Karskovy Rift Drive
From NSwiki, the NationStates encyclopedia.
|
Discovery
The original theories of the K-Drive were laid down by Macken scientist, Richard Karskovy in 914I.R. during his time as a Senior Lieutenant in the Fleet. Karskovy was part of a small design team researching possible upgrades to current Fleet technology. While attached to this team, Karskovy would often have to travel aboard Fleet vessels to and from various research labs. Often these journeys would take days, or even weeks. This frustrated Karskovy to no end. Upon his return to the main research facility one day, he used his clearance to pull designs of the current FTL drives in use by the fleet.
Karskovy researched all the inner workings of the drive, and found it vastly inefficient by modern standards. He requested permission to split off from the group he was attached to, and pursue the creation of a new drive which he claimed would revolutionize the fleet. The Emperor himself granted Karskovy clearance, and provided funding to start experimental prototypes. After 16 years of constant work, the first working prototype was unveiled. It was outfitted on a small Fleet frigate, and successfully tested, traveling from Helmrakai to the military planet of Schild (a journey normally requiring 6 days) in a matter of minutes.
Technical Aspects
The K-Drive functions differently then conventional FTL drives, which simply accelerate a ship several magnitudes the speed of light. The Karskovy Rift Drive functions instead by "jumping" through "rifts" from one point in the galaxy to another. It does this by feeding a charge through a classified mineral alloy designed by Karskovy known as Karskovinium. This charge can influence and affect spacetime in seemingly extraordinary ways. As the K-Drive is powered up, it receives targeting solutions from an attached computer.
Once the required charge is reached, the K-Drive activates a jump. It first bends its point of space to be as near as possible to the targeted destination. Once optimum width is reached between the point of spacetime on which the drive is located, and the destination point, the charge is released and a rift is created, momentarily creating a point to point connection between two separate areas of the galaxy. Since the energy required to maintain this connection is massive compared to the energy required to move it, the Drive then folds the rift to pass over the ship, effectively moving the drive from origin to destination in a matter of milliseconds.
Since the drive relies on folding spacetime to suit its purposes, the drive is incapable of placing a ship inside of a certain range of a gravity well. As the gravity itself causes spacetime to fold, the power needed to fold space within the well even further is prohibitive, as a charge that large would destroy the drive. In addition, the K-Drive has been known to be inhibited by FTLi fields, although the reason for this is not fully understood. Several studies have been fielded to discover the cause of this, but so far results have been lacking.
Drawbacks
While revolutionizing the Empire, the K-Drive is not entirely without its downsides. However, the benefits of the drive vastly outweigh the drawbacks, thus continuing its service in the Fleet and civilian ships of the Empire.
Charging Times
The K-Drive requires charging before being ready to initiate a jump. This time increases proportionally to the distance being jumped, so that longer jumps require a longer charging period before the drive has enough energy to create a rift. There is a point where the distance is simply too great, and the drive cannot generate a charge large enough to open a rift. Though this varies depending on local system conditions, the general limit is accepted to be around 2,000 Light Years.
Rift Inaccuracy
In addition to the increased charging times associated with long range jumps, the K-Drive also has a computational limitation on accuracy of rifts. As the distance of a jump increases, the targeting computer connected with the K-Drive is increasingly able to chart accurate jumps. At jumps of 600 LY and above, the targeting computer is known to make calculation errors of up to ±100 Light Years in the travel axis of the jump, with up to 50 LY errors in other spatial directions. This effect compounds with increased distance: i.e., jumping a distance of 1800LY results in 3 times the amount of erroneous jump placement as jumping 600LY does.
This effect is usually compensated for by making a large jump, then stopping and determining galactic co-ordinates, and then making a second, smaller jump to the target location. This process can take anywhere between 2 minutes and an hour depending on the distance and familiarity of the territory being jumped to. Ship databases contain elaborate star charts of familiar and allied territories to expedite this process.
Cooldown Periods
As the K-Drive functions by building up a charge in the reactor, multiple subsequent charges have been known to damage the drive and in a few cases even cause an overload. As such, Fleet SOP maintains that no more then 5 jumps in 5 hours should be performed without sufficient cooling time. Though cooling time varies depending on the charges placed on the Drive, these times generally range between 30 minutes and 6 hours.
