Name: Blink drive, teleportation engine, pulse drive, photon engine. Description: A squad of soldiers find themselves cornered between hostiles and the edge of a ravine. They’ve suffered heavy losses and in spite of having no visual on any extraction ship they have been regularly promised rescue. Hope is waning in the group before the sky suddenly splits in two, erupting in immense light and sound. Piercing this fiery glow is three vessels. A dropship, followed by a gunship and corvette escort which rain down hellfire onto the battlefield. Appearing as a roughly dumpster sized device, the blink drive is a piece of starship mounted equipment which allows a vessel to jump a short (in stellar terms) distance in any chosen direction. Though the device is considered an enclosed system, it does require extensive modifications to a vessel's hull in order to be installed, such as additional radiators and a targeting array. When jumping with a blink drive, the ship will appear to glow a faint blue for about a minute, before suddenly disappearing into a bright explosion of light. From this bright explosion there’ll be a thin, wispy blue trail connecting it to a different flash at the end of the ship's journey. Abilities: Short-range teleportation: The blink drive allows a ship to teleport across a short distance, (even within an atmosphere or gravity well), and in a relatively short span of time. At most, a ship is able to cover around 250 kilometres in a single blink. (For context, that's the distance from sea level to low earth orbit.) Limitations: Charge-up: The blink drive requires a considerable amount of time to charge, requiring 1 minute (~10 combat turns) to fully charge, 10 seconds to finalize spooling and 30 seconds (~5 combat turns) to fully cool down post jump before it can be charged again. Power intensive: The spooling process is incredibly power intensive, so during the 10 seconds the device spools and another 5 seconds after the jump finalizes many non critical systems aboard the vessel will be without power. This includes weapons, sensors and shields. (These systems are restored to regular operation 1 crp turn after the jump.) Size constraints: Due to the size and power requirements of a blink drive, the device cannot be mounted on anything smaller than a mid-sized dropship. In addition, due to the exponential power drain increase due to size, the device can’t practically be installed on a ship larger than a frigate. Vulnerable: During the 10 second spooling period just before the jump a ship is incredibly vulnerable. Not just due to many non critical defensive systems shutting down (such as weapons and shields), but also because for a jump to be executed the ship cannot make any sudden maneuvers and has to fly in a straight line. This effectively means a ship spooling a blink drive is a sitting duck without shields. Conditional Limitations: Expensive: Blink drives are very expensive pieces of tech, costing around 100 000 pX for dropships, 120 000 pX for corvettes and 150 000 pX for frigates. How does it work: The blink drive works as a heavily up-scaled energy dash system, in that the device projects a quasi photonic field around the vessel in order to convert the ship and any crew aboard into weakly tangled photonic particles. However, as a side effect of the vastly greater scales to consider, there are a few different limitations and advantages to a blink drive compared to a standard energy dash device. The jump sequence of a blink drive is divided into four primary stages; Charging, spooling, discharging and venting. The longest of these by far is charging, during which the device prepares the ship for teleportation. The device wraps the ship in a thin quasi photonic field, which slowly builds charge over the course of a minute. During charging the ship is very easy to spot on most sensors. Spooling, in contrast, only takes about ten seconds. During spooling power is rerouted away from non-critical systems and into the blink drive, powering and turbocharging the finalization of the field. As soon as the field hits a critical point, the device transitions into discharge, where in a violent release of energy the ship (and anything aboard) collapses into photonic particles which careen forth and cover the entire span of the ships jump in about 7 milliseconds. At the end the ship suddenly restructures itself as the field dissipates, and the drive enters a venting period, whereby it spends the next 30 seconds cooling off, during which it cannot start charging again. Just like standard energy dash technology, G-force from acceleration is a non-issue to neither the ship, or its inhabitants. Flavor text: Developed around the same time as the energy dash as a spin-off technology. Early prototypes were quick to be utilized on various hylotl dropships, gunships and assault corvettes built for rapid deployment. The blink drive is still used in the hylotl navy, however has seen a great drop in application in recent years, what with the lessened requirement of an equipped navy and with the advancement in other fields of astronomics. As such, the blink drive has been relegated for use in almost exclusively dropships and certain stealth craft. Referenced Technologies: Energy Dash Tech Attainability: [OPEN] (Though it should be noted that blink drives are very hard to come by, especially so in the fringe, and are very expensive.) Tags: [MILITARY] Category: [TRANSPORTATION]
seems pretty epic. There's only one thing I'd like clarification on, after reading this over. If this functions similarly to energy dash, then does this mean blink drives are also unable to pass through solid objects? Not really an issue in the void of space, but it could come up in the case of an asteroid field or while navigating through a planet's atmosphere.
Hi! This was actually something I was gonna clarify on but it slipped my mind. It's a yes and a no. No, blink drives cannot send ships through solid objects, there needs to be more or less a solid, unbroken signal between the sensor array and the exit point for at least the entire spooling period, so it couldn't pierce a thick, solid wall or jump straight through an asteroid. However, if the wall is very thin, or there's a hole in it much smaller than the ship in question (think maybe a ship escaping a massive exploding facility ala the death star), but the hole is big enough for the sensor array to see through then the ship could jump "through a wall".
Small enough for the sensor to get a reading through? If I had to give a more exact value I'd have to say no smaller than maybe 3 metres in any dimension for subcorvettes, 5 metres for corvettes and 10 metres for frigates.
