Glide Drive

The Essential Interplanetary Drive system

The Subspace Acceleration System, colloquially known as the Glide Drive, is a type of acceleration device attached to (or more commonly built into the spaceframe of) spacecraft, in order to facilitate extreme subliminal acceleration without detrimental effects on its users, allowing interplanetary travel in reasonable time periods. Alongside The Gates, the Glide Drive is considered one of the most vital pieces of technology within the modern human realm - it is imperative that any government has control of at least some Glide Drive enabled ships, or else it will be severely dampened in its fast response-ability.

Utility

With a Glide Drive, travel times between the planets of a star system are reduced from days or even months to mere hours. This is because of its main functionality - the Glide Drive creates a cone of space pointing in the direction of travel of a spacecraft; the space at the "top" of the cone is warped, becoming much shorter in length, whilst the space at the "bottom" of the cone (behind the spacecraft) is stretched back into normal space. The cone never actually touches the craft - this limits the shape of spacecraft, or at least changes the requirements of a drive dependent on a craft's spaceframe.
Within this cone, the spacecraft - and hence its occupants - experience acceleration exactly the same as they would if the ship was accelerating without a Glide Drive. However, the cone itself, and the entire structure overall, accelerates at a rate several orders of magnitude higher than the Fusion drive of the craft can produce. This allows the craft to accelerate to (and potentially beyond) relativistic speeds within a matter of minutes. However, as the acceleration must be produced by an object with the cone (I.e. by a conventional fusion drive), any ship using a Glide Drive must still perform "flip and burn" maneuvers at the half-way point of their journey, in order to slow down before they reach their destination.
Within Commonwealth space, it is a Capital crime to misuse a Glide Drive. As they are currently limited to mostly military uses, this is thankfully a rare occurrence outside of registered testing facilities; however, as Glide Drives become more common due to the development of artificial Arkonite, the threat of abuse has become ever more clear. Glide Drives are incredibly dangerous to use within a planet's atmosphere; during testing on low atmosphere worlds, the equivalent of a High Yield nuclear weapon could be produced by using a Glide Drive enabled ship in low orbit. Testing on Earth-like atmospheres, due to the rarity of natural worlds and the difficulty and in the terraforming of them, has been barred in all Commonwealth territories - although there have been whispers that the Periphery, known for their disdain for planetary living, has been making moves to test a Glide Drive weapon system on a Commonwealth world. Furthermore, the ability to accelerate vessels at incredible speeds could prove to be an incredibly potent weapons system; both against other ships, and against stations and planets. As such, hard-wired shutdown systems are present within all manufactured Glide Drives by law.
Within the Commonwealth Naval Command, Glide Drives are usually used in two ways; Cone Ships, and Patrol vessels. Cone Ships, officially called Fleet Carriers or Command Carriers, are large vessels that generate a massive enough Glide cone that several smaller ships can fly along with it. This allows a Cone ship to carry a small flotilla of both combat and support vessels along with it under its own power. The ships' get their name from their general cone shape, and they normally have a centrifuge hab as well as relying on thrust gravity. Patrol vessels, on the other hand, are deliberately designed to work on their own or in tandem with other, similar vessels. Generally small frigates or corvettes, these vessels use their Glide Drives to respond quickly to interplanetary threats and to patrol subliminal trade routes.

Access & Availability

Although their importance cannot be downplayed, Glide Drives are actually quite rare in the modern world. This is because they utilize Arkonite - the material in which the Arkons' used to build their crashed vessel at Site Apollyon. Whilst humanity has a large stockpile of this material, the supply is not infinite; and, as this site is currently the only known ruins of the Arkons, the supplies are quickly dwindling. In recent years, developments towards the synthesis of artificial, albeit impure, Arkonite have been met with some successes. Chemists hope that this new impure Arkonite will allow the further proliferation of Glide Drives, not only to military organizations but to private individuals and civilians, in the near future.

Complexity

Essentially, the Glide Drive is a particle collider. Pieces of Arkonite are bombarded with super-accelerated particles of hydrogen; this causes the Arkonite to emit a previously unknown field around all matter in which it is connected. The effective range of this field is based on the size of the Arkonite piece used and the number of collisions per second. Finally, the field itself is directed by applying a directed current along its axis - this can be used to direction the field in the same direction as the main drive direction of a craft.

Discovery

The Glide Drive, like most advanced technology, was reversed engineered from the crashed vessel at Crash Site Apollyon on Centaurus. It was one of the first technologies established from the site, due to inherent and easily detectible space-time warping around the site, discovered to be caused by the material in which the vessel was constructed.

Related Materials

• Arkonite