Shard Drive

The Sub-Dimensional Impulse Accelerator, more colloquially known as the Shard Drive, is a remarkably advanced method of faster-than-light travel first devised by the Serphiads. One of the few examples of dimensional engineering technology native to The Cluster, the Shard Drive exponentially boosts the acceleration of spacecraft by restricting them to a lower plane of existence, thereby increasing the efficiency of their propulsion.

History and Development
Creating the technologies that preceded the Shard Drive would have been impossible if not for the naturally inquisitive, intelligent nature of the Serphiads themselves. Transcending political concerns thanks to their pacifistic tendencies and rational thought patterns, the Serphiads reached their early space age very quickly, and wasted no time in devising a faster method of interstellar travel. Their research was not focused towards graviton science, as was the case for many other civilizations, but rather, towards the manipulation of reality itself. Dimensional engineering was a burgeoning science in early Serphiad civilization, but preliminary research hinted at the fact that matter already in motion could be accelerated significantly by reducing the amount of dimensions it existed in. Adjusting the dimensional constructs of large objects was no easy task, but once the possibility of rapid interstellar travel was made aware to the Serphiads through this research, they immediately devoted a striking majority of their scientific resources towards making this technological pipe dream a reality. Soon enough, the first Shard Drive incarnations had been developed, and access to a multitude of nearby star systems was granted to the Serphiads. Even in its infantile state, Shard Drive technology was equal in capabilities to the advanced Fold Drive systems of neighboring civilizations, allowing the Serphiad Union to expand rapidly and rival the territorial extent of civilizations much, much older than it. As the technology was refined, the effective range of Serphiad interstellar travel was increased, eventually allowing them to expand beyond the confines of the Andromeda Galaxy and establish themselves as the mighty intergalactic superpower they came to be recognized as. This makes the Shard Drive, alongside the Fissure Drive and Swapper Dynamo, one of the only faster-than-light devices in The Cluster that allows intergalactic travel.

Following the conclusion of the First Vuokra Invasion and subsequent destruction of the Serphiad Union, the legacy of the Shard Drive lived on in the Zetylian Hegemony. Being the direct descendants of Serphiad civilization, the Zetylians perpetuated many ancient Serphiad technologies as a part of their own civilization, including the Shard Drive. However, their reliance on its intergalactic travel capabilities was much lower, since the Zetylian Hegemony, once it had sated its material needs and acquired enough territory within the Andromeda Galaxy, ceased a majority of its outward expansion, never bothering to involve itself much in the other two galaxies of The Cluster. As a result, Shard Drive technology degraded slightly over the course of Zetylian history, though it was never completely abandoned. However, its usefulness as a method of intergalactic travel was minimized up until the outbreak of the First Cluster War, where direct assaults on the colonies of the Kaeolian Empire demanded that the Zetylians rediscover lost aspects of their Shard Drive technology so that it could once again be used to cross intergalactic distances.

After the Zetylian Hegemony collapsed, the relevance of Shard Drive technology within the intergalactic community was minimized. Though it persisted within the Gleaming Sisterhood and, to a much less significant extent, the Community of Free Peoples, Shard Drive technology, like most relics of Serphiad civilization remained out of the hands of most major civilizations for the rest of The Cluster's recent history. Outside of the Andromeda Galaxy, which did not see the emergence of any new major civilizations prior to the Second Vuokra Invasion, most Zetylian relics were too old or heavily damaged to be of much use to the civilizations that discovered them, preventing the Shard Drive from reemerging. Interestingly enough, the Coalition of Intelligent Organisms, often cited as being the effective third incarnation of Serphiad civilization, came the closest to reviving this piece of lost Zetylian technology. Their discovery of an old Zetylian frigate, which had remained in pristine condition as it drifted through space, allowed Coalition scientists to extract a fully-functional Shard Drive and transplant it into an experimental long-distance scout vessel, Prototype IGS44561. However, this ship, and its Shard Drive, were stolen by Alek Leagr before Coalition scientists could finish reverse-engineering it, and was destroyed during Alek's psychotic assault on the Cobalt Citadel, keeping the technology out of Coalition hands forever. However, this brush with the Shard Drive was still the closest any civilization in the recent history of The Cluster had gotten to replicating a piece of original Zetylian technology. The Coalition's strategic placement within the Spur Trinity of the Milky Way Galaxy, which was the location of a major Zetylian incursion during the First Cluster War, is widely-accepted as the principal reason the Coalition was able to recover Zetylian artifacts more easily than other civilizations.

Mechanics and Usage
Shard Drives were developed based on the Tulani-Zalva Variable, a Metamath principle that draws connections between the alignment of quarks inside particles and their existence within different dimensions. By finely altering the arrangement of quarks in subatomic particles, their existence in the material world can be adjusted with a very high degree of precision. Technically speaking, matter affected in this way does not have its dimensional proportions shifted, but rather, it "tricks" the universe into thinking it exists in lower dimensions through its adjusted quark alignment, causing the effects of universal physical constraints (such as the speed of light, strength of gravity/electromagnetic forces, and relationship between matter and energy) to be lessened. This extreme reduction of inertial forces dramatically improves the effectiveness of a ship's basic impulse engines, allowing them to propel the ship at relativistic speeds in excess of the speed of light. Since all matter within the effective range of a Shard Drive is affected equally, the inhabitants of the ship will not notice anything different when under a Shard Drive's effects, and time will still pass normally inside of a ship using a Shard Drive thanks to Hyperisolation. Shard Drives gained their colloquial title based on how they affect the outside appearance of ships. Since, as far as the rest of the universe is concerned, matter under the influence of a Shard Drive exists in lower dimensions of space, ships using their Shard Drives will appear to be nothing more than a bright white line, though they will "expand" back into three dimensions immediately upon deactivation of their Shard Drives.

The technological breakthroughs that allowed Shard Drives to function as a reliable method of intergalactic travel were marked by the degree to which a Shard Drive separates a ship from the physical constraints of the universe. Although they can be moved apart to generate the effect of a Shard Drive, the Tulani-Zalva Variable acknowledges that quarks will always snap back to their original positions inside particles if they are not under the influence of tremendous forces. Likewise, a ship must use exorbitant amounts of energy in order to maintain these effects for a prolonged period of time, so the effective range of a Shard Drive is ultimately determined by a ship's capacity to generate and store energy. For the Serphiads and Zetylians, powerful Neoplasmatic Reactors, a step up from cold fusion, satisfied the energy demands of intergalactic travel, but, in theory, any type of highly-advanced generator could enable intergalactic travel for a civilization that possesses Shard Drives. However, the factor that accounted for the rarity of Shard Drive technology after the fall of Zetylian civilization was not energy limitations, but rather the complexity and uniqueness of the Tulani-Zalva Variable, which most civilizations not directly related to the Serphiads fail to conceptualize in its entirety due to the limitations of their mathematical systems.