K-F and hard scifi do NOT belong in the same paragraph... How realistic is it TBH that K-F and HPG tech have remained essentially static for what, about a millenia? and the extremely slow rate of BT technological development... but I'm dropping it, I rather like the BTU the way it is.
I said "hard scifi aesthetic". I'm very careful about that when it comes to BT. I never call BT hard scifi only, for it is not. But it very much maintains an illusion and trappings of realism at some level, one reason i really like BT even though i'm not a big fan of soft science fiction in general some exceptions aside (and care even less for mecha usually).
And i think artificial gravity would be a gross violation of this aesthetic.
And there exists scifi that can be called hard while still having FTL, as long as they're otherwise hard, though admittedly this is uncommon. FTL is largely a necessity for space opera (though there are exceptions). FTL in harder scifi is usually jump-type (often based on wormholes) because it is easier to work with than free FTL flight like Star Trek or Star Wars has.
The way it was written confused a lot of people with regard to Lagrange points. Simply stating a maximum gravitational field that would support a jump would have been simpler and more consistent (since the proximity limits don't track stellar mass very well). Also, the whole "stationary with regard to the target on arrival" thing is hard to reconcile. It would make more sense to have to velocity match the target prior to jumping.
If jumps were limited by gravitational field strength, then pirate points would be impossible. (Consider LEO, which has something like 97% gravity field compared to surface of Earth, freefall is not quite the same as zero-g.) Any pirate point usually used would be well within local stars gravity field and therefore
That stationary on arrival is kinda odd, but it prevents relativistic jump weapons... Though i wonder if this is the reason it has been decided to work like that.
BT ships have enough reaction mass and engine power to accelerate to significant percent of lightspeed in short time, follow that with a jump carefully aimed to the target planet... And i think these can be made unmanned and work with BT tech even though CASPAR systems didn't play nice with FTL for some arbitrary reason. If not, i'll just find suitably fanatical people, shouldn't be an issue with huge populations.
Of course, as it is, this is easy enough to work around as it is: I jump far away from the target planet (say, 100 AU) and deploy a DropShip with sufficient reaction mass and acceleration...
EDIT If velocity needed to be matched before jump, some jumps would likely be impossible, or at least require massive amounts of reaction mass. Star velocities and vectors can be quite different after all.
For designers and writers, not needing to take this into account is likely far easier.
