Tesseract Jump Drive

A form of faster than light (FTL) travel invented by the panNorm of S-14 and widely used by nations of the Triumvirate of Yut, which received patterns of the drive in return for ending the panNorm's racially instigated Succession Wars.

Design and Use

The Tesseract Jump Drive (TJD) is a nearly infinitely-scalable instantaneous jump engine ('infinitely'-scalable assumes having 'infinite' power, of course) that has been used in designs ranging from small unmanned probes no more than several meters long used by the panNorm to a few very large mobile habitats used by The Territory capable of sustaining hundreds of thousands of people at a time. The actual drive itself is usually small, ranging from the size of a suitcase to a large commuter bus depending on the mass of the object it is supposed to move; the real limitations to its usage are cost and power.

It is normally limited, therefore, to large capital-scale ships, although experiments have been performed with probes (as mentioned previously). Its construction, while not excessively more expensive than the Berserker-invented Einstein-Rosenberg Black Knight Drive previously used by the Triumvirate, requires a great deal more precision and thus is limited to those with precise enough facilities and information (making the exact details of TJDs state secrets).

The panNorm have further modified the basic TJD into a wavefront weapon for military applications. In short, this device acts something akin to a conically projecting EMP weapon that defeats external hardening such as shielding. How it accomplishes this is too in-depth for this article, which is primarily concerned with the propulsive uses of tesseract technology.

Operating Principles

Cutaway of a small TJD used for Loki-class dropships

The tesseract jump drive works to break most accepted rules of Einsteinian reality by essentially leaving the domain that those rules are applicable in. In the simplest possible yet accurate terms, it uses a tesseract in a similar manner as the mobius loop of a Seiki Gravity Wave Generator to transelate a sphere of space around the vessel from normal fourth-dimensional (i.e. Einsteinian) space to a universal twelve-dimensional space (whose existence is inferred by string theory by their gravitational effect on four-dimensional motion) or occasionally to a twenty-six dimensional space. By increasing the number of dimensions that defines the motion of an object in the universe, the probability that points wholly dissimilar in four-dimensional space approaches unity, or at least the distance between them becomes exceedingly small.

A common analogy for the tesseract, first penned by Madeleine L'Engle in A Wrinkle In Time, is the space fold--imagining Einsteinian space to be a sheet of paper or cloth, the quickest way between two points is to fold the entirety of space until the two points touch and then hop from one side to the other. This, simply put, requires wholly astronomical amounts of energy and, while suitable, is relatively inaccurate. String theory suggests that higher dimensional space comes 'pre-folded,' in terms of membranes, and so one can 'fold space' by increasing the number of dimensions that describe the object's position. Thus, a far more accurate (albeit more complex) analogy is actually that tesseracts differentiate the position equation multiple times. Differentiating a first-order equation leads to a constant; differentiating a twelfth-order equation twelve times leads to a constant, and so forth. Moving to the new point essentially requires integrating the function as many times as it was differentiated, returning the equation to its full form (and the ship to four-dimensional space).

There are more in-depth analyses of the mathematics and physics involved, but they tend to look like [this].

Limitations

The TJD is not without its limitations. Firstly, the equations and operations required are extremely computation-intensive, requiring powerful computers. Secondly, it can be foiled by FTL denial systems that prevent the translations required to use the TJD. Thirdly, while the TJD is capable of insystem jumps, the equations required are greatly influenced by the presence of gravity wells--insystem jumps require that the system's gravitation be reliably mapped, especially for jumping inside of strong planetary gravity wells.

The final, and most notable limitation, is the recharge time of the tesseract--essentially, the amount of time required for it to 'normalize' after translating. The standard jump range is one hundred light years, requiring a recharge time of a single day. Recharge times for jumps greater than that can be modeled relatively accurately with this function, where t is distance in months and d is distance in light-years:

t = ln(d/100) + 1/30

At ranges less than ninety light years, the time involved becomes difficult to predict, which limits its usefulness in tactical situations.