User:Narc/Unnamed Story about Tully Winston/Tully Winston Data Gathering

People

 * Tully Winston -- title character, so far not much known about him.
 * Commander Ronald Van Der Meer -- Captain of the ESF Bern. No data available yet here, either.
 * Lt. Cdr. Philip Chu -- Navigator of the Bern.

Ships

 * ESSF Bern -- A frigate of the Earth Space Services Fleet, captained by Ronald Van Der Meer.
 * The Bern is lightly armed and heavily sensored, in keeping with its designed role as a police ship.
 * Compared to other frigates of the period, it is also severely undermanned, being crewed by only five people (normally 25), which is offset by heavy automation.
 * It also has leather seats. :)
 * EMSS Mule -- Unmanned, automated freighter belonging to the Earth Space Merchant fleet under private registry until its destruction in the beginning of the story.

Places

 * Maison Gris -- a space habitat built inside a hollowed-out asteroid approximately 30 years ago. It is the anchoring point for the space-borne industry exploiting the mineral-rich asteroids that form the rings of Aerys V.
 * Aerys -- the star system in which our story begins. The star is a G7 (i.e. somewhat more orange than Sol) positioned "not far" (more precise distance to be determined) from Sol itself. It has no habitable planets.
 * Aerys V is (as expected) the fifth planet in the star system. It is a large Jovian, strongly reminiscent of Saturn, and featuring similar rings made up of very mineral-rich asteroids. Maison Gris orbits it a few hundred km beyond the outer edge of the ring system, in the same plane, making it a perfect mining base.

Technology

 * Reaction drives are used throughout all of known space. Officially, there is some suspicion that reactionless drives are possible, but the technology has failed to work usefully so far. Unofficially, at least two ships have had a functioning reactionless drive successfully mounted and used in trials; however, these are being kept secret for the time being.
 * FTL travel is achieved using a hyperspace translation drive, commonly abbreviated hyperdrive (duh). In brief, hyperdrive translates a spherical volume of space including the ship into hyperspace, which is many-layered. By controlling the shape of the volume after translation, ships can move in any direction desired, thanks to some properties of hyperspace geometry. This requires power to maintain. Standing still, however, with the volume in default spherical shape, requires little more power than just keeping the hyperdrive at idle, which is normally the case unless it is undergoing maintenance.
 * Hyperspace motion is applied as a force acting on (parts of) the hyperdrive itself, thus the hyperdrive is usually mounted very securely as close to the ship's center of mass as possible.
 * Losing power to the hyperdrive while in hyperspace will result in the realspace volume being immediately returned to its default spherical shape, after which, over a period of several hours, it is slowly returned to realspace from the outside in. Hyperdrives usually carry enough realspace that the time until core hull begins translating back is around ten hours, and the maximum amount of realspace that can be translated depends on the size of the drive and energy supplied to it . However, the more realspace being translated, the more energy-consuming it is to reshape it for directional travel, and the slower the travel speed.
 * Hyperspace has bands, or levels, nominally lettered A-Z, and the amount of energy required to translate into a higher band grows exponentially the "higher" you already are. Realspace is often accepted as hyperband zero, in spite of having an apparently completely different geometry from hyperspace. The reason to go into a "higher" hyperband is because realspace distances become (linearly) more compressed the further "up" you go. However, strange things have happened with experimental hyperships purpose-built to reach as "high" as possible -- no ships have returned after passing hyperband H.
 * Hyperwalls (i.e. the walls of the "bubble" of realspace that is translated into hyper) interact by pushing each other away. It is thus impossible for two ships traveling together to both translate into hyper on their own power and stay together. Similarly, electromagnetic waves do not travel through hyperwalls (or perhaps they are absorbed by the natural medium of hyperspace), so ships in separate bubbles cannot communicate. Thus, the tendency in this universe is to have bigger cargo ships rather than more, and for each to travel separately. It is possible but obviously dangerous to tow ships through hyperspace, as long as the trailer does not activate its hyperdrive. If it does activate its hyperdrive, the newly formed bubble will immediately deform the original one, and the two will mutually repel each other until they do not touch.
 * Hyperdrives are expensive, bulky, and, as shown above, can be extremely energy-demanding. The exponential increase in power when translating "up" through the hyperbands generally restricts merchant vessels to hyper-C or below, while the quadratic increase in power when translating more volume tends to restrict ship sizes.