Editing FederalSpace:Technology (section)

=== Stardrives ===

Transport was the origin of the warpdrive in this setting. The early "stutterwarp" (inspired by the one in ''2300''), developed during the Terran Empire, is essentially a transporter that transports itself. Because the range-per-cast is short, the drive has to be cycled rapidly to get anywhere; breakdowns are frequent.

The later "transwarp", developed independently by a number of people (but first by what would become the Federated Worlds), is a variation that, in layman's terms, lets the bubble be maintained ''indefinitely.'' Thus, your starship can rampage all over the place at fantastic pseudovelocity—until you hit something that disrupts the bubble, and then you're back in normal space again, at a dead stop. Long-distance travel is a continual start-and-stop affair, carefully jockeying the drive across gravity gradients and around the higher-concentrations of spacedust, and recalculating your location after the last inadvertant bounce-and-scatter. 

I have a glimmering of an idea that the classic layout of Trek ships is actually a requirement of the warp drive—that they've placed the habitat module in the safest part of the bubble, and that the warp nacelles ''have'' to be cantilevered away from the center of mass like that. Efficiency trade-offs should also play a role: you've got your powerful but slow tugs, swifter cruisers, and slow but ''stealthy'' (i.e. low warp signature) craft like the old Romulan Warbird.

Though no one in the core setting uses them as far as I know, stargates are theoretically possible, if you could build a transporter with range and accuracy sufficient to cross interstellar distances. (Most transporters have ranges of no more 1.0 light-second.) The catch is that there's no way to get your ship back without another stargate—and if you could carry one on your ship, why not just fit it with a warpdrive? Still, it's probably do-able if you took the time—perhaps some Borg hives have gate networks, and myriads of small ships to fling between their worlds. It'd be easier to do within a system, Cowboy Bebop style, than for interstellar travel—at ''that'' scale, I imagine you'd consider yourself fortunate to hit the right part of the target solar system. A stargate accurate enough to take a single person from one world to a specific location on another world would be far beyond the capabilities of anyone in this setting. (Alien Space Gods could do it, but there aren't any, remember? :) )

The warp bubble itself is very finicky, and "collapses" at the slightest notice: not only impact with too much mass (causing the "bounce" effect), but too much energy, or energy change, or crossing too powerful a gravity gradient, or… When the bubble drops, you have to stop and reestablish it, which is difficult to do under combat conditions. Basically, warp drive is ''cheating'' on a cosmic scale, and it's easy for the universe to force you to play by the rules again.

I suppose theoretically you could warp a planet, Lensman-style, if you could build a big enough generator—but that's way out of the reach of their current technology.

==== Commentary ====

'''LordDraqo''': I like this, as it feels like the Alcubierre warp that has been kicking around for a while.

'''Niles:''' I like Pseudovelocity, it's very Star Trek for starships to come to a stop when they get engine trouble.

And it means that not everyone with a starship has access to extinction level kinetic strikes. For maintaining the mood it's probably best to keep that temptation away from the PCs.


'''Shadowjack:''' …Our new-and-improved transwarp drive is the Star Trek standard, whose bubble doesn't collapse after a fraction of a second. Instead, you can just drag your ship all over space, at exponentially greater speed. Wheeeeeeeeeeee. And then, when you cut off the drive, you're conveniently deposited next to whatever you were trying to reach. Anything messes with the bubble, *bip*, you're back in normal space, but if no one's attacking you, you just kick in the drive again and away you go. This probably happens all the time during normal operations, which explains why there's always a helmsman on duty, and they don't just automate this.

Still don't want to do this in atmosphere or gravity, because you'll have to stutter the drive again, and this time it wasn't built for it. Also, there's no way we're risking a trillion-dollar warp engine down on some planet where it could get rusty or dusty or vandalized by some native with a spraypaint can.

'''Myth:''' I like that Helmsman thing. Missed it on the first read-through. I was quoting this to point out why there are Engineers, and why they seem to have an inordinate amount of pull for their place in the command structure.

Same thing, really -- Engineers always on duty, ready to kick the unstable drive in the right spot to get it moving again, adjust the field density for the average pressure of space in this part of.. um.. space, warn the Helm guy when it starts overheating, etc.

I like the idea of the whole ship-zooming-though-space thing being mostly an illusion of the passengers, with stops, drops-outs, semi-random changes in pseudovelocity, and barely-managed physics driving the whole thing, usually, in the more-or-less correct direction.

'''Shadowjack:''' From an aviation/astronautics point of view, having the Flight Engineer high up in the command structure makes a good deal of sense already—that's a good point you add to it.

Really, that description of travel is not that far off from the Original Series. I rewatched some of those old episodes a while back, and was intrigued by the difference between their technology and TNG+ technology in its failure modes. TNG+ stuff was just ''fickle''—does it work today? Oh, ionization. Never mind. Shiny, but unreliable on a metaplot level. TOS stuff, on the other hand, worked—but the ''equipment'' broke down. Plot-level failure. Those little ships were barely able to contain the powers they handled, and you really got the impression that Scotty was sweating every day just to keep things together. 

I like my starships to be a ''little'' less gum-and-baling-wire, but it's something to keep in mind. Stuff works… but it can ''break''.



'''LordDraqo:''' It occured to me that with stutter-warp, it would be possible to have the sensors sample the surrounding environment everytime that you were "at rest" in normal space, and put together a "flight-picture," from that.