FERRANTI/YAUR-MARANN DRIVES

            The Ferranti/Yaur-Marann drives are a simple theoretical extension of existing ‘flicker drive’ technology, though to turn this conceptual advance into a real flight technology required almost entire rewriting of flight system design.

            Flicker drives work behind the phenomenon that when DCM is ‘flashed’ with pulses of energy, it can create extremely large curvatures, and thus travel. In early flicker drives the core was either subjected to intermittent power, or a constant beam was accumulated behind a partial stasis field which was periodically released. Though flicker drives could travel very fast, their efficiency was not all that greater to normal constant drives, and their drive cores would accumulate damage very rapidly. The Flicker drive fell out of popularity as drive systems became more efficient and their edge in speed was slowly diminished. However some designer continued research into Flicker drive design, the most important advance was when they realised that to sacrifice an engine core for high speeds would not be a total loss, indeed a ship which could do this would be very useful.

            Out of this insight the Ferranti/Yaur-Marann (aka, ‘shock drive’) drive was born. The principle would be that although the ship would burn out its drive core after only a single jump, it would accumulate enough energy at the pulse that it would reach tremendous speeds. Depending on the exact drive system used a Ferranti/Yaur-Marann drive can travel at 10^6 to 10^23 times the speed of light, but with an important catch, for only the very smallest fraction of a second before the DCM wavefront collapses. In normal drive propulsion space is effectively moved around the ship, so in principle the ship never moves faster than light, this can also be imagined as the ship travelling in the throat of its own personal wormhole, though the curvature is very much weaker.

The Ferranti/Yaur-Marann drive generates such curvature it can be thought to instantaneously create a wormhole duct between its current position and its destination, though unlike wormhole travel it still has to push past the intervening space, this generates an important problem, and that is the risk of collision. Though deflection is generated by propulsion fields on normal ships, the extreme curvature and relatively poor field control means this option is impossible for Ferranti/Yaur-Marann craft, as the strength of deflection required at those speeds is almost unattainable. Instead the craft have to use another way to avoid deflection, which is to put the craft out of spin with normal matter, in this way a ship could glide through a star as if it were not there, as its matter does not interact with matter out of spin with itself. At the time when Ferranti/Yaur-Marann were being first designed phase shift was incredibly energetically expensive, though with the energies available in the core this was not to be problem. Thus inside the core were not only the super efficient and advanced drive core components but also phase shift generators that slipped the craft out of normal space in the jump.

The use for this type of ship is often understated when it is described as a craft for defensive purposes. The drive system can make the ship jump as much as 500 ly on the newer models, with relatively high precision. This enables a whole fleet of military vessels to flash into existence at any breach in defence or to spearhead or reinforce an attack group. Though the crafts main drives are totalled in the jump, most newer ships have other auxiliary drives to enable normal flight at location. Ferranti/Yaur-Marann drives therefore represent one of the most potent of defensive technologies available to the Federation, and for this reason the number of Ferranti/Yaur-Marann drive ships is in the many thousand and rising, with a large number of these always on active duty, primed ready for jump.