Inclusion & Splash Drives

Faster-than-light travel made interstellar civilization possible. It never made space travel safe. We were such fools to think space would ever be safe or comfortable.

Humanity spent generations staring toward distant stars before technology finally allowed people to reach them. The first successful faster-than-light (FTL) systems were developed in secret, and knowledge of their existence remained closely guarded long after their inventors began using them. But, as with all secrets, eventually the secret got out.

What followed was an explosion of human expansion across known space and the development of two dominant forms of FTL travel: inclusion drives and splash drives.

Both technologies manipulate quantum space. At its simplest, the vessel, its occupants, and everything caught within the drive’s influence are translated into quantum information and transferred toward a paired destination before being returned to real space. The people aboard remain conscious, but they are not steering through the transition in any conventional sense.

Nor are ships traversing some supernatural, chaotic, or demonic realm between stars. They’re passing through quantum space. And just because there’s an absence of malevolent gods and their demonic kin, that distinction doesn’t make the trip any more pleasant.

Inclusion drives are designed for smaller vessels, generally those carrying crews of five or fewer. Personal spacecraft, specialized transports, small frigates, drones, and similar ships can use them to cross interstellar distances without relying upon the enormous systems required by larger vessels.

An inclusion transition forms something resembling a wormhole around the vessel. Inside, the crew experiences the violence of the passage without having meaningful control over it. When the vessel reaches the other side, its return to real space can announce itself with a piercing scream followed by an eruption of cosmic particles, energy, antimatter, and other materials humanity doesn’t completely understand. Then the ship is thrown free.

Fast. Blind. Frequently spinning. Pilots have seconds to understand where they are, regain control, and hope nothing occupies the same piece of space. Thankful most of space is devoid of things to collide with.

Splash drives solve the same problem but at a much larger scale. Transports, military vessels, industrial ships, and even enormous space structures require power systems capable of moving masses far beyond what an inclusion drive can handle. Rather than wrapping a small vessel in an inclusion corridor, a splash drive produces a much larger spatial event, disrupting space both from the point of entrance and the point of egress.

The resulting splash can be enormous. Energy and displaced matter erupt around the point of arrival. The size of the vessel, distance traveled, and energy involved can turn the arrival of a sufficiently large ship or structure into an event measured across extraordinary distances. For that reason, ships are expected to transition far from planets, stations, and other vessels. Fleets must arrive at intervals of both time and space.

Space installations enforce those distances whenever they can. Many utilizing special technology, such as inertial stabilizers, to prevent proximity threats. A bad arrival can destroy far more than the vessel making it. Predictable drive ranges and safe transition zones have helped create the routes along which interstellar civilization moves. Trade follows them. Infrastructure follows trade. Predators follow both.

The technology did more than create shipping lanes. FTL removed the distance that had contained humanity for millennia. Splash-capable industrial fleets could move enormous amounts of equipment, labor, and infrastructure into systems that had previously existed only as points of light. Smaller inclusion vessels gave specialists, corporations, militaries, pirates, and wealthy travelers the ability to move independently around those expanding networks.

Human civilization spread outward. Corporate civilization spread faster. Today, inclusion and splash drives are ordinary infrastructure throughout ChromaSpyke. Their violence is accepted because the alternative is a universe in which most inhabited systems remain generations apart. Even with the Daphemi to prop up workforces, the Directorate understands that without FTL, much of what they’ve built would be at risk within a couple centuries.

If you’d like to experience FTL travel in ChromaSpyke fiction, Pickpockets begins inside an inclusion transition and follows its violent return to real space. Esca Mizutara reaches further into the nature of quantum-space travel.

Now that you’ve been introduced to inclusion and splash drives, continue exploring ChromaSpyke through its cybernetics or explore the underground faction that rejects these advancements. Or return to the ChromaSpyke universe page and explore other lore articles.