearly flew into a star. The second, they came very close to crashing into a planet, but at least it was the right one. |
| 207 | * This is how the Megas in ''WesternAnimation/MegasXLR'', originally stolen in Earth orbit in the far future, ended up in Jersey City in 1930. Though it was not originally a blind jump, but ends up that way because Megas got its head blown off while setting course. |
| 208 | * ''WesternAnimation/StarWarsResistance'': In [[Recap/StarWarsResistanceS1E20NoEscapePartII "No Escape, Part II"]], [[spoiler:although Kaz gives Neeku the coordinates to D'Qar to program the Colossus' hyperdrive, Neeku runs out of time and only puts in part of the coordinates. Kaz and Yeager are less than thrilled when they find out that they ultimately have no idea where the Colossus is going to end up.]] |
| 209 | [[/folder]] |
| 210 | |
| 211 | [[folder:Real Life]] |
| 212 | * Averted by the only physically permissible (more-or-less) way of FTL proposed so far, the AlcubierreDrive, because there's no hyperspace involved at all, instead, a vessel is accelerated within its own spacetime bubble. The whole setup is possible because the ship itself remains stationary relative to the bubble, and [[LoopholeAbuse there's no reason]] (that we know of) why the closed ''zone of space'' (instead of material object) cannot move faster than light. It is, however, inherently dangerous to any place the ship ''arrives to'', because all space debris, high-energy particles, electromagnetic emissions and so on get trapped in the front face of the bubble, and ''continue their FTL movement'' as the bubble stops, [[KillItWithfire incinerating everything in front of the ship]]. |
| 213 | [[/folder]] |
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