Available technology

This is what technology is known in the empire.

• Most interstellar travel uses hyperspace,another dimension where distances are shorter, for travel.
  • Hyperspace is a hostile place with high energies and a viscosity that the ships need to push against to travel.
  • Any object that is not within an active field of hyperspace will drop to normal space very fast(normally halving speed every second) as they will decelerate fast and nothing can exists in hyperspace and travel at speed of less than 1% light speed in normal universe. They will arrive in normal space traveling at about 1% of light speed(hyperspace threshold). While in hyperspace they are exposed to the high energies and thus most pieces of junk will be burned. Typical life pod will most likely endure such as will someone in an armored spacesuit.
  • Hyperspace ship passing by is detectable very close by with gravity sensors, but for practical purposes at normal ranges is undetectable.
  • Entry and exit from hyperspace are easily detectable as high energy events, the pulse is +12+ship SM to detect.
  • To enter hyperspace a ship needs to travel at a minimum speed of about 1% light speed. In most cases this means a significant travel time due to the fairly long boost time to reach the 1% hyper threshold speed.
  • Exiting they will emerge from hyper at about 1% light speed.
  • Hyperspace travel cannot go through gravity wells and must happen at least 100*diameter of any planet or star*its density. (for Earth it is about 13 ls and can thus be normally ignored due to acceleration time/distance, but for a Sol it would be 1.3 AU and thus has to be figured in for close planets.)
  • Available starting late TL 9: 1 parsec/day
  • TL 10: 1-2 parsec/day.
  • TL 11: 1.5-4.5 parsec/day.
  • Typical starship accelerations,time to reach the 1% light speed and approximate distance from starting point
    • 1g=84.9hr(1527 lsec)
    • 2g=42.4hr(763 lsec)
    • 3g=28.3hr(509 lsec)
    • 4g=21.2hr(381 lsec)
    • 5g=17hr(305 lsec)
    • 6g=14.1hr(254 lsec)
    • 7g=12.1hr(218 lsec)
    • 8g=10.6hr(190 lsec)
    • 9g=9.4hr(169 lsec)
    • 10g=8.5hr(152 lsec)
    • 20g=4.2hr(76 lsec)
    • 30g=2.8hr(50 lsec)
• Jumpdrive: The earliest form of interstellar travel is really not used anymore. It uses another dimension that is closer to our dimension than hyperspace.
  • The jump space is a place of “nothingness” where nothing can be seen or sensed. Everything in the electromagnetic spectrum is heavily dampened. Vision takes double range penalties, radios have 10% normal range and so on.
  • One can only jump along certain routes between stars where the jumpspace “exists”. The end of a jump route can be found with a gravity sensor.
  • There are normally 1-3 such routes from any star.
  • All such endpoints are within 50-100 diameters of the star.
  • Using jumpdrive requires huge amounts of energy in a very short time and while the drive itself is fairly small and simple, the capacitor banks are large.
  • Traveling along the jumproute does not require anything special once engaged, you will arrive at the other end and to normal space with a velocity relative to the local star equal to the velocity you had relative to the origin star.
  • Unlike hyperspace there is no special pulse at entering or leaving jump, though on entering the drive radiates a large amount of heat as it dissipates all the power.
  • Travel speed along jump routes is 0.2 parsec/day.
  • Technically the Jumpdrive is fairly easy to do with TL 7 technology, but getting to the jump points and traveling between such is difficult at such low TL. Lowest practical TL is 8.
  • Life pods, people in space suits,debris and similar will just exit at the other end when the time comes. Thus being separated from the ship you will be fine if you have enough oxygen and food to last until you get out and then you can radio for help..
  • The new built imperial Message drones use jump space as hyperspace navigation is not possible for computers alone, but given a map of jump routes jump space navigation is simple 3D navigation to get to the jump point.
  • It it also still used by huge unmanned bulk cargo carriers to move very low priority cargo al rock bottom prices.
  • A jump drive system is a -1 SM system for starships and costs as -2 SM stardrive.
• Stargates: Fold space temporarily to make two places be the same for an instant.
  • Available TL 11
  • They are limited by the total tonnage and the tonnage/hour they can transit though them.
  • The only current implementation is based on mini black holes and The imperial versions have maximum transit capacity and capacity/hour of 300 000 tons. The Salarian and Asari gates can only transit 100 000 ton weights, but have a total capacity of 600 000 tons/hour. The Manil gates share the 300 000 ton transit and 300 000 ton/hour capacities with imperial gates.
  • They work between any two such gates at a distance of slightly over 300 parsecs.
  • They must be located far from significant gravity sources and cannot send things though such, thus they tend to be built at about 2 times the hyperspace threshold to minimize the blocking effect of the star.
  • The gates of the different species are linked and it is thus possible to travel though their spheres of influence.
  • There are also apparently quite many automatic gates built by unknown civilizations that are usable by anyone scattered around the galaxy. These gates are under intense scrutiny currently as they seem to be able to transit things much further than current gates and have much higher mass limits, but so far there are no answers. There is also a big search to find their makers. Some ruins have been found that might have been left by at least some of them, but the search continues.

• Artificial intelligence and Expert systems:
  • The research into AI is forbidden by all civilized races due to the problems it creates.
  • All current computer hardware has locks in place making both deliberate and spontaneous AI creation very hard.
  • The lack of AI limits the roles that computers can take. Some examples:
    • Smart automated weapons are not possible, though targeting systems and automated target tracking is definitely possible.
    • Robots require supervision as they tend to do stupid things when confronted by something unexpected.
    • There exists expert systems for a lot of things but they are all limited by the programmed in options and decision trees.

Contragravity: Available TL 10. Allows increasing/decreasing the felt gravity

• By 1g for a light generator 2g for a heavy(*5 cost) at TL 10
• By 5g(*5 cost) and 10g(*25 cost) at TL 11.

Reactionless drives are based on the same phenomena as hyper space travel and come in three main types:

• Cold reactionless drives; Late TL 9:Have acceleration of 10g*their mass(0.5g in the standard 5% of ship mass base). They are fairly efficient and do not create significant signature. At TL 10 their efficiency is doubled.
• Hot reactionless drives; Late TL 9:Have acceleration of 20g*their mass(1g in the standard 5% of ship mass base). They are fairly inefficient and create a significant heat signature. At TL 10 their efficiency is doubled.
• Improved reactionless drives: Available TL 11: Have acceleration of 200g*their mass(10g in the standard 5% of ship mass base). They are fairly efficient and do not create significant signature. Normally limited to 10g due to the limited gravity compensation available, some fighter craft have up to 30g acceleration, causing 20g felt gravity(causing HT rolls at base -6, but normally +9 from the advanced g-suit and position.).

They are limited in the total % of light speed they work at, The first generation reactionless thrusters could not quite make the 0.01c hyperspace limit and early hyper ships had to carry a reaction thruster to reach the last 1-2% of th threshold. But by mature TL 9 technology they could reach it, but would start to loose efficiency at about 80% of that and dropping to no acceleration at about 120%. Typical TL 10 thrusters keep full effect to the hyper threshold but start to lose efficiency quickly after that dropping to no acceleration by 2% of speed of light. By TL 11, they only start to lose efficiency at about 2% dropping to no acceleration by 3%. Badly tuned drives start to lose effectiveness much earlier, but do not tend to lose as much maximum speed.

• Genetic engineering is possible in limited way, but not very common and slightly frowned upon, though some nobles and few planets take pride in flaunting their genetically engineered bodies.
• Cybernetics are very common, with almost everyone having at least a implant communicator and a bio monitor implant.
• Anti aging treatments are available, but they are risky limiting total possible lifespans. Approximately 5% or treatments have some serious issues such as cancer or natural healing problems and similar with close to 1.5% of total treatments having catastrophic issues like totally scrambled genetic code, untreatable very rapid cancer, a too serious system shock killing immediately and similar.

• Force screens are TL 11 technology. They cannot be standalone, instead they must be built into the vehicle/suit surface.
• Cloaking devices are available at TL 11, but are of limited utility except in space.
  • They work by making no radiation(including visible light) escape out, thus the area will always be “black” in all frequencies so if the background is not the darkness of space they are very visible.
  • They have a limited use time until the collected heat/radiation must be dumped out. Though the dump can be done in a smaller arc still providing protection from other angles.
  • These limitation cause most scout ships, warships and similar to also have chameleon surfaces, radar stealth and similar things.
  • They are harder and hard to build as the size protected increases. Currently in the empire basic cost applies up to 300 tons, with 4* cost up to 1000 tons and 20* cost up to 3000 tons, 100* cost up to 10 000 tons. So only only scouts are likely to be mass produced with such.
• Due to construction all electronics are considered hardened for purposes of resisting surges getting +3 HT for such purposes and you cannot select the separate hardened option.

• Faster than light communications exist in the form of Gravity ripple comms, but they are fairly short range(maximum normal range of about 5 light seconds), expensive and very slow transmission speed.