Conduits

**Conduits** are transit devices scattered throughout the Settled Systems, usually located within star systems, that are connected to the Nexus via a network of hyperspace tunnels, allowing for intergalactic travel. Built by both the Intergalactic Commonwealth and the Confederacy in a rare demonstration of cooperation between the two entities, the conduits contain an element-C core that acts upon starships that pass near them, supercharging the starship's lightfold engine and enabling them to cross distances measuring hundreds of billions of light-years.

## History

### Background and Conception

In 2904, during the Battle of Keystone, Frontier Covenant leader Erron Rayes piloted the CS *Olympus* and its overloading lightfold engine into the Final Breach, a tear in spacetime through which Leviathan and its Titans were emerging. The subsequent combination of foldspace, breach energy, and Leviathan's unique energy signature caused a mass-disruption in local spacetime, creating a permanent link between realspace and the Continuum. This link activated all of the dorment element-C in the Universe, re-opening the Remnant's vast portal network as well as creating a planet-sized body of plasma-phase element-C in the former Keystone System; this body was subsequently named the Nexus.

Early observations of the Nexus allowed the Alliance to discover that the Nexus' energy could supercharge a starship's lightfold engine, providing it with near-infinite energy supplied by the Continuum and allowing for intergalactic travel. The first explorations, led by humans, resulted in early explorers arriving and settling new galaxies. However, any starship that travelled using the Nexus would end up at a random - and often inhospitable - place in the Universe. As the Alliance fractured into various nations and entities, the two largest - the Intergalactic Commonwealth and the Confederacy of the Great Attractor - decided to come together to build a network of devices that would allow targeted travel using the Nexus. These devices became known as the conduits.

In theory, a conduit would consist of a giant space station surrounding a core of plasma-phase E-C that would be connected to each other conduit and the Nexus itself via hyperspace (a combination of realspace, foldspace and the Continuum); effectively, any starship using a conduit would travel on a relay principle: depending on the destination, a starship would have to travel between multiple conduits rather than directly between two. Each major settled galaxy would have at least 3-5 conduits, each located in a major system.

## Overview & Physics

Conduits essentially act as miniature copies of the Nexus, to which all conduits are connected via the Nexus Network. When a starship flys near enough to the element-C core at the centre of the conduit, the E-C's radiation amplifies the lightfold engine, allowing the starship to reach the velocity necessary to enter hyperspace.

When a ship travelling through hyperspace approaches the destination conduit, the station detects the ship's unique signal and fires a beam of energy, known as a brake-beam, at the speed of light that seeks out the starship like a beacon. When the brake-beam collides with the starship, it introduces classical laws of physics into a physics-defying space (since the Continuum, one of the three components of hyperspace, has no dimensions or laws of physics), effectively bringing the ship's velocity to near-zero and physically pulling the ship out of hyperspace and back into realspace.

In order to soften the impact of the sudden and immense inertia (the interior of the starship keeps moving at hyperspace speeds) that arises from pulling the ship out of hyperspace, the ship must almost immediately lightfold; barring this, a graviton core can be used to provide a large enough repulsion force to counteract the sudden inertia, which itself can be amplified by generating bioenergenic dark energy fields.