Python Reactor

Invented by Dr. Rupert Python, the Python Reacor is the standad method of faster-than-light propulsion employed by the Gudersnipe Foundation.

The Reactor itself uses multiple stages to produce Python particles (discovered by Dr. Python), which are employed in the creation of the energy mantle which allows for FTL.

FTL Jump Stages

Going from sub-light to faster-than-light requires the ship to "jump", accelerating rapidly from the maximum normal-space speed(around 70 PSL) to several times faster than the speed of light. This requires a series of events to happen in very precise order.

• 1. After plotting a course, the ship accelerates along it to it's maximum-possible sublight speed(not to be confused with it's Acceleration curve.

• 2. The Phython Reactor produces the energy mantle

• 3. The Gravity Field Generator(GFG) ramps output, reducing the ship's mass and increasing acceleration.

• 4. A burst of Pythons is released, either through the ship's N-space drive or through a special "jump" drive.

• 5. At the same time as the Python Burst, the GFGs reach their peek and reduce the ship's mass to 0, resulting in a sudden burst of extreme acceleration.

• 6. During the acceleration burst, the energy mantle moves the ship partially out of normal space.

• 7. The N-space drives kick in, and the ship is now traveling faster than light.

If everything goes right, the ship will accelerate from around 70 PSL to 2 or 3 times the speed of light in an instant. Compensation from inertial dampers is also critical, and must be precisely timed with the GFG output or the crew will end up as greasy little smears on the back wall of the ship.

Large vessels, such as capitol ships and large commercial carriers, are extremely vulnerable during the first stage. The ship must accelerate along a very straight, predictable trajectory. For some civilian ships, this stage may take several hours.

In general, a minimum velocity of fifty PSL is required to imitate a jump, though the transition is much smoother at higher speeds. The Star Hammer 90 PSL+ transitions from top speed to FTL so smoothly most passengers do not even notice.

Components

Python Reactor

The Python Reactor is the heart of the standard FTL drive. Many races and civilizations have created their own variations, but the principles are the same. The reactor serves a number of functions. It does not generate electrical power.

Photonic Core

At the heart of the Python Reactor is the Photonic Core. This key component is made from exotic, extremely high-density materials and is, in simplest terms, a giant light bulb. The core produces large amounts of photons, and among the photons is a sub atomic particle called a Python. Pythons are capable of traveling faster than light.

Energy from the photonic core is routed through the photon traps, which filter out the photons and leave mostly Pythons. A purity rating of 80% is the absolute minimum for a successful jump, 90% is generally recommended. High-preformance, well-tuned engines can reach 95. The Star Hammer used a unique, multi-spatial trap, and is the only known FTL drive to produce 100% pure Python particles.

Unused photons are routed back into the photonic core, where they react to produce additional pythons.

Energy Mantle

The energy mantle is projected by the Python Reactor, and is itself composed of Python Particles. The interactions between the ship and the mantle are very complicated and multi-dimensional:

• The mantle "breaks" the hyperspace tension in the same way birds flying information rely on the lead bird to help overcome air resistance. This allows both for faster speeds and lower power consumption on the N-space drive.

• As the ship continues to accelerate, the mantle begins to "draw" the ship along after it, providing even higher speeds, greater efficiency, and, at maximum performance, allowing a ship to shut down it's N-space drive all together(this level is typically only achieved during inter-galactic journeys).

• The mantle also provides a sort of cushion or buffer between the ship and the higher planes of space, protecting the crew during the journey, and providing one of the most important safety functions of the entire drive system.

Jump Drive

The biggest obstacle to reaching FTL is crossing the stop-light barrier(the speed of light). An Ion vacuum drive, the most common form of normal-space propulsion, has an upward speed limit of about 70 PSL, not enough to reach the stop-light barrier. The velocity is ultimately limited by how fast a ship can "throw" particles out the other direction. Once the speed at which exhaust is leaving the back of a ship equals it's forward velocity, it can no longer accelerate.

This is where Python Particles produced in the python reactor come into play. Python particles travel faster than the speed of light, but, like photons, have no resting mass. The Jump Drive channels pythons from the reactor, mixed with drive plasma, out the back of the ship, resulting in a massive burst of acceleration.

Dedicated Jump Drive

Dedicated drives are required on high-performance ships needing to make rapid FTL jumps, or ships who's N-space drives do not work on a compatible principle(such as those using gravitational mass-displacement); or on drives that cannot reach at least 50 PSL nativly.

In principle, a jump drive works similarly to a Deuterium Drive. Drive plasma(sometimes dry plasma, in extremely high-performance applications) is mixed with a large mass of pythons and diverted out the back of the ship. Jump drives are typically designed to create a single, high-powered, short direction pulse, as this is all that is needed to cross the stop-light barrier.

Hybrid Jump Drive

In a hybrid drive, the ship's ion-vacuum or similar normal-space engines double as a jump drive. The principles are all the same, just directing pythons into plasma combination stage of the engine. Hybdrid drives are required on smaller ships which do not have the capacity for a secondary, dedicated jump drive.

This method is not preferred because it places exceptionally high stress on the engines, shortening engine lifespan, and increasing the risk of accidents and failures. A hybridized jump drive/N-space drive engine is typically regarded as having about 1/4th the operational lifespan of an N-only counterpart.

Despite this, numerous commercial spacecraft on a scale that would necessitate a dedicated drive are still constructed with hybrid drives. This is done as a cost-cutting measure, and is most often seen on pleasure craft where a low initial investment is desirable over a longer operational lifespan(Within Joint Space, Furkea Meraki is a particularly notorious offender).

Stop-Light Engines

When the time comes to drop out of FTL, the ship will make use of a stop-light engine(most ships have at least two, for redundancy).

Since a ship cannot reach FTL without the aid of the energy mantle, any disruption in the FTL drive would cause it to immediately slow to 99.999~ PSL. The stop-light engines use python particles from the reactor to slow the ship in the same way the jump drive accelerates it(it is possible, but not recommended, to employ the jump-drive as a stop-light engine).

A stop-light engine typically has three modes: normal stop, emergency stop, and safe slow.

• Normal Stop is typical operation, the command has been given to leave FTL and the engines are brought online at the right interval to slow the ship to it's typical cruising speed. In some applications, the stop-light engine one slows the ship to around 70 PSL, and the N-space drive does the rest.
• Emergency Stop assumes a serious engine problem or eminent reactor failure, and an immediate slow to near zero velocity is required. This is extremely taxing on the components, and is considered an emergency function.
• Safe Slow is used in a wide-ranging failure, and assumes other supporting systems such as the inertial dampers, cannot be trusted. It is also an emergency function. In this case, the engines work with both the python reactor and the N-space drive to slowly and safely bring the ship to a stop.

Safety

Traveling beyond the speed of light, while necessary to cross the distances between stars, is not inherently safe. All safety measures, save for the mantle, are engineered and subject to failure.

Inertial Dampers

The most common and immediately deadly point of failure is the inertial dampers. Similar in function to gravity field generators and artificial gravity systems, the dampers exist to reduce the g-forces on the crew, arguable the most fragile part of the ship. A damper failure is instnatly fatal, even in sub-light manuvers.

Complicating matters is that multiple inertial damping fields canel each other out(two fields running at the same intensity over the same area have a net-zero effect). Spacecraft overcome this issue in two ways. The first is through the use over overlapping fields of different strengths. If to emitters are used, one running at 70% and the second at 30%, the net effect on the area is 40%. The failure of the 70% field would reduce the effect to only 30%, while the failure of the 30% field would have no impact. Assuming in this instance that a 30-40% output is sufficient, the end result is a redundant field(note that in this example "field strength" reffers to the output of the emitter, not the amount of g-forces being dampened). The second safety measure is to use a sort of instnat-on field emitter that can go from an idle state to a protective state in a tiny fraction of a second. Though not fast enough in key moments, the instant-on technology has saved countless lives. Most space-fairing cultures eventually develop one of the two techniques, and modern starcraft nearly always use both.

It is still common to find ghost ships, either from ancient times, or from less advanced civilizations, in which a key inertial damper failure killed the entire crew.

Foundation

The Gudersnipe Foundation takes few chances, and employs a highly redundant series of damping systems on it's spacecraft.

Each emitter module is a self-contained set of three instant-on emitters, and every area is covered by four emitter modules total(two for overlap, and two hot-spares. Since any one emitter can protect the crew, this alone creates ~8 levels of redundancy. The Foundation also installs the emitter clusters with a switch; power can run to one or the other, but cannot be disabled to both. Also installed on each emitter node is an uninteruptable power supply(a battery). It is functionally impossible to cut power to the inertial dampers without physically seperating the lines.

In addition, Foundation ships employ a system that can sue the gravity field generators to reduce the ship's mass(and the crews) to near-zero, greatly reducing the risk of injury.

In all, the system has roughly 10~ levels of redudnancy. However, the threshold for these various levels is "prevents instant death", injury, including serious injury, is still possible.

Stop-Light Engines

Typically, a ship will have an additional backup set of inertial dampers tied to the stop-light engines. The prefered configuration is a large, "ship-wide" damper that can have it's own redundant power source and be activated automatically by emergency systems.

Additionally, even if the ship is not using hybridized jump-drives, the necessary systems will be in place to use the engines in a hybridized mode, in the event that the main stop-light engines are not functioning.

Python Reactor Safety

A python reactor cannot fail in a catastrophic way that, in and of itself, is capable of exploding. While pressure levels within the core can get very high, this occurs only over a tiny area that is inertially confined. In the even of a core breach, radiation leakage is of considerably greater concern than actual pressure release(most of the core is a vacuum, in a loss-of-confinement incident, the pressure within the entire vessel would not reach even one atmosphere).

The core itself, while in operation, produces deadly levels of radiation, and has to be shielded quite heavily. On larger ships, shielding is passive, usually very thick layers of dense materials. In order to make FTL practical for smaller spacecraft, active shielding is required. The core only produces radiation while a python reaction is happening, though the levels are intense enough to change the composition of contaminants within the core and cause them to become radioactive. The area inside a python reactor, when at full vacuum, is among the most empty spaces in existence, with an entire core champer having as few as a dozen free-floating atoms.

The primary dangers are twofold-failure in use, and failure on root.

In-Use Failures

An in-use failure is protected by the energy mantle, which does a great deal to slow a ship's velocity even as the reactor fails. The mantle, in conjunction with well-designed spacecraft and inertial damping, prevent the ship from being instnatly torn apart in the event of a reactor failure.

In use failures are very uncommon. Once a python reaction becomes self-sustaining, very little can cripple the drive system besides a loss of electrical power. In this case, if the python reactor itself is not damaged, the supporting systems can most likely be repaired.

On-Root Failures

Much like a light bulb, an FTL drive is most likely to fail when it is being turned on or turned off. An on-root failure is a much more dangerous problem. While not resulting in immediate death, it could mean stranding a ship in deep space. Traveling at sub-light speeds is functionally impractical. If the FTL drive cannot be repaired, the crew can die from lack of resources.

There are two failsafes used to combat on-root failures. The first is to plan a course that sets all FTL cool downs at a location where resources are available. A star system with a habitable planet is preferred, although a well-prepared crew can usually survive in nearly any star system. Since the majority of starcraft follow this procedure, and added benifit is that the chances of being rescued increase dramatically. Mid-space cool downs(cool downs in inter-stellar space are highly discouraged