Fusion Engine

The fusion drive, also known as a fusion engine, is a type of spacecraft propulsion system which serves as the primary form of sublight propulsion on most human spacecraft, whereas the Ward Hyperspace Engine is used for travel at superluminal, or faster-than-light, speeds. The fusion drive system generates both power and direct thrust for the ship.

Description

The primary component of a fusion drive is an inertial confinement fusion reactor or a series of such reactors. The reactors on USC warships fuse deuterium and tritium atoms to generate a stable and abundant supply of superheated plasma within a magnetic containment field. The plasma is channeled into a series of exhaust manifolds, which vector it out of the ship's engine nozzles along with added water or hydrogen reaction mass to provide propulsion for the ship. The drive system utilizes inertial-electrostatic containment and higher-order manifolds to mitigate fusion backblast, while magnetic fields and thrust-vectoring plates are used to improve maneuverability.
The main components of the fusion drive are typically located in a ship's engineering. The number of fusion engines varies between ship classes. USC frigates are typically equipped with two primary reactors and at least another two secondary reactors, while Maxwell cruisers are powered by an array of three fusion reactors. Larger ships, such as the mobile hospital USC Rest-In-Peace, could possess as many as six reactors. The number of engine exhausts also varies greatly; ships usually have two or more primary adjacent exhaust nozzles, and a series of smaller, secondary ones.
Fusion engines are capable of producing remarkable acceleration; using gravity-assist maneuvers to an advantage, human ships—from small diplomatic shuttles to Titan-class battleships—are capable of crossing interplanetary distances in just an hour.
For small-scale maneuvering, human ships utilize smaller chemical rocket thrusters placed around the vessel. Such thrusters expel chemical propellants such as triamino hydrazine.

Development history

Significant developments were made in fusion engine technology over the course of the 26th and 27th centuries; the Mark II fusion engines used by Maxwell-class cruisers produced only a tenth of the power output of modern reactors as of 2725.
In 2725, the USC Blue Dawn was refit with a power plant which used an experimental architecture where a single main reactor is nestled within two smaller reactor rings. When activated, the secondary reactors supercharged the main reactor, and their overlapping magnetic fields could temporarily boost the reactor output by 300 percent. In addition, the engine did not require external coolant systems like most reactors, instead neutralizing waste heat by means of a "laser-induced optical slurry of ions chilled to near-absolute zero". The more power the reactor is generating, the more supercooled particles it produced, effectively cooling itself.