Stasis

One of the technologies gifted in the years following Earth’s incorporation into the federation was stasis field technology. Though humans have dabbled in temporal physics before joining the federation, the Panatrak and Trenoc had long ago perfected it to an art in itself. The most significant application was the invention of a stasis field.

The stasis field works in similar ways to the spatial propulsion systems, though rather than distorting space, the unit disrupts the other dimension of time. When a stasis unit is operating it generates a field which suppresses the passage of time, this means any object placed in the field will be held is stasis, and no time passes for it.

The unit uses a material similar to driver coil material (DCM) which converts the energy supplied by high energy plasma into the stasis distortion, however the need for this high energy feed restricts this technology to areas which have supply to high power sources. Though some mobile units have been developed which can generate stasis for short units of time when high-energy plasma is injected into a rservoir in the device.

The shapes the unit generates, and the efficiency of generating these fields, dictate the stasis units shape. It is best if the shield generating material surrounds the objects, this not only helps in generating the field but also prevents matter and light interacting with the field when it is set up, this means that the cabinet is thickly walled to accommodate the material and the shielding, and the doors equally thick, which seal to form direct contact with the other material segments. Also the generated fields tend to adopt spherical, or ellipsoid distortions, this is reflected by the shape of the cabinets that try to match this as closely as possible.

Generating large scale stable stasis fields has proven difficult as power consumption and field instability increases with field size, however a subsidiary application of this technology has been to incorporate these field generators into pre-existing propulsion systems, these units act to correct the slight distortions in time generated by asymmetric field propulsion systems, though the fields these units generate are large enough to encompass the ship, the extent to which these fields effect time is far lesser than a stasis units capability.

Stasis fields have been most extensively used in biological applications. In medicine a stasis field allows physicians to preserve tissue samples from the time they were taken from the patient, or to preserve critical patients while doctors ascertain their problem without losing the patient any of his time. The same technology is also used to store radioactive samples that are used in medicine, as decay of these specially prepared products is halted while in stasis. This technology is also used by biologists who can take samples and be sure that they will not have degraded by the time they get round to analysis.

There has also been a sort of ethical dilemma that has arose out of this technology, that is people can be kept in these devices for ever, giving them a degree of immortality. The federation does not in general allow the use of this technology for this purpose, as there are not enough units to provide a service to the whole population, and rather than allow a select few to use it, the technology is not used at all for this purpose.

But there are some people who spend extended time in stasis, the main of these tend to be colonists. It takes a lot of space and support function to sustain one person through a journey, unless exceptionally large ships were used to transport colonists there is no other way of carrying large numbers of people without loss of environmental quality on small ships, so stasis is used to transport people. People in stasis do not put stress on life systems, they do not take up as much room, and they wont get on the nerves of the crew.

Stasis also allows an exploratory ship to only use its on board biologists or chemists when it actually has something for them to work on, this avoids specialized crew members remaining idle for long periods of the mission.