Technical Briefing: Starships by Cameron Olson

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Past a certain point the energy required to make a ship go faster becomes absurd. In combat the lowered ability to actually change direction can be deadly, so most warships try to avoid getting up to peak velocity if they can avoid it. As for the second mode of travel, the hyperdrive, it is reasonably simple to describe. All the hyperdrive does is punch a hole into a dimension that has a point-to-point correspondence to so-called "realspace" but that has a corresponding volume only 1/7200'th that of realspace. Once a ship is in hyperspace it accelerates and travels at its normal speeds, re-entering realspace at the point corresponding to its destination. Being its own dimension, hyperspace has some of its own laws, most of which are not understood and most of which can give someone a very bad day if they run up against them. For this reason, all ships traveling through hyperspace use a hyperspace stabilizer to enforce a field of "normal" physics around their immediate selves.

Hyperdrives: Since its invention in 2138 AD (at least on Earth) the hyperdrive has gone through very little real change. Mainly, the size of the auxiliary parts has been reduced and more of the function fitted into the two hyper-nodes usually located above and below the insystem gravity impulse drive. In action, the hyperdrive surrounds the ships in a specialized energy field which it uses to stress the fabric of space itself until it can locate a single fracture. Once it finds the fracture it rips it open for a brief instant, pulling the ship through into hyperspace. The same process is repeated to get back into realspace, though exiting hyperspace is much easier than entering and so can be done more quietly.

Insystem Drives: Insystem drives consist primarily of fusion based maneuvering drives and gravity impulse drives. The fusion drives are pretty basic, using superheated plasma to push a ship around whenever it's in a situation where using a gravity drive would be a bad idea (such as inside the docking bay of a starbase). The gravity impulse drive, on the other hand, is quite complex. Suffice it to say that it generates a gravity field which can push a starship forward or backward at a very high acceleration (hundreds of gravities) and it does so without blowing up very often. Three major types of gravity impulse drive exist, the dual-point, the quad-point and the strike drive. The dual-point is the drive used by most interstellar vessels and civilian insystem ships and it resembles a crescent emerging from the back end of the starship facing away from it. The inside edge of the crescent is the energetic portion of the drive and it glows when in use. The quad-point drive adds another piece to the dual-point drive, mainly a long pointy extension of the upper and lower armor shells. This drive is considerably more effective than the dual-point, but requires specific technologies to allow it to work without ripping the ship its attached to into very small pieces. As of 2413 AD only the Chinese Stellar Republic possessed this technology.