Slipstream Drive

Slipstream Drive
The Slipstream Drive utilizes two entangled quantum particles, one in the ship's Library, and another submerged in a distant Star, to create a bridge across space that carries the ship to a new destination instantaneously.

The Haylaeron Ring links every particle in the ship to this quantum twin and rides the tunnel of information moving towards it at hyper-light speed. When the Hayleron Ring releases along this journey the ship drops out of the slipstream event window somewhere along the path before hitting the star.

The uncertainty factor of Slipstream travel is a major obstacle. "Quantum Noise" introduced by gravity waves, dark matter, stars, dust, and other phenomena cloud the slipstream route. It's also caused by the ship's Heat Level, and people moving around the decks of the ship, especially during combat. This noise requires time to parse out from the signal, or else the ship can't gain a firm lock to jump.

To combat this noise, the Slipstream Room and Arrogation are housed in a spinal segment, usually near the Bridge, where it can benefit from being highly armoured and grounded away from the Batteries and Furnace.

The heat from the Slip Card has to be stripped away by a set of lasers that cool it to near Absolute Zero, or else the Lighthouse Particle can't be detected, let alone safely removed from its protective sheath and locked.

Every 2 Light Years the noise problem gets exponentially worse. Where an average 10ly jump may take between 10 and 90 seconds to calculate, a 20ly jump will take between 20 to 180 seconds to calculate. 100ly jumps may take upwards of 180 to 46,080 seconds (12 Hours!) just to dial.

The Dialling Sequence is randomized every time the laser is re-attached to the Slip Card's Lighthouse Particle, giving a different estimate as it goes looking for it again and parsing out the information bleeding across the distance. This is called "Re-Dialling," and it is often spammed like rolling a set of dice to get a lower number.

In addition to the variable in time, the exact location of where the ship will appear in a radius around the target exit point is also unsure, starting at 10,000km at 10Ly, 100,000km at 20Ly, and over 100,000,000km at 100ly.

With a very skilled Physicist this jump uncertainty can be teased down to a fraction and set a more exact exit destination. The time also decreases, as the Physicist uses their intuition to feel out the noise and locate the right thread to grasp.

A level 1 Physicist may only reduce jump uncertainty by 1%, but at level 40 will reduce it by as much as 80%, taking what would have been a 2 hour wait and making it only take maybe 15 minutes.

This time can be spent building things, travelling in a system, talking to crew, preparing for the jump, or in an Acceleration Coma to quickly pass the time.

Slip Cards
Slipstream Chips can be bought from local governments and private explorers, or even from pirates who manage to Anchor a Wild Star. If an enemy doesn't sabotage their library when boarded they can be salvaged out of derelict ships.

Stellar Anchors must be sent to a distant star at sub-light speed, a scout ship or a probe sent to the targeted star in a journey that lasts several years. Because of this, Slip Cards are currently only viable for ~11,000 "Known Stars."

Stars outside this Local Cluster are still considered "Wild" and are impossible to reach without the help of an Interstellar Matter Gateway.

Slip Cards are extremely valuable. While every Forerunner World's Slip Card comes with each new Slipstream Drive, the more rare cards are sometimes appraised for the cost of an entire flagship. Collectors will often buy the Slip Cards just so they can keep them on display, attempting to gather all the known cards for every visited star.

Buying a brand new Slipstream library for every new Slipstream Drive built is an expensive hassle, but while it may not be the best way to travel the stars in a human lifetime, it's currently the only way.

Should a Stellar Anchor at any point be destroyed, all of its Slip Cards would become useless. So far that has only ever happened once, when Atraxia was shot by a XL MAC, cutting off all travel into the system during the Reunion War. But the Torlan quickly built a new Lighthouse with Slip Cards they controlled after the war.

Stellar Anchors
Stellar Anchors are created by entangling hundreds of millions of photons in a solid conducting medium that traps them in a nearly infinite loop as if they were still travelling through deep space. Each of the hundreds of millions of Lighthouse Particles aboard the Anchor have their Entangled Twin stored to a Slip Card.

This Lighthouse Black Box is then locked inside a probe with a massive heat shield and coolant system that draws power from the convection current around it. That device is then loaded onto a ship, accelerated as fast as possible, and set to drift towards the target star for months, if not decades or centuries.

Once the ship reaches the target, the Anchor is then dropped into the corona of the star. A set of small Drive-Rails dive the Anchor into the sun where it battles against the upward currents of convection and plasma that are fighting to leave the star. The harder the star fights, the colder the Anchor's radiators keep the Lighthouse, which is near absolute zero. Ironic for being surrounded by a thermonuclear ocean of plasma.

The Seed Ship then jumps home, signalling success, and the Slip Cards can be disseminated.

Jumping into the Sun
Apart from the inherent risk in entangling every particle of the ship into one, then threading that massive particle into a photon sized hole, the ship must also travel through a winding subatomic stream across space time and exit at a random point along the line "near" the destination, which just so happens to be a Stellar Anchor buried in a Star.

The goal is to drop out of Slipstream before you dive face first into a sun. So far, no known cases of this happening have ever been recorded. Possibly because if it did, no one ever came home to report it, and no one observed it because it would be indistinguishable from a Star Quake.

Appearing inside an Asteroid or Other Such Day-Wrecking Object
There is also a minor risk that the ship might exit slipstream inside an object that wasn't accounted for when the Physicist chose the exit point near the Star.

The distances involved in jumps are vast, and planets and stars are still in motion, which is a bit like throwing a dart at a blurry pinheel across a city. The fact that Drive-Rails and Planets light up Gravity Assays like Christmas helps.

Things like debris and asteroids might eclipse the space-time rupture that occurs as the ship exits slipstream, causing the ship, which is still the size of a peculiarly large atom, to pop into being inside of the object, fusing its obscene atomic weight into a scrambled knot of nuclear physics.

Again, it is unknown if this has ever happened, but it would explain some unusual phenomena seen in the night sky of some heavily trafficked planets.

Saying Hello to Your Local Badniks with a Gravity Wave
There is also the risk that your ship will be interdicted as it leaves slipstream by pirates, police, or a hostile military patrolling the average embarkation sphere around the target star, depending on who you've pissed off lately.

Since ships generally jump into the same expected points roughly 1AU from the star in any given direction, those areas are highly guarded on Forerunner World Systems.

The Star is Gone But We're Still In Orbit
In addition to accidents and strategy, there are also the very real relativistic concerns in plucking a starship from one star system, transporting it across space-time, and dropping it around another star.

The first problem is that a starship maintains its original angle of momentum in orbit around the object it last jumped away from, much like a person jumping from a spinning train onto another passing train. The ship must accelerate or decelerate to match the relative velocity of this new solar system. That costs extra power and time.

Appearing Somewhere/Somewhen Else in Space-Time
The next problem is the regulation of quantum mechanics and the conservation of causation.

As a ship jumps, it is not just taking a short-cut across space, but it is also jumping through time.

If you jump to a star system, then jump back, the time elapsed between when you left and return is the same for those watching you do it as it was apparently for you.

The clock on Terra, which you left, shows you were gone for 2 days, and your ship's clock when you jump back reads roughly the same, plus some seconds, minutes, or hours you spent rushing around the other star system in your vessel at a fraction of the speed of light. The longer you spend in Acceleration Coma, the shorter this time will feel to you, but that time is still being spent the same as if you had been asleep - or in this case, frozen. If you went really fast a few times, then your clock starts to slow down relative to that of the Galactic Clock set by Sagittarius A, and the Terrestrial Clock back home.

That's not the quirk of Slipstream travel. This is:

When the ship exits slipstream, it does so in a rapidly expanding sphere of gravity that displaces space time around it, creating a kind of reverse "chirp" accompanied by a blast of light. This wave echoes across not just the immediate space near the ship, but also across the cosmos at the speed of light. It also happens at the point you had previously left simultaneously.

So years later, if you jump to another third star system nearby, you can look back and listen to yourself leave one system and appear in another that you are no longer in, like watching yourself in a mirror through a window into a room you left years ago. Depending on which star you are closest to now, you can even seen this process in reverse, watching yourself arrive, then years later also watch yourself leave to get there.

But when you jump to go greet yourself, you jump through the light that's been travelling for years since you left and appear with the equivalent time having elapsed since you were last in that system, plus wherever you've been waiting. If you then jump to where you had originally left from to reach the first system, the sum total of all of that time is now elapsed, and you can again wait some years and watch yourself watching yourself watch yourself.

Luckily, time only ever goes forward, and all people and all ships originated on Terra with the first Stellar Anchors, so all ships everywhere are jumping around in the same relative time frame across the same galactic time-line.

At least, as far as been reported.

The Heat Shadow Dilemma
The speed of light also just so happens to be the speed of causation.

When you go faster than the speed of light, you also go faster than the speed of events being inspired to transpire, skipping those critical in-between phases where decisions are made along a time-line.

Those decisions don't just happen faster because you are moving faster, and more importantly, observers watching you make decisions see you slowing down as you move further away, or speeding up as you get closer. If they could see you, that is. If you're moving faster than light you are functionally invisible until you go by in a burst of all the light you've ever emitted since you breached the light speed barrier. Just as there is a "sonic boom" there is a "light boom" also.

But what happens if you jump through time across slipstream, skipping all of the decisions your body would have made on the journey to get there?

When a ship is dialling down to to leave a star system, it has been reported, both as a matter of popular myth and as matter of observable fact, that the "Heat Shadow" of the ship that is preparing to leave, sometimes spontaneously bleeds into the region of space where it will one day jump ''back. It also appears in the location around the star it is about to jump to, simultaneously.''

The problem is that the decisions that were made in the new star system that determined when and where the ship would return hadn't been made yet, sometimes for decades. And yet, sure enough, after years of Intelligence Officers registering an extreamly feint but consistent thermal and light emission from a fixed point in apparently the middle of nowhere, that unexpected, unscheduled ship, suddenly arrives exactly where it was predicted.

This has been repeated so consistently under various circumstances that some take it as a matter of prophesy that their voyage will be safe. It is, however, variable, and not 100% accurate because sometimes the Heat Shadow appears somewhere currently obscured by a planet, or in a region of deep space further into the orbit of the star that simply isn't close enough to be observed yet.

Further compounding this quirk, some home defence observers have reported seeing the heat and gravity signature of incoming invasion fleets minutes or years in advance - sometimes before the enemy even made the decision to attack.

The most famous example was at the start of the War for Morning Grace.

A massive array of feint heat and light signals, not much more than the ambient background noise, but indicating a fleet of possibly a hundred ships, began glittering in the skies above Pix'Ban weeks before Fleet Admiral Kazhak Shel made the decision to assault the Mexam colonists that had merged into the local Serin population there.

The ConFed local defence forces knew that the neighbouring Rin'kor system had recently been supplied with a war fleet. So they sent a single spy craft, the Confederation Scout Ship Observance, to investigate. Their mission was just to check on the status of that enemy fleet, which curiously matched the number of signals they were detecting. The Observance jumped. Its Heat Shadow was never spotted in Pix'Ban. It also never came home.

A week later, Fleet Admiral Kazhak Shel's fleet arrived and sparked a battle that raged for 3 years, ultimately leaving Pix'Ban the ruined world of ashes it is known for, and cementing Kazhak Shel as an infamous genocidal war criminal.

The mystery is that when the Observance arrived at Rin'kor, Fleet Admiral Kazhak Shel hadn't even assembled the fleet yet. As far as they could tell he was actually arguing with Supreme Commander Anax'zi'Pradash about whether the cost was worth it or not. Kazhak Shel was certain it was, he hated the idea of Mexam and Serin living in harmony, but the ultimate authority fell to Anax'zi'Pradash, whose Pesh Gai'lin wife was Rin'kor's Pradsa, a kind of pacifist guru who abhors violence and would not allow her husband to make such a decision without familial consequences.

The arrival of the Observance was detected by one of Shel's Ravens who had been prowling for a Heat Shadow in that region days earlier, and when the Observance was engaged and destroyed, Kazhak Shel overrode Anax'zi'Pradash's authority, jumping to Pix exactly as predicted and laying waste to the system for years.

The question has lingered even through the haze of war and the horrors of a planet being reduced to cinders: did the detection of the Heat Shadow fleet send the Observance which triggered the war, or was it simply doomed to happen?

Stats
Phase 1:

 Slipstream Calculator – Interstellar Route Generator 

The Computer takes 2-10 seconds to “dial in,” then a random amount of time is displayed until the system has a lock.

 Small Slipstream Drive 

5 Units of E to Dial, and generates 24 Heat /sec – Add 100 E for 1 Additional Fleet Craft (max 2)

 Md Slipstream Drive 

10 Units of E to Dial, and generates 48 Heat /sec – Add 100 E for 1 Additional Fleet Craft (max 4)

 Lg Slipstream Drive 

20 Units of E to Dial, and generates 96 Heat /sec – Add 100 E for 1 Additional Fleet Craft (max 8)

 XL Slipstream Drive 

40 Units of E to Dial, and generates 192 Heat /sec – Add 100 E for Additional Fleet Craft (max 16)

Phase 2:

Coundown Begins. The Clock then starts counting down from that seed, which the player can then pass by skipping ahead in Acceleration Coma or waiting in real time while combat or conversations play out.

>10LY: 10 to 120 Seconds til jump.

10 LY: 90-120 seconds til jump.

20 LY: 120-240 Seconds til jump.

50 LY: 3840-7680 Seconds til jump.

100 LY: 122880-245760 seconds til jump.

Upgrades
 Capacitor Slot  (Max 4) – Reduces calculation time by 10%

Cost: 10 E/sec - 1 Capacitor Slot

 Dual Channel Calculator  (Max 4)– Allows two parallel Slipstream Locks Having a Dual Channel Calculator lets the ship roll the dice twice, hoping to get a lower time to jump. Having 4 DCCs lets the player roll 8 times in parallel, keeping the lowest time.

Cost: 5 E/sec - 1 Capacitor Slot

 Emergency Jump Drive  (Max 4)– Allows an instant jump to a set system that dials in as soon as the ship arrives in a new system, and maintains the lock so the ship can begin to jump home in case it comes under fire.

Cost: 5 E/sec - 1 Capacitor Slot

 Rapid Cooling Laser  – reduces time by 2 seconds (4 Max)

Cost: +2 Heat/sec Phase 2: 1 LY: 10-20 seconds til jump.

 Physicist Level 1-100  – reduces time by 1% for every level in Astrogation.