AN: You can find 14 Advanced Chapters on my Patreon
https://www.patreon.com/cw/Crimson_Reapr
---
Once Mark had reached a level of familiarity with power systems that satisfied Anahrin's expectations, they moved on from it. If power were the heart of a ship, then its propulsion systems were its legs, which could either carry you through the void or leave you stranded in oblivion. Mark found himself strapped into a gauntlet of lessons, simulations, and Anahrin's relentless tests.
"Understand this, Mark," Anahrin began one morning as the hum of the holo-projectors kicked on, "without power, you are a corpse in the void. Without propulsion, you are a corpse that drifts in the void. And to us ship engineers, drifting is just another word for dead."
The hologram snapped into existence with the image of a cross-section of a ship, its drives flaring like miniature suns at the aft. Anahrin handed Mark a wrapped bar of what Mark had taken to call "The Neuro-Fuel bar." It was a bar composed of nutrients, proteins, and carbohydrates, all crushed into a paste that would then be hardened and compacted into a bar with the pleasant taste of white chocolate. It held the perfect mixture of what a Strathari would need to get them through a month of intense physical and mental work... However, the constant strain on Mark's mind, along with his not-so-optimized physique, ensured that its effects only lasted a week. Mark chewed the bar, savoring the taste of white chocolate as if he'd never tasted it in his life.
"I'll tell you what, they sure as hell nailed the taste," Mark said in between bites. "Every single time I eat it, it's as if I'm eating white chocolate for the first time all over again."
"That was the purpose," Anahrin responded. "Early variants had their consumers growing tired of the taste rather quickly. But through trial and error, they managed to create the perfect mix that sends a certain signal to your brain that makes it feel as if it is the first time you're trying it. Quite the marvelous invention, especially for those who sail through the stars for weeks or months on end."
Anahrin let Mark finish his bar before formally starting their lesson. "Now that you're done, we can finally start with the second most important part of a ship. A ship's Propulsion Systems. The current titan of interstellar travel is the Jump Drive. To humanity, FTL engines are far too inefficient, while Warp drives are still on the theoretical part of things, though I have learned that Stellar Dynamics has a dreadnaught shelved with a pair of Warp Drives they are trying to study and possibly replicate. According to the reports marked as 'need-to-know only', the drives were salvaged from the remains of a Vulpinian Destroyer. They are unsure of what caused the vessel's destruction, but the destroyer had severe damage, as if it had been ambushed in battle. It is a marvel of science that its drives were still salvageable. Oh, I'm getting sidetracked. Now, where was I?"
"Warp Drives," Mark answered.
Anahrin nodded his head as he continued the lecture. "Right, Warp drives. As I was saying, Warp drives, FTL engines, and Jump drives are pretty much all the same thing, just wearing a different name across civilizations, each dressed in the cloak of their creator's pride with varying results. I know I just said that they are pretty much the same thing, but they aren't, nor do any of them work in the same way. However, the principle is the same: bending, breaking, or outright ignoring the rules of space to get where you wish to be faster than the speed of light would allow."
Anahrin pointed to a series of glowing engine cores in the projection. "FTL engines were what opened up FTL travel to Humans. The ability to travel at FTL speeds was opened to humans thanks to a group of quite ambitious scientists and engineers from humanity's cradle, Terra. The invention of FTL engines was most notably led by Jean Maçon during humanity's expansionist period, back when it was all one united front. However, FTL engines quickly went out of fashion when the engineer Mathis Meier and his wife, Dr. Frieda Kron, made an accidental discovery while messing around with the bare components of an FTL engine, sending a wrench a whole system over and annihilating a fifth of an uninhabited planet. After its discovery, they went down the rabbit hole they had just opened up, eventually finding themselves with the creation of Jump Drives. They were so much more efficient than FTL engines that to this day, they are the current bread-and-butter of human travel. Considering your military background, you understand them well enough... Correct?"
Mark nodded while answering Anahrin's rhetorical question. "Yup, I sure do-"
Anahrin didn't waste any time interrupting him. "Wrong. You know them as a captain and a pilot. Not as an engineer."
The hologram split into two. On the left, a freighter building speed on its conventional engines; on the right, a cruiser flaring violet as its Jump Drive spooled.
"Though you no longer use them, I believe it would be good for your learning to break down FTL engines first," Anahrin continued. "Before it was fully replaced by the Jump Drive, FTL engines had come to be known as the straight-line sloggers, being used to travel for long stretches of space. However, that was also a limitation. Only being able to engage FTL in open stretches of space with nothing in front meant that they could barely be used, especially to run from a battle. It was required for a ship to first accelerate on its sublight engines to a sufficient speed before the FTL engines could bend the corridor ahead."
"But if you weren't moving fast enough, the corridor wouldn't form, and if you activated them while going too slow, then the drive would tear itself apart trying to form a corridor. All in all, it was too sloppy. Your chances of accidentally smearing your vessel across the vastness of space were far higher than successfully escaping a fight, something that became apparent as pirate activity surged and the range of weapons, especially those of railguns, increased by leaps and bounds. It was determined that trying to activate their FTL engines without the required speed or while being in one of the declared FTL lanes wasn't just unsafe, it was suicidal. You spool them up while stationary, and you become a line of shredded mess floating in the same position your ship once held. You spool them up without being in one of the lanes, you run the risk of smearing your vessel across various light seconds after slamming into an asteroid you never knew was there."
Mark gave a small grunt of agreement, memories of the history classes he had taken bubbling up to the top of his mind, amongst them the history of space travel and the modes of space travel, finalizing on why the Jump Drives had become the standard.
"Precisely so," Anahrin said, noting Mark's understanding. "It was determined that it would be safer to force people to crawl through the cosmos at sublight engines only rather than giving them the option to accidentally commit suicide and take a whole planet with them. FTL Engines were a good idea, an introduction to FTL travel in general. The requirements for it are just too limiting. Rather, just go to a Jump Point and activate the jump drives, covering a wider distance in a much shorter time frame. FTL engines were predictable and glacially slow compared to their replacement. The numbers back it up as well. Every 10 minutes of jump-time is equivalent to twelve hours by FTL Engines."
Anahrin moved his hands, causing the holographic projection of the vessel to shift and zoom in again, this time zooming in on the rear of a ship's hull. "Which brings us here, to the true workhorses of each and every vessel: Sublight engines. In truth, the engines are the muscles of a ship. Jump drives may allow you to travel over long distances of space, to stride over its vastness, but it is your sublight that carries every ounce of the ship for every second you are traveling through actual space. From maneuvering to acceleration and thrust in the void, sublight engines are the ones doing the heavy lifting. And of course, as you may know, they are not all built equal, both due to their classifications and who their manufacturer is."
Eight Engine schematics with multiple variants unfurled before Mark, arranged neatly in ascending rows.
"These are the engine classifications I found while digging into humanity's web. It seems like there are 3 big players in the field, Stellar Dynamics (SD), Spatial Propulsionary Solutions (SPS), and Solara Frontiers (SF). Stellar Dynamics and Spatial Propulsionary Solutions own the vast majority of the market, with Solara Frontiers just starting to scrape at their hold. Within all these variants of engines, you have the Classes 1 through 4, engines that are usually reserved for the civilian populace. They're used in anything from transports, freighters, colony vessels, and mining vessels."
"Class One's specifications mark them as the run-of-the-mill economy line engine: cheap, durable, and severely underpowered. Built only to push ore haulers between moons at a crawl. From what I was able to discern, these aren't really in use by humanity; they really went out of fashion about one hundred and twenty-seven years ago. Yet humanity keeps on producing them. A waste of material if you ask me. You'll be lucky to find them bolted onto mining barges where time is less important than fuel efficiency."
Anahrin manipulated the hologram to zoom to a bulky ore carrier, its engine exhaust a dim trickle.
"Moving on to Class 2 engines," Anahrin went on, "a more commonly used model throughout human-occupied space. These have been standardized due to their reliability and ease of repair. They'll get you where you're going in a reasonable timeframe, provided you don't need to outrun anyone, of course. They are most commonly found on passenger liners, trade freighters, and surprisingly, quite a number of corporate survey craft."
He then swiped at the air, causing the previous ship to disappear, replaced by a sleek liner, its engines burning steady blue.
"Class 3 starts pushing into performance territory. With a faster acceleration and a more responsive engine, however, it has quite the appetite for fuel. These can be typically found on luxury liners, corporations that transport high-value cargo that can't be late, a handful of smaller military vessels, and quite a number of smugglers use them because they shave days off a run."
Mark smirked faintly at that, remembering how he had once intercepted a smuggler's rust-bucket armed with Class Three engines that made no sense on paper.
"Class 4 engines," Anahrin continued smoothly, "are the upper ceiling for most civilian craft. These are made for the fast couriers, the patrol skiffs, the privateers who want speed without having the ability to step into what is considered military grade. A well-tuned Class Four engine can make a ship dance, but push them too hard, and you'll burn out the coils faster than you'd like."
The projection dimmed the civilian half and brightened the next four schematics with three variants from Stellar Dynamics, Spatial Propulsionary Solutions, and Solara Frontiers.
"Now, Classes 5 and 6 are transitional engines. In other words, hybrid engines. They're used by anyone from corporate security fleets, system defense craft, and high-priority government vessels. Along with Class 4 engines, these are a fan favourite amongst pirates and mercenaries who manage to get the money to purchase them. They are faster, more durable, and can hold sustained burns longer than any civilian-class engine. They're designed with redundancy in mind and are made to last. You knock out one coil, there's another waiting to fire up."
The image showed a compact corvette banking hard, its Class 6 engines flaring white.
"And then, of course, we have Classes 7 and 8. From my research, these are reserved for the military only. Both the CIV and the IUC use them on their Battleships, dreadnoughts, and carriers. They are monsters within their right. A Class 7 engine is built to push megaton hulls, trading agility for power and endurance, able to drive warships across a system without pause. Class 8 engines are essentially a bigger and more refined version of Class 7 engines. They are inefficient, temperamental, and cost quite a lot to maintain. However, considering the size of the ships they are equipped on, I must say, humanity has managed to impress me, just marginally though."
Anahrin let the projection of the dreadnought's Class Eight engines linger for a moment, their colossal exhausts painting the void in white fire. Then, with a flick of his hand, he dissolved the image into strands of numbers and heat signatures, efficiency charts, and fuel consumption graphs.
"Now here is the truth about all of these engines and their variants," Anahrin said, his voice edging on disdain. "None of these engines, not a single Class, not a single variant, not a single one is truly efficient. No matter who their designer or manufacturer is, the engines that humanity prides itself on and calls marvels of engineering are, in my eyes, nothing more than sluggish and bloated pieces of technology. The materials wasted on them? The fuel that is consumed by them? I've come to see that, unlike the Starthari, humanity tends to throw energy at the problem until it moves, and then they cheer as though they've conquered physics."
Anahrin swiped his hand, and Class One through Eight reappeared in sequence again, this time stripped bare into wireframes. "Take the dominant manufacturer for Class One engines to begin with, Solara Frontier. They're made with cheap alloys, inefficient heat sinks, and radiators that bleed more energy than they contain. Your typical mining barge spends a quarter of its fuel just fighting its own thermal buildup. And the fixes are so simple, too. It's amusing that they've never implemented them. Just swap in layered composites that channel heat through a superconductive lattice and you'd double the efficiency overnight, with no increase in mass or compromising the engine."
He shifted to Class Two and Three. "Now we look at the more popular seller for this class, Stellar Dynamics. Their civilian middle-tier engines waste thrust through poorly aligned nozzle arrays. They spew plasma like a drunk spilling wine, surely beautiful, yet quite inefficient. Refine the geometry, channel exhaust through adaptive magnetics, and you could squeeze thirty percent more thrust from the same burn. Thirty percent, Mark. That is weeks shaved off a long-haul."
Mark's brow furrowed as he thought to himself. 'Thirty percent more thrust at the same burn with such a simple fix? That would be a game changer for liners and trade.' He thought of the countless hours of dead drift, waiting for acceleration arcs to finish.
"Class Four," Anahrin pressed on, "burns bright, but the brighter they burn, the faster they burn out. The average problem with all variants of the Class 4 engines is the alloys. They crack under repeated stress because they were never meant to flex. All they have to do is build the drive bell with a composite layering that wants to bend, and all of a sudden, the durability problem is solved with a new durability measured in decades instead of months."
The hologram shifted again to the heavier engines. "Class 5 and 6… clever in design, redundant, but still bound by their waste. Their secondary coils bleed resonance into the hull, which probably explains why there are multiple reports of crews complaining of vibration on long burns. They only need to stabilize the frequency with harmonics tuned into the ship's frame itself, and they would not only solve the vibration problem, but they would also be reclaiming lost energy."
Anahrin let out a sigh as he looked Mark in the eye. "All of these fixes I'm suggesting for these handful of engines are top-of-the-head simple solutions. If I were to truly break these down, I assure you that I would be able to, at the very minimum, multiply their outputs, thrust, efficiency, and everything tenfold. But I'm not here to tell you what I could envision, what could be, what needs fixing. I'm here to teach you so that you are able to recognize these sorts of things, so that you may build better, so that you may innovate the already existing technology."
"Understand this, Mark," Anahrin said, his eyes narrowing. "Humanity has always chosen the easy road. They make engines that work, and that's great for the time being, but come on, what's the point of making something if you don't perfect it? They never make anything that excels, worshiping what is familiar, even when it drags them down. But with the knowledge I give you, you could build drives and engines that will make your fleets untouchable. Lightning fast where everyone else crawls, efficient where everyone starves. You could turn drifting hulks into agile hunters."
Mark's lips pulled into a thin smile as he nodded along. "You're saying that humanity got complacent with their accomplishments."
"No," Anahrin shook his head, correcting him. "I'm saying that humanity mistook mediocrity for mastery and therefore has started looking into disastrous avenues before they have mastered the easiest of them all, which is an oxymoron for you. Always chasing perfection, and yet, to think they achieved it within their first attempts, barely innovating on previous designs. It's as if they are purposely holding technology back, which I wouldn't put beyond your ruling corporations, squeezing all the juice out of one engine before introducing a new generation that creates a major leap between the previous one and the new one. But that is an issue for you to navigate once you return to civilization..."
"I must say that greed sure is the most detrimental factor to a civilization's advancement, while war tends to be quite beneficial..." Anahrin trailed off his words as he thought. "Most of the time, that is."
Mark spent the next few days familiarizing himself with ship engines, breaking them down, repairing them, and building them anew in virtual space. He saw what made them tick, what made them fire away, what made them fail, all the while Anahrin prepared his next lessons and gave Mark tasks and challenges with the engines.