Interstellar

Welcome to the one page that discusses the universe in which the Remnant exist. While lonesome, it turns out that it's one of the most popular pages on the site. I imagine that has to do with the fact that, rather than looking like a freakishly huge block of tiny text, this page is laid out in a nice, friendly table. See, it's already showing that the Universe nodes were going to be more fun!

Look at my fake physics and come on down to my project-assessment.

Interstellar Travel

The galactic arm in which the Remnant operate is vast and traversable only with the help of some advanced method of motivation. The methods of travel available are listed below. Of these, the most commonly used are hyperdrive technology (for short range) and warp drives (for interstellar travel). Of NPCs, less savory types tend to favor the quick getaway offered by slamdrives while only the most experienced and formidable AI have been known to carry TIDEs aboard their ships.

Components

Motivator	Speed	Energy Cost	Benefits	Drawbacks	Description
Conventional Drives	Sub-light	Negligible	Slow, but sure	Limited to local area	The basic drives vessels use to maneuver in space.
Hyperdrives	Sub-light	Variable	Allows for quick interplanetary travel	Limited to nearby planets	A feature of high-end drives is the ability to focus all of a ship's energies into navigation and propulsion, allowing for bursts of speed over long distances.
Slamdrives	Sub-light	Low	Low energy cost, faster than Hyperdrive	Requires fuel	A slamdrive is a dedicated engine which applies tremendous force to a vessel by consuming fuel, similar to rockets. This fuel can be manufactured onboard a ship with the necessary research and equipment.
Nuclear Slamdrives	Sub-light	Low	Much faster than conventional slamdrives. Allows for slow interstellar travel.	Requires fuel, some risk of damage to engines	Similar to slamdrives, only the propulsion is achieved via a series of nuclear explosions.
Annihilation Slamdrives	Near-light	Medium	The fastest possible sub-light travel. Fast, interstellar, medium energy cost.	Requires a great deal of matter and antimatter, neither of which are easy to come by. Some risk of damage.	Annihilation slamdrives are the pinnacle of sub-light speed travel technology. With appropriate research, equipment and time, a ship may fill her hold with half dense matter and half antimatter, annihilating them in the engines to propel the ship to incredible speeds.
Warp Drives	Light	High	Allows for light-speed interstellar travel	Takes time to initiate. While initiating, ship and warp field are vulnerable	By cocooning the vessel in a structured, inertialess warp-field, the mass of the vessel is reduced to an imaginary number, allowing it to accelerate to exactly the speed of light using conventional drives. This is by far the most commonly used method of interstellar transportation.
Quantum Blinking	Super-Light	Very High	Can be faster than light speed	Requires exponentially increasing amounts of energy per 'blink'	Using experimental drives, a vessel can lock in its quantum existence at a location beyond what should be possible. This causes the vessel to 'blink' from one location to another. This distance increases exponentially for every blink, but so does the energy cost. With large enough energy stores, a vessel could achieve faster-than-light speeds.
T.emporal I.nterrupt D.istortion E.ngine	Instantaneous	Immense	Instantaneous travel to any location	Only attemptable by AI vessels with repair faculty. All materials on the vessel age as if the vessel had traveled conventionally. Requires perpetually operational power plant.	The TIDE uses every drop of energy aboard a vessel in order to release a pulse of particles which momentarily disrupt the universe, slipping the vessel and anything else caught in the pulse into a timeless, massless dimension parallel to our own. The ship then travels to the coordinates of its destination by conventional means, which may take millennia. Once at its desired destination, the ship engages the TIDE once more and slips back into reality the very instant it disappeared, light years away.

Structures

Motivator	Speed	Price	Location	Description
TIDEWays	Instantaneous	Varied fees	Secure worlds	The gateway system for which TIDE technology was initially developed, no two TIDEWay stations look alike. Essentially, they are stations which, for a fee, use a blast of energy to open a rift into a TIDEWay. These specially picked universes are dead, all the the mass of which having been condensed into one black hole. Falling into this universe, a vessel is sucked towards the black hole until it passes near another TIDEWay station, which receives it the instant that it's sent. Older TIDEWay stations can succumb to mechanical failures, spelling doom for the odd unlucky vessel.
Artificial Wormholes	Instantaneous	Free	Major trade worlds	With an incredible amount of time, effort and energy, some major trade worlds have stitched artificial wormholes together to allow for instantaneous interstellar travel. Resembling large circular mirrors, glowing around the inner rim, these gateways are passable windows to another world.