The Cosmic Adventurers

Chapter 2. Easy technical break. sub-chapter 2.

The conversation turned out to be long, as much as several hours. With detailed explanations about everything that relates to this station. Ariadne, changing pictures and animations at the click of her light fingers, (a funny convention, even with sound) showed us the basic structure of the station, the features of its operation, the principles of crew organization, and much more necessary for normal life and confident work on board. During this time, several glasses of water managed to move out of the table and go back again. And where there is water, there should be a toilet. It is located behind one of the doors, along with other hygiene products. It's convenient. We didn't complain. On the contrary, we listened, listening to every word, gesture and image, and often we asked to repeat and show everything again. In particular, this is why the briefing was greatly delayed. But, it was necessary. Any new equipment requires study before use, and here is a whole space station, especially from another era. Upon closer acquaintance, it seemed to us that this station was not from another era, but rather from another world. As if it wasn't designed by humans, but by some xenos from another galaxy. Everything that could be done differently from what has been done for centuries in human shipbuilding was different here. To begin with, the station is spherical. As I expected, a little more than a hundred meters in diameter. And this is already unusual. Of this form, from inflatable modules with superstructures, simple stationary orbital stations, satellites, balloons for gas giants are usually built, but not ships. For more than a thousand years, the most common design of large interstellar ships has been frame-block-modular. The ship consists of removable target compartments-modules fastened together or fixed on one skeleton, each of which solves its own task- engines, sublight and gravpolar, sensor compartment, control center, cargo and residential, g*n combat modules, compartments for bolides and probes- dozens of types. Such ships are outwardly simple, unaesthetic and even brutal in appearance, there is no need for aerodynamics in them, such a coupling cannot land on planets without special modification, and it is not intended for this. Its element is pure space and islands of orbital stations, which every planet with a sufficiently large and developed population has. Their task depends on the number of specific modules in the coupling, on their size and capabilities. And most often they are built in the simplest design- linear, one after the other. This makes it easier to service ships at orbital spaceports. In appearance, these are typical "flying bars" consisting of container cubes. Such ships are even called the eloquent word "space train". Most military spaceships are also modular, however, their modules seriously differ from civilian ones not only in appearance, but also in a number of modifications. The absolute majority of orbital stations are built from such blocks, and sometimes ground structures on planets with unsuitable conditions for humans. This is the simplest, most reliable, inexpensive and universal of the constructions that gave rise to the human mind. Moreover, even the majority of xenos who managed to go into space have come up with basically similar designs, albeit with a different final implementation in appearance. This is the case when the same tasks give rise to similar ways of solving them in different civilizations. Most often, cargo and passenger civilian ships, as well as most military ships, are built according to this scheme. All kinds of non-state armed companies that lack funds, connections or rights to normal warships are assembling their fighting vessels from the same civilian block modules - these are mercenaries, militias, system patrol, corporate security, pirates and raiders, just free adventurers who have chosen space as their home despite all its dangers. Even the Great Founders overcame all their trials on such armed and pumped to the limit civilian transports - they had very few real warships. Another, also very popular design in shipbuilding is a monoplane. This is when a spaceship is immediately designed and built as a whole, without joints and divisions, all the contents are inside its outer shell. In such a design, it is possible to place only a set of equipment limited by the creators, but in such spaceships it is possible to implement some things that are inconvenient or even impossible on modular ships. For example, you can place one branched technical system that occupies not one block, but the entire ship as a whole. Most often, aerospace bolides are built according to this design - relatively small winged machines similar to hypersonic atmospheric aircraft, with good thermal protection, they fit from one to a group of people and up to several tons of cargo - depends on the modification. Such a ship can safely land from space on planets and take off into space again, and is capable of traveling at sublight speed within a star system. The same technology is often used to build combat aerospace bolides - universal light sublight vehicles capable of fighting both in space and in atmospheres of different density and composition. However, large interstellar ships are also built using monoplane technology, although much less often than modular ones. They lack flexibility and are severely limited in modernization, their construction is very long and costly, but they have an aerodynamic shape, they are able to take off and land on planets independently without additional modifications. And they are also very beautiful, they are real works of engineering art! Usually these are representative class ships - diplomatic missions and space yachts of the rich in Three Empires. We, in the space of Novorossiya, do not build such large monoplane ships - everyone, from the highest persons of the Order of the Renaissance to ordinary colonists, fly on "couplings" and do not show off. What can we do, the principle of "functionality above appearance" reigns in our country. As a "compensation", we like to paint these outwardly simple and angular ships with beautiful pictures of space-resistant paints. Any spaceport is also an art gallery... There is, of course, a legend that in the RT-331 nebula, the Guardian fleet built by the Order of the Renaissance is hiding and waiting in the wings, consisting of hundreds of super-powerful kilometer-long battleships and monolithic carrier cruisers, and waiting in the wings to repel the threat from outside the galaxy… Nonsense, in my opinion. Or someone's wild fantasy, or the Order itself is spreading these rumors to mislead the Three Empires ... well, you never know what will come to mind for their political leaders? Of course, after the joint repulse of the invasion of the Gray Overseers five hundred years ago, our relations improved, and from deadly hostile they became detached and neutral, which is already progress from the bottom of the sea to heaven, but who knows what will come into the heads of their rulers and secret structures? Suddenly they want to repeat their success of a thousand years ago? And here is a good argument not to do it… In general, the two most common designs are block-modular, similar to a train of containers, and monoplane, close to airplanes. The Photon space base is completely different. Imagine a sphere woven from twisted spring rods, with a volume-cellular inner frame, similar to fullerene molecules nested into each other on the principle of a matryoshka doll, and these cells contain smaller spheres of different sizes connected by flexible threads of technical highways and passageways. These spheres are target compartments, each of which has a specific set of equipment and carries its own task. At the same time, these spheres are not stationary - the frame is equipped with three-dimensional mobility mechanisms that allow moving the sphere-compartments among themselves, changing their places and positions, reconnecting from one highway to another. Despite the presence of gaps between the sphere sections, there are more than a thousand units, and each performs its own group of tasks. A separate song is getting energy and a way of moving in space. Again, there are two common ways. The first is reactive - when the flow of particles is pushed back from the body and the body moves forward. In turn, the most common jet engines for ships are ion engines and extraplasma engines. There are also chemical engines running on the combustion of chemical fuel, but they have not been used for a long time. Ionic are extremely effective in the ratio of costs and results, they are economical, safe, relatively easy to build and maintain. They do not require consumable fuel, which is important from the economic side - they only need an energy source and a working medium in the form of a superconductor. However, they manifest their properties only in conditions of pure space, where there is no strong attraction and resistance of the atmosphere. In the atmosphere, the ion beam is strongly inhibited and quickly dissipates. A ship with an ion engine capable of developing hundreds to thousands of kilometers per second in space will not even budge in the atmosphere of an Earth-like planet. In addition, they are not capable of developing really high cosmic speeds. However, for sublight flights inside the system, huge speeds are not necessary and even dangerous - in order to completely avoid space-time anomalies, you should not develop a speed of more than one tenth of the light for a long time. At the very least, one third - but this is already dangerous. All civilian spaceships without the ability to land on planets, satellites and stations fly on ion engines. The extraplasma engine (EPE) is a kind of hybrid of a ring EMP accelerator and a traditional plasma engine. This unit moves the ship due to the explosive ionization of the gas mixture in the plasma discharge chamber using ultrahigh voltages, followed by acceleration of the formed plasma through an electromagnetic accelerator. The outgoing jet has temperatures from hundreds of thousands to millions of Celsius, and the velocity of the outgoing particles is close to light. The exhaust of an EPE in space is capable of spraying matter at distances of tens and sometimes hundreds of kilometers, until the exhaust particles begin to lose speed and naturally deviate. This engine can be used as a defensive weapon during a retreat maneuver. Because of this, EPE is considered unsafe, and as a rule, near populated planets, spaceports and just in busy areas inside star systems, the rule applies - turn off plasma generation and go on the quiet course of an electromagnetic accelerator, which in the absence of plasma generation works as a simple ion engine. Such an engine has quite natural analogues (only magnified by millions and billions of times) - pulsar stars and galactic polar jets. If these ornaments of the universe threw out their jets only from one side, then they would be avid space travelers. The EPE is the only jet-powered unit theoretically capable of getting close to the speed of light. However, despite numerous experiments with record-breaking overclocking units, no one has ever succeeded - all the devices disintegrated, falling into sublight anomalies of time stratification. The reactive principle of motion, where other matter and the momentum between them are used to accelerate matter, is by itself fundamentally unable to disperse a material body above this "diamond wall of space and time". This requires a completely different principle, in which there is no working body as such, which operates not with matter, but with pure energy, and not its own generated on board, but someone else's - the energy of much more powerful surrounding cosmic bodies. And then gravitational motion comes to the rescue. It is similar to sailing - a sailboat does not have its own engine, it uses external forces (wind) for movement, and the sail only plays the role of a catcher of these forces. The gravpolar engine... if we do without the tooth-crushing terms and passages that only AI can pronounce with a run-up, it is a double directional super magnet that, when operating, enters into an enhanced narrowly directed gravitational interaction with remote space objects in front and behind the ship. In fact, the effect is created as if the ship was very close to the stars ahead, which it aimed at, although spatially it is still far away, and at the same time, much further from the stars that are behind, reducing their attraction. This creates the effect of a constantly accelerating fall forward without the cost of any fuel, substance or other working fluid. In this case, the "working body" becomes the space bodies in front and behind the ship. The energy on board a ship with a gravpolar is spent only on accelerating supermagnets and focusing them. Gravpolar motion was discovered rather by chance, during tests of a multi-acceleration extraplasmic mass supercharger engine in the 2200s. The Phoenix testers in those years of the first interstellar sublight flights worked intensively on the creation of the so-called "warp engine", aka diving, jumping, hypertunnel, etc., which gives a local spatial tunnel that merges two remote points of space with each other for a moment. Even then they wanted to overcome the speed of light. Alas, they never managed to create a single warp engine for a separate ship - the mass created to open the tunnel was categorically insufficient, and protective devices and materials could not cope with keeping the equipment intact. The maximum that was possible was to create a warp gate through which, through a pair of locally controlled event horizons synchronized with each other, it became possible to teleport small loads from one star system to another. This has already become an incredible leap that has lifted Phoenix to the heights of fame, and people to the first serious step to the stars. Alas, the gates were huge, costly, and inconvenient to maintain. Most often they were created on the basis of already existing small planetoids, in which technical communications were drilled and devices were placed there to inject mass and create a hypertunnel. The gates were few, one or two per system, and there were long queues of those wishing to use them. However, further tests revealed the same gravitational interaction with distant objects. Calculations have shown that such an engine can surpass the speed of light without any perversions with the folding of space, but it is not clear what will happen to it next when it goes over the edge. As a result, after the loss of several prototypes and their subsequent refinement, Phoenix managed to break through the "diamond wall of space-time" with the first unmanned probe. It turned out that the ship that crossed the boundary falls out of ordinary space and becomes completely invisible and immaterial to a sublight observer. Like the whole world around for a superluminal object. That is why superluminal objects cannot be noticed by a sublight observer - in sublight mode they do not exist, except for a partial trace of their mass. Only the gravitational trace of the ship remains, caused by the disturbance of space and time. He creates a space-time cocoon in which the ship becomes invulnerable to collisions with space objects. In addition, the old scientific problem of exceeding the calculated mass of the Universe over the observed one has been solved. It turned out that our reality stably exists only in a certain range of speeds relative to the center of the Universe - from absolute zero speed to the speed of light in a vacuum. And most of the matter of the universe is located precisely beyond these two boundaries, one of which man was able to penetrate. The boundary beyond zero velocity was conventionally called a subspace, (or minus-space). The boundary above the speed of light is the superspace. (it's also a plus-space). In the subspace where the bulk is concentrated, matter has an almost absolute density and an extremely low velocity of time, this is a kind of core of the Universe, and in the superspace, on the contrary, it is so discharged that it does not prevent material objects trapped in this environment from continuing acceleration, with the strongest reduction in travel time, to any possible speeds, depending only on the power of a gravpolar or other similar engine that uses an external force. At the same time, at the ship's exit from superspace into ordinary space, a natural synchronization of time occurs around the returned object, this effect resembles the attenuation of the vibration of a touched string, where its two differently vibrating ends again enter into harmony. The universe is very flexible, and automatically extinguishes anomalies unnatural for its structure. And besides, they discovered through experiments with penetration beyond the edges that our universe was not born from an explosion at all, but at the same time it is not stable. Rather, it is like a star, from the superdense depths of which plasma bursts out, and at the borders with boundless eternity it sinks back and this circle is eternal, but this is expressed not in a geometric but in a high-speed model. In an ordinary three-dimensional sublight environment, the observer sees only the expansion of the Universe, but does not see the return of the departed matter, and can only record a partial trace of its mass. And what about "dark matter"? Well... It exists. This is the very matter that returns back to the center of the universe, or rather, its small part, its individual fragments, reaching sublight speed, sometimes manifest themselves in various cosmic phenomena. However, it decays very quickly and turns into energy. This substance can be created artificially, on special installations, and it will even behave as predicted by the ancient theories dedicated to it. But it never became the expected "main substance of the universe". But, this substance is extremely unstable and explosive, and rarely anyone is eager to get involved with it. Apart from purely scientific, it no longer represents any other interest. EPE and ionic devices are simpler, more reliable and safer. In general, the main thing in superluminal interstellar movement is not to fall out of superspace back into ordinary space somewhere wrong. For example, in the interstellar debris field. This is very dangerous, and therefore the waypoints of star systems are usually located not in the flat zone of the ecliptic, where all the planets, asteroids and clouds are concentrated, but several above it, where the concentration of dangerous objects is minimal.

Gravpolars have become a true revolution in interstellar communication. Since then, people have been able to fly freely in any direction, without being tied to the gate.

Alas, the gravpolars, especially of the first centuries, turned out to be far from ideal. The great complexity of the device, expensive materials, low energy efficiency, the minimum effective installation size is from twenty meters, it is useless to put on bolides, gravpolars are too large and heavy for them. Only for capital ships. Their effective launch zone began outside the planetary system of the star - after each gravpolar jump, you need to fly to the planet you are interested in on an EPE or ion engine - and this is a long time, depending on the power of the engine, the mass of the ship, the size of the star system and a bunch of other parameters, the flight could take from several hours to a month in triples and multiples star systems. It is useless to launch a gravpolar in the zone of intense gravity of a star. The movement will start, but not faster than on the EPE, and the energy overruns will be such that you will want to switch to the EPE or ion engine on your own. The older the gravpolar, the more problems with it and the worse its characteristics. A little later, of course, gravpolars were miniaturized to ten meters, increased power, reliability, and safety. Overload compensation and gravity correction systems have been developed for ships. Gradually, the cumbersome and inconvenient warp gates became a thing of the past and all interstellar communication switched to gravpolar ships. It is worth noting that the ion engine, and especially the EPE, turned out to be not only an effective means of space transportation, but also ... became almost an absolute weapon. And the point is not in the exhaust jet, which can also cause trouble, but in the banal fact that any object accelerated to a speed of tens of kilometers per second when hitting a more or less material target instantly disintegrates into atoms and generates a monstrous explosion of both itself and partially of what it hit. All the space empires, the military, and just ordinary people quickly realized this. And they were scared to the point of losing their pants. Since then, long-range and short-range anti-space defense has been the most important element of space infrastructure in the development of star systems. Because even a light torpedo ship on an EPD, accelerated to a couple of thousand km per second, will do any planet and its inhabitants very badly. The movements of spaceships in star systems are monitored with all eyes, gradars and telescopes, any unknown ship that has appeared in the system without warning is a serious threat, even if it does not carry weapons, because the speed of a spaceship is already a terrible weapon. And if there is no response to the request, a system patrol group instantly flies to intercept it. Several or more alien ships that invaded the star system without prior warning - already, consider it a war - first the patrol will intercept them and try to destroy them, and only after that they will figure out who it is and why they came to the star system. If you do the opposite, you can be left without your planet. During the Great Interstellar War, more than one hundred thriving planets fell victim to such a "misuse of the engine". Someone from the ancients wisely said that no matter what people invent, first of all they see it as a weapon…

Gravpolars are somewhat more complicated in this regard. Despite the superluminal speeds, and the fact that when a ship with a gravpolar engine (GPU) collides, according to calculations, it should tear apart gas giants and extinguish stars, this does not happen. For two reasons at once. The first is that a ship flying at superluminal speed does not exist in sublight space, and if it is capable of colliding with a solid object, it will fly through it, only slightly deflecting it with its gravitational wake. The second reason is that the gravpolar is effective only outside the gravitational cocoons of stars, inside the system its trajectory is strongly bent and extinguished under the influence of the star's gravity, and even when the ship with the gravpolar continues to work, it slows down and is carried out into normal, sublight space, and the ship turns on jet engines for further controlled movement.

In order for these wonderful, magnificent units to work, an extremely powerful source of energy is needed. In fact, it is necessary to ignite a pulsar-class micro-star in a small volume, keep it from disintegrating and maintain its operation. And there are also two of the most common methods- a power-EPE and a nuclear reactor in space design. The power EPE is a small extraplasmic propulsion device that does not take its ejection outside and works in a closed mode exclusively to generate energy for itself and power the main EPE, and already the main EPE gives an outburst for the movement of the ship. The first gives energy, the second releases it. This is a two-circuit EPE. The power EPE spends a smaller part of its energy on its own plasma formation and the operation of the EMP accelerator, gives most of it to the more powerful second EPE for plasma formation and the operation of magnets in it, and already the second EPE emits an outburst. The starting charge for the first plasma formation of the power EPE is received from a battery that can have any nature and design, as long as it gives out the starting charge of the required power and can be recharged from the further operation of the EPE. There are also multi-circuit EPEs, where there is a whole cascade of such units from the smallest starting to the largest and most powerful, issuing the final exhaust. It was on the basis of such a multi-circuit EPE, in which all plasmagnetic vortices were transferred to a closed mode of operation without external emission and their orientation was rebuilt, and the first gravpolar was created. So, we can assume that gravpolars have grown out of EPE and are their highest stage.

The second method of production energy is a nuclear reactor, with converters of thermal energy into electrical energy from a special energy-condensing grade of carbosil. This, by the way, partially solves the problem of cooling the ship in space. Its disadvantage is that you need to have nuclear fuel, usually these are radioactive metals of the uranium group, the advantage is a long service life, ease of maintenance, there is no need for frequent replenishment with consumable fuel-you need to change plutonium rods every few decades. For EPE, on the contrary, plasma-forming substances are needed - usually a helium-hydrogen mixture, sometimes with additives from other gases and dispersions, and when released in sublight flight in the form of a plasma jet, it is consumed. It will end- and that's it, you need to replenish, or fly on the energy of backup batteries in the ion engine mode without plasma. Fortunately, the helium-hydrogen mixture is not a precious rarity - it is easy to pump it on any gas giant or brown dwarf (in general, on any large gas planet that has not grown to the status of a star that has a helium-hydrogen atmosphere). And usually a nuclear reactor is used in conjunction with an ion engine, and a power EPE is used in conjunction with a flight EPE or gravpolar. The reverse scheme is extremely rare. There is also a third type of engines- combined engines, which are both EPE and gravpolar, and everything depends on the operating mode- if the units work to emit a plasma plume outwards, this is EPE, and quite powerful, and if plasma flows are closed in annular magnetic circuits to obtain gravitational interaction with distant objects, then this is already gravpolar.

To our relief, there is a gravpolar on the "Photon". In the largest compartment, fifteen meters in diameter, in the central core of the spherical ship. Moreover, it is a combined engine. The southern shaft, opposite to the one through which we got to the ship, serves several tasks at once - this is another entrance, the final contour for the release of plasma during sublight movement, the shaft for the release of probes and bolides (yes, they are here too), the contour for the attracting beam and the contour of the gravity cannon. A separate g*n is not required, the operation of the gravpolar is simply reconfigured - with the help of the magnetic contours of the shaft, the repulsive effect from the gravpolar in the form of an expanding cone is focused into a narrowing cone, and for a second the power rises to the possible limit safe for the space base. Any substance in the path of such a beam is penetrated by the strongest piercing effect. And immediately, instantly, with absolute speed and over huge distances. Like an instant prick with an invisible rapier of cosmic proportions. Here is such a utilitarian, inhuman functionality - each compartment, unit and mechanism has several purposes here at once.