Warp drive

A propulsion system also known as Alcubierre drive used by ships of both Commonwealth and Union for faster-than-light travel, most often to overcome wast distances between systems as ships are basically blind while in the warp and cannot avoid any obstacles, having to rely on the emptiness of interstellar space.

Warp drive can be used in three ways/modes.

1. Through uncharted space - ships traveling in this manner have to perform short jumps, each jump followed by a pause to collect data creeping at the speed of light in order to plot the safest possible next jump. Available civilian software makes this relatively safe as the jump success rate is currently about 60%. The success rate of this manner of travel for military ships is currently about 75%
2. Along an established route - warp routes are mapped lines, dotted with relay stations that continually gather data about surrounding space and compute safest routes towards neighboring relays. The current success rate of this type of travel is 95%,
3. Along a warp string - thanks to the effect of the string, there is no danger of collision, making the ship's Shield hardness the only factor limiting the length of a jump. Generally, most ships are able to traverse the entire string in one jump, making this the safest way to travel, with a success rate of 99,8%.

Utility

Enables the ship to reach effective speeds of up to 9.99c.
(Sol - Alpha Centauri in 5 months and 3 days)

Warp transition

The transition from normal space to or from the warp bubble is called warp transition. Massive g-forces occur during the transition and have to be compensated for by Inertial dampeners.

Radiation

Levels of radiation that occur inside the warp bubble are so extreme that any person inside would be dead in less than 5 minutes. This is remedied by using shields. This also creates massive weakness - if the shield generator is disabled or destroyed, the ship cannot use its warp drive for any effective period without killing its crew.

Time for which the ship's shield is able to withstand radiation at a certain warp factor is shown by the equation

Where
t is time in seconds
w is warp factor, a positive number, a cube root of the vessels velocity in multiples of c
d is shield hardness, positive number, most often integer
h is planck constant
10²⁶ is arbitrary constant added in order to push the result into practically meaningful units.
Additionally, the result is often multiplied by another constant of 86 400 to transform the result into the number of days

Discovery

Originally proposed by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994. Some practical research was done in the early 21st century but failed to produce a viable prototype. After the discovery of the derelict alien base on Io, most of the ships located there were reverse-engineered and the viability of this technology was confirmed leading to renewed research, combining the existing research data with the newly obtained data from alien machines.

First prototypes were produced less than a decade later and it was discovered that in order to be used for transportation of people, the drive has to be combined with shield, another technology based on alien design.