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Space is a big place, and the challenges of negotiating such
enormous distances are staggering. While mankind long since been mastered
interplanetary travel, thanks to the advent of the quantum thruster, humanity
is interstellar exploits span only a few generations.
Subluminal Travel
From the early days of space exploration, humanity sought ways
to increase fuel efficiency on spacecraft. Chemical rockets are grossly
inefficient, and require the use of extremely slow, and often complex, transfer
orbits, and later ion drives, while capable of attaining much higher speeds,
couldn't move large loads. Despite theoretical nuclear rockets and plasma
drives, mankind eventually forsook traditional reaction engines when it developed
the quantum thruster. Still a reaction engine, these motive systems continuously
excite the virtual particles of the quantum vacuum and push off of them via an
electromagnetic field. This allows a ship to forgo massive fuel tanks because its
fuel supply suffuses the entire universe; all the thrusters require is
electricity. As efficiencies increased and more compact energy sources became
available, ships began to use constant acceleration to both traverse
interplanetary distances in days or weeks and provide the illusion of
artificial gravity to the crew. Today, quantum thrusters are mature technology
utilized for virtually all subluminal conveyance.
With the advent of gravity-manipulation by the Jovian Aerospace
Group, a new sort of truly reactionless thruster became available to the
market. Extremely expensive, it is typically used on military vessels that
require extreme accelerations to outmaneuver their opponents at subluminal
speeds. By bending and warping space-time around the vessel, which does not
actually move relative to the bubble, the ship can attain tremendous
accelerations without adversely affecting its crew. Theoretically, this should
allow a ship with sufficient power to accelerate far beyond the speed of light,
but to date, nothing of the sort has been developed. It appears that further
refinement in the drive mechanism itself is required. Other hurdles would
involve seeing where the ship is headed while outrunning any sensor signals,
and the effects of space dust and debris at superluminal speeds.
Superluminal Travel
For most of humanity's existence, it has been bound to the
confines of the solar system. Even with the advent of unlimited thrust, the
closest star was unreachably far away – the crew may experience 4.5 years of
time, but due to time dilation, hundreds of years would pass on Earth before
explorers would arrive at their destination. This all changed when the Jupiter
Aerospace Group announced its hyperdrive. Humanity was able to reach other
stars in a matter of weeks, most of which was spent performing extensive and
complex calculations for the jump itself. The jump itself was quite unpleasant for
the crew, resulting in severe pain and unconsciousness, but today, jumps merely
leave crewmembers and passengers stunned and nauseous. And as Jupiter Group works
to mitigate these effects, more and more people move to the frontier worlds.
And still, after almost eighty years, no one has unlocked the secret of the
hyperdrive’s function.
Jupiter Aerospace Group has gone out of their way to protect
the secret of the hyperdrive’s inner workings. They have not patented the
drive, maintain extensive security forces at all of their manufacturing sites,
and conduct the bulk of their research and development on Triton – far from
humanity’s strongholds. While they have released no specific explanation about
the theory behind the hyperdrive, they have given the oversimplification that the
drive shunts a volume of space into another universe momentarily, and then
shunts it back at a preprogrammed location. The calculations required for an accurate
jump requires incredibly complicated calculations performed by a dedicated “jump
computer,” also produced by JAG, and the risk of arriving off course increases
drastically with distance. For that reason, humanity has explored space via a
series of shorter, surer jumps at the cost of taking extra time for
calculations and charging jump engines.
Lost in Space
There may be times that a superluminal mishap sends a
starship off course. The crew may arrive in an unexplored arm of the galaxy
tens of thousands of light-years off course and utterly unaware of their own
location. Luckily for them, the galaxy provides hundreds of lighthouses by
which a lost ship can regain its bearings. Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron
stars that emit pulses of radio waves in frequencies and intervals unique to
each pulsar. If you know the exact arrival times of pulses from a couple of
pulsars, a navigator can calculate the position of the lost ship. Most
exploration ships and military vessels carry sophisticated radar arrays that
can rapidly detect and analyze the signals from pulsars and feed them into a
navigation computer, colloquially called a "navicom", that tracks the
location of the ship.