A Brief History of Slip Travel
By Doctor Hasegawa Valentina
How the initial ships and arcologies of humanity arrived in the heliosphere we now call Palingena is not known. As humans slowly began to explore, they discovered that they could not simply travel in any direction. A strange phenomenon surrounded the system, an invisible lattice that acted as a wall preventing outward travel — except through the cracks that would occasionally open, allowing ships to “slip” through to another system.
The explorers soon realized that all systems were like this, orbiting in an expanding circumference of circles around the axis of a massive black hole. As their lattices rubbed against their neighbors, gaps opened. Slips work by exploiting the interaction with Z-space, so that the ship momentarily passes along an extra dimension and then back into regular spacetime with the two spheres having moved in the intervening period, which brings the slipship back in the destination heliosphere rather than departure sphere. The effect is effectively instantaneous travel that conserves vehicular momentum.
Cautious pilots could plot courses through these gaps to adjacent systems. Not just ships can pass through these slips - radiation transfers across while spheres “rub” against each other. Monitors pick up on these increases in signals, using them not only for intersphere communication, but also to detect when slipping is possible and to triangulate the areas of greatest overlap. These slips are predictable, after much study, but complex, making their navigation both a science and an art. Those who fail to meet the proper calculations end up crashing fatally into the barrier, or lost forever in the void between systems,their fates unknown.
Slips are focused around a Brouwerpoint, which is the location that is held in common with its neighboring heliosphere no matter how the two move in relation to each other. Slipping can occur within a short distance or arc of the Brouwer point, which in spatial terms would cover several hundred cubic kilometers of space, but the closer to the Brouwer point the origin is, the more accurate the slip will be. A so-called Perfect Slip - or a vee-zero, VeeZee, VZ (variation equals zero) - moves the ship from the originating Brouwer point to the destination Brouwer point and is a source of boasting among pilots - “I’ve slipped a VZ from Neutonia to Paradise Stars three times.”
“Slip travel," as space travel between systems became known, is the only form of travel between systems. Through these gaps, or more accurately overlaps, ships can follow established routes from one system to another. Over the near thousand years of slipping, established times and routes make it relatively safe if laborious. For the most part, spheres operate autonomously, getting travellers and news from abroad on a semi-regular basis - a few in clusters have constant contact, some may get contact every few years, others pass decades before brief connection is made with travellers from any particularly isolated or distant heliospheres.
