Jump Drive

Jump Drive
See Also: Standard Model

The Jump Gate (JG) and the Jump Drive (JD), twin technologies from the earliest days of the Sapient Explosion that allowed the Union and the Accord to exist, bypasses the issue of understanding the Ether Sea.

Causes
The Jump Drive creates a salient or “protrusion” of realspace into the Ether and then enters said salient, before pinching off the salient into a bubble and traveling through the Ether Sea in the relative safety of the bubble. During the passage through the Ether Sea, the Jump Drive constantly works to maintain the bubble’s integrity and to chart a “course” through the Ether Sea to the desired destination. Instead of phasing “inwards” and into the interior of the sphere, a Flatlander with a Jump Drive will instead phase “outwards”, form a bubble of the Flatland shell around them, and then traverse into the space outside.

The method by which the Jump Drive charts and follows a course through the Ether Sea is poorly understood but is believed to involve a theorized attraction between bubbles of reality in the Ether in a manner similar to that of gravity. This theory is controversial due to the heavily contested nature of the evidence provided to support its validity; however, due to the lack of a more consistent explanation, it remains the most accepted theory on the nature of the Jump Drive.

The Jump Gate projects a salient of reality, one much larger and more powerful than that of any Drive, into the Interstitial Void in a manner not unlike an amoeba extending a pseudopod. When this salient intersects with a universe, the result is a one-way “tunnel” of reality flowing from the Jump Gate to the intersection. Such a tunnel allows objects to ride the flow of reality and travel from the Gate to the intersection point. The end of the salient widens the further it extends into the Void; because of this, objects traveling through a one-way Jump Gate will be scattered away from the “center” of the intersection point at a rate directly proportional to the “distance” between the home Gate and the intersection point. A Flatland Jump Gate will extrude a cylindrical volume or salient out of the Flatland sphere, its outside enclosed by the impermeable material and its inside connected to the rest of Flatland, in hopes of joining the salient into a different Flatland-like universe.

Jump Gates usually operate in pairs with each Gate located on the ends of a desired two-way superluminal and transversal passageway. The paired Jump Gates project and merge their salients to create a much more stable two-way bridge of reality connecting the two ends, allowing objects to traverse in either direction with effectively no scattering. Such tunnels are stable over long periods of time assuming proper maintenance of the Jump Gates in question.

Though such an event has never been observed before, some hypothesize that a failure to maintain a Gate-based salient will lead to the creation of a one-way funnel leading from the Jump Gate’s home universe into the Ether Sea. The implications of such a funnel is unknown, as the Standard Model is uncertain as to how a large opening into the Interstitial Void will evolve with or without interference from a Jump device. No such event has occurred due to strict regulations on the usage of Jump technology, as regulators fear that previously unforeseen consequences may turn an experiment into catastrophe.

Effects
As with the Superluminal Drive, the Jump Drive requires the insertion of information regarding its current location and a desired destination. However, due to the much more complex method by which JDs carry out their task, the information in question is similarly much more complex. The JD also consumes an amount of fuel and energy, one much greater than any SD will reasonably consume, in order to initiate its jump. This initial fuel and energy cost scales with the mass of the ship transported but much less with the distance traveled.

However, unlike with the SD, the JD substitutes the energy and fuel cost on reentry with a continuous energy cost in transit and a one-time energy surge on reentry. This energy goes into maintaining the bubble of reality the JD equipped ship is located within, without which the ship will be exposed to the Ether and almost certainly be destroyed. The reentry energy cost is required to similarly cushion the reality bubble and the ship within, however this energy cost does not scale nearly as rapidly in gravity wells.

The imminent entry of a Jump Drive equipped ship is marked by foreshocks similar to but distinct from those of a Superluminal Drive equipped ship. Similarly the action of entering realspace from a JD jump also causes ripples that are similar to but distinctly different from that of an SD ship. This allows for a careful observer to detect the occurrence of a Jump Drive based reentry and react accordingly.