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Mass Sensors

            Since detecting spatial curvature became important to drive physics of starships, sensing mass became one of the most important sensor types installed aboard spacecraft. Every ship capable of using spatial distortion for propulsion is fitted with powerful mass, and spatial curvature sensors, which not only monitor the spatial environment around them but also detect the health of the drives they are using. Mass sensors become even more important when ships travel above the speed of light, where other forms of sensor would have problems picking out significant objects whose mass and therefore gravity could disrupt a starship’s drive, and also to prevent the partially blind spacecraft colliding with one of these objects.

            Mass sensors rely on a well-understood and important material, driver coil material (DCM), which is able to transmute gravity into other physical effects, usually electrical current. Mass sensors are in principle very simple devices, they consist of very accurately designed slabs of driver coil material, which around their edges are covered with instrumentation to pick up weak electrical potentials generated when the material is in the presence of a gravitational field. Driver coil material will generate a flow of electrons which flows in the same direction as the gravity from the object, the instrumentation just detects these small changes in potential difference.

            Every ship is installed with a few large mass sensors, which are orientated to allow accurate sensing of the surround environment. Sensors smaller than half a metre, are able to detect all the planets in a solar system as well as the sun, and give ideas of their relative size, and gravitational pull, also small sensors such as these provide accurate measurements of a gravitational field around an object. But increasing sensor size yields improvement of sensitivity, a half metre sensor may just detect the larger asteroids at great distance, but a sensor twice that size will be able to detect all the bodies in the solar system larger than a kilometer across, and locally detect objects that may only be a few metres across. Many starships have mass sensors installed that are much larger than these, and have correspondingly better accuracy.

            This simple static type of sensor can be improved simply by rotating it. When the sensor is stationary, the pull is felt only along one line of the sensor, when this sensor is rotated, the axis in which the pull is felt changes as the sensor moves. Instrumentation is better at detecting small objects when the sensor is treated in this manner, as even weak gravity sets up fluctuations in current that amplify its signal, and the faster this rotation the greater its effect.

            Generally ships will have specific sensors to operate in one of these two modes, static sensors are more useful for navigation, as true direction can be taken from them, acting more like a compass, where as rotating sensors are good for picking up smaller objects that are not big features of the system, these act more like radars scanning the space around the ship.

 
 

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