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Ams Jendob
Moff


Joined: 14 Jun 2009
Posts: 1579
Location: The Gala

 Post Posted: Sat, January 17th 2015 07:29pm    Post subject: Sneak Peek...
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Vader held his blade out before him as he searched the dark, unlit corners of the incomplete throne room. “You cannot hide forever, Luke.”

“I will not fight you.”

The Sith turned toward the sound. I have you now. “Give yourself to the Dark Side,” he taunted. “It is the only way you can save your friends.”

He reached out with his feelings. He did not have a physical location on Luke, but he could sense the turmoil. The mention of his doomed compatriots had stirred the young Jedi. Perhaps he felt safe in the shadows... but nowhere was safe from the Dark Side of the Force. Vader pressed harder against Luke's defenses. “Yes. Your thoughts betray you. Your feelings for them are strong.”

He felt a mad scramble, to bury feelings deeper, to hide and conceal the pathetic connections that made him weak, made him vulnerable. And in the scramble, the gleam of something truly prized was overlooked... by Luke. “Especially for,” Vader began... then paused. Impossible! “Sister!”

Vader's own confusion clouded his senses for but a moment. He honed in on the icy knot of fear building in Luke. “So, you have a twin sister. Your feelings have now betrayed her too.”

Despair and self-loathing screamed out of the void, now so strong that Vader could localize his son's physical form while tormenting him emotionally. “Obi-Wan was wise to hide her from me. Now his failure is complete. If you will not turn to the dark side,” the Dark Lord paused, savoring his ultimate victory over Kenobi, “then perhaps she will.”

Despair and pain changed to righteous fury with such explosive suddenness that Vader was momentarily overwhelmed. He didn't hear the snap-hiss of an igniting lightsaber, and only barely registered the defiant scream of “Never!

He began to turn toward the sound when a lance of emerald death drove toward his face. His swordarm snapped his blade upright, barely clearing Skywalker's thrust before it impaled his skull...


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Emperor Ams Jendob, Ruler of the Imperial Remnant


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----"Moff", CMAC Dreamcrusher, Official Administrative Waldorf and Statler----
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Ams Jendob
Moff


Joined: 14 Jun 2009
Posts: 1579
Location: The Gala

 Post Posted: Sun, March 08th 2015 12:20am    Post subject:
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Would anyone like to read up on the inner workings of hyperdrives? :p

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There are many factors that contribute to the existence of a galactic civilization, but without argument, none match the existence of faster-than-light travel in importance. Without the ability to bypass special relativity, the spaces between stars are simply too vast to span. Indeed, many solar systems would have their outer reaches more remote than Wild Space is from the Core today. Every schoolchild knows that the speed of light in vacuum is the ultimate speed limit in real space, as found by the Columi over two million years ago. Any object with mass will gain mass as it approaches the speed of light, requiring more force and thus more energy to accelerate. These all increase asymptotically, going to the infinite at the speed of light.

Ironically, it was the depredations of the Rakata that brought the answer to the Galaxy. Their hyperdrive systems carried them across the stars during their brutal conquests; when the Infinite Empire fell, the peoples they subjugated quickly captured and reverse-engineered any technology the former masters left behind.

Early hyperdrive experiments were not safe, but showed that hyperspace freed one of the universal speed limit of 299,792,458 meters per second that bound all things in realspace. So even as sublight sleeper ships left Coruscant, the hyperdrive was being refined. Eventually, the designs mutated into hyperspace cannons that blasted ships into hyperspace. But the dream of mounting the equipment for passing into hyperspace within the hull of a ship continued to inspire and eventually birthed the modern hyperdrive.

However, while the process of transitioning into, flying through, and exiting hyperspace was theoretically safe, the practical use of the hyperdrive was considerably more dangerous. While objects using faster-than-light transit via hyperdrive are not in realspace, massive bodies in realspace cast "mass shadows" into hyperspace. Contacting one of these mass shadows in hyperspace will—at best—result in the vessel violently translating down to realspace. This is exacerbated by the relatively low gravity field needed to force this crash-translation: 1.09 meters per second squared, or approximately one planetary diameter out for a standard terrestrial planet. Assuming a ship survives contact and reversion to realspace, it must now contend with the fact that it is perilously close to a massive object, such as a planet or—worse yet—a star or even a black hole, likely at much less than orbital velocity and equally likely with insufficient time and control to generate a proper orbit.

This requires a jump to a destination take into account any gravitic hazards along the way. Unfortunately, this is complicated by the fact that the Galaxy we live in is not static. It is a dynamic, evolving, and rotating place, with stars, nebulae, black holes, and rogue bodies shifting position constantly. Starship computers are simply not up to the task of simulating the complex interactions of the every single celestial body in the Galaxy to generate real-time data on safe routes, and this was even more true twenty millennia ago. To provide safe travel between worlds, routes were marked with jump beacons, forming a kind of lighthouse network for ships to follow. These beacons were massive, floating supercomputers that refined and reevaluated their route. They were also prime targets during the many wars fought by the early Republic: destroy the beacons, destroy the route, and cripple the enemies' ability to deploy their forces.

But, just as the drive to mount a hyperdrive within the hull of a starship made the hyperspace cannon obsolete, a similar drive to make the navigational system self-contained eventually led to the development of the navicomputer. The pilot was now free of the tyranny of the beacons; so long as there was a known destination, the computer could take him there.

With the marriage of hyperdrive and navicomputer complete, hyperdrives progressed gradually over the years, propelling larger vessels to greater speeds and across greater ranges. Modern drives are completely pangalactic, though the routes are certainly not. One issue that seems fundamentally endemic to hyperdrive technology is the lack of maneuverability: vessels cannot alter course in hyperspace; therefore, all jumps are straight. To alter course, such as to account for a bend in a hyperlane, a vessel must exit hyperspace at the necessary point, maneuver onto the correct vector, and then reengage its hyperdrive. This does somewhat blunt the rather fantastic speeds of modern drives; with a Class 3 engine, a trip from Coruscant to Dantooine would take 57 hours. However, the actual distance between them is far less than the 129,000 lightyears a Class 3 drive can theoretically travel in that amount of time.

This "faster-than-light, no left or right" approach means hyperspace travel is predictable. Those seeking to evade pursuit will usually jump away on a false vector, decant, change course, and jump again, perhaps repeating the process several times depending on the doggedness of pursuit and paranoia of the pursued before finally coming onto the desired vector. However, this adds greatly to transit times, making it a less-than-attractive option for those under time constraints.

Jumping into hyperspace is more difficult than exiting: while starships can safely decant as close as one diameter with a standard terrestrial planet (or wherever the 1.09 meter-per-second-squared radius around the body happens to be), transiting upward cannot be done in gravity fields more powerful than 0.058 meters-per-second-squared, or about six planetary diameters above the surface of a standard terrestrial planet. This egress limit is generally used to demarcate the inviolable sovereign space of a planet; jumping in closer is restricted to emergency cases and military vessels assigned to the planet. Many a freighter pilot has had a small calculation error and decanted between the one and six diameter lines, to be promptly greeted first by threat-acquisition scanners and weapon locks before a very terse comm message from local space control.

Both entering and exiting hyperspace produces a weak but very characteristic emission pulse of Cronau radiation. It is generally undetectable beyond 50,000 kilometers even for dreadnought-squadron-scale translations, but closer in, the pulse is a massive flare announcing the arrival or departure of a vessel or fleet to all watching. This fact helped save the famous Alliance base on Hoth from orbital bombardment when the Imperial fleet decanted at point-blank range of 15,000 kilometers above the surface. Had the Imperials dropped out of hyperspace further out, they likely would have appeared to be one of the many meteor showers that fouled the Alliance sensors until it was too late. Instead, the Alliance had time to erect their shield generator and force the Empire into a grueling ground battle while they evacuated the planet.

Hyperdrive engines are rated by classes. The class ratings give the maximum speed of the drive in deep space, relative to each other. So, a Class Four engine is half as fast as a Class Two engine, and twice as fast as a Class Eight drive. During the Clone Wars, Class Three engines were the standard primary drive on military ships, with especially fast vessels using Class Two or better. In the modern era, Class One engines are considered top-shelf, with Class Two being more standard. Large freighters generally employ Class Three or Four drives. Backup hyperdrives generally start around Class Six to Twelve, with Class Eight and Ten drives being the most popular. Drives capable of performance above Class One are not common and get exponentially more expensive and dangerous as the speed increases. Many smuggling ships are modified to perform between Class 1 and Class 0.7 performance with a moderate success rate. Early-run Acclamator-class assault ships employed experimental Class 0.6 drives, but were heavily retrofitted when safety issues began costing the Republic entire divisions. Making 0.5 past lightspeed (which, coincidentally, requires a Class 0.5 hyperdrive) is often discussed in theoretical engineering and smuggling groups, however, only one vessel is known to have achieved the feat and survived: the Millennium Falcon. Hyperspatial turbulence at that velocity (approximately 120 million times the speed of light) will easily tear apart even the strongest of craft. It is believed—the Falcon's owner is reticent on the subject—that special modifications to the hyperdrive help "streamline" its hyperspace profile, reducing turbulence. The modifications involved involve as much trial as calculation, and to date, no major organization has been willing to risk lives, credits, or hulls tampering with otherwise stable hyperdrive technology.


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Emperor Ams Jendob, Ruler of the Imperial Remnant


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----"Moff", CMAC Dreamcrusher, Official Administrative Waldorf and Statler----
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