The ship employs a Master of Fandom? (Not a Secret Master, obviously; they’re too hard to recruit.)
I once had a chat with Dan Alderson (1941–89) about his “tramlines” (as he called them). They follow gradients of the “fifth force” field; traversible tramlines pass through saddle-points (because potential energy must be conserved). The fifth force is generated by stars in proportion to some power of their luminosity. So, to a rough approximation and with some simplifying assumptions, a traversible tramline exists between two stars if there is no point on the line between them at which some third star appears brighter. Thus they join neighboring stars, not random ones (like wormholes in the Barrayar universe).
The ship employs a Master of Fandom? (Not a Secret Master, obviously; they’re too hard to recruit.)
I once had a chat with Dan Alderson (1941–89) about his “tramlines” (as he called them). They follow gradients of the “fifth force” field; traversible tramlines pass through saddle-points (because potential energy must be conserved). The fifth force is generated by stars in proportion to some power of their luminosity. So, to a rough approximation and with some simplifying assumptions, a traversible tramline exists between two stars if there is no point on the line between them at which some third star appears brighter. Thus they join neighboring stars, not random ones (like wormholes in the Barrayar universe).