Enterprise-class interstellar vehicle

**Enterprise**-class was the world's first operational warp capable spacecraft. Entering service under NASA in 2063, it was first ships were the first crewed spacecraft to visit Alpha Centuari Bb in 2063 and make first contact with the K'lerin on 6 April 2065. Her initial commanding officer was Jin Musgrave, a widely respected Space Force officer who set the stage for many of the protocols of today's interstellar space fleet.

The *Enterprise* was authorized in 2059 before the first launch of the uncrewed Prometheus. Construction began in 2060, and the ship was launched in January 2061, attended by 51st President of the United States Dan Forest. It was officially commissioned after 2 years of shakedown tests into NASA. Its lifetime average warp cruising "speed" was approximately 12 times light speed. In 2082 NASA would begin phasing out the *Enterprise*-class for the *Columbia*-class.

## Design and Development

Work on a practical White-Alcubierre Drive began in 2055 with the X-96 WIZARD project. The X-96 was little more than a relatively small (10 meter wide) drive section with a flight test sensor package. In early 2057, the X-96 traveled from Earth-Solar L4 to just outside of Martian orbit, roughly 52 million km covered in just over 2 minutes or roughly 1.4 times the speed of light.

The X-96 led to the development of the Prometheus, and was itself the instigator for the IV Project.

### Historical background

The concept of warping spacetime to attain faster than light travel can be traced to science fiction in the 1960s. The concept would inspire the first practical proposal by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994, the Alcubierre drive is based on a solution of Einstein's field equations. Officially these mathematical metric tensors are designated the Alcubierre metric. Since objects cannot accelerate to the speed of light within normal spacetime, Alcubierre's metric devised a way to shift space around an object so that the object would arrive at its destination more quickly than light would in normal space without breaking any physical laws.

As Alcubierre's solution required masses of exotic matter comparable to that of Jupiter to achieve any kind of practical speed, it was not considered a practical form of faster-than light travel until NASA Eagleworks physicist Harold White and collaborators discovered that modifying the geometry of exotic matter would reduce the mass–energy requirements to that of the Voyager 1 spacecraft (c. 700 kg) or less. White's solution found that by thickening the wall of the warp bubble (a fuzzy torus), so the energy is focused in a larger volume while keeping the amount of energy required small. However, as this less energetic warp bubble also thickens toward the interior of the torus, White's theories establish that a warp bubble too large would distort spacetime and damage anything near the center of the tori. This fundamentally limits the volume of a warp capable spacecraft.

Desktop experiments by NASA, DARPA, and the Space Force conducted through the 2010s and 2040s proved that perturbing spacetime as White and Alcubierre described was possible, however there were two issues preventing the development of warp capable spacecraft: finding a suitable source of "Exotic matter" that could repel gravity and create a warp bubble, and the "Bubble Trap" phenomenon. When a warp bubble is generated, any energy or particles that contact the warp bubble during flight become trapped as energy. Once the warp bubble collapses that energy is released forward as a burst of infinitely-blueshifted radiation. As a result, if a ship is facing a planet once dropping out of warp, the energy released would be so great that it would destroy said planet. Even with the surge in space telescopes and the establishment of NASA's United Interferometry Network was not able to provide enough accuracy in guidance systems across interstellar distances.

The loss of IV-103 *Constitution* in 2067 forced a design review of the Enterprise-class and an inquest into NASA's pre-flight procedures, particularly around the level of redundancy in the effective-negative mass process.

### White-Alcubierre Drive

The Enterprise was the first class of ship to employ a faster-than-light drive based on Warp Field Theory principles pioneered by Alcubierre and White. Its development was pioneered by NASA in the 2040s based on wartime research into advanced metamaterials that could be used to create negative effective mass satisfying the conditions for exotic matter as defined in the theoretical principles behind warp travel. The first of these composites was dubbed Yadav-Renfrew 2049 or YR-49, originally developed for electronic warfare applications.

The drive operates by contracting spacetime in front of the ship, slowly transitioning over the length of the ship's habitation section, and then expanding spacetime behind it. The Enterprise used three 170 meter wide particle accelerators to create oscillating tori that were sufficiently thick to reduce the energy requirement for warp travel, while not being so thick as to distort spacetime on the ship itself. YR-49 had to be cooled to near absolute-zero to reverse the spin of otherwise normal atoms before being deposited in the tori. Their expansion upon entering the tori would result in effective negative mass.

The Bubble Trap problem was addressed with the creation of quantum-based navigational tools, which made it possible to plot and correct a course across interstellar distances with an extreme degree of precision, and NASA's "Out of Reach" doctrine, requiring ships only drop out of warp near the edge of a star system.

## Description

### Ablative Shield

The most massive single component of the Enterprise-class, indeed all classes of Warp capable spacecraft, is the depleted uranium shield that protects the spacecraft from high energy particles and debris that manage to transit through the warp bubble. Any matter or energy moving in the opposing direction of a warp ship will enter the warp bubble at the same relative speed it would have if the ship were stationary. As a result, impacts are usually quite harmless, especially as quantum navigation systems prevent keep the ship on a course that avoids larger objects.

The Ablation shield is technically not one structure. The large domed shield that protects the crewed compartment and antimatter propulsion bus does not directly connect to the shield placed on the leading edge of the White-Alcubierre Drive's particle accelerator and bracing structure.

### Crew compartment

The habitable portion of the Enterprise was by far its smallest feature. A simple blunted capsule reminiscent of earlier chemically propelled spacecraft measured only 34 meters in diameter compared to its 170 meter wide drive tori. Like all early warp capable spacecraft, its design was limited by the volume of warp fields that could be generated at the time.

The crew compartment has historically been nicknamed the "meat locker" by NASA crews, as its main purpose is to hold the suspended bodies of the ship's crew during the long flight between worlds. Enterprise was the first class of ship to employ suspended animation for the entire crew, save for the androids and biorobots entrusted with maintaining the ship during most of its flight. Enterprise's suspension racks are just over a meter in length and half a meter in width and hold a thin synthetic amniotic sac holding a crew member for the months and years of the ship's journey.

#### Crew Rescue Vehicle

The crew compartment is subdivided into six segments and in the event of a catastrophe can decouple from the central spine of the ship and conduct atmospheric entry. The outer hull is jacketed in a heat shield and as a Crew Rescue Vehicle (CRV) each segment is equipped with an impact ballute and parachutes. In the event that the CRV itself is compromised, the racks of suspended crew members can be ejected as well. Each rack has a ballute to lessen the impact upon landing and its own parachutes, as well as sufficient power for a low-energy reanimation cycle.

### Drones

Given the volume constraints of the Enterprise-class and all successive classes of warp ship, In-situ resource utilization (ISRU) drones are essential to establish appropriate living quarters and research equipment. At the time of its deployment, the Enterprise-class was one of the first spacecraft to exclusively use biorobotic drones for both ISRU manufacturing and construction, as well as regular maintenance of the ship that did not require human assistance.

Upon reaching the destination star system, NASA and the crew would select an asteroid to cannibalize into a permanent space station that would house most of the crew not required in the main crew compartment or on the surface. These beachhead stations would be the home of the majority of the ship's crew for almost all of their time out of suspended animation. Similar efforts of ISRU would be used to create fleets of telescopes and communication satellites for not only the current mission but all successive ones.

Technically, as these space stations hosted farming modules to produce food and regularly recycle the air of the crew, definitionally every interstellar mission is a mission of colonization, despite NASA's mission statement to never colonize any world or star system that hosts a native intelligence.

### White-Alcubierre drive

The drive section of the Enterprise-class includes three ~170m diameter circular particle accelerators which use antimatter via the weak equivalence principle to generate the oscillating warp tori which manipulates spacetime.

### Antimatter propulsion bus

Enterprise featured a collapsible antimatter propulsion module which would extend out beyond the range of the accelerators during subluminal flight in star systems. Around the outermost edges of the three warp tori were the ship's radiators which were positioned closer to the warp field than any single part of the spacecraft, allowing photons to radiate out over millions of miles a second. The heat pumps for this system consumed roughly half the energy output of the ship's onboard fusion reactor.

Anti-matter was chosen for is extreme energy density which made it possible for the *Enterprise*-class, and all subsequent warp ships, to have a reliable propulsion system without overburdening the available volume and mass of the ships design. Unlike more fanciful designs for anti-matter propulsion, Enterprise's system was designed to never be significantly more powerful than bulkier chemical or nuclear assisted rockets, allowing for a high level of flexibility for inter-system flight.

Most of human governments have agreed to limit the production of antimatter to the outer orbit of Jupiter. Throughout the history of interstellar spaceflight, there have been calls to cease the production of antimatter all together as it is often seen by the public as a material too dangerous to be used. However, given the limits of interstellar astronomy and faster-than-light navigation, there is simply no propulsion system with the energy density required for interstellar vehicles to reliably navigate new star systems.