A spike drive is a device used to achieve nuclear fusion and FTL (Faster Than Light) travel in spacecraft.
Essential for FTL travel, spike drives are often colloquially referred to as a ship's “core”, “drive” or “engine”, but spike drives can also be installed on permanent installations as power generation, or for other uses.
A spike drive can serve several functions;
- FTL (Faster Than Light) space travel - Sublight propulsion - Power and heat generation - Nuclear research and industry - Multidimensional research and industry - Multidimensional quantum computation
In common for these is the containment and fusion of light elements into heavier elements. This is accomplished through the Crohn’s process, which allows the creation of a “bubble” of a self correcting star-like environment inside the spike drive containment chamber. Through the manipulation of multi-dimensional quantum gravity, this Crohn’s “bubble” turns a large part of the energy emitted from the nuclear fusion back into the containment chamber to stabilize and maintain the fusion process. This makes the spike drive very resistant to external disturbances and allows it to keep operating in the harsh conditions of space as long as it has fuel available.
If fuel is cut to the spike drive without the proper wind down procedures, the Crohn’s process will naturally start getting hotter as it has to fuse heavier elements to get the energy needed to stabilize itself. An unmanaged spike drive will naturally undergo a runaway thermal process as it grows hotter and hotter until it has converted all its fuel into Iron, at which point it will become unstable and terminate in a violent gravitic singularity, often destroying or severely damaging any ship it is installed in, if it has not already been destroyed by the intense temperatures an unmanaged spike drill reaches.
To safely shut down a spike drive, a slow controlled destabilizing process must be conducted. This typically includes flooding the chamber with fuel while cooling it to a point where it can no longer sustain fusion. Some spike drives have emergency devices which allow a spike drive to be “blown out” or for the containment chamber to be wholly ejected, but these devices are typically at least partially destructive and reserved for emergency responses.
As the spike drive is fed hydrogen, it naturally ejects fusion products and high-energy radiation to maintain an internal equilibrium. Spike drives designed for use on spacecraft have mechanisms that allow for the controlled emission and lensing of these high energy products into ship propulsion and weaponry systems. Subligh propulsion is achieved by layering and focusing these streams to accelerate them to near the speed of light before ejecting them from the spacecraft to impart an accelerating force in the opposite direction.
Spike drive FTL travel functions fundamentally different from sublight propulsion. Crohn's process was specifically developed to navigate multidimensional spaces not normally accessible. By imploding into an multidimensional singularity the Crohn’s bubble can radically increase its volume to include the space around the spacecraft, and expand its active fusion volume and rate by the cube-tesseract law. Through quantum gravity manipulation, this energy can be directed to “drill” the Crohn’s bubble “into” and “through” multidimensional spaces before “drilling” back “out” into “real” space once the desired location is reached. A limitation of the gravitic aspects of the Crohn’s process is that it can only drill at the edge of massive gravity wells, typically a narrow band at the outer limits of star systems.
Spike drives naturally generate a lot of heat during operation, and usually requires active cooling to not damage itself or surrounding support systems. While some experimental models have had success in capturing electrical energy directly from the ejection streams from the Crohn’s process, most spike drives have a connected power plant that uses coolant, thermal expansion and turbine generators to convert the heat of a spike drive into usable electrical energy.
Spike drives are commonly categorized by their size class and level of fusion (rating).
A spike drives rating indicates what level of fusion it is rated for. While all Crohn’s bubbles theoretically will fuse hydrogen all the way into iron, only spike drives of rating 6 are built to be able to safely sustain such a fusion for any extender duration. Since the fusion fuel is fused multiple times in higher rating spike drives, the propulsion efficiency and FTL efficiency of these drives also goes up dramatically, but they do require more energy to stabilize and cool the heavier fusion processes.
The common ratings of spike drives are:
Rating 1 - Fuses elements up to Helium Rating 2 - Fuses elements up to Carbon Rating 3 - Fuses elements up to Neon Rating 4 - Fuses elements up to Oxygen Rating 5 - Fuses elements up to Silicon Rating 6 - Fuses elements up to Iron
A spike drives total energy output is also dependent on its size class. For the FTL travel capabilities of a spike drive to function properly, its size must be tuned to the shape and volume of the ship. Generally, larger ships require larger spike drives.
The common sizes of spike drives are:
K class - Typical for single person spacecraft G class - Typical for frigate class ships and other medium spacecraft F class - Typical for cruiser class ships and small space stations. A class - Typical for capital class ships and large space stations
Some experimental spike drives, or spike drives not meant for FTL, can be smaller than K class or larger than A class.
Spike drives are also sometimes configured in binary or trinary configurations, where several independent containment chambers are configured to operate in parallel. This allows for some redundancy, and is a simple way of increasing the size class of the spike drive without the complexity of large single chamber spike drives, but it generally underperforms compared to bigger purpose-built single chamber spike drives.
A black start is the process of igniting a spike drive from its inert “Dead” state, to its active “Bright” state. Without the stabilization energy of the Chron’s process, nuclear fusion requires pressure on par with that found in the core of stars to start the fusion process. Typically, a black start requires the spike drive containment vessel to be cooled to very low temperatures (typically less than 30 Kelvin) to achieve the super conductive properties needed to magnetically confine and compress the hydrogen plasma to achieve seed fusion. Once seed fusion is achieved, it must be maintained as the Crohn’s process is bootstrapped and eventually takes over.
In some computing applications, modified spike drives have been used to parallelize quantum computation. This typically requires heavy modification of the standard spike drive designs and a large amount of conventional computational support systems to process and feed data into and out of the Crohn’s bubble, but the raw computational capacity of such a system is almost unrivaled.
Typical applications for spike drive computation are:
- Multidimensional research - FTL navigation and cartography - Artificial intelligence - Accelerated virtual intelligence - Large model simulation
Originally invented by Dr. Tiberius Crohn some time before 2108, the spike drive was the first means of FTL travel successfully deployed by humans. After its invention the pre-Mandate nations of Earth started large-scale stellar exploration and colonization culminating in the first wave of colonization.
Beginning in the early 2300s, spike drives were slowly becoming redundant in the core systems as the jump gate network started coming online, and while spike drives remained in regular use in fringe systems for several hundreds of years, by the 2600s even the furthest system was connected to the jump gate network and spike drive technology were relegated to exploratory and military purposes.
Post scream the spike drive has returned as the only real FTL alternative, its primary design remaining mostly the same as the original Crohn model.
Spike drives safety is regulated by a number of inter stellar regulatory bodies. While statistically safe in normal operation, spike drives have the capacity to Spike drives require heavy radiation shielding to protect persons from ionizing radiation.
[contested]
FTL traveling with a spike drive has been linked to Elevated cell mutation Elevated risk of cancer Multidimensional Extroversion Syndrome (disputed)
- Drive system - Dr. Tiberius Crohn - Multidimensional Extraversion Syndrome - Spike Madness - Jump Gate Network