Kevin's Watch

However, some of the gap drive's effects were more subtle. For example, it produced an insidious distortion in the perception of real space. The ability to travel imponderable distances almost instantly created the pervasive illusion that those distances were indeed effectively small.

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In real time, effective time, the light-years crossed by the gap drive didn't exist. A ship with a gap drive didn't travel those light-years: it bypassed them through dimensional translocation. But when the crossing was done, the ship returned to normal space - and normal space was so vast that its scale was not truly conceivable.

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In other words, the discovery of the Juanita Estevez Mass Transmission Field Generator had a transforming effect on humankind's relationship with vast distances - and no effect at all on humankind's place in normal space.

The dilemma of piracy was a case in point.

Why was piracy such a virulent problem? How had it attained such power in human space? Ships could cross the gap in a matter of instants. If a pirate raided, say, Terminus, the information could be transmitted to Earth by gap courier drone, and within hours UMCPHQ could send out a cruiser to support the station. How could any illegal flourish under these conditions?

Quite simply, piracy flourished because it took place in normal space. Like the UMCP, illegals often had gap ships. Nevertheless their every action took place in normal space. Gap ships could change the sector of space in which they acted with incredible ease; but the actions themselves still consumed real time and involved real distances. A UMCP cruiser might well chase the pirate vessel across the entire galaxy - and yet every effort the cruiser made to give battle occurred in normal space, where simply hunting through a solar system for telltale emissions was a job that might take months.

These hindrances were vastly increased by the fact that gap travel itself was not as precise as it appeared on paper. Both course and distance for any crossing were susceptible to several forms of inaccuracy. Minuscule fractions of a degree in course became hundreds of thousands of kilometres when those fractions were multiplied by light-years. And the calibration of distance was even more complex. The distance a ship travelled through the gap varied according to a number of factors, including speed, rate of acceleration, and the ratio between her mass and both the actual and potential power of her gap drive.

In addition the interaction of those elements was ruled by the gap drive's hysteresis transducer, which controlled the extent to which the drive's effect lagged behind its cause: too much lag, and the ship never went into tach; too little, and the ship never resumed tard. As a result, tiny fluctuations in power or hysteresis, or minute miscalculations of mass, became large shortfalls or overshots. Superhuman precision was required to make any ship resume tard right where her captain intended when he went into tach.

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Here again the sheer scale of space subtly undermined humankind's apparent mastery of inconceivable distances. Being a pirate was easier - and fighting piracy was harder - than most people understood.

Avatar wrote:Uh, he'd kill him?

--A

StevieG wrote:Nick reminded him that he was beaten?