Jump Drive History

The Jump Drive was first discovered by the Ancients more than 300,000 years ago. With it the explored the greater part of Charted Space. At the conclusion of the Final War, the Ancients jump technology was lost.

Jump drive was first discovered by Humaniti at Vland in -9235. It was also independently re-discovered by the Zhodani in -5415, the Hiver in -4698, the K'kree in -4142. the Vargr in -3810, the Solomani in -2431, and the Aslan in -1999.

Jump field is partly a gravitic effect. Much of it came from the investigation of theoretical physics and black hole properties. Jump fields are created by energy storage systems, superfast power switching elements, and several field generators which actually use this pulse of energy to generate the jump field. The field is an event horizon. The ship falls out of space into what we now call jumpspace. It is what Terrans refer to as an artifical Einstein-Rosen bridge; it is short lived, and is a small pocket of space wrapped entirely around the center of field, which is inside the ship.

Primitive jumpdrive was a crude affair, employing a single field generator. This created a spherical field, and hulls therefore had to be spherical to get as much as possible inside the expensive to produce field. These systems could not direct the jump. One had to place the ship at the optimum place to jump to a destination, charge up, then fire the drive. If everything worked, you vanished in a flash of Chernikov radiation and were on your way. Jump space navigation was normal space navigation, plus grav field calculations for the departing star and nearby lesser bodies. Destination mass is also important, at least for the star, and is required to define the terminus of the jump. Jumping into empty ('flat') space with this primitive system is fatal, as one cannot rejump. It was only usable to jump from star to star, and only if they were not more than 1 parsec apart. The word primitve is well applied to this crude system— but it gave the people of Vland several nearby stars to explore and colonize.

Starships must generate immense amounts of power to jump, and therefore additional fuel must be allocated for employment of the jump drive at the rate of 10% of the ship's tonnage per parsec to travel via jump. Much attention has been paid to this in an attempt to reduce it. However, due to the tradeoffs of power system design to get this much power output in this small a space, and the cost and size of a large high efficency plant, the optimum solution is a small plant that can operate at vastly higher output for short periods, and a large consumption of much cheaper fuel.

The critical bottleneck defining the general limitations everything else must conform to is the short time one can store that much power in a supercapacitor before it breaks down from the stress. This means the ship must generate all the power to use in jump within a half an hour before discharging it into the drive proper. Several experimental ships in the early days exploded due to capacitor failure. ONly a capacitor is able to discharge it's energy store this rapidly, batteries of the electrochemical sort simply cannot serve in this manner of application.

Devlopment of the supercapacitor to give it the power density and stability demanded for this service stagnated early on, and little progress has been made since then in spite of considerable effort to find ways to improve it. At the tremendous energy density of the capacitor at full charge, material stability is the seriouos issue, and tends to degrade exponentially if the charge is maintained too long. Current state of the art capacitors are rated to permit storage of full charge for 1/2 hour at the conclusion of charge cycle. (The first ones had to be used withing 1 minute of reaching full charge. )

This is a critical factor in ship design- because the power plant must generate all the power the jump drive will use, and hand the last of it over for use within the 1/2 hour period that the supercapacitors can withstand the stress of full charge. A high efficency system able to power the system up would occupy most of the ship.

Therefore a more compact system is used, which can operate in overload mode for the time required, delivering the needed power. This is not very efficent, and uses a lot of fuel as fuel, and even more as coolant for all systems under the extreme stress of prejump chargeup. This is why ships have such large jump tankages. A system to jump with good efficency would demand a large reactor and power converter not operating in overload mode, and would be at least 10 times as large for the capacity needed.

Spheres are not the most efficent forms for small ships to contain crew and cargo. Effort was made to explore ways to modify this to permit more useful forms, which in time resulted in a system employing 2 field generators, resulting in a short fat cylider with hemispherical ends. In time this succedded, and firing them together resulted in a successful ship which performed exactly as did the spherical ships— but with a shaped field, allowing a shaped hull within it.

Detailed design discussion

A new design was created using a central switching element next to the supercapacitors, and cabling feeding the field generators. The cabling lengths was somehow bungled or not taken into account, and the ship when tested Jumped backwards— towards Vland. It reemerged just out of atmosphere, and exploded.

They built a new one to the exact specifications of the first, but aimed it the other way (tail first)— and it arrived at it's intended destination, with minor error in arrival point, which was considered odd. It was aimed back at Vland tail firstand arrived at the system, again with arrival error. At this time, standard ships on the route positioned at departure point properly always arrived exactly at the known emergence point for that system, so the error was quite intresting to consider. In time this was determined to be due to it's vector orientation— which way the stern as pointing in when the fields fired.

The 2 generator system was firing one just before the other; the generator closest to the switching system fired just prior to the other, and the ship 'fell' into jumpspace in that direction. Aim the ship, you aim the jump. Towing it well away from the departure point, the ship was aimed at the system next door with exquisite accuracy, and fired off— and it arrived where aimed, allowing for aiming error. It has jumped from a point far less than what the math said was THE departure point for the system next door. (However, doing this later proved to be risky, with a higher incidence of misjump. To this day, jump point is the recommended departure for nice safe civilian jumping.)

The ship was also automated, and sent off on a dangerous mission- jump to an empty hex, take star pictures, and jump pack. The flatspace prison was overcome, and man could reach for the stars. This combined with the devlopment of grav decking, resulted in a practical technology which gave Vland the stars.

Spheres and cylinders are not very streamlined, and have trouble landing on worlds with livable atmospheres. Not impossible, but problematical. Hulls that could fly and possibly land would be very useful indeed. Research into this devloped the idea that a hull must conform to the shape of the field. Therefore, a field must conform to the shape of a desired hull. the problem is that fields want to be spheres. A round ended cylinder was possible using 2 overlapping jump fields, around one object. This was modified by creating one field smaller than the other, producing an egg shape. It worked, but offered no real aerodynamic advantage, less space, more of it's space in an awkward manner, and more complex construction. The shape today is almost never used. However, it was a first fledgling step forward. It led to 3 generator shapes, and the first primitive cones, so it has a place in history as a stepping stone.

A winglike shape would need a winglike field, and this would take not two generators in a line, but several generators, spaced out to create a conforming field shape. The first such was a rather blunt and lumpy flying wing, which worked— sort of; it could reenter, 'fly', and land. Another was a 3D wedge, a cone like shape- the reader is reminded of the fictious Tholian ship design. However inefficent at using available space, at least it flew well and could land. mounting external fuel or cargo pods improved efficency, at the cost of reducing aerodynamic efficency. In pure form, it was a superb supersonic shockwave rider, although not very good at subsonic velocity. A pure cone was also devloped and remains on the lists to this day as a stable usable configeration. Alas, it devlops little lift, and is inefficent at using it's internal space for decking or vehicles or cargo at small sizes; a better shape was needed. Developing complex multiple field generator systems was obviously the path to the future, and much funded research went into devloping the technology.

As a side effect of field research, hints were discovered which in time led to the startling discovery that there were multiple octaves of jumps space, which eventually resulted in jump 2, but that was a long time later when these hints were persued. At the time, they were strange details which simply needed to be recorded, which had nothing to do with understanding how fileds interacted and surrounded their generating sources- and that's what the funding declared the mission was for.

Devlopment continued, and soon found there were ways to control everything, ever more complex, which allowed one to create more and more complex and precisely defined fields- and shapes of hull to fit them. Flying wings were a problem, as velocity of reentry and velocity of convient flight and landing are greatly different. shapes appearing to be useful were wedgelike, or flat sphere like. With multiple generating systems becoming possible, then practical, both were used to success. With the study of primitive meson beam technology, the tendency of certain shapes to be difficult to precisely range resulted in ranging errors, with distinct advantage to navy vessels who may somedya have to face practical meson weapons. For non combatant ships, the flat sphere offered considerable advantage.