Space travel
Casandro nodded as he pushed the throttle. "They'll be far behind by then. I'm yet to see the rocket engine that can measure up to a good set of leviters."Obviously there would be no galactic civilization if space travel wasn't relatively easy (as in, it doesn't take decades and superhuman efforts to prepare a trip of a few light years). But the first hurdle is still getting off the ground, and that's where leviters come in. Simply put, a leviter counters a planet's gravity, allowing a vehicle to get into orbit without ejecting enormous amount of reaction mass. You still need to expend power equal to the vehicle's potential energy, plus any losses: leviters are 99.9% efficient. An offshoot of the same principle allows spaceships to generate artificial gravity without the need for continuous acceleration or rotating sections, and to ensure crews aren't squished during a sudden maneuver. Yet another related piece of equipment is the tractor beam, essentially a focused cone of artificial gravity that can pull objects towards each other in space -- the opposite of a leviter, as it were. In space, reaction drives are still preferred for most applications, especially in the military. For one thing, thrusters are more robust than leviters, since they can be as simple as a pressure tank with a nozzle. By the same token, a thruster can be buried deep within the ship, leaving only the nozzle out, while leviters have to be mounted on the outside. Last but not least, leviters can't be used together with deflector shields. On the plus side, they can provide very high thrust, at the cost of an exponential increase in energy use. This is only possible thanks to the a-core, a device than can turn matter directly into energy with 99.9% efficiency, safely and within a reasonably small package. But a-cores are expensive, and not as robust as more primitive power plants, so they're only used where nothing else would do. Then, of course, there is hyperdrive. How it works is a question best left unasnwered. Suffice to say, it can move a spaceship from point A to point B much faster than relativity would normally allow. How fast? A small freighter might do 5000 times the speed of light, while a ship built to circumnavigate the galaxy can easily be five to six times as fast. They can only remain in hyper mode for a few weeks at a time, though, after which they need a cooldown interval of one hour per two or three days spent in hyper. Ships in hyper mode can't interact with each other and objects in normal space. But sufficiently large objects project a "mass shadow" roughly corresponding to their gravitational field, which can pull a ship in hyper off course, or even force them out of hyper. The same thing happens if a hyperdrive fails mid-flight. It's not possible to track ships in hyper, but any ship equipped with a hyperdrive can instantly detect another entering or exiting normal space within one ight year. While ships can travel faster than light, data can't -- at least not by itself. It is however possible to stabilize a small wormhole and move one of its ends to another star system. Since wormholes can't exist outside normal space-time, this can only be done at relativistic speeds, and takes decades even between nearby stars. Wider information networks operate on a point-to-point basis. As these wormholes are needle-thin, only laser beams can usefully travel through them.
They both watched tensely as their pursuers were falling behind, not even trying to keep up.
"We're going right where they want us, aren't we?"
There was a brief burst of radiation far ahead, and another ship came out of hyper, cutting them off. A big one.
"Yep." concluded Jake.
"Time for plan B then. Call for help?"
Jake tapped an indicator. "No network here. Uncharted star systems, remember?"
"Then how are they coordinating?"
"Do you want to call and ask?" The Trashcan shook. "What now?"
"Tractor beam. And we're accelerating right into it." He swore under his breath, as turning the control yoke had little effect other than pushing them into their chairs as the ship banked hard.
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