FTL and Hyperspace Draft
FTL via man-made vortex engines punching into hyperspace; beacon-marked lanes; light-speed sensors and bandwidth-limited relay comms.
World Rules
- Operating a vortex engine demands immense power; ships shut down non-essential systems while jumping, and gates need massive dedicated power sources. Energy is stored in capacitors/batteries and discharged.
- Gravity distorts hyperspace, so portals must open far from gravity wells. Gates therefore sit beyond a system's planets in clean empty space.
- No guaranteed direct hyperspace path between systems. Ships ride beacon-marked safe lanes, exit to real space, cross to the next lane's start, and re-enter.
- Sensors and in-system comms are light-speed limited; detection degrades with distance (you see the past).
- Interstellar messaging uses the hyperspace beacon relay but is bandwidth-starved (a few messages, like old long-distance trunk lines). Often easier to send a ship.
- Republic technology is wireless by default. A hardwired physical data port is deliberate isolation from any network, and is anomalous enough to be evidence in itself.
- In Republic service, a vortex array that navigates hyperspace on its own is capital-ship hardware — battlecruiser scale, with dedicated power banks. Nothing smaller does it.
- Plotting a course off the gravitational bends of hyperspace itself, rather than following beacons, is possible and far faster — a 6-7 day run in 4. No Republic system does it.
- A portal can be opened directly into a planetary atmosphere, bypassing an orbital satellite net entirely. Twice observed, both times by the same non-Republic hardware.
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).
- Swarms meet swarms. Man-portable nanobot swarms are standard TL11 recon kit, and they can be countered in kind. On the Firetemic Tower’s 17th floor a third party blanketed the level in jamming and ran hostile nanobots against Shackleton Magellan’s recon rig; his swarm still mapped the hallway but could not read a room behind curtains and steel shutters. The first opposing swarm the crew have met. Confirmed Session 8.
Unaided jumps need a survey. A ship-mounted vortex drive that plots its own lane, as the Alien Navigation Device aboard The Albatross does, has to account for every large body in the destination system to avoid arriving inside a planet or asteroid. Without that data the device rated a direct jump to the Peric System at three days and a 65% chance of success, and it asked for seven days of in-system scanning to improve the figure. Confirmed Session 10.
Blind jumps. A ship with its own vortex drive can jump with no destination data at all by aiming at empty space far from any planetary body, trading extra travel in normal space at the far end for safety. The Albatross did this from the Peric System to the Katha System, off the gate network. Confirmed Session 11.
- Gate against blind jump. From the Katha System to the Dinon System the gates take three days and a blind jump takes four. Confirmed Session 12.
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.