Wondering what’s going on? Just pop back to the beginning of this short story (only 14 pages) to find out!
Can you spot Zan in the second panel? He’s a wee little speck standing upside-down on the Pathfinder‘s underside. He’s pretty easy to miss, isn’t he?
And, sigh, as carefully as I planned out the distance traveled and the benchmark stars, I have a growing suspicion I will have to change it again. I’m really better off being nice and vague about the scale of the Galaxioverse, it gives me room for flexibility. (You’ll notice how I’ve never pinned down a year when all this takes place, either!)
Tara,
For writing SF stories that unfolds in nearby stars systems, I recommend this wonderful interactive 3D map of the stellar enighborhood.
http://kisd.de/~krystian/starmap/
Hey, that’s pretty neat!
Y’know… I’d go for an outpost too.
Otherwise, assuming the 5 parsecs is correct, they’ve better have *some* kind of FTL already, at least communications, or they’re not likely to see home again any time soon…
It would take 16.3 years for a radio message to reach home, then a litte while to perfect the drive with the new data (assuming they left the project on ice since it appeared to have failed, ship was simply gone afterall), build a good version of it into a ship big enough to carry it, and send it out to rescue them…
And I somehow doubt they’ve got food, water and air for that long. 17 years is a while to be stranded in space.
‘Course, they’ll probably take a little while to get home anyway, because even if they do have fast FTL comms, I assume that any FTL travel they have is slower than the 326 lightyears per hour they just did. (326 ly/hour = 5 parsecs in 3 minutes, which is twice approximate)
They might get to an outpost much sooner though, I don’t know how close that would be, but probably much closer since Zan suggested it.
Actually… it was even faster than I thought. I just did some rereading… And in the “present-time” storyline of the Galaxion’s jump it was mentioned that the Pathfinder actually did 3.5 parsecs in less than 20 seconds, which works out to 2053.8 lightyears per hour.
That is the same as travelling the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy in less than 48.7 hours (just a tad more than two days).
As Anna said when it was mentioned, hard to imagine.
It’s an order of magnitude faster than what I calculated above, which came out at under 13 days, which is already very fast in my opinion…
With that kind of speed, I’d assume the current scale of the “empire” is miniscule in comparison, pretty much no matter what kind of FTL they already had…
On the other hand, it’s a jump engine, not a movement engine; for all I know it might be able to go that distance in the same 20 seconds, or at least something closer to that than to the two days.
And that is completely ignoring the possibilities of if it indeed can travel to other dimensions…
Just a note, the “What do you mean, the Solar System is that way?” will likely make it into an e-mail signature
With appropriate link-back, of course 
Actually, I think Zan’s statements here – since they don’t involve actual numbers – might be sufficient for the average reader. Arcturus and Mizar would both still be bright enough stars, though if I were Zan, I’d also be keeping an eye out for Sirius and Vega. Still, nothing to worry about.
This does bring up an interesting question: what kind of FTL travel does TerSA and IP have until now? I’m guessing a variant on Alcubierre’s “warp bubble”, though even the more optimistic energy requirements for that have some serious implications about human civilization in the Galaxioverse…
LOL. “That way.” [points]
Very helpful, Zan.