Phenotype Universe 1 - The Jump Drive

Perhaps the most influential technology of the 21st Century, the Samson-type Jump Drive has finally allowed people to traverse the gulfs between the planets in days, rather than years. Like most of the most important inventions in history, it was discovered at least partially by accident.

Experimental physicist Gregory Samson had been attempting to create a device to predictably punch wormholes in the fabric of space. So far, all his device seemed to do was make its own internal clock run extremely fast. However, when a transformer several blocks away from his office was hit by a truck and unloaded several gigajoules of current into his device, it and the table it rested on vanished, appearing in a pub several miles down the road, much to the surprise of those enjoying their afternoon pints.

While a pretty deep knowledge of physics is needed to understand why the jump drive works, understanding how it operates is fairly simple; when you drop a large amount of electrical energy into the drive over a very short (less than 1 second) period of time, the drive disappears in one location and appears somewhere in the direction the drive was pointed at a distance proportional to the power used, along with anything it's particularly well-attached to. Through extensive testing, it is known that the jump always takes exactly 121 minutes, no matter the distance travelled.

In usual practice, a drive is connected to a power source, typically a large bank of capacitors. The ship is pointed in the direction of its destination, and the capacitors are charged to full and then unloaded all at once into the drive of the ship. The ship vanishes from its present position and reappears 121 minutes later several light-minutes away. The crew then re-orients the ship, recharges the capacitors either from solar cells or small neuclear reactors or batteries, and jumps again, and the process is repeated until their destination is within a few light-seconds, at which point more conventional thrust is used to guide the ship into dock.

Obviously, the more capacitors a ship can hold, the further it can go, especially because the drive seems not to care how much mass it drags with it, so bigger ships tend also to be faster, though there are exceptions in the form of smaller courier ships packed full of power but with space for little else. Since Clarke Station on Europa was one of the first stations to be established outside of the Earth-Luna system, the jump capability of ships is often referred to in the number of jumps, on average, it takes a ship to travel from Earth to Clarke Station. The smallest of ships, the kind that might be owned by (very rich) individuals might range from eighteen- to twelve-jumpers. Bigger cargo and mass transport ships tend to be more like five- or three-jumpers. The Empress of the Skies, a giant cargo and passenger transport (and the ship that all of the heroes will be travelling on in the first session) is the first ship that is a guaranteed one-jumper, and is one of the largest vehicles ever built. The Empress has, so far, made two hundred and sixteen successfull trips to Europa and back, and has never suffered so much as a navigational malfunction.

There are some people that are opposed to the widespread use of Samson-type jump technology. Because of the slingshot-like nature of the drive, no ship has ever been lost in drive space, but the ships aren't immune to damage while in transit, and a very few have come out full of corpses after their life support systems failed, or as tangled balls of metal after their conventional drives malfunctioned and exploded. Ships continue to become ever-safer, but enough accidents have been broadcast and televised to make some believe that the technology simply isn't safe. There is also at least one church that claims to have learned that the drive space is Hell, and that demons gave us the technology to lure us there to steal our souls. Needless to say, this is not a widely held belief.