Share
Void Ships

Reactionless craft developed and used by the Highest Archailects; the vessel is apparently entirely enclosed within a Void Bubble

Void Ship
Image from Steve Bowers
Void ships are apparently invisible within their bubble of curved space; but on occasion the space-time disturbance which they create can be observed when it passes in front of a celestial object such as a star

At the level of the greatest Archailects, Singularity level:6, void bubbles reach their highest state of advancement. The three key breakthroughs are that the bubbles can now, for the first time, be taken down so gracefully that even living biological matter inside can be retrieved without harm. Second, the exterior dimensions and interior volume, and thus total mass that can be placed into the bubble, is much greater than what can be achieved by S5 technology, increasing the life-span of the system. Lastly, and most importantly, wormhole mouths can be placed inside, allowing far easier access to the interior of the bubble without opening and thereby destroying it.

These three breakthroughs allow the spacetime ship to reach its ultimate expression, the Void Ship. In essence, the external conventional hull is eliminated, as are the separate drive bubbles. Instead, the entire ship is inside of - or essentially consists of- a single giant bubble. Since such vessels, despite their enormous interior size and vast mass, are practically invisible, they are widely and romantically referred to as Void Ships, alluding to the fact that they occupy the Void, and not Space as modosophonts know it. Since the entire Void Ship is outside of our universe, meaning the vessel is no longer subject to relativistic effects, accelerations are astronomical, and range is extremely long. The maximum speed is high fractions of c; 0.999 at a minimum. Typical ranges are 5000+ light years.

Of all the transapient created reactionless drives, the Void Drive is by far the rarest and most elusive, and perhaps the most capable. Even in this author's experience, despite extensive and exhaustive exploration and research, as well as numerous interviews with various high level transapient powers; actually observing the rumored 'Void Drive' in operation has not been possible. However, the substantial body of anecdotal evidence, including reports dating from both the Consolidation and Version Wars, interviews with known credible witnesses, and most importantly a one-time flyby visit of an associated agent to a so-called 'Valhalla Cluster' transapient manufacturing center five centuries ago lead us to conclude that such a drive (and its associated technologies) both exists and likely operates on the principles outlined below.

Void drives appear to operate on the same basic principle of the generation and manipulation of void bubble warps as is employed by the Displacement and Halo drive systems. However, the void bubbles involved are at least an order of magnitude larger in their internal volume. In the case of a Void Drive, it appears that, rather than being propelled by a swarm of Void bubbles external to itself, a vessel, group of vessels, or some other combination of matter and technology (each enclosed in one or more additional void bubbles operating together or nested within each other) is instead completely enclosed in a single large Void bubble which is then manipulated to accelerate itself and everything within it up to a high percentage of the speed of light in a matter of seconds or less. When the bubble and its enclosed cargo reach its destination, the outermost bubble is generally not deactivated, but rather some number of the interior bubbles are ejected from it in a controlled manner and the associated vessels or devices carried within them are then released into space at the destination point. Due to the flat space nature of the metric within the warp boundary, objects carried within the Void bubble experience neither acceleration forces nor time dilation and Lorentz contraction effects (which may be seen as a limitation on the technology of Void bubbles as a whole).

The phenomena of Metric Ghosts and Interferometric Ghosts have certain characteristics in common with the observed characteristics of Void Ships; however, the most intriguing set of Metric Ghost sightings have occurred deep in the Perseus arm, far from the sphere of activities of any known S:6 Archailects. This may mean that the Metric Ghosts are in fact xenosophont in origin.

As a final note, I wish to personally corroborate recent sightings of so-called Black Angels, which appear to exist as a direct instrument of Transapient authority. My observations of Black Angels suggest that they employ tens of thousands or millions of Void bubble nodes, which would give them reactionless, relativistic capability, and imply that the bulk of a Black Angel is invisible except to gravitational instrumentation. Their military capabilities are correspondingly +++

corrupted data, Node45E21/MGMU DateTime2.345E6/10499, transmission truncated
Black Angel Attack 2
Image from Operapoints
 
Related Articles
 
Appears in Topics
 
Development Notes
Text by Todd Drashner and Adam Getchell
Mark Mcamuk and Chris Shaeffer
Initially published on 09 December 2008.

Black Angle Image by Operapoints added July 18, 2023
 
 
>