Cowboys and Aliens Ch. 30

Another thing that happened was that Cricket had done a lot of analysis on the Magellan craft and, while the mission had failed, Cricket had figured out what went wrong. Their FTL drive actually had worked and it was an amazing piece of technology. The problem came from external issues.

One issue that had occurred was that they tried to enter faster than light when they were too close to the planet and didn't have inertial dampeners. The gravitation distortion caused undue stress on the infrastructure of the tiny ship.

Secondly, and probably the biggest factor, was that they were entering faster than light in the same zone as another ship was exiting faster than light. Entering and exiting faster than light travel does weird things to the space around it, think of it as kind of a sonic boom when an airplane breaks the sound barrier, except breaking the light barrier is much bigger. That was a total freak mishap that likely couldn't be duplicated, even if they tried. Without that freak mishap, their experiment would've likely worked, but not for long as the craft itself probably wouldn't be able to handle more than a couple of missions without inertial dampeners to lessen the gravitational effects.

Once Cricket had found those issues, she did inform the Space Agency of the causes, she also informed them that their drive technology was actually quite revolutionary and asked if they minded if she used parts of it as a basis for some new Federation FTL drives.

Knowing they had created something that was even better than what a technologically advanced civilization like the Federation had, made them feel good about their program. They agreed to share the FTL drive technology in exchange for an inertial dampener and a couple of AGCs, for use while they were a probationary member. That would make their ships safer and more efficient.

As such, Cricket took their FTL drive and made several improvements. She calculated that the new improvements would nearly triple the current FTL speed. Which meant that once the security ships got updated, a trip between Earth and Magellan would only take a day, and Earth to Atlanterra would take just over a day.

Since the Poseidon had been in orbit for a month, she had already upgraded the Poseidon and the orbiting Sentinel with the new FTL drive and there was a Destroyer en route and it would be upgraded once it arrived.

A day after Federation law went into effect, most of the criminals had already been taken off the streets and the transition appeared to go quite smoothly as the local police forces entered the abbreviated training program to get them up-to-date on Federation law and enforcement techniques.

With things going smoothly on Magellan, it was time to return home.