- What was early spacetravel like?
- Modern Vehicles
- Most early forms of spacetravel were remarkably slow, and frequently used for unmanned voyages onto foreign planets.
- Different civilizations reached the starts at vastly different times, centuries apart from one another, though they generally all follow the same patterns.
- The difference, however, often boils down to what sorts of fuel are used, based on the resources available on the species' home planets.
- Typically, a pre-FTL spaceship would effectively launch itself using a contained explosion, and manage its movement in space with these powerful engines.
- Using the force of the explosion, the ship would be able to move itself about by the lack of any other forces to counteract it.
- While effective for moving about, this was notoriously slow, not even breaching lightspeed. Travelling between planets would, at a minumum, take several years.
- The Unathi were the first species, despite their level of technology, to achieve FTL travel due to just how long their species has been in existence.
- This step forward was born from a desire for military might, and as such, most ships for the first few centuries of FTL travel's existence were far from luxurious.
- Originally, FTL engines would, upon enterring space, rely on distorting the space in front of it to effectively shorten the amount of distance needed to travel.
- This movement, an extremely basic, almost primitive form of teleportation, was the first form of FTL travel.
- Unfortunately, this meant crossing paths with another ship would either result in a tragic accident or somebody getting severely lost.
- With the conditions of these ships being designed for mere survival, this would hardly lead to a comfortable lifestyle.
- In Sol Standard year 2036 ACE, the first off-world Unathi colony - and, in turn, first interstellar colony - were formed.
- The Skrell, despite colonizing other planets in their own solar system, wouldn't discover FTL technology until 2053 ACE.
- Skrellian interstellar travel would give rise to civilian spacecraft, featuring more luxurious interiors and greater safety measures.
- The next major development in FTL technology wouldn't rise until 2176, over a century later, when Solar Federation scientists discovered bluespace.
- Upon first contact with humanity, most species were quick to adopt bluespace technology into their own vessels, and it quickly became industry standard.
- Over centuries, while the core idea of FTL travel has remained similar, the means of achieving it have drastically changed.
- While early Unathi ships may have been using Bluespace to some minor extent, they still operated off of movement in the traditional sense.
- To this day, they still operate more like an air-based vehicle than most spaceships, combining the miniature warps invovled in bluespace travel with high-speed movement.
- While most ships are capable of sharper steering and more precise controls, Unathi ships tend to take larger turns and require more hands-on operation.
- Despite the safety hazards present with such a means of operation, it also makes them much easier to learn, as they are mostly operated within the same dimension people
- usually live in. While it may struggle in civilian operations, this makes them particularly hard to hit compared to other battleships, as most long-range weapons equipped to
- ships are not designed to target vehicles with minimal bluespace signature. All aiming when fighting Unathi vehicles is forced to be manual.
- The less controlled movement makes these ships incompatible with most lower-end artificial intelligences, and can prove to be a hassle for anybody just wishing to travel
- from point A to point B. On the other hand, it is vastly superior for navigating uncertain and uncharted areas, such as a battlefield or an unexplored frontier
- due to being able to better percieve where, exactly, your ship is going in real-time.
- On the other hand, human and especially skrellian ships are heavily bluespace-reliant. By enterring bluespace, they are able to safely skip over large tracts of space in mere
- minutes.As long as the pilot is aware of where their destination is, these ships can travel with incredible speed, and are extremely compatible with artificial intelligence
- systems. Such luxuries make skrellian and human makes highly desirable, and is responsible for the human-owned Nanotrasen corporation's almost complete dominance over
- the ship and especially ship engine industries. However, the lack of in-the-moment perception of the ship's surroundings and location often hampers its ability to fight.
- Because of this quirk, it's not uncommon by any means to simply see the ship park, opening up so that the soldiers within may emerge to do battle themselves.
- Most, if not all, civilian and cargo ships are of human or skrellian design due to their speed and convenience for travelling known territories.