Navigation

Galactic Navigation is an entire discipline in the Merchant Marine Academy, the Naval Academy, their local counterparts across the galaxy, and the high learning institutions of every star system.

The basic hazards:

1) Wormholes open in real time.

2) They must be line of sight. ie; they cannot curve.

3) therefore they must avoid gravity wells.

4) the speed of light is infinitely sluggish vs instant wormhole transit time.

5) Every object in the galaxy is moving at high speed, relative to a point fixed in space.

6) therefore, where your sensors perceive a mass object is, is actually *where it WAS* when it's light began its journey.

A given star 10 ly away, has drifted an extreme distance in the 10 years the light has travelled from it's prior location to your current location. Every navigation hazard between and near here and there could have drifted into dangerous proximity to your wormhole's course.

Navigation computers are large and the databases within them are premium valuable information. Plotting the drift of every object, every asteroid and larger in the galaxy, is critical to avoiding catastrophic wrecks throughout the galaxy.

The Galactic Stellar Navigation Corps collects fresh data from every navigation computer in the galaxy after every jump. It updates its records, feeds free updates to every starship in system, and ensures that information passes downstream through every wormhole station and starship in the galaxy.

Hence, a significant amount of data feed is passed from starships to stations at all times, updating ship's navigation charts and holos to the most current and accurate information available when the navigator enters any given jump coordinates. Due to this, the accident rate has steadily declined in the decades since StarSys took over the network from the Xardian hosts.

Tenublians have a knack for filtering all the relavent data from the navigation computer faster and more accurately than other species, thanks to their naturally networked mind of multiple brain lobes.

It is a high crime under penalty of immediate execution for intentionally causing a navigation hazard which causes a wormhole transit accident.