Via Solaris

The river that led humanity to the stars

Connecting the largest solar system colonies, the Via Solaris is a Hypersea lane that resembles a river and is easy to traverse by starship. Its course has changed over the years, as if it is actually meandering. This was considered relatively harmless until 38 years ago, when the Lupus Exonis System lost its access to the Via Solaris. Since then, governments started preparing for the worst case scenario.
The Via Solaris only requires low Relativity to navigate. The massive starships traversing it would never be able to use other Hypersea lanes, due to their size preventing them from obtaining higher Relativity levels. These large ships can transport both Terraforming Seeds and large armies, which is what made the Via Solaris so crucial to the spread of humanity across the galaxy.

Nature

Hypersea

Type

Main shipping lane

Relativity

0.5~0.8

Tranquility

2.7~3.9

Usage

Intensive

Piracy

Very low

History

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Discovery

For millennia, humanity dreamt of venturing into space. Yet to reach other stars within a lifetime, we needed a way to travel faster than light. The discovery of Hyperspace let our ancestors believe this dream was possible and in 2372 CE they first succeeded. From that point forth, their knowledge expanded.
What they discovered was that Hyperspace wasn't like normal space, bland and boring. Instead, the interaction of dark matter and dark energy caused it to have main pathways, weather-like conditions, even physical objects. It isn't just Hyperspace, to us it is a Hypersea.
And Sol System turned out to be lucky: It is connected to a calm part of the Hypersea, which allowed for easy navigation to other star systems. This calm part is what we now call Via Solaris, as it was the road that let us wander from the sun to other stars.

Seeding the stars

While harder paths through the Hypersea were discovered and technology advanced to make proper use of those, the Via Solaris is still the big definer of humanity's larger settlements. The largest ships are incapable of sailing the harder paths, due to lacking both the Relativity and the ability to survive the rough waters, so to speak.
As a result, systems off the beaten path will not be terraformed as quickly. They're still popular for many different reasons, such as mining and more independence. But when twenty stronger ships are needed for the cargo space of one large ship, it simply is too costly to send large fleets.
Of course another problem these so-called Strata and Itinera face is piracy. Pirates don't need a massive fleet to raid for supplies, and the harder-to-reach places also allow them to sneak up on systems by avoiding the main routes.

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Collapsing the curves

In 2773, disaster struck and showed that humanity still had much to learn about the Hypersea, when a curve of the Via Solaris broke off. The area had become rougher to sail, but none had expected a collapse.
The Lupis Exonis System had gone through a few natural disasters in the years beforehand, and heavily depended on importing food. One particular vessel, the CS Ramses, had been en route when the Via Solaris collapsed underneath it. It crashed out of Hyperspace and was considered lost. In reality the damaged ship sailed on until they could re-enter Hyperspace.
While smaller vessels did manage to reach the Lupis Exonis System, they could not bring in enough food for the entire population. Starvation and riots killed many while the system government tried to evacuate all they could. Then the damaged CS Ramses arrived, five months late. Without it, the system would have perished.
Since then, governments live in fear. What if their system is cut off next? What if we lose Sol instead, and with it access to all its factories? Every system desperately aims for self-sufficiency, while all are studying the Hypersea in the hopes that next time, we see the clouds before the storm.

"The entire ship just groaned. The sound of metal settling and stretching and dying. And then the alarms went off, while we crashed out of Hyperspace. Y'know, it's funny, back then all we could hear were the alarms. But in my dreams, I hear that second sound. The sound of Hyperspace falling apart around us, as it too got torn to shreds."

— Account of a crewmember of the CS Ramses

"You know the hype of adrenaline which turns into shock eventually? We spent literal days fixing the ship, counting the dead, trying to get everything up and running again. Drugged up so we stayed awake, because nobody knew how long the ship would last if we didn't fix it at once. The shock came after and never left."

— Account of a mechanic of the CS Ramses

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Hypersea

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Relativity

Often described as measuring Hyperspace depth, Relativity is how deep starships are able to go into Hyperspace. Rather than calling it depth, a more logical way of describing it would be force and resistance. If an area has a resistance of 1, your starship must have a minimum force of 1 to stay afloat. If a ship enters an area with a higher Relativity than it can handle, it will sink out of the Hypersea and return to normal space.
A Relativity of 1 was the original goal and theoretical limit of Hyperdrives, and they got close to it at first. Via Solaris has a Relativity of 0.8 at worst, so it was rather friendly to these initial explorations, whereas the Strata branches are significantly deeper. When a new generation of Hyperdrives was developed, humanity discovered that the larger a ship, the lower its maximum Relativity. And the larger ships already had reached their limit.
Science and technology have kept advancing, so now small vessels can handle Relativity that scientists initially never had dared dream of. But the limit of mass remains, which means the largest starships are inseparable from the Via Solaris: They cannot be used outside it, and at the same time they are a must for supplying the larger systems. Thus the Via Solaris defines the beaten path.

Tranquility

Still waters versus choppy seas are terms a normal sailor will recognize. In the Hypersea, these turbulent waves aren't visible to the naked eye, but still are measurable by sensors. Tranquility ranges from the perfectly peaceful 5.0 to the unreachable limit of 0.0 where even atoms would theoretically be torn apart.
The Via Solaris tends to balance between 3.5 and 3.9, which is a bit unwieldy but perfectly doable for pretty much any starship. Sometimes stormy weather will make the waves harder to handle, so weaker vessels may temporarily drop out of Hyperspace to avoid these.
On the bright side, this high Tranquility means both less turbulence but also less obstacles. Dark matter clumps are rare and can be easily avoided. Much unlike the Itinera, which are akin to navigating cliffs.
Of course a high Tranquility is both a gift and a curse. A starship moves by pushing against the waves, so to speak. The smaller the waves, the lower the maximum speed. Even small rapid vessels cannot go fast here, which is why Stormfarers hate the Via Solaris. They prefer stormy deep areas, where they brave weather and dark matter to obtain high speed.

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