Slipspace - That Odd Dimensionless Place

It took many tries, many lost craft, before the maths of slipspace travel could be translated to a working drive. It has been universally decided that the first successful manned slipspace transit, by George Carvhalo, shall be designated as the date 0.000 csd, such is the importance of this discovery.

It is no exaggeration to state that the Confederation of Planets, nor any interstellar relationships or governance, could not exist without this technology. Professor Carvahlo was an engineer by trade, a teacher by vocation, and a visionary.

When his third lost unmanned ship resulted in a pulling of University funding, he mortgaged his entire family's assets, as well as pulling in one private investor whose name has never been discovered, to fund and construct one, final ship.

This ship, The Odyssey, made the first successful, unmanned slipspace transit.

Field Generation and Hardware

It has been said that the number of people who truly understand the processes behind slipspace travel can be counted on one hand at any point in history. The engineering is fairly straightforward, but the reasons it works are not. The best description that a layman can understand is the standard "slipping between dimensions". It is a poor explanation, but the best that has been offered that doesn't require a thousand pages of mathematics.

It has been noted that Arachnid and Confederation technologies are remarkably similar in their engineering details, the only significant difference is the Arachnid propensity to use bio-mechanical technology in all of their constructs. It has been hypothesised that the technologies are sufficiently similar to allow interchangeability of parts, but this has never been tested. It is theorised that an Arachnid slipspace drive has greater efficiencies due to Arachnid inter-connectedness.

The basic tool for manipulation of the dimensional barrier is known as the Slipspace Drive Field Generator. It consists of a central sphere in which raw Fusion Drive reactor plasma, derived from a Deuterium-Deuterium reaction, is converted to a phased flow plasma, smoothed, and sent to four equally spaced field generators. Visibly, one sees a turbulent, crimson plasma enter, and a smooth-flowing blue plasma exit, Over years of research, it was determined that a tetrahedron is the most efficient shape for the field generators with tetrahedral ends for the creation and dispersion of the field.

The slipspace field extends spherically from the tetrapod. This was perfectly acceptable for early, small research vessels. As ships grew in size, multiple tetrapods were attempted to generate a larger field, but the interface between the fields proved unstable, resulting in total loss of the ship after field collapse. The shapes of the field dispersion units were experimented with in a geometric progression. For some reason, spheres failed completely. Cubes and octahedrons proved useful in generating larger fields, but the power consumption increased disproportionally with field size.

The first dodecahedral field generators showed a remarkable propensity to align the slipspace field with the contours of the electromagnetic protective shield lines. This greatly simplified field projections, and also lowered the energy required to maintain a stable field and to manoeuvre within slipspace. Thus, the dodecahedron became the standard shape for the four field generators.

This had the added advantage of tying the slipspace field to the protective shield surrounding the ship, keeping ships less susceptible to damage from a fluctuating field. The disadvantage is that a severe weakening of a ship's shielding also results in slipspace field fluctuations. In severe cases, the field can impact the hull, causing effect ranging from minor to catastrophic damage.

During the transition from normal to slipspace, the transiting ship is enveloped in a field of Cherenkov radiation. The blue glow blocks all electromagnetic radiation, visible, scans, and communications. From inside the ship, the radiation tears away as if a wind were blowing away a mist. From outside, a sphere of the radiation becomes visible as space itself seems to ripple and waver. From out of this sphere emerges the transiting ship.

Upon emerging from slipspace, ships maintain their pre transition velocity and attitude. For reasons not fully understood, changes to velocity and attitude in slipspace have no effect upon the ship once it returns to normal space.

Slipspace Limitations and Oddities

Slipspace travel requires intense calculations before making the transition. Detailed scans and maps are required. Every gravitational perturbation adds a complication to the route's planning. Using well mapped, predetermined routes reduces the computational stimes required, but does not reduce the need for flat and smooth space to make the initial transition.

Trips of greater than 1000 light years are beyond the ability of all by the largest warship computer's abilities to compute. Therefore, trips are divided into jumps of less than that, with drops to normal space required to allow for recalculation. There are predetermined drop zones on longer, well mapped trade routes, corresponding to known flat space.

This maximum transit distance was greater during the era of shipboard AIs, but the cost was deemed worth the sacrifice of these dangerous tools.

Reliable communication through slipspace remains one of the most significant unsolved challenges in modern physics. Signal degradation, temporal drift, and spatial incoherence render long-range transmission effectively impossible beyond minimal distances. This is further complicated by certain unexplained void regions.

Numerous experimental attempts have resulted in either complete signal loss or unusable data fragmentation. As such, all confirmed communication systems rely on pre-established relay networks, utilising quantum encryption for privacy, or upon physical data transport. Ships query the nearest relay upon dropping out of slipspace. These relays have expanded as the Confederation expanded, are heavily shielded, and constantly transmit any nearby ship signatures to the security network. These measures have greatly reduced sabotage and vandalism to these vital components.

Claims of stable, direct communication across slipspace without relay infrastructure are considered theoretical at best, and fraudulent at worst. No verified system has demonstrated sustained coherence beyond localised relay conditions.

Scans are also quite limited. Ships are considered lucky to get an imperfect two minute view ahead of them, 30 seconds for sufficient clarity to discern ship types. The opposite effect is also true, however, to an even greater extent. Ships in slipspace are impossible to detect from normal space at a distance of much more than a light year. This gives very little warning when a ship is about to drop into normal space.

The biggest oddity, and the least explainable, however, is the views from a ship in slipspace. Every scanner or camera ever devised, either internal through a viewport, or externally mounted, shows a flat, grey field surrounding the ship. Every observer ever recorded, however, reports seeing a kaleidoscope of colours. The patterns shift and change, the colours are intense and vibrant. Travellers use the light to read by, yet cameras and sensors show the environs to be too dark. Adding to the non falsifiable reports are the consistent impression that the colours and patterns are different depending on the mood, or on the danger levels being approached.

Velocities and Turbulence

Speeds in slipspace are measured in cs. The original meaning of this abbreviation has been lost to poor record keeping. It is guessed to have been either a play on multiple 'c's, which is incredibly inaccurate, or an abbreviation for Carvhalo Standard.

Most civilian craft cruise at a speed between 20cs and 30cs, or 20 to 30 light years per standard hour. Warships and more advanced craft can cruise at approximately 40cs. Beyond that speed, trips become difficult and more dangerous. Small eddies in the slipspace continuum become more difficult for ships' systems to avoid, or shields to deflect.

The rougher the space, the less stable the localised gravitational environment, the more difficult the navigation and travels through slipspace. These issues increase rapidly as speeds pass 35-40 cs. Guidance systems are constantly making small adjustments to course and speed based upon the localised conditions. Combined with the poor scanning abilities, inconsistencies are much more difficult to avoid or to navigate.

Certain scout ships can break the 50cs barrier, being small, light, and reinforced. The fastest travel ever recorded is 68.025cs. When an attempt to replicate this feat was attempted, the ship was lost. It never returned from slipspace.

The Dangers of Slipspace

There is an unexplained loss of a slipspace travelling ship, statistically, every 75 million hours of travel. This translates to approximately 15 losses per standard year. These are losses for which there is no explanation. The ships simply vanish into slipspace. IT is hoped that the crews perish when that happens, as the alternative ov being trapped in the nothingness between dimensions seems to be a fate worse than death.

In addition, there are the random fluctuations that shields and slipstream fields fail to compensate for. These ships can return to normal space damaged to varying degrees. Damage to armour plating, the loss of certain parts of the ship, and rare, extreme cases of partial ships returning.

There have been 27 recorded instances of attempts at EVA while a ship is in slipspace. of those known attempts, there have been 4 survivals. The constant fluctuations of the slipspace field makes this an incredibly dangerous proposition. Many of the failures simply resulted in the disappearance of the worker. In 7 cases, partial bodies were recovered at a later time, cleanly severed at the plane the field dropped to. Fortunately for them, it is the upper half of the body that is severed, resulting in a presumably quick and painless death.