History Main / BlindJump

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** [[Comicbook/XWingSeries Gavin Darklighter]] once escaped from a Star Destroyer trap this way, unfortunately highlighting a lesser-known danger of the whole process: now he has no clue where he is, and he's low on fuel.
** The ''[[Literature/TheThrawnTrilogy Katana]]'' [[Literature/TheThrawnTrilogy 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.

** ''Literature/{{Foundation}}'': 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.

*** ''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. It's InUniverse TechnologyMarchesOn; Trevize is using a new, much more powerful computer that is no longer subject to the limitations of older technology.
*** And 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.
*** And in the second Foundation trilogy, 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.

** Subverted in ''The Stars Like Dust''. 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:Later, however, [[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 truth: 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]].]]

** ''Film/TheRiseOfSkywalker'' takes this UpToEleven with Hyperspace Skipping: thanks to the Hyperspace Tracking that debuted in ''Film/TheLastJedi'', to escape some TIE Fighters he has to make multiple blind jumps to random locations. He pulls it off, but arrives at the Resistance base with the Falcon on fire.

* 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 beckons. Still, there are massive Explorer Class ships who's 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.

* In ''Film/StarWars'', it's stated (see the quote above) that ships must perform precise calculations before jumping to light speed, but there are exceptions.

Naturally the heroes will make it. 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.

* 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. [[CrowningMomentOfHeartwarming They rematerialize him in his backyard and depart]], while he embraces his wife and son, who thought he was dead.

** ''Literature/{{Foundation}}'': 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.
*** In ''Literature/FoundationAndEmpire'', while escaping the Mule after the fall of Haven, Toran desperately does hyperspace jumps without proper planning. One time the group almost ends up inside a red giant star.
*** A later book has Golan Trevize be surprised that a ship has plotted out a course involving twenty-eight hyper space jumps since this means they can't pause to fine-tune the calculations on the way.
*** This is most likely a case of TechnologyMarchesOn. The original trilogy was written in the '40s and '50s, when computers weren't really a thing. The later books in the {{trilogy|Creep}} were written in the '80s when excessively long calculation times for routine navigation were starting to seem a bit silly. It's made clear that Trevize is using a new, much more powerful computer that is no longer subject to the limitations of older technology.
*** Possibly to set up Toran and group's blind jumps in the second half of ''Foundation and Empire'', the climax of the first half features a blind jump away from near-Trantor orbit. It isn't actually ''that'' risky, 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 they then have to spend quite some time poring over starcharts until they get enough of an idea of their location to set a course for home. Also, the gravity field makes the jump very unpleasant - the pilot he gets a severe headache while his older companion passes out from pain. At least they get clear.

* In ''Disney/LiloAndStitch'', Stitch faces recapture after stealing a police cruiser ("Yeah, he took the red one") so 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 took him to a habitable planet that just happened to be a [[InsignificantLittleBluePlanet mosquito preserve]], which severely limited what the Grand Councilwoman could do in terms of recapturing him. Unfortunately, he landed on an island, and he can't swim. It was a very near thing. He almost landed in the water itself.

-->-- '''Han Solo''', ''[[Film/ANewHope Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope]]''

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* ''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...]]

* The Franchise/StarWarsExpandedUniverse 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.
** ''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.
** 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.
** [[Comicbook/XWingSeries Gavin Darklighter]] once escaped from a Star Destroyer trap this way, unfortunately highlighting a lesser-known danger of the whole process: now he has no clue where he is, and he's low on fuel.
** The ''[[Literature/TheThrawnTrilogy Katana]]'' [[Literature/TheThrawnTrilogy 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.
*** 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.
* 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]].
** 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]].
** 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.
*** They also use a teleporter without setting a destination, the alternative was crashing into a sun.
* Creator/AndreNorton:
** ''Literature/UnchartedStars''. 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.
** 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.
* Creator/RobertAHeinlein.
** ''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.
** ''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.
* 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).
* In [=McCaffrey=]'s [[Literature/TowerAndTheHive Talent]] universe, 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".

* 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.]]

* In Bob Shaw's novel ''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]].
* 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 [[AuthorExistenceFailure 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''.
* 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.
* 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.
* The ''Literature/WarWorld'' series has the last ship full of Saurons, malevolent SuperSoldiers, escape to a backwater PrisonPlanet by making a blind jump.

* 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.
* 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.
** 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.
*** 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.
* 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.

* 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.
** 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.
* 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.
* ''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.
* ''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.
* 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!.
* 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 misscheduled passenger shuttle, killing hundreds and leaving the populace more uncooperative.]]
* 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.

* 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 the destination was random Geralt spends the rest of the series searching everywhere for her.

* The story of ''[[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.
* 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:
** 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.
** 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 {{AI}} 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]].

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* The CoolShip in ''Series/{{Farscape}}'' had the 'Starburst Drive', a sort of space-folding jump drive which was always blind, with no way to choose a destination AND even a small jump invalidates all previous navigation points. Fortunately there were other means of getting around if it wasn't crucial to leave quickly.
* ''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 [[spoiler: Admiral Cain and the ''Pegasus'' escape the initial Cylon attack.]] In the finale, [[spoiler: Starbuck, not that that should be much of a surprise,]] 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.]]

* In the new-era ''Series/DoctorWho'' Series 4 finale, "The Stolen Earth"/"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.
** The classic-era episode "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.
** 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 first time they use it, nothing too bad happens to them. The second time, 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.]]
* 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 beckons. Still, there are massive Explorer Class ships who's 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.

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* 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.

** ''Literature/UnchartedStars''. To escape pursuit by Jacks (space pirates), the protagonists must make a hyperspace jump using untested coordinates from a [[{{Precursors}} Forerunner]] artifact that they hope will take them where they want to go.

* 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 protagonists, 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.

* ''VisualNovel/FaultMilestoneOne'': The story begins with [[spoiler:the protagonists doing a magical equivalent of a Blind Jump to escape the invaders]].

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.

A subtrope of the HyperspeedEscape. Not to be confused with LeapOfFaith, which is a video game trope. Compare RandomTeleportation

** Subverted in ''The Stars Like Dust''. 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:Later, however, [[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'''. The protagonist, on hearing this, realizes the truth: 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]].]]

** Subverted in ''The Stars Like Dust''. 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:Later, however, [[IdiotBall the same character who made that assumption]] boasts that the other characters 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'''. The protagonist, on hearing this, realizes the truth: 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]].]]

** Subverted in ''The Stars Like Dust''. 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 my a small meteorite; it's assumed that said meteorite interfered with the ship's gyroscope, resulting in an accidental Blind Jump. [[spoiler:Later, however, [[IdiotBall the same character who made that assumption]] boasts that the other characters 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'''. The protagonist, on hearing this, realizes the truth: 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]].]]

* Creator/IsaacAsimov's ''Literature/{{Foundation}}'' series:
** 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.
** In ''Literature/FoundationAndEmpire'', while escaping the Mule after the fall of Haven, Toran desperately does hyperspace jumps without proper planning. One time the group almost ends up inside a red giant star.
** A later book has Golan Trevize be surprised that a ship has plotted out a course involving twenty-eight hyper space jumps since this means they can't pause to fine-tune the calculations on the way.

** Possibly to set up Toran and group's blind jumps in the second half of ''Foundation and Empire'', the climax of the first half features a blind jump away from near-Trantor orbit. It isn't actually ''that'' risky, 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 they then have to spend quite some time poring over starcharts until they get enough of an idea of their location to set a course for home. Also, the gravity field makes the jump very unpleasant - the pilot he gets a severe headache while his older companion passes out from pain. At least they get clear.
** And in the second Foundation trilogy, 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.
* Asimov later averts this with ''Nemesis'': the local [[{{FTL Travel}} FTL technobabble]] is set up in such a way that you can't kill yourself with a blind jump since on emergency, any obstacles are harmlessly pushed aside.
* 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...

* In ''Disney/LiloAndStitch'', Stitch uses this to escape recapture. Fortunately, his jump took him to a habitable planet that just happened to be a [[InsignificantLittleBluePlanet mosquito preserve]], which severely limited what the Grand Councilwoman could do in terms of recapturing him. Unfortunately, he landed on an island, and he can't swim.

* 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 misscheduled passenger shuttle, killing hundreds and leaving the populace more uncooperative.]]

* 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 loosing engine power will cause you to drift away from the navigation beckons. Still, there are massive Explorer Class ships who's job it is to build new jumpgates and the nav beckons 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.

** The manual to the ''VideoGame/HaloCombatEvolved'' mentions that 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''.

* The story of ''[[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, 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 same settings will always lead to the same destination, and nobody who has tried changing the navigation settings in mid-flight has ever returned.