Driver Coil Replacement

Though the operational lifetime on an individual driver coil is expected to out live the lifetime of the ship that houses it, driver coils a routinely replaced and exchanged through a ship’s operation lifetime. The reason for this is that it maintains the ship’s high performance, with only a very little down time, and refitting of the drive design.

Driver coils slowly lose their efficiency and performance over time because of the accumulation of minor flaws in it’s structure, though these faults do not endanger the integrity of the units, they do however reduce the performance. The structure of Driver Coil Material (DCM) means it has a remarkable property to ‘self-heal’ whereby the structure of the lattice realigns to remove any dislocation automatically, it is this property that allows a ‘tired’ and badly damaged coil to slowly repair itself, a process accelerated by extreme cold, and removal of stress forces.

In small craft, such as transfer shuttles, driver coils are rarely replaced, because they spend so much time inactive that the damaged received by the coils during flight repairs fully before its next use, this is not however the case in most large craft, which are in a state of near continuous operation, and so damage accumulates and insufficient down time is run to allow all of these faults to repair themselves.

‘Tired’ driver coils are swapped out for fresh ones in many flight facilities, the actual load on federation manufacturing plants is essential nil, as these coils in time return to their full strength, and are able to be swapped back in again. The system can then be thought of as a rotating use system, allowing a ship to regularly receive ultra high conditioned coils, without having to reduce operational flight time, to allow for their own coils to fault repair.

This reason also supports the production of mass produced coils series which are then able to swapped between sister craft without need for adaptation, custom built craft will also try to incorporate existing driver coil designs so they can swap out their coils from time to time. Ships of the same design and class will share the same design of driver coil, which would be a specific number in the DCX series, for example all Merlin craft share the same DC2200 design coils, and other craft ranges have specific DCX numbers, this system allows for quick classification of a ship’s flight abilities from only the sketchiest look at provided details.

Occasionally flight designers will create updated flight designs to driver cores, and will be considered upgrades to an existing coil set, so that the improvements to the Merlin drive were reassigned to DC2201, DC2202, and DC2203. these upgrade units shared the same rough dimensions of the first DC2200 design, and so are easily swappable for upgrade, though with each upgrade system tests have to be performed to adapt to the new drives. The update number (the last two digits, also provide an idea of the refit status of the craft, with the higher the number the more recently it has been upgraded, where lower numbers indicate that a ship has not had a major refit recently.

Though this existing swap out system is very efficient, flight designers are still striving to develop better drives, with particular note to more damage resistant drives, and quicker self healing times. The existing swap out infrastructure already in place means that new units can rapidly be incorporated into ships without having to call in all ships of that class for refit.