Needle Drive

The needle drive is an FTL Travel technology pioneered by the Galenteans. The drive made the interstellar Empire of the Galenteans possible, and as a result became extremely widespread throughout the galaxy.
While the original drives from the Golden age could shorten trips between individual star systems down to a matter of weeks, contemporary needle drives can result in trips as short as 3 days. Certain drives of exceptional quality have been said to be able to travel between systems within a day.
Needle Drives are mounted within spaceships and generate the physical effect that allows for FTL travel while the drive is active. Disabling the drive will return the ship to sub-FTL speeds.
Needle drive accidents are possible when the performance of the drive is pushed to its limit. The harder the drive is pushed, the higher the chance of an accident. More optimzied drives are capable of being pushed harder than others.
Modern, mass-produced needle drives are commonly available, although costly, and are capable of propelling a ship to travel at 1500 times Light speed.

Operation and mechanics

The needle drive allows for FTL travel by poorly understood means, but the actual mechanics and rules of actual FTL travel is well-understood. The drive generates an effect that warps realspace and allows a ship to travel many times the speed of light.
Ancient Galentean Needle drives were rather rough by today's standards, and could accelerate a ship to about 720 C. Modern drives, being more advanced and more stable, can accelerate ships to around 1500C.
Larger needle drives will accelerate ships faster, provided they are stable enough to do so,, and will have a larger area of effect. Larger vessels thus need larger drives to travel safely.

Mechanics

Needle drives work by generating a field around a vessel that simultaneously captures and stabilizes a small section of realspace within it, and allows this bubble containing the ship to 'dive' into hyperspace. Hyperspace topology seems to be much more compressed than realspace, allowing a ship to travel vast distances extremely rapidly. Additionally, the 'deeper' a ship dives into hyperspace, the faster one can travel.
One of the primary mechanics of hyperspace is that gravity seems to extend into it and makes it more 'dense', making it harder to travel through hyperspace within the gravity well of a star or planet, compared to deep space between systems. Because of this, it is impossible to travel through hyperspace within a certain distance of a star or planet.
As Needle Drives have been developed and improved, one of the main points of improvement has been their Hyperspace Buoyancy. The theory is that all common matter has the same Hyperspace Buoyancy that keeps it within realspace and out of hyperspace/subspace. The needle drive then creates a bubble that is 'heavier' and is able to 'sink' into hyperspace. While this has allowed for shorter jumps, it also brings with it the consequence that due to the increased depth, the breaching angle is considerably steeper, making breaching more risky without a proper breaching solution.

Jumping and Breaching

Hyperspace travel with a needle drive consists of 2 stages: the Jump and the Breach. The Jump is the very starting point of the transit, up until reaching the furthest hyperspace depth the drive can reach. Following this the ship will coast through hyperspace until it comes close to the destination system, where the drive will be slowly disengaged to allow for a safe Breaching back into realspace. While Jumping itself is relatively safe, Breaching is risky depending on where a ship tries to breach, and the breaching angle, which describes the angle of approach, or speed with which the ship tries to emerge from Hyperspace. While most drives can handle a standard breach and a breaching angle of up to 24 degrees, rapid breaches can result in a Needle drive's destruction, or even the utter destruction of the entire vessel in a Starburst.

Breaching event

When a ship emerges from hyperspace and back into realspace, space-time tries to adjust to the new presence, causing a breaching event. Breaching events are a common and obvious signifier that a ship has entered a system, and Breach detectors tend to be placed throughout systems to detect and triangulate incoming ships.
To navigators, Star systems have three distinct 'zones', concentric rings around the core star, all of which is surrounded by deep space. Within deep space, the theoretical maximum depth a ship can travel is infinite, though modern Needle drives can only drive so deep. The closer one gets to the gravity well of a star, the 'denser' hyperspace becomes, and lowers the maximum safe depth a ship can traverse. This then leads to the first zone, the safe or landing zone, in which ships can safely decelerate from hyperspace and breach back into realspace. Some navigators will try a riskier jump into the system, a 'deep' or 'shallow' jump, by overclocking the Needle drive and attempting to breach into the system's 'slow zone', so named because of the high hyperspace density and the general use of kinetic drives in this area of the system. Finally, the area nearest to the star has a gravitational effect so strong that it will forcibly eject any vessel in hyperspace back into realspace immediately, resulting in a starburst. The limit between the 'slow zone' and this 'core zone' is the point where maximum relative velocity reaches 1c.
Another observed effect with Needle drives are Hyperspace Tides. Hyperspace Tides tend to drastically alter the general efficacy of warp travel in an area for any period of time, ranging from months to decades. The reason for these tides is not well known and still being studied.

Generations

1st gen

1st generation drives were pioneered and used by the Galentean empire for the first wave of the Exploratory fleet. These drives were capable of reaching speeds up to 300C, and were highly robust, suffering very few accidents within the first in the first hundred years of operation.

2nd gen

2nd generation drives were the first major advancement in needle drive technology, as Galentean scientists began to figure out the exact mechanics and workings of the FTL systems, bolstered by technical data from the expansion of the empire and seeing the effects of decades of use on existing drive cores. Based on their new understanding, 2nd generation drives were capable of being pushed harder than the 1st gen, achieving up to 500C. This, however, came with long-term instability of the system, and the 2nd gen was much more dependent on maintenance, calibration, and regular repairs than 1st generation drives. Nevertheless, many of these drives were installed in the vessels of the Galentean peacekeeping fleet. Many of these ships would suffer from various drive failures and would prompt the development of the 3rd generation.

3rd gen

3rd generation drives are known as 'golden age drives', since they were the primary drives used during the Golden age of Galentara. They could reach up to 800C. These drives would push their drive cores to their limits, and would require regular maintenance after every jump. Nevertheless, these drives would include many internal safety systems to try and prevent the occurrence of drive failures, and would operate for hundreds of years with minimal losses.
While none are in use today, these drives are still highly sought after by collectors, historians, and treasure hunters.

4th gen

The result of a combination of advancements in drive design made during the collapse. Different factions had different needle drives with different improvements, leading to slight differences in performance, speed, and reliability throughout the different militaries. After the collapse, drives were widely salvaged, reverse-engineered, and ultimately led to the creation of the more standardized 4th generation. 1000C

5th gen

5th Gen drives introduced a secondary, lighter drive core into their designs. While these had no impact on the actual performance or speed of the ship, the 2nd core nonetheless funcioned as a backup in case the primary core was at risk, or otherwise inoperable. Before this change in design, many sufficiently large or important vessels would mount a backup drive.
The drives could reach up to 1100C on their main core, but only up to 600C on their backup core.

6th gen

6th gen drives reworked the drive core from scratch, introducing a new design, and utilizing new materials in its construction. This made the drive cores cheaper and easier to manufacture, without sacrificing performance. 1200C

7th gen

While the 7th Gen has been long outclassed by the 8th and 9th gens, they are nevertheless the most common generation of needle drive in everyday use. 7th gen drives stand out among other generations for their general ease of maintenance, reliability, and low cost production cost. This generation needs very little maintenance to operate properly, and what maintenance has to be done can be done with minimal training and specialized tools. As such, it's a very common drive for civilian and commercial use. Can reach up to 1200C.

8th gen

8th gen Needle drives were introduced shortly after the 7th generation. While the robust 7th gen was fine for everyday use, military, mercenary, and specialized transport groups would raise demand for much more performant version. The 8th gen was developed to squeeze more performance out of the drive core, sacrificing the ease of maintenance of the drive, but retaining the general robustness. 8th gen drives would only ever be utilized on vessels that could afford to have dedicated and highly-trained personell on board to supervise and maintain the drive. Can reach up to 1300C.

9th gen

Currently the most stable & recent generation of Needle Drives. 9th gen drives feature many more safety features than previous generations, and drive failures are almost unheard of. Investigations have shown that any failures that have happened were the result of neglect, shoddy maintenance, or deliberate interference with the workings of the drive. 9th gen drives have been capable of achieving 1500C.

10th gen

A highly experimental generation, 10th generation drives nonetheless show a lot of promise for the future. Prototype examples have been capable of reaching speeds of 2000C, but this level of pressure on the system has led to the emergence of new safety concerns and points of drive failure. Nevertheless, there have been rumors of military & pirate vessels that have managed to acquire prototype drives and use them, regardless of the risks.

Needle drive Failures

FTL travel is an inherently dangerous prospect, although the modern needle drive is the most reliable way to travel between systems, and has been since its inception. Nonetheless, Needle Drive accidents do occur, and for various reasons.

Instant Breach (starburst)

Shearing

Often a consequence of poor drive maintenance, a part of a ship can be 'sheared' off during travel due to fluctuations in the Needle Drive's field of effect. Field fluctuations can result in parts of the ship temporarily protruding outside of the area of effect, which will cleanly shear off the exposed part as it is violently pulled back into realspace into a small starburst.
Shearing damage can range from relatively minor to catastrophic, depending on how much and what is sheared off the vessel.

Core wobble

Similarly to shearing, an extremely unstable drive core can result in a cascading effect of field fluctuations, which tends to result in progressively more material being sheared off the ship until catastrophic failure of the Needle drive takes place and the rest of the ship is destroyed. In case of core wobble, most ships will elect to slowly disengage the drive to return to realspace and enact emergency repairs before attempting a second jump.

Crunch

A hypothetical drive malfunction, there are no recorded instances of the event, but it is hypothesized to have happened to any ship that has made a jump and was never found, with no traces of starburst along their path. Whereas other drive failures result in the ship being 'pushed' out of hyperspace and into realspace, this type of drive failure is hypothesized to happen when a ship instead goes too deep into hyperspace, and is unable to re-emerge. Some theories about what happens if this happens is that the Drive field is crushed by the 'depth' of this hyperspace, that it is ejected into a different universe entirely, or that they are stuck in a slower time dimension.

Utility

The needle drive is the most common method to achieve FTL travel in the galaxy, and as such they are extremely common aboard most instellar ships.
Attempts have been made to weaponise the needle drive in the past.
A common attempt to weaponise the needle drive was to try and create an interstellar guided missile, using a needle drive to fire a projectile from one stellar system to another. Besides becoming extremely expensive due to the needle drive's implementation, any testing missiles were extremely inaccurate at FTL speeds, and at sub-FTL speeds were rather easily intercepted by most orbital defense systems.

Social Impact

The needle drive is still considered to be one of the most important technological advances in Galactic history. It enabled the Galenteans to build the Galentean Empire and conquer most of the Galenaran Reaches, as well as building their vast interstellar resource network. Even now, the cheapest and most reliable method to travel between systems is the needle drive, and is the key to transporting people, resources, information, and military might on a large scale.

Access & Availability

The needle drive is the most common method FTL travel available in the galaxy. As such, Needle drives exist in many forms, shapes, and sizes. While they are still highly complicated devices and expensive to create, needle drives are still widely available.

Discovery

The Needle drive was discovered at the peak of the cold war between Galentus Primus and Galentus Secundus, as well as the wider factions of the Galentus system.

Related Vehicles

• Rising Fury
• Scorn

Related Species

• Galenteans