In all honesty, I can't say as I blame you for your frustration. The explanation of how to give a jump order sucks scissors sideways. It is possible that a player should know what all the codes in the examples mean, but as my first sergeant use to tell me, "Assumption is the mother of all foul-ups."
What the bleep is a PB or an FF??? (my guess is they are a type of ship like "Patrol Boat" or "Flying Fortress" but they could be anything and there's sure nothing in the section that explains what they are.) Again, what's a "Benjamin Franklin?" The face on the amount of currency you must send to the GM to get the order to go through??? (My guess this time is that it is the name of the starship, but there's nothing in that rules segment that supports that opinion.)
I am not suggesting that every section of the rules has to explain over again what all the codes are, but there should be an identifier explanation as well as an example. Something like: "A jump order consists of the ship's type-code followed by at least one space, followed by the ship's name, followed a comma and at least one space, followed by a destination code which can be the system's Cartesian coordinates ( x y z --spaces, no commas in-between) or by the code for planet ('PL') followed by a space, followed by the name of the planet."
Of course I have no idea if I have correctly identified the codes, but if there was something like this immediately preceding the examples, I suspect frustration would be lowered. Better still of course would be the UI that RAM is designing that wouldn't let you input anything that wasn't machine readable and doable by your ship.
By the way, I have no idea whether or not the player is supposed to type "START JUMPS ; Place jump orders here." and "END" or if they are part of the turn sheet. That may simply be the fact that I jumped into reading Movement Rules instead of RTFM from the beginning.
What the bleep is a PB or an FF??? (my guess is they are a type of ship like "Patrol Boat" or "Flying Fortress" but they could be anything and there's sure nothing in the section that explains what they are.) Again, what's a "Benjamin Franklin?" The face on the amount of currency you must send to the GM to get the order to go through??? (My guess this time is that it is the name of the starship, but there's nothing in that rules segment that supports that opinion.)
I am not suggesting that every section of the rules has to explain over again what all the codes are, but there should be an identifier explanation as well as an example. Something like: "A jump order consists of the ship's type-code followed by at least one space, followed by the ship's name, followed a comma and at least one space, followed by a destination code which can be the system's Cartesian coordinates ( x y z --spaces, no commas in-between) or by the code for planet ('PL') followed by a space, followed by the name of the planet."
Of course I have no idea if I have correctly identified the codes, but if there was something like this immediately preceding the examples, I suspect frustration would be lowered. Better still of course would be the UI that RAM is designing that wouldn't let you input anything that wasn't machine readable and doable by your ship.
By the way, I have no idea whether or not the player is supposed to type "START JUMPS ; Place jump orders here." and "END" or if they are part of the turn sheet. That may simply be the fact that I jumped into reading Movement Rules instead of RTFM from the beginning.