FTL Drives

An **FTL Drive** is a device used to achieve faster-than-light speeds on ships. Many corporations manufacture them, and there are several designs, but they all rely on the same fundamental principles.

## Function and Mechanics

FTL Drives enable physical objects (ie, spacecraft) to travel outside the laws of general relativity. The universal age would be impossible without this technology, as traveling at normal speeds would make the average interstellar trip take decades.

The central component of an FTL drive is the Relativity Inhibitor, which is most importantly made up of core fragments, a unique mineral that is still not fully understood, that can be found deep inside the interior of a planet. When an electric current is ran through it, it generates a field known as an Allan Field, which is comprised of a unique form of matter called Reyes Particles. A ship surrounded by this field can essentially defy the laws of physics to a limited degree, enabling ships with their standard thrusters to accelerate to faster-than-light speeds. The baseline for the amount of power is 5,367 megawatts or roughly 5 1/2 gigawatts. Allan Fields can be stronger or weaker than others depending on how many Reyes Particles are present, with higher amounts generating stronger fields enabling greater relativity inhibition and therefore faster speeds. The size and strength of an FTL Drive varies between ships, as larger vessels need to produce more Reyes Particles than normal to create a field large enough to enable FTL travel.

Early FTL drives were able to shorten trips that would take tens of thousands of years. down to about a standard month. After centuries of refinement in both overall design and power plants, a trip of similar size with a modern drive takes anywhere from a few minutes to a few seconds.

## Limitations

The most inherent obstacle for using an FTL Drive has to do with the immense amount of power needed to use them. Many ships have an entire reactor put aside especially for it. Relativity Inhibitors are also extremely expensive, although this is offset by them only requiring replacement with heavy use on average 15 years.

Reyes Particles are highly dangerous to living things, with a significant dose causing agonizing and lethal radiation poisoning. Ships need special shielding to prevent the particles from entering during FTL travel.

Allan Fields must also be precise in their size. If a field doesn’t cover all of the vessel, parts left uncovered will be torn from the ship and potentially cause explosive decompression.

## History (Earth)

By 2065 miners on Earth had to dig deeper and deeper into the planet to find minerals and ore. The drilling continued to get deeper, burrowing through the Earth’s mantle. Miners started encountering a strange orange rock. It glowed with a dim light, and seemed almost crystalline in nature. Several of these “core fragments” were brought to the surface, where scientists began to study this new material. Various experiments were done on it, with the main researchers being David Allen and Hector Reyes. The story goes that one day, the pair were running electricity through a sample and one of them dropped a pen while near it. They watched as this pen fell and accelerated as it passed by the sample. After replicating the experiment, they quickly realized that something was being generated by the fragment that was causing the pen to temporarily exceed its terminal velocity. Measurements taken showed that when electrically charged, the core fragment would emit a form of matter in a relatively uniform shape around itself. These particles were therefore known as Reyes Particles and their accumulation referred to as an Allan field. Further experimentation showed that these particles could effectively create a space where the laws of physics were defied. Allen and Reyes demonstrated this before the scientific community in 2066 at Harvard University when they were able to create perpetual motion within an Allan Field. This discovery would lead to them earning a joint Nobel Prize in Physics in 2070. The two of them started designing a device that would generate Allan Fields. They first experimented on small aircraft. In testing they managed exceed Mach 5, which shattered records by a huge margin. They noticed that density of Reyes Particles dictated how much an affected object could free itself from natural law. However, the amount of power needed to generate the particles was extremely high. The testing aircraft could only sustain their speed for only a few minutes on one charge.

### Space Travel

The United Nations had interests in both expanding their colonies on Luna and Mars, and also seeking out new worlds to colonize. A trip to Luna took several days and an immense amount of fuel, meaning very few could afford to pay for a trip on top of the costs of moving and starting a new life on another planet. The UN saw Allen and Reyes’ work as an opportunity to fix this and approached them about the project in 2071 and they agreed. The challenge was immense. The only way they could conceivably power one of their newly named Relativity Inhibitors was with a nuclear reactor. By this time fusion had become the primary means of nuclear power, but they were the size of small skyscraper. The sheer size of a nuclear reactor made it impractical, as the ship would need more than one reactor to power the RI as well as the ship itself, making it beyond impractical. The project would languish for a little over a decade before a revolutionary new device, the compact fusion reactor, was invented in 2082. The CFR was far smaller, to the point of an adult human not being able to stand up inside one. The project was still extremely expensive, but the CFR made it practical.

In 2084 construction began on a vessel to utilize the Relativity Inhibitor. Several compact fusion reactors would have to be built into the ship to help provide power, and the hull, on top of being huge, also had to be lead-lined to keep out the Reyes Particles. But in 2089, she was finally completed. Allan and Reyes, at this point now married with children, came out with their family to see the vessel christened. In the end, it was decided that they should be the ones to name her. They christened her as the *Starchaser,* and shortly after she embarked on her historic journey to Luna. The trip traditionally took a couple of days. The *Starchaser* completed it in a second. The second part of its mission was to reach Mars. This trip which would take weeks conventionally, was completed in 3 minutes. The ship became the first Earth made object to reach and then exceed the speed of light. The people of Earth now looked to the stars. The universal age had begun.

After the success of the *Starchaser*'s mission, the United Nations immediately ordered the building of over a dozen more vessels. Over the next few decades, the UN would send these FTL ships would use these ships to quickly ferry people and cargo to and from their colonies in the Sol System. A few of these ships were put aside for use in interstellar exploration. These particular vessels would travel to several points in the universe, searching for signs of life and to collect scientific data. In 2097, one of these vessels discovered the Kornepheros System. On several of its planets, the explorers found not only vegetation, but also various species of animals as well, marking the first time Earthlings had seen extraterrestrial life. Several other worlds containing life would be found over the next few decades, including the ruins of past civilizations proving that there at least were other sentient species at some point in history. In 2103, the UN dispatched its first official colonization mission to the Aximia System. The expedition would arrive a little over a month later, and the first interstellar colony was formed. This lead to a colonization initiative by the UN that would see over a dozen systems colonized in the coming decades.

In 2140, corporations successfully lobbied to allow commercial core fragment mining. This lead to an influx of far more affordable core fragments, enabling the cost of FTL Drives to drop significantly. This is what started the huge wave of colonization that would happen between 2140 and 2165, when several wealthy Earthlings financed the construction of FTL capable vessels.

In 2153, scientists at the E.ON power company were able to refine the Relativity Inhibitor to make it more efficient in its production of Reyes Particles. This lead to a 15% decrease in FTL travel time. This was the first significant improvement made to the basic FTL Drive design.

The European research company CERN finished the first antimatter reactor in 2214. This coincided with the beginning of antimatter farming in the Sol System. FTL Drives were modified to use these new reactors, and the massive increase in power meant that the density of the FTL's Allan Fields became significantly higher. This cut down travel time to the point that one could get from one place in the universe to another in anywhere from minutes to mere seconds. The high price of antimatter meant that this improvement had relatively little impact on the public at large, but it was still a very important milestone for FTL travel.

In 2469, scientists at Westinghouse finished work on the universal reactor. This revolutionary new reactor could extract all of the potential energy out of a used fuel source whether it be something as complicated as antimatter or simple as petroleum. These reactors were incredibly efficient, capable of a higher power output than even the antimatter reactors, and its lack of reliance on any specific fuel source made them very cheap. Most ships today use a universal reactor, and its usage is what has allowed common vessels to be able to travel anywhere in the universe as quickly as with an antimatter reactor.