Yutani Drive

## Overview

The **Yutani Drive** returned humanity to the stars during a time when such a feat seemed no longer possible. Although FTL travel had been unlocked long before the design of the Yutani Drive, it was the Galactic FTL Crisis that brought about the desperate need for this new engine. The Yutani Drive underwent successful human trials in 6994 and was the precursor for Earth's newfound dominance over its former colonies that dotted the stars.

## Functionality

The Yutani Drive uses selerium, a crystalline solid once found only deep underground and in rare quantities. However, the drive is capable of using synthesized selerium, artificially generated in mass quantities at comparatively lower costs than extracting naturally-occurring selerium. This is unique from its predecessor, a drive that could only process natural selerium.

Internally, the Yutani Drive is a maelstrom of complex mechanisms all working to one end: launching the spacecraft into FTL without tearing everything else apart. While not in use, the central chamber of the engine is empty. When in use, however, a five pound deposit of selerium is transferred to the central chamber before being immersed with superfluid helium-3. The deposit of selerium is bombarded by six different lasers, three of which are free-electron and the other three of which are deuterium fluoride lasers. This bombardment is constant, with deuterium being injected into the chamber at exceptionally high speeds. A concentrated solid-state laser pulses every three seconds into the central chamber to begin a reaction between the deuterium and helium-3 resulting in unstable fusion.

The combination of cooling from the helium-3, the heating by the free-electron lasers, the stress put on the selerium by the deuterium fluoride lasers, and the expulsion of the deuterium gas alongside the solid-state laser pulses makes for a chaotic system of carefully maintained temperature as well as a fantastically immense generation of energy. This energy is leeched out of the central chamber and fed directly into the ship's engine nacelles, charging until there has been a large enough energy buildup for expulsion and the subsequent entering of FTL. It can often take up to three minutes for a sufficient charge to be built up. When the charge is released, it opens a tear in space-time directly in front of the ship, pulling it in immediately.

After entering FTL, the selerium deposit is exhausted and the lasers stop bombarding the central chamber. The deuterium and helium-3 remains in play, with the solid-state laser continuing to agitate a fusion reaction that gets continuously transferred to the engine nacelles. These bursts of energy maintain the ship's integrity inside the FTL fold, ensuring that speed discrepancies don't tear the ship apart and across light years of space.

Ships exit FTL by ceasing the deuterium-helium-3 fusion process and then flooding the exterior of the ship with a wave of ionized particles. After the ion wave, a plasma flood is released to bring the ship to a neutral state upon removal from the FTL fold at no risk to the ship's integrity.

## Speed

It is worth noting that the Yutani Drive greatly reduces the distance that must be traveled instead of simply speeding up the ship. Crossing the entire Milky Way galaxy from one end to the other would take three months with standard sublight engines if the ship were in a continuous spacetime tunnel, a significantly shorter time than the several hundred thousand years it'd normally take. While classifying the Yutani Drive as an FTL engine is a bit of a misnomer, it is undeniable that the tear it generates greatly reduces the amount of time it takes to travel from one world to another.

Even though the Yutani Drive does not serve as an engine that speeds the ship itself up to FTL figures, it does allow the respective vessel to travel faster than it ordinarily would due to other ship systems often being offline during FTL transit. This speed-up is usually negligible on a cosmic scale but every meter per second counts when you're tunneling through spacetime.

## Disadvantages

One of the main disadvantages of the Yutani Drive is its energy use. If you're rich enough and have a strong enough ship, you can store the additional materials necessary to run the Yutani Drive outside of the device in special containers designed for that exact purpose. Most people don't fall in that category, and so most owners of a Yutani Drive are forced to rely on internal storage. These drives can contain up to four "charges", meaning that making shorter FTL jumps is financially detrimental to the consumer. This financial detriment must be balanced carefully with the dangers of extended FTL jumps. Is it worth blowing up to save a few credits?

As a courtesy, the manufacturers of the Yutani Drive across the Human Sphere include an FTL distress beacon with each device for if a pilot were to make an FTL jump on their last charge but not be close enough to a refueling depot. There is an entire industry dedicated to towing ships that weren't smart with their fuel usage.

Another disadvantage of the Yutani Drive is that the ship is vulnerable to enemy attack after exiting FTL. The necessary ionization and plasma neutralization leaves the ship's systems struggling to remain online, with most ships often needing to completely bring systems back online upon exiting FTL. It is possible for ships to shield their systems from this process but it comes at an exorbitant price and is usually only used for the less complex and more centralized systems such as navigation and sensors. Most ships shut off several systems upon entering FTL to speed up reboot times.

## Common Use

The **Yutani Drive** has a **YES** Common Use policy. Any human-origin spacecraft you use that is capable of FTL travel will have a Yutani Drive in it.

## Credits

Technology artwork designed by Alwyn Talbot on Artstation. You can find the original source here.