Dead End

Story

Characters

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Reference

FTL and Hyperspace Draft

FTL via man-made vortex engines punching into hyperspace; beacon-marked lanes; light-speed sensors and bandwidth-limited relay comms.

Overview

FTL is real but limited and infrastructural (TL11 super-science, mostly FTL). Man-made vortex engines punch holes from physical space into hyperspace, deployed either as fixed

gates or built into a ship. Physical space is sub-light only; all FTL goes through hyperspace.

Details

  • Power: jumping is enormously power-hungry — ships go dark (shut down non-essentials) and gates run on huge reactors; energy is banked in capacitors and discharged. A jumping ship is briefly blind and vulnerable.
  • Hyperspace navigation: gravity from real-space masses folds hyperspace, so there’s rarely a straight path between systems. Ships follow beacon-marked lanes (lighthouses in hyperspace), surfacing to real space to cross between routes. Gates mark lane endpoints and sit beyond the planets (never drop out inside a gravity well — or a planet).
  • Sensors & comms: both light-speed. Distant readings are stale; you cannot watch the far side of a system in real time. Interstellar comms use a bandwidth-starved beacon relay — a short text might route (slow, queued, monitorable); real proof must be physically carried.
  • Wired is wrong. Republic hardware talks wirelessly as a matter of course. A hardwired physical data port means someone chose to keep a device off every network there is — which makes the port itself worth reading as evidence. (Bio-computer Implant, Session 5.)
  • Scale of the art: a vortex array that navigates on its own is battlecruiser hardware in Republic service, drawing on power banks built for it. The cube the crew are flying behind does the same work from a mounting near the cockpit, off a power source nobody aboard can find. What built it solved problems Republic engineers have not opened.
  • Beacons are not the only way to steer. The cube plots off the gravitational bends of hyperspace itself — the pull of distant stars — and consults no beacon at all. It cut a six-to-seven day run to Corwin down to four. It will also open a portal straight into a planet’s atmosphere, under any orbital watch, which the crew have now seen twice (Thides III, Session 3; Corwin II, Session 6).

Cross-Domain Links

  • Politics and Citizenship — the Federal Republic taxes gates (jump tax) and licenses space ops.
  • Thides System — a charted dead-end with one known gate: the system’s only way in or out.
  • Thides I — mined hollow and closed about a decade ago; a collapse there is a lane-scale concern, not a local one. Federal Marshals have flagged the planet’s structural integrity as a navigation problem for the whole system.