Description

Commonly known as hyperdrives, spatial compression devices compress space, allowing for faster than light travel but don't actually move the ship.  The ship's engines propel it through hyperspace, so ships with more powerful engines also traverse hyperspace faster.  A spatial compression device alters the geometry of space through the use of Negative Energy technology to create an Alcubierre field.  Space is made of discrete units, and the spatial compression device allows some fraction of these to be skipped over while traveling. The fraction of space skipped over while traveling FTL  is known as the compression ratio.  The higher the compression ratio, the farther into hyperspace the ship travels, and the higher the speed it can attain.

A spatial compression device has a maximum range proportional to the amount of negative energy stored in its anticapacitors.  Since the ship is traveling quite fast, any impact is dangerous, and star-ships have to be well armored and/or carry heavy deflector shields. Most ships also mount an array of point-defense weapons as a means of removing obstacles ahead.  

The Empire of 1,000,000 Suns had this technology for a long time, but didn’t achieve compression ratios much over 1,000:1 until after contact with the Planetary League.  

The Planetary League didn’t have this tech until Era-1 was in full swing, owing to early contacts with the Convergence, particularly the first Convergence War.  In a short time after developing the technology, scientists in the Planetary League designed a spatial compression hyperdrive with a compression ratio of 10,000:1, giving a clear speed advantage to anyone using that design.  Development of spatial compression technology continued apace, and at the end of Era-1, the fastest ships had compression ratios on the order of 100,000:1.  As the technology continued to improve ships kept getting faster, and by the end of Era-2, the fastest ships had compression ratios around 10,000,000:1.  Speeds kept increasing through Era-3, as well. 

Vital Components

Spatial compression requires the generation of negative energy.  Most early models of hyperdrive used Casimir-plates to achieve this.  Later models more often used squeezed light, and a few high end models even used the Hawking Radiation of a small black hole.

A spatial compression device requires an anticapacitor to operate.  The anticapacitor is used to store negative energy to generate the Alcubierre field.  Over time, as the drive operates, the anticapacitors discharge, and when they are empty the Alcubierre field collapses and the ship returns to normal space. A ship can also exit hyperspace at any point along its journey by directly discharging the anticapacitors.

A large coil of negaconductive wire (many types of normal wire have negaconductive properties, but the best negaconductors are rare and made of exotic matter) is needed to generate the Alcubierre field.

Note on Compression Ratios

A spatial compression ratio of 100:1 means that a ship could travel 100Ly in one year, if it could accelerate to the speed of light without compression (which doesn't work because of relativity).  In practice, most ships travel at about 1/10c without compression, so a typical ship with 100:1 compression would travel 10Ly per year.

Cosmic drift

When traveling through hyperspace, a ship is partially detached from the space-time continuum where it originated, and when it returns to ordinary space, it doesn't return to exactly the universe it originated from.  This phenomenon is known as cosmic drift, and over repeated voyages, a traveler might wind up in a universe quite different from their original one.  Cosmic drift rarely affects a traveler or ship directly, anything directly tied to the traveling entities tends to be the same in the destination universe as it is at the point of departure.  Cosmic drift usually only affects details of reality beyond the light cone of the ship's departure into hyperspace, although under extreme circumstances such as a hyperspace storm, this is not always the case. On rare occasions, a traveler will exit hyperspace into a universe vastly different from their origin point.

Cosmic drift detectors are devices tied via quantum entanglement to a particular space-time continuum, and can measure how far they have drifted from their originating spacetime. Most spacecraft with spatial compression technology have such a detector, and handheld units are carried by many travelers.