Spike Drive
Dr. Tiberius Crohn. The name means little to the common man, but among scientists he is equal parts as incredible as he is a complete mystery. The man was solely responsible for the invention of the Spike Drive; a propulsive piece of technology that is capable of moving a specialized spacecraft 'upward' through a spectrum of dimentional frequencies by delicately tampering with the nature of space-time beneath the spacecraft.
Being in this meta-dimensional space (also referred to as Drillspace) allows a vessel to reach velocities that are inconcievable in typical 'luminal' space.
Humanity’s interstellar history began in a musty instafab laboratory on a remote coast in northern Greenland in the year 2108. A small army of jury-rigged microfab plants and hotwired autofacs had been churning for years, painstakingly realizing the plans of their creator. Dr. Tiberius Crohn was an insular lunatic of the first water, a laughingstock among physicists and a regular font of absurd claims. Were it not for his admitted talent at wrangling autofacs he would likely have vanished into the twenty-second century’s faceless proletarian mass without so much as a ripple.
His talents had gotten him the parts and resources to establish his laboratory in the radioactive wilds of Greenland, not far from the hot zone left by a missile from the Russo-European War. The glow masked the peculiar emissions from his test units, but in 2108 his work finally reached fruition. Crohn had invented the spike drive, the faster-than-light engine that would lift humanity to the stars.
Even now, a thousand years later, researchers still wonder how Crohn managed to devise the mathematics and theories that supported the spike drive’s creation. Widespread claims of “alien influence” were debunked by later Mandate historians, but rumors of these “Mentors” are still stock space legends.
Some of the axioms involved defied all perceptible reality, and the theories made certain assumptions about the fabric of the universe that spun off at least a dozen new religions within the first two hundred years of the discovery. The spike drive was a window on a universe far stranger and vaster than experimenters had thought possible.
Through a delicate gravitic twisting of the universal substrate beneath a ship, the spike drive drove it “upward” through a spectrum of dimensional frequencies. The ship vanished from mundane, “luminal” space and was thrust into the metadimensions. These inchoate realms of vast energy currents and formless masses were extremely hostile to unprepared ships, but their gravitic currents propelled a ship at speeds impossible in the mundane universe. Suitably massive objects such as stars cast a “shadow” into these metadimensions, forming both navigational beacons and anchor-points that enabled transit up and down the dimensional spectrum. So long as a spike drive had a star to launch from and a star to bring it down, it could ride the metadimensional currents in a headlong rush of superluminal speed.
The initial transit along a course was always the most dangerous. The metadimensional currents were unmapped on those routes, and a navigator had to make regular course corrections in hope of finding a current that would bring them to their course before the spike drive’s protective bubble broke down in the metadimensional environment.
Once the initial journey had been made, course rutters could be shared with other ships. So long as ships regularly made the transit, any shifts in the currents could be recorded. If a route lay fallow for too long, however, the slow creep of currents would render the rutters worse than useless, and a fresh course would need to be plotted by some brave crew.
Crohn’s discovery was announced by the sudden launch of his retrofitted spacecraft-laboratory from the Greenland hot zone. A number of orbital weapons platforms attempted to bring it down, but the spike drive provided such a wildly anomalous maneuver profile that the tracking algorithms were hopelessly confused. Earthside watch stations followed him out to the edge of the solar system, dutifully recording his ship’s impossible velocity. At the very rim of the system the sensors picked up a strange gravitic surge, and he was gone.
He returned thirteen days later, broadcasting a radio transmission that not only included data on Alpha Centauri that could only have been acquired through on-site surveying, but also included the necessary data for the reconstruction of the spike drive. Between the observations of the tracking stations and the content of the signal, there was no doubt of it; mad old Crohn had actually done it.
Even today, no one is entirely certain how he managed it. A prototype spike drive would have required six days of metadimensional travel to reach Alpha Centauri and drill down into mundane space. Crohn claimed to be alone aboard the ship, but such would have required him to remain awake and navigating the uncharted drill course for six straight days, all without any hint of prior experience. The creed that later became known as the Book of the Sky refers to it as “the Night Journey of the Prophet Tiberius” and considers it the founding event of the faith.
Tiberius himself promptly drilled back out into metaspace once his transmission had been sent. He was never seen again. To this day, thirteen known religious sects are convinced that he was translated directly into the presence of God as a fitting reward to the opener of the celestial ways.
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