#tachyon speed

[pangeen]

“ About Tachyons “ // Physicsgene

[noosphe-re]

A transwarp conduit, also known as a transwarp corridor or a transwarp tunnel, was an artificially-created energy conduit through a realm of subspace known as transwarp space. The entrances of transwarp conduits bear many resemblances to subspace gateways. They were utilized by the Borg to cover great distances in a relatively short period of time. Accessed via tachyon pulses of alternating frequencies, the conduits contained a matter stream in which a vessel could reach velocities at least twenty times greater than the maximum warp speed of a Galaxy-class starship, in a process Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge described as "like falling into a fast-moving river and being swept away by the current." (TNG: "Descent", VOY: "Dark Frontier", "Shattered", DIS: "Su'Kal")

—https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Transwarp_conduit

[masoncarr2244]

[whats-in-a-sentence]

Some physicists and philosophers have suggested that progress hinges on our recognizing that the focus of the discussion so far is somewhat misplaced: the real core of special relativity, they rightly point out, is not so much that light sets a speed limit, as that light's speed is something that all observers, regardless of their own motion, agree upon.¹⁶

16. Special relativity forbids anything that has ever traveled slower than light speed from crossing the speed-of-light barrier. But if something has always been traveling faster than the speed of light, it is not strictly ruled out by special relativity. Hypothetical particles of this sort are called tachyons. Most physicists believe tachyons don't exist, but others enjoy tinkering with the possibility that they do. So far, though, largely because of the strange features that such a faster-than-light particle would have according to the equations of special relatively, no one has found any particular use for them – even hypothetically speaking. In modern studies, a theory that gives rise to tachyons is generally viewed as suffering from an instability.

"The Fabric of the Cosmos" - Brian Greene

[tenth-sentence]

Between the two Universes is the luxon Universe, with possible velocities confined to c, and never either less or more, at any energy.

"The Stars in their Courses" - Isaac Asimov

[nomadlastronin]

I've been sitting here thinking and decided to make a couple of screenshots. Thanks for the idea @snap-oversteer I must say right away that this is not canon of auto-forms of characters and I made them purely based on my own thoughts. Prowl -  Apollo 2018 Intenza Emozione

Jazz - Ferrari 2014 FXX K

Rodimus - Koenigsegg 2020 Jesko

Drift - McLaren 2018 Senna

Mirage - Rimac 2019 Concept Two

Sideswipe - Lamborghini 2011 Sesto Elemento Sunstreaker - Lamborghini 2016 Aventador

Blurr - Raesr 2019 Tachyon Speed

Decepticons

[jingszo]

If you're standing perfectly still, then eventually, the tachyon will reach you in less time than it would take for light to get there. You wouldn't be able to see the tachyon coming until it already passed you, which is still no big deal. If you had a telescope pointed at me, you would receive the tachyon before seeing the image of me pressing the button to send it. Curious, but still no huge problem.

The issue comes if you start moving. In relativity, from your perspective, you are standing still while Earth appears to be receding. This introduces time dilation: From your perspective, everything in the universe — including the action of me pressing the button —​​ slows down. In fact, if you're traveling fast enough, you could receive my tachyon and send a reply before I even hit the button in the first place; you can send a signal back in time.

[dat-physics-gal]

A leap of faith and physics

We thought for a civilization to form, one needed liquid water, a stable planet with a hot core, and tardium crystals. Apparently, this is not so.

Because we just received a vibromessage over the tachyon network from an unknown source.

Which in itself would not be too unusual. Plenty of newly realized civilizations figure out how to configure tardium to send tachyon messages across isospace. Hoping someone will answer. We always do. It always takes some time to go from simple repeating messages to understanding one another. Most civilizations don't come up with the galactic standard modulation on their own. Nor do we know their form of communication all that well, language, culture, all of that.

First contact is always a lengthy affair, until the new species is integrated into the intergalactic community. Then follows the exchange of knowledge and culture, the setting up of historical archives and sharing of starcharts. Since light travels only at luxionic speed, the charts provide a valuable look at the past. Once the new civilization has been caught up to date, things tend to settle. Updates are fewer and far in between, and culture tends to somewhat homogenize. Not completely, of course, as everyone has different living circumstances, but with all the exchange between us, some settling is bound to happen.

But we know where tardium reserves are, have felt the reverb of our scans, we know where civilizations could potentially pop up. The message we received was unusual not because its source was unknown, but because it came from a sector without any sufficient tardium deposits.

That... shouldn't even be possible!

The signal is also a bit noisy. Strange. Usually, the bigger the tardium array, the more self-stabilization should occurr. And for interstellar communication, you tend to need quite large arrays. So then why was there so much noise?

It was clearly a signal, and according to the triangulators, it came from the outer third of a dark spiral galaxy. We call them that, since they were never really observed, at least not with any isocartography. We only know they're there due to shared star charts. No idea what's going on with them at the current isotime. We can't know, without any tardium resonance to pick up.

Anyway, of course we answered. Their signal had been prime numbers, if we demodulated it correctly, followed by things we couldn't really make sense of. It was standard practice to begin communications with mathematics, and fundamental harmonics. It's strange that they did that right away, but not unheard of. We sent back primes, and then a couple of playful harmonics. Music. What we received back was weird, because we thought it was music, but it wasn't.

It turned out to be a starchart, and not just any kind. Pulsars. We sent back a chart of their galaxy, as reconstructed from several older starcharts. Then, we waited for their answer. And waited. And waited. An entire solar cycle (of our species) later, we finally got another answer.

And it just would not stop. We recognized it was a series of images, or rather, rapid successions of images, together with harmonics on a different band as well. This was video! The footage depicted a bipedal species, with symbolics next to different features. The images cycled through different body parts, with different descryptions. We had a really hard time catching and saving all the data, a task which had to be offloaded to the communal computation grid, as our own planet simply did not have the capacity to do it alone. This should have tipped us off to what we were going to be dealing with, but it didn't.

We continued, almost business as usual, just a fair bit faster. Then objects were being shown, often together with the bipedals, and their corresponding glyphics were depicted right next to them. Also, each image was accompanied by a sound file. They really made learning their language easy for us. We learned that they called themselves Humans, and their home was Earth, a planet orbiting a yellow star. They were a surface dwelling species! Those are pretty rare, as most can not survive the exposure to open space for some reason. We then sent back images and glyphics of our own, matching them in their intent. We sent images of life forms, images of our own body parts, images of objects and always accompanied by isostandard glyphics.

Usually, once communication has come to a basic understanding, the exchange of culture would begin.

But the Humans had started out with primes and starcharts, so of course, their next communication wasn't about culture. We... honestly didn't know what exactly it was, for a while. Until some of the mathematicians from across the network found patterns. They were sharing mathematics with us!

Eager to help, we sent back entire databases full of insights. They requested more soon. So we sent more. And more. And more. We wondered how they could even store all that we sent them. We asked. They sent back something we didn't understand. We hoped the mathematicians could figure it out, but nope.

Eventually, we sent steam engine configurations, as well as the corresponding heating and shunting tardion-arrays used to power them. They sent back their own designs for steam engines. And other engines that seemed similar, but shoudn't work with steam. The machine configurations, piston layouts and such, were fairly primitive. As was to be expected from a new species. But they never sent us schematics of their heating or shunting arrays. When we asked how they kept things cool without shunting arrays, they sent back another steam engine. But, when we called it that, they corrected us. What they had shown us was a heat pump. They used the opposite effect, instead of creating movement from a temperature difference, they created a temperature difference from movement. We asked them why they wouldn't just use shunting arrays. They asked what those were.

And this is how we found out why they were in dark space. Why their signal was so noisy. And why they had never depicted heating or shunting arrays in their schematics.

They had practically no tardium. They simply did not have enough of it to make arrays, as we thought all civilizations do. The largest piece of tardium they had was the centerpiece of a gigantic machine. It was about the size of a human "nail", which is a vestigial claw originally used for superior grip on one of the native plant species of their planet.

We did not know how to respond. We could not comprehend how a civilization could form without tardium crystals. They asked us if we knew where more could be found, preferably near them. We didn't understand what they meant. Then they asked us how to locate reserves. We gave them the modulations that we use to scan for the crystals' tachyon resonance.

They thanked us, and ceased their questions. Then, communication became choppy. Only occasionally would we receive an exchange of culture. Their questions about mathematics and tardium crystals ceased.

---------------------

When we first received back an answer from the deep space tachyon dish, we were extatic. And shocked. And kind of in disbelief. Nobody had really known if it would work. Still, everyone in the control room agreed that we should make sure it was really a signal, before we dropped that bombshell to the public.

We focused a couple more dyson collectors onto the dish, and changed the signal. Instead of primes and harmonics, this time, we encoded the pulsar chart, multiple times, in every encoding we could think of, and sent them all.

Only a few hours later, we received another signal from the previous location. The encoding was our own, easily recognized. With shaky hands, i pressed the 'open image file' button.

When i was greeted by a picture of the Milky Way, everyone in the room lost their collective shit.

"Holy Fuck!" "Oh my god." Someone fainted. Multiple people cried. Nobody minded any of that.

~~~

The prime administrator creased her brow. The direct line was ringing. This better be important. "Hello? Prime administrator here." From the other end, she could hear someone suppressing tears, and whimpering: "Tachyon dish project operator here. We... we."

"Everything ok over there?", she asked. What could possibly have happened that had the scientist crying? Was there an accident with the dyson swarm or something? Did people die? No, she trusted the operator of that experiment to not call unless it mattered to the entire human race.

A wet chuckle. "Better than ok. Maam? We... We're not alone."

Not alone? What does that...? Oh. OH! oh

"Are.. you sure?" Dammit. Now even her own voice was shaking.

"We sent a pulsar chart and got a beautiful image of the Milky Way back, in the same image file type. Pretty sure at this point."

~~~

The following year was downright insane. The mere confirmation that we weren't alone in the universe spurred us all on. Artists did their best to show all sides of us, scientists got together to determine what questions we should ask, even the long obsolete military awakened from its slumber, churning out tactical analyses of possible tachyon based weaponry, and how to defend against it.

Some people were panicking, others in denial, but most relished the opportunities that might open up.

Policies were made, on how to handle aliens that would come to the solar system. Tachyon mechanics, an until now unproven theory, made leaps and bounds, scientists working as hard as they could to understand it better.

The dyson collectors were turned to multiple new research projects, powering large machines that channeled vibrations into the tiny crystals we had found to pick up on tachyon vibrations. The largest one that we had discovered while asteroid mining was still in the communication dish, but the smaller shrapnel, a couple millimeters in size at the most, were being utilized.

Eventually, after a year was up, communications resumed. The linguists sent data, and worked closely with the astronomers that had made the initial transmissions. We also received back data, and the scientific community devoured every piece of information. We learned their language as fast as we could.

But our requests for the sharing of scientific knowledge appeared to fall on deaf ears. Whenever we sent natural constants, or physical laws, we got nothing back. Well, almost. Our prodding did yield one answer: How to locate the crystals. Which were apparently common? Though our scans painted a different picture. We did have some scattered about the asteroid belt, yes. But the largest one we detected was only 3cm in diameter. A little bigger than the one in the communication dish, sure, but not that much.

We came to accept this, figuring that maybe there was some kind of prime directive that forbade the sharing of further technology. Actually, perhaps we leaned a bit too far into our Star Trek analogy. Because most of us would not get it out of our heads to try to build a warp drive. Well, not really a spacetime bending drive, but something that could go faster than light. Because, obviously, thanks to our discovery, we now knew that while the speed of light may be finite, the speed of information was not.

-----------------------------

After ten cycles of cultural exchange, the humans sent a request for isocoordinates of the nearest known civilization to their own. This request kind of drowned in the noise, we didn't really think about it much, we just transmitted our coordinates. Turns out, the nearest ones were us, in what the Humans call the Andromeda Galaxy.

Shortly after the request, they went totally vibrosilent. We tried and tried to contact them, but to no avail. This, while tragic, was a reality of civilization, though. Extinction events could always happen. Sometimes the affected civilization would realize in advance and send a couple warnings, but nobody could help them from afar, of course. So that's what we figured happened to Humanity. Maybe their sun blew up, or they got knocked away from it by a passing object, anything could have happened.

Many cycles passed. I had aged, my once young and springy exoskeleton now wobbly and soft, though my mind was still sharp enough to crew a communications array.

None of us were prepared for the schockwave resonating through our sensor grids. Multiple arrays straight up shattered. Luckily, as big as they were, there was nobody close to them, so no deaths. What the rest of them picked up though made no sense. We could determine there was a pulse, but no normal communication had that level of power, nor resonance.

Then, half a planetary rotation later, there was a new luminance in the sky. We were about to renew our arrays and update our starchart, when the light source moved. Toward the planet.

What?

And then, my assigned communications array resonated.

"This is the Human vessel Enterprise, calling anyone on the planet. Can you read us?" the crystal sang in choppy English, the language of the Humans. The ones we thought were extinct.

I scuttled to my post at the resonator, tuning it to reply:

"This is communications, we read you, but i don't understand? We are recovering from an unprecedented resonance pulse that shattered multiple arrays, sorry if the modulation is a bit off."

The answer was swift: "Sorry about that, our engines are a bit out of tune at this point. That pulse might have been us. Glad to hear you all down there, is anyone injured?"

"Your engines? And uh. No, nobody injured."

"Yes our engines, again, we apologize for that. But glad to know everyone is alright.

Requesting permission to land on the surface."

This was a momentous occasion, which i didn't realize until later on. The entire tachyon network would eventually refer to this exact communication as a reference time. This exact moment would come to be known as 0:0 PFJ

0 Cycles and 0 rotations Past First Jump.

The only thing i remember is absently giving permission, not quite understanding what exactly they were requesting here. If i had, i would have convened with the councils beforehand.

Then, the cave began to shake. It wasn't coming from any of the arrays. It was coming from the surface.

~~~

They. They were here. The Humans were here. On the surface. Of. Of our planet. What? How?!

Most importantly, why?!

Then i remembered the stories about their exploration of the surface of their own planet. How they had sent people to their poles, despite their biology not being fit to survive there. And several did die! How they climed mountains. Made pressurized vessels to dive below the surface of their open ocean. We asked them why. They told us.

I realized at that moment, not how they were here. But why.

"Because we could, and no human had been there before," they had answered back then.

[drunkenskunk]

Four Hours

Hour 1:

Shit was fucked, and everyone knew it.

Alarm klaxons loudly blared from every single loudspeaker in every single corridor... but Scarlet could barely hear it over the rest of the chaos. Panicked shouts and desperately barked orders, as well as the cracks and booms of distant gunfire and explosions, echoed through the station. She tried to block out the noise, focusing only on her task: get all this ammo to a cut off militia unit on the other side of the hab ring before they were overrun.

It all started when a passing blinkvoid disabled the local Omninet, effectively cutting off Hell's Gate from most external communication. And then, the very instant they were isolated from everyone else in the system, the station went into red alert: an unidentified hostile warship had appeared out of nowhere, and started immediately launching boarding torpedoes. It was a perfectly timed attack that caught everyone in the station with their pants down, and it was only through sheer luck – and a few spare coldcores acting as decoys in an empty hangar – that the Strategic Response Team managed to even get inside their mechs in the first place, much less push back the initial assault.

Once the first fight was over and they got a single moment to catch their breath, that's when the team found out exactly how fucked up the shit was. And the answer: comprehensively. Because it wasn't just any warship attacking them. It was The Tachyon: the ship from a (possible?) nightmare future that had contained the cascading NHP god of the local apocalypse cult. Scarlet was sure she and the rest of the team had seen that stupid ship explode in orbit of Chameleon months ago when all this madness started, but...

Then again, Andros Capella died on that fucking ship, and he came back because that future NHP could apparently just DO that, just like it brought back Ignatius Aurum after that asshole got murked, and time travel was also involved somehow, so who the fuck knows anymore! All this shit was melting Scarlet's brain, and it was pissing her off.

What she did know was that the Hell Hounds – having seemingly been absorbed by The Faith of The One – were now intent on boarding the station, and the militia was offering a well practiced rebuttal: “Hippity-Hoppity, Get Off My Property.” Now, that? That, she could wrap her head around.

So that's why Scarlet – still wearing her interface jacksuit underneath a set of heavy combat armor, loaded down with guns and ammo for resupply, and still juiced on the combat stims in her system from the fight less than half an hour earlier – was running at full speed towards the sounds of gunfire and explosions off in the distance.

“Heads up grunts! I'm inbound on your position with resupply!” Scarlet said into her helmet comm, with no idea if anyone from the militia was even still alive and on the frequency to receive her. Up ahead, the sounds of violence seemed to be petering out, and that was either a good sign, or exceptionally bad. She tried her damnedest to pour on more speed (which wasn't easy considering how heavy all this fucking ammo was) and every heavy footfall shook the deck plating under her and sent a violent shock up her spine.

She rounded a corner and the makeshift command post and barricades beyond the bulkheads finally come into view, and she was momentarily gripped with panic at the number of bodies and spent shell casings she saw littering the floor. Was she already too late? But then the moment passed and she let out a sigh of relief: it looked like nearly everyone here was still alive, just hunkering down behind cover. She'd worked with Zinfandel the last few months to make sure the militia had prepared for this exact scenario with dozens of “all hands, repel boarders” drills, and it was clearly paying off.

“Was that the last of them?” Scarlet heard someone ask from somewhere up ahead. A pair of milita troopers were taking cover behind a flash-printed chest high wall, and one of them quickly peeked over the edge before ducking back down again.

“I dunno,” he said. “Probably not for long. I don't think we can hold against another assault like that...”

“Good news, fellas!” Scarlet yelled, grabbing the attention of everyone still alive. “I got beans, bullets, and bandaids! Load up!” She unbuckled the ratchet across her chest, undoing the makeshift harness made out of tie-down straps holding the giant metal crate to her back. The 4-foot cube loaded to the brim with ammunition, weapons, grenades, and directional mines dropped down unceremoniously with a colossal thud.

“Scarlet? Issat you?” one of the militia she recognized – a kid by the name of Flavor Profile – asked from where he was taking cover behind a nearby pillar. He peered out from beneath his helmet and adjusted the grip on his shotgun. “Christ the Buddha, you're a godsend! I think I'm down to my last two shells.”

“Where in the hells did y'even get all this?” another one of the militia, Spud Wrench, asked while she peered into the giant box of munitions. “We had to beg, borrow, and steal just to set up this chokepoint!”

“Called in a favor,” Scarlet said with a shrug. “Couple of smugglers I know, offered to 'share' some of their inventory. Now, I'd ask for a status update, but shit's kinda obvious,” Scarlet unslung the bullpup carbine off her shoulder and into her hands. “Anyone too wounded to fight, there's a med station that got set up, 'bout two sectors spinward. Everyone else, pull back, regroup, and reload. When the next wave hits, I'll hold them here and buy you some time.”

“What, by yourself?” Flavor asked incredulously. Before he could get an answer, however:

“CONTACT!” came a yell from up ahead, followed swiftly by the bark of gunfire. Without another word, Scarlet was in motion, leaping over the barricade. Violence was no longer imminent, it was here, and it was as if a switch in her head flipped. A sharp electric tingle buzzed in the back of her brain, like the rush of dopamine she always got from fighting in Big Red.

Several armored figures hove into view, their haphazard combat gear painted in faded Hell Hound colors unevenly obscured by iconography of The Faith. The heads-up display on her helmet lit them up like beacons, and with efficient, almost mechanical precision: POP! POP! POP! Scarlet squeezed off three bursts and dropped them before any of them could even get a shot off. She didn't bother to stop, intent on countering the charge of these zealots with one of her own.

Just as she got to the bend in the corridor, she heard the unmistakable sound of a small revving engine. She skidded to a halt just as an arm swinging a rusty chainsaw blade appeared, passing through the spot she would've been. A wild-eyed cultist appeared, carried by his own momentum, and swung the blade again. Scarlet was so high on stims it was like she was watching him moving in slow motion, and it was clear he was aiming to chop her head off. She ducked, and the chainsaw missed her helmet by inches. She let go of the carbine's foregrip, shoved the barrel up under his chin, and pulled the trigger.

There was no time to stop. Scarlet grabbed the dead man by his chestplate, and held the lump of meat ahead of her as she pressed forward, rounding the corner. Seconds later, she heard the bark of automatic fire, followed swiftly by the sound of several wet impacts against the dead man's back. Scarlet hunkered down behind her makeshift cover, tucked the carbine in close, and continued forward, bullets either ricocheting off the corridor all around her or hitting the dead man.

As soon as she felt she was close enough, she shoved up against the body she was carrying with all her might, and threw it forward; it crashed into one of the cultists, sending them tumbling. In one fluid motion, she tossed the carbine into her left hand, reached down for the pistol on her hip with her now free right, and leveled the carbine at one of the cultists trying to duck behind cover. She fired off a quick burst, quickly aimed her pistol at another, and pulled the trigger.

For a split second, it felt like she was back in her mech; she'd been making a habit lately of firing the Leviathan mounted on Big Red's shoulder in one direction to swiss-cheese an opponent, while shooting the assault rifle in another direction at a completely different target.

“So,” Scarlet stood over the man trying to pick himself up off the floor, and very deliberately leveled her carbine at his face. “You gonna come quietly, or am I gonna have to clean you off my boots?”

“My death won't matter,” the cultist said, while trying to be subtle about reaching for his discarded weapon and failing miserably. “Feather will burn this corrupt and cruel universe to cinders and start anew. Let the final verse be written, so the page m-AUGH!” He yelped as Scarlet stomped on his hand before he could reach the rifle.

“You talk too much,” was all she said before smacking him in the head with the butt of her carbine. Scarlet quickly scanned the corridor for more targets, but it seemed the current assault was over, if only for a moment. She flipped the unconscious man onto his front, reached into one her pouches for some zip ties, and began binding his hands; it was a longshot, but maybe Shelly and Zinfandel could get some decent intel out of a prisoner who didn't know when to shut the fuck up.

When he woke up, that is.

- - -

Hour 2:

Things were still bad, but... far as Scarlet was concerned, they could be worse.

The militia platoon defending this particular section of the station had done wonders with all those supplies. On top of refortifying their position, nearly every maintenance corridor surrounding them had been booby trapped. A few enterprising cultists had already tried to flank their position by cubbying, and ended up getting turned into greasy smears. That dissuaded the rest, funneling the cultists into a heavily defended killbox, and right into all of their bullets. Over and over and over again.

Scarlet had no fucking idea how there were so many of these lunatic apocalypse cultists, or where they were even all coming from, since there seemed to be no end to them in sight. They weren't going to get anywhere if they kept on the defensive and just waited to be overrun; no, they had to push forward, and find some way to kick these idiots off personally.

So, Scarlet did the most sensible thing she could think of: she asked for volunteers, and put together a strike team. With any luck, that would give the rest who'd opted to stay behind time to further dig in, and maybe reestablish communication with the rest of the station. There were a total of five of them in this op, with Scarlet taking point, and things started off well. Enemy resistance had started to peter out the further they got from the militia checkpoint... so maybe the Hell Hounds had finally run out of reinforcements?

And then it all went to shit. Again.

She wasn't sure who fired first, but as soon as they reached the atrium where the boarding torpedo had landed, the bullets started flying. Scarlet and the rest knew the terrain better, but there were far more of the cultists, and they just kept coming, heedless of their own safety. It was like a fucking clown car! How could so many fit in that one fucking torpedo?!

An extremely loud shriek drowned out everything else, muffling the explosions and gunfire all around, and it made Scarlet's blood run cold. It was a sound that made her feel like every single nerve ending around every port and connection that would normally have plugged her into her mech had suddenly pulled taut: the whine of a set of miniaturized IPS-N ramjet engines spooling up.

The corridors in this section of the station were too narrow and had ceilings too low for most mechs, which is why Scarlet had felt confident to be boots on the ground instead of in a cockpit for this op... but most mechs wasn't all mechs, and they had now run into the worst case scenario.

“FALL BACK!” Scarlet yelled, already on the move and trying her best to disguise the rising panic in her voice. “NOW! WE'VE GOTTA GO NOW!”

A blur of burnt red and dull gold metal emerged from the darkened torpedo entrance in a motion almost too fast to see. It was so fast, in fact, that two of the cultists weren't able to get out of the way in time, and the half sized mech plowed straight through them as if they weren't there, aerosolizing them in an instant. The unmistakable silhouette of an IPS-N Caliban emerged through the rapidly expanding clouds of blood that had been it's allies a second before.

Scarlet and the others were already running, and she just hoped they would all be fast enough to escape, but what the fuck could they even do? This is the exact situation the Caliban is designed for! If she could get to Big Red it might level things out, but... even if her mech wasn't on the other side of the station, that big fucker couldn't fit in these corridors!

“Machete!” Scarlet yelled at one of the squad as they all rounded a corner. “Get that bulkhead sealed!” She pulled a grenade off her kit, and tossed it like a baseball straight at the charging mech which seemed to fill the entire corridor. The grenade exploded with a pop, and a cloud of dirty black smoke appeared at the mech's head-height for a fraction of a second.

The Caliban didn't even notice. And then, the mech raised its left arm, a pair of shotgun barrels glinting in the fluorescent light.

“FUCK!” She dove for cover behind the bend just as she heard a titanic boom, like an angry god slamming a car door. All the color was washed out by the intensity of the muzzle flash. An immense cloud of flechette darts, ball bearings, and superheated magnesium strips filled the corridor they had just barely managed to escape. The metal walls, floor, and ceiling all got torn up or melted, and nearly every electronic panel and light fixture simultaneously exploded.

“BULKHEAD!” Scarlet yelled again through the tinnitus. She fought the urge to keep running as she watched Machete reach for the lever to activate the emergency seal. All the stims in her system made every motion feel painfully, agonizingly slow, until they finally grabbed the lever and yanked it down.

The Caliban appeared around the corner, mere feet away. Even through the tinnitus, she could hear that distinctive, terrifying whine of the ramjets spooling up again. Scarlet realized in that moment that there was no way out... so if this is how it was gonna be, she was going out fighting, even if she knew it was pointless. She raised her carbine, thumbed the safety to full auto, and just unloaded. A second passed, and half a dozen bullets impacted against the Caliban's armored chassis amid a hail of sparks, every shot bouncing off harmlessly.

Just before the mech started to move, the heavy metal bulkhead slammed down hard, sealing the corridor and trapping the mech on the other side of several inches of heavily reinforced metal. Steam and smoke spilled out of the barrel of her carbine, and Scarlet let out the breath she was holding...

There was a loud ringing BANG against the bulkhead. And then another. And then another. It was the sound of heavy metal fists punching the solid slab of metal separating the Caliban from its prey...

“That's not gonna hold it,” Scarlet said through ragged breaths, slowly backing away, and motioning for the others to do the same. “We've gotta get out of here... find some way to stop it.”

How any of them were going to do that, Scarlet honestly had no fucking idea...

- - -

Hour 3:

Scarlet leaned against a bulkhead back at the checkpoint. She was starting to feel sluggish, and checked the auto-injector mounted on her armor: one stim left, and all the rest were empty. Fuck. She hit the magazine catch on her carbine, and checked her remaining ammo: 10 shots left. Fuck.

“How we doin'?” Scarlet asked, already knowing the answer.

“I mean, we're not dead?” Machete shrugged, ignoring the blood trickling down her temple.

“What about comms? We still cut off?” Scarlet peered around her cover. Nobody coming yet. That was good, at least.

“Yeah, for the most part...” Machete nodded. “Short range works, but we can't reach anybody further out than, like... 4 sectors? I think? I dunno if they've got a jammer, or there's some kinda paracausal shit goin' on, or what. We've got some runners, but... takes way too much time.”

“What about that Caliban? Anybody have eyes on it?”

“We got Spud working with a couple other sigdivers, trying to keep it busy. Opening and closing bulkheads to direct it away from us, keep it going' in circles, tryin' to get it lost... but, I mean... I guess we're lucky those cult fuckers seem to be just as scared of it as we are, y'know?”

Scarlet furrowed her brow inside her helmet, trying to weigh her options. They weren't going to get far if they couldn't deal with that damn mech. If Agarin was here in his Caliban, That Which Poets and Artists have Eternally Sought: The Power to Move, this wouldn't be a problem. Not only would he would wipe the floor with that amateur pilot, he'd personally turn every one of these cultists into chunky salsa without breaking a sweat. But... hell, even if comms weren't down right now, the rest of the SRT was in the same boat as her: dealing with too many crises all over the besieged station, all at once, and with not enough time to fix everything...

And then, an idea crossed her mind.

“Hang on... do we have any thermite charges left?” Scarlet asked. Machete did a double take, staring at her as Scarlet left cover to head deeper into the checkpoint.

“We have thermite?” she shook it off. “Wait, where are you goin'?”

“Got an idea. Gonna find Spud, see if we can funnel that Caliban closer to the station skin...”

- - -

Hour 4:

This was either a brilliant idea, or it was the single dumbest thing Scarlet had ever come up with.

“Scarlet, you set up yet?” a crackling voice said through her helmet comm. Scarlet surveyed the corridor one last time before replying. Hopefully the thermite charges were disguised well enough that whoever was piloting that monster wouldn't notice...

“As I'll ever be, Spud,” Scarlet adjusted her grip on the SMAW resting on her shoulder. “That Caliban getting close?”

“He's taking the bait,” Spud replied, amid a hail of static. “Be ready, he'll be on you any second. I'll seal him in as soon as you give the word.”

She could hear heavy footfalls, thudding in the distance and getting closer.

Well. It's now or never. She raised up the SMAW, aiming it at the far end of the corridor, finger resting just above the trigger...

The Caliban rounded a corner, filling the hallway with its (relatively) immense bulk, and it came to a stop as soon as it noticed Scarlet. The hallway behind the mech was lit up by bright blue flame, as the shrieking whine of the ramjets spooling up began once more.

“Backblast clear, I guess...” she muttered, squeezing the trigger. The end of the tube exploded in flame and smoke, and even inside the armor she could feel the concussive force of the rocket engine buffeting her. It screamed down the hallway for half a second, directly at the mech, before it impacted dead center with its chestplate. The deck beneath her feet shook as the end of the hallway was consumed in a fireball, briefly enveloping and obscuring the Caliban.

She knew that wouldn't stop it, but it wasn't supposed to. Scarlet tossed the empty SMAW aside as quick as she could, reached over for the already primed bulkhead controls on the wall next to her with her left hand, and pulled the detonator off with her right. The fire and smoke at the end of the hall was violently pushed away as the Caliban charged down the corridor, ramjet engines screaming; Scarlet slammed down the lever as soon as she saw it emerge, and hoped against hope that she was fast enough...

THUD. The bulkhead slammed shut, and she could just barely hear the Caliban screech to a halt on the other side.

“Now!” Scarlet said into her comm. “Seal it now!” Without waiting for a response, she hit the button on the detonator. The corridor shook once again, and there were a series of muffled thuds from the other side of the bulkhead as the carefully placed thermite charges detonated... and then, every sound beyond the sealed metal came to a swift stop.

After all, sound can't propagate in a vacuum.

“Holy shit... I, uh... I think you got him!” Spud's voice crackled, the channel still flush with static. “Let me see if I can link into one of the external cameras... oh yeah! Yeah, you spaced the fucker!”

Scarlet sighed heavily, and stood there for a minute or two. A part of her wanted to let the tension that had kept her in a vice grip evaporate, but... it didn't. It couldn't. She couldn't let it. The Gate was still in danger. Her friends were still in danger. Her home was still in danger. There was no time to rest. There was no time to stop.

Not yet.

[elgatofx]

Made a what if "Riff wasn't the first sonadow fusion" situation (NOT CANON!)

Meet Environ the original Sonadow fusion

I got tempted to make a what if prototype scenario and made Environ. I made it to consist of all the things Riff and Synth don't have.

Environ (also known as "Project Cosmo") was like Riff's prototype, except the scientists purposefully made Sonic's genes more dominant than Shadow's. But it ended up making it too fast and too powerful, once it realized it's power, it escaped into space faster than the speed of light never to be seen again.

It's constantly in its superform and it never runs out.

Speaks in two voices (male and female) that it can adjust to make the other voice more dominant.

Faster than light itself, Environ is a massless being, made of tachyon particles (a hypothetical subatomic particle that exceeds the speed of light). Since it travels so fast, Environ is mostly invisible to the naked eye, any and all objects would phase through it.

[wheelsgoroundincircles]

RAESR Tachyon Speed Electric Supercar by Coldstar Art

[cthulu-in-a-ballgown]

I am back on my particle physics shit entirely due to Death Grips.

A tachyon is a (theoretical, almost definitely doesn't exist because it would violate causality) subatomic particle that goes faster than the speed of light.

This has a bunch of fun side effects such as the mass being an imaginary number (!!!) and speed increasing as energy decreases.

Relativistic version of the energy equation for reference:

In a vacuum, in proper time, a tachyon is constantly accelerating. Its world line (path through 4-D spacetime) is a hyperbola, which has to be formed of TWO tachyons with opposite momenta. Two for the price of one - amazing sale! They annihilate each other when they reach infinite speeds in the same location, producing nothing because infinite speed means 0 energy.

[masoncarr2244]

[whats-in-a-sentence]

And if so, then whatever we do, whatever we do, tachyons and all, attaining or surpassing the velocity of light will remain impossible, that's all.

"The Stars in their Courses" - Isaac Asimov

[youngmekka]

Hey y'all! Say hello to Maxwell Rock Fortuna! The Tachyon Ranger, or more commonly known as Admin!

Here he is in all the forms of his I've animated so far!

Unmorphed

File Name: [None] Suit Name: [None] Abilities: Flight, Energy Beams, Super Strength, Super Speed, Super Durability.

T.U.R.B.O. Base Mode

File Name: Protocol_R.O.C.K. Suit Name: The Steel Suit

Abilities: Enhancement of all base powers and durability. Drawbacks: Limited enhancement in regards to other forms.

T.U.R.B.O. Brawler Mode

File Name: Protocol_G.U.T.S. Suit Name: The Strength Suit

Abilities: Enhancement of physical strength and energy attacks, increased jump height. Drawbacks: Lower travel speed, disables flight.

T.U.R.B.O. Soaring Mode (No idle animation because my software can't export to MP4 and gifs don't support partial opacity.)

File Name: Protocol_A.I.R. Suit Name: The Flight Suit

Abilities: Greatly enhanced flight speed, increased resistance to wind attacks. Drawbacks: Disables energy attacks.

[space-archaeology]

What are tachyons?

Tachyons are a hypothetical particle that can travel faster than the speed of light, which is currently thought to be impossible.

In Einstein’s theory of relativity, causality means that an effect cannot occur from a cause that is not in the past of that event. If tachyons existed, they would break this rule.

Einstein’s special relativity states that nothing can start out slower than the speed of light, and then speed up to cross that barrier. The loophole with tachyons is that they are hypothesized to start out already being faster than the speed of light, meaning that they never had to speed up to reach this pace.

If ever found to exist, these particles could potentially be the answer to time-travel. So if you’ve heard of things like the Grandfather Paradox, these might be the potential side effects of tachyons. (If you haven’t heard of it, the Grandfather Paradox is essentially where you go back in time to kill your grandfather, but then he could no longer go on to give birth to your parents, who give birth to you, the one who kills your grandfather.)