Stardrive (Patreon)

The arcane solution to the disappearance of hyperspace, the Stardrive (also called the Stardust drive after its key component) enables ships to ride the ley lines to jump between star systems. The Stardrive does not technically require the oversight of a mage, but it is recommended that it be maintained and overhauled regularly, usually by an artificer.

Stardrives were discovered by the Solar Empire and have now largely been standardized. Produced en masse by industrial facilities in the Core Worlds, they have also been replicated on a smaller scale elsewhere, by independent worlds and various interstellar polities, but any spacer worth their salt will always prefer the safety and reliability of an Imperial stardrives to the knockoffs.

Stardrives use the ley lines to 'jump' between systems. It is impossible to jump when no ley lines are present, as proven by the expeditions into the Silent Stars. When a ship jumps, it vanishes in a flash of energy called a jump flare. When they emerge, a similar, if distinct, burst of energy also appears, called an emergence flash. It should be noted that while the jump flare is generally benign, the emergence flash has a tendency to disrupt a wide variety of sensors, especially arcane ones, for a few seconds, leading to the well known, if momentary, 'sensor blindness' for ships emerging from jump.

A Stardrive jump always takes one week, minus an hour and twenty minutes, roughly six hundred thousand seconds. It is close enough that everyone calls it one week. The distance crossed in realspace is utterly irrelevant, and the jump is usually accurate to the millisecond on when it ends, though there have been variations of up to half a second or so when jumping in regions with abnormally large stellar anomalies such as black holes, or during coordinated jumps of large fleets.

Stardrives can only jump at a certain distance from a star, usually seven hundred million kilometers, about the orbit of Jupiter in Sol. This is not actually dictated by gravity, but by the star's own arcane properties. Similarly, jumping in requires one to emerge at such a distance from the star.

The accuracy of a jump is highly variable, but generally, jumping closer to where the ley line (which forms a straight line between two star systems' elliptical planes, due to the way the network is construed, though why is unclear) meets the jump limit leads to more precise jumps, hence why such 'jump zones' are usually protected in more secure star systems, even if only for customs and anti-smuggling purposes. The farther one gets from this point, the less accurate the jump, exponentially so, to the point that attempting to jump onto the other side of the jump limit could cause one to jump straight past the outer system and into the system's khuiper belt. Not however that one cannot jump much further than that from the system...unless it is on the ley line linking the two stars together.

Deep space jumps are not only hazardous, they are imprecise to the point of being useless. Many proposed methods of interstellar communications have fallen through because of this. Lacking a gravity well to anchor the ship into at all, the inaccuracy of the jump goes from hundreds of million of kilometers to light months or even light years. Thus, the fabled deep space rendez vous of pirates, or secret networks of Imperial communication satellites and listening stations hidden between the stars are just that, legends and fables dreamt up by those with little clue of how the galaxy truly works. Besides which, the Empire has an entire merchant navy to be its eyes and ears.

The stardrive requires an immense amount of energy to function, some of which cannot be provided by an external source. Most of which is given by a special, stardust infused liquid mana fuel consumed during the beginning of the jump, usually called enriched fuel. Expensive to manufacture and hazardous to store, it is nonetheless one of the most potent arcane fuel sources known, and powers humanity throughout the stars. It is thus produced in most star systems for passing vessels, though most free traders or other vessels expected to head into less than civilized space will carry onboard fuel refineries and Stardust harvesting systems. The process is slow, but it enables one to never run out of fuel, provided that they are willing to get quite close to a star.