Kamimaru Effect

This article or section is **incomplete**.
Please add information to improve its coverage and accuracy.
The Kamimaru effect is a scientific theory of allowing the compression or expansion of space. Predominantly important for faster than light space travel, the Kamimaru effect has a number of uses in military and industrial applications, allowing the creation of incredibly powerful machines which can outperform even the most well constructed and designed traditional machinery. There are no known naturally occurring Kamimaru sources in the galaxy, however it is theorised that Kamimaru effects would be observable inside hyper-dense objects such as black holes and neutron stars.

### Kamimaru Effect in Space Travel

The first Kamimaru engines were produced on Mars in 2473 by Wayfarer, a skunk-works of the now defunct Bridgeworks group.

The Kamimaru effect as used for space travel is a form of Alcubierre Drive which selectively compresses space ahead of a travelling vehicle. Kamimaru fields at this scale produce incredibly powerful and chaotic magnetic and gravitational fields, any conventional materials in the field are typically immediately shredded to miniscule pieces.

Particular rare earth compounds(RE Materials) are capable of conducting Kamimaru in a similar way to electricity in a metal, and are required both in the design of all Kamimaru field generators, as well as to provide shielding for any vessels which intend to travel using the Kamimaru effect. Coating the full surface of a vessel creates a Faraday cage which near-perfectly excludes Kamimaru from the interior of the vessel, allowing to to slip through the Kamimaru field. Due to the space-compression, a vessel travelling through Kamimaru will, from its perspective, need to cross a shorter distance than the distance they can travel in real space, thus Kamimaru drives effectively create a ratio between the distance travelled in real space, and the distance travelled in a Kamimaru field generated by the engine.

The first Kamimaru-powered spacecraft produced by Wayfarer were not capable of FTL travel reaching a maximum local speed of about 0.04c at a ratio of 1242:1, however even this relatively feeble speed by modern standards was an incredible improvement over the conventional chemical and ion driven space craft of the time and made transit to and from the outer planets feasible for the first time in human history.

#### Gravity Spikes

When the two Kamimaru fields intersect they produce a bipolar field which causes a significant feedback effect in both field sources. The shape of this field produces an inverted cone of space compression emanating from the barycenter of the two field sources. Though properly referred to as a 'Bipolar Kamimaru field' or simply 'Kamimaru cone' by far the most commonly used, if somewhat innacurate, term for this effect is a 'gravity spike'. Within this field movement toward the barycenter is compressed and movement away from it is expanded.

This simultaneously presents an enormous vulnerability and opportunity for Kamimaru in military contexts: Any ship equipped with Kamimaru projectors can be effectively arrested and dragged directly to any sufficiently powerful Kamimaru source so long as it is moving even slightly towards it. The affected ship does not need to be actively generating a Kamimaru field at the time that it is spiked and once the spike takes hold, only the spiking ship needs to put energy into the system to sustain it. For this reason, most military vessels are equipped with retractable RE shielding which cover their Kamimaru projectors when not in use.

Gravity spikes are instrumental in system defense and the most common form of defensive installation in occupied star systems are checkpoint stations which use gravity spikes to force any and all incoming traffic to enter the system at one location. For more populous or strategically important systems checkpoint stations are combined with large arrays of Kamimaru barrier emitters which can be activated when the system comes under attack. These emitters can typically sustain a roughly spherical bubble of Kamimaru for up to 30 minutes fully entrapping the newly arrived ship in an impenetrable arena and providing enough time for defending ships to destroy them.

This effect, can also be used in FTL pursuit through a process called 'Kamimaru Hyperdiction', commonly referred to as 'snag-and-drag' in military parlance. Kamimaru Hyperdiction requires an enormous amount of energy to perform but allows a pursuing ship to easily catch up to a fleeing ship so long as the pursuer is capable of projecting a Kamimaru field far enough. Many military grade Kamimaru drives are equipped with large capacitors and specialised short-term cooling systems to facilitate Kamimaru Hyperdiction, however any Kamimaru drive can theoretically perform at least short-range spikes and many motivated pirate groups have been known to simply overextend their Kamimaru drives to interdict unsuspecting civilian transport or cargo ships.

### Kamimaru and Semiconductors

Even with RE Material sheilding, travelling through Kamimaru causes a vessel to experience intense magnetic and electric turbulance. Traditional Semiconductor computers cannot survive onboard a ship which is travelling through Kamimaru. This presents a problem for ship design as the might and power of modern computer technology is effectively inaccessable for any and all vessels which wish to travel beyond a single star system.

Some headway has been made with RE Material based semiconductors and valve-based computers, however even so any computers used in Kamimaru capable vessels tend to be enormous machines occupuying entire rooms of the ship. The state of computer technology aboard Kamimaru Capable vessels is approximately comparable to computer technology in the latter half of the 20th century. This necessitates that most vessels require large crews to fill roles which would otherwise be better served by computers or artificial intelligence.