Gravity Seeds

The starships of knownspace fly on conquered gravity.

By focusing a gravity field on a known strand, and intensifying it to break open the hyperspatial tunnel to the core that it describes, a starship can 'slip the strand' and ride the string. Riding up is possible, but is more difficult than riding down. Once inside a strand, all things outside are immaterial to the riding ship. Another ship riding the same strand, however, is not immaterial and no more than one ship can exist at a given point on a strand at a time. All that is necessary to exit is to deactivate the ship's gravity field. The strand will immediately eject the ship, contents and all, back into realspace.

Now for the weird part. All these gravitic field generators come from somewhere. When a strand passes through a body, say a planet or a moon or a star, a ship equipped with a harvester can capture the gravity field generated by that body and strip it away. The engine of every starship is built around a stolen gravity field.

The effect of removing the gravity field from a planet or a star is devastating. Planets spin apart into debris fields thousands of leagues wide. Stars wink out and puff into nebulae or explode with more force than a dozen supernovas.

Gravity based technology influences everything in knownspace from personal weaponry to ship drives to ship weapons and defenses. A tiny, focused, gravity field can hold plasma in a bullet until it is fired. Larger fields aboard starships can capture energy from weapons and funnel it to power the ship, and a focused field can punch through defensive armor with punishing results.

other technology