Jump Drives

In the regular BT fiction and setting there are three types of KF drives.

The first we were introduced to was the Jumpship, a paired down drive that ate up 95% of a Jumpship's mass.

However the first to be invented was the compact core, eating up only 45.25% of a ship's mass, leaving room for cavernous cargo bays, transit drives, crew quarters, armor and weaponry.

The last type is the subcompact core which weighs 50% of a ships mass and is far far more expensive then a normal drive (16x) and it can't have any docking collars. The only advantage is that it can be built small.

Of course all of the drives can jump 30ly and they can all be supplemented by a single lithium fusion battery which allows for a second immediate jump, without having to first spend a week recharging the KF Core. Of course then the ship must rechage both the battery and core, usually sequentially, but concurrently is possible using the fusion charging rules, so at a cost of fuel.

However the Jihad introduced a permutation to the equation, the super jump, which works for any lithium fusion equipped vessel. By bypassing all rational safety equipment, the ship jumps while jumping, the range is technically unlimited, but practically limited to around 900 LY. The Jihad Hot Spot 3076 implies that it is an accuracy issue, so jumping 15,000 ly away and then slow boating to the nearest star may be an option. Especially if targeting denser clusters of stars.

There are two other drives available to chose from, Interstellar Players had the reusable super jump drive, with a 120 ly range, but it was only available on a Jumpship, and it was stuck with a drive mass increase to 96.9 percent of the ships mass, meaning that a Lithium fusion battery version would be impossible. And the drive could suffer damage after every jump and to throw napalm into the wound the would risk damage when making a sub 30ly jump. So even when behaving like a normal Jumpship it was just as frail when making a super jump.

The last drive is the colony drive, little is known about it other then the fact that it could only make 12ly jumps. I would suppose that it was not compatible with docking collars and lithium fusion batteries and that it took up more mass then a conventional compact core. But I would give it one advantage, I would make it take half the time to charge.

There is one more drive, but it's details are a mystery, it is called the Manassas drive, named after the Aegis Class Cruiser that was lost in time after a failed jump. It was also rumoured to have an expanded jump range, it could have been 40ly, with no side effects, or 120ly like the safe super drive or just a regular one shot no safety features KF LiFi drive combo that the WoB stumbled over. Or it could have been more or less then those things.

What is important to note is that by 3345 KF technology has been perfected in many ways. A super jump diode network has been developed allowing ships to save their KF drives when making a super jump (LiFi Battery is still fried) a micro jump controller has been developed that allows a ship to jump within a solar system (3ly) while only using 10-60% of the stored drive charge and a time skip technology has been developed because of the Manassas drive.

Another improvement is the reintroduction in the colony drive, for 50% of the ships mass, and jumping at twice the rate. Also the micro jump controller is included in the drive's weight and it only consumes a third of the drives charge when jumping, instead of the variable rate from more conventional drives.

A final improvement is in the subcompact core technology, even though it is limited to 50,000 tons in mass it can now be installed in pretty much any type of vessel to a minimum of 200 tons. Meaning jump capable small craft exist. And they have been known to use all types of advanced KF drive technology.

Up next, the HPG hyper-grid.