View source for Psycho-navigation

if you are not considering making a psycho-navigator (obviously a points issue) and if you don't feel like you'll be able to leave this information out of character (or if you just prefer not to know), please don't read this section, it is NOT common knowledge in the Gemini, and is basically known only by practitioners of psycho-navigation (the history part of it is not known really even by many of them).<br>

Psycho-navigation as a concept is inspired both by the book "light" by M. John Harrison and the astro-navigators of WH40K.  

The discovery of K-tech led, among many other things, to the discovery of drives that could manipulate extra spatial and temporal dimensions beyond those previously known.  Although such additional dimensions had been postulated theoretically, K-tech for the first time permitted humans to manipulate these dimensions, notably for the purposes of long range communication and travel.  Although the story is long and complex, eventually humans managed to develop advanced enough AIs to navigate these dimensions and use these drives to make "space-jumps", in which huge distances were covered in a very small amount of time.  However, the time required for even these computers to make the necessary calculations was on the order of days to weeks, and it was thus still of limited practical use.<br>
A major breakthrough came with the development of beacons: beacons were capable of using sub-space (ie, multi-dimensional) communication to set up established routes which could vastly shorten the required calculation time.  Of course, travel to areas without beacons continued to be problematic, or travel to areas supported by beacons to which a given ship did not have access.  <br>
Around the same time as beacon development, an unusual group of people, called psycho-navigators, were beginning to be discovered.  These individuals are so few and far between that what makes them special has not yet been identified: the bottom line is that they are capable of performing a discipline called "intuitional mathematics".  In short, intuitional mathematics is based on the rather illogical premise of solving an equiation before all the data is in: in this respect, it is a form of calculated precognition.  The second factor which is crucial to psycho-navigation is the ability to interact closely with the AI solving the space jump equation, and to "follow along" with the computer's math: to an outsider, the best explanation is that while the AI does the grunt work, when the computer encounters a problem that takes a particularly long time to process and gather data for, the psycho-navigator steps in and simply selects one of the possible outcomes.  To any other person, often even to the navigator him/herself, it appears as if the selection is totally random, but 90+% of the time, the selection leads to a correct solution of the problem.  The result is that psycho-navigators can shorten the time to calculate a space jump to hours, or even minutes under pressure and with a little luck, even to locations without beacons.