Technology

← Library index

Most of humanity's ship technology rests on well-understood physics. The exceptions are alien technologies that humanity uses without truly understanding them, above all the fold drive and the waystations.

Ships and how they fight

The ship types of the 31st century and the technology that drives, protects and arms them.

Ship types

Six types of void vessel make up the flotillas of the 31st century, but only five are true ships. Escorts are too small to count as ships in their own right, so spacers might call one a ship or a boat in casual talk, but anyone who has served in a navy knows the difference. A ship has a captain. An escort has a skipper, at least in NOVA, which keeps the traditions of the old navies of Earth. Other factions have their own words for it.

The names of these ships have been used throughout human history for different types of ships, but here they refer to ships with very specific roles:

• Corvette: A light gunboat used for scouting, diversions and outmanoeuvring.
• Frigate: A dedicated torpedo ship, used to support a flotilla with rapid-firing torpedoes.
• Destroyer: A balanced ship that delivers a broadside at close range and torpedoes at range. It is the all-rounder: "There is no task it cannot perform but it is not specialised to anything." It is the ship for unpredictable situations and the benchmark for all other ships.
• Cruiser: A powerful ship that can dominate others and hold a position against force.
• Freighter: A large, tough transport ship that can be outfitted with many modifications. See Freighter types.
• Escorts (not counted as ships): Much smaller spacecraft used as tenders or to assist the large ships.

Each ship type is usually recognisable at a glance. The differences come from the factions' unique fighting style and their shipyards’ designs.

Fusion drive

Fusion drives are highly efficient engines that can power a thruster for long periods. They allow constant acceleration, which means a ship has artificial gravity while it accelerates and can travel within a system in days and weeks rather than years.

The fusion drive is well protected at the centre of a ship, but if a ship takes too much damage the drive can go critical and explode, damaging other ships close by.

Firing your fusion drive makes your ship a lot easier to track, so in combat the main thruster is normally used in short bursts (burns) when needed rather than constantly. The more burns a ship makes, the more it can accelerate, decelerate or change direction, but these powerful short bursts can cause structural damage to a high-mass ship.

Artificial gravity

Ships get false gravity two ways: constant thrust, or centrifugal force. Most rely on acceleration and deceleration between points; if they coast, they drift weightless. Some large freighters are built with a spinning disk for centrifugal gravity. Docked to a station, a ship can also pick up the station's spin if it is turning at the right rate. Humans still do not understand gravity and cannot make true gravity of their own.

Fold drive

Reverse-engineered alien technology, given to humanity by Sovereign. Humans understand it only in a basic way, and it is unreliable because of that. A ship with a fold drive can fold through a wormhole it opens to a well-mapped place, or to somewhere a guide is already waiting. Folding takes time, energy and careful calculation, and even then it is not always safe.

Gravity wrecks a fold. You cannot fold from a planet's surface out into space without risking your insides becoming outsides, or finding yourself on the far side of the galaxy. Folding is for open void, not planetary transport.

Arrival is only accurate to many cubic kilometres. For ships that is still within the certainty sphere where a vessel "is" anyway, so it is safe enough in open space.

An in-system fold takes long minutes to calculate and fire, and the bigger the ship's mass, the longer it takes. A heavy cruiser may need several such stretches before it can jump.

Each ship fires its own fold, but they work in concert and know the shared destination. They normally jump only to a place a friendly ship has already reached and can guide them into, or to a hidden tether of their own. Escorts are too small for a fold drive, so they must ride with larger ships and fold with them.

Guides and rally zones: Buoys, waystation crews and friendly ships can all guide a fold. Fleets often leave a fold tether buoy at a rally zone so they can jump out of a fight and still land reasonably close together. You can also fold to a friendly ship within its line of sight, because it helps with the calculation, though arrival is still only accurate to cubic kilometres.

A fold tether can be stolen or spoofed in theory, but it is rare. Tethers are tiny and hard to find, and a sensible fleet leaves them somewhere awkward to spot. They only work within a solar system. To reach another system, or jump across the galaxy, you need a waystation. Humanity does not understand those at all: they were clearly built by aliens far ahead of us, and we still cannot make them.

Folding in combat: Ships map the space around them in real time. This gives allies a safe point to fold in, near any friendly ship they can track. The limit on folding "outside of a combat zone" applies only to blind folds into space that nobody has mapped.

Emergency folds: Every ship carries an emergency-fold AI. When the hull is close to falling apart or exploding, the AI kicks in and folds the ship out, hopefully to the rally zone. Because the calculation is rushed, that rarely goes cleanly: irreparable damage, a foul position, or a jump so far from the rally that friends are hard to find for a long time. Still preferable to dying in space.

Waystation folds: When in orbit of an alien waystation, a ship can fold across the galaxy to another solar system whose waystation is connected to it. Ordinary fold drives and tethers cannot do this. See The Web and aliens.

Carapace

The armour and skeleton of a ship can be rapidly and constantly repaired by a variety of drones and repair protocols. Every faction has its own way of doing it, but the idea is the same: a hull that can be patched and added to constantly. In a fight that means drones and quick repair. After any big scrap, most ships still need proper downtime to fix themselves properly. It takes careful coordination to find and repair the damage, as well as lots of disposable drones and repair materials, so a lucky shot to the stores or the repair console can cripple this function.

Guns

For humans, rail cannons are the standard ship-to-ship gun. Prototypes sometimes try other systems, and alien ships often use very different weapons, but railguns are what human fleets rely on.

"Guns" usually means rail cannons, which fling tiny, hyper-accurate projectiles through space at amazing speeds. Hitting the ship isn't the problem, because the computer can fire at the perfect moment as long as it can track the target correctly. Once a round hits, whether it strikes something vital depends largely on how big the ship is. That's why larger ships, though their armour has little chance of stopping a round, can survive a hit much more easily.

The roll to hit is therefore a roll to hit something vital, not the ship itself, and cover makes tracking harder.

Torpedoes

In practice torpedoes and missiles are much the same kind of weapon. Officially, a torpedo is a large rocket fired by a ship at another ship: bigger, more advanced. A missile is usually smaller, used against escorts or other light threats, and is what ground forces use. Voidsmen often use the words interchangeably.

The common ship torpedo is made up of five parts:

1. the guidance computer, which navigates the missile intelligently
2. the warhead, which explodes as close to a ship as it can get
3. the casing, which ejects it from its mother ship
4. the initial charge, which sends it on its way
5. the reserve charge

The reserve charge is special: it lets the missile and its friends re-orientate themselves to a new vector and velocity. If it isn't used, it fires just before impact instead, making the missile much harder to hit.

Taking a ship

Forced boarding is rare and rarely worth it: entry pods are a nightmare of problems. A few specialists, such as the Dead Men, still train for those manoeuvres. Most captures come by negotiation when a ship is too crippled to escape, or by surprise on a station when it is fully docked and cannot leave quickly, using ordinary firearms and clearance tactics.

Other established technology

• Hab cylinders: These make up the Earth's orbital ring and the labyrinth of Phobos Station.
• Energy shields: A shield technology known only to the Kingdom of Saturn; no other nation has it or understands it. Widely thought alien in origin; nobody knows where Saturn got it. See Kingdom of Saturn.
• Digital downloaded consciousness and hologhasts: See The Plutocracy.
• Holo tables and holopanels: Commanders watch their flotilla on a holo table, and projections appear from a holopanel.

The certainty sphere

Millions of calculations are done every second to track targets and manoeuvre, and commanders watch a boiled-down holomap of the battle and make the key decisions. A ship's certainty sphere is the space in which an observing ship can be sure another ship or object is.

Living and working in the void

Keeping crews alive and in touch far from home. For customs and culture aboard, see Cultures of the void.

Life support and resupply

Flotillas can recycle almost everything and stay self-sufficient for long stretches, like an old Earth submarine. Nobody likes drinking the same water cleaned over and over, even when it's fine, and people want fresh food, so whenever they can they take resupply from home or a colonised moon. Day-to-day mass rations are packaged, freeze-dried, or ship's biscuits: swallowable pills that expand in the stomach with all the nutrients you need. They are not particularly fun, but they do the job. Luxuries like tea or chocolate usually have to be bought. When they must, crews can go without fresh comforts for a very long time.

EVA (going outside)

EVA (extra-vehicular activity) means leaving the ship in a suit to work outside. The gap between ships is vast, so leaping from hull to hull is a joke, the stuff of children's comics. In theory, if both ships hung still and you kicked just right, you might drift across; nobody would try it. Jet suits exist for careful work when ships are close and quiet, like repairs, much as people did during the twenty-first century's early space colonisation.

Communication

Within a single system, messages travel by a network of communication buoys, which pass signals from one to the next in minutes or hours depending on the distance. No signal can cross a waystation, though. News, orders and gossip only move between systems as fast as a ship can carry them through the fold, so a flotilla out in the Web may be weeks or months behind events at home. That is why courier ships run regular mail routes through the waystations, carrying everything from naval orders to letters home. It is steady, valuable work, and a natural trade for a trader flotilla.

Each nation runs its own buoy network in the systems it controls, and a frontier port's buoys belong to whichever faction holds it. That makes buoys an early target in any war. Cut an enemy's buoys and their flotillas are left deaf and blind, unable to call for help or hear new orders until a ship brings word.

The human body

Long lives

Long life in the 31st century comes from a mixture of technology and medicine, and what's allowed depends on the faction, since some nations ban certain treatments. Living past three hundred is a real achievement and costs a great deal. Such long-lived people only seem common because there are so many humans: across the billions of Earth and the Ring, even a rare privilege adds up to a crowd. For most people, a long life is something to save for, earn or be given, not something to expect. The Queen of Saturn, at some four hundred and fifty, is one of the oldest humans alive.

Cybernetics and body modification

Heavy cybernetics make a person less human in the eyes of most people, because in a literal sense they are. Across most of the solar system, people who take implants take care to hide them and stay as human-looking as possible. A few nations and cultures go the other way.

In the Plutocracy, body modification is part of the culture: when people can afford an upgrade they often take it, and a visible change can even be an advantage, a mark of wealth or status rather than something to conceal.

The people of the Kingdom of Saturn often take modifications as well, but theirs are usually designed to look beautiful: more regal, more human, or even angelic.

NOVA and most people who live on the Ring treat cybernetics as a grim practicality. Most want to stay as human-looking as possible, but few would refuse a replacement limb, a repaired eye, or the odd slight upgrade to the brain.