Technologies

Bluespace

Bluespace, a defining technology of the 24th century, freed from the shackles of FTL technology, near-instantaneous transit across vast quantities of space became possible. breaking the excruciatingly slow speeds of FTL and plunging the galaxy into a state where the measure of a parsec became a reasonable unit of measure for travel.

Furthermore, the subjugation of colonies became far easier for superpowers. No longer would fleets take weeks, or months of real time to cover the space, but mere hours or days to cover the space. Furthermore, Bluespace transit was simply more comfortable, and the terrors and insanity brought on by FTL exposure were nullified due to the complete alternate means of travel.

Bluespace, at its core, is the unlocking of another dimension of travel, though often simply put as "folding space" to contend with curious minds. The true inner workings of Bluespace drives often confuse even their own maintainers. A scant few researchers have spent enough time researching all the aspects of Bluespace travel to understand exactly the calculations and procedures taken to complete a full jump, start to finish.

Onboard ships, most engineers simply know how to operate the computers and examine statistics to ensure the drive is in good working order, as well as confirm jump calculations are accurate. The complex computations of 4th dimensional travel take drive computers much time, as well as multiple runs to confirm the math checks out. Once completed the complex process of jumping starts, As a pathway through another dimension is formed before the ship, it will accelerate past the point of no return and enter the Bluespace tunnel.

While in fourth-dimensional space, nothing unusual is able to be noted, save for the complete and utter warping of all visual aspects outside of the carefully calculated and formed route. For this reason most of the crew are completely barred from looking outside of a ship during Bluespace travel. Those that have, report, at best, no effect, while other cases result in complete and irrecoverable mental insanity.

In the early days Bluespace travel was dangerous, taking near a year of research for acceptable levels of loss of vessel percentages to be achieved. Even at its height of use though, Bluespace travel was never 100% safe, with the rare occasional ship being lost to the void. Often blamed on failed maintenance of the drive or improperly calculated jump routes, on rare occasions, ships have returned in varying states of decay or intactness.

Around 2638, the Mar’Qua Alliance posted a bulletin to the galaxy at large, warning of a statistical increase in vessels lost to Bluespace. The margin of increase was deemed too low to be of concern to most, even to some of the Mar’Qua Nest worlds. This bulletin would be the only warning sign of the impending Bluespace crash.

In the year 2645, on October 19th, at 06:26 and 15 seconds SET (Sol Event Time), Bluespace, as it was known to work, ceased. Ships traveling in groups and arriving one after another around this time would note that any ship arriving before that exact moment would arrive, but anything after the 15th second would never arrive. All ships in Bluespace at this time were lost to the void; further ships wouldn't receive notice of the crash and would jump into the warp, never to be seen again. By 06:38, SolFed announced the galaxy-wide crash of Bluespace and warned all ships to cease Bluespace travel. From this moment on, Bluespace travel has never worked for long-distance travel, and short-distance teleportation has taken great effort to make work in any meaningful way.

FTL

The Alcubierre drive, in conjunction with long-term cyrosleep, set the stage for the first steps into FTL travel and primed the galaxy for an age of expansion from the core of Sol in the year 2139. At long last, man had overcome one of the fundamental laws of the universe; the stars, oh so distant, were now within grasp. 

The effect on the Terra-Martian relationship was instant; the original 9-month flight to the red plant could now be completed in just 3 minutes by the simplest of FTL drives. The entire system of Sol was now easily capable of being unified with this new transit technology. 

In the coming years, the means of FTL travel would be developed further, speeds would slowly increase to make long distance travel more and more reasonable, and soon, other stars were in reach as FTL drives reached 500c. However, issues slowly made themselves more and more present as speeds continued to increase.

While moving faster than light, a whole new plethora of particles that only exist at speeds faster than light were found. The colloquial term "tachyon" now applies, as these particles only exist and can only exist at speeds faster than light. At low intensities, these particles had no noticeable effect, but as FTL drives accelerated faster and faster, more and more crews began to report abnormalities in both electronic systems and, more worryingly, in their own thoughts.

Further studies concluded that the particles, while mostly harmless, did impose electronic interference on an atomic level; thus, computers needed to be shielded as best as possible, have redundancies set up, error checking, and self-correction. Through technology, the machines were able to go faster; it was merely the people that could not. 

The first known incident of "Starlight Madness" as it was dubbed, was recorded in 2146, when a high-speed FTL test platform, the BlueStar, experienced a sudden and fatal incident when the ship's engineer appeared to enter a state of psychosis despite having no mental issues on record. After suddenly assaulting and overpowering his two additional crew members, he piloted the test ship into Jupiter's 17th moon. After a few weeks of searching, a black box was found, revealing the nature of the engineer's sudden onset of madness as recorded by his microphone.

While concerning, those in cryostorage fared far better at high FTL, oblivious in their unconscious states; at worst, people would awaken with headaches. In time, though, lasting effects were found from FTL travel, even for those in cyro. Permanent damage will impact all who used FTL, in cryo or awake, with the new effect titled "Sudden Sleep Disorder." SSD, a byproduct of using FTL, impacted previous travelers at random times, causing a sudden, complete catatonic state for seemingly random durations.

In the end FTL remained a viable option despite these drawbacks, however its speed was forever limited by the human and electronic factor. In later testing, it was found that positronic brains offered no extra resilience, making AI-crewed FTL ships worthless. Instead, the standard was to travel at safe speeds and rotate crews in and out of cyrosleep for long journeys, as well as using crew-administered drugs, body modification, and simply picking people less emotional to be crew at higher speeds.

Subspace

Quantum mechanics, A well-known term to even those of the 21st century, became even more of a common term in the 22nd century as its inner workings were better understood, and useful work extracted from them.

With the growing communication lag between earth and mars, the hundred year long trips to deliver messages from one star to another was easily seen as impractical, work was started well before FTL existed to remedy that issue. The solution, Subspace messaging, through the use of quantum mechanics, messages could be instantly delivered over any distance. The drawback, the unpredictability in quantum mechanics.

Subspace messaging servers, ranged in size from small single office rooms, to entire buildings. Needed to be kept cool mostly for superconductors of the non-room temperature variety, the Subspace messaging room became an easy sight to find in any building. Usually a large, extremely sterile room, washed in supercooled nitrogen.

The sheer size of Quantum server rooms has failed to shrink much throughout time. The vast amount of equipment to determine probabilistic existence of incoming message, and begin the process of deciphering a proper message from Quantum interference is a hard task. One that usually take even the best of server rooms, multiple re-transmissions of the message to accurately decipher what the original message was.

The only other limiting factor then became throughput. While a large corporate server building may have the capacity to handle millions of quantum bits, and process each one's state billions of times a second. Smaller facilities may only have a few dozen quantum bits that they can only process thousands of times a second. Leading to issues with low bitrate, meaning even simple messages can take multiple minutes to transmit even though the message is sent instantaneously in terms of travel time.

Nonetheless Subspace is the de-facto method of communication from planet to planet. Its low bitrate on small worlds has made it well designed for ancient transmission methods brought up to modern standards, such as fax machines, and text messaging. Rather than holo-calls, and voice-calls.

Prosthetics

Prosthetics are replacements for a missing or damaged part. In the most common and obvious example, a prosthetic arm or leg that provides most of the range of motion as an organic limb. Lower end models tend to lack a sense of touch or temperature, and struggle to lift heavier weights, while higher end models will offer more feeling and senses, more strength (on par with an organic limb) and even have synthetic skin layered over. Prosthetic organs simply function in the same way as organic ones, though not without the same measure of function as before. A prosthetic heart may not beat and prosthetic lungs may not swell and deflate with each inhale and exhale. In the situations where an organic body becomes too damaged to repair and the individual has provided informed consent for such a procedure, the brain can be placed into a Man-Machine Interface and then placed into a Full Body Prosthetic, or FBP for short. If one survives the pairing process and the years of therapy required to adapt to a new body, then they can live out their years in as close to organic feeling and form as possible. While it isn’t as exact, it still functions passably to allow for a FBP to function in day to day life.

Synthetic Skin, often abbreviated to Synthskin, comes in two forms: Polymer and Biomimicking. The former is a cheaper option, intended for those affected by disasters to retain their natural appearance despite their prosthesis. Consisting of a plastic semi-elastomer, dyed to look near indistinguishable from normal skin until properly inspected - or touched. This type is mainly used on full-body prosthesis, and such can be manufactured by any colony subsidiary, provided they have a licensing agreement with Soteria. The latter is the premiere option, which is not only visually indistinguishable but functionally so as well - allowing near-full sensation and range of functionality for both the limbs and organ implants available for purchase. The price of some of these options ranges into the tens of thousands of credits, with some limbs costing hundreds of thousands of credits in initial cost, and thousands more in maintenance. Biomimicking components are manufactured exclusively by Soteria, in collaboration with the family and the individual, based upon prior body scans or simply pre-designed custom to-order. They are often paid for in advance of their production, unlike traditional prosthesis. This line of product is unavailable to standard synthetic manufacturers. Given the complexity of the synthetic biomimicry involved, and partially living tissue, consistent and expensive maintenance is required - making these chassis inaccessible to any anyone other than the colony's super-rich.

In the current day, after so much has become lost or hidden with the Bluespace Crash, most of the current designs on the market are built and machined from blueprints copied from older blueprints and produced on the worlds still capable of making them. These are then traded on ships that ply the trade lanes. In Nadezhda, the presence of several factions equipped with sophisticated manufacturing facilities offers a wealth of options beyond primitive frontier prosthetics and whatever a ship brings along. The church of the absolute offers sturdy prosthetics forged in biomatter, Blackshield provides the majority of military grade prosthetics while Soteria both provides chemical resistant models and is the main provider of synth skin covered models. Soteria also recently acquired the blueprints to manufacture top of the line Greyson Positronic limbs. For all other needs, Lonestar has various models on sale sourced from various traders in addition to the more standard models manufactured in colony, not from any one faction.

AI

WIP

Cryosleep

WIP

Bio-revival

WIP