03/08/24 ♦ do the hump jump!

a primer on ftl tech in the microcosm

hmp tech is a weird little keystone of the microcosm that i dont talk about often, but absolutely love to when i do. it's essentially their version of faster-than-light travel that uses some crazy magnets to teleport them through space. here's the big rundown

hmp, hypermagnetopulse, operates on the principle that spacetime, if subjected to an extremely strong dynamic (ie fluctuating) magnetic field, "delaminates" along the field boundary and allows for the near-instantaneous translation of the resultant 'field bubble' and its contents through space. to simplify: create a wacky enough magnetic field and spacetime /jails you for being too fucked up, but it forgets to turn off your noclip.

nobody knows who invented HMP tech. it was probably the vellandor, but like, a lot of them were fascists and a lot of them suddenly and mysteriously died of railgun slug overdose, and the splinter communities who didn't want anything to do with that nazi shit don't have a clue either, so like. thanks Unknown Contributor for making the microcosm work good,that magnet stuff u did was nuts

hardware

anyway: HMP "drives" consist of a series of hardpoints mounted to the exterior of a vessel, each housing a block of superconducting magnets. they're bolted down pretty nicely but need to be calibrated by generating a static field prior to the dynamic one - a little bit of energy is let into em just to make sure they won't be ripped off and they're all kumbaya with one another. all the timings are set up by the ship computer, but the system is incredibly modular and can be tacked on to just about anything as long as it's not too massive

once they're cooled down and ready to go, u need to charge the capacitors and get em ready to dump. a lot of ships in the microcosm run "within their means"; the popular SD-08 planethopper for example sports a 50 KW toroidal fusion reactor, which is great bc it'll run for months without needing a refuel, but is kinda bad for satisfying the power demands of HMP drives. as such they often just trickle charge off the reactor and can take hours between jumps. hope you got a magazine ready... also if you have any metal parts don't move around too much during the test cycle, you'll get a static zap next time you touch anything

charged? good. cool? good! the jump itself is basically all handled by the ship computer (or biocomputing software if you're Jacked In or whatever) and is for all intents and purposes instantaneous. as the capacitors dump their charge into the magnets, a slight phase shift is induced by some extremely high voltage electronic control systems until a sufficient level of flux is reached to irritate spacetime enough that it puts you in isolated space bubble limbo. then a bunch of other shit happens, the computer manipulates the field so your local space moves thru external space at comical effective speeds right up until it exhausts the effective energy within the system or you've reached your destination, then the field is allowed to collapse and discharge back into the capacitors (or is safely shorted into resistors).

bow shock

one of my favourite details about HMP travel is that the bubble u travel in is a physical thing. like, it might be a bubble of space, but it's still an object and space kinda fucks up around it. things that collide with the bubble gather on its surface, kinda like shockwaves from travelling supersonic - and like the air, space dust really, really doesn't like travelling faster than the speed of light. i mean, it doesn't really, but it gathers as a dense, thin film at the interface between normal spacetime and your fucked up space bubble. when the bubble collapses, that thin film is so dense and (probably) so hot that shit fuses in it and explodes in a process KNOWN AS... .... BOW SHOCK

bow shock is a really common problem in dense regions of space within the macrocosm, like the Graveyard. the interiors of Bok globules, big gloopy masses of space dust that form over millions of years as gravity pulls the remnants of past supernovae together, are completely inaccessible to even the hardiest of explorer vessels. there's a region in the Graveyard, the Down-Below, that has its own little interstellar feudal culture - very little can get in or out.

the most affected by bow shock are larger HMP-capable vessels like mass transports and big cargo bulkers, but its effects are felt by everyone who flies interstellar - most spacecraft have rolling blast shields to not only protect windows, but eyes and skin too, since the flash from the detonation produces a fair bit of EM radiation. it's mostly safe though - there's not too much gamma radiation, and gene therapy is basically part of everyone's yearly checkup

oh! also big vessels sometimes incorporate massive "shock cones" that are designed to really take a blast, made of some tungsten ceramic shit or whatever. i forgot to mention. they're put up on big hydraulic jacks and you can really hear n feel the boom in the ship superstructure

umpire

interesting thing: while so much of the microcosm's infrastructure relies on HMP tech, a bunch of ships - namely the superfreighters that carry most of the syndication's goods - don't have any hardpoints at all. HOW ?????? Just continue reading i'll tell you!!!!!!

massive spacecraft which would otherwise take weeks to travel from system to system achieve a couple every day through the UMPIRE static hypermagnetopulse network, a system of relay stations that act like a gigantic railway system. instead of creating a spacetime fuckup localised to a single spacecraft, UMPIRE creates a big spherical spacetime fuckup that can have a hell of a lot of spacecraft inside of it, then shoots it out to a relay station in a process called "pitch-bat-catch".

when the field bubble forms, the entry node begins "pitch", where it just kind of compresses the bubble thing into a javelin and points it at a relay node while stretching it out towards it. the relay node then takes over where the entry node left off and keeps doing it along the line, "bat". finally, the exit node (also an entry node) "catch"es the weird javelin doohickey and expands it out into normal spacetime. if any node fails along the line, there's a bunch of failsafes to make sure they can be redirected, or if nothing can be found they just get dumped out at the previous node and they have to go back in again. annoying but its not a total loss

thats it

yipy you made it to the end!! congratulations your curiosity is commendable. hate to alliterate but what's one to do i guess. have fun knowing something you didn't know about my little worldbuilding project