String Drive (Tech 5)
Black Box, Slider Drive
String theory has been debated, debunked, resurrected, reworked, and revised
for generations. Like any good physical theory, it remains unproven but
still manages to spin off a good number of useful technologies. The
String Drive is a notable example of this, the base theories of
operation being developed by Hal Nargorest of the
Kharkosanth
Imperial Design Corps and subsequently "acquired" by the
Core Commonwealth and some industrial interests therein. The
first working drive in the
Prodigal Void was
developed by a team of
scientists lead by C.J. Escher in a combined effort of
San Jorge
Industries, the Lexicon Group, and
Elegant Particles
Laboratories. The
principles and workings of the drives are still highly guarded and
drives are only available in "black box" form... "no user
serviceable parts inside". The most advanced drive designs are
currently produced and highly controlled by the
IDC, who
maintain the technology strictly for military and government
starships, and by
San Jorge Industries, who sell the drive throughout the
Prodigal Void.
Azatlath Advanced
Construction has also
developed a competing model that is less effective and somewhat unstable
but relatively cheaper and available with less control.
The inner workings of a string drive are
a guarded secret, both in terms of manufacturers not releasing
intellectual property and in terms of the drives only being available in
sealed, tamper-proof "black box" form. Manufacturers will
provide trained service technicians that are available on-call or to be
assigned as staff on the starship. Essentially,
the
string-drive takes advantage of
modern physics and the universe's 13-dimensional
nature. As the marketing literature will tell you, the drive "spins the ship on a dimensional axis
to take convenient shortcuts through the other 9 dimensions". It
should be noted that this is not believed to be "magic"
technology that will drop your ship into mysterious parallel universes
or "hyperspace", at least not per se. The 13 dimensions are a
fundamental part of our existence, they're there every day and as part
of every object and integral to the workings of such fundamental forces
as gravity. We, as 4-dimensional beings, just don't perceive them or
consciously utilize them. Functionally, the string drive feed huge
quantities of rotated particles into a starship's Blind dimension while
manipulating its Vague dimension with a quantum field. The result seems
to be that the starship is coaxed into traveling through both the
Tangible and Manifold dimensions, providing a circuitous shortcut to the
final destination.
The
string drive is huge, expensive, and very high-tech. It requires a
long stationary prep time before being engaged while massive computers calculate
13-dimensional trajectories utilizing variables engineers call "symmetry",
"spin"
and "axial phase conversion" before travel actually begins.
The prep time varies from minutes to hours, based on the distance and
complexity of the travel. The computer will give pilots an estimated
time to engage, though even this can be off and vary from location to
location. This technology
is good for traveling large interstellar distances quickly but is
basically useless in-system as massive objects and gravity
fields make the necessary 13-dimensional calculations
prohibitively complex. It is simply faster to get there with more
conventional technologies.
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