Pillai hyperdrive

The Pillai hyperdrive is the faster-than-light drive of human space, invented by the Magellan Consortium physicist Vinak Pillai and first tested on 14 August 2289. It translates a ship along a computed line to a point light years away, in about six hours, from the edge of one star system to the edge of another. It cannot be used inside a gravity well. Every human starship since 2289 has carried one, and the Expansion Era of 2289 to 2318 was built on it.

The drive ended 139 years in which the Darmstadt Convention had banned faster-than-light research, after the Imaeda Institute's ship Infinite vanished with 780,000 people aboard. Pillai's theory showed why the Infinite had failed and how to avoid repeating it: a drive must begin and end its jump where a star's gravitational gradient falls below a threshold. The Consortium has built five generations of the drive, and every one is bound by the same rule.

Background

The Imaeda drive's ship, the Infinite, activated its fold 4 million kilometres from Europa and vanished with 780,000 people in a fifth of a second. The Darmstadt Convention on Spacetime Translation that followed banned research into, construction of and operation of any drive on the Imaeda Institute's principles, in perpetuity. Its inspectorate walked into every shipyard in the solar system for 139 years. The Institute's papers were sealed at Big River on Callisto.

In 2281 Pillai published a paper that the Consortium's reviewers held for a year. It showed that the Imaeda drive's failure lay in the assumption that a ship could be translated from inside a gravity well. The Infinite had activated well inside the region where the Sun's gradient made the translation's endpoint undefined. A drive that operated where the gradient fell below a threshold, which for a star of the Sun's mass lay about twelve astronomical units out, could translate a mass up to ten light years and arrive. When President Tuji ordered the Institute's papers unsealed to her in 2286, Pillai found that the Institute had calculated a probability of arrival of 60 percent and had gone anyway. The Infinite had not exploded. It had arrived somewhere, and nobody will ever know where.

The Senate amended the Convention on 21 March 2288 by 61 votes to 44, to permit drives on other principles under the inspectorate's supervision at a distance from any star set by the inspectorate. The inspectorate set the distance for the Sun at fifteen astronomical units, three beyond Pillai's figure, because it did not trust her figure. Every pilot since has called it the Pillai radius.

Development

The Consortium built the drive at Magellan through 2288 on a budget of 40 billion credits, which the Chamber's Scientific Research committee approved by a single vote. It was installed in the Anant Two, an unmanned hull of 2,000 tonnes. The Anant Two left Europa on 2 March 2289, crossed the Pillai radius on 22 July, and translated at 0900 Jovian Standard Time on 14 August 2289, 15.3 astronomical units from the Sun. Thirty-six days later, on 19 September, the Magellan array received its carrier wave from a point 36 light days out along the computed line, with a picture of the Sun taken from farther away than any human instrument had been. The vehicle had spent six hours in translation by its own clock and six by the Sun's.

The Anant Three made the return jump on 3 December 2289 and was recovered on 8 January 2290. A crewed vehicle, with two Consortium volunteers and an inspectorate observer, jumped a light year out and back between March and June 2290. The observer reported that the translation felt like nothing and that the six hours were the longest of her life.

Operation

The Pillai drive is a field generator. Its coils, wound from the Xi institute's superconducting composite, are charged by the ship's fusion plant. Charged, they establish a region around the hull inside which the ship's position ceases to be defined with respect to the surrounding spacetime and becomes defined with respect to a computed endpoint.

• The Pillai rule. The endpoint must lie outside the gradient threshold of any mass. Every jump begins and ends at the edge of a star system, in the cold beyond its outer planets. No drive can be used inside a gravity well, and every ship spends weeks or months under torch climbing out of one system's well and falling into the next.
• Range. In the first generations the maximum translation was about ten light years, a limit set by the endpoint's precision, which degraded with distance until a ship was as likely to arrive a light year from its target as at it. Ships of the Expansion Era jumped six to eight light years.
• Time. A jump takes about six hours by the ship's clock and about six hours by everyone else's. There is no time debt.
• The Pillai flash. Departure and arrival each release a burst across the electromagnetic spectrum, detectable at the range of a system's edge by any instrument looking. No ship can arrive in a system unseen. The flash shaped every war fought with the drive.

Generations

The fifth generation was tested at Magellan on 14 August 2499, two hundred and ten years to the day after the first. The Consortium's report stated that it was the best drive the Republic's materials could carry. It was not the monolith's drive, because the Republic could not wind the Fevarian hull alloy as the golden age had. The Republic's fleet of 2510 was the first since 2289 that could reach the Veil's far side from Haedius in three jumps.

Other species' drives

Every drive humanity has met obeys the Pillai rule. The Institute of Xenology's comparison of 2491 concluded that the rule is a property of spacetime and not of any species' engineering.

• Voor. Every Legion ship of 2333 jumped 25 light years and charged in a day. The Voor survey cruiser of 2317 made the jump from Cirban to Haedus in forty minutes, a jump the Grissom took six hours to match.
• Maweer. The Maweer drive, sold to the Republic in 2474, jumped twenty light years.
• Fevarian. The ancient drives of the Fevarian monoliths translated forty light years on a six-hour charge, because their coils were wound in the monoliths' hull alloy to a geometry no other species' drives had used. The Institute's monolith section established in 2490 that the ancient drive was of the Pillai kind.
• Mardak Vol. The Tadasca colony ship carried a drive that was neither a Pillai drive nor an Imaeda drive, and the Institute judged in 2320 that the Mardak Vol had been within a generation of a drive without a Pillai radius. The Consortium spent 200 billion credits in the 2310s and could not reconstruct it.

Legacy

The drive made the Expansion Era. Elliot O'Neil, whose single vote on the Scientific Research committee had carried the drive's budget, was elected President in 2291 on a platform of expansion, and Pillai stood beside him at his inauguration. The Manifest Pledge of 2292, the four Voyager-class explorers, the four core worlds and the encounter with the Voor followed from it. The Navy's doctrine for two centuries rested on its two rules, that a ship must jump from the edge and that its jump will be seen.

BOOK SOURCES

1. Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.1 "The Pillai Hyperdrive and the Manifest Pledge"
2. Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.2 "On the Solar Wind: The Four Explorers" and §7.4 "La Recalada: The Founding of the Core Worlds"
3. Solar Eternal, Part VIII, §8.4 "The Voor Legion"
4. Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.7 "Solar Ascendant: The Voor Surrender"
5. Solar Eternal, Part XV, §15.7 and §15.9 "The Hulk, the Fifth Drive and the Mardak Cluster"