Chapter 433 - Far Future Ch. 143 – Parsecs per Hour (1/2)
TL 12, Harmonic Drive and basic Tachyon Drive came online. The math finally made sense once we started thinking in That Direction, and the engineering looked like total freaking magic, as weird science must. But it worked, so those not a Twelve did not complain and set their sights a bit higher than Ten so they wouldn't feel stupid at not knowing why it did.
Testing on the systems was done well above the solar ecliptic, out in the middle of nowhere. The elvar in particular were very interested in our Harmonic Drive, since it would trump their solar sails. It wouldn't have if they'd bothered to update their inertial compensator tech, but they seemed to have lost the tech or the driving need to have it, so maybe us catching up to and dancing rings around their ships would impel them to up their tech curve again.
Stabilizing the power supply, grabbing all of the atoms of the ship and sending them vibrating in one direction... inertial compensator improvements, ship's engines, gravimetrics...
We could sustain .6c in normal space, but it required TL 15 shields to deal with scattered debris we found on the way. Everyone groaned, but deflector shields ranging out ahead to clear a path were a must, and we couldn't call them anything else. The demands on power supply really were too damn high, too...
Since we could print off TL 15 shields without kowtowing to the Mekkers, we went ahead and did so.
Putting all that together and doing a tachyon flood into a shielded bubble changed the spatial rules, and suddenly, things clicked. The Harmonic Drive neared 100%, time slowed, tachyon distortion kept it solid, and speed through real-time space multiplied.
50% Harmonic Drive became 2c. 60% became 2.5. 70% became 3.3. 80%, x5. 90%, x10. 95%, x 20. 98%, x 50...
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We had to go outside the heliosphere for the higher multipliers, as we needed to stay at those speeds for some time to get proper performance data, and above 95% an hour would suffice to cross the entire system in a couple hours.
Suddenly, a star system wasn't big enough anymore. The thought was tantalizing to just about everyone...
The violent clearing of exo-heliosphere space we'd undertaken was completely justified by what was going on. We needed room to run around as we clocked to .999c, and could do 1000 times the speed of light. That was a light year in under nine hours. That seemed nice, but when stars are light years apart, and the galaxy was 53,000 light years across, that was simply not viable, even for stars close by.
The standard was parsecs per hour, or multiples of 28,557c. In the Tachyon Drive, that was 99.999965% of light speed to reach 1p.
That was very quick for nearby systems, but still very slow for heading off to Tellus thirty thousand light years away.
And thus, the Phlogiston Rivers.
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The post-light speed era of physics had begun, which meant we were shooting down a whole new knowledge tree where things were even weirder then normal.
Going faster than light while remaining in the dimension, albeit within a tachyon bubble, meant space, dimensions, and energies were strange beasts outside. Light, for example, was completely unreliable, as was anything in the EM spectrum that moved at or below light speed. Basically, we had to futz around with tachyons, causality, forces becoming particles, and invent a whole new branch of FTL science to meet the demands we had.
First discovery was that gravity was much more perceptible at FTL. Permutations in gravity literally moved instantly as far as we could tell, a shift in a system over here was detectable on the far side of the galaxy instantly, if you had stuff that could register the shift. At FTL, those shifts became much more obvious, as a ripple half a light year in length could now be detected. As a result, gravity basically became long range sensors, while tachyons became much more obedient and started acting almost like normal waves and particles once you were also moving at FTL. Reading neutrino splash with tachyons basically became short-range sensors, and creatively interpreting the whole mess, building alternate systems to engage at FTL, testing them, then miniaturizing them... yep, that took a LOT of brainpower.
It was wonderful. So much stuff to think about all the time. Vroom vroom! So much brainpower from so many Hagbloods wrapped up in this stuff. The laws of reality quaked under increasingly intense inspection by the Children of Rantha, rarr!
The Phlogiston Rivers were also much more perceptible at FTL, as the line of gravitic strings were the primary broadcast points for ripples and changes in the spatial curves. Since gravity permeated out from them and to them, it literally was like looking for rivers and holes. Map out the overlapping gravity waves, find where they converge, and suddenly the paramass spatial math began to click after finding the first one, verifying the waves and eliminating all the extras.
We found the second Phlo point a month after the first. The third took a week. The fourth, a day... and then it was just a case of how many sensors we could put on the task, and runs we could make around and through the system to get in range at FTL to find them.
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No, we didn't tell the Mekkers we had it working, as GAMT didn't require their approval or contributions, and we were adding Beacon-tech to the whole mix. Beacon Rantha-tech was incroidulously awesome at anti-Warp influence, ridiculously person-intensive and expensive, and set a whole new bar for the Coronal's We Must Have This. Even the Dukes had to roll their eyes after they saw what went into the stuff, but every Knight and Inquisitor in the sector wanted a Power Armor suit with the stuff, and were clamoring for it for the cyberware for their Cohorts, and the systems for their ship's shields and coms, and drives, and generators, and-and-and-and...
Our current highest degree of tech was dubbed Angeltech, as both the psis and working crew had to be Good for it to qualify. Beacon+AMT was as good as GAMT vs the Warp, but also against everything else, so to speak... so it was priced the next tier up, naturally.
Angeltech basically told the Warp to take a flying leap, unless you were staring down an avatar of a Warp God or something. Even Greater Demons couldn't fry it at range, and got extremely fricking annoyed with it.