Tech

Technology

• Drivesat – capable of communicating through drivespace. Transmissions reach the destination drivesat, up to 50 lightyears away, in exactly 11 hours.
• Drivespace – a sub-space dimension underlying “real space”
  • Resonance – background perturbations caused by vessels transiting drivespace which allow drivesats to detect starfalls and impending starrises within 50 lightyears.
• Gridspace – the Grid was the logical evolution of the Internet, allowing beings anywhere on a planet to interact in real-time in an immersive environment.
  • Interplanetary Grid – light speed initially led to each planet having its own disjointed node. The development of the mass transceiver allowed a single Gridspace to encompass an entire star system.
  • Interstellar Grid – individual system grids are connected via drivesat relays. This incurs round trip ping times of 22 hours, or more if multiple hops are involved.
• Mass Transceiver – allows for instantaneous communication within the gravity well of a star system
• Stardrive – allows a vessel to transit through drivespace. Travel time is always 121 hours, with the power of the drive determining the maximum range. Typical vessels can traverse 5-10 lightyears, but larger ones commonly manage 15-30ly, with fortress ships capable of up to 50ly.
  • Starfall – entering or ‘falling into’ drivespace. Often accompanied by a multicoloured burst of light.
  • Starrise – after exiting drivespace, a stardrive requires 2-5 days to accumulate sufficient tachyons to starfall again.
  • Radiation – the (mostly) harmless radiation produced by ships entering and exiting drivespace is unpredictable. Usually frequencies are scattered across the visual spectrum, but occasionally just a single colour is emitted. Superstitious spacers consider a black starfall lucky, but hold a red starrise to be a bad omen.

Equipment

• Arasaka T3X Spider drone – an outdated but robust spider-like robot; 30cm long; 7kg; powered by a hot-swappable lanth cell (lanthanide battery)