[Bytetron Technology] Darkouus Field

Bytetron has created an entirely new type of propulsion, one which is adequate for medium to large ships, although it cannot be used on supercruisers, which this ship is designed to fuel up. This new type of propulsion is called the Darkouus Field, and is, essentially, a portable gravity field. It allows the ship to 'fall' toward any direction using the mass of an enormous planet, far off in another solar system. In order to use this planet's mass to propel the ship in the direction intended, a rift in space-time is created, similar to the way wormholes function. The rift in space-time is always just ahead of the ship in whatever direction it is moving, thus accelerating it. These space-time rifts are mainly used to move the ship outside of FTL travel, e.g, when the fleet is heading into or from planetary orbit. Otherwise, the ship travels via wormholes generated either by letting the space-time rift generated by the Darkouus Field remain in place, rather than letting the ship be attracted to it. A diagram may be helpful.

   O ~-----------------------------------------------~ <==|

The 'O' represents the planet, with its enormous gravitational pull(hereforth known as GP) The '~''s represent space-time rifts, which allow the GP to act on the ship, shown here as the '<==|'. Finally, the '-''s represent the fictional wormhole 'tunnel' persay. The space-time rifts always stays just ahead of the ship, as it is generated by the Darkouus Field, which is part of the ship. When the ship is going to enable FTL travel, the diagram stays the same until the last moment, when the space-time rift is changed to the desired location, the momentum of the ship then causes it to be accelerated through the space-time rift, and the ship has been moved.



This picture, one of the Tectus Vacca, shows the Darkouus Field Generators, which can be identified by the 'red gem' component.

Use a gravity powered device to power the whatever makes the rift, and it'll feed off the gravity from the rift. .....but I have a feeling that that would end up something like this:

Spoiler:

It's a really creative idea, but I dont' think it would work as well as sublight thrusters. It would take alot of energy, as dino said, to create the rift, and it would be easily tampered with. (Think of it as having a rope to pull your cart uphill, rather than having a truck. The enemy can cut the rope anywhere along the route, instead of having to shoot your engine block out right at your vehicle.) It also would accelerate very slowly, even if you rifted to the gravity right at the base of the planet/star. (Gravitational pull drops off very quickly as I recall.) Gravity is comparison to other forces, is actually extremely weak. We can use a tiny amount of chemicals to overcome the gravity on a huge planet. The only plus to gravity is it's constantness (which is what eventually allows whatever you just sent flying into the air with a fire-cracker to come back down.) So possibly as a back up device when you run out of fuel/solar pannels are broken/you can't warp. But again, you have to have power to create the rift......

But again, it's a neat idea.

yeah, now that I've thought about it for a while, it really doesn't seem that efficient...
Maybe it could be a ship which was retired quickly or something...

I'm thinking so...well, the ship itself is nice....just not it's propulsion,