History Main / BlindJump

** 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.

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

* 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 [[{{Intangibility}} Shadowcat]] with him, and her powers were able to get them out of the rock safely, in severe pain but with no lasting harm.

[[folder:Anime]]

*** ''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.
** ''Anime/{{Macross 7}}'': 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.

* 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.]]

* 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 [[{{Intangibility}} Shadowcat]] with him, and her powers were able to get them out of the rock safely, in severe pain but with no lasting harm.

* The plot of ''ComicBook/TransformersMoreThanMeetsTheEye'' 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.]]
*** [[spoiler: They actually repeat this in the finale 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 begining their voyage in a universe they know nothing about...]] ]]
* In an early issue of ''ComicBook/StarWarsMarvel1977'', 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.

[[folder:Fanfiction]]

** 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 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.

[[folder:Film — Animated]]

[[folder:Film — Live-Action]]

** And then in ''Film/TheForceAwakens'', 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.

A subtrope of the HyperspeedEscape. Not to be confused with LeapOfFaith, in which one literally jumps to an unseen landing point. Compare RandomTransportation.

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

** ''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: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]].]]

** 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 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".

** 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]].

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

* ''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 ''Franchise/StarWars'', it's stated (see the quote above) that ships must perform precise calculations before jumping to light speed, but there are exceptions.
** In ''Film/ANewHope'', Han Solo has the ''Milennium Falcon'' make an emergency jump to escape a Star Destroyer when her DeflectorShields start to collapse.

** ''{{Literature/Nemesis}}'': A blind jump isn't dangerous because in this version of FTLTravel, in an emergency, any obstacles are harmlessly pushed aside.

* 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 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.

* In an early issue of the original ComicBook/MarvelStarWars, 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.

** 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. What with this being ''[[CrapsackWorld 40k]]'' it's strongly implied that this was humanity's own fault, since the Warp reflects violence in the real world and humanity went through various civil wars and a RobotWar leading up to it.

*** 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.

** [[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, reasonign 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.

** [[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.

* In ''Disney/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 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.