Spaceflight

Traveling in Space: What it‘s Like

From the perspective of the typical traveler in space, there's not much to know or talk about. The CETIL Drive (see below) provides a constant thrust for as long as it's needed/desired, without any reaction-mass needed. That means that ships under power can maintain a constant acceleration for the majority of any given trip, and the longer the distance, the higher the top speed will be.

A typical trip will spend just under 50% of it's time accelerating towards the destination, then stop the drive, flip the ship around to point away from the destination, and turn the drive back on to decelerate until reaching it. As a result, from the start of the trip to the end of it, barring maybe an hour during turn-over, there is a constant "gravity." Ships are typically built to leverage this, with what is most easily described as a stack of decks, one on top of another, with an eye towards "up" being the direction opposite the direction of thrust — usually towards the front of the ship.

The CETIL technology can, theoretically, accelerate at any rate, but there is a weird practical limitation: At enough power to accelerate over 0.60235 Gs, something starts happening in the process. Vehicles that have exceeded that limitation have vanished or exploded (in a manner that's closer to a nuclear explosion than a chemical one, though even that is not a very accurate description — there was abnormal EM radiation, but not the same type that happens with a fission or fusion explosion).

The 0.6-odd-G limitation of CETIL drives also means that CETIL-only ships cannot make planetfall on Earth, though Luna, Mars, and all of the asteroids in the Belt have far lower gravity, allowing landings and take-offs without exceeding the "speed limit" of CETIL technology. Take-offs from and landings on Earth are still manageable, though, with a magnetic levitation system that is believed to be a spin-off of CETIL research and development. Those mag-lev systems require a substantial amount of power, even with the much more efficient EM-monopole systems that they use, and are not common on ships built in the Belt.

History

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The 21st Century

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When Earth Went Dark

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Spaceflight Now

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The Core Technologies

CETIL Drives

CETIL: Casimir Effect Tunneling-Inversion Laminae

Note: CETIL is typically pronounced "kettle," or sometimes "kuttle."

Exactly how CETIL drives work isn't well understood in the Belt. Enough is known about it to keep things running, and even to make new drive components when needed, but that's about it. The engineering-problem aspects of it are where real understanding of the technology typically stops, though.

The most compelling guesses, usually based on the name, are that the drive-nodes interact with the zero-point energy of quantum theory, to generate thrust by doing something ("inverting") the Casimir Effect, and/or the Quantum Tunneling effect. One thing that is known about it, though, is that it also acquires additional energy in the process, presumably though the zero-point energy interaction noted. For all practical purposes, once a CETIL node has gotten to its working state, it becomes a self-sustaining process, even with a bit of surplus energy that can be used to recharge the power-supply used to kick-start the process in the first place. All that it requires, really, is a sufficient electrical charge to get things going.

Electromagnetic Monopoles

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Small-Scale, High-Output Fusion

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Aspects and Troubles

[CETIL] Mysterious Inner Workings: If there's anyone in the Belt that actually understands how CETIL systems work, they're keeping really quiet about it.

[CETIL] Don't Go Over the Speed Limit (Trouble): CETIL drives that exceed an acceleration of 0.60235 gravities? Strange things happen to them. One blew up. Several have vanished (though one of those there was communications contact with for a few hours afterwards, before they went silent).