Krasnikov-Hiraski Event
Krasnikov-Hiraski Events, or 'Keyholes' were the first method of travelling between star systems in a practical timescale. Appearing as a sphere with a deep blue glow, they allow instant travel between linked pairs.
The first wormholes were discovered by a Japanese scientist named Hirasaki Masuyo, who isolated one as it bubbled up from the quantum foam on Phobos. It was infinitesimally small, and it didn’t lead anywhere exotic: Its two mouths were a mere Planck length apart. Hirasaki developed techniques to grab each mouth and keep them from winking out of existence and learned how to incorporate mass and energy into the wormhole, widening it. Separating the mouths allowed the connection of two points as if they were right next to each other. More wormholes were discovered over time, but less than a dozen were able to be isolated and stabilised.
A huge project, incorporating the latest in anti-matter generation and drive technologies, succeeded in sending a wormhole mouth to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to Earth. The first men and women transited the wormhole a little more than a decade after Hirasaki’s discovery. The creation of linked, artificial wormholes was developed eight years later by a Ukranian scientist named Zoya Krasnikov, giving the technology's name; Krasnikov-Hirasaki Event wormholes, or KHE Holes, colloquially referred to as 'Keyholes'
KHE Holes have not been used in thousands of years, since the invention of the FourDrive rendered them obselete. The KHE network sits unused in humanities oldest systems, a relic of a far long past.
Utility
When a Keyholes is generated, one half is loaded onto a Pioneer ship - a small craft consisting of little more than an over-powered anti-matter drive and a dust shield. The vessel is then sent off at extreme acceleration towards the target star; whilst its journey may take many years to an outside observer, to the craft's contents, relativity reduces the journey time significantly. A journey that may take 10 years to complete, at a constant 5 G acceleration will reach the blistering velocity of 99.99% of c, and appear only to take 1.6 years as viewed through the wormhole.
Once the vessel has arrived at its destination (not always a guarantee, due to hazards of interstellar travel), energy and matter is fed into the wormhole, widening it enough for ships to pass through. Pioneer vessels tended not to last much further than 10 light years, and the shorter the trip, the lesser the risk of losing the craft.
A few inherent limitations was encountered very early on in Keyhole deployment, most notably when some of these limitations were broken and resulted in the loss of an entire mission. These restrictions are:
- The KHE Hole has an upper limit of about 4 kilometres in diameter - energy and matter can be fed into the hole to widen it, but only up to this point. Any more and the linked holes get unstable and collapse.
- Mass balance has to be maintained between the two sides of the Keyhole -however much mass passes through one way needs to pass through the other. Established Keyholes have nearby stations that maintain asteroids for this very purpose.
- Keyholes need to remain a few million kilometres from each other as close proximity causes instability and collapse in the wormhole. This is also true of large gravitation masses, such as planets and moons, Keyholes are often found at Langrage points for this reason.
- Attempts to link Keyholes back on each other in a loop will result in the collapse of not only the incoming wormhole, but risks collapse of an entire chain of Keyholes. The limit distance is linked to the spacetime distance it would take to travel between the wormholes at non-relativistic speeds.
Manufacturing
Originally, wormholes had to be obtained naturally, by careful examination of the quantum foam. They were hard to detect, even harder to capture, and tended to be quite unstable. Hirasaki's initial work did stabilise these natural wormholes for them to be useful, but it was still a time-consuming process that severely hampered the rate of expansion across the galaxy. Krasnikov's invention of artificial wormholes accelerated the process significantly, and before long, self-sustaining factory vessels were tasked with expanding the Keyhole network.
Enormous vessels would have all the facilities on to manufacture Pioneer vessels, generate the necessary antimatter to power them, and create and manipulate the KHE holes to go with them. Within ten to twenty years of entering a new system, these Exploration Vessels would have created a network of KHE Stations, leading to all the reachable systems. By that point, the systems tended to have a viable colony, and the Exploration Vessels then expanded out into the network. The vessels prioritised habitable systems as 'hub' stations, leading to a complex but expansive network of Keyholes and were capable of creating more Exploration Vessels when necessary.
Due to the requirement of Exploration Vessels to maintain synchronicity with each other, to prevent collapse of the network, they were all badly affected by the Amnesiac Virus. Not one of the dozen vessels operational at the time escaped their memory banks and AI being wiped clean.
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