More actions
Tachyonic sailing ships, or tachyon sailers, were a type of interdimensional sailing ships, resembling large 18th-century sailing ships.
Nature
According to CS-NA's internal encyclopedia, tachyonic ships function by “capturing the natural flow of faster-than-light tachyon particles (created as a byproduct of the linear passage of time)” with their tachyonic sails. This allowed them to sail onto a “poorly-understood ‘layer’ of time” known as the Chronon Sea, where they can be manually sailed onto the timestreams of individual parallel universes. Because they followed different principles than conventional Void Ships, they could sometimes get past barriers meant to stop ordinary Void Ships, in the same sense that mundane boats could pass through no-fly zones with defences in place to stop aeroplanes. When wanting to stay in one place without being blown away by a random tachyon gust, tachyon sailers used Conceptual Anchors.
The Consistency Imperium's tachyonic sailing ships were remarkably sturdy, able to flip over several times on solid ground without breaking. (PROSE: The Winter Quests)
History
Due to a time paradox, tachyonic sailing ships always existed throughout the hypercontinuum, but had also always been considered an obsolete form of interdimensional travel. However, their aesthetics, and other concerns, meant they remained in use by a few, such as eccentrics drawn to the swashbuckling life and the Consistency Imperium. CS-NA, a ship-repairing robot created in the Imperium, never had the chance to fix a tachyonic sailing ship, but was programmed to be able to do so should the occasion arise. (PROSE: The Winter Quests)
On the day of the Imperium's fall, the Faction of the Fooling Fish made off with one of their sailing ship, with which they also brought Marksmanship-522, Tracker-764, Bibliophile-962 and Pythagoras-858 back to the Cupid Homeworld. It was photographed by Nadar-124 materialising in the Homeworld, with the picture ending up on the front page of The Cupid Courier. (PROSE: Rifts Crisis Officially Over!)
The Faction would later use their newly-acquired multiversal sailing ship to play all kinds of practical jokes on residents of the Void and other dimensions, including Jenny. (PROSE: Multiversal Mischief) They eventually named their ship the Fish'n'Ship. In December 2021, CS-NA landed aboard the Ship by chance while using his Dematerialisation Engine with random coordinates. The Faction convinced him to help them steer their ship past a treacherous dimensional barrier and into a heavily-warded pocket universe which they named Dimension Zeta-32-Orangepeel-Grbbrzkwlkglb. (PROSE: The Winter Quests)