Metadimensional Space and Spike Drives

A higher-order continuum "understood" by only a handful of brilliant researchers and astronautic engineers, through which interstellar travel takes place. Fortunately, it is not necessary to have an intuitive understanding of the place in order to operate a spike drive starship. While modern postech spike drives are neither as powerful nor as efficient as the exquisite creations of the Terran Mandate , most worlds can still put together the necessary components to get a ship from one stellar system to another.

Metadimensional Mechanics

Within the gravity well created by a stellar body, a spike drive provides sub-light propulsion sufficient to get the ship to most system locations within a few days at most. Only at the edge of a solar system, where the gravitic influence of the star dwindles away to almost nothing, can the spike drive be fully engaged to catapult the ship into metadimensional space. This gravitic transition zone is critical for providing the necessary step-up and step-down for a spike drive. Without such a transition, a ship can neither climb into metadimensional space nor come down from those elevated dimensional frequencies. Only a star is sufficient to provide enough of a gravitic gradient; random interstellar rocks and debris don’t exert enough of an influence to form a usable transition zone.
Ships are generally unable to “overshoot” a transition zone. If a ship is coming into a system from a spike drive course to the stellar northwest of the star, it will appear at the northwest edge of the solar system. Its pilot can’t choose to “overshoot” that region, traveling across the solar system to come down on the southeastern edge of the star’s transition zone. This property allows a solar system’s owner to fortify probable transit paths into the system, placing defenses and picket ships in the path of likely arrivals.
This can be a difficult and expensive process if the star is in a crowded stellar neighborhood. The transit paths from each potential destination are different; if a star has two other systems to its east, it has to fortify two different arrival zones if it wants to be confident of detecting incoming ships from both stars. If an exceptionally powerful spike drive allows an intruder to drill in from a more-distant star, the local polity might have no local sensors at all in the region, having never anticipated that a ship might come directly from such a distant location.
These relatively-fixed arrival zones only apply to ships arriving at a star. A ship can leave from any location on the rim, traveling toward any destination within reach of its spike drive. Thus, a ship that’s able to skulk past a system’s frontier sensors can usually find an empty region of space in the transition zone to skip out undetected. It also has no obligation to be on the “correct side” of the star to go leaping off toward a particular stellar destination.

Spike Drills

Interstellar spike drills are dangerous. Some sectors have the technology and friendly-enough metadimensional weather to make standard drill paths relatively safe for travel. Ships in these favored sectors can move between connected worlds with no significant chance of disaster. Other sectors are not so fortunate, nor are those ships that must forge through uncharted metadimensional space to reach their destination. Careless navigation or sheer bad luck can result in these ships being snuffed out by an unexpected surge of metadimensional energy or lost in the storms of hyperdimensional space.

Type

Natural