Jump shock

A Jump shock or Jump blindness refers to the sensor distortion effect caused by the transiting through a jump point. The tremendous energies involved in a jump transit causes fire controls and active sensors to stop functioning for an amount of time after the jump has been conducted. A squadron transit will cause blindness for 11-30 seconds and a regular or jump gate transit will cause blindness for 121-180 seconds. The jump shock period can be reduced by the ship crew grade training for each ship.

Jump shock is a big part of why you'd want to perform squadron transits, since the blindness period is so much lower. If you know for sure the far side of the jump point is safe, a standard transit will suffice. Also, note that Engines are not affected by Jump shock, so ships can still move immediately after jumping.

Detailed Example

The jump blindness period can be reduced by crew training. First, the grade multiplier is calculated (the multiplier is basically 100% - the ship's grade bonus): Multiplier = 1 - (integer_part(sqrt(grade_points) - 10) / 100). As an example, UNS Berlin has 881.3 grade points due to its accumulated training (not task force training, which is different). Thus its multiplier is 1 - (integer_part(sqrt(881.3) - 10) / 100) = 0.81.

The delay is then calculated. For squadron transits, the base delay is 10 seconds + a random number between 1 and 20 seconds. For a standard transit, the base delay is 120 seconds + a random number between 1 and 60 seconds. This is then multiplied by the multiplier above. Thus, for a squadron transit, the delay is anywhere between 11 and 30 seconds (121 - 180 seconds for a standard transit), and then multiplied by multiplier.

For the Berlin, with its multiplier of 0.81 delay would be between 9 seconds and 24 seconds (98 - 146 seconds for standard). Remember that the max grade bonus of a ship is 34%, so the minimum multiplier would be 0.66, and thus the minimum possible delay time for a squadron transit is 7.26 (round up to 8) seconds (80 seconds for standard). Since the game basically can't proceed in intervals less than 5 seconds, the practical minimum delay for a squadron transit is 10 seconds. Note that in those ten seconds, bad guys on the emergence side of the jump point can be lighting you up.

Reference

• Jump blindness psuedo code, by Steve Walmsley, 2010.