The Crucible Universe is a place where the past and future collide, and where the boundaries of reality are pushed to their limits. A universe of adventure, intrigue, and the unknown.
Herein learn of its background and technology.
Scientists of the U.S. Naval Research Center experimenting with waves of gravity for submarine communications make contact with an alien species.
They receive basic guidance on using the technology for communications, infinite power and as an interstellar drive. Colonel Daniel Drake is assigned as project director to build the starship Argos.
Drake and his crew launch only to have a malfunction in which their ship disappears and they are blieved lost. However, their ship is drawn into the storms of Jupiter where a natural phenomenon projects them
back in time to a universe ninety-nine million years in the past where their ship crashes on a planet filled with dinosaurs.
Dr. Mark Nolen, son of the wavedrive inventor, has built a corporation on Jupiter's moon, Titan. In secret, they also build a starport on an Earth, sixty-five million years in the past.
From there, they intend to expand into the universe without restriction.
A hurried flight, fleeing on a starship to new friends in an ancient world, a young girl discovers she has a talent to manipulate this new science that appears to be more magic than technology.
A new ship, a new design, and an old merchant captain who finds himself in a new war ... with his own motherland.
Nations of Earth are dominated by two superpowers, the North American Union (NAU) and the China Trans-Asia Coalition (CTAC).
The NAU has established colonies they have named Jasper and Kraken. All are involved in a war, confined by treaty to off-earth conflicts.
However, the colonists of Kraken are caught in the middle and will not survive unless they learn to defend themselves. Their first Warbird is a converted merchant starship sent out to defend the colony on the treacherous gravitic ether of the universe with Captain Jankin Decatur at the helm.
War lingers on. Kraken citizens are split in their loyalty. Hostile acts against the colony by a desperate motherland are rising.
Jankin Decatur takes a desperate mission of peace to Earth to appeal to the NAU Senate on what may be their final hope for survival.
Come the years just prior to 2032 CE, using Earth’s ancient Gregorian Calendar, it became common knowledge that every element of the universe was composed of atoms which themselves were constructed of tiny particles called electrons, neutrons, and protons. However, in that year, Phillip Nolen revealed the existence of an even smaller sub-electron particle called the graviton; the fundamental building block of the universe. The discovery of the quantum gravity particle ushered in humanity’s second golden age of expansion and our entry into galactic society.
Similar to the great release of energy and neutron or proton particles observed when an atom is riven, the split-electron releases tremendous energy and particles we now call ‘Gravitons’. Graviton particles are quantum packets of gravity which, similar to photons, conform to the wave-particle duality concept of quantum mechanics.
Often likened to electrons that physically move opposite the flow of electricity, gravitons fly out from their source even as gravity’s flow pulls any mass inward. Although gravity ripples through the fabric of the universe at the speed of light, free graviton particles pulse out at supralight velocities. The discovery of this strange minutia, this graviton particle, made possible the development of today’s superluminal slipdrive engine as well as localized gravity control and many other applications we now take for granted.
The slipdrive field of a starship saturates the vessel, penetrating every atom and electron of every element within its field to excite sub-electron graviton particles to higher energy states, allowing them to link to the huge graviton waves of the universe. The greater the phase-aligned linkage to the wave, the faster the energized graviton particles which compose vessel, cargo, and crew travel. Every slipdrive has two field components, a link-drive that binds the electron’s high energy gravitons to the quantum gravity particles of the universe and a more difficult to tune and maintain external repellant field, called the ‘spindizzy’, used to accelerate matter from the path ahead -- a critical component even in deep space where a mass plunging at many times lightspeed suddenly discovers the universe ahead is not as empty as once thought and encountering even a pin-size particle can be deadly.
The name ‘spindizzy’ derives from the external field’s designed function of throwing anything out of the ship’s path as encountered on a molecule-by-molecule basis. This field will entrap and hold anything lying flush on the skin of the ship at slipdrive initiation. Problems occur when any free-floating or unsecured, elongated object is present at field initiation since these objects tend to remain as parasites in the field, draining energy as they spin because of the attempted ejection of one end of the object nearest the outer edge of the field even as the opposite edge is drawn to the ship’s surface. Particles excited by a slipdrive field are immune to barriers postulated in classic Einsteinian relativity, allowing vessel and contents to race far above lightspeed-limiting changes of mass-expansion and momentum just as raw gravitons themselves inherently travel far in excess of lightspeed.
A slipdrive ship rides the crest of a long-wave in deep space between the stars or glides across its face to slow, shift to another wave, or simply tack or warp out to a different course. Every atom within a slipdrive field is linked to the wave whether the particle is part of a solid, gas, or biological molecule. This feature allows instant changes, or even reversals of direction at any speed to occur with no perceived change in motion or momentum and therefore no experience of matter-damaging acceleration. Slipdrive technology thus gave to humanity the fabled reactionless drive since subparticles of all electrons within the drive-field become a part of the graviton wave flow rather than being physically pushed forward by crude reaction thrust.
So, only a few hundred years beyond the age of wind and sail, human transportation once again finds itself subject to the whims of wind and wave but, rather than those of an ocean, today’s vessels sail from star-to-star on great cosmic waves of gravitons.
You may wish to recall that all objects, down to the smallest particles in our universe, are a source of gravitic waves. Wave-strength varies in proportion to an object’s mass, no matter how huge or ever so minute the body might be. As a result, travel within the planetary confines of a star system involves passing through a volume of space filled with a rough chop as the surging waves of the star’s gravity well collide with those originating in other sources of high mass, such as nearby planets.
However, the mass of a physical object is not the sole criterion for a great wave.
Gravitonic waves also depend upon an object’s density. For example, a microscopic black hole radiates massive waves to distant regions of the cosmos. Expanses of dark-matter lay in the deadly gas-filled nurseries of stars called nebulae, emitting great waves capable of rolling across parsecs of space. ‘Cosmic strings’ create even deadlier threats emanating from these massively dense creases in the dimensional fabric of the universe. Never thicker than two sub-atomic protons, these strings extend across parsecs of space as a focused, directional current of huge pulsed waves.
Today’s starships hold many similarities to the ancient wind-powered navies of our ancestral world and we now voyage between the stars with the same relative ease our forefathers first ventured across their planet’s oceans.
Perhaps the most intelligent AI weaponry of the colonials, Crest Runners link to a gravitic wave’s crest, skipping from wave-to-wave for a bit, jigging to change their direction of attack before coming around to another tack to complicate enemy tracking even as they are accelerating. Crest Runners are designed for use as a first strike capability and work in unison, as they must in order to defeat a spindizzy field.
A spindizzy shield is strongest at the leading-edge of a ship, which could be at any point on a slipdrive ship that happens to be normal to their instant directional velocity vector. This is often called the ‘bow’, similar to the physical bow of a wet-navy ship. Similarly they also sport a ‘stern’ of aft segment but keep in mind there is no fixed physical part for either on a slipdrive since this class of ship can move in any direction and change it at any instant without the ill-effects of momentum.
Crest Runners are fired in muli-missile pods. As they approach their objective, each determines their probability of completing a successful attack based on multiple parameters including their position relative to the objective. The missile with the greatest potential for a successful attack, fires sabot-enhanced railgun slugs, optimally from astern the target.
Spindizzy fields are designed to deflect oncoming flotsam ranging in size from micrometeoroids to even large objects by molecular disassembly of the object. The field works less efficiently for impacts to the ship’s ‘side’ and is weakest at its stern.
A Crest Runner under sail has excited-electron gravitic mass so it is not subject to Einstein relativity effects but the sabot slugs it fires quickly revert to simple objects subject to a relativistic-mass increase when moving at a significant fraction of lightspeed. The slug is released while traveling near or even above lightspeed so, as soon as they exit the missile’s gravitic field, their relativistic mass balloons to near infinity. Thus, we weaponize the classic speed-of-light barrier for a rail-gun slug’s striking force is proportional to the slug’s mass multiplied by its acceleration relative to the target.
The railgun sabots are fired at grazing incidence to the target’s spindizzy barrier which immediately attempts to reverse the intruder’s direction and push them aside and astern. However, during an attack the target’s spindizzy field now is faced with an extremely difficult task since the sabot’s mass is tremendous and they come from astern rather than bow-on, the field must therefore attempt to reverse the full mass of the sabot’s velocity vector.
A Crest Runner attack has a high probability of destabilizing the target’s spindizzy shield so that subsequent torpedo releases can survive to complete a penetration that results in a graviton energy release and destruction of the objective. At worst, they weaken the target’s defenses providing an opportunity for a well-timed attack by other munitions.
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The greatest problem in starship warbird conflict is to penetrate the ship’s spindizzy field, the energy barrier designed to move all molecules of matter out of the path of a warbird traveling at supralight speeds.
The preferred method is to sacrifice one torpedo if it can be maneuvered to strike aft of the target, striking in the objective’s direction of travel where the field is weakest.
During a normal attack, a gravity-driven Graviton torpedo approaches the edge of the target’s spindizzy field. At the first detection of a nearby target’s field, it fires a blast of heavy-metal chafe enveloping a central sabot. The chafe locally weakens the target’s field and, before the sabot-charge can be attacked. The charge ignites using an internal atomic reaction to generate a small circularly polarized magnetic field. If the sabot has penetrated far enough, then its explosion creates a second gravitic field that reacts with the target and forms a gravitic sub-electron reaction within the objective resulting in a massive, explosive conversion of all matter in the target to energy.
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Acronym for ‘High Altitude Atmospheric Crest Holography’. Adaptive Active Optics technology providing detailed remote imaging for viewing any point on any planet supporting an atmosphere using reconstructive imaging of airwave aberrations to recreate photon ray traces. The ray traces are used to reconstruct high-resolution multidimensional holographic images of the planet below.
This technology will also function at a water-atmosphere interface for imaging of sea-bed details.
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A small patch, thinner than a piece of paper with the diameter of a piece of chalk, designed to rest on the skin just above the human mastoid, the bone located behind the ear. Upon installation, thin monomer tendrils are released. Like living things, the tendrils grow into the pores of the subject’s skin, passing inward to pierce the subcutaneous and penetrate to the base of the brain. There they sample from every nerve synapse firing, pulling in the energy needed to run the miraculous organic circuitry of the HiveTab.
Twenty-four hours a day, the patch monitors body functions, and brain-nerve synchronization. It contains an internal clock synchronized to the stable shifts of cosmic dark-matter frequency slides. It also accepts external data from gravitonic emissions, physical contact with external stimuli, and the emanations of other nearby human hosts. In operation, the patch provides both interface and leading-edge technology for enhanced processing, data storage, rendering and transmission of information as well as other, more mundane functions.
The patch is not a computer, it’s a human augmentation that learns from its host over time, essentially becoming a part of the host.
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Each sub-microscopic, molecule-sized HCD is an autonomous construct that uses active molecular programmed components smaller than the wavelength of a blue photon to create a weapon of war able to think and react to counter threats.
HCD interiors churn with constrained gravitic energy controlled by cognitive programmed molecules residing across neural bubble-nerve bundles to link and form a single, newly awakened hive-mind with one goal in its short lifetime, the unleashing of the tremendous gravitonic energies stored in the cumulation of its electron sub-particle bonds.
The drone entity is capable of projecting a pattern-sensitive field ahead of it that can extend nearly a tenth of the distance from the Earth to the Sun as it searches for its quarry or for the familiar encounter with the sensor field of a sister drone. Each contact linking to another drone allows it to expand its hive consciousness and computational powers both in strength and in breadth to a swarm maximum that can extend across nearly a light-minute of space.
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Programmed NanoBot molecules (HiveBots) designed to communicate and function autonomously or within a swarm. Each HiveBot component is roughly the diameter of a rare-earth molecule. They link together forming nebulous particle clouds but can remain constrained as tightly packed swarms, essentially an intelligent cloud deployed into a volume of space as anti-shipping munitions. They react to any matter within a designated proximity or to the presence of an external gravitic field causing them to track the target and, upon contact, explode into life. As the swarm density grows, the intelligence and capability of the hive increases.
Hive Mines penetrate a gravitic field by overloading it locally. If they can reach beneath the external spindizzy barrier and into the excited subelectron particle region of a slipdrive starship, they begin disassembly of the matter, instantly reprogramming the released molecules of the matter to create additional HiveBots. A successful attack will eventually cause the release of all the gravitic energy of the molecule’s activated electrons resulting in a huge energy release.
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Light armament for sidearms and shoulder-weapons including both slug and needle gun adaptations using caseless ammunition. Larger munitions are also constructed for action against planetary emplacements and targets unprotected by slipdrives.
A small gravitic reaction is created inside a shielded chamber. Munition base material of any format -- metal, silicon, even heavy elements -- is stored as a solid bar or compressed powder in a clip-holder. As the field gravitic field rotates, it shaves atoms off the top of the bar. The bare atoms form a super-heated plasma that is spun and formed into a hollow or solid projectile, depending upon device settings, by the accelerant field and exits the weapon at supersonic speeds while still a spinning plasma. The plasma instantly solidifies into a ‘dumb’ slug traveling at multiple times the speed of sound with spin stability given to it by the rotating magnetic field, it delivers a heavy punch equivalent to having a hand-held Railgun.
The Pulsar’s accelerator is a closed system. The pulses are shielded and won’t interact with a drive field the tuning of the receiver’s magnetic bottle is intact.
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Graviton particles were first theorized in a paper from Stephen Poliakov in 2002C.E. Doctor Francis Nolen initially used controlled magnetostriction of materials to both induce and detect very high-frequency sideband modulation in the extremely long waves of gravity as a communications device. The field concepts evolved to other applications including a superluminal drive capable of linking to the gravitational waves of the universe, called the Wave Drive.
The Slipdrive, a second generation improvement, was invented roughly fifty years later.
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Vehicles designed for stealth atmospheric entry facilitated by a small, limited function wavedrive module providing enough power to reach ahead
of the warrior as they pierce the atmosphere by pushing aside gas molecules forward of their path. Since the molecules are accelerated to the side only a short distance,
rather than pushed ahead and creating a bow-wave that would compress the atmosphere to form a shock wave, entry is silent and without frictional buildup.
Their descent is unpowered and without the resistance of atmospheric drag, allowing the combatant to accelerate groundward unhindered and in stealth at speeds far
exceeding terminal velocity.
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Troop vernacular for Ship-to-ship boarding vehicles. Each one a small, cylindrical rack-like delivery cage shaped a bit like an elongated rifle slug,
little more than a central tube with cradles welded to it. The cylinder will support a combination of up to four warriors, robot drones, or man-portable heavy equipment
packages lying parallel to its long axis.
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An old but reliable favorite because of their compact design and minimal maintenance requirement. Kraken designs appear in both long and short banister installations with the shorter rails used for more rapid, close-quarters work. They fire an enhanced depleted ‘uranium’ sabot that is easily manufactured on ship as needed by molecular modification of any of the Actinide elemental waste products found in Fermi Class vessels. Being program enhanced, the sabots can perform minor course deviations using limited but effective molecular programming.
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Individuals drones used by CTAC forces composed of an exterior ablating ceramasteel crystal rod about the thickness of a straw and a finger in length, encapsulating a depleted uranium needle sabot.
A WAIED attacks a starship by driving into it like a missile. Their outer shell resists molecular disassembly by a ship’s gravitic shield and, although it cannot prevent the field from ripping it apart molecule-by-molecule, the destruction is slowed by the drone’s super-dense crystalline lattice. As its skin ablates molecule-by-molecule, the drone’s core continues its penetration deep into the victim ship’s slipdrive spindizzy region.
Upon contact with the vessel’s outer skin, the ultra-dense uranium needle, or sabot, fires. Piercing inward through the ship’s multiple outer shells until it explodes into life inside. The resulting hole is tiny, barely the width of a human hair, but through it the energy from the target’s own protective slipdrive exterior field now had a channel into the interior. This force, turned inward against itself, spreads through the target’s innards by ripping apart the already energized electron shells that make up ship, crew, and cargo until the entire vessel disintegrates into a highly energized subparticle mist. Full conversion takes less than a femtosecond, that is, one quadrillionth of a second. The amount of time it takes light to travel thirty centimeters in the open vacuum of space.
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