Hyperspace travel series#

Please Note: The following is taken directly from the Design Decision Forum and will need to be checked and amended as elements are implemented into current gameplay.

For example when a ship emerges from hyperspace after a misjump, the pilot's body is turned inside out. LoreĪ hyperspace jump requires precise calculations with quantum mechanics and a discrete amount of energy. INRA took over the project, made modifications, and tested it with human pilots. She created a prototype hybrid hyperdrive and noted that Thargoid drives worked differently than human drives which shifted space around a ship. The INRA engineer Effie Ratling led research into reverse-engineering the Thargoid technology. Rarely does a wormhole remain open after a Thargoid passes through, however, making it impossible for a human ship to enter it, as the ship will simply bounce back. Thargoid vessels such as the Thargoid Interceptor can be observed to deploy a type of green beam to create a wormhole. Thargoids use stable wormholes to enter and exit hyperspace. Thargoid Interceptor Witch Space Wormhole Space crackles behind the points of light, darkness writhes and lightning flashes.

Hyperspace travel series#

When a capital ship exits hyperspace, a series of lights can be seen moving against the backdrop of space. In the process of jumping, the capital ship essentially tears open a wormhole into hyperspace, allowing elements of witch-space to leak out into our universe as exemplified by the strange particle effects and audio observed during a capital-class jump. Unlike the Frame Shift Drives installed in smaller ships that consume Hydrogen Fuel, Capital Ship Frame Shift Drives require Tritium. This increased energy results in capital ships jumping into and exiting from hyperspace in a much more spectacular fashion. Majestic-Class Interdictor emerges from Witch-spaceĬapital Ships such as the Farragut-Class Battle Cruiser, Majestic-Class Interdictor, and Drake-Class Carrier also use Frame Shift Drives, but their increased mass results in proportionally larger energy requirements that dwarf the already significant energy consumed by regular ships upon jumping. It may be centuries before all of its mysteries are unravelled.' Capital Ships Many pilots have reported glimpsing inexplicable lights, and even structures, within the witch-space tunnels. 'Even today, hyperspace remains poorly understood. Journeys that had hitherto been considered unfeasible were now within the realms of possibility.' Jump times were reduced to mere seconds, as they had been with quirium drives, without any loss in jump range. 'In the late 3290s, a new hyperspace system emerged that immediately rendered the Type 2b obsolete. Unfortunately, ships equipped with a 2b left behind a hyperspace 'cloud' at their entry and exit points, making it all too easy for malcontents to track and ambush these vessels.' A number of different drives strove to fill the void left by the quirium drives, but it was the Type 2b that proved most popular.

When this formula was lost, the hyperspace industry suffered a major setback. 'The original hyperdrives were powered by a fuel known as quirium, the formula for which was a closely guarded secret. It is certainly true that a number of ships never reached their destinations.' Some even believed witch-space was haunted by 'ghosts of ships that went into Faraway and didn't come out again'. 'It was around this time the phrase 'witch-space' first appeared, reflecting the inherent dangers of early hyperspace technology and the strange 'corridor' a ship travelled through during a hyperspace jump. The Faraway system was far from perfect, however, depending on a complex network of monitoring satellites, branch lines, stop points and rescue stations – which took hundreds of years to establish – to operate smoothly.' 'The first commercially available hyperspace system was known as the 'Faraway Jump'. 'Hyperspace technology originated in the early 22nd Century, but it wasn't until the 2800s that consumer ships began to take advantage of it.' Noted historian Sima Kalhana discusses the development of the hyperdrive: This led to a corporate race-for-the-stars as massive colony projects were founded, funded, built and launched, together with hundreds of automated probes sent to all the nearby systems. A new frontier of science and engineering opened, confirmed by the first detailed messages and system scans to be received back to Earth from an interstellar probe sent to the Tau Ceti system years earlier. The discovery of a workable hyperspace theory and the design of the first rudimentary 'faster than light' drive by Li Qin Jao opened the possibility of exploration and settlement. The 22nd century saw early pioneering projects begin to take shape.

Fer-de-Lance in Witch-space Early hyperspace travel