Clearly whatever effects there might be are long accounted for for normal impeller/sail powered ships in hyper -- their nav errors just aren't wildly off; they're generally tiny fractions of a percent error. (Compared to the distance they travel through hyper) And we know that ships sometimes do have to change hyper bands to either stick to economically favorable grav waves or to dive under turbulent areas -- and we've heard nothing about that any significant impact to navigation by doing so.tlb wrote:I am not sure if that matters to a ship that in traveling in a single band (except for going to or coming from normal-space). But if a rogue wave is encountered that required a shift to another band for some time, on return (without a position check in N-space) the assumed position might be wildly off.
Another case we that could be significant would be a ship with streak drive trying to catch a ship with a head start, but a normal hyper-generator. Assuming the heading was known, when the chase ship drops down to intercept, the slower ship might be nowhere to be seen.
And for spider drives, the Sharks had no problems worth mentioning in getting to their planned insertion point a light-month from Manticore. Now we don't know how accurately they hit it (they did have a ton of margin if they needed it); but I'd think if the spider drive was significantly less accurate in hyper navigation it would have been mentioned as an issue. (Though we've been told so little about it that maybe it just hasn't come up)
Still, the way those drive normally work, each emitter seems to grab for a very short period of time. Just enough to impart a slight pull on the ship before it releases to grab the next anchor point. So if the anchor points moved relative to you that movement would have very little time to affect the ship. Such hypothetical anchor movement seems to me to only be an issue if you did a static hold for some long period.
As for a ship disappearing on your if you try to overfly it using a streak drive -- well that's kind of likely anyway. We don't know how much extra velocity gets bled off going into the Kappa band (though odds are it's around 44%) but the 'speed by hyper band' chart RFC provided shows that just cracking the Iota wall robs a ship of 48% of its velocity (and it'll lose that again coming back down). So while the velocity multiplier in the Iota bands is 20% higher than in the Theta ones the ship'll have to spend significant time working back up towards their previous velocity before that additional velocity multiplier helps enough to let them overtake the estimated position of their quarry. If the other ship was at all aware of the pursuit it would change course or just drop to some other hyper band as soon as the pursuer disappeared -- making it almost impossible to find by the time the pursuer returned.
(And due to the 48% velocity drop dropping back into the Theta bands it wouldn't have to alter course much for the, now slower, pursuer to be unable to pull of an intercept despite dropping out somewhat ahead of their targets estimated position) You can successfully play cat and mouse games to avoid a single pursuer for a long time even if they can access hyper bands that you can't. (All this assuming that you both have the same top speeds -- but if they could go faster than you then they'd likely have just run you down normally, not tried to get the jump by emerging along your projected path)