Chapter 422 - Far Future Ch. 132 – The Uncharted Waters of the Void (1/2)

Nobody bothered to go out past the heliosphere except sleeper ships, as there was literally no reason to, ever. Pointless travel time, spots of superheated plasma, magnetic storms, and psychic and Warp fluxes heartily encouraging you to stay back in safe space and do your Helljumps from there, instead of adding to the scattered atoms of interstellar space.

But we were planning on the Tachyon Drive, and I was This Close on the math and psicraft to get it working. The Harmonic drive was the core of the multipliers, as it wouldn't be viable for more than closest system travel until we could get the multiplier into the thousands.

The eventual goal was parsecs per hour in speed. I could only gnash my teeth at not having true inertialess, but things would change at Twelve.

Gravity Drive plus full engine thrust was .35c. The Harmonic Drive could hit .5c by itself at this point. .85c combined was truly fast, and would draw a lot of attention from a lot of parties if unleashed.

But at Twelve, I would be able to upgrade the Harmonic Drive to .6c, and should be able to do an inertialess shunt like the elvar used for the speed boost for their Sunsails, for +.05.

That would technically get us to 1.00, but it really meant very, very close to light speed.

The Tribute already had potential Void Shield tech to deal with friction from molecules or objects in the void, the tachyon field basically forming almost a new pocket dimension in space so all that stuff just slid by. It would be like a fish swimming in spatial folds...

All the stars in the galaxy that hadn't been messed with were in rotational alignment. They had gravimetric connections.

Gravity bent space and time. The gravitic paths between stars were basically areas of stressed space...

Eff me. That was all totally and utterly possible!

[My Princess, you're still a wonder!] Hugs and kisses /emotes everywhere. –[Hey, everyone!]- I /dumped into Mark and Band to all the Ranthas. –[My Princess had a small observation on phlogiston rivers. Those probably aren't possible... but gravitic rivers between the stars most certainly are! Who wants to go exploring the nasty cold depths of the Heliosphere and find some for us?]-

Everything lit up, as everybody with any Explorer-like Talent promptly pinged the shit out of me, and Delores Rantha promptly got inundated and smothered with well-wishing comments for the steal.

Yeah, she had quite the big family now.

Space was once again the final frontier, and we were going to chart it in a way only the most dedicated of scientists would ever bother to... except we'd actually have funding.

Which promptly meant a whole bunch of master sensor/div specs needed to be trained, we needed to calculate what we were looking for, and then we needed to make stuff that could find these points automatically, and automate the whole damn process to get our maps drawn up as fast as possible.

Finding out the formulas and things to look for to determine where the things were ahead of time would also be quite the thing. Happily, I had some major computing power with lots of downtime just sitting there with nothing to do, and it happened to have loads of sensor data from some very high-end scanners it could work with from historical records to get a jump on this whole process. The Tribute got to work.

Following a gravitic river that was already acting on space could be a x10 speed increase, maybe more. Furthermore, such a thing would be avoided by dark matter entities just like you'd avoid wandering into a fire hose going off. Warp incursions would be squeezed almost flat and useless, despite the planar stress.

How could it not be there? This was transmagical space, and magical gravity could already auto-accelerate ships to a tenth of light speed. Why wouldn't there be rivers between the stars?

Of course, new ships had to be designed, new sensor suites printed off and installed, and they all had to have some legs because they were just bound to find Void races out there, as those types liked to play around at the edge of systems and in the Kuiper belts. They would be taken out just to be taken out.

Mmm. Escort duties for the new ships with Harmonic Drives, then? Better yet, some drones could be sent out to key areas, and see what was to be seen. Psi-link them with the correct runework, and even if they were lost, all it did was point out difficult things in the area... things that probably needed violent attention.

The fact that actually discovering spatial gravitic rivers would revolutionize astrophysics and turn potential travel between the stars upside down was a very secondary factor. I found myself wondering just what steps the Warp gods had taken to shut down heliosphere exploration and stumbling across the rivers we weren't sure existed, and force FTL travel into the Helldive path...

I had to keep advancing, make Twelve, one more step on the road, and start shining that light of progress ahead of us once again.

As for all the interesting Mythos shit and bases we were absolutely going to find out there at the edge of the Heliosphere... well, the Mothball Fleet was continually raring for some action after their repairs and continuing upgrades, and since I didn't want them leaving the system to help elsewhere, giving them continuous shit to do in the system made much more sense.

Mythos and Aberrants weren't necessarily Chaotic, but they were pretty much all Evil, and Rantha-tech equipped ships were definitely going to have an edge over standard Imperial Standard designs facing them down. The surviving Fleet ships that had been towed to Threshold and were being refitted were also being imbued with Rantha-tech internal gear, but AMT ship designs were just as effective against Chaos as GAMT was against Evil, so there was no need for the Mothballs. If that dipshit and somewhat more subdued System Admiral Colos wanted to send some ships out to other systems calling for help, he could do it from his precious mainline Fleet, and the Mothball Fleet could live up to its name and stay home.