Cassiel Field

## Overview

Cassiel Fields are the Dominion's primary form of FTL (faster-than-light) travel. They can be found in everything, from projectiles and missiles to spacecraft. Almost anything that traverses the heavens will possess one of these indispensable devices.

## Origin

An unprecedented new form of FTL, developed early on in the Dominion's history by the Think Tank- unlike many other proto-Dominion developments, Cassiel Fields are purely technical in nature. They are far superior to any previous method of FTL and allow for full realspace interaction while in an FTL reference frame and are down scalable enough to be used in projectiles and missiles to great effect.

## Mechanism

Cassiel Fields enable theoretically infinite acceleration for anything under their influence, by canceling out the interaction of the Higgs Field for the object within. This renders the object massless to external observers. This also has the side effect of making the target immune to external gravitational forces, which is incredibly useful due to the increasing quantity of high-density gravity wells.

The main limitation of the Cassiel Field is the fact that space isn't empty. Cassiel Fields do more and more work the faster the object within is moving relative to the external reference frame due to collisions with space dust and other cosmic flotsam. This means there's a hard limit to the velocity of an object under the influence of a Cassiel Field that is proportional to the particle density of the space it resides and inversely proportional to the surface area of the object. High energy external impacts, such as weapons fire can also quickly overload a Cassiel Field.

A Cassiel Field that has overloaded from being pushed beyond its limits, fired upon, or by colliding with a sufficiently massive object will instantaneously "snap" the velocity of the contained object within back to a very high fraction of c with the rest of the energy being bled off as Askaryan radiation, conceptually similar to Cherenkov radiation. This results in the surface of the object heating to extremely high temperatures which is one of the reasons why Dominion spacecraft have such heavy armour plating: to avoid being melted by their own field breaking. This also results in the interesting detail of the Dominion's FTL kinetic projectile weapons flash-vaporizing into plasma before impacting with targets.

## Usage

Cassiel Fields can be found on all Dominion spacecraft, heavy+ missiles, torpedoes and autocannon projectiles, and much more. If something is spacefaring then it's considered dead in the water without the ability to travel at massively superluminal speeds.

The introduction of these fields completely revolutionized spacecraft designs and combat doctrine, requiring all spacecraft to be redesigned and reclassified appropriately. Combat at massive ranges of dozens of parsecs minimum became the standard tactic, with anything closer being considered pure suicide.

Spacecraft combat, with the introduction of modern AI technology, became much more focused on dodging and responding with an overwhelming volume of fire in the hopes of hitting the enemy. Any weaponry incapable of FTL transit became obsolete or relegated to point defense duty.

Spacecraft survivability became less of a focus as it doesn't matter if the hull isn't breached if weapons fire is able to drop the Cassiel Field.