Technology

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The Empire

Technology

PLACEHOLDER

Abridged Information

The technology of the Empire, though advanced in places, is built upon ancient, often forgotten knowledge, confounded by the lack of resources to consistently build and repair it. Voidships are often centuries old, held together by luck, ingenuity and a cavalier approach to the risks that has created superstitions and myths akin to those of the sailors of old. Warpgates function by long-forgotten means and hold countless oddities that the Empire cannot begin to guess at the causes of. Vital infrastructure decays under the weight of age in an Empire without the means to properly maintain them. Despite efforts to reclaim the knowledge of the forebears, for each small innovation made, a dozen more are lost.

Voidships

Voidships are space-faring vessels capable of transporting a crew through space. Within the Empire, voidships tend to be old, if not ancient, with ships at least a hundred years old being the norm, with many more pushing into several centuries old. These venerable ships inevitably develop many problems, be that noisy, creaking piping, the odd thruster failing from wear and tear, or even whole sections of the ship depressurising from microfractures.

The lack of resources within the Empire and the subsequent scarcity of advanced technological components means that the issues in ships frequently take months or years to be repaired, or even never. When they are repaired, the fixes tend to be haphazard or salvaged from less fortunate vessels. Despite this, one thing that is rarely in short supply are the wrecked, abandoned husks of ancient, forgotten voidships to salvage from.

Voidships are stressful, isolated environments, but also long-term ones. Travel on a voidship may take weeks or months, and crew may live on a ship for years or decades with very little shore leave or even true ‘offtime,’ always being on call. All the while the ship slowly degrades with age, and external factors threaten even the safest voyages.

Due to the difficulties, spacers, as they are often called, tend to be a highly superstitious people, believing in anything from lucky wrenches and vengeful power manifolds, to unknown monsters within the depths of space to even deities who watch over voidships and their crews, but often demand offerings or else risk their wrath. Commonly believed deities include the Lost Navigator, who guides lost ships home, Edyth Mechann, a multi-armed engineer who keeps ships from suffering mechanical failures, and the Voidlure, a malevolent being who tricks voidships into their doom to turn the souls of the damned into its spectral slaves.

Warpgates and Jumpgates

Travel between star systems is achieved through the use of warpgates and jumpgates—massive spatial constructs that utilise wormholes to allow for voidships to travel through a tunnel outside of regular spacetime to the other side. Warpgates and jumpgates are fundamentally the same, except that the former uses a wormhole that links it to another warpgate on the other side, creating a more stable connection.

A jumpgate, by contrast, creates a wormhole that does not have a connecting gate, but instead is temporarily kept open at an approximate location long enough for a ship to pass through. These wormholes are highly unstable, risking damage to a ship using one, but nonetheless is essential for establishing new warpgates. Due to the instability and uncertainty of where the wormhole will actually lead to, there are two methods of warpgate travel – opening in deep space approximately near the destination, or attempting to open one around a large mass.

The former is the safest, however the wormhole, without a mass anchoring it, is liable to open potentially lightyears off from its intended location, leading to the voidship likely needing to take an arduously long, sublight voyage to its final destination, possibly taking years, by which time the crew may well have ran out of supplies and died. The latter is quicker, but more risky, as the gravity of a large mass anchors a wormhole to it, ensuring it opens nearer to the intended location. However, a voidship may emerge too close to the mass. While less of a danger with gas giants, it is rare to find one massive enough to be reliably used for this method, and so the star itself is typically used, risking the voidship emerging into a solar flare or into the star’s corona itself, destroying it.

Wormholes are a scarcely understood phenomenon. While the creation of and use of them is known for the most part, the inner workings of one is pure speculation. They tunnel outside of regular spacetime, enabling the distances inside to be shorter than outside, but this means that they are going outside of reality as it is understood. Ships undulate and disform alongside the wormhole in impossible ways, and while upon exiting these ships return to their original shape, invariably there is some damage caused, with the destruction of entire ships, while rare, not being unheard of.

More concerning are the effects on the minds of humans and other lifeforms. The experience of going through a wormhole is, for whatever reason, anathema to consciousness, leading to those who go through becoming catatonic, unintelligibly traumatised, or – perhaps thankfully – outright dying from shock. To avoid this, hypersleep chambers are used to put a crew into a dreamless, deathly sleep to be rethawed on the other side. This averts the majority of the effects, however many report feeling disconcerted or strangely empty upon reawakening.

Even with these precautions, prolonged, repeated warpjumps have a significant correlation to the eventual development of dementia or schizophrenia, while the offspring of those who have undergone dozens of warpjumps have an unusually high rate of birth defects, especially among those who were in gestation in the time. This includes anomalous genetic information belonging to neither parent, nor able to be regarded as just mutations. This phenomenon is commonly called WBS – Wormhole Birth Syndrome.

Atomic Fabricators (Atfabs)

Atomic fabricators, near universally called atfabs within the empire, are machines that are capable of rearranging subatomic particles in order to convert any matter inputted into a desired result – provided there is sufficient quantities of particles to perform this feat. The ancient, advanced technology that predates the modern Empire can, by and at large, be manufactured only within Atfabs, making these industrial, oftentimes city block-sized machines a fundamental necessity to the survival of the Empire.

While atfabs are highly efficient materially, wasting less than 2% of the inputted material, they are also highly energy intensive. For many worlds possessing one, it may take many months to generate enough power to run a single atfab for several hours. While this was evidently not an issue in the forgotten past, the modern Empire simply lacks the energy infrastructure required to maintain constant atfab usage, and must settle for building only the essentials in the limited time they can operate.

Curiously, House Ryoshi’s atfabs appear to have an unusually high uptime that is in contrast to the amount of energy they should have access to. Despite this irregularity, or perhaps because of, House Ryoshi is dismissive of any inquiries or attempts to ascertain the reasoning behind this.

Quantum Relays

Where jumpgates and wormholes permit faster than light travel for voidships, the process for enabling FTL communication is comparatively simpler. Utilising arrays of quantum-entangled crystalline structures, information can be transmitted between two distant locations instantaneously. Despite the reliability and safety of this system, quantum relays are limited by a number of factors. One crystal can only ever be linked to a single other crystal, both of which must be produced simultaneously. The process by which a pair is produced is painstakingly slow and complex, with only House Ryoshi maintaining all the facilities to produce them. Finally, the infrastructure to support the system - including the means to relay a message across a chain of relays and the ability to read the encrypted messages, is prohibitively intricate and expensive to maintain.

These limitations, confounded by a relatively slow rate of transmission and processing of data, necessitates that the majority of communication through them be of tactical, political, or economic significance, with only the nobility being able to afford the luxury of sending personal messages through them, and even then at significant financial cost.

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