Rotation Drive

The rotation drive is a transport technology that allows ships to maneuver between locations in interstellar space without actually traversing the distance between them. This invention made interstellar exploration practical for the first time in human history. The first successful test of the drive was hailed as the beginning of a new age, and eventually was renumbered as the first year of the Galactic Era (1 GE).

Theory / Overview

The theoretical basis of the rotation drive has its origins in M-theory, heterotic string theory, and other topological theories in fundamental physics that were already developing as early as four centuries before the Galactic Era. These theories all featured advanced mathematical descriptions of the universe as a high-dimensional membrane-like structure with complex topological properties. The dominant theory to emerge in the last centuries before the Galactic Era was one characterized by 14 extended (observable) dimensions, of which 11 are "space-like" and 3 are "time-like", and 6 compact (structural) dimensions that contribute to the properties of fundamental particles but that are not traversable at larger scales. By manipulating the complex dimensional geometry of the universe, the rotation drive allows ships to appear to travel faster than light by rotating them through a high-energy transformation of the fourteen extended dimensions. It is impossible to completely understand how the rotation drive works without having a thorough understanding of several areas of advanced mathematics, including Riemannian geometry, group theory, algebraic topology, K-theory, complex manifold theory, Kac-Moody algebra, homological algebra, Lorentz groups, and Cartan's classification. Even now, in the fourth century GE, there are probably no more than a hundred people who have a complete understanding of rotation drive theory. For most engineers and politicians, and even most scientists, a complete understanding isn't necessary. What matters is simply that it works. The following quote from the popular series "Lectures in Space Travel" written by second century science writer Dr. Fe Gjørdatter is often lauded as one of the best descriptions of the rotation drive simplified for a non-technical general audience:

You're probably familiar with the experience of taking a transparent or wireframe cube and rotating it to see how it changes when viewed from different sides. So for example, you can look directly face-on to line up corners and see a square-within-a-square. But as you rotate it, the corners change and the shapes morph into different patterns. This is because the actual image reaching your eyes is a two-dimensional projection of the three dimensional object. You can pick any two vertices on the cube, any by rotating it you see you can shift them closer together or farther apart. Of course, the distances do not change: the shape of the cube is the same. But you don't experience the cube itself with your eyes. You experience the two-dimensional projection.

Now let's have some fun. Try to imagine an 11 dimensional cube. Of course you can't, but imagine analogously. The 11 dimensional cube has 2048 corners. When you project it down to two dimensions, some projections align the vertices and they look very organized. But change the rotation just a little and it becomes very confusing. It shifts and moves. Pick any two vertices in the complex pattern, and you can find a way to move them closer or farther away by rotating the cube just so.

You have already guessed, of course, why I chose 11 dimensions. You know that our universe has 11 spatial dimensions, as we already discussed in lecture six. We don't experience all of these dimensions: we experience a projection that collapses the 11 dimensions of space down to three. So, this is only a rough analogy, but I hope you see why we have the name “rotation drive." The drive allows us to change the projection we experience just long enough to make a jump between two points that are not normally close together.
— Dr. Fe Gjørdatter, "Lectures in Space Travel" (197 GE)

Discovery

Between the years -32 GE and -25 GE, the String Theory Research Group at the Central European Institute for Cosmology and Fundamental Physics (CEICO) in Praha, Czechia (a member state in the Transeŭropa Demokratia Reto) published a series of key manuscripts outlining the properties of a 20-dimensional P-brane model that linked quantum energy states to local topology, with specific implications for calculations of distance and adjacency within the 14-dimensional topology of the extended spacetime manifold. One of the implications of their analysis was that the topology of the extended spacetime manifold could be manipulated at high energy levels. Two research teams in the Zhongguo Corporate Empire recognized practical implications of the work: the Interdisciplinary Center for Theoretical Study located in the School of Physical Studies at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) and the Quantum Transport Lab at the Shenzhen Institute for Quantum Science and Engineering (SIQSE). Because the costs needed to test these theories would be so enormous, they strategically teamed up with the High Energy Physics team at the University of São Paulo, enabling them to petition the Zhongguo-Cruz Corporate Empire Alliance (ZCCA) for special funding as a "collaborative alliance project." The project was approved in -13 GE, kicking off large-scale engineering projects in Shenzhen, Beijing, and São Paulo.

Demonstration

The first functioning prototype of the rotation drive was manufactured in Beijing, and the first successful "rotation" transported a prototype engine from Beijing to a partner facility in Kaiping. The drive itself was approximately four meters on each side and ten meters tall. Multiple tests confirmed that the drive appeared to "teleport" the distance of approximately 2,250 kilometers with no latency (i.e. instantaneously). The year of that first practical demonstration was selected, more than a hundred years later, to represent humanity's transition to a new age and was designated as the first year of the Galactic Era (1 GE). Subsequent tests from positions in orbit around Earth established the capabilities of the drive across greater distances. These tests also showed that the drive achieved greater accuracy using less energy when the "rotation" endpoints were farther away from Earth's gravity well. The implications of these tests were clear: the drive was not entirely practical for transportation point-to-point on the surface of the earth, but perfect for exploring the galaxy.

Manufacture

The TDR initiated a massive intranetwork crowdfunding campaign to construct the Ianus Autofactory, an orbital manufacturing plant specifically designed to build spaceships powered by the new rotation drive. Funding rounds ran from 24 GE to 30 GE, and construction of Ianus ran from 32 GE to 86 GE. Some political commentators speculated that this was the first move in what later would become a blatant economic war between the TDR and ZCCA. Over the next several years the Ianus Autofactory churned out the first wave of research vessels that kicked off the first phase of intersteller exploration of the Galactic Era: Project New Ariel.