Raising Steam - A lecture on Batteryless Jump drives by Dr Amalie Hutto

[Enkidu]

Dr Amalie Hutto, Applied Spacecraft Architect, Freeman Drive Commune, Pacifica, architect of the BIFROST Heat Exchanger device.

“My fellow Syndics. Thank you for lending me your afternoon."

"As large spacecraft gain increasing layers of complexity, they find themselves, for the first time, limited by the dimensions of Sirian infrastructure and natural celestial phenomena. When traversing solar planes at vast velocities, the laws of the conservation of momentum operate less favourably for a spacecraft that weights ten thousand tonnes than one that weighs only ten. This brutal reality of the universe has long cost spacecraft repair expenditures or even hull integrity before the natural forces of the universe; to the planetary accretion disks and celestial nurseries that still form the building blocks of life within this young, fertile universe.”

“Yet we still find ourselves bound by the boundaries of movement – how we move, how efficiently we move, as the critical factor in choosing where we raise our sails and ride across the waves of the void. Fusion, a technological marvel of combustion used continuously by humanity longer than any other form of propulsion, has reached an efficiency several times exceeding that of common stars. We realise in the light of our continued stretch for cosmic omnipresence – and our failure to reach it – that we are, in effect, no better than the stars. We are bound by its products, its projects, yet cannot eclipse them. Unlike the Daam K’vosh, we find ourselves hog-tied and immobile to the prow of created entities, in one sole spacetime. Bound by tricky, pugnacious laws that have haunted us since our ancestors first rode fleeting chemical rockets towards the black of space, over a millennia ago. Those brief moments where we have been able to contravene nature’s laws – with superluminal gates and trade lanes, have only bound us to more limits, more laws, more restrictions. Space ships, for example, cannot be designed to exceed the dimensional aperture of the gates and lanes we have depended upon for so long. These same gates represent not a increase in the power of the majority users, but a compact to enrich the few who know of their secrets and profiteer accordingly. The greatest question, that of adventure, remains unanswered, whilst we bend the fruits of stars to our will.”


“The Jump Drive - a technology just only over a decade mature, offers the delicious possibility that even the spacecraft for which ourselves, as Unioners, revere, may one day be defunct. Perhaps there may be a time where distance and time no longer govern our ability to traverse the great black. To blink and be anywhere else in the star cluster is to look through the eye of God, just as nanomachines became the fruits of creation a mere two centuries ago. Even mass becomes irrelevant in the great antimass reaction where weight and soul are meaningless in equal measure.”


“We realise that we stand upon the shoulders of colossi, that we dare become the colossi ourselves – at the very least, cyclopses. Yet as we stand in our gigantism, lacking depth perception to see the fabric of the universe around us, we find ourselves again bound by the uncompromising banality of physics. Whilst our fusion engines have reached an efficiency rivalling antimatter with less equivalent volitivity, the energy-to-negative mass reactions required for the surrogation of two or more patches on the spacetime quilt requires a furious input of thermal and electrical energy – enough to incinerate most spacecraft and their crews. Thermodynamics remains the limiting factor of survival in space, even as we bridge what, in Earth time scales, would have been their fourth millennium on this side of the calendar record.”

“Jump Drive Batteries – part energy retention device, part sacrificial cooling unit, stretch the concepts first outlined by Gauss and Guericke to the point of tensile extremity. These massive units, operable only for the largest of Sirian Spacecraft – from the Bustard Liner, to the Nephilim mobile Colony, cost vast premiums to produce, in part, due to the newness of the technology, in part due to their extreme demand, regulation, but most taxingly of all; the massive material and logistical requirements placed upon battery units by Sirian jump drives. The largest of drives, the so-called ‘Mark Four’, bears the most promise for the future, capable of teleporting vessels and mass with great precision external to the spaceframe and shield bubble of the jump host. The reason why this drive hasn’t dominated Sirian logistics and trade yet is a matter of efficiencies – even with instantaneous transit, the huge energy expenditure of the drive in both material ‘battery’ heat sinks and strain upon the host spacecraft have repulsed Sirian industries, who, in the the spirit of monopolism, reserve themselves and their subcontractors to the old chains of tradelanes and gates.”


“We must expect, within our lifetimes, that the embrace of drive technology will become increasingly corporatized and regulated. The potential mobility offered by such engines of spacetime traversal contravene the existing powers of the oligarchies, which has resulted in stiff penalisation for civilian use of the hardware – for the drive is insensitive to zones of control, to the considerations of man as to what is hers or his, and what is not. The drive replaces border stations, fortresses – indeed, any defence of the government that does not have a drive itself, or a carrier vessel equipped with one. The revolution will be stymied, slowed, and regulated, through the most effective means of control – the blood of the body; the batteries themselves.”


“These great Unions that we have nurtured in the creche of space for near a thousand years, must rise to the task of averting the corporatist’s future. The Jump Drive is our ally, the technology, the freedom that the proletariat requires to free themselves from the Corporatist fist. No other population has the freedom of agency, combined with the technical knowhow and intent, to commit to the act of liberation. We must develop humanity’s first known battery-less drive unit, and we must do so fast.”


“This, of course, means challenging Gauss and Guericke. But at what point has humanity stopped at the limits of the impossible before? Certainly not within our lifetimes – most adults remember the victory of the human race over those that would destroy us, a quarter century before. There was a point where the colonisation of space was doubted by the majority of humanity – within a quarter century of the third millennium, the first feet alighted on the soils of Mars, putting quiet the voices of doubt. Gauss and Guericke were with the first explorers to venture upon the surface of another world just as they are with us as we shorten the distance between those worlds, just as they helped others throughout our history. The mediums of energy release for our current drive systems – batteries – are not the first forms of energy transfer system used by man, outside of the bodies of ourselves, animals, sinew and pullies. “


“Water. Water the incompressible, the body of life, the constituent compound of all of Earth’s emigres – from the tiniest microorganism, to the bottlenose dolphin. Wherever humanity goes, water travels with us, inside us, and around us. It shields us from radiation, immerses our organs with the pressure gradients required for respiration, for movement, the spark of electrons through our minds and souls. Water, that boils away into vapour in space. Water, that cools and releases energy as it collapses into gas. It is fitting that the most appropriate medium for the economic mastery of spacetime itself will be the same compound that tool itself with us when the first Ichthyostega crawled out from the Devonian soup.”

“To venture into the unknown, we must first raise steam.”

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