[ASH][3732] The Grand Encyclopedia - Twist Drives

WELCOME TO THE GRAND ENCYCLOPEDIA.  TOPIC?

The Twist Drive, please.

WHAT LEVEL OF DETAIL/TECHNICALITY?

Medium detail, interested non-scientist.

THANK YOU.  HERE IS YOUR ENTRY.  SELECT ANY WORD OF PHRASE FOR GREATER
DETAIL. 

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     The Twist Drive is a means of superluminal transport.  Like the ancient
Hyperdrive, it allows a ship to travel faster than light without violating
the laws of nature, although it seems to violate physical causality.  In
fact, it requires the development of sixth stage post-Classical physical
theory before any form of superluminal transport is even scientifically
plausible. 

     The basic principle behind the Twist Drive was put forth during the
development of second stage post-Classical physical theory in the second half
of the 1900s.  While many details of that century have been lost, it is known
that scientists exploring the implications of a first stage post-Classical
physical theory known as Relativity realized that a purely mathematical
approach predicted Tachyonic matter.  Where normal matter is constrained to
speeds less than that of light (within the limits of the first five stages of
post-Classical physical theory), matter with certain special properties would
be limited to speeds greater than that of light.

     A short digression is in order.  Classical mathematics states that the
square root of a negative number is a meaningless quantity.  Early
transitional mathematics assigned a value to the square root of -1, calling
it "i", an "imaginary" number.  Later development found it useful to describe
numbers as a mix of real and imaginary parts, resulting in Complex numbers.
While useful in describing real-world situations such as oscillations, no one
seriously thought imaginary numbers had a physical counterpart.  Any physical
quantity could be "rotated in the Complex plane" for calculational purposes,
but it was merely a tool.

     This would change.

     Somewhere around the year 1970, theoretical physicists realized that if
the equations that helped limit speeds to less than that of light were
applied to a purely imaginary mass, they would force that object to travel NO
SLOWER than the speed of light.  They called these particles of imaginary
mass "tachyons", or speedy particles.  It was theorized a few decades later
that the mythical "Tymythy Twystyd", among other supernormals, engaged in
rapid transport by converting himself to tachyons.  This was dubbed Twisting
and explained as a rotation or "twist" in the Complex plane that converted
low subluminal speeds into high superluminal speeds for the barest instant.

     However, with the end of the so-called Heroic Ages, Twisting passed once
again into the realm of theory with no real chance of practical application.
It would not seem practical again until late in the First Expansion of
Humanity.

     By 2150, enough of the principles of Santari technology had been
understood to allow for the development of sixth stage post-Classical
physical theory.  This, combined with humanity reaching the limits imposed by
the Hyperdrive ships bought from the shattered Planetary Confederation, led
to the decision to attempt to change Twisting from theory to reality.

     Sixth-stage theory was soon put into practice, and it was discovered
that rotation in the Complex plane was physically possible.  However, all
test craft vanished without a trace.  Calculations were checked and
rechecked, until a low-level technician finally raised a very basic question
no one had considered, a question that relied on mere first-stage theory.
Namely, that there is no such thing as an absolute frame of reference...any
speed has to be measured as compared to something else.  The early Twist
Drive prototypes were focusing on the ship itself as a reference frame.  As a
result, every part of the ship went from zero velocity with respect to the
drive...to infinite speed.  In all possible directions.  It was necessary to
focus the drive on an alternate frame of reference.

     Further experiments determined that the frame of reference would require
a mass of some sort with dimensions large enough that all parts of the ship
could move away from it in the same direction.  In practice, this meant
something at least ten times larger than the ship.  Test craft that used
nearby planets as reference frames were able to survive Twist transit,
although it was difficult to control how far they would travel, and return
trips required first locating a suitable mass while traveling under
Hyperdrive before the Twist Drive could be used again.  Also, while
theoretically possible, Twisting from a planetary surface was soon abandoned
due to the significant damage inflicted on the ship's former surroundings in
the wake of the Twist.  

     Once the ship Twists, it stays Twisted for a set amount of time based on
the energy applied to the Twist Drive, after which it spontaneously reverts
to normal matter with no acceleration noticeable in the reference frame of
the ship.  This also applies to any matter Twisted without an internal drive,
although the reversion is less efficient and generally fatal to highly
organized lifeforms.  However, it was found to be useful for a form of
superluminal communications, using encoded particle beams Twisted to cross
several lightyears at a time.  Precise aiming was required, but the beams
spread enough that it was generally fairly easy to hit a starsystem with
enough signal strength to transmit messages.  

     While useful for cutting days or even weeks from travel time in
peacetime, this version of the Twist Drive was not suitable for warships.
And with signs that the old Santari Houses might be stirring again, a
wardrive was necessary.

     It took nearly a century more to develop the Twist Drive as we would
recognize it today, during which the "System Hopper" dual drive system helped
humanity expand far beyond the previous boundaries imposed by Hyperdrive.
The System Hopper would have caused humanity to expand beyond its ability to
remain culturally unified, if not for the simultaneous perfection of the
Twist Comm.

     A scientist on Delta Pavonis III, whose specialty was artificial gravity
fields, provided the key to true Twist Drives in 2241.  He was attempting to
create free-standing gravity fields, with an eye towards eventual
applications such as "tractor beams" and safety fields that could be erected
in places where a worker might be at a risk of falling.  Despite all his
efforts, he was never able to find a way to generate a field that would last
for more than 0.23 seconds before collapsing.  Even using a pulsed field did
not help, as each field after the first would collapse in roughly half the
time if the region was not given several seconds to "relax" first, so the
pulsed field lasted only approximately 0.45 seconds before it was impossible
to continue generating a free-standing gravity field in that area.
Additional, purely practical, concerns made the hoped-for tractor beam
unfeasible, and it remains an inefficient and generally weak device even with
modern technology, although the desired effect can be generated now with
remote drone units that create gravity fields within a space defined by the
drones.

     In 2252, a researcher on Earth was examining the previous scientist's
work when he realized it wasn't a complete failure.  If a sufficiently large
free-standing gravity field could be generated, a ship could use that field
as the reference frame for its Twist Drive.  Despite attempts by the United
World government of Terra to keep this discovery secret, Santari scientists
soon repeated the breakthrough, possibly with the help of espionage.

     Various characteristics of these artificial gravity fields place
functional limits on the performance of Twist Drives:  

     1) A ship must generate the field with itself as the initial center
point, although certain tempermental and extremely expensive generators can
generate the field tangent to the ship.  This means the ship must move away
from the field before it is safe to engage the Twist Drive, lest the problems
of the original prototypes be encountered.  Twist Drives have safety
interlocks that prevent Twisting while the field still intersects the ship.

     2) Because the field collapses within 0.23 seconds, a ship has only that
long to separate itself from the field.  Twisting inverts the ship's speed as
a fraction of lightspeed (i.e. if going 0.20 c initially, it will Twist to
5.0 c): the faster the ship goes when it Twists, the more slowly it travels
during the tiny fraction of a second it is Twisted.  Increasing Twist Speed
means decreasing the ship's speed away from the gravity field and increasing
the risk that not all parts of the ship will go the same direction.

     A consequence of these factors is that smaller ships are generally
faster and more responsive than larger ships.  Smaller ships take less time
to get free of the gravity field for a given speed, so may move more slowly
in realspace and therefore faster while Twisting.  Smaller ships may also
accelerate more quickly in realspace, allowing for extremely short pre-Twist
times when Twist speed is not as important as Twisting immediately.

     However, a third factor favors larger ships.  Creating the artificial
reference points takes tremendous amounts of energy.  Small ships are rarely
able to generate more than a handful of reference points before needing to
recharge, although they can choose to generate less stable fields using less
energy if speed is less important than endurance.  Large ships often carry
sufficient power-generation capacity to Twist many times in rapid succession,
and warships always carry massive capacitor banks that increase their ability
to Twist multiple times in combat.

     It should be noted that the conversion of normal matter to tachyonic
matter is not 100% efficient.  A tiny percentage of the normal matter is
converted to a combination of photons and Twisted ions, known as the Twist
Pulse.  This is repeated at the end of a Twist, during spontaneous reversion,
during which a small percentage of the matter reverts an almost infinitesimal
amount of time earlier or later than the main body.  Even rapid, repeated
Twisting almost never causes enough mass loss to be noticed, however.  The
one exception involves devices that depend on tiny amounts of exotic
materials, where the loss of even one atom might be noticed.  Such devices
are often transported by archaic Hyperdrive ships to ensure their continued
operation.

     The Twist Pulse can be detected in various ways and can provide an
instantaneous warning of an arriving ship if the Twisted matter spreads far
enough.  Warships have special systems that can reduce the strength of the
Twist Pulse, or channel it in a limited direction, but they also have far
more sensitive detectors.  As a result, warships can generally detect the
Twist Pulse of any other warship, while civilian craft may be blind to the
presence of a military-grade craft entering their area.  Shielded Twisting is
more expensive in terms of both drive technology and energy usage, and very
little of it has found its way into civilian craft even though the technology
has been available for over a millennium.  Currently, both the United Worlds
and the Santari Empire restrict ownership of Pulse Shields quite heavily, as
they would allow pirates and smugglers to evade detection (although their
tremendous cost ensures that any "pirates" are really privateers working for
smaller star polities or rogue elements of one of the two main star
nations). 

     END ENTRY.  DO YOU WISH MORE DETAIL?

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                                The Twist Drive
                               An ASH 3732 File
                       copyright 2003 by Dave Van Domelen

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