Knives in the Void: Technology of Interstellar Warfare

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We'd normally start off with a prologue, some sort of thing to tell you what this issue is about, but, hey, it's in the title! Everyone knows that everyone's been fighting for as long as life's been around, and maybe even before that. Doing it in space is as obvious as picking up a rock and using it to bash in the head of the sophont next to you. Of course, things in space are a bit more complicated than just rocks. So instead of a lengthy treatise on a historical star conflict, this time we're talking about nuts and bolts and relativistic rocks: how all those big shiny warships do what they're designed to.

Warp Fields

The fundamental building block of practically all spacefaring civilizations, the warp-field generator (or WFG) is a solid-state thaumaturgical device that sacrifices immense amounts of heat to warp spacetime. The violation of causality and thermodynamics is nothing new in the realm of magic, but the scale of it is impressive. Generally, most non-spacefaring societies understand magic to be useful on the personal level (healing wounds, creating light, translating speech, finding lost objects, breaking down doors, etc), but impractical on an industrial level (mining, power generation, assembly lines, etc) when compared to mundane means. The key to the warp-field generator is that this relationship breaks down at sufficiently high energies.

The uses and functions of WFGs are many. At their core, they can twist spacetime and create fields of acausal acceleration. Most species immediately use them to produce practical fusion reactors upon discovery, as they can compress hot plasmas with acceleration fields far more effectively than magnets can. Conveniently, these early fusion plants provide the hot plasma needed to fuel additional WFGs, leading to reactionless thrusters, artificial gravity, shields, weapons, and eventually faster-than-light travel.

WFGs are delicate and specialized devices. While they can endure massive amounts of heat and pressure, they can only do the specific purpose they are designed for, and generally only function in vacuum (with two notable exceptions: agrav thrusters and artificial gravity). "Variable" WFGs that can dynamically reshape their effects remain at the forefront of scientific research.

Power

The heart of any starship is its primary reactor, which produces high-temperature plasma suitable for use in warp-field generators and other solid-state thaumaturgy. Practically every interstellar society has their own preferred reactor design. Occasionally this is expressive of a civilization's attitude towards life in general, but more often it's simply a matter of practicality with a bias towards whatever they figured out first.

When it comes to warship design, the main design concern for a primary reactor is how much energy the ship's jump drive will consume. Weapons, shields, and propulsion generally use a fraction of a ship's maximum output, though not a negligible fraction. Some ships, particularly ones with grav-fusion primaries, cannot sustain the power generation required to open a hyperspace window, and use plasma capacitors to deliver the required peak power.

Gravitic Containment Fusion

A common design that has been independently invented over a hundred times, the humble grav-fusion reactor uses warp-field gravity to compress fusion fuel into a tiny artificial star. Grav-fusions are compact, easy to maintain, and easy to design, but require regular refueling. Outside of logistical concerns, they are generally considered lacking in power when used as a primary reactor, but they see widespread use as secondary or backup power sources, particularly on ships with reactors that require significant startup power. While the warp-field generators that make a grav-fusion work require reactor plasma to operate, they can be cold-started in a pinch via the use of a ultra-low-yield nuclear warhead.

Primary users: Everyone. Civilian vessels and civilizations that are new to warp-field technology often use grav-fusions as primary power sources.

Hyperspace Breach

Often referred to as hyperspace reactors, breach cores, or jump reactors, these designs hold open a malformed hyperspace window and siphon off the resulting energy release via dedicated shield arrays. Their primary advantage is that the nature of a breach disrupts most gravitic sensors, making it impossible to accurately determine the size, location, or number of ships with a breach core at long range. This is also their main disadvantage: an active breach is nearly impossible to hide, even if it cannot be localized. Other disadvantages include the extreme energy requirements for initial startup, a requirement for powerful computational resources to keep the breach stable, and the possibility of extremely energetic failure states. Breach cores only compare favorably to other power generation options if the advanced computers required to run them can be miniaturized: a doped-silicon computer stabilization system compares unfavorably to even gravitic fusion reactors, but a spinglass-based design has practically double the power density of a comparable plasma reflector or AMP reactor. Additionally, a breach core can be overloaded, producing a brief hyperspace tear that is devastating to unshielded targets.

Primary users: Interstellar Union, in both warships and civilian vessels.

Antimatter Parity (AMP)

Antimatter parity reactors are simple to explain: they create matter and antimatter with magic, then annihilate both together to heat reactor plasma. Actually building them is somewhat more complicated, as creating antimatter via thaumaturgy is generally considered to be impossible. The AMP reactor bypasses this impossibility by creating "virtual" antimatter and normal matter together in such a way that they immediately annihilate, and then extracting energy from the products of the annihilation reaction. AMP reactors are favored for their relatively high energy yield and simplicity of operation: only a few components (warp-field generators, shield emitters, and plasma conduits) are required, which means they can be easily repaired even when heavily damaged. Their downside is their signature: an AMP reactor has an extremely distinct gravitic "heartbeat" caused by each individual annihilation cycle, allowing relatively straightforwards detection at range. When intentionally brought into an overload state, an AMP reactor can briefly produce neutrino emissions on par with a supernova, making it an effective last-ditch weapon against unshielded targets.

Primary users: Interspecies Confederacy military vessels, some civilian vessels from advanced polities.

Plasma Reflector

A more heavily magical design, plasma reflectors (sometimes called plasma taps) use thaumaturgy to generate magnetic mirrors with slightly more than perfect efficiency. This system relies on the fact that there is a slight disparity between the upkeep cost of the magnetic mirrors and the energy they produce— only a few hundredths of a percent, but enough to exploit. In order to produce useful energy, plasma is bounced between a series of mirrors millions of times, with the majority of the energy being fed back into the mirrors for upkeep. The primary advantage is their ease of design, lack of detectable emissions, and relative safety. A plasma reflector can only release the plasma that's inside of it if it fails, and can't be coaxed into a catastrophic explosion like an AMP reactor or breach core. The downside is that they are uniquely vulnerable to magic maintenance troubles and have a response lag on the order of several seconds, necessitating dedicated plasma capacitors to provide on-demand power for ship systems.

Primary users: Orion Council, Seddu, Ivu'alek, many civilian vessels.

Sublight Propulsion

All modern vacuum propulsion works on the same principle: reactor plasma goes in one end, warped spacetime comes out the other end. Because space itself has energy, it can be tied up in nanoscopic knots and tossed out the back of an engine nozzle to produce thrust without needing reaction mass. The omnipresent warp-field reactionless drive has been invented independently by practically every spacefaring species in the galaxy. A variety of different names for it exist, most of which translate to something along the lines of "distortion drive".

Low Pressure, High Thrust

Distortion drives only work when they can work on space itself. The presence of any significant amount of mass (such as planetary atmosphere) around the nozzle will result in either catastrophic damage to the engine itself or an emergency shutdown to prevent said catastrophic damage. In optimal conditions, however, modern distortion drives can accelerate vessels at dozens of gravities for months before needing maintenance.

Wake

A distortion drive's exhaust consists of short-lived foamed spacetime, which emits white light in the visual spectrum due to quantum interactions along the foam surface. Due to this foam's similarity to shields, it is practically impossible to shoot or see through a drive wake, no matter who it belongs to. Different drive designs have different wake characteristics, often specialized for particular hulls. Many warships are designed to produce large wake cones as a protective measure at the cost of additional power requirements, while civilian vessels generally prefer unmodified wakes. Stealth drives attempt to eliminate the signature white glow, instead producing a muted rainbow shimmer that is much more difficult to detect. Regardless of its visibility in the EM spectrum, drive wake is typically detectable by gravitic sensors, though often difficult to localize.

Maneuvering

Nearly all ships mount dozens of distortion-drive maneuvering thrusters around their hull. All ships use this for docking and maneuvering, but warships use this to strafe at high accelerations— which is vitally important for attempting to evade incoming ordnance. Additionally, ship's main drive can typically be angled a few degrees, allowing it to balance out shifts in the center of mass.

Atmospheric Thrust

Most distortion drives (maneuvering thrusters or primary engines) can be reconfigured to behave like a hovercraft in atmosphere, creating a "cushion" of mass underneath them and then pulsing a warp field to slide along said cushion. Drives operating in this mode are described as "agrav", short for anti-gravity. This capability does not make atmospheric landings easy or safe, however. Agrav modes universally require more atmosphere than the cutoff point of a drive's vacuum mode, leaving a region where controlled flight is impossible.

FTL

Practically all faster-than-light travel in the galaxy works on the same theoretical basis: transiting through a dimension where traditional physical rules do not apply. In Union parlance, this dimension is called hyperspace, and the system used to transit it is called a jump drive, but names for FTL across the galaxy are as varied as life itself.

Components

A jump drive is typically the most expensive part of a ship, whether that price is measured in labor, rare elements, or currency. It consists of massive hyperspace window generators (which open the "portal") along with a network of sensors and shield emitters (used for plotting jumps and protecting the ship from hyperspace). Damage to any section of a ship can render it incapable of safely jumping. Warships typically have robust backups to allow them to jump while damaged, at a commensurate price tag.

Hyperspace Weather

Hyperspace itself is not a flat featureless plane. It is generally described as "bright", a featureless white void filled with hard radiation and turbulent spacetime. The sheer violence of this turbulence is enough to shred an unprotected ship, so jump drives encase their vessels in a bubble of isolated spacetime to protect them.

Jump Plotting

The protective bubble of a jump drive means that a ship is incapable of maneuvering or using sensors while in hyperspace. The only action it can take is jumping out, which can only be done safely in low-turbulence zones— which cannot be detected by a ship in a jump bubble. Thus, to safely jump, a ship must calculate a precise hyperspace trajectory to "coast" along prior to entering hyperspace. While hyperspace is influenced by real-world conditions (particularly massive objects), calculating their effects and then finding a desirable path is an extraordinarily difficult math problem. In practice, a ship's jump range is dependent on how powerful its jump computer is and how long it spends computing a jump. Due to the nature of the math problem at the core of the issue, jump routes must be computed for each individual ship, and typically must be used within a few minutes of their completion before conditions change. For civilian traffic, it is common for outlying transit stations to offer jump plotting services, substantially increasing jump range (and thus reducing travel time) for a fee. The current leader in jump range is the Union, whose spinglass-based jump computers can achieve ranges exceeding five lightyears per jump.

Drive Cycling

A jump drive builds up a significant amount of magical feedback while in use, which must be disposed of after returning to realspace before another jump can be initiated. This process is referred to as "cycling", and can take anywhere from hours to days depending on the design. Advanced drives, like those used by the Confederacy, can cycle in under six hours.

Jumping

A ship's reactor is generally designed to fulfill the peak energy demand of its jump drive. Jumping itself requires relative peace and quiet in the immediate area, which means that a ship must turn off its shields and cease firing any weapons for a brief moment to jump, with even a drive wake in the immediate area sufficient to prevent a jump. When a ship's jump drive finally activates, it disappears as a spherical region of space inverts around it, which then collapses and releases a distinct burst of light and radiation called a jump flash.

Time and Relativity

Jumps are not instant, from either an observer's or traveler's perspective. The amount of time they take is not constant and varies depending on a wide variety of factors, but a safe bet is no more than one hour per lightyear. Making a jump "faster" is possible, at a heavy computation price. Jumping into or out of a relativistic reference frame substantially increases the time a jump takes. It's thought that this serves as a "natural" protection against paradoxes— any way to actually send a message back in time has yet to be discovered.

Safety

While it is theoretically possible to jump deep inside a star system's gravity well, the practical side of this problem remains unsolved. All jump drives only function when sufficiently far away from massive objects, typically requiring entrances and exits to take place in interstellar space or on the edge of a star system. Jumping blind or bypassing safeties is a practically guaranteed ticket to having your ship lost in hyperspace. Outside of these extremes, jump travel is largely safe and uneventful.

Defense

There are between two and four layers of defense for any warship, depending on who you ask. Practically all starships, even civilian ones, have shields and some degree of armor, even if it's only a few millimeters. Electronic warfare and active point defense are occasionally present on blockade runners, clippers, and other ships that expect harassment in their travels.

Shields

Layers of foamed spacetime produced by warp-field generators, shields intercept matter and energy without transferring any of the kinetic energy back to the ship. Matter is shredded into subatomic particles by what is effectively a cheese grater made of space itself; energy is diverted and refracted away from the ship. Doing this comes at a cost: as a shield absorbs more damage, it builds up magical backlash in its emitters. Much like a jump drive, this can only be disposed of when the shield is offline, which means a shield can only absorb so much firepower before failure. Shields with more and larger emitters can withstand more damage, meaning that ship volume tends to correspond closely to their shielding potential.

The most successful military designs are "unitary" (ie, a single layer of shields) due to the complexities of layered backup emitters and the fact that resetting a shield usually takes far longer than combat itself. Visually, a shield appears as a faintly shimmering surface when idle, flaring brilliant white when intercepting weapons fire. Most shields are tuned to permit particular wavelengths to pass through for sensors, and can open holes to allow outgoing weapons fire as needed. All vessels carry some form of navigational shielding, typically a two-layer, low-power shield to intercept blueshifted radiation, interstellar dust, and micrometeorites.

Shields easily absorb lighter particles, particularly anything proton-mass or lighter, making lasers and most traditional particle beams relatively ineffective. The most favored element for disrupting shields is iron, which is heavy enough to "pop" the bubbles of spacetime foam and cause significant stress to a shield emitter, and common enough to be trivially replenished from asteroids.

Shield geometry is often an essential part of a navy's doctrine. While shields rarely have secondary layers, they are often divided into multiple panels, allowing a ship to rotate to present undamaged shield sections. Confederate Navy vessels typically use a grid of small hexagonal shields, Council Fleet ships use a two-hemisphere design, and Union Space Corps ships use a six-segment rectangular prism. Changing a shield's geometry is relatively simple in terms of design work, but requires rebuilding or replacing every shield emitter.

Armor

While armor is generally ineffective at fully stopping relativistic ordnance, it is not useless, particularly against missiles and c-beams. Most armor is designed to vaporize into heavy plasma or gasses when struck, which then lingers around the ship and heavily attenuates other weapons fire. Armor effectiveness is dependent on two things: the actual strength of the armor, and the power of a ship's inertial dampener. A warship's inertial dampener will extend its coverage beyond its hull, allowing it to drag vaporized armor material along as it accelerates. Better dampeners can extend this coverage further, and hold onto vapor for longer periods of time. The most durable warships use compartmented designs that can retain vaporized armor, forcing repeated hits to waste most of their energy on already-destroyed material rather than intact components, though this design philosophy comes at a mass cost.

Most starship armor is referred to as "battlesteel", and consists of nanoscale layers of diamond, rubber, ablative ceramic, nanocrystalling steel, and high-entropy alloy. Particularly advanced armor types include lithographed runes for magical protection. Battlesteel is notoriously difficult to fabricate, and is often seen as an expression of the apex of a civilization's material engineering.

Stealth and Electronic Warfare

The best defense is never getting hit. Ships designed for stealth use low-wake drives, radar- and laser-dissipating hull designs, and focus on long-range weapons systems. Electronic warfare exists as another layer of defense when passive stealth is insufficient, relying on powerful laser dazzlers and jammers to prevent accurate targeting.

Point Defenses

Point defenses consist of a variety of weapons that propel very small projectiles at relativistic speeds with high accuracy and rates of fire. For civilian vessels, they are helpful to clean up space debris; for warships, they are essential for attriting missile salvos and fighter swarms. Designs often vary, even within the same navy. Most modern designs either fire warp-accelerated packets of plasma or macrons filled with fusion fuel.

Weapons

Starship weaponry generally falls into one of four different range brackets. All polities with competitive navies use more or less the same weapons, though the ways they use them different significantly.

Missiles

Guided, self-propelled projectiles, typically equipped with a warp-field-initiated shaped-charge fusion warhead and distortion drive. Missiles are the longest-range weapon system available, and are fueled by a plasma capacitor. Because all plasma capacitors must expend stored plasma to continue containing said plasma, all missiles have a flight time dictated by the quality of their plasma capacitor, regardless of how much delta-v they expend. Unlike chemical missiles, distortion-drive missiles must have their capacitors charged with reactor plasma prior to firing, which can take minutes for large salvos. Because missiles are designed to accelerate for their entire flight time, they are most effective at their maximum range, reaching the maximum possible speed before detonating. Most missiles are designed to release their payload as a narrow cone, allowing them to detonate some tens of thousands of kilometers away from the target and spend less time in point-defense envelopes. Many warhead designs can also be set to detonate in omnidirectional blasts rather than shaped ones, often at a much higher yield, useful for intercepting enemy missiles. Modern warhead yields are typically measured in hundreds of megatons of TNT for shaped blasts, and terminal velocities generally approach 0.3c. Due to the effectiveness of point defenses, most missiles are expected to be intercepted. Against a peer combatant, perhaps one in ten missiles are expected to actually deliver any energy to the target.

Railguns

Modern railguns use warp fields to accelerate projectiles rather than electromagnetism, but are otherwise fairly similar in function to a traditional railgun. Due to the extreme ranges involved, all modern railgun projectiles are guided, with small internal plasma capacitors and simple plasma-vent thrusters to bring them onto their target. Compared to missiles, railguns have less effective range and much worse guidance, but are much harder to intercept due to their lack of distortion drive and small size. A railgun shot retains its velocity over any range, but their finite delta-v gives them a maximum practical range against a maneuvering target. Railguns generally function as a method of wearing down an enemy's shields as the distance closes, though some specialized combatants will attempt to hold a target at railgun range and snipe them to death. Most railguns fire inert slugs at speeds between 0.1 and 0.3c; projectile mass and rate of fire depends on the weapon design. Outside of point-blank range, most railgun shots are expected to miss, but with enough ordnance in the void, some hits are practically guaranteed.

C-Beams

While "c-beam" is a catch-all term used to refer to any relativistic beam weapon, in modern military usage it specifically refers to particle beams consisting of relativistic iron plasma with a practical range of a few light-seconds. Like railguns, c-beams do not have a hard limit on range, but eventually disperse into uselessness. In combat, beam emitters "weave" a lattice of beamfire around a target, expecting to only land glancing hits due to lightspeed lag and target evasion. To compensate, c-beams have tremendous power, with single emitters delivering megatons of firepower per second. At short range, the lack of lightspeed lag means that c-beams can deliver "drilling" hits, staying focused on the same point to overpenetrate a target.

Knives

A colloquial term for point-blank thaumaturgical weapons, knives use esoteric means to quickly remove a target from the battlefield, often ignoring physical constraints entirely. Knives are generally designed to allow a ship to win in the otherwise mutually-lethal world of point-blank combat. All knife weapons are entirely ineffective against shields, which break the thaumaturgical line-of-sight required to deliver their effects. Knife-weapons with ranges beyond fifty thousand kilometers are extremely rare, and ranges beyond half a light-second are unheard of.

• Molecular Disruptors: Disruptors fire a beam that severs atomic bonds. The beam is atomically thin, but punches through any matter in its path for its entire range. Emitters are typically swiveled during firing to "rake" targets, slicing them into multiple pieces. Favored knife weapon of the Orion Council, which famously deploys miniaturized (and highly volatile) versions with its elite shock troops.
• Aetheric Mortar: Charges and fires bolts of magical potential. They inflict relatively little damage to physical matter, but produce magical intensities sufficient to "white out" most complex information, including sapient life. Favored knife weapon of the Interspecies Confederacy.
• Shunt Emitter: A method of weaponizing a breach core, releasing a hyperspace tear as a twisting, flickering lance similar to a lightning bolt. Exposure to raw hyperspace is sufficient to obliterate most normal matter, and the release has the added advantage of causing significant sensor disruption. Solely used by the Interstellar Union.

Sensors

A warship carries enough sensory equipment to make an entire pre-FTL civilization jealous. Modern sensors are effectively ruggedized, combat-ready versions of astronomical devices, and are often part of a standardized package. Union ships in particular are very well-known for this— almost every hull uses the same baseline sensor arrays, with larger hulls simply mounting more and using software to produce synthetic apertures. Because larger sensors are more sensitive, larger ships are generally better at detecting things than smaller ships. Specialized scout ships often make significant sacrifices to their defenses and weapons in order to mount large fold-out arrays that allow them to compete with their larger brethren.

Electromagnetic Radiation

Light is perhaps the easiest emission to detect in space, and the most readily-understandable type of sensor. Most warships have powerful optical, infrared, and radio telescopes to use for passive sensing, and make use of radar and lidar for active sensing. EM sensors are used for everything, from general situational awareness to stargazing to target acquisition.

Neutrino Radiation

Neutrinos are somewhat more difficult to detect with traditional means than light is. Fortunately, some modifications to shield emitter control and feedback allows a ship's shields to detect abnormal neutrino impacts. Neutrinos are a natural byproduct of fusion; most ships have backup fusion reactors; detecting neutrinos is an obvious choice. Because the signal-to-noise ratio of neutrinos is extremely poor (space is full of neutrinos), neutrino detectors are unsuited for pinpointing targets, and are generally used to detect the presence and general bearing of a target instead.

Gravitics

Gravity sensors use advanced laser interferometry to detect changes to local spacetime. High-quality gravitics, like those on most warships, can accurately detect the presence of objects on the scale of tens of thousands of tons, and are especially good at detecting the signatures of distortion drives, AMP reactors, and active jump drives. While they are excellent at detecting the presence and strength of these signatures, they are generally quite poor at detecting distance and bearing, requiring EM sensors to actually identify and acquire targets.

Probes

Probes and sensor drones are an essential part of any fleet's sensor net. Most drones are intended to be disposable, and use the same plasma capacitor as a missile, giving them flight times measured in the tens of minutes. Gravitic and neutrino sensor packages are generally too bulky for these small frames, which limits them to EM wavelengths.

Next Time

That covers it for this week! Don't miss our next issue: Knives in the Void: Naval Doctrines of the Relin War!