False Prophet wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2020 11:47 pm
Is there anything such as minimum fold jump distance?
Not in the sense of a limitation in the technology or the physics involved.
Folding is a very energy-intensive process, so it's usually not economical to use a space fold to cover distances of less than a light second or so with humanity's current fold technology.
We have seen folds over shorter distances
in extremis, like when the Macross-7 fleet used fold boosters in a bid to steal/rescue the captured Macross-5 civilian population from Gepernich's spiritia farm by folding the whole spritia farm away. The Protoculture ruins on Uroboros used ultra-short range fold devices to transport people and equipment around as a form of practical personal teleportation.
False Prophet wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2020 11:47 pm
And how exactly long does it takes to transition in or out of a fold jump?
It varies... but it usually seems to take a couple of seconds for a ship executing a fold jump to transition into or out of higher-dimensional space.
On a few occasions, larger warships like mobile fortresses and the like have been shown to take somewhat longer to transition into or out of higher dimensional space. Whether that's just Rule of Drama or what is unclear.
False Prophet wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2020 11:47 pm
I wonder if you can abuse fold jump in space combat?
Depends what you mean by "abuse".
Much of the existing weapons technology in the
Macross setting is built on the higher-dimensional physics of fold technology.
- Super Dimension Energy weaponry, AKA converging beam cannons AKA heavy quantum reaction beam cannons, etc. operate by using fold carbon to produce a form of dimension-straddling matter called heavy quanta that the cannon then excites using fold waves until its immense mass that was trapped in fold space collapses into normal space. The gravitational collapse of the heavy quanta causes it to ignite in a fusion reaction, which the cannon's housing (or focused bending of space-time) directs into a high-velocity fusion plasma beam.
- High-Angle Beam Guns, a form of super dimension energy cannon without a movable turret, bend local space in order to aim the fusion plasma beam.
- Thermonuclear Reaction weapons are pure fusion warheads that use the intense gravity of heavy quanta that's been excited by fold waves to instantly compress hydrogen slush and trigger a fusion detonation.
- Barrier technology is a focused warping of space-time, sort of a "space fold lite".
- Dimension Eaters and their more compact Micro Dimension Eater (MDE) form are literally weaponizing folding, using the superheavy quanta produced by fold quartz to trigger super-intense local gravity that sucks matter into higher-dimensional space after violently crushing it with black hole-like super-intense gravity.
It's perfectly possible to fold in close to an enemy, attack, and fold away before a reprisal strike can arrive... or fold a fighter with reaction warheads into the middle of an enemy formation for a point-blank attack.
False Prophet wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2020 11:47 pm
How hard is it to set up a fold jump-deny area?
Effectively impossible with present technology.
One of the things limiting the strategic utility of space folds is that unless you're folding over very short ranges, it's difficult to be precise about where you're going to come out relative to a moving target. Folding ships can only see the immediate area where they'll defold before emerging from higher-dimensional space, so trying to do something like folding into the middle of a fleet incurs the risk of, say, crashing into another ship immediately thereafter like Quamzin's forces did. It's also very difficult to detect an incoming space fold until the folding ship starts messing with local gravity, so you usually only get a few seconds of advance warning before the ship starts coming out of a fold jump.
False Prophet wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2020 11:47 pm
And what if someone try to sabotage a ship by placing wrong jump coordinate to somewhere, like, say, near a gravity well or the sun? I suppose that ships usually follow established routes with fixed jumping points, so if you try to jump anywhere else, the sirens would sound.
Due to the nature of higher-dimensional space and how space folds operate, there aren't really established routes as such. Ships are forced to work around disruptions in higher dimensional space like fold faults, and the range a ship can fold is dependent on its ability to store energy for its fold system, so not every ship can create a fold of the same length. Some ships might need two or more folds to cover the same distance a more advanced ship might cover in one.
If the ship were traveling to a known, well-mapped destination, messing with the jump calculations might raise a warning. If hazards are detected at the planned defold point the ship might drop out of space fold early to avoid a collision or something of that nature. There are occasionally ships lost when they miscalculate a jump and end up stranded in higher-dimensional space because they didn't have enough energy to return to normal space (this was the cover story for the SDFN-04
General Bruno J. Global's destruction by the Vajra), and there've been other accounts of ships accidentally defolding practically on top of rogue Zentradi forces or simply vanishing. SDF-05
Megaroad-04 found Windermere IV by being forced out of a space fold by an intense fold fault that nearly disabled the ship, which turned out to be the fold fault surrounding Windermere.
Tracing has been a persistent problem in western comics for a very long time now.
Comic book artists work under very tight timing constraints even at the best of times, and the artists working on monthly serialized comics have it especially rough. Art styles in mainstream comics have been trending towards increased levels of detail for decades, so even with newer digital art technologies it takes longer for an artist to draw, ink, and color a single page and they may have to redo pages if the editorial staff doesn't like them. That means some artists - a growing number of them - resort to tracing characters and other things from photographs and other existing art as a way to speed up production or avoid having to spend time developing a new design to be used in one story and then thrown away. Greg Land is one such artist, being notorious for tracing his art from existing art or photographs of toys and models.
Robotech comics published by Academy Comics, Antarctic Press, and Titan Comics are all notorious for blatantly tracing their mecha art from
Macross artbooks, often accidentally using designs Harmony Gold has no rights to. Titan actually got in trouble for stealing far art from a CG modeler and passing it off as their own original take on the VF-1, and eventually paid a license fee to the fan artist in question when he threatened to sue, then abandoned the design because their audience hated it.
On some occasions, it's done as a deliberate homage to some other work the author is particularly fond of instead. Like in the first
Transformers movie, you can see the wreckage of several Gundams in the Quentisson jail, or how several
Macross fans working on
Star Wars titles have slipped
Macross-based designs into the titles they were working on... like the
Clone Wars cartoon using the
Macross's gravity control system as inspiration for the engine room on the
Venator-class Star Destroyer.