The Far Horizon Venture
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The Far Horizon Venture |
When wormhole technology was first being developed in 2131 AT the superbright imagineer El Perinn asked the famous question; "If we send a wormhole on a reactionless drive craft towards another galaxy, with constant acceleration it would reach Andromeda in a few subjective years, and the edge of the universe in just a few years more. Why not send linelayer craft off in all directions and colonise the universe in a very short time?"
However at that time the full potential of relativist wormholes could not be realised, as no ships were fast enough to reach relativist speed while carrying a heavy nanoscale wormhole terminus. During the age of Expansion the invention of the various reactionless drives provided an opportunity to answer the question, but the Consolidation wars and the Version Wars intervened and the considerable resources required to construct a craft capable of continuous reaction-free operation could not be found (except for military purposes)�
After the Version War and the subsequent period of recovery it was possible to make an attempt at very long distance exploration, using the most powerful reactionless drives available - the Pitch Drive and the Bias Drive. If a nanoscale wormhole was carried and isolated from the space-time distortion of the drive itself, contact could be made with the ship even when it was far away in space and far in the future due to relativistic effects.
The Far Horizon Venture was established as a co-operative effort between the Lord Of Rays, who provided the weylforges at various outlying parts of his empire, and the Curator-Progress-Negentropy organisation, a collective effort by several former enemy polities as a form of bridge building exercise.
There were several of these long distance ships sent off, two to the Eagle Nebula, four to Omega Centauri, one each to the Magellanic clouds and six to the distant Andromeda Galaxy, but one by one the nanoscale wormhole mouths that allowed access to these ships (and to the far future) collapsed when the ships penetrated too far into an unknown Xenogen wormhole Nexus and experienced Visser Collapse.
Measurements of the distance at which this collapse occurs suggest that the unknown Xenogen Nexus or possibly Nexi extends (at least in part) as close as fifteen thousand light years from Terragen space, perhaps closer.
More recent Far Horizon ships have the ability to eject the nanoscale wormhole mouth before collapse occurs, and presumably continue toward their destinations unhindered but beyond communication.
