Gravity Drive

The Gravity Drive, also known as a coaxial warp induction drive was a revolutionary method of locomotion that has been described as "crucial as the taming of gyullo-horses" by its first proposer, Professor Sibelin Maurikanus. The technological devlopment of the engine took more than 35 years and took place at the shipyard complex Utopia Isis.

Several succesfull test have been performed on unmanned probes. The first Starfleet vessel to have a working Gravity Drive prototype was the USS Destiny, first of its class. The first attempt to test the drive on a manned starship resulted in the disappearance of the entire ship.

Background and features
The theoretical mechanism of the Gravity Jump is based on the Higgs-mediated type-III subspace entanglement when associated with a colourless-able tachyon burst and the calculation has been shown to require 17 years to be completed by the Planetary Computer Rakastan. The crew of Utopia Isis would like to take this chance to thank the cool bunch of physicists who did the calculation for them.

The Gravity Jump is characterised by an instananeous jump (instanaeous must clearly be understood as defined in the Second Revision of Relativity by TIR founder Azrel Jols). The energy required by the jump has been inferred to be potentially none provided an equipotential jump, but is made considerable by technical reasons. The range of the jump is independent of the energy and infinite.

How it works
The gravity drive was a propulsion technology that was first hypothesized by Starfleet in the late 24th century, with the theoretic capability of folding the fabric of space, allowing a ship to travel instantaneously across extremely large distances.

The gravity drive functioned by drawing in subatomic particles and reconfiguring their internal geometries. The drive was imperfect, however, as particle instabilities tended to overload the engines. To correct for this flaw, engineers conceived of the idea of using a polaric modulator to dilute the particle stream as it entered the gravity core.

The Gravity Jump appears to be instantaneous to an external but, in fact, any attempt to define better the time span taken by the Gravity Jump clashes with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, as strictly zero error in time would correlate with infinite error in energy, which is impossible.

Therefore it can be said that the jump takes a time comparable with the Planck time, which is the smallest time observable in this universe. The exact figure is derived by the following formula:
 * $$t_P \equiv \sqrt{\frac{\hbar G}{c^5}}$$ &asymp; 5.39106(32) × 10&minus;44 s

where:
 * $$\hbar = h / 2 \pi$$ is the reduced Planck constant (sometimes $$h$$ is used instead of $$\hbar$$ in the definition)
 * G = gravitational constant
 * c = speed of light in a vacuum
 * s is the SI unit of time, the second.

It is nevertheless impossible to measure the exact time needed by the Gravity Jump. This is not due to limitations to our instruments but to the fact that in this circumstance time itself stops being appreciable.

The Gravity Drive on the USS Destiny
The USS Destiny was conceived around the Gravity Jump Engine (despite having a conventional slipdrive installed) and built accordingly in the shipyard at Utopia Planitia. A consistent team of engineers stayed on the ship during its maiden voyage in order to verify the performance of the engine - which was proven to be rather poor. The team on board included three of the four main Federal experts on the Gravity Jump engine (the disembodied brain of Prof Maurikanus could not be moved from its hospital on Vulcan and made it clear that he wasn't pleased). They also happened to be seriously injured by a plasma burst when the Gravity Jump engine was given energy.

Trivia

 * Despite popular belief, "instantaneous" is a meaningless term in a Relativistic universe. After the Totally-Inductive Rewrite (TIR) of Physics a new convention has emerged for the term, although it clashes with the popular understanding. The two meanings just happen to coincide in everyday life.
 * The Gravity Jump Engine is roughly 6 meter tall, 8 meter wide, has an outer shell of bluish Iridium alloy and, because of its very peculiar chemico-linfatic cooling system, smells like aceton.
 * Few people know how it works. Even fewer than that could have understood why it didn't work correctly. One of them is on Vulcan and the other tend to be dead.