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@node "story_newdrives"
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Man is not alone in the universe, though it may seem so at times.  Long ago,
other races have plied the space of our galaxy, erecting their empires and
making many other achievements now lost in the dim reaches of time.  We do
not know what happened to them, or if they still survive elsewhere, as all
we can find of them now are some ancient ruins hinting at former greatness,
and some weird artifacts, some of which definitely prove that the greatness
mentioned was indeed awesome.  The latter includes several derelict ships,
with drives of a complexity far beyond what we can design ourselves, or in
fact even perceive clearly, as the design of these engines utilizes forces
acting in a plenum beyond four dimensions...  All we can do is to carefully
transfer the drive itself from the debris of the derelict ship and mount it
in a modern ship, thus giving it tremendous range with a low mass.

Fortunately these drives themselves are always intact, as their structure is
multi-dimensional, and thus immune to any damage from any forces originating
by normal four-dimensional action (such as normal material aging). It is less
fortunate that this also prevents us from analyzing the design, as it will
not interact in any meaningful way with our instruments...  Still, there is
a rumour that Imperial scientists have learned some of the secrets of how
to interact beyond four dimensions, and that this is how they succeeded in
designing the internal spacewarp for their new scoutships.  Even so, that
appears to be a very limited success, as they can't apply it to any larger
ships, or use it for new drive designs.  So for the present, we can only
reuse those ancient warp drives that we find, unable to design any new such.

To date we have found two different main types of warp drives, evidently due
to differing needs of local and remote trading and commerce in those ancient
cultures.

The local drive, now called 'GALACTIC drive' has the following data:
Hyperclass:     18              Mass:   25 tons
Price:          $4,500,000 (When available)

The remote drive, now called 'ALIEN drive' has the following data:
Hyperclass:     32              Mass:    4 tons
Price:         $18,000,000 (When available)

Occasionally you may find an advert on the Bulletin Board of a spaceport,
stating that such a drive is available.  Just contact the advertiser then,
and he will directly install the drive for you, provided you have room for
it, and enough money to pay for it.  The hyperfield of such a drive will
interact with that of any previous drive, throwing it into 'limbo', which
actually means that it disappears into some unknown dimension.  For this
reason you can even replace the drive of ships that normally don't allow
this, having integral drives.  But in any case you do not get any refund
for the old drive, so if you have a ship which allows normal removal of
the drive, then it is smarter to sell your drive to the shipyard before
contacting the advertiser to get a 'GALACTIC drive' or an 'ALIEN drive'.

The latter is a much more complex drive, folded through a much larger number
of dimensions, thus achieving the extremely low 3-dimensional mass.  It was
evidently very expensive and rare even in the ancient culture, as it is now
very rarely found, whereas the 'Galactic drive' is still found quite often.
(Relatively speaking of course.  You may still have to search for one...)

One theory states that the ancients did have a lot more of the 'Alien drive'
than apparent now, because these were used to flee this galaxy for another
when their empire was threatened by extinction during a coalescence of our
galaxy with Lundmarks Nebula, many billions of years ago.  Although that
sounds fantastic, it is clear that they could do so, by mounting the drives
on medium-sized or small ships, which could then reach the galaxy Andromeda.
As the coalescence itself endured for several hundred million years, it
is clear that they would have no real reason ever to return, as all that
their ancestors had left behind here would be destroyed or ruined by then
anyway.

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@endnode "story_newdrives"
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