Wormhole

Wormholes in the Celestial Lance Universe are used as a method of interstellar and intergalactic travel. Starkind are the only species known to have the ability to transit without a jump drive. Prior to the invention of the Kovel jump drive, the Halfen stardrive was the most common method for starfaring species (other than the Starkind) to transit wormholes.

More than 65 percent of explored star systems have wormholes. Most of those have two, with a smaller percentage having only a single wormhole. Less than one percent of explored star systems have more than two wormholes. Wormhole "lines" with regular passenger and cargo service have been created along heavily-traveled routes.

History

The Deci-Hertz Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (DECIGO) was launched in 2031, four years after its proposed launch date. While not specifically designed to detect wormholes, it detected the five wormholes in the Sol system within its first 15 years in operation. It wasn't until 2116, when first contact was made with the Starkind, that humans learned exactly what the wormholes were.

Appearance and naming

Wormholes are almost invisible to the naked eye, appearing as almost-transparent rippling spheres (in visible light) that release gravitational waves in pulses. They most often (99.999 percent of the time) appear to sensors as wrinkled distortions several thousand kilometers (usually within about 30,000km) above one of the magnetic poles of the system's star. In very rare instances, they may appear above one of the magnetic poles of gas and ice giants, stars. Even more rarely, they may appear within the Kuiper belt or Oort cloud of a star system. The formation and location of Kuiper and Oort wormholes is still a mystery, and there has been no detectable pattern in nearly 2000 years of research outside of them usually forming near dwarf planets. There is some speculation that such wormholes were artificially created.

The pulse frequency created by the gravitational distortion varies from wormhole to wormhole, giving each wormhole in a specific system a "signature" that can be used to detect it. These signatures have proven to be stable since being discovered. Wormholes vary in diameter from about 600m to nearly 5km, and the size tends to be stable.

Most star systems that have wormholes (about 85%) have only two. About 15 percent have a single wormhole, and the remaining less-than-one percent have more than two. Wormholes are almost always found within 1000 kilometers of each other in any given system, regardless of the number of wormholes in the system.

Wormholes within each system are numbered, usually in the order in which they are discovered. For example, if you are in the Sol system, the "Sol → Barnard's Star wormhole" is wormhole #2, and is referenced as "Sol (2)".

Appearance during transit

When a starship transits a wormhole, there is a brief (1-2 seconds) burst of X-rays on the exit end, along with a rainbow shimmering of energy on the hull of the starship. This shimmering looks like a film of iridescent water running across the hull in cascading sheets. After about 20-30 seconds, the energy dissipates. On the entrance side, there is no significant energy release (nothing detectable from farther away than 1-2km).

Transit

Starkind can travel through wormholes without the aid of a jump drive by making a connection with an anchor point on the far side of the wormhole. All other known races require a ship with a jump drive to safely transit. The Kovel jump drive, or variants of it, is used by most races. It uses the same anchor points as starkind to pull, or "slingshot", the ship through the wormhole to the far side. The calculations generally take a minute or two for established wormholes and are based on jump data stored at each wormhole station.

Each wormhole has a "station" which stores phase rate information for the anchor points, other information about that wormhole, and information about other stations in the network. Each time a ship arrives or departs, the hump engine and the station exchange wormhole jump information in order to keep updated. Tampering with this information is an extremely serious crime in all societies that use the wormhole network, with penalties up to death in some polities.

Since the implementation of the Kovel jump drive, travel through the wormhole takes about 1 nanosecond (one billionth of a second, or 0.000000001 second) for each approximate light year traveled (it varies slightly from 0.89 to 1.21 nanoseconds) between the physical locations of the wormholes in real space. This means most jumps are, for all practical purposes, instantaneous. Prior to the Kovel drive, jumps could last several seconds to a little over a minute, which caused enormous stress on those traveling, resulting in nausea (severity varies greatly, similar to motion sickness), disorientation, and—in very rare cases—death (less than one percent of one percent).

Newly-discovered wormholes

It can take several days to gather enough data for a safe manned jump through a newly discovered wormhole as probing the wormhole is a slow process. The first few jumps through a newly discovered are almost always made using unmanned probes, which then gather data from the other side and bring it back to aid the manned ships in making the new jumps. In addition to probing area surrounding the far side of a new wormhole, these probes also make a preliminary scan of the star system while traveling at about 0.7 light speed.

Wormhole stations

Most wormholes have a space station located nearby. This station handles and schedules traffic through the wormhole. It also stores wormhole jump data that is automatically uploaded to the station from each inbound ship. This data is then collated and uploaded to any outbound ship to allow them to more quickly make the calculations for the jump.

Wormhole lines

Many wormholes along heavily-traveled routes are grouped into "lines" similar to train lines, and there are a variety of cargo and passenger ships that provide regular service along these lines. Each "station" consists of (usually) two wormholes separated by at least several hundred kilometers. In the case of terminal (or dead-end) wormholes (wormholes that go to a system with no other wormholes), the "station" consists of only that single wormhole.

Superhub

A star system with three or more wormholes is considered a superhub (see here). These are uncommon, though not entirely rare. It is unknown why some systems have more than the standard one or two wormholes.

Blocks

The only known case of a wormhole block (up to that point) was the discovery of the Saak 8wb → Hemelein Prime 6wa wormhole on 26 May 3947. It is unknown how or why the wormhole was blocked, or why it suddenly stopped being blocked sometime prior to 17 August 4127. It is speculated that the Renn possessed the technology to perform the blocks.

Questions needing answers

• Come up with some specific cases where wormholes failed, and whether they fail on both ends simultaneously, or if one end fails and the other end (sometimes) creates a new exit/entrance somewhere else.
• Come up with a reason and method for how a wormhole can be blocked.

External links

• Wormhole on Wikipedia
• DECIGO on Wikipedia
• 100,000 Starson Chrome Experiments