Wave Skim-Drive

Parallel-AnchorHead (PAH): Ships are equipped with sensors, antennas, or drones attached to long wires (sometimes miles long) that are deployed ahead of the ship to detect any potential obstacles or anomalies within the skimming border dimension. These devices are essential for faster and more accurate detection, giving the navigator or onboard computer better time to react to any alterations in a spaceships route. In more advanced ships, these PAH systems are extremely precise, making skimming significantly safer and faster.

Traditional Sensors: All space ships and ships without a PAH rely on traditional sensors that are less accurate, resulting in slower speeds and increased risk of collision with obstacles like stars, planets, or black holes. While traveling this way ships are more vulnerable, and their crew must be more experienced in navigating the complexities of skim-space without the advantage of advanced detection. Ships can theoretically skim without any form of sensor input, but this is extremely dangerous and typically reserved for emergency situations. The lack of any proactive detection makes this a last resort.

Gravitational guidance: To reduce energy consumption and to increase the starting speed, ships can initiate a skim by performing a gravitational slingshot manoeuvre around a planet, star, or other massive celestial body. This manoeuvre increases the ship's velocity and lowers the energy needed for the journey. It’s a common practice for fleets to rely on smaller vanguard vessels that perform slingshot manoeuvres to scout ahead and assist in the safe navigation of the entire fleet.

Obstacles: While ships in the skimming state still exist in physical reality, objects like stars, black holes, and planets can still affect the ship’s course. When encountering an obstacle, the ship "jumps" over it like a wave on the sea, altering its trajectory by a small margin or possibly causing it to be launched into a completely different direction, often this is calculated into the journey, but unprepared vessels might end up stranded in the space between stars or at worse find themself in hostile territory after a sudden jump.

Interference: Ships equipped with PAH have an advantage in detecting incoming obstacles and ships, but other vessels can interfere with a ship’s path by blocking the skimming route. This can be achieved through weapons fire, mines, or specialized equipment like mono-molecular nets that can disrupt the skimmer's course, often forcing the vessel to forcibly exit skim-space due to taking damage or to avoid getting lost.

Communication: Skim-Sign communication cannot be used while a ship is actively skimming. Ships and fleets traveling with a WSD are effectively cut off from all external contact until they reach their destination. This creates inherent risks for fleets, which must rely on pre-planned courses and contingencies for emergencies. The inability to communicate with ships during skimmer travel forces fleets to operate autonomously, increasing the importance of well-trained navigators and skilled tacticians, often a fleet admiral or a ships captain have to make split-second decisions when when they exit skim-space, something that have caused both political tension and triumph.

The Wave-Skim-Drive enables faster-than-light travel by "skimming" the dimensional border between realspace and a neighbouring reality. Its speed is determined by the efficiency of the drive, the skill of the navigator, and the local Skim-Space environment.

Skim speeds are calculated with deceleration in mind, meaning that the theoretical maximum velocity of a Wave-Skim Drive is roughly twice as fast as the listed practical speeds. However, traveling at full velocity without accounting for the need to slow down would result in overshooting the destination or dangerous reentry failures. This limitation requires ships to begin decelerating halfway through their journey, effectively halving the maximum distance they could travel in a given timeframe.

This calculated compromise ensures that vessels can exit Skim-Space safely and accurately while maintaining manageable travel times across vast distances.

Examples:

A basic Wave-Skim-Drive travels at an average speed of 0.2 light-years per hour (approximately 1.7 trillion kilometers per hour). Advanced drives or conditions such as gravitational slingshot manoeuvres can increase this speed.