Spaceflight

Spaceflight is the human technology that made possible the era of the Ecliptic Mariner, part of a long-running continuum of transportation technologies being developed throughout the course of human societal evolution. From humble beginnings one step more complicated than suborbital weapons delivery, to the modern era of routine interplanetary flight, Spaceflight is arguably the defining technology and practice of the era.

Key Technologies and Concepts

Luceno Confinement Drive

Main Article: Luceno Confinement Drive

The Luceno Confinement Drive is a critical technology for modern spaceflight, enabling vessels to sustain relatively lengthy periods of flight under burn and complete journeys that once took years in weeks. Luceno Confinement Drives are so named because they are variations upon designs first promulgated by Arretta Luceno, which were the first commercially-producible and standardized examples of what became known as the torch drive. As an advantage over chemical rocket and even fission engine designs, Luceno Confinement Drive-equipped ships require no additional reaction mass apart from their relatively inert fuel (though some designs do allow for "augmented propulsion" modes, usually consuming water as additional reaction mass. However, as a serious disadvantage, Luceno Confinement Drives produce dangerous amounts of X-Ray Radiation and heat which must be accounted for in ship design, and their relatively long drive plumes are an extreme hazard. As a result, it is often illegal to engage them in certain orbits around inhabited bodies or stations, and most ships therefore have one or more additional drive mechanisms available.

Abraham-Frank Thermal Redistribution System

Main Article: Thermal Management Systems The Abraham-Frank Thermal Redistribution System(AFTRS) is a class name for a variety of heating management systems designed for incorporation in spacecraft, named for the Luna-based engineers who lead the teams that created the standard implementation of the system, Lester Frank and Belle Abraham. The system was designed with two major concerns in mind:

1. Manage the enormous waste heat output of the Luceno Confinement Drive in a design that allowed for more compact ship profiles, and;
2. Do so in a way that allowed vessels to stow their Radiators for lengthy periods if needed.

In its simplest terms, the AFTRS system manages heat throughout the ship by capturing it, passing it through any of a number of heat-exchange technologies to generate electrical or mechanical power (as needed), and dumping the waste heat into an inert-mass sink or sizeable coolant resevoir. Then, when possible, the waste heat is radiated away from the ship through the use of extensible radiators.

Because of the relatively delicate nature of these radiators, they are often stowed for maneuvers through debris-rich areas, including combat zones (or former combat zones). For this reason, they are often called "afters" by crews. Flying with radiators extended is known as "wings out" flight and is sometimes a slang term for smooth and easy times.

Exospheric Medicine

In addition to a variety of exotic first-aid and emergency medicine problems in space which don't necessarily exist on a world's surface, career spacefarers find themselves in need in particular of two special classes of medication.

Microgravetic Holstic Therapies

The human body is poorly adapted to microgravity, and with the exception of earth itself, just about everywhere else permanently or temporarily inhabited by humans counts - even most ships under drive only burn at a fraction of 1G. In addition to requiring specialist physical therapy, people who will be in space for extended periods or who live on worlds other than earth usually need MHT Drugs to support their health and development. Even with the highest quality treatments, however, long careers in space or living on low-gravity worlds often leads to spacer physiology developing.

Retrotherapeutic Gene Therapy

Treatments have been developed (for those who can access them) which can repair genetic damage caused by radiation exposure, and are even supposedly useful in forestalling - and in some cases reversing - aging. However, these treatments are highly expensive and require tailoring to specific individuals. Usually, they are impossible without having first registered a full-sequence baseline for later drug development.

Oncocidals

Oncocidals are a special class of medications that are targeted toward killing cancer cells and other fast-replicating cell lines. Unfortunately, among their side-effects includes infertility, particularly in men. They are usually accompanied with hormone replacement therapy. Many spacers choose to keep sperm or eggs in long-term storage on safe worlds or stations in the event they later have an exposure incident requiring them to go on oncocidals.