Shaw-Fujikawa Translight Engine (Earth-7149)

"They have opened a path to the stars for all of us."

- - Dedication to Tobias Fleming Shaw, ScD, QeD, FRS (January 30th, 2120–November 10th, 2217), and Wallace Fujikawa ScD, QEnD (April 20th, 2115–February 18th, 2218)

The Shaw-Fujikawa Translight Engine (SFTE), of the Shaw-Fujikawa drive, and colloquially better known as slipspace drive, is a spacecraft propulsion system developed by humans, enabling the transition from and to slipspace from normal space, and thus FTL travel.

History
The Shaw-Fujikawa Translight Engine was developed for six years by engineers and theoretical physicists led by Tobias Fleming Shaw and Wallace Fujikawa, at on Venus. The project was finished on 2191, and from then on, it became the pinnacle of human innovation, propelling humanity into a golden age of space colonization through the Orion Arm of the Milky Way galaxy, known as Domus Diaspora.

By the 26th century, the vast majority of human spacecraft were equipped with Shaw-Fujikawa Translight Engines if their sizes were sufficient enough to handle them, which included most of the warships of the United States Colonial Marine Corps. Despite the numerous technological advancements that the drives underwent through the years, the technology is still limited, with slipspace jumps taking several weeks or months depending on the distance of the star system.

Navigation and functionality
To travel from and to slipspace, the Shaw-Fujikawa Translight Engine creates Einstein-Rosen bridges between normal space and the slipstream space subdomain, through the use of highly-powered cyclic particle accelerators that generates microscopic black holes. Duo to the low mass of the drive, Hawking radiation grants it a nanosecond before it is evaporated and converted into useless thermal energy. In the granted nanosecond, the drive manipulates the black holes in coherent ruptures between the two known spaces.

The Shaw-Fujikawa Translight Engine then generates a slipspace field, preventing the ship and its crew from being exposed to slipspace, and in turn it "translates" the presence of the ship to the slipspace's foreign physics. The ship is essentially "squeezes" through higher dimensions until it reaches its destination. The mass effect fields are unstable, and so, to maintain them, constant calculations must be made, which varies from ship to ship depending on their size. Massive ships such as the Phoenix-class colony ships require 4.3 quadrillion calculations per second within the mass effect field. To manufacture a drive, the elements selenium and technetium are used.

The task of accelerating the ship through slipspace is performed by the vessel's fusion drives, allowing ships with more powerful engines to travel faster within slipspace. During its activation, the Shaw-Fujikawa Translight Engine emits alpha and beta particles through astrogation. The numerous calculations require navigation artificial intelligence or executive Replicant to manually perform, although humans are able to laid off the basic calculations.

Dangers and risks
Because SFTEs are difficult to repair and maintain after their initial activation, they are considered dangerous during travels. As noted by Dennis Parker, the radiation generated by them can distort active devices around it. It has noted that many mechanics had disappeared in the past while trying to manually adjust an engine. Despite the many advancements in slipspace travel, the engines still need to be manually adjusted from time to mine, duo to its superconducting magnets drifting out of phase, as well as the electronic systems malfunctioning when hear the drive's core by the exposure to slipstream space's laws of physics. Slipspace ruptures can also cause EMPs that disable nearby and surrounding communications.